#SUSAN LANDON SANTA MONICA MOVIE#

Not only had Mihm written a screenplay, but digital technology had removed economic barriers that for years had limited film production to the rich and well-connected. And his son decided to make a movie.įriends Mihm and Craig had always talked about making a movie, yet it wasn’t until 2005 that the former classmates decided to pursue their dream. In 2000, the elder Mihm died of stomach cancer. But kids like George Mihm devoured them, and when they grew up, passed on that devotion to their offspring. Sometimes horror, sometimes science fiction, the B-grade feature was always cheaply and quickly put together-and it showed, in the wooden acting, the cardboard sets and the formulaic plotlines. The price of admission bought a double feature.

#SUSAN LANDON SANTA MONICA MOVIE#

He like others of his generation sought out the local movie house as an island of freedom in a world of parental authority, and as a source of entertainment. Mihm’s father George was a youth in the 1950s. Nor were the scads of B-grade movies spewing out of Hollywood movie studios either starring teens-Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf-or seizing on their predilection for intense emotion, bizarre plots and proofs of their elders’ moral corruptibility. They were kids with part-time jobs and disposable income Hollywood banked on it.

Suddenly, the moody, self-obsessed offspring of America’s Greatest Generation were the target market for everything from poodle skirts to Hula-Hoops to drive-in movie tickets.

The 1950s, for better or worse, reinvented teens. They gave rise to communist fears and bomb shelters. It is also a campy, twisted, pastiche-laden, irreverent tribute to the genus of moviemaking that filled theaters when “I Like Ike” was a buzz phrase for post-World War II domestic retrenchment, a time when America’s war industry retooled to sustain a baby boom and a growing taste for all things suburban, electrified, and modernized.

After all, The Monster of Phantom Lake is horror, and as its title so aptly recognizes, a card-carrying member of the monster-film subgenre. Mihm and John Craig had to pinpoint the location of Phantom Lake, they might finger a remote, wooded location due east of Minneapolis, due north of Eau Claire and west of the realm of possibility. 1-3) and Tampas Independents Film Festival. Britt Aamodt checks out 'The Monster of Phantom Lake,' a spoof of ∕0s horror schlock that was selected as an official entrant of both the Twin Cities Underground Film Festival (Sept.

Susan landon santa monica