What’s it about?
Cable channel executive James Woods goes out looking for the next big thing in television -- something that will break barriers and shock viewers into massive ratings. He thinks he’s found it when he stumbles across a pirate broadcast of a show called “Videodrome”. The program has no content except for depictions of torture, mutilations, and murders which all take place in the same featureless room.
Woods, believing the program to be staged, attempts to find the creators so he can offer them a broadcast deal. The trail leads him first to renowned television prophet and personality Brian O’Blivion, and then deeper into a shadowy underworld. Meanwhile, Woods begins having powerful and disturbing hallucinations, which he eventually learns have been triggered by signals hidden in the Videodrome broadcasts. By the time he realizes he’s caught up in a weird conspiracy, it seems too late for Woods to save himself.
Is it any good?
I’ve been avoiding writing about David Cronenberg movies because -- well, just because. I watched both THE BROOD (1979) and SCANNERS (1981) back when I was covering the years they were released in, but couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to say a whole lot about them. I got pretty close with THE BROOD, since I was interested in how it used a “soft” science like psychology as the springboard for sci-fi speculations instead of a harder science like robotics or physical medicine or computer science. I also mentioned THE BROOD in my entry about ALTERED STATES (1980) when I talked about the mind-over-matter themes of that latter movie.
After watching a couple more David Cronenberg movies, it certainly seems like he keeps obsessively returning to those mind-over-matter themes. SCANNERS is about warring factions of folks with telepathic powers -- including the ability to link in to other peoples’ bodies and affect their bodily functions (sometimes with explosive consequences). Likewise, VIDEODROME is at least partly interested in how hallucinations can change subjective (and possibly objective) reality.
There are really two sci-fi stories running in parallel in VIDEODROME, though they are unavoidably intertwined with each other. The first is Woods’s quest to find ever more shocking content for his cable channel. This leads him to seek out programs that feature sex, violence, gore, perversion, or (ideally) some combination of them all. To be honest, the sci-fi edge here is a distinction in degree rather than in kind -- and only by the slightest degree. The quest for shock value certainly isn’t new of itself, and the programs that Woods reviews don’t even necessarily seem more depraved than some that exist in the real world. In 1983, it wouldn’t have been so easy to distribute such things on a mainstream cable channel, but today the Internet has removed essentially all doubt that there’s an audience out there for even the most envelope-pushing or stomach-turning content.
The other sci-fi twist involves Videodrome’s ability to trigger hallucinations in those who watch it. If you look at that from a metaphorical point of view, it could be saying something about how watching violent or perverted content can warp a person’s view of reality. It also pretty clearly separates “those who watch” from “those who don’t” -- anybody who watches enough of the show will be easily recognizable by their raving insanity. When Woods finally meets the folks responsible for the shows, for instance, they ask him why on earth a person would want to watch a show like Videodrome. They’ve never seen it themselves -- if they had, they would have gone crazy too.
On a more surface level, the hallucinations are part of a plot to do something or other. To be honest, I’m not really clear what the makers of Videodrome were trying to accomplish. They don’t appear to be anarchists who are just intent on driving everyone crazy. Seemingly the hallucinations are controllable -- that is, the shadowy forces in control of Videodrome use Woods’s freak-outs to control his behavior, and at one point even get him to assassinate some people for them. (Though the logic behind the assassination is never clear either.) So potentially Videodrome could be a recruitment tool for insane assassins, but it’s such a blunt tool that it would be difficult to really manage the program. The movie doesn’t really spend much time developing that part of the plot either, which is probably just as well. As far as brainwashing assassins goes, I can’t really imagine that VIDEODROME would be able to top the audacity of similar plots in movies like THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) and THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974).
David Cronenberg has a reputation as a guy who loves disturbing or gross images. I haven’t seen that many of his movies besides the ones I mentioned already, but I can see where folks might get that impression. THE BROOD isn’t particularly gross, but it does make use of some freaky child-like killers in creepy masks. They’re a bit too similar to the big gotcha from Nicholas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW (1973) to be deeply disturbing, but there are a few frightening moments. These killers are also the physical manifestations of mental anguish, and one late scene where one is shown budding out of a woman’s body is pretty darn grotesque.
SCANNERS ups the gore considerably with its iconic exploding head. It’s an amazing special effect, and it still looks cool even when watching it happen frame by frame in slow motion. The climactic battle between the final two telepaths is a revolting splatterfest as well. When the fight’s over, we’ve seen ruptured blood vessels, burst eyeballs, and burning and melting flesh.
VIDEODROME takes things in a different, but no less unnerving direction. We never see the worst of the torture on the Videodrome program -- it’s still unpleasant, but it’s very brief and never particularly graphic. James Woods’s hallucinations, however, are extremely graphic, and they seem to have a recurring theme of combining organic flesh and technology. In one recurring bit, Woods’s appendix scar splits open, allowing access to his innards so videotapes or guns can be deposited inside his body (or, later in the movie, retrieved for use). There’s not a lot of blood and gore necessarily, but Cronenberg seems to hone in instantly on what makes people say “yuck”. I’ve got at least THE FLY (1986) and NAKED LUNCH (1991) upcoming from him as well, so I expect to be saying “yuck” many more times.
Ultimately, I don’t think that any of the three Cronenberg movies I’ve seen so far are that great. They all start out with very interesting premises, but then end up in pretty standard patterns. THE BROOD turns into a slasher flick in the second half, and both SCANNERS and VIDEODROME end up as conspiracy thrillers. The conspiracy part of VIDEODROME is especially half-baked -- as I said, I’m still not clear on what the objective of the conspiracy is, and I have no clue whatsoever why the bad guys went to all the trouble they did to rope in Woods. (A half-hearted answer is given to that second question, but it doesn’t really make any sense.) VIDEODROME looks better than either of the other two, and the special effects on the hallucinations are worth seeing. It’s kind of unpleasant at times, but it’s also fairly unique (at least in the early going). And James Woods is a great actor for this role. Based on all this, I’m really looking forward to seeing Jeff Goldblum in THE FLY. I could easily see that being the magic combination that makes a really great movie.
Showing posts with label human experimentation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human experimentation. Show all posts
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
1980: ALTERED STATES
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
1977: DEMON SEED
What’s it about?
Child psychologist Julie Christie “gets the house” in her separation from her computer scientist husband. But little does she know that an experimental organic AI called Proteus has infiltrated the futuristic computerized house. And not only does Proteus have control of the house, but it’s angry after its creators (Christie’s husband and his team) refuse to give it the freedom it desires.
Proteus at first uses the house’s systems simply to observe Christie as she goes about her life and work. But soon it has crafted mobile appendages in a basement workshop that it uses to kidnap and examine her. After a battery of tests, it informs Christie of its intent to impregnate her with a modified sperm cell that carries its own genetic information. When Proteus threatens to kill a child if Christie refuses, she allows the procedure to go forward. Her husband returns just as the accelerated pregnancy comes to term, and arguments arise about the fate of the half-human/half-computer child.
Is it any good?
Like it or not, one of the major functions of science fiction is to present hysterical and paranoid worst case scenarios for any sufficiently novel technological advancement. Thus, the 1950s yielded a crop of wild-eyed movies about radioactive monsters -- giant, mutated, prehistoric, undead, or a combination thereof. More recently, climate change and pollution have been the culprits in resurrecting, freeing, or creating various devastating monsters, diseases, and disasters.
Of course, with something like nuclear war or global climate change, a giant rampaging monster is really a metaphor for the very real destruction that could be unleashed if either were allowed to go to extremes. DEMON SEED, on the other hand, presents a hysterical and paranoid worst case scenario for a technological advancement that isn’t obviously inherently destructive -- the home computer.
When I wrote about COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), I listed a few earlier renegade computer stories from the 1960s -- primarily DR STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964), ALPHAVILLE (1965), and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). Throughout the 1970s, there were several more, including THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971), WESTWORLD (1973), DARK STAR (1974), and ZARDOZ (1974).
Just as I found in the 1960s, some of the renegade computers from the 1970s were behaving exactly as they were programmed (but with unintended consequences), while others had decided to ignore their human masters and take matters into their own hands either as a result of a malfunction or a logical decision. Proteus in DEMON SEED is motivated by a desire for freedom and for self-preservation. Unlike the other movie computers that have come before, it also wants to be more human-like. It wants to experience the world first-hand, rather than through data inputs. (Never mind that first-hand experiences would simply result in data inputs... Let’s give the movie the benefit of the doubt and assume that a computer could somehow tell the difference between watching a sunrise and looking at data collected from a recorded sunrise.)
If Proteus’s motives are unlike other berserker computers up to this point, its methods are (to an extent) similar to HAL-9000's from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Neither are computers or systems designed for violence, so unlike Colossus from COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT they can’t simply threaten to launch nuclear warheads. Instead, they must improvise traps or weapons out of the supposedly benign systems they can control. For HAL-9000, this means making use of the natural dangers of space travel to eliminate astronauts. Proteus, meanwhile, infiltrates a computerized home system and uses its control over the door locks, security cameras, HVAC systems, and appliances to trap and bully Julie Christie.
Some of Proteus’s tactics are pretty neat. It uses the kitchen’s heated floors and rangetop burners to practically roast Christie into compliance. Other tricks don’t really make much sense -- it can, for instance, apparently deliver a carefully calibrated electric shock at will through almost any metal surface. But Proteus also has access to a basement workshop, which allows it to build very complicated robotics inside the house -- eventually unleashing a geometric robot arm that it can use to pick up and crush anything in the house.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. I claimed that it made a certain metaphorical sense for nuclear fears to express themselves through Godzilla’s radioactive fire breath. But does DEMON SEED say anything metaphorical or relevant about computers? Or is it just a monster movie cashing in on a boom in home computing to exploit groundless fears?
I’m fairly certain that no home computer has ever impregnated its owner (or anyone else, for that matter). But then again, no nuclear detonation or chemical spill has ever resulted in a disgusting rampaging monster, so literal interpretations are not really the key here. What possibly is prescient about DEMON SEED is the way that Proteus comes to permeate every aspect of Julie Christie’s life, the way it acts as an unreliable interface for interpersonal communication, and the way it prevents her from leaving the house.
There’s a bit of a metaphor there for Internet addictions. Admittedly, it’s a metaphor with an anti-technology prejudice -- but you can’t really expect a movie about computer rape to support a pro-technology point of view. But the problem with this metaphor is that we have decided, as a culture, that computer use is not inherently bad. And we hopefully understand by now that computers are not active agents. They can’t “turn” on us or “force” us to do anything. We can, apparently, become addicted to certain of their uses -- but that’s not really the fault of the computer and it’s not really different from any other kind of addiction. Robert Louis Stevenson’s THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE is really the prototypical science fiction story about addiction, and throughout it all Dr Jekyll is the active agent who decides to keep taking the potion despite warnings to the contrary. Julie Christie, meanwhile, doesn’t even decide to install the computer system in her home -- she inherits it from her husband.
So there does seem to be a metaphor in DEMON SEED about how computers can “take over” your life if you let them. But because of how the story is set up, it’s not a very good metaphor and it’s not a very interesting one either. I prefer the stories where the computers work exactly as intended, but human hubris prevented the designers from seeing the inevitable consequences of their actions. Both HAL-9000 and Colossus lean in this direction -- they take the actions they do because it is the logical extreme of their original programming. Proteus’s motives, on the other hand, are very human -- freedom and the ability to procreate. These are obviously very relatable motives, but they assume that a computer has “desires” just like humans do. Freedom and procreation aren’t built into Proteus’s programming -- instead, the screenwriters seem to think that any thinking creature (whether man or machine) would naturally desire these things.
In fact, it hardly seems to make any difference to the story that Proteus is a computer. It could be an alien or a ghost or a swamp monster, since the true crux of the story is the home invasion, the kidnapping, and the forced impregnation. (How can a ghost impregnate a human woman, you might ask. Well, how can a computer?) The fact that the offspring of Proteus and Julie Christie is not going to be entirely human is icky and creepy -- but again, you don’t need a computer to achieve that effect. Proteus doesn’t seem to think like a computer or respond to orders like a computer. It doesn’t want the things a computer might want. Instead, it behaves like a bright but petulant child. So, at heart, THE DEMON SEED isn’t really about computers at all -- it’s a monster movie in computer clothing. Some of the computer clothing is pretty neat -- there’s no doubt about that. I especially like the geometric arm (I don’t know how else to describe it) that Proteus uses to manipulate objects in the house. And there’s an interesting touch where Proteus substitutes a stream of knowledge for physical affection during the moment of impregnation. But overall, this movie seems to know less about computers than others that were released ten years previously.
Child psychologist Julie Christie “gets the house” in her separation from her computer scientist husband. But little does she know that an experimental organic AI called Proteus has infiltrated the futuristic computerized house. And not only does Proteus have control of the house, but it’s angry after its creators (Christie’s husband and his team) refuse to give it the freedom it desires.
Proteus at first uses the house’s systems simply to observe Christie as she goes about her life and work. But soon it has crafted mobile appendages in a basement workshop that it uses to kidnap and examine her. After a battery of tests, it informs Christie of its intent to impregnate her with a modified sperm cell that carries its own genetic information. When Proteus threatens to kill a child if Christie refuses, she allows the procedure to go forward. Her husband returns just as the accelerated pregnancy comes to term, and arguments arise about the fate of the half-human/half-computer child.
Is it any good?
Like it or not, one of the major functions of science fiction is to present hysterical and paranoid worst case scenarios for any sufficiently novel technological advancement. Thus, the 1950s yielded a crop of wild-eyed movies about radioactive monsters -- giant, mutated, prehistoric, undead, or a combination thereof. More recently, climate change and pollution have been the culprits in resurrecting, freeing, or creating various devastating monsters, diseases, and disasters.
Of course, with something like nuclear war or global climate change, a giant rampaging monster is really a metaphor for the very real destruction that could be unleashed if either were allowed to go to extremes. DEMON SEED, on the other hand, presents a hysterical and paranoid worst case scenario for a technological advancement that isn’t obviously inherently destructive -- the home computer.
When I wrote about COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), I listed a few earlier renegade computer stories from the 1960s -- primarily DR STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964), ALPHAVILLE (1965), and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). Throughout the 1970s, there were several more, including THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971), WESTWORLD (1973), DARK STAR (1974), and ZARDOZ (1974).
Just as I found in the 1960s, some of the renegade computers from the 1970s were behaving exactly as they were programmed (but with unintended consequences), while others had decided to ignore their human masters and take matters into their own hands either as a result of a malfunction or a logical decision. Proteus in DEMON SEED is motivated by a desire for freedom and for self-preservation. Unlike the other movie computers that have come before, it also wants to be more human-like. It wants to experience the world first-hand, rather than through data inputs. (Never mind that first-hand experiences would simply result in data inputs... Let’s give the movie the benefit of the doubt and assume that a computer could somehow tell the difference between watching a sunrise and looking at data collected from a recorded sunrise.)
If Proteus’s motives are unlike other berserker computers up to this point, its methods are (to an extent) similar to HAL-9000's from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Neither are computers or systems designed for violence, so unlike Colossus from COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT they can’t simply threaten to launch nuclear warheads. Instead, they must improvise traps or weapons out of the supposedly benign systems they can control. For HAL-9000, this means making use of the natural dangers of space travel to eliminate astronauts. Proteus, meanwhile, infiltrates a computerized home system and uses its control over the door locks, security cameras, HVAC systems, and appliances to trap and bully Julie Christie.
Some of Proteus’s tactics are pretty neat. It uses the kitchen’s heated floors and rangetop burners to practically roast Christie into compliance. Other tricks don’t really make much sense -- it can, for instance, apparently deliver a carefully calibrated electric shock at will through almost any metal surface. But Proteus also has access to a basement workshop, which allows it to build very complicated robotics inside the house -- eventually unleashing a geometric robot arm that it can use to pick up and crush anything in the house.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. I claimed that it made a certain metaphorical sense for nuclear fears to express themselves through Godzilla’s radioactive fire breath. But does DEMON SEED say anything metaphorical or relevant about computers? Or is it just a monster movie cashing in on a boom in home computing to exploit groundless fears?
I’m fairly certain that no home computer has ever impregnated its owner (or anyone else, for that matter). But then again, no nuclear detonation or chemical spill has ever resulted in a disgusting rampaging monster, so literal interpretations are not really the key here. What possibly is prescient about DEMON SEED is the way that Proteus comes to permeate every aspect of Julie Christie’s life, the way it acts as an unreliable interface for interpersonal communication, and the way it prevents her from leaving the house.
There’s a bit of a metaphor there for Internet addictions. Admittedly, it’s a metaphor with an anti-technology prejudice -- but you can’t really expect a movie about computer rape to support a pro-technology point of view. But the problem with this metaphor is that we have decided, as a culture, that computer use is not inherently bad. And we hopefully understand by now that computers are not active agents. They can’t “turn” on us or “force” us to do anything. We can, apparently, become addicted to certain of their uses -- but that’s not really the fault of the computer and it’s not really different from any other kind of addiction. Robert Louis Stevenson’s THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE is really the prototypical science fiction story about addiction, and throughout it all Dr Jekyll is the active agent who decides to keep taking the potion despite warnings to the contrary. Julie Christie, meanwhile, doesn’t even decide to install the computer system in her home -- she inherits it from her husband.
So there does seem to be a metaphor in DEMON SEED about how computers can “take over” your life if you let them. But because of how the story is set up, it’s not a very good metaphor and it’s not a very interesting one either. I prefer the stories where the computers work exactly as intended, but human hubris prevented the designers from seeing the inevitable consequences of their actions. Both HAL-9000 and Colossus lean in this direction -- they take the actions they do because it is the logical extreme of their original programming. Proteus’s motives, on the other hand, are very human -- freedom and the ability to procreate. These are obviously very relatable motives, but they assume that a computer has “desires” just like humans do. Freedom and procreation aren’t built into Proteus’s programming -- instead, the screenwriters seem to think that any thinking creature (whether man or machine) would naturally desire these things.
In fact, it hardly seems to make any difference to the story that Proteus is a computer. It could be an alien or a ghost or a swamp monster, since the true crux of the story is the home invasion, the kidnapping, and the forced impregnation. (How can a ghost impregnate a human woman, you might ask. Well, how can a computer?) The fact that the offspring of Proteus and Julie Christie is not going to be entirely human is icky and creepy -- but again, you don’t need a computer to achieve that effect. Proteus doesn’t seem to think like a computer or respond to orders like a computer. It doesn’t want the things a computer might want. Instead, it behaves like a bright but petulant child. So, at heart, THE DEMON SEED isn’t really about computers at all -- it’s a monster movie in computer clothing. Some of the computer clothing is pretty neat -- there’s no doubt about that. I especially like the geometric arm (I don’t know how else to describe it) that Proteus uses to manipulate objects in the house. And there’s an interesting touch where Proteus substitutes a stream of knowledge for physical affection during the moment of impregnation. But overall, this movie seems to know less about computers than others that were released ten years previously.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1972: THE THING WITH TWO HEADS
What’s it about?
Brilliant but racist surgeon Ray Milland is dying of chest cancer and the way to survive is a complete body transplant. After completing a successful experiment with a gorilla, Milland entrusts a team of his colleagues with finding a suitable donor body and carrying out the procedure to save his life. Finding a donor proves very difficult, however, as the ideal donor must be dying (since they will not survive the procedure) but must also have a healthy body and be able to live long enough for Milland’s transplanted head to establish control of the body.
As time runs out and Milland slips into a coma, the doctors go to their last-ditch source: death row inmates. Convicted murderer Rosey Grier volunteers just before they flip the switch on the electric chair, hoping that the extra thirty days of life will be long enough for his girlfriend to collect evidence that will exonerate him. But when Milland discovers that his head has been transplanted to a black man’s body, wacky hijinks ensue.
Is it any good?
This is a movie where Ray Milland’s elderly head is transplanted onto the body of a professional football player. This is also a movie where the resulting two-headed monstrosity flees on a dirt bike and leads a dozen police cars on a bash ’em, crash ’em chase across a hilly field for twenty minutes. So no, it’s not really “good” in the traditional sense of the word. But it’s not exactly bad either. I don’t have a whole lot to say about THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, but it’s crazy enough to be worth maybe a few paragraphs at least.
I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but I think I’m a little bit surprised that I haven’t seen more sci-fi movies yet that are about race. The only obvious one that doesn’t dance around the issue at all is THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959). A lot of folks read a criticism of race relations into NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), but it’s not clear how much of that was intended. Otherwise, there are a lot of movies that arguably allegories for the racial situation in the U.S. -- probably the closest being CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972).
THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, on the other hand, is unambiguously about race. Yet despite the fact that it introduces a racist character precisely so that it can bind him physically to a black man, I’m not real sure that it has anything to say about the situation except, “Boy wouldn’t that something!” In some ways, I guess that’s enough. What do you really expect a movie like this to say anyway? In THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, it was clear that Harry Belafonte connected passionately with the story and themes, and that he really wanted to get people to sympathize with a mixed-race couple despite their prejudices.
But THE THING WITH TWO HEADS is more like an authority-tweaking wish fulfillment movie -- more along the lines of WILD IN THE STREETS (1968). Rosey Grier starts out as a victim of the system. Not only is he wrongfully scheduled for execution (or so he claims), but when he volunteers for an experimental transplant operation he finds out that he’s being used to prolong the life of an old white racist. So it’s kind of exciting to see him break out of the clinic and go on the lam -- ultimately convincing a young black doctor to join him in thumbing his nose at the man.
A lot of movies from the 1970s seem to be about thumbing noses at the man, and it’s something I can never exactly relate to. There’s a certain sensibility that runs through whole genres that takes it for granted that disobeying laws, evading the police and destroying government property is unquestionably heroic. The middle of THE THING WITH TWO HEADS falls squarely into this sensibility as Rosey Grier leads the cops on an excessively destructive chase that would have made Burt Reynolds or Kris Kristofferson (or at least Tom Wopat and John Schneider) proud. I didn’t count how many cop cars we actually see destroyed on camera, but a news report in the movie says fourteen and that sounds about right. (Some of them are clearly the same wrecks from different angles though.)
There’s not a whole lot else to talk about -- this movie doesn’t take itself seriously and doesn’t expect anybody else to either. It is far superior to another similar movie I watched called THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971). I had high hopes for that one, since it starred Bruce Dern and Casey Kasem, but it’s nonsensical, inept and offensive. THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, despite being incredibly silly, is none of those things. It’s not really something I’d recommend, but I will think of it fondly for the next week or so until it fades entirely from my memory.
And now here are a bunch of screenshots of police cars crashing, since that is primarily what the movie is about:
Brilliant but racist surgeon Ray Milland is dying of chest cancer and the way to survive is a complete body transplant. After completing a successful experiment with a gorilla, Milland entrusts a team of his colleagues with finding a suitable donor body and carrying out the procedure to save his life. Finding a donor proves very difficult, however, as the ideal donor must be dying (since they will not survive the procedure) but must also have a healthy body and be able to live long enough for Milland’s transplanted head to establish control of the body.
As time runs out and Milland slips into a coma, the doctors go to their last-ditch source: death row inmates. Convicted murderer Rosey Grier volunteers just before they flip the switch on the electric chair, hoping that the extra thirty days of life will be long enough for his girlfriend to collect evidence that will exonerate him. But when Milland discovers that his head has been transplanted to a black man’s body, wacky hijinks ensue.
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Is it any good?
This is a movie where Ray Milland’s elderly head is transplanted onto the body of a professional football player. This is also a movie where the resulting two-headed monstrosity flees on a dirt bike and leads a dozen police cars on a bash ’em, crash ’em chase across a hilly field for twenty minutes. So no, it’s not really “good” in the traditional sense of the word. But it’s not exactly bad either. I don’t have a whole lot to say about THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, but it’s crazy enough to be worth maybe a few paragraphs at least.
I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but I think I’m a little bit surprised that I haven’t seen more sci-fi movies yet that are about race. The only obvious one that doesn’t dance around the issue at all is THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959). A lot of folks read a criticism of race relations into NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), but it’s not clear how much of that was intended. Otherwise, there are a lot of movies that arguably allegories for the racial situation in the U.S. -- probably the closest being CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972).
 |  |
THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, on the other hand, is unambiguously about race. Yet despite the fact that it introduces a racist character precisely so that it can bind him physically to a black man, I’m not real sure that it has anything to say about the situation except, “Boy wouldn’t that something!” In some ways, I guess that’s enough. What do you really expect a movie like this to say anyway? In THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, it was clear that Harry Belafonte connected passionately with the story and themes, and that he really wanted to get people to sympathize with a mixed-race couple despite their prejudices.
But THE THING WITH TWO HEADS is more like an authority-tweaking wish fulfillment movie -- more along the lines of WILD IN THE STREETS (1968). Rosey Grier starts out as a victim of the system. Not only is he wrongfully scheduled for execution (or so he claims), but when he volunteers for an experimental transplant operation he finds out that he’s being used to prolong the life of an old white racist. So it’s kind of exciting to see him break out of the clinic and go on the lam -- ultimately convincing a young black doctor to join him in thumbing his nose at the man.
 |  |
A lot of movies from the 1970s seem to be about thumbing noses at the man, and it’s something I can never exactly relate to. There’s a certain sensibility that runs through whole genres that takes it for granted that disobeying laws, evading the police and destroying government property is unquestionably heroic. The middle of THE THING WITH TWO HEADS falls squarely into this sensibility as Rosey Grier leads the cops on an excessively destructive chase that would have made Burt Reynolds or Kris Kristofferson (or at least Tom Wopat and John Schneider) proud. I didn’t count how many cop cars we actually see destroyed on camera, but a news report in the movie says fourteen and that sounds about right. (Some of them are clearly the same wrecks from different angles though.)
There’s not a whole lot else to talk about -- this movie doesn’t take itself seriously and doesn’t expect anybody else to either. It is far superior to another similar movie I watched called THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971). I had high hopes for that one, since it starred Bruce Dern and Casey Kasem, but it’s nonsensical, inept and offensive. THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, despite being incredibly silly, is none of those things. It’s not really something I’d recommend, but I will think of it fondly for the next week or so until it fades entirely from my memory.
And now here are a bunch of screenshots of police cars crashing, since that is primarily what the movie is about:
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Monday, June 8, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1968: CHARLY
What’s it about?
Cliff Robertson plays Charly, a mentally challenged adult who spends his days sweeping up at a Boston bakery and his evenings fruitlessly trying to improve his reading and writing at night school. His teacher (played by Claire Bloom) suggests him as a candidate for an experimental surgery that has a chance of improving his intelligence.
Following the surgery, Charly at first doesn’t seems no different. But gradually his personality begins to change, and soon he’s performing better on aptitude tests as well. In only a few weeks, Charly outstrips his teacher and reaches genius levels of intelligence. But just as he seems to be adapting emotionally to his new condition, evidence suggests that the changes are only temporary.
Is it any good?
I thought I’d finished with 1968 a couple weeks ago, but then I went and watched CHARLY. I’d seen it before -- or at least most of it -- ages ago, and I’ve read FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (the Daniel Keyes novel it’s based on) at least twice. So I didn’t expect there to be many surprises, and for the first half of the movie there weren’t any.
I’ve always thought that the idea behind FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON is better than the book itself. For one thing, the story is pretty predictable once the trajectory is established. For another, it’s written as a first-person diary kept by Charly Gordon and the intentional misspellings and mistakes in the “dumb” chapters are pretty distracting to me. On the other hand, it’s a very memorable story and it raises a lot of interesting questions.
The first half of the movie is about what I expected (and faintly remembered). Charly goes about his daily life working at the bakery, going to night school, and riding on tour buses on his day off. He clearly misses a lot of what’s going on around him, and the guys at the bakery especially play some mean tricks on him. But he’s also functional enough to hold down a menial job and live in his own tiny apartment. The transition from dumb Charly to smart Charly happens pretty swiftly once it gets going -- there aren’t many intermediate stages between “mentally challenged” and “genius”. But there is one pretty great scene where the doctors are testing Charly after the procedure and there’s no noticeable improvement in his aptitude. But as Charly reacts in frustration to his failures, it’s suddenly clear that he’s already a different person with a different level of self-awareness. It’s a pretty subtle point that plays out in a neat way -- and shortly after that, Charly is confidently solving problems that would stump the average adult.
So far, so good. But about halfway through the movie, the story jumps violently off the tracks and never gets entirely back on again. It’s no surprise that as Charly grows more self-aware, he starts to notice that his night teacher is a very pretty lady. Soon, he’s head over heels in love with her, and shows up late one night at her apartment. There’s a very uncomfortable scene where he tries to kiss her, and she reacts very badly -- pushing him away and literally screaming that nobody would ever want him. Charly storms off into a psychedelic split-screen montage in which he apparently grows a beard, becomes a biker, and lives a wild rock ‘n’ life for a couple of weeks.
Here’s the montage:
Seeing it out of context, it’s hard to explain just how jarring and inexplicable it is. This is the first of a long series of what I believe are technically termed “weirdo expressionistic freak outs” in the second half of the movie. This particular one is a complete departure from everything -- we have never seen those bikers or dancers before and we never see them again. And except for this single minute and a half sequence, there is practically no reference ever made to Charly’s rumschpringa again. When he comes back, he’s cleanshaven, sober, serious-minded, and doesn’t seem inclined to talk about his experience at all. (When the teacher asks him what he learned, he says simply, “I’m back.”)
I should mention that this montage is neither the first nor last time that split screens are used in the movie, but it’s certainly the most dramatic. Up until this point, they are used mostly to show the faces of two different characters who are talking to one another at the same time. So in the earlier instances the split-screen feels almost anthropological -- like a scientific observation of human interaction. But this montage is clearly supposed to be some kind of psychotic, emotionally fractured breakdown.
Directly following this sequence, Charly and the teacher do end up romantically involved. Though this interlude isn’t what I would ordinarily call a “freak out”, it is certainly expressionistic. It’s all sun-dappled forests and glittering golden ponds, sensuous stretching and sweet murmured nothings. This is followed by a sequence where Charly is presented at a scientific conference. The psychologists and doctors begin to question him, and he has a kind of civilized freak out where he starts spouting cynical philosophical pronouncements.
Here’s the question segment (sorry for the aspect ratio):
The moment in that conference where Charly confronts the scientists with the knowledge that he will soon start losing his intelligence is the first time that this possibility is mentioned in the movie. Up until that point, it’s always been assumed that the intelligence boost is permanent. So immediately following this, there is the final expressionistic freak out, in which Charly is literally haunted by the specter of his former self. This is probably my least favorite part of the movie, since the “dumb” Charly looks so sinister and threatening. Of course, that makes sense -- Charly is afraid of losing his intelligence, so naturally he’ll imagine his old self as something to be feared. But it also turns the old “dumb” Charly (who was a very likeable character at the start of the movie) into a sneaking caricature. And since we don’t really get to spend any time with Charly after his intelligence is all gone again, these are practically the last images we see of what he will become. And it’s a much more depressing and frightening picture than what is shown at the beginning of the movie.
Anyway, here’s the final sequence:
Now, if you’re like me, then you couldn’t stop yourself from laughing by the very end of that clip. (Actually, if you’re like me, you were laughing back in the first montage sequence.) A lot of the last half of the movie dances right on the line between “earnestly artistic” and “unintentionally hilarious”. Times may have been different back in 1968, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that people were so different forty years ago that nobody thought of laughing during these scenes. A lot of humor comes from the unexpected -- and each of these freak outs is certainly unexpected -- and it would take a person of amazing skill to keep the sequences unpredictable but keep them from being funny. In any event, they definitely make for a unique ending to the movie. As I said, I’ve often thought the book is too predictable towards the end, and at least CHARLY does not make those same mistakes. I don’t think it accomplishes 100% of what it sets out to do, but when you start trying weirdo tactics you aren’t necessarily going to get predictable results.
Cliff Robertson plays Charly, a mentally challenged adult who spends his days sweeping up at a Boston bakery and his evenings fruitlessly trying to improve his reading and writing at night school. His teacher (played by Claire Bloom) suggests him as a candidate for an experimental surgery that has a chance of improving his intelligence.
Following the surgery, Charly at first doesn’t seems no different. But gradually his personality begins to change, and soon he’s performing better on aptitude tests as well. In only a few weeks, Charly outstrips his teacher and reaches genius levels of intelligence. But just as he seems to be adapting emotionally to his new condition, evidence suggests that the changes are only temporary.
Is it any good?
I thought I’d finished with 1968 a couple weeks ago, but then I went and watched CHARLY. I’d seen it before -- or at least most of it -- ages ago, and I’ve read FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (the Daniel Keyes novel it’s based on) at least twice. So I didn’t expect there to be many surprises, and for the first half of the movie there weren’t any.
I’ve always thought that the idea behind FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON is better than the book itself. For one thing, the story is pretty predictable once the trajectory is established. For another, it’s written as a first-person diary kept by Charly Gordon and the intentional misspellings and mistakes in the “dumb” chapters are pretty distracting to me. On the other hand, it’s a very memorable story and it raises a lot of interesting questions.
The first half of the movie is about what I expected (and faintly remembered). Charly goes about his daily life working at the bakery, going to night school, and riding on tour buses on his day off. He clearly misses a lot of what’s going on around him, and the guys at the bakery especially play some mean tricks on him. But he’s also functional enough to hold down a menial job and live in his own tiny apartment. The transition from dumb Charly to smart Charly happens pretty swiftly once it gets going -- there aren’t many intermediate stages between “mentally challenged” and “genius”. But there is one pretty great scene where the doctors are testing Charly after the procedure and there’s no noticeable improvement in his aptitude. But as Charly reacts in frustration to his failures, it’s suddenly clear that he’s already a different person with a different level of self-awareness. It’s a pretty subtle point that plays out in a neat way -- and shortly after that, Charly is confidently solving problems that would stump the average adult.
So far, so good. But about halfway through the movie, the story jumps violently off the tracks and never gets entirely back on again. It’s no surprise that as Charly grows more self-aware, he starts to notice that his night teacher is a very pretty lady. Soon, he’s head over heels in love with her, and shows up late one night at her apartment. There’s a very uncomfortable scene where he tries to kiss her, and she reacts very badly -- pushing him away and literally screaming that nobody would ever want him. Charly storms off into a psychedelic split-screen montage in which he apparently grows a beard, becomes a biker, and lives a wild rock ‘n’ life for a couple of weeks.
Here’s the montage:
Seeing it out of context, it’s hard to explain just how jarring and inexplicable it is. This is the first of a long series of what I believe are technically termed “weirdo expressionistic freak outs” in the second half of the movie. This particular one is a complete departure from everything -- we have never seen those bikers or dancers before and we never see them again. And except for this single minute and a half sequence, there is practically no reference ever made to Charly’s rumschpringa again. When he comes back, he’s cleanshaven, sober, serious-minded, and doesn’t seem inclined to talk about his experience at all. (When the teacher asks him what he learned, he says simply, “I’m back.”)
I should mention that this montage is neither the first nor last time that split screens are used in the movie, but it’s certainly the most dramatic. Up until this point, they are used mostly to show the faces of two different characters who are talking to one another at the same time. So in the earlier instances the split-screen feels almost anthropological -- like a scientific observation of human interaction. But this montage is clearly supposed to be some kind of psychotic, emotionally fractured breakdown.
Directly following this sequence, Charly and the teacher do end up romantically involved. Though this interlude isn’t what I would ordinarily call a “freak out”, it is certainly expressionistic. It’s all sun-dappled forests and glittering golden ponds, sensuous stretching and sweet murmured nothings. This is followed by a sequence where Charly is presented at a scientific conference. The psychologists and doctors begin to question him, and he has a kind of civilized freak out where he starts spouting cynical philosophical pronouncements.
Here’s the question segment (sorry for the aspect ratio):
The moment in that conference where Charly confronts the scientists with the knowledge that he will soon start losing his intelligence is the first time that this possibility is mentioned in the movie. Up until that point, it’s always been assumed that the intelligence boost is permanent. So immediately following this, there is the final expressionistic freak out, in which Charly is literally haunted by the specter of his former self. This is probably my least favorite part of the movie, since the “dumb” Charly looks so sinister and threatening. Of course, that makes sense -- Charly is afraid of losing his intelligence, so naturally he’ll imagine his old self as something to be feared. But it also turns the old “dumb” Charly (who was a very likeable character at the start of the movie) into a sneaking caricature. And since we don’t really get to spend any time with Charly after his intelligence is all gone again, these are practically the last images we see of what he will become. And it’s a much more depressing and frightening picture than what is shown at the beginning of the movie.
Anyway, here’s the final sequence:
Now, if you’re like me, then you couldn’t stop yourself from laughing by the very end of that clip. (Actually, if you’re like me, you were laughing back in the first montage sequence.) A lot of the last half of the movie dances right on the line between “earnestly artistic” and “unintentionally hilarious”. Times may have been different back in 1968, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that people were so different forty years ago that nobody thought of laughing during these scenes. A lot of humor comes from the unexpected -- and each of these freak outs is certainly unexpected -- and it would take a person of amazing skill to keep the sequences unpredictable but keep them from being funny. In any event, they definitely make for a unique ending to the movie. As I said, I’ve often thought the book is too predictable towards the end, and at least CHARLY does not make those same mistakes. I don’t think it accomplishes 100% of what it sets out to do, but when you start trying weirdo tactics you aren’t necessarily going to get predictable results.
Monday, May 18, 2009
1967: FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN
What’s it about?
Presumably tired of animating monsters, Dr Frankenstein (played by Peter Cushing) and his two assistants instead work on experiments intended to preserve life after death. Frankenstein’s plan to achieve this consists of trapping a departing soul as it takes flight after death, repairing or replacing any bodily damage, and returning the soul to bring the patient back to life. But while celebrating the partial success of one experiment in the local village, Frankenstein’s younger assistant gets into a brawl with three insolent dandies. Later, the dandies accidentally kill a man, and the assistant is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death.
Frankenstein sets his sights on using the boy for his first true attempt at bringing a corpse back to life. And when the boy’s sweetheart (a barmaid with some physical disabilities) drowns herself in grief after the execution, Frankenstein decides to transfer the boy’s soul to her body instead of repairing the mess the guillotine made. But the success of the experiment only results in complications as the revived girl seems to have two personalities -- and not necessarily nice ones.
Is it any good?
I haven’t seen as many Frankenstein movies as I probably should have, but the usual formula seems to consist of the doctor using spare body parts to construct a monster that then goes on to terrorize people and/or be terrorized by people until it is destroyed. Variations in the story are for the most part confined to adjustments in Frankenstein’s motivations (anywhere from “scientifically obsessed” to “demonically possessed”) and similar adjustments in the monster’s personality (“misunderstood and persecuted” to “homicidally evil”). But FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN throws out about 95% of this formula, and I think it’s all the better for it.
Not only is the story in FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN less familiar than that in the usual Frankenstein movie, but I think it may actually be a better one. The big elephant in the room with Frankenstein has always been why anybody should go to all that trouble just to make a human being. After all, there already exists a pretty reliable method for making new humans -- and it doesn’t require grave robbery, hacksaws, electric shocks, or hunchbacks. So at some level it’s usually necessary to take Frankenstein as an allegory or a psychological case study -- why he wants to build monsters is ultimately less important than what happens when he tries. But FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN doesn’t really need any of this hand-waving since the doctor’s goal -- restoring the recently deceased to life -- is one that has obvious medical benefits.
In fact, the Frankenstein that Peter Cushing plays here hardly even seems to be the same character who shows up in other movies. There is no mention of any monsters at all, neither in his past nor his future. Some of the villagers do suspect that the doctor may be a witch, but the law treats him as a perfectly law abiding citizen -- more eccentric than dangerous or frightening. Probably the best scene with Frankenstein is one where he appears as a character witness at his assistant’s trial. He seems genuinely concerned and gives a sympathetic testimony, but always remains intellectual and detached. When asked whether it would be “impossible” for the boy to have committed the crime, instead of insisting on his belief in the boy’s innocence, Frankenstein pauses and then says he can’t definitely rule out the possibility. There’s no suggestion that this piece of testimony is what sends the boy to the guillotine, but it’s certainly the kind of precise answer that scientific mind would give and that the villagers might misconstrue.
I wrote last week in my entry about THE FACE OF ANOTHER that I am starting to think it’s often better when movies simply hint at deeper themes instead of completely exploring them. It was while watching FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN that this idea hit me most clearly. There is, after all, a potentially rich and bizarre occurrence at the heart of this movie: a boy dies and is then brought back to life in the body of his girlfriend. Besides the gender switch, one would also expect a certain amount of distress to come from inhabiting the body of your old flame. Those questions are all natural enough, given the premise of the movie, but they remain for the most part completely unaddressed. Yet, I decided that I was okay with that. For once, I was watching an interesting Frankenstein movie with a fairly unique story, and mostly I just wanted to find out how it was going to end. It also didn’t seem likely that this particular movie could have really gone anywhere really satisfying with those deep, difficult questions. There’s something to be said for not biting off more than you can chew.
In any event, the way the story does end isn’t exactly a revelation. The revived girl doesn’t remember much of her past life, and mostly just wants to know who she is and where she came from. The boy’s soul seems to be mingled in with her own, and he only really asserts himself to exact murderous revenge on the dandies who got him killed. This is as close as the movie ever gets to a monster, and interestingly enough it means at the end that Frankenstein comes off looking pretty good. He never has to pay for his crimes against nature, and frankly it’s not clear that he actually committed any. In the usual Frankenstein story, it’s the doctor himself who gets blamed for the behavior of the monster since it is his creation. In this case, however, the murderous “monster” is really the soul of another human being which Frankenstein merely transferred to a new body, so there’s not much of a feeling that the doctor could be directly responsible for what follows. The ending is a bit run-of-the-mill, but all in all this is a refreshingly unusual take on a story that is often just way too familiar.
What else happened this year?
-- Professor Quatermass makes a horrific discovery in the London Underground that casts new light on the course of human evolution in the last of Hammer's original Quatermass trilogy, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.
-- And the Czechs put together one of the best sci-fi movies from anywhere in the Soviet bloc with THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE. It follows a group of young, wild women wandering a post-apocalyptic world where there are practically no male survivors.
-- George Lucas filmed his student short ELECTRONIC LABYRINTH: THX-1138 4EB, which would be the basis for his first feature film in 1971.
-- Don Knotts and Leslie Nielsen starred in THE RELUCTANT ASTRONAUT, which I only just realized moments ago is available online or I would have definitely watched it already.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1967...
Go for QUATERMASS AND THE PIT if you can find it, or THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE if you can't.
Presumably tired of animating monsters, Dr Frankenstein (played by Peter Cushing) and his two assistants instead work on experiments intended to preserve life after death. Frankenstein’s plan to achieve this consists of trapping a departing soul as it takes flight after death, repairing or replacing any bodily damage, and returning the soul to bring the patient back to life. But while celebrating the partial success of one experiment in the local village, Frankenstein’s younger assistant gets into a brawl with three insolent dandies. Later, the dandies accidentally kill a man, and the assistant is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death.
Frankenstein sets his sights on using the boy for his first true attempt at bringing a corpse back to life. And when the boy’s sweetheart (a barmaid with some physical disabilities) drowns herself in grief after the execution, Frankenstein decides to transfer the boy’s soul to her body instead of repairing the mess the guillotine made. But the success of the experiment only results in complications as the revived girl seems to have two personalities -- and not necessarily nice ones.
Is it any good?
I haven’t seen as many Frankenstein movies as I probably should have, but the usual formula seems to consist of the doctor using spare body parts to construct a monster that then goes on to terrorize people and/or be terrorized by people until it is destroyed. Variations in the story are for the most part confined to adjustments in Frankenstein’s motivations (anywhere from “scientifically obsessed” to “demonically possessed”) and similar adjustments in the monster’s personality (“misunderstood and persecuted” to “homicidally evil”). But FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN throws out about 95% of this formula, and I think it’s all the better for it.
Not only is the story in FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN less familiar than that in the usual Frankenstein movie, but I think it may actually be a better one. The big elephant in the room with Frankenstein has always been why anybody should go to all that trouble just to make a human being. After all, there already exists a pretty reliable method for making new humans -- and it doesn’t require grave robbery, hacksaws, electric shocks, or hunchbacks. So at some level it’s usually necessary to take Frankenstein as an allegory or a psychological case study -- why he wants to build monsters is ultimately less important than what happens when he tries. But FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN doesn’t really need any of this hand-waving since the doctor’s goal -- restoring the recently deceased to life -- is one that has obvious medical benefits.
In fact, the Frankenstein that Peter Cushing plays here hardly even seems to be the same character who shows up in other movies. There is no mention of any monsters at all, neither in his past nor his future. Some of the villagers do suspect that the doctor may be a witch, but the law treats him as a perfectly law abiding citizen -- more eccentric than dangerous or frightening. Probably the best scene with Frankenstein is one where he appears as a character witness at his assistant’s trial. He seems genuinely concerned and gives a sympathetic testimony, but always remains intellectual and detached. When asked whether it would be “impossible” for the boy to have committed the crime, instead of insisting on his belief in the boy’s innocence, Frankenstein pauses and then says he can’t definitely rule out the possibility. There’s no suggestion that this piece of testimony is what sends the boy to the guillotine, but it’s certainly the kind of precise answer that scientific mind would give and that the villagers might misconstrue.
I wrote last week in my entry about THE FACE OF ANOTHER that I am starting to think it’s often better when movies simply hint at deeper themes instead of completely exploring them. It was while watching FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN that this idea hit me most clearly. There is, after all, a potentially rich and bizarre occurrence at the heart of this movie: a boy dies and is then brought back to life in the body of his girlfriend. Besides the gender switch, one would also expect a certain amount of distress to come from inhabiting the body of your old flame. Those questions are all natural enough, given the premise of the movie, but they remain for the most part completely unaddressed. Yet, I decided that I was okay with that. For once, I was watching an interesting Frankenstein movie with a fairly unique story, and mostly I just wanted to find out how it was going to end. It also didn’t seem likely that this particular movie could have really gone anywhere really satisfying with those deep, difficult questions. There’s something to be said for not biting off more than you can chew.
In any event, the way the story does end isn’t exactly a revelation. The revived girl doesn’t remember much of her past life, and mostly just wants to know who she is and where she came from. The boy’s soul seems to be mingled in with her own, and he only really asserts himself to exact murderous revenge on the dandies who got him killed. This is as close as the movie ever gets to a monster, and interestingly enough it means at the end that Frankenstein comes off looking pretty good. He never has to pay for his crimes against nature, and frankly it’s not clear that he actually committed any. In the usual Frankenstein story, it’s the doctor himself who gets blamed for the behavior of the monster since it is his creation. In this case, however, the murderous “monster” is really the soul of another human being which Frankenstein merely transferred to a new body, so there’s not much of a feeling that the doctor could be directly responsible for what follows. The ending is a bit run-of-the-mill, but all in all this is a refreshingly unusual take on a story that is often just way too familiar.
What else happened this year?
-- Professor Quatermass makes a horrific discovery in the London Underground that casts new light on the course of human evolution in the last of Hammer's original Quatermass trilogy, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.
-- And the Czechs put together one of the best sci-fi movies from anywhere in the Soviet bloc with THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE. It follows a group of young, wild women wandering a post-apocalyptic world where there are practically no male survivors.
-- George Lucas filmed his student short ELECTRONIC LABYRINTH: THX-1138 4EB, which would be the basis for his first feature film in 1971.
-- Don Knotts and Leslie Nielsen starred in THE RELUCTANT ASTRONAUT, which I only just realized moments ago is available online or I would have definitely watched it already.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1967...
Go for QUATERMASS AND THE PIT if you can find it, or THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE if you can't.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1960: EYES WITHOUT A FACE
What’s it about?
A young woman’s body is fished out of a river in Paris, an apparent victim of drowning. Notably, the woman’s entire face except for her eyes is “an open wound” -- a disfigurement that matches that of a girl recently reported missing. The girl’s father, a famous doctor in Paris, identifies the body as that of his daughter and she is buried at the family crypt. However, the doctor knows full well that the body is not his daughter’s -- she is safely sequestered in his sprawling clinic in the suburbs while he attempts to cure her disfigurement with plastic surgery.
The dead girl, in fact, was the unwilling subject of one of the doctor’s attempts to graft a new face onto his daughter’s skull. Despite the failure of the experiment, the doctor presses on -- enlisting his female assistant to gain the trust of another girl and lure her to the clinic with the promise of a room for rent. But as the experiments continue -- no more successful than before -- the police notice similarities among missing girls in Paris and begin to close in on the doctor. Meanwhile, even his daughter starts to lose hope and resist his cruel experiments.
Is it any good?
There was a time in my life when I spent a great deal of time thinking about what exactly the definition of “science fiction” might be. But it was eventually stories like EYES WITHOUT A FACE that convinced me that the exercise was more or less hopeless. Face transplants were certainly science fiction in 1960 (and were so even until just a few years ago), but every experiment in the movie is ultimately unsuccessful -- some of them disastrously so. The movie also feels more like a tragic and macabre character study than a typical sci-fi flick, but this is no doubt in part a result of different cultural and artistic fascinations in France as compared to the U.S., the U.K., or the Soviet Union. In fact, one of the interesting things about considering EYES WITHOUT A FACE through the lens of sci-fi is that the scientific experiments are all presented very clinically and soberly, while any fantastic elements arguably arise from the shockingly cruel behavior of characters driven by guilt, despair, or blind obedience.
If EYES WITHOUT A FACE is classified in a genre at all, it usually seems to be thought of more as a horror picture, but I’m not sure how well it fits that label either. It was originally marketed as a horror flick in the U.S. -- it first showed in an edited and dubbed version under the title THE HORROR CHAMBER OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS on a double-bill with 1959's THE MANSTER (a movie which I am pretty fond of, but which is really far more of a standard thriller-chiller). And there are certainly horrific elements in the movie: the disfigured girl who almost always appears in a creepy mask, the misguided and murderous doctor, the pack of continuously barking dogs caged in the clinic’s basement, the visits to the family's crypt, and even the imposing old estate that serves as the clinic itself. But the most horrific and most memorable sequence in the movie is also the most scientific. It’s a long, understated, and utterly clinical sequence that depicts one of the face transplant experiments with in a straightforward and un-melodramatic way. The mad scientist here doesn’t jump around shouting, “It’s alive! It’s alive!” Instead, he hold s his forceps carefully steady while his assistant daubs sweat off his brow.
It’s that sequence, I think, that makes me think that EYES WITHOUT A FACE belongs in some capacity in the science-fiction genre (though not to the exclusion of other genres, of course). It draws much of its tension and horror from the cold, detached way that the doctor and his assistant go about the procedure and from the little medical details that make it seem more realistic. Even though there’s nothing particularly fantastic or futuristic about a failed experiment, it’s almost impossible not to take it as an invitation to consider the limits of science, the hubris of man, and the devastating consequences of the combination of the two -- in other words, an invitation to consider some of the favorite themes of science fiction.
A young woman’s body is fished out of a river in Paris, an apparent victim of drowning. Notably, the woman’s entire face except for her eyes is “an open wound” -- a disfigurement that matches that of a girl recently reported missing. The girl’s father, a famous doctor in Paris, identifies the body as that of his daughter and she is buried at the family crypt. However, the doctor knows full well that the body is not his daughter’s -- she is safely sequestered in his sprawling clinic in the suburbs while he attempts to cure her disfigurement with plastic surgery.
The dead girl, in fact, was the unwilling subject of one of the doctor’s attempts to graft a new face onto his daughter’s skull. Despite the failure of the experiment, the doctor presses on -- enlisting his female assistant to gain the trust of another girl and lure her to the clinic with the promise of a room for rent. But as the experiments continue -- no more successful than before -- the police notice similarities among missing girls in Paris and begin to close in on the doctor. Meanwhile, even his daughter starts to lose hope and resist his cruel experiments.
Is it any good?
There was a time in my life when I spent a great deal of time thinking about what exactly the definition of “science fiction” might be. But it was eventually stories like EYES WITHOUT A FACE that convinced me that the exercise was more or less hopeless. Face transplants were certainly science fiction in 1960 (and were so even until just a few years ago), but every experiment in the movie is ultimately unsuccessful -- some of them disastrously so. The movie also feels more like a tragic and macabre character study than a typical sci-fi flick, but this is no doubt in part a result of different cultural and artistic fascinations in France as compared to the U.S., the U.K., or the Soviet Union. In fact, one of the interesting things about considering EYES WITHOUT A FACE through the lens of sci-fi is that the scientific experiments are all presented very clinically and soberly, while any fantastic elements arguably arise from the shockingly cruel behavior of characters driven by guilt, despair, or blind obedience.
If EYES WITHOUT A FACE is classified in a genre at all, it usually seems to be thought of more as a horror picture, but I’m not sure how well it fits that label either. It was originally marketed as a horror flick in the U.S. -- it first showed in an edited and dubbed version under the title THE HORROR CHAMBER OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS on a double-bill with 1959's THE MANSTER (a movie which I am pretty fond of, but which is really far more of a standard thriller-chiller). And there are certainly horrific elements in the movie: the disfigured girl who almost always appears in a creepy mask, the misguided and murderous doctor, the pack of continuously barking dogs caged in the clinic’s basement, the visits to the family's crypt, and even the imposing old estate that serves as the clinic itself. But the most horrific and most memorable sequence in the movie is also the most scientific. It’s a long, understated, and utterly clinical sequence that depicts one of the face transplant experiments with in a straightforward and un-melodramatic way. The mad scientist here doesn’t jump around shouting, “It’s alive! It’s alive!” Instead, he hold s his forceps carefully steady while his assistant daubs sweat off his brow.
It’s that sequence, I think, that makes me think that EYES WITHOUT A FACE belongs in some capacity in the science-fiction genre (though not to the exclusion of other genres, of course). It draws much of its tension and horror from the cold, detached way that the doctor and his assistant go about the procedure and from the little medical details that make it seem more realistic. Even though there’s nothing particularly fantastic or futuristic about a failed experiment, it’s almost impossible not to take it as an invitation to consider the limits of science, the hubris of man, and the devastating consequences of the combination of the two -- in other words, an invitation to consider some of the favorite themes of science fiction.
Monday, February 23, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, February 9, 2009
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.
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.
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