Marty Mackenzie is an unsuccessful stage actor who takes an interest in private investigating. He takes a job working with Jack Potter, a crusty private eye. They both take a case in Beaver Ridge, a seedy small town where a murder is being planned against a rich gravel pit owner. Marty realizes that private investigating is not as it seemed to be.
“Our modern technology has achieved a degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams. But this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We live in an age of anxiety, a time of stress. And with all our sophistication we are in fact, the victims of our own technological strength. We are the victims of shock … of future shock.” No, this isn’t a quote from a Huffington Post column on the Facebookization of modern communication. Nor is it pulled from an academic treatise on the phenomenologies of post-industrial existence. This statement was made by Orson Welles in the 1972 futurist documentary Future Shock, and, unlike some of the more dated elements of 1970s educational films, Future Shock remains shockingly current in verbalizing the concerns and anxieties that come along with rapid societal and technological change. (Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive)
In the late 1800's, Boris Karloff has discovered a way to use nuclear power. He creates a beam weapon and blows up a big rock. Outer space aliens are scared and one alien who looks a lot like James Cameron with a big fake nose only this one isn't fake lands and brings other aliens who take over the bodies of Karloff and his assistant. The assistant is a Jack the Ripper style killer who has done a few nasty murders which have riled the townsfolk. The body-snatched bodies become radioactive and start killing flowers and other stuff (but don't die themselves) and some stuff happens and in the end Karloff destroys the beam weapon equipment (and his lab and house), then the aliens leave and warn us that if anyone ever does it again there will be trouble.
A painter of morbid art, who becomes a murderous vampire by night and kills young women, attempts a daytime relationship with a woman who resembles a former love and is also the sister of one of his victims.
Shocked by the death of her spouse, a scheming widow hatches a bold plan to get her hands on the inheritance, unaware that she is targeted by an axe-wielding murderer who lurks in the family's estate. What mystery shrouds the noble house?
On the Las Vegas strip, two unlikely men rendezvous: Samuel Hill, an ill-kempt desert miner, and Benjamin Jabowski, a John Birch Society dandy from the city. Intent on some sort of mayhem, they enter the Herald Club before the burlesque show starts, and they wire something to the electrical box, set to blow at midnight. They sit at the back of the club to get to know each other. As they drink and glance at the stage, Sam tells of a partner driven mad by visions of naked women in the sagebrush; Ben tells a tale of trying to rid his neighborhood of a pin-up studio. As they get drunker and the clock ticks toward midnight, they pull their chairs closer to the women on stage.
