What's it about?
Young scientist William Hurt experiences an apparent flashback to a primitive proto-human state while experimenting with sensory deprivation. Believing that he has somehow tapped into a genetic memory of man’s ancestry, Hurt goes to South America to retrieve an untested hallucinogenic fungus that he thinks will intensify his head trips.
The fungus seems to do just that -- but Hurt also comes to believe that it is causing physical changes in his body which could cause him to revert to a primitive state. When his colleagues urge him to stop his experiments, Hurt pushes on alone with predictably disastrous consequences. Only the love of a good woman is able to break his descent into a Jekyll and Hyde tailspin.
Is it any good?
Back in the 1950s (or at least back when I was watching lots of sci-fi movies from the 1950s), I got so very sick of stories about scientists. Practically every movie had either a handsome scientist or astronaut for its hero, and they would always come up with some implausible scientific scheme to save the day at the last minute. Movies like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) and I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958) seemed revolutionary to me at the time because they were about normal people with hardly a scientist anywhere in sight. (I still think they are both excellent movies, by the way, but there was a bracing freshness at the time that was mostly a result of comparing them against all the scientist movies that had come before.)
There’s no period of sci-fi movie history where scientists and astronauts aren’t common fixtures in the lists of heros or villains. But it’s certainly true that in the 1960s and beyond, movies that aren’t about scientists start to outnumber the ones that are. Many of the scientists who do remain are just as one-dimensional as their 1950s counterparts -- but they are increasingly likely to be the ones causing the problems rather than the ones fixing them.
All of this is a long preamble to the admission that I was actually excited by the scientist protagonists in ALTERED STATES. Almost all of the main characters are scientists and (to my untrained ear) they seemed like pretty realistic ones. They are passionate about their work, intellectually curious, more likely to come up with hypotheses than improbably certain answers, and a little too prone to arguing philosophical points. More than anything, I think it’s the enthusiasm in Hurt and his colleagues that make them seem both real and also the kind of people you might want to know. These aren’t the all-knowing, ever-calm hero scientists of the 1950s, but neither are they the dour, self-important meddlers of paranoid 1970s thrillers.
After creating such fine scientist characters, it’s a bit of a shame that ALTERED STATES sticks them in such a cliched dilemma for the genre. I really enjoyed the beginning of the movie, when Hurt and his friends were discovering the ability to flash back to primitive states while undergoing sensory deprivation. But before long, Hurt finds himself almost literally in a Jekyll and Hyde situation. Though at first addicting, his experiments have become terrifying. But he’s powerless to stop their effects, as his body now starts slipping into its primitive state against his will.
Oh yeah, I haven’t really mentioned that part yet. Hurt’s experiments eventually do suggest that the flashback state triggers physical changes in the subject’s body. Latent genes are tripped or some hooey like that, and the result is that Hurt’s body transforms itself into that of a primitive man -- heavy brow, underdeveloped vocal cords, hair all over the body, the works. This is kind of a cool idea, so I don’t really mind that it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Actually, it’s really two cool ideas. The first is the idea of a modern man reverting back to a less evolved form, and the second is the idea that mental exertions can result in physical changes.
ALTERED STATES is not the first movie to suggest a link between the mind and the body. (A link beyond the normal one, I mean.) SOLYARIS (1972) is partly a movie about telekinetic powers -- though the mind in that case is that of a planet-sized organism. A bit more to the point, I almost wrote about a movie called THE BROOD (1979), in which an experimental form of therapy called “psycho-plastics” results in physical manifestations of the patients’ neuroses. Psychology in THE BROOD is presented almost like Edwardian spiritualism, with trance states and mediumistic role-playing and ultimately bodily manifestations that are not unlike ectoplasmic emissions. It’s this last bit that gives pyscho-plastics its name, and also that is most like the “mind over matter” powers of ALTERED STATES.
Having set up the science of the movie in this way, I am perhaps starting to see for the first time what the ending of the movie is really about. Hurt subjects himself to risky experiments despite the warnings of his colleagues, and the result is that he eventually emerges from the sensory deprivation tank in the form of a hairy proto-human with limited impulse control. The situation worsens later when Hurt begins to revert to this ancestral form at times he can’t control.
But the very ending is what I wanted to talk about. There’s one last experiment that Hurt convinces his colleagues to help him with, to prove and document once and for all these unaccountable physical changes. But Hurt either regresses too far or just does it once too often, and he somehow experiences the terrifying nothing that existed before the creation of life. Hurt changes first into a monstrous form, and then into a swirling whirlpool. He also seems to phase in and out of reality, like a picture going in and out of reception on an old television.
Hurt is then saved not once, but twice, by the love of his wife. This is what I mean when I said I was starting perhaps to understand this part of the movie. She first retrieves him from the brink of nothingness during the experiment by daring to wade into the psychic maelstrom in the laboratory and physically pulling Hurt out. Then she saves him agin by convincing him to fight against an unexpected regression back to the nothingness. I get pretty annoyed with movies when they seem to be suggesting that “love is all you need” or that “love conquers all”. Those may be truisms, but they are hardly universally true. ALTERED STATES wasn’t really any different in that respect -- I got pretty annoyed at its lame (and highly controversial) pro-love message.
What I did realize just now though is that the whole movie is about “mind over matter” -- using only the power of the brain to make physical changes in the world outside. Love, in this case, would reside in the mind. So simply by changing one’s mind -- transferring creative passion from scientific pursuits to a loved one, for instance -- one can also change the reality of the world. In this way, the message is not so much “love conquers all” but rather more like “the mind conquers all”.
I’m being pretty generous to ALTERED STATES with this interpretation, and I’m making it sound better than it really is. I still think the beginning of the movie is great, but the end is just a mess. It’s practically impossible to tell what’s happening to Hurt -- both from the dialogue and from the visuals. The initial regression into a proto-human form is pretty straight-forward, but the later transformations just don’t seem to make any logical sense. And the images themselves aren't shocking or terrifying enough to make the exact whys and wherefores superfluous. And even though the “love conquers all” ending arguably fits with the rest of the “mind over matter” themes in the movie, it’s still pretty lame when threatening forces are instantly dissipated when the main character finally admits that he loves his wife.
Through much of ALTERED STATES I was also reminded of Francis Ford Coppola’s YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (2007). At the end of that movie, there’s a sequence where Tim Roth’s supernaturally intelligent and supernaturally young linguist has hooked up with a woman who babbles in ancient languages while under hypnotic trances. By using past life regression techniques, Roth is able to send her further and further back into history until she is speaking the ur-languages of primitive humans. Such experiments take a spiritual and physical toll on the woman, but she’s eager to keep helping Roth isolate the first moment when human language is created.
I’m not really sure how I feel about YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH in total, but that part of the movie has stuck with me ever since I saw it a couple years ago. For one thing, these experiments are seemingly the only way for Roth to complete the history of language that he’s been writing for a lifetime (or two), so it’s obvious why he’s willing to take these risks. And the fact that he’s gambling with somebody else’s sanity and life only makes the stakes even higher (and makes it a more realistic parallel for actual scientific research). Finally, the ancient babbling of the woman (and its effects on her) is both logical and pretty darn creepy.
The parallels with ALTERED STATES are obvious, but the differences are also instructive. At the beginning of the movie, Hurt doesn’t really have any stake in research into primitive humans. He’s monkeying around with sensory deprivation and drugs to study altered states of consciousness. The caveman hallucinations (and eventually the physical changes) are an unexpected discovery, so it’s not clear why Hurt is willing to risk everything to hurtle headlong down this path. The movie seems to suggest it’s just Hurt impulsively seeking generic “truth”.
Likewise, Hurt putting himself in danger is pretty boring. A lot of science fiction is surprisingly anti-scientific, but even if Hurt ended up turning himself permanently into a monkey man, that’s not really much of a cautionary tale. One scientist goes too far, gets turned into a caveman, and is presumably hunted down. Hardly on par with Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita in regret at the first test of the nuclear bomb. Changing the nature of the threat to Hurt -- from regression to annihilation -- does make things more interesting, but it also makes no sense at all. So despite its promising beginning, I don’t really see myself thinking about any particular scene from ALTERED STATES years from now.
Showing posts with label evolutionary throwback. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evolutionary throwback. Show all posts
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Thursday, August 6, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1972: HORROR EXPRESS
What’s it about?
Archaeologist Christopher Lee returns from an expedition to Manchuria via the Transsiberian Express, carrying back the frozen body of a prehistoric ape-man. Almost immediately, the crate containing the body raises an extraordinary amount of interest in just about everybody who comes across it: a thief, a mad monk, a rival scientist played by Peter Cushing, government officials, an inventor, a porter on the train, and probably many more I’m forgetting. When several of these people turn up dead with their eyes turned completely white, Lee and the authorities draw the logical conclusion that the two million year old corpse is supernaturally murdering people.
As Lee and Cushing try to track down the missing murderous fossilized ape-man, it slowly becomes apparent that the culprit is really something quite different. But by this time the authorities have called in blood-and-guts czarist army officer Telly Savalas to chew gum and break heads (and gum hasn’t been invented yet). Dimly lit fight scenes, glowing red eyes, and a big explosion soon follow.
Is it any good?
I’m not actually going to talk about this movie much at all. It’s a low budget sci-fi horror flick that has a couple of neat ideas but is full of a lot of stupidity as well. Peter Cushing has a lighter role, which is kind of interesting, but the charms of Christopher Lee continue to elude me, and I have absolutely no idea what Telly Savalas thought he was doing. The plot is cluttered with way too many characters, the special effects are only decent, and the music is pretty good. In short, it’s just like any other middling 1970's sci-fi movie. If Tom wants to mount a passionate defense of its merits, I’ll let him take care of that part since I don’t think it’s really anything special.
But what I do want to write about are public domain movies. I’ve seen more than my share of these and I’ve already even written about a couple -- namely THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). HORROR EXPRESS is another public domain movie, which means that practically anybody can make and sell unauthorized copies of it. (Exactly what “public domain” means in this context can be pretty complicated, since movies have all kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. It’s possible, for instance, for broadcast television rights to lapse while home video rights remain in effect. And movies that are derivative works of books or plays are protected in special ways that don’t apply to original works. I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of this, but suffice to say that sometimes movies fall into a definition of “public domain” that allows them to be sold on tape or DVD without clearing copyright.)
There seem to be several different reasons why movies end up in the public domain. Sometimes it’s a clerical error or oversight in transferring ownership. Sometimes a legal issue prevents the copyright from being renewed. In the case of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it happened because the movie was erroneously distributed without a copyright notice in its first theatrical run. (I don’t think that would be a problem anymore since the reforms of the Berne Convention.) And in the case of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, the film makers didn’t believe the movie would be worth anything after its initial run so they never bothered to file for a copyright in the first place.
Most movies in the public domain are quick-and-cheap jobs, so I suspect that the last reason is (or at least was) a pretty common one. But in addition to a handful that have gained cult fame over the years -- like the two mentioned above, the horror curiosity CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and Ed Wood’s so-bad-they’re-good flicks -- there are others that must have always had commercial value and I am sure weren’t intentionally abandoned. There’s the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicle THE ROAD TO BALI, Fritz Lang’s noir SCARLET STREET, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL, cartoon classics like GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, John Wayne’s MCCLINTOCK!, Spencer Tracy’s FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND, and (perhaps the most famous of all) the screwball classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY.
A lot of folks would probably agree that the term of copyright protection is unnecessarily lengthy. After all, there are warehouses full of books, movies, and sound recordings from the 1930s and 1940s that have been out of print for decades but that it’s still technically a crime to copy. The demand for these materials isn’t high enough for the copyright owners to justify releasing them and nobody else is allowed to publish them, so lots of potentially fascinating things go on languishing in vaults. Huge chunks of genres -- like, say, early musicals or westerns or slapstick comedies -- are inaccessible because they don’t have famous names that generate interest today.
It’s easy to imagine a world where copyright protection lasts only for 25 or 50 years, so that all this material could be distributed by others who don’t need to justify high profit margins. There already exist bargain bin distributors who package public domain movies into cheap DVD packs -- sometimes selling as many as 50 movies for the price of a single “official” release. (I’ve bought four such discount packs myself, racking up 200 movies at an average cost of fifty cents each.) And with online delivery improving all the time, movies will only become cheaper to distribute.
On the other hand, these existing public domain movies are a pretty good warning of why losing copyright protection might not be such a good thing. There have been dozens of home releases of famous public domain movies. I’ve seen two different versions each of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and HORROR EXPRESS, and all of them were awful in terms of quality. Since anybody can sell cheap transfers from salvaged film stock or old videotapes, unscrupulous distributors tend to flood the market with inferior product. There are presumably good versions of these movies out there somewhere, but a quick search on Amazon revealed a lot of confusing options for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot of disappointment and contradictions in the comments. (There was even one “special edition” two-disc release that apparently consisted of nothing more than the movie needlessly cut in half on two different discs.) Rent-by-mail services like Netflix don’t usually discriminate between different releases of a movie either, so it can even sometimes be impossible to get a good version even if you know what to look for.
It’s no big deal when HORROR EXPRESS looks and sounds terrible -- though I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if any care at all had been taken with the presentation. A bad version of something like CARNIVAL OF SOULS is more annoying, but there’s a certain feeling of resignation that comes with watching cult classics, as though digging around in the trash to find them is part of the experience. But imagine now a world where the average consumer is likely to be duped into buying an edited, washed-out, badly synched DVD of CASABLANCA or CITIZEN KANE that was lifted off a television broadcast or a worn-out VHS cassette. Or a world where a glut of bargain bin offerings of RIO BRAVO or THE FLY or A SHOT IN THE DARK convinces a studio executive that it’s not worthwhile to spend money on restoration and an official release. Why invest all those resources if the final product is just going to be undercut by a lot of inferior versions anyway?
I don’t really think I know enough to say exactly how I think things should work. There are clearly pitfalls in either direction. I do think, however, that copyright should be handled differently for movies and sound recordings than it is for books. If you buy a cheap version of a classic novel, that just means the pages will turn yellow and the binding will fall apart in a few years. But the experience of reading the story itself and whatever your imagination conjures up won’t really be changed by that (unless you are a very easily distracted reader). Typos in the text or mistakes in layout are a bigger problem, but it’s still comparatively easy and cheap to get the text of a book in a presentable state.
Recordings, on the other hand, fall prey to all kinds of problems that take real time and money to fix. If you rip a page in the book you’re copying from, that doesn’t mean that the copy will have a tear in it as well. But if you rip or wrinkle a piece of film or tape, then any copies you make thereafter are going to be compromised. In other words, there seems to be a compelling public interest to provide financial incentives for folks who take good care of movies. In a world of short term copyrights, I’m sure that some organization would be formed to do just that -- there are enough cinephiles to support a quality distributor even if cheap alternatives are also available. But it’s hard for me to decide if this would allow for improvements over what we have right now, or if things would be far, far worse.
Archaeologist Christopher Lee returns from an expedition to Manchuria via the Transsiberian Express, carrying back the frozen body of a prehistoric ape-man. Almost immediately, the crate containing the body raises an extraordinary amount of interest in just about everybody who comes across it: a thief, a mad monk, a rival scientist played by Peter Cushing, government officials, an inventor, a porter on the train, and probably many more I’m forgetting. When several of these people turn up dead with their eyes turned completely white, Lee and the authorities draw the logical conclusion that the two million year old corpse is supernaturally murdering people.
As Lee and Cushing try to track down the missing murderous fossilized ape-man, it slowly becomes apparent that the culprit is really something quite different. But by this time the authorities have called in blood-and-guts czarist army officer Telly Savalas to chew gum and break heads (and gum hasn’t been invented yet). Dimly lit fight scenes, glowing red eyes, and a big explosion soon follow.
Is it any good?
I’m not actually going to talk about this movie much at all. It’s a low budget sci-fi horror flick that has a couple of neat ideas but is full of a lot of stupidity as well. Peter Cushing has a lighter role, which is kind of interesting, but the charms of Christopher Lee continue to elude me, and I have absolutely no idea what Telly Savalas thought he was doing. The plot is cluttered with way too many characters, the special effects are only decent, and the music is pretty good. In short, it’s just like any other middling 1970's sci-fi movie. If Tom wants to mount a passionate defense of its merits, I’ll let him take care of that part since I don’t think it’s really anything special.
But what I do want to write about are public domain movies. I’ve seen more than my share of these and I’ve already even written about a couple -- namely THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). HORROR EXPRESS is another public domain movie, which means that practically anybody can make and sell unauthorized copies of it. (Exactly what “public domain” means in this context can be pretty complicated, since movies have all kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. It’s possible, for instance, for broadcast television rights to lapse while home video rights remain in effect. And movies that are derivative works of books or plays are protected in special ways that don’t apply to original works. I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of this, but suffice to say that sometimes movies fall into a definition of “public domain” that allows them to be sold on tape or DVD without clearing copyright.)
There seem to be several different reasons why movies end up in the public domain. Sometimes it’s a clerical error or oversight in transferring ownership. Sometimes a legal issue prevents the copyright from being renewed. In the case of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it happened because the movie was erroneously distributed without a copyright notice in its first theatrical run. (I don’t think that would be a problem anymore since the reforms of the Berne Convention.) And in the case of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, the film makers didn’t believe the movie would be worth anything after its initial run so they never bothered to file for a copyright in the first place.
Most movies in the public domain are quick-and-cheap jobs, so I suspect that the last reason is (or at least was) a pretty common one. But in addition to a handful that have gained cult fame over the years -- like the two mentioned above, the horror curiosity CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and Ed Wood’s so-bad-they’re-good flicks -- there are others that must have always had commercial value and I am sure weren’t intentionally abandoned. There’s the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicle THE ROAD TO BALI, Fritz Lang’s noir SCARLET STREET, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL, cartoon classics like GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, John Wayne’s MCCLINTOCK!, Spencer Tracy’s FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND, and (perhaps the most famous of all) the screwball classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY.
A lot of folks would probably agree that the term of copyright protection is unnecessarily lengthy. After all, there are warehouses full of books, movies, and sound recordings from the 1930s and 1940s that have been out of print for decades but that it’s still technically a crime to copy. The demand for these materials isn’t high enough for the copyright owners to justify releasing them and nobody else is allowed to publish them, so lots of potentially fascinating things go on languishing in vaults. Huge chunks of genres -- like, say, early musicals or westerns or slapstick comedies -- are inaccessible because they don’t have famous names that generate interest today.
It’s easy to imagine a world where copyright protection lasts only for 25 or 50 years, so that all this material could be distributed by others who don’t need to justify high profit margins. There already exist bargain bin distributors who package public domain movies into cheap DVD packs -- sometimes selling as many as 50 movies for the price of a single “official” release. (I’ve bought four such discount packs myself, racking up 200 movies at an average cost of fifty cents each.) And with online delivery improving all the time, movies will only become cheaper to distribute.
On the other hand, these existing public domain movies are a pretty good warning of why losing copyright protection might not be such a good thing. There have been dozens of home releases of famous public domain movies. I’ve seen two different versions each of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and HORROR EXPRESS, and all of them were awful in terms of quality. Since anybody can sell cheap transfers from salvaged film stock or old videotapes, unscrupulous distributors tend to flood the market with inferior product. There are presumably good versions of these movies out there somewhere, but a quick search on Amazon revealed a lot of confusing options for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot of disappointment and contradictions in the comments. (There was even one “special edition” two-disc release that apparently consisted of nothing more than the movie needlessly cut in half on two different discs.) Rent-by-mail services like Netflix don’t usually discriminate between different releases of a movie either, so it can even sometimes be impossible to get a good version even if you know what to look for.
It’s no big deal when HORROR EXPRESS looks and sounds terrible -- though I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if any care at all had been taken with the presentation. A bad version of something like CARNIVAL OF SOULS is more annoying, but there’s a certain feeling of resignation that comes with watching cult classics, as though digging around in the trash to find them is part of the experience. But imagine now a world where the average consumer is likely to be duped into buying an edited, washed-out, badly synched DVD of CASABLANCA or CITIZEN KANE that was lifted off a television broadcast or a worn-out VHS cassette. Or a world where a glut of bargain bin offerings of RIO BRAVO or THE FLY or A SHOT IN THE DARK convinces a studio executive that it’s not worthwhile to spend money on restoration and an official release. Why invest all those resources if the final product is just going to be undercut by a lot of inferior versions anyway?
I don’t really think I know enough to say exactly how I think things should work. There are clearly pitfalls in either direction. I do think, however, that copyright should be handled differently for movies and sound recordings than it is for books. If you buy a cheap version of a classic novel, that just means the pages will turn yellow and the binding will fall apart in a few years. But the experience of reading the story itself and whatever your imagination conjures up won’t really be changed by that (unless you are a very easily distracted reader). Typos in the text or mistakes in layout are a bigger problem, but it’s still comparatively easy and cheap to get the text of a book in a presentable state.
Recordings, on the other hand, fall prey to all kinds of problems that take real time and money to fix. If you rip a page in the book you’re copying from, that doesn’t mean that the copy will have a tear in it as well. But if you rip or wrinkle a piece of film or tape, then any copies you make thereafter are going to be compromised. In other words, there seems to be a compelling public interest to provide financial incentives for folks who take good care of movies. In a world of short term copyrights, I’m sure that some organization would be formed to do just that -- there are enough cinephiles to support a quality distributor even if cheap alternatives are also available. But it’s hard for me to decide if this would allow for improvements over what we have right now, or if things would be far, far worse.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1968: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
What’s it about?
Divided into four more or less loosely related vignettes, the movie spans practically the whole course of human history. First, a twenty-minute segment follows a group of primitive ape-men as they forage for food, fight over watering holes, and pick nits out of their fur. But the discovery of a mysterious black monolith is thematically linked to the discovery of tool and weapon use.
Second, the first of two space-age vignettes depicts an astronaut’s journey from Earth to an orbital space station, and then on to the moon where he was ostensibly called to help deal with an outbreak of a deadly disease. But upon arriving he learns that this is simply a cover story meant to hide the fact that the lunar exploration team has uncovered a monolith similar to that in the first vignette.
The third episode takes place eighteen months later when two other astronauts are sent on an expedition to Jupiter -- which was the target for the sole observable radio transmission from the monolith. On the way there, the ship’s artificial intelligence -- a computer named HAL-9000 -- malfunctions and starts hunting the crew members, as it believes they are endangering the mission.
And finally, the last vignette finds one of the astronauts from the Jupiter mission completing his objective and passing through some kind of (very lengthy) dimensional doorway to a world that resembles a brightly lit baroque palace. After aging through several life stages, he is either reborn as or incorporated into or possibly simply observes the advent of a giant space baby that floats back towards Earth with unclear but hopefully peaceful motives.
Is it any good?
Back in the mid 1990s when I first saw this movie, I didn’t have much experience with movies outside of the usual mainstream multiplex flicks. So back in those days, a twenty-minute dialogue-free stretch of caveman antics in a sci-fi movie was just about the craziest thing I could think of. Of course, by the time I had finished watching this movie, my horizons had already been considerably expanded and the new craziest thing I could think of was a twenty-minute dialogue-free stretch of an astronaut flying through photographic special effects towards a space baby.
These days, it’s a lot easier to see truly weird movies since we’re no longer confined to watching only what’s on the shelves of the local video store. So 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY actually looks pretty tame by comparison. But luckily its weirdness was never really its main asset, and in fact nothing in the movie really feels like weirdness for its own sake. I think the ending vignette particularly goes on too long, but it does seem to have a point even if I don’t know exactly what it is.
One thing I do know is that the point of the opening caveman section went right over my head the first time I saw it. For some reason, I thought the discovery of the monolith by the ape-men was what led them to violence and war. But that’s not what happens at all. Before the monolith, the ape-men are pure animals -- they grub in the dirt for food, fight over watering holes, run from predators, and that kind of thing. Violence and death are already unavoidable parts of their lives -- just as for any animal. What the monolith represents is the discovery of tool and weapon use, which is what allows the ape-man (and eventually man-man) to dominate the rest of the natural world.
So as near as I can tell, the first vignette is meant to set up the function of the monoliths -- they are either catalysts, portents, or symbols of game-changing evolutionary advancement. So when another one is discovered on the lunar surface, it seems to suggest that some equally great leap forward is about to happen to the human race. (That’s how I interpret it anyway -- but if anybody has a better idea, let me know.) Following this reading, the space baby or star child or whatever would be the likely candidate for that next step. But then, of course, you have to wonder whether the entire middle of the movie is really necessary, or if it’s just a very elaborate McGuffin.
Another way to look at the movie is to turn this interpretation completely inside-out. Instead of examining the beginning and the ending for the “meaning”, it makes a different kind of sense to temporarily ignore those parts and focus primarily on the middle two vignettes. I don’t think that’s totally satisfying, since there are too many unanswered questions and dangling threads in those sections. But heck, those are the parts of the movie that are really most like what we would usually call sci-fi.
In any event, one of the best things about the space age parts is the detail and (seeming) realism that goes into the scenes of spaceship life. It’s not that the movie makes a big deal about how “THIS IS WHAT LIFE WOULD BE LIKE” but there is definitely an accumulation of tiny details that really start to feel real. The production design certainly favors the clean, sterile, brand-new type of spaceship (as opposed to the dirty, used, lived-in kind that would become popular later). I think conventional wisdom has pretty much accepted that not everything in the future is going to be sparkling clean and fresh off the assembly line, and in fact that a lot of nifty futuristic gadgets will be old and broken down. But regardless of that, the pristine condition of everything in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY gives it all an alien and intimidating air. It’s no doubt intentional -- space is very underpopulated in these segments. Despite accommodations that would comfortably fit dozens of travelers, the shuttle to the moon has only two passengers. You get the sense that this is the night before opening day in space -- everything seems ready to receive an onslaught of visitors, but none of them have shown up yet.
My biggest complaint about the second vignette is that it ends abruptly with the monolith on the moon emitting a radio transmission. We’ve followed an astronaut on most of his uneventful journey from lower Earth orbit to the lunar surface, and have learned about the security measures being taken to keep the monolith a secret. But then almost as soon as we get a glimpse of it, the vignette ends and we move on to the next episode where a ship is headed out to Jupiter to investigate what the monolith might have been transmitting to. But we never get any more information about what happened to the people we met in the last part.
Anyway, the third vignette is the part that everybody thinks of when they think about 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. It’s the bit where the super-computer HAL-9000 decides the human crew of its spaceship (just two guys, really) is too unreliable to carry out the mission and so plots to kill them. It’s the most story-like part of the movie, but it’s also the part that seems to have the least to do with the rest of the movie. At first glance, it seems like nothing more than a detour on the way to Jupiter. Somebody has to get there eventually so they can go through the next stage of human evolution, but the malfunctioning computer doesn’t seem to have any purpose beyond simply making that objective more difficult to achieve.
Of course, there probably is more to it than that. In some movies, I would assume that it was just shoddy storytelling. But everything in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY feels planned out, so HAL-9000 no doubt serves his purpose too. I don’t claim that I have any real answers to what it might be, but it is kind of interesting to think what might have happened if HAL-9000 had beaten the humans and succeeded in killing them both. The computer’s homicidal tendencies weren’t mere craziness -- it was specifically doing what it thought was necessary to complete the mission. So if HAL-9000 had reached the objective alone, would it have itself been the next step in evolution? Would it have ushered in a world where computers replaced humans in every respect? Admittedly, it’s hard to speculate on what a different ending for the movie would be when the actual ending isn’t even particularly clear. But if all the pieces of the movie are supposed to fit together somehow (and I suspect they are) then that is my best guess so far as to what the completed puzzle is supposed to look like.
Divided into four more or less loosely related vignettes, the movie spans practically the whole course of human history. First, a twenty-minute segment follows a group of primitive ape-men as they forage for food, fight over watering holes, and pick nits out of their fur. But the discovery of a mysterious black monolith is thematically linked to the discovery of tool and weapon use.
Second, the first of two space-age vignettes depicts an astronaut’s journey from Earth to an orbital space station, and then on to the moon where he was ostensibly called to help deal with an outbreak of a deadly disease. But upon arriving he learns that this is simply a cover story meant to hide the fact that the lunar exploration team has uncovered a monolith similar to that in the first vignette.
The third episode takes place eighteen months later when two other astronauts are sent on an expedition to Jupiter -- which was the target for the sole observable radio transmission from the monolith. On the way there, the ship’s artificial intelligence -- a computer named HAL-9000 -- malfunctions and starts hunting the crew members, as it believes they are endangering the mission.
And finally, the last vignette finds one of the astronauts from the Jupiter mission completing his objective and passing through some kind of (very lengthy) dimensional doorway to a world that resembles a brightly lit baroque palace. After aging through several life stages, he is either reborn as or incorporated into or possibly simply observes the advent of a giant space baby that floats back towards Earth with unclear but hopefully peaceful motives.
Is it any good?
Back in the mid 1990s when I first saw this movie, I didn’t have much experience with movies outside of the usual mainstream multiplex flicks. So back in those days, a twenty-minute dialogue-free stretch of caveman antics in a sci-fi movie was just about the craziest thing I could think of. Of course, by the time I had finished watching this movie, my horizons had already been considerably expanded and the new craziest thing I could think of was a twenty-minute dialogue-free stretch of an astronaut flying through photographic special effects towards a space baby.
These days, it’s a lot easier to see truly weird movies since we’re no longer confined to watching only what’s on the shelves of the local video store. So 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY actually looks pretty tame by comparison. But luckily its weirdness was never really its main asset, and in fact nothing in the movie really feels like weirdness for its own sake. I think the ending vignette particularly goes on too long, but it does seem to have a point even if I don’t know exactly what it is.
One thing I do know is that the point of the opening caveman section went right over my head the first time I saw it. For some reason, I thought the discovery of the monolith by the ape-men was what led them to violence and war. But that’s not what happens at all. Before the monolith, the ape-men are pure animals -- they grub in the dirt for food, fight over watering holes, run from predators, and that kind of thing. Violence and death are already unavoidable parts of their lives -- just as for any animal. What the monolith represents is the discovery of tool and weapon use, which is what allows the ape-man (and eventually man-man) to dominate the rest of the natural world.
So as near as I can tell, the first vignette is meant to set up the function of the monoliths -- they are either catalysts, portents, or symbols of game-changing evolutionary advancement. So when another one is discovered on the lunar surface, it seems to suggest that some equally great leap forward is about to happen to the human race. (That’s how I interpret it anyway -- but if anybody has a better idea, let me know.) Following this reading, the space baby or star child or whatever would be the likely candidate for that next step. But then, of course, you have to wonder whether the entire middle of the movie is really necessary, or if it’s just a very elaborate McGuffin.
Another way to look at the movie is to turn this interpretation completely inside-out. Instead of examining the beginning and the ending for the “meaning”, it makes a different kind of sense to temporarily ignore those parts and focus primarily on the middle two vignettes. I don’t think that’s totally satisfying, since there are too many unanswered questions and dangling threads in those sections. But heck, those are the parts of the movie that are really most like what we would usually call sci-fi.
In any event, one of the best things about the space age parts is the detail and (seeming) realism that goes into the scenes of spaceship life. It’s not that the movie makes a big deal about how “THIS IS WHAT LIFE WOULD BE LIKE” but there is definitely an accumulation of tiny details that really start to feel real. The production design certainly favors the clean, sterile, brand-new type of spaceship (as opposed to the dirty, used, lived-in kind that would become popular later). I think conventional wisdom has pretty much accepted that not everything in the future is going to be sparkling clean and fresh off the assembly line, and in fact that a lot of nifty futuristic gadgets will be old and broken down. But regardless of that, the pristine condition of everything in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY gives it all an alien and intimidating air. It’s no doubt intentional -- space is very underpopulated in these segments. Despite accommodations that would comfortably fit dozens of travelers, the shuttle to the moon has only two passengers. You get the sense that this is the night before opening day in space -- everything seems ready to receive an onslaught of visitors, but none of them have shown up yet.
My biggest complaint about the second vignette is that it ends abruptly with the monolith on the moon emitting a radio transmission. We’ve followed an astronaut on most of his uneventful journey from lower Earth orbit to the lunar surface, and have learned about the security measures being taken to keep the monolith a secret. But then almost as soon as we get a glimpse of it, the vignette ends and we move on to the next episode where a ship is headed out to Jupiter to investigate what the monolith might have been transmitting to. But we never get any more information about what happened to the people we met in the last part.
Anyway, the third vignette is the part that everybody thinks of when they think about 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. It’s the bit where the super-computer HAL-9000 decides the human crew of its spaceship (just two guys, really) is too unreliable to carry out the mission and so plots to kill them. It’s the most story-like part of the movie, but it’s also the part that seems to have the least to do with the rest of the movie. At first glance, it seems like nothing more than a detour on the way to Jupiter. Somebody has to get there eventually so they can go through the next stage of human evolution, but the malfunctioning computer doesn’t seem to have any purpose beyond simply making that objective more difficult to achieve.
Of course, there probably is more to it than that. In some movies, I would assume that it was just shoddy storytelling. But everything in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY feels planned out, so HAL-9000 no doubt serves his purpose too. I don’t claim that I have any real answers to what it might be, but it is kind of interesting to think what might have happened if HAL-9000 had beaten the humans and succeeded in killing them both. The computer’s homicidal tendencies weren’t mere craziness -- it was specifically doing what it thought was necessary to complete the mission. So if HAL-9000 had reached the objective alone, would it have itself been the next step in evolution? Would it have ushered in a world where computers replaced humans in every respect? Admittedly, it’s hard to speculate on what a different ending for the movie would be when the actual ending isn’t even particularly clear. But if all the pieces of the movie are supposed to fit together somehow (and I suspect they are) then that is my best guess so far as to what the completed puzzle is supposed to look like.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1957: THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN
What’s it about?
Botanist Peter Cushing disregards the objections of his wife and mysterious warnings from a local wise man to join an expedition scaling the Himalayas in search of the fabled Yeti. Tempers soon flare on the five-man expedition when it becomes clear that not everyone is there for the same reason. Nerves fray even further when one man is injured by the carelessness of another, and vital equipment is destroyed in an angry scuffle. By the time a Yeti appears (only to be promptly shot at by a trigger-happy trapper), the men in the party are already practically at each other’s throats.
Meanwhile, Peter Cushing’s wife becomes concerned when the expedition’s native guide returns to the base camp in a panic. Though the locals try to hide the truth, she insists on mounting her own rescue party to seek out her husband. But things go from bad to worse on the mountain as foul weather moves in and the Yeti begin literally playing mind games with the survivors of the first party.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Peter Cushing would eventually go on to play Victor Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, the vampire hunter Van Helsing, and many other roles in Hammer movies, but this is one of his first for the studio. I haven’t seen many of Peter Cushing’s other movies, but he is certainly one of the very best things about THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN. And in a movie where the focus is heavily on interpersonal interactions rather than scary monsters, appealing actors are pretty darn important.
It took me a while to identify the pattern, but there’s a coyness about Hammer’s sci-fi flicks that sits in stark contrast to most American movies of the period. Whereas American movies usually start developing right away whatever fantastic mystery or conflict they have for their centerpiece, Hammer flicks instead reserve the sci-fi elements until almost the last possible moment and spend most of their early running time on character interactions. (This is not necessarily true of every single Hammer movie -- but it’s true of many of them, and none more so than THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN.) Consequently, the Hammer movies often seem more naturalistic since we see many of the characters dealing with perfectly ordinary conflicts at home or in their jobs. “More naturalistic” doesn’t necessarily mean “better”, of course, since it’s perfectly possible to make a very boring movie about domestic discord and work stress. But it certainly gives the pictures a different mood than most of those from other studios, and often they come off feeling as though the scripts were written for a more adult audience. The fact that it’s a different approach makes it feel a bit like a breath of fresh air for that reason alone. But anybody who approaches this movie with the quite reasonable expectation that they will see a lot of exaciting abominable snowman action is going to be sorely disappointed.
In fact, I will admit that I find Hammer’s skewed focus frustrating at times -- breath of fresh air or not. The abominable snowmen do eventually show up, but they are kept entirely off-screen (except for a single hairy arm) until the final minutes of the movie. I’m not sure if that was done for budgetary reasons or if it’s the manifestation of some perverse British desire to deny the audience, but the refusal to show a clear shot of the title creature pretty quickly became both annoying and absurd. Fortunately, much of the picture would work just as well if there weren’t any Yeti at all, and the story is really quite good. Peter Cushing is a scientific man who comes to realize that the expedition he’s joined has commercial objectives that he strongly disagrees with. But by the time he learns the truth, the party is already high up among the peaks of the Himalayas, and there’s nothing he can do about it without endangering himself and the others. There are also some interesting theories put forth about who the Yeti are -- rather than evolutionary throwbacks, it’s suggested that they could be the inheritors of the Earth who are simply waiting for man to annihilate himself. So despite the disappointing dearth of actual live Yeti action, there are still quite a few things to recommend THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN -- but primarily to those already disposed to like Peter Cushing or Hammer movies.
Botanist Peter Cushing disregards the objections of his wife and mysterious warnings from a local wise man to join an expedition scaling the Himalayas in search of the fabled Yeti. Tempers soon flare on the five-man expedition when it becomes clear that not everyone is there for the same reason. Nerves fray even further when one man is injured by the carelessness of another, and vital equipment is destroyed in an angry scuffle. By the time a Yeti appears (only to be promptly shot at by a trigger-happy trapper), the men in the party are already practically at each other’s throats.
Meanwhile, Peter Cushing’s wife becomes concerned when the expedition’s native guide returns to the base camp in a panic. Though the locals try to hide the truth, she insists on mounting her own rescue party to seek out her husband. But things go from bad to worse on the mountain as foul weather moves in and the Yeti begin literally playing mind games with the survivors of the first party.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Peter Cushing would eventually go on to play Victor Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, the vampire hunter Van Helsing, and many other roles in Hammer movies, but this is one of his first for the studio. I haven’t seen many of Peter Cushing’s other movies, but he is certainly one of the very best things about THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN. And in a movie where the focus is heavily on interpersonal interactions rather than scary monsters, appealing actors are pretty darn important.
It took me a while to identify the pattern, but there’s a coyness about Hammer’s sci-fi flicks that sits in stark contrast to most American movies of the period. Whereas American movies usually start developing right away whatever fantastic mystery or conflict they have for their centerpiece, Hammer flicks instead reserve the sci-fi elements until almost the last possible moment and spend most of their early running time on character interactions. (This is not necessarily true of every single Hammer movie -- but it’s true of many of them, and none more so than THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN.) Consequently, the Hammer movies often seem more naturalistic since we see many of the characters dealing with perfectly ordinary conflicts at home or in their jobs. “More naturalistic” doesn’t necessarily mean “better”, of course, since it’s perfectly possible to make a very boring movie about domestic discord and work stress. But it certainly gives the pictures a different mood than most of those from other studios, and often they come off feeling as though the scripts were written for a more adult audience. The fact that it’s a different approach makes it feel a bit like a breath of fresh air for that reason alone. But anybody who approaches this movie with the quite reasonable expectation that they will see a lot of exaciting abominable snowman action is going to be sorely disappointed.
In fact, I will admit that I find Hammer’s skewed focus frustrating at times -- breath of fresh air or not. The abominable snowmen do eventually show up, but they are kept entirely off-screen (except for a single hairy arm) until the final minutes of the movie. I’m not sure if that was done for budgetary reasons or if it’s the manifestation of some perverse British desire to deny the audience, but the refusal to show a clear shot of the title creature pretty quickly became both annoying and absurd. Fortunately, much of the picture would work just as well if there weren’t any Yeti at all, and the story is really quite good. Peter Cushing is a scientific man who comes to realize that the expedition he’s joined has commercial objectives that he strongly disagrees with. But by the time he learns the truth, the party is already high up among the peaks of the Himalayas, and there’s nothing he can do about it without endangering himself and the others. There are also some interesting theories put forth about who the Yeti are -- rather than evolutionary throwbacks, it’s suggested that they could be the inheritors of the Earth who are simply waiting for man to annihilate himself. So despite the disappointing dearth of actual live Yeti action, there are still quite a few things to recommend THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN -- but primarily to those already disposed to like Peter Cushing or Hammer movies.
Monday, March 2, 2009
1956: THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US
What’s it about?
In the third and final installment of Universal’s Gill-man franchise, a party of scientists again go looking for the creature after he escaped from a Florida marine park at the end of REVENGE OF THE CREATURE (1955). During a test dive to calibrate their sophisticated sonar equipment, the scientists spot the creature but are unable to get near enough to capture him. The creature then leads them upriver into the dark waters of the Everglades, until the scientists are forced to follow in a small open boat. Having evened the odds a bit, the creature forces a confrontation which ends with his capture -- and with him being badly burned in the process.
The scientists take the creature back to the waiting vessel where they’d hoped to study him, and find that the creature’s gills have been almost entirely burned away. However, they discover that he also possesses an unused set of lungs, so they perform emergency surgery to make them operational. Once the creature begins breathing through his lungs, he undergoes strange physical changes -- shedding many of his fish-like qualities and becoming increasingly human in appearance. Unsure as to whether the “humanizing” of the creature will extend to his behavior as well, the scientists bring him ashore for observation. But rivalries and jealousies among the scientists soon lead to a catastrophe.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Universal’s famed horror unit produced a handful of movies after this one, but THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US is the last installment of their last major franchise. It also happens to be one of the best monster movies Universal ever produced, and is well worth watching both on its own merits and also as the conclusion of a film making epoch. In the first two Gill-man movies, the creature is presented as a missing link between man and his distant marine ancestors. (Don’t think too hard about that one.) Though he has some human characteristics, he never does much more than kill intruders in his lagoon, kidnap pretty women, and flee from superior force. But in THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US, the creature becomes more cunning, more human, and possessed of a great deal more personality.
The first part of the movie -- the hunt and capture of the creature -- is much longer and considerably more exciting than a similar sequence in REVENGE OF THE CREATURE. The Everglades locations (or their studio equivalents) are plenty creepy, and the underwater photography is crystal clear. The creature seems to know he’s being hunted, and leads the scientists on a long chase that draws them into less safe territory. And although the scientists are aware that the creature is leveling the playing field, they have no choice but to follow and attempt the capture anyway. It’s all very tense and suspenseful, and really my only complaint about it is that the three male leads are all so square-jawed and hunky that it takes a little while to learn to tell them apart. But as the movie progresses, it becomes clearer that they each have different personalities and agendas -- something that you can’t always take for granted in these kinds of flicks.
But the real payoff is what happens after the creature is captured. The pseudo-scientific explanation of the physical changes doesn’t make any sense -- supposedly the mere act of breathing through lungs instead of gills causes spontaneous mutations that tip the balance of evolution away from fish and towards human. But the changes make the creature far more sympathetic, as does his sudden lack of interest in kidnapping and killing. (There’s a pretty funny bit where he comes across a woman and looks at her for a moment -- apparently ready to snatch her up -- but then moves along without a second glance.) Rather than a killer, the creature here is a pathetic figure who is hunted, persecuted, and stranded by physical mutations in a world he doesn’t understand.
Although I am an unabashed fan of the original CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954), I think I’d nevertheless have to say that this is an even better picture than that one. It’s a shame that Universal didn’t make many more monster movies after THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US, since they finally seemed to figure out how to fuse their usual sensational sensibility with a more psychological and ambiguous style of horror. But starting in 1957, Universal turned over the rights of its horror franchises to England’s Hammer Studios -- which would go on to produce many, many monster movies (almost all of them featuring either Baron Frankenstein or Dracula) in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.
What else happened this year?
-- Don Siegel directed the first (and, as far as I’m concerned, still the best) iteration of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, and managed to turn a pretty silly story into a creepy and tense thriller.
-- The other big sci-fi spectacular from 1956 is FORBIDDEN PLANET, an outer space updating of Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST that introduced the world to Robbie the Robot (among many other things).
-- Stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen and producer Charles Schneer turned their collective attention to the problem of mechanical marauders in EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS.
-- The 1954 Japanese monster flick GOJIRA was re-edited and released in America with 100% more Raymond Burr as GODZILLA, KING OF ALL MONSTERS.
-- Hammer released X THE UNKNOWN, a sci-fi/horror flick about a blobby menace haunting the Scottish marshes that was originally intended to be a Quatermass sequel.
-- Universal’s THE MOLE PEOPLE is a surprisingly interesting story about archaeologists stumbling upon a superstitious underground society descended from ancient Sumerians. Actual mole people are also both promised and delivered.
If you watch only one sci-fi movie from 1956...
As terrific as THE CREATURES WALKS AMONG US is, I’d say go for INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS if you can only do one.
In the third and final installment of Universal’s Gill-man franchise, a party of scientists again go looking for the creature after he escaped from a Florida marine park at the end of REVENGE OF THE CREATURE (1955). During a test dive to calibrate their sophisticated sonar equipment, the scientists spot the creature but are unable to get near enough to capture him. The creature then leads them upriver into the dark waters of the Everglades, until the scientists are forced to follow in a small open boat. Having evened the odds a bit, the creature forces a confrontation which ends with his capture -- and with him being badly burned in the process.
The scientists take the creature back to the waiting vessel where they’d hoped to study him, and find that the creature’s gills have been almost entirely burned away. However, they discover that he also possesses an unused set of lungs, so they perform emergency surgery to make them operational. Once the creature begins breathing through his lungs, he undergoes strange physical changes -- shedding many of his fish-like qualities and becoming increasingly human in appearance. Unsure as to whether the “humanizing” of the creature will extend to his behavior as well, the scientists bring him ashore for observation. But rivalries and jealousies among the scientists soon lead to a catastrophe.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Universal’s famed horror unit produced a handful of movies after this one, but THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US is the last installment of their last major franchise. It also happens to be one of the best monster movies Universal ever produced, and is well worth watching both on its own merits and also as the conclusion of a film making epoch. In the first two Gill-man movies, the creature is presented as a missing link between man and his distant marine ancestors. (Don’t think too hard about that one.) Though he has some human characteristics, he never does much more than kill intruders in his lagoon, kidnap pretty women, and flee from superior force. But in THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US, the creature becomes more cunning, more human, and possessed of a great deal more personality.
The first part of the movie -- the hunt and capture of the creature -- is much longer and considerably more exciting than a similar sequence in REVENGE OF THE CREATURE. The Everglades locations (or their studio equivalents) are plenty creepy, and the underwater photography is crystal clear. The creature seems to know he’s being hunted, and leads the scientists on a long chase that draws them into less safe territory. And although the scientists are aware that the creature is leveling the playing field, they have no choice but to follow and attempt the capture anyway. It’s all very tense and suspenseful, and really my only complaint about it is that the three male leads are all so square-jawed and hunky that it takes a little while to learn to tell them apart. But as the movie progresses, it becomes clearer that they each have different personalities and agendas -- something that you can’t always take for granted in these kinds of flicks.
 |  |
But the real payoff is what happens after the creature is captured. The pseudo-scientific explanation of the physical changes doesn’t make any sense -- supposedly the mere act of breathing through lungs instead of gills causes spontaneous mutations that tip the balance of evolution away from fish and towards human. But the changes make the creature far more sympathetic, as does his sudden lack of interest in kidnapping and killing. (There’s a pretty funny bit where he comes across a woman and looks at her for a moment -- apparently ready to snatch her up -- but then moves along without a second glance.) Rather than a killer, the creature here is a pathetic figure who is hunted, persecuted, and stranded by physical mutations in a world he doesn’t understand.
Although I am an unabashed fan of the original CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954), I think I’d nevertheless have to say that this is an even better picture than that one. It’s a shame that Universal didn’t make many more monster movies after THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US, since they finally seemed to figure out how to fuse their usual sensational sensibility with a more psychological and ambiguous style of horror. But starting in 1957, Universal turned over the rights of its horror franchises to England’s Hammer Studios -- which would go on to produce many, many monster movies (almost all of them featuring either Baron Frankenstein or Dracula) in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.
 |  |
What else happened this year?
-- Don Siegel directed the first (and, as far as I’m concerned, still the best) iteration of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, and managed to turn a pretty silly story into a creepy and tense thriller.
-- The other big sci-fi spectacular from 1956 is FORBIDDEN PLANET, an outer space updating of Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST that introduced the world to Robbie the Robot (among many other things).
-- Stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen and producer Charles Schneer turned their collective attention to the problem of mechanical marauders in EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS.
-- The 1954 Japanese monster flick GOJIRA was re-edited and released in America with 100% more Raymond Burr as GODZILLA, KING OF ALL MONSTERS.
-- Hammer released X THE UNKNOWN, a sci-fi/horror flick about a blobby menace haunting the Scottish marshes that was originally intended to be a Quatermass sequel.
-- Universal’s THE MOLE PEOPLE is a surprisingly interesting story about archaeologists stumbling upon a superstitious underground society descended from ancient Sumerians. Actual mole people are also both promised and delivered.
If you watch only one sci-fi movie from 1956...
As terrific as THE CREATURES WALKS AMONG US is, I’d say go for INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS if you can only do one.
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