BONUS BLOG -- 1955: THIS ISLAND EARTH

What’s it about?

While flying his personal fighter jet cross country, a scientist encounters a mysterious phenomenon that takes control of his plane temporarily. Later, strange and seemingly impossibly advanced electronic parts arrive at his laboratory in response to a routine supply order. These are followed by the equally mysterious arrival of instructions on how to build a puzzling device called an “interociter”. Once completed, the interociter turns out to be a television the size of a Volkswagen with a triangular screen that can't have been adequately product-tested. (It later turns out to have convenient built-in laser beams as well.)

Upon plugging in the interociter, a man with a lumpy forehead appears on the screen and invites the scientist to a secret meeting of intellectuals at an undisclosed location. After delivering the message, the interociter destroys both itself and all the blueprints for its construction. Undeterred by this, the scientist travels to the secret meeting anyway but soon deduces that maybe something is a little amiss at the compound. But before the scientist can escape, he and a woman scientist are whisked away in a flying saucer to the dying world of Metaluna. The planet is on the verge of being annihilated as a result of being constantly pummelled by meteorites guided by its enemies. The two Earth scientists are needed to help finish research on an energy source powerful enough to charge the failing deflector shields that can keep the planet from exploding in a shower of sparks.


Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller


Is it any good?

I’m not really sure how to answer that question since THIS ISLAND EARTH is a baffling mixture of good and bad. The script, despite a lot of interesting ideas, feels thoroughly half-baked. The beginning of the movie takes its time and unfolds its mysteries slowly, but after landing on the planet Metaluna the movie suddenly can’t seem to be finished quickly enough. The plight of the planet is illustrated pretty well, but then a deux ex machina raises its implausible head, and the Earthlings are rescued from the dying planet without having done anything interesting at all except commute on the planet’s light rail system.

The dialogue is often awful -- the better lines in the movie are pure exposition, and the worst are nothing but nonsense. (The only exception to this is a single immortal line that is brilliant both in and out of context: “I feel like a new toothbrush.”) The film makers also clearly have neither any regard for nor any knowledge of science. I don’t mind when a sci-fi movie elides over the nuts and bolts of an impossible invention, but THIS ISLAND EARTH just seems intent on flaunting its ignorance in the most unnecessary ways. At one point, for instance, a cat is introduced and a character explains that they call him Neutron “because he’s so positive”.

Yet, coupled to all these shortcomings is a movie that looks absolutely fantastic. Looking at the sets and special effects, it’s clear that THIS ISLAND EARTH is not a B-movie. The end of the movie especially is one elaborate special effects sequence after another. Some elements -- such as the insectoid mutants that act as servants on Metaluna -- are pretty disappointing. But others -- like shots of the flying saucer skimming over the alien world’s surface as it’s bombarded by falling meteorites -- are amazing. It’s not that the special effects are especially realistic or convincing, but they’re captivating and exhilarating nonetheless. And everything is shot in crisp, vivid Technicolor. Unfortunately, the shiny special effects do nothing to hide the absurdities in the script, and the ending of the movie is truly an unforgivable let-down.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that THIS ISLAND EARTH’s biggest claim to fame these days may be that it was screened on the Satellite of Love in MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000: THE MOVIE (1996). Also, the Professor from Gilligan’s Island has a supporting role.

1955: TARANTULA

What’s it about?

A doctor is called to examine the body of a horribly deformed man found in the desert of the southwestern U.S. The man appears to have suffered from a rare disorder that causes deformities over several years, but he is identified as a scientist who had last been seen apparently healthy and unblemished just a month before. Trying to find out how this could be, the doctor investigates at the remote laboratory where the scientist had been working. It appears to have been recently damaged in a fire, and the surviving scientist only reveals that he and his late partner had been working on a new synthetic nutrient to help ease world hunger.

Meanwhile, a new assistant at the laboratory strikes up a friendship with the investigating doctor. Through her, the doctor learns that the nutrient is unstable and unpredictable -- and that it has caused astounding gigantism among the laboratory animals it’s used on. Eventually, it becomes clear that a tarantula that had received injections escaped during the fire, and is now preying on cattle (and the occasional human) in the area. The tarantula continues to grow at an alarming rate, and ultimately terrorizes the town.


Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller


Is it any good?

It’s good enough to have made a believer out of me where the special effects are concerned. I have never much liked the use of close-up photography of real animals as “monsters” in these kinds of movies. I’ve always felt that the creatures inevitably look too ordinary and that the inability to have monsters interacting with actors is a fatal shortcoming. But TARANTULA makes that tactic work probably as well as it ever could -- and no doubt my dislike of such things is a result of having only ever seen cheap, unimaginative knock-offs of this very movie. For one thing, close-up pictures of a real tarantula are pretty darn creepy and alien looking. (This, however, is not necessarily true of lizards, to name another oft-enlarged movie monster.) And shots of the tarantula and the environment aren’t just flatly superimposed -- great care was obviously taken to make it look like the spider is actually interacting with the rest of the things in the frame. It crawls down hills, clambers atop buildings, and so on. There are obviously limits to this, but for the most part it’s done very well.

The story has a lot of the same silliness that other 1950s sci-fi movies do. The science is laughable, and the dialogue is often stilted and unnatural. TARANTULA, however, is far from the worst offender of the decade (or even of the year) in either of those areas, and the main characters at least have some personality. The catalyst for the creation of the giant spider -- the search for a synthetic nutrient -- is also a nice break from the usual stories about atomic fallout spawning mutations, man’s encroachment dislodging previously hidden monsters, or (worst of all) the mad scientist breeding an unstoppable weapon.

But obviously the main attraction is the tarantula itself. Because of how the effects are generated, it can’t usually do much more than stalk into view and look menacing. It’s a limited bag of tricks, but the movie makes the most of them. Especially effective are some shots of the spider peering through the second storey windows of the house where the laboratory is housed. And since the nutrient has a different effect on humans -- causing horrific deformities instead of gigantic growth -- there are other creepy things to fill in some of the gaps where the spider can’t go. I wouldn’t exactly say that TARANTULA is required viewing for anybody, but it’s also not likely to disappoint if you like giant monsters. It can stand with THEM! (1954), GOJIRA (1954), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957), and THE BLOB (1958) as one of the best examples of the 1950s.

What else happened this year?

-- THIS ISLAND EARTH mixes an utterly absurd script with top-of-the-line special effects to produce a ridiculous movie with serious third-act problems that looks fantastic. It was later mocked (with some justification) in MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000: THE MOVIE (1996).
-- Hammer released the first of its Professor Quatermass sci-fi adventures, THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT. I’ve unfortunately never been able to find this one, but all the Quatermass movies have an excellent reputation.

If you watch only one sci-fi movie from 1955...

Make it TARANTULA, unless you can find THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT. If you can, let me know if it’s as great as I imagine it to be.

BONUS BLOG -- 1954: GOJIRA

What’s it about?

In case there’s anybody who doesn’t know the story of Godzilla, here it is. Underwater tests of atomic bombs disturb a prehistoric monster known in Japanese legends as Gojira and cause him to come to the surface in a seriously bad mood. After trashing the island of Odo, the monster moves towards the mainland and destroys much of Tokyo in a couple of midnight raids.

Meanwhile, a scientist has developed an oxygen destroying substance that could be used to make a weapon even more powerful than the atomic bomb. The substance is seemingly the only thing that might stop Gojira, but the scientist is unwilling to share his discovery until he has converted it into a form that cannot be used as a military weapon. As the destruction and death toll mounts, the scientist finds himself faced with a moral dilemma -- let Gojira continue on his rampage, or stop him and give the world a new deadly weapon in the process.


Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller


Is it any good?

The ending is really terrific, though there are parts in the middle that are fairly dull. The first third of the movie mostly follows the arrival of Gojira -- from the mysterious sinking of ships to the destruction of Odo to the first appearances of the monster himself. The second third is mostly concerned with Gojira’s attacks on Tokyo and the attempts to stop him with conventional weapons. Finally, the end of the movie -- where things really come alive -- deal with the devastating aftermath of the monster attacks and the scientist’s moral dilemma.

It seems strange to say, but the weakest part of the movie are really the attacks on Tokyo. Gojira was reportedly the first movie to use a suited actor so extensively in monster attack sequences -- previous movies like THE LOST WORLD (1925), KING KONG (1933), MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), and THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953) had all used stop-motion animation. Any novelty that may have attached to the man-in-a-suit approach in 1954 has been erased by fifty years of sequels and knock-offs with the same kind of miniatures being destroyed in much the same way. Some of the miniatures are pretty neat (the boats especially look very good), and several shots of Gojira are quite striking -- when he rises suddenly from underwater or from behind a hill, or is framed by fire as he stalks through Tokyo. But overall, both Gojira himself and the attack sequences feel too familiar to be truly exciting anymore.

But it’s worth sitting through those Tokyo attacks to get the final third of the movie. There’s an appropriately dramatic demonstration of the oxygen destroyer in the laboratory. (Though the true effects of the discovery are unnecessarily withheld from the audience until late in the movie.) The invention itself makes absolutely no sense as explained -- but the important thing is the chilling effect it has on living matter. The scenes after Gojira’s final attack on Tokyo are also very effective. It’s no secret that the movie is a parable about atomic weapons -- and in fact the movie lays this on a bit thick -- but knowing that Japan had suffered two nuclear attacks less than ten years before GOJIRA was released really does give the aftermath of the radioactive rampage an extra layer of emotional depth.

As a final note, I ought to say that it’s been at least fifteen years since I’ve seen the American re-cutting of GODZILLA from 1956 (with Raymond Burr inserted to appease American audiences), so I can’t really say how it compares to the Japanese original.

For the rest of my thoughts on 1954 in sci-fi movies, see the entry on THEM!

1954: THEM!

What’s it about?

A string of strange disappearances, killings, and sugar thefts in the New Mexico desert leaves the local authorities and FBI stymied, so a father-daughter tag team of scientists is called in to give their opinion. The two scientists have a theory, but refuse to share it until it’s been conclusively proven. The sudden arrival of a nine-foot carnivorous ant renders their silence moot, and the hunt is on to find and exterminate the nest of giant ants.

Once the nest is found and neutralized, the scientists realize that at least two young queens and their male consorts have already left to start their own colonies. Yet another hunt is on for the location of this new threat, tracking the fugitive queens as far as Texas and the California coast. The survival of mankind ultimately hinges on a final showdown of man vs. giant killer ant in the storm drains of Los Angeles.


Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller


Is it any good?

It’s a heckuva lot of fun. The movie is structured like a police procedural, so it moves along swiftly from clue to clue as the true nature of what’s happening becomes apparent. None of the characters (except possibly the father-daughter scientist team) are the least bit memorable -- but neither does the movie really ask you to care about any of them. There’s no paper-thin love story or family melodramas or even any fresh-faced army privates hoping to get home to their best girls. There’s literally nothing else besides a desperate search to find the giant killer ant nests before it’s too late.

The 1950s saw an awful lot of sci-fi movies of widely varying quality about giant animals -- mutated, prehistoric, or both. Like most of the best ones, THEM! doesn’t try to pass off cheapo rear-projected footage of real animals for monsters. All the giant ants here are life-size puppets with moving parts that often get shot full of holes or burned up by flamethrowers. I actually started to wonder how many ant puppets they had to build to make all the destruction possible. But even though the ants are not realistic (or mobile) enough to be really scary, the fact that they are big and real and able to interact with actors does make them creepy in a way that close-up shots of live ants never could be. The movie also makes the most of spooky ways of framing the ants or their shadows or evidence of their murderous rampage. Even though the puppets look pretty silly, it’s still chilling to see one dropping a picked-clean human rib cage among a pile of other bones and skulls.

If there’s any downside to the movie, it’s that the best part comes almost exactly halfway through when a small team of humans is exploring the ant nest in New Mexico to confirm that all the ants have been gassed to death. (Spoiler: They haven’t been!) The dead ants and gestating eggs that fill the nest are very eerie, and the whole sequence ends far too quickly. The scenes that follow of flags being pinned into maps and reports rolling off teletype machines somehow just don’t hold the same tension as a handful of humans penetrating a nest of giant ants to torch the egg chamber. There is another climactic hunt through the storm drains of Los Angeles at the end of the movie, but it’s not nearly as gripping as the first bit in the nest. Still, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and fast-paced giant monster movie.

What else happened this year?

-- Another giant animal that owes its existence to the atom bomb menaces a different major city in GOJIRA. For better or for worse, this was the first monster movie to forgo stop-motion or puppet effects in favor of the man-in-a-suit approach.
-- Universal introduced its last big monster movie franchise (and one of the best) in THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, originally shot and shown in 3-D.
-- Walt Disney’s 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA was also released this year. I’m not really a fan of any of his big budget, all-star sci-fi spectaculars, but this one is probably the best of the bunch thanks to a very likeable (and often shirtless) Kirk Douglas and a suitably misanthropic Captain Nemo played by James Mason.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1954...

You might as well make it GOJIRA, though you can’t steer too far wrong with THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON either.

New header!

Hey everybody, the blog now has a brand new header! It was drawn by Dennis J. Reinmueller, who has also offered to illustrate some of the upcoming posts. He's already done some great drawings for 1954, so there will be another one to look on Monday. And it's pretty awesome!

Dennis doesn't have a website yet where you can see his other work, but when he gets one I will definitely link to it. I am pretty excited to finally have some pictures to put up, and doubly excited to have cool original art!

1953: FOUR SIDED TRIANGLE

What’s it about?

Two young friends work together on a scientific project under the encouragement of a benevolent and fatherly doctor. The arrival of an old childhood friend -- a girl they were both once in love with -- gives them fresh inspiration to overcome the technical obstacles in their way. At last, they complete a working prototype of a machine capable of replicating any object. As they begin the much less interesting work of marketing their invention, one of the scientists announces he and the girl are now engaged.

The other scientist is heartbroken by this turn of events, but keeps his pain to himself. He works night and day to find a way to modify the replicator to work on living creatures. Ultimately successful, he begs the woman to let him duplicate her so that both of the men can have their own copy and be happy.

Is it any good?

Not surprisingly for a movie about lone scientists pushing the boundaries of knowledge, FOUR SIDED TRIANGLE has a lot in common with FRANKENSTEIN or THE FLY -- but is better in many ways than either of those. I don’t recognize any of the actors, but the two male leads make a fantastic irrepressible scientist tag team. The laboratory is appropriately full of wonderful scientific machinery -- a lot of dynamos and big electronic things with switches and oscilloscopes. It’s never really clear what all the machinery is for, but it does make the replication trick fun to watch even the third or fourth time they do it.

A lot of the movie -- probably too much, in fact -- follows the development of the various iterations of the replicator. As a result, it does feel like they shortchange the existential and emotional ramifications of duplicating a human being in favor of showing more of the experiments. Things obviously don’t go exactly as planned, and though the ending is not as riveting as it might be, it’s not a total let-down either. What is disappointing, however, is that the woman who gets duplicated never really gets to say anything about how she feels about it, even though the choice is ostensibly hers. She seemingly goes through with the process out of pity for the unmarried scientist, but it’s frustrating that she’s sidelined so much both before and after the duplication.

But in general this is a really juicy sci-fi flick about a pretty unusual situation. The high-tech 1950s lab is very neat, the actors are fun, and it mostly moves along at an exciting rate. I would actually have liked it to be a bit more melodramatic about the implications of everything -- most of the characters seem to take the idea of duplicating a human far too much in stride. And I would definitely have liked to have seen the female lead have more of a say in things. But all in all it’s an enjoyable and fairly unique 1950s sci-fi movie. It’s also worth noting that this is one of the earliest Hammer science fiction movies, which means that everybody in it is as British as is humanly possible.

What else happened this year?

-- THE WAR OF THE WORLDS is one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made in any year, and is absolutely something you should go check out right away if you have any interest in this kind of thing.
-- I’m also very fond of IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, which I would say deserves to be a minor classic of 1950s sci-fi.
-- INVADERS FROM MARS is not nearly as good as either of those movies, but has a lot of imagination and a pretty wild ending that makes for a fun midnight movie experience.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1953...

There’s no question that it should be THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.

1952: RED PLANET MARS

What’s it about?

A radio astronomer played by Peter Graves sends messages into space and receives responses that appear to be coming from Mars. Though they are at first unintelligible, he continues to work on a way of deciphering the messages from space despite periodic apocalyptic pronouncements from his wife (sample: "This will lead to our deaths!"). Meanwhile, a former Nazi scientist named Calder listens in on the American broadcasts and the Martian responses from a remote observatory in the Andes, and passes reports on the communications back to the Soviets.

When the messages are at last decoded and published, they cause pandemonium throughout the capitalist west. They indicate that the Martians are in possession of technology that would render the greater part of western industry obsolete. Afraid of causing further panic, the president is about to order the communications stopped when suddenly the messages change and begin to take on a decidedly religious tone instead. These messages in turn spark a popular uprising behind the Iron Curtain, and soon the Communist nations are in as much turmoil as the west. The whole situation is brought to a final crisis when Calder personally (and implausibly) confronts the American scientists in their own laboratory. Several twists later, the movie ends with a bang.

Is it any good?

It has a few things going for it. For one thing, it’s one of the few movies I can think of that deals primarily with radio messages from an alien civilization. (The only other that springs to mind is CONTACT from 1997 -- and even that one ultimately drops radio contact in favor of the personal kind.) As such, the first half hour is fairly interesting as the scientists try to find a way of making themselves understood. The movie doesn’t really do as much with this as it might and the solution they arrive at is simplistic enough that a middle schooler could (and, in the movie, in fact does) figure it out. But it’s at least sufficiently different to be interesting.

Things take a sharp turn for the worse in the middle section, where the world suddenly starts going crazy based on a handful of messages from Mars. The revelation that the Martians use cosmic rays for energy instead of fossil fuels, for example, somehow inexplicably leads to every coal mine on Earth spontaneously closing down -- despite there being no information yet on how Earth could harness the power of cosmic rays. Other equally inexplicable developments bring the entire western economy to its knees. It’s easy to believe that messages from an advanced alien race could incite panic and upheaval, but RED PLANET MARS is not the least bit convincing about it. When the messages switch from scientific to religious -- and create a panic in the Soviet sphere -- the same problem arises again. This part, in fact, is the very dullest stretch of the movie as it has nothing new over the western panic except a lot more preachy pontificating from a very Christian president.

By far, the best character in the movie is the Nazi scientist Calder. So even though his appearance at the American lab late in the movie is utterly preposterous, it’s nonetheless very welcome. The plot twists that arise out of this confrontation vary in their plausibility and effectiveness. I won’t reveal exactly what happens, but the messages are not exactly what they appear to be, and the revelations lead to a bit of a scuffle between the scientists. In any event, RED PLANET MARS is not what I would call a particularly good movie and it occasionally flirts with deadly dullness -- but it’s unusual and unconventional enough that I don’t want to give everything away in case anyone is actually interested.

What else happened this year?

-- The only other movie I’ve seen from 1952 that is remotely sci-fi is one called INVASION, U.S.A. It’s a WWIII flick about a Soviet invasion of the United States, and is a pretty heavy-handed propaganda piece about the need for ordinary citizens to contribute to anti-Soviet programs even in peacetime. It’s the earliest movie I know of that depicts an atomic war (through copious use of stock footage, natch), though it treats H-bombs simply as big bunches of dynamite and doesn’t address the effects of radiation or the possibility of nuclear winter.
-- Legendary B-movie RADAR MEN FROM THE MOON was also released this year, but I haven’t inflicted it on my attention span yet.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1952...

Go with RED PLANET MARS. But unless you have a high tolerance for both B-movie badness and high handed Christian preaching, you might as well steer clear. There’s a fairly unique story under all the distracting parts, but it’s more of a curiosity than essential viewing.