What’s it about?
Two dogs named Snitter and Rowf escape from a secret government research station in the wilds of Scotland. After being subjected to cruel experiments during their time there, they are only too happy to get away. But what they don’t realize (being dogs) is that their escape route took them through another laboratory where scientists were working with the bubonic plague.
The government at first tries to cover up the escape, but soon a dragnet is being cast for the dogs to prevent the possible spread of infection. As the days pass, the two dogs resort to killing sheep to eat, and before long the army is called in. Led by effective (but compassionate) commander Patrick Stewart, it seems certain they will quickly get the job done.
Is it any good?
Based on a novel by Richard Adams (who also wrote WATERSHIP DOWNS), THE PLAGUE DOGS is yet another animated sci-fi movie that isn’t really appropriate for kids. This is despite the fact that it’s a movie about two talking dogs (one voiced by John Hurt) and their animal pals, including a crafty fox named “the Tod”.
To be honest, this is the only movie I can think of where the talking animals are all anatomically correct. There’s no reason why dog testicles shouldn’t be in a kids’ movie, I suppose, but they just usually aren’t. After all, any kid who has owned a dog (or who has even played with one) would quickly be exposed to such anatomical realities, and yet for some reason it still seems strange to see them onscreen in a cartoon where someone deliberately drew them.
That’s not really what makes this movie less than ideal for kids though. The main reason is what I will call “adult themes” -- that is, the hopelessness of the dogs’ situation. It’s not their fault if they are infected with the plague, but all the same they need to be hunted down and destroyed. And the fact that the dogs understand none of this -- they talk, but they are still fairly simple-minded -- only adds to the pathos of the situation.
There’s also some cussing and a couple scenes of fairly shocking violence. Besides killing sheep for food, the dogs are also ultimately responsible for two human deaths -- one an accident, and the other in self-defense. In fact, the cut of the movie that I watched is an abridged version that apparently leaves out some even more disturbing material -- such as implications that Snitter and Rowf (while starving) make a meal out of a dead human. The animal experiments at the beginning of the movie are pretty tough to watch as well. In particular, Rowf is repeatedly thrown into a tank of water with no exit and allowed to practically drown -- presumably to measure his endurance or something.
Snitter, meanwhile, was subjected to experimental brain surgery before the start of the movie. It’s not really clear what the point of this surgery is, but it’s explained once as removing the wall between the subjective and the objective. Mostly, it results in Snitter having flashbacks to previous moments in his life at inopportune moments. During these flashbacks, he’s blinded to the world outside, and only sees what his memory shows him. This experimental brain surgery is really the only part of the movie that would traditionally be considered science fiction. But the whole thing is about animal experimentation and the arrogance of science and all that. If a movie about the ramifications of scientific research doesn’t count as science fiction, then we may have to reassess what science fiction is.
As far as the normal movie things go, I liked the story a lot -- even though there didn’t seem to be any possible happy ending. (Spoiler alert: In an odd twist of the usual paradigm, the book is apparently cheerier on the ultimate prospects of the dogs than the movie is. I haven’t read the book myself, but the comment boards on IMDb were pretty vocal on this subject.) There were some particular scenes that I thought were overwrought -- the accidental human death especially comes out of nowhere and is handled in a way that made me laugh out loud in a totally inappropriate way. The animation is pretty neat though. In addition to featuring more realistic character designs, the movie also has a dull, muddy look that fits well with the Scottish setting and the dispiriting, quasi-misanthropic themes. If you’re a fan of animation (especially animation for adults) or if you’re just interested in movies that are unique or unusual, then I’d definitely recommend checking it out.
THE PLAGUE DOGS would also make an interesting double feature with THE SECRET OF NIMH (1982) -- another animated flick from the same year which is coincidentally also about escaped laboratory animals. I’m not going to write about THE SECRET OF NIMH separately, but it’s worth a mention here. It was directed and produced by Don Bluth, a former Disney animator who left the company and started competing directly with his former employer by putting out high-quality cartoon movies like THE SECRET OF NIMH, AN AMERICAN TAIL (1986), and THE LAND BEFORE TIME (1988). In fact, Bluth’s movies often went head-to-head with Disney’s animated releases and beat them at the box office. To be fair, the 1970s and 1980s were not exactly rife with animated Disney classics, and some folks credit Bluth’s movies with shocking Disney out of its slump. After the 1980s, Bluth continued to turn out animated films and achieved some mainstream success again with ANASTASIA (1997) and notice among sci-fi fans with TITAN A.E. (2000).
In any event, THE SECRET OF NIMH is pretty exciting and surprisingly dark -- as it opens, the main (mouse) character’s husband has just been violently killed, her son is sick with a serious case of pneumonia, and a human farmer’s equipment is about to plow her home under and kill everyone still inside. There’s a lot of tension and action -- including some bloody swordfights -- but it still looks a lot like a kids’ movie and is clearly intended to be enjoyed by children. But since it contains hardly any pandering at all, there’s no reason adults can’t like it too.
I will say that the “message” of the movie strikes me as a little lame in places. The escaped lab animals I referred to earlier are rats who were made hyper-intelligent by the National Institute of Mental Health (the “NIMH” of the title, natch) and who then used their newfound smarts to escape the lab. They now live under a rosebush in this farmer’s yard, and in the past few years have figured out how to tap into the power grid and provide electricity to their colony. That’s not the lame part, though. The lame part is that in this movie, increases in intelligence and knowledge are linked directly to increases in moral awareness. The rats are preparing to move out of their home because they have realized that stealing is wrong, and they no longer want to rely on the human power grid to serve their needs.
To be fair, there is some internal disagreement among the rats about whether the move is really necessary. But the ones who want to stay and continue stealing are depicted as both morally corrupt and also not as intelligent as the others. If you don’t know stealing is wrong, says the movie, then you really aren’t that smart. That’s fine, I guess. But if the rats who want to stay aren’t even intelligent enough to be capable of moral awareness, then why should I feel satisfied when they get their comeuppance? Where’s the justice in punishing folks who don’t know right from wrong? Granted, it’s not 100% clear this is what the movie is saying, but that’s because the motivations the rats have for wanting to leave or wanting to stay are glossed over. THE SECRET OF NIMH is still an exciting, interesting movie -- but it doesn’t feel like as much thought was put into the moral center of the movie as was put into the world of mice and rats.
Showing posts with label science experiment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science experiment. Show all posts
Thursday, March 18, 2010
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.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1965: SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH
What’s it about?
An unemployed ne’er-do-well nicknamed Shreeman Funtoosh goes out looking for a job with a friend. But before they get too far they literally bump into two beautiful women while stopping to pray for good fortune at a temple. The job interview goes badly, and so does the wooing -- at first anyway. But persistence soon pays off with the ladies, which earns the boys the wrath of the powerful family of one of their intended husbands.
The wrath takes the form of a complicated frame-up for theft that involves too many moving parts to mention here. But the nefarious schemes gang agley (as aft happens) when Shreeman Funtoosh evades the hoodlums sent to waylay him, and instead gets zapped by malfunctioning lab equipment. As a result, he is turned into an indestructible iron man, with disastrous consequences for everybody he comes into contact with. An interrupted attempt to restore him to his normal state simply makes things worse by shrinking him to a tiny size. Meanwhile, the woman that Shreeman Funtoosh loves is being forced into a marriage with a real jerk, and it looks pretty hopeless that he’ll be able to stop things.
Is it any good?
Apart from a few movies by Satyajit Ray, I know practically nothing about Indian cinema, so I was pretty interested to see what this flick would be like. It’s a Hindi language movie that was filmed in Mumbai (or Bombay, if you prefer), so based on my limited understanding of such things it seems that it would qualify as an honest-to-gosh Bollywood movie. But since I’ve never seen a Bollywood movie before, I have no idea if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is typical or not.
The first surprise was when I checked out the movie’s running time and discovered that it was two and a half hours long. There’s nothing in the story that requires the movie to be that long, but it seems content to take its time and stroll along leisurely from start to finish. The cast of characters isn’t especially big, but the main players are all tightly bound together by a series of coincidences so the outcome of the love story bears directly on the experiments that provide the sci-fi bits and also the fates of three families. (For example, the man that Shreeman Funtoosh tries to get a job from in the beginning is BOTH the guy who is bankrolling the scientist whose lab equipment malfunctions AND the guy who ends up trying to force the heroine into a loveless marriage with his jerky son. The other character relations are all just about as involved as that.)
The second surprise was that the movie is pretty funny. I’m never sure if I’m grading comedies from other countries on a curve -- at the very least, with foreign movies it’s less likely that I’ll recognize if all the jokes are stolen. So I don’t know if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is funny compared to other Bollywood movies, but the lead actors are all pretty likeable and amusing. I did end up watching the movie over the course of two days, so it’s not as though I was transfixed from start to finish. But it was much easier going than I expected from a two and a half hour Hindi-language musical. And speaking of the musical elements, the third surprise was that there were only six songs in the whole movie. I’m no fan of movie musicals, so I wasn’t too disappointed that there weren’t more songs. Though I will say that a couple of the songs were good enough that I went back and watched them again -- not for the lyrics (which were pretty trite) but for the dancing and costumes and humor, which all had a different flavor than in western musicals.
Several of the songs are integrated into the story fairly naturally as performances that the characters are staging that just happen to mimic their emotions. (Only two of the songs are really people spontaneously breaking out into song.) This one is pretty typical -- in it, Shreeman Funtoosh has tied up his jerky rival so he can take his part in a song-and-dance number with the heroine, thus wooing her more effectively with his moves.
But my favorite song is a much more restrained one that takes place when Shreeman Funtoosh has just found out that the girl he loves (and who he thought loved him) has been engaged to this same jerky guy. I just really like the way the heartbroken Shreeman Funtoosh floats around over the shoulders of the two other characters while simultaneously expressing his woes and providing the music for them to dance to.
So, uh, I guess I should talk about the sci-fi parts. They are mostly just kind of funny, but barely even serve any purpose in the story. I mean, the fact that Shreeman Funtoosh is first indestructible and then tiny creates some small obstacles to the love story. But really the sci-fi bits are an afterthought and could be completely dropped with barely any change to the main plot. (I guess the only thing that would have to change is there would need to be a different reason for Shreeman Funtoosh to be delayed showing up at the climactic wedding besides “being restored to normal height by a shower of rays scratched onto the film with a paperclip”.) For the most part, the iron man segment seemed to be an excuse to make some jokes about what it would be like if Superman were clumsy. I’m not sure why exactly the Shrunken Funtoosh bits are there, but it’s as good a reason as any for him to be late to breaking up the wedding.
Anyway, I have no idea if this is a good Bollywood movie, or just an okay one. But it’s the only Indian sci-fi flick I could find, so if you are (like me) watching a lot of science fiction movies all in a row then it’s not a bad diversion.
An unemployed ne’er-do-well nicknamed Shreeman Funtoosh goes out looking for a job with a friend. But before they get too far they literally bump into two beautiful women while stopping to pray for good fortune at a temple. The job interview goes badly, and so does the wooing -- at first anyway. But persistence soon pays off with the ladies, which earns the boys the wrath of the powerful family of one of their intended husbands.
The wrath takes the form of a complicated frame-up for theft that involves too many moving parts to mention here. But the nefarious schemes gang agley (as aft happens) when Shreeman Funtoosh evades the hoodlums sent to waylay him, and instead gets zapped by malfunctioning lab equipment. As a result, he is turned into an indestructible iron man, with disastrous consequences for everybody he comes into contact with. An interrupted attempt to restore him to his normal state simply makes things worse by shrinking him to a tiny size. Meanwhile, the woman that Shreeman Funtoosh loves is being forced into a marriage with a real jerk, and it looks pretty hopeless that he’ll be able to stop things.
 |  |
Is it any good?
Apart from a few movies by Satyajit Ray, I know practically nothing about Indian cinema, so I was pretty interested to see what this flick would be like. It’s a Hindi language movie that was filmed in Mumbai (or Bombay, if you prefer), so based on my limited understanding of such things it seems that it would qualify as an honest-to-gosh Bollywood movie. But since I’ve never seen a Bollywood movie before, I have no idea if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is typical or not.
The first surprise was when I checked out the movie’s running time and discovered that it was two and a half hours long. There’s nothing in the story that requires the movie to be that long, but it seems content to take its time and stroll along leisurely from start to finish. The cast of characters isn’t especially big, but the main players are all tightly bound together by a series of coincidences so the outcome of the love story bears directly on the experiments that provide the sci-fi bits and also the fates of three families. (For example, the man that Shreeman Funtoosh tries to get a job from in the beginning is BOTH the guy who is bankrolling the scientist whose lab equipment malfunctions AND the guy who ends up trying to force the heroine into a loveless marriage with his jerky son. The other character relations are all just about as involved as that.)
 |  |
The second surprise was that the movie is pretty funny. I’m never sure if I’m grading comedies from other countries on a curve -- at the very least, with foreign movies it’s less likely that I’ll recognize if all the jokes are stolen. So I don’t know if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is funny compared to other Bollywood movies, but the lead actors are all pretty likeable and amusing. I did end up watching the movie over the course of two days, so it’s not as though I was transfixed from start to finish. But it was much easier going than I expected from a two and a half hour Hindi-language musical. And speaking of the musical elements, the third surprise was that there were only six songs in the whole movie. I’m no fan of movie musicals, so I wasn’t too disappointed that there weren’t more songs. Though I will say that a couple of the songs were good enough that I went back and watched them again -- not for the lyrics (which were pretty trite) but for the dancing and costumes and humor, which all had a different flavor than in western musicals.
Several of the songs are integrated into the story fairly naturally as performances that the characters are staging that just happen to mimic their emotions. (Only two of the songs are really people spontaneously breaking out into song.) This one is pretty typical -- in it, Shreeman Funtoosh has tied up his jerky rival so he can take his part in a song-and-dance number with the heroine, thus wooing her more effectively with his moves.
But my favorite song is a much more restrained one that takes place when Shreeman Funtoosh has just found out that the girl he loves (and who he thought loved him) has been engaged to this same jerky guy. I just really like the way the heartbroken Shreeman Funtoosh floats around over the shoulders of the two other characters while simultaneously expressing his woes and providing the music for them to dance to.
So, uh, I guess I should talk about the sci-fi parts. They are mostly just kind of funny, but barely even serve any purpose in the story. I mean, the fact that Shreeman Funtoosh is first indestructible and then tiny creates some small obstacles to the love story. But really the sci-fi bits are an afterthought and could be completely dropped with barely any change to the main plot. (I guess the only thing that would have to change is there would need to be a different reason for Shreeman Funtoosh to be delayed showing up at the climactic wedding besides “being restored to normal height by a shower of rays scratched onto the film with a paperclip”.) For the most part, the iron man segment seemed to be an excuse to make some jokes about what it would be like if Superman were clumsy. I’m not sure why exactly the Shrunken Funtoosh bits are there, but it’s as good a reason as any for him to be late to breaking up the wedding.
Anyway, I have no idea if this is a good Bollywood movie, or just an okay one. But it’s the only Indian sci-fi flick I could find, so if you are (like me) watching a lot of science fiction movies all in a row then it’s not a bad diversion.
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Monday, April 13, 2009
1962: LA JETÉE
What’s it about?
A soldier in post-apocalyptic France is captured by the enemy and sent to a prison camp in dark catacombs under a city that appears to be Paris. In fact, all survivors of the war now live underground to escape the deadly radiation that permeates the surface of the Earth. Realizing that the irradiated world above no longer has the resources to support humanity, the enemy scientists begin work on a time travel program designed to cull necessary resources from the past and the future. Prisoners are used for the dangerous experiments -- and when it comes the French soldier’s turn, several subjects have already died or gone insane as a result of the experiments.
Sent successfully back in time, the soldier encounters a woman he remembers glimpsing once in his childhood. They strike up a friendship, and then a romance. The woman -- a memory of an almost forgotten pre-war world -- becomes a focal point for the soldier’s time traveling, and eventually he is able to visit the past almost at will. But no sooner does he realize this then the scientists fling him forward in time to beg help from humanity’s futuristic descendants. Knowing he will be executed after completing his mission, the soldier seeks a way to escape through time back to the days of his childhood and the woman he has grown to love.
Is it any good?
Only half an hour long, LA JETÉE is not a movie in the traditional sense. Instead, the story is told entirely through a montage of black and white still photographs combined with narration, music, and sound effects. As such, it’s very simple -- characters exist only as faces and short narrated descriptions. It’s less dramatic than even a radio play or a short story, and yet even stripped down to such bare essentials it is still very interesting indeed.
The short running time helps, of course. And even though the images themselves don’t move, they do change every few seconds. Paradoxically, this means that LA JETÉE often shows more of any particular scene that a typical motion picture does -- instead of cutting back and forth between two people exchanging dialogue during a two-minute scene, the photographs here can roam around and show the actors and environment from every possible angle. And each shot is carefully framed to communicate either information or emotion. Watching LA JETÉE isn’t like looking at photo stills or a storyboard for a movie -- it’s like paging through a book of carefully composed photographs.
The extreme simplicity of the movie also gives the story a fable-like quality that doesn’t really feel like any other sci-fi movie that has come before. In some ways, it feels so startlingly different that it seems it must have sprung fully-formed from the mind of a visionary, rather than being the natural product of organic developments in the genre. But even though there may not be film antecedents to LA JETÉE (and I don’t know for sure there aren’t), there were certainly many sci-fi novels and stories in the 1950s and 1960s that formed the tradition it draws from. So, taken in the context of the other movies of the time, LA JETÉE is a reminder of how little of the genre’s possibilities had yet been explored on film even by 1962.
Though the post-apocalyptic catacombs and the future world are briefly depicted, it doesn’t seem that LA JETÉE is really interested in speculating on fantastic worlds. Instead, it lingers on the ordinary world of every-day modern Paris, which is what the time-traveling soldier sees as fantastic. The movie is a meditation -- it’s absorbed in its own premise and in no hurry to trade quiet contemplation for action or character or plot. The basic story was later used by Terry Gilliam as the basis for his movie 12 MONKEYS (1995), but watching LA JETÉE is a very different experience indeed.
What else happened this year?
-- John Frankenheimer’s THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE casts Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in a paranoid conspiracy thriller about brainwashing, McCarthyism, communist plots, and political assassinations.
-- Actor Ray Milland took one of his few turns as director with the nuclear war thriller PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!
-- I can’t really in good conscience recommend THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE to anybody, but it has a couple unforgettable scenes at the very end. HANDS OF A STRANGER, on the other hand, is less memorable but overall a better movie about the same kind of themes.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1962...
It might as well be LA JETÉE. It’s easier to watch than it sounds, but if you prefer something less experimental then go with THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE instead.
A soldier in post-apocalyptic France is captured by the enemy and sent to a prison camp in dark catacombs under a city that appears to be Paris. In fact, all survivors of the war now live underground to escape the deadly radiation that permeates the surface of the Earth. Realizing that the irradiated world above no longer has the resources to support humanity, the enemy scientists begin work on a time travel program designed to cull necessary resources from the past and the future. Prisoners are used for the dangerous experiments -- and when it comes the French soldier’s turn, several subjects have already died or gone insane as a result of the experiments.
Sent successfully back in time, the soldier encounters a woman he remembers glimpsing once in his childhood. They strike up a friendship, and then a romance. The woman -- a memory of an almost forgotten pre-war world -- becomes a focal point for the soldier’s time traveling, and eventually he is able to visit the past almost at will. But no sooner does he realize this then the scientists fling him forward in time to beg help from humanity’s futuristic descendants. Knowing he will be executed after completing his mission, the soldier seeks a way to escape through time back to the days of his childhood and the woman he has grown to love.
Is it any good?
Only half an hour long, LA JETÉE is not a movie in the traditional sense. Instead, the story is told entirely through a montage of black and white still photographs combined with narration, music, and sound effects. As such, it’s very simple -- characters exist only as faces and short narrated descriptions. It’s less dramatic than even a radio play or a short story, and yet even stripped down to such bare essentials it is still very interesting indeed.
The short running time helps, of course. And even though the images themselves don’t move, they do change every few seconds. Paradoxically, this means that LA JETÉE often shows more of any particular scene that a typical motion picture does -- instead of cutting back and forth between two people exchanging dialogue during a two-minute scene, the photographs here can roam around and show the actors and environment from every possible angle. And each shot is carefully framed to communicate either information or emotion. Watching LA JETÉE isn’t like looking at photo stills or a storyboard for a movie -- it’s like paging through a book of carefully composed photographs.
The extreme simplicity of the movie also gives the story a fable-like quality that doesn’t really feel like any other sci-fi movie that has come before. In some ways, it feels so startlingly different that it seems it must have sprung fully-formed from the mind of a visionary, rather than being the natural product of organic developments in the genre. But even though there may not be film antecedents to LA JETÉE (and I don’t know for sure there aren’t), there were certainly many sci-fi novels and stories in the 1950s and 1960s that formed the tradition it draws from. So, taken in the context of the other movies of the time, LA JETÉE is a reminder of how little of the genre’s possibilities had yet been explored on film even by 1962.
Though the post-apocalyptic catacombs and the future world are briefly depicted, it doesn’t seem that LA JETÉE is really interested in speculating on fantastic worlds. Instead, it lingers on the ordinary world of every-day modern Paris, which is what the time-traveling soldier sees as fantastic. The movie is a meditation -- it’s absorbed in its own premise and in no hurry to trade quiet contemplation for action or character or plot. The basic story was later used by Terry Gilliam as the basis for his movie 12 MONKEYS (1995), but watching LA JETÉE is a very different experience indeed.
What else happened this year?
-- John Frankenheimer’s THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE casts Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in a paranoid conspiracy thriller about brainwashing, McCarthyism, communist plots, and political assassinations.
-- Actor Ray Milland took one of his few turns as director with the nuclear war thriller PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!
-- I can’t really in good conscience recommend THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE to anybody, but it has a couple unforgettable scenes at the very end. HANDS OF A STRANGER, on the other hand, is less memorable but overall a better movie about the same kind of themes.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1962...
It might as well be LA JETÉE. It’s easier to watch than it sounds, but if you prefer something less experimental then go with THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE instead.
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, March 16, 2009
1958: FIEND WITHOUT A FACE
What’s it about?
A U.S. air force outpost in Manitoba conducts experiments with atomic powered long-range radar, but can’t seem to generate enough power to keep their equipment working consistently. Meanwhile, mysterious deaths near the air base cause the locals (already suspicious of the Americans) to question whether they want the GIs there at all. Things only get weirder when autopsies of the victims reveal that their brains and spinal cords have been removed through tiny holes in the back of their necks.
Military investigators -- convinced that the atomic reactor can’t be the cause of the deaths -- begin to zero in on a local scientist who is researching telekinesis and other mental phenomena. After some hemming and hawing, the scientist breaks down and confesses that he siphoned power from the atomic reactor to aid him in experiments that he hoped would create physical manifestations from thought alone. It seems that one of these invisible manifestations is responsible for the spate of deaths, sucking out its victims’ brains and spinal cords in an attempt to reproduce itself. As the monsters grow more and more numerous, they take control of the power plant and jolt themselves with enough juice that they take a fully physical form and finally become visible. Meanwhile, a handful of desperate humans barricade themselves in a farmhouse surrounded by the brain monsters -- and then things get crazy.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Let me put it this way: I cannot imagine anybody watching the last fifteen minutes of this movie and being disappointed. The first hour is a decent sci-fi procedural that alternates between invisible monster attacks, the official military investigation, and vigilante action by the angry Canadians. It’s pretty standard stuff, with its fair share of both neat moments and silly ones. But nothing in that part of the movie can prepare a person for the exuberant insanity of the last fifteen minutes. It starts with frightened people looking out the windows as disembodied brains and spinal cords menacingly climb the trees outside, and only gets crazier from there.
Why the monsters look like brains and spinal cords is never really satisfactorily explained. That’s what the scientist who was doing the thought-materialization experiment envisioned, and that’s what appeared. But as to why he decided to envision that -- well, who cares? The important thing is that everything about them is totally creepy. They are, after all, essentially motile internal organs with little eyestalks waving around on top. The way they inch along the ground is creepy. The way they sound as they approach is creepy. The way they fly through windows -- well, that’s hilarious actually.
I’m not even really sure what else to say about the movie because after you see the ending the rest of it just doesn’t matter anymore. The fiends are rendered in a combination of stop-motion and rubber prop effects, both of which are done fairly well. Although they are very squicky and creepy, they are not particularly scary and there were definitely moments during the climactic fight at the end where I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. So this is neither the tense claustrophobic horror of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), nor is it the cruddy campiness of an Ed Wood movie. But it has its own brand of unabashed audaciousness that makes it both utterly indelible and completely unique. And even though this is far from the best movie of the decade, it is still absolutely something that every fan of 1950s sci-fi or horror should see for themselves.
What else happened this year?
-- Vincent Price gave his budding career as a horror icon a big boost by starring in THE FLY, one of my favorite movies of all time.
-- Meanwhile, Steve McQueen was fostering his own career by starring opposite a blob of purple silicon jelly in, well, THE BLOB.
-- ATTACK OF THE 50 FT WOMAN is one of the cheapest and worst sci-fi movies I have ever seen, but somehow it is still considered a camp classic.
-- I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE puts its own spin (and social commentary) on the bodysnatcher premise by swapping a bridegroom for an alien invader on the eve of his wedding.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1958...
It ought to be either THE BLOB or THE FLY.
A U.S. air force outpost in Manitoba conducts experiments with atomic powered long-range radar, but can’t seem to generate enough power to keep their equipment working consistently. Meanwhile, mysterious deaths near the air base cause the locals (already suspicious of the Americans) to question whether they want the GIs there at all. Things only get weirder when autopsies of the victims reveal that their brains and spinal cords have been removed through tiny holes in the back of their necks.
Military investigators -- convinced that the atomic reactor can’t be the cause of the deaths -- begin to zero in on a local scientist who is researching telekinesis and other mental phenomena. After some hemming and hawing, the scientist breaks down and confesses that he siphoned power from the atomic reactor to aid him in experiments that he hoped would create physical manifestations from thought alone. It seems that one of these invisible manifestations is responsible for the spate of deaths, sucking out its victims’ brains and spinal cords in an attempt to reproduce itself. As the monsters grow more and more numerous, they take control of the power plant and jolt themselves with enough juice that they take a fully physical form and finally become visible. Meanwhile, a handful of desperate humans barricade themselves in a farmhouse surrounded by the brain monsters -- and then things get crazy.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Let me put it this way: I cannot imagine anybody watching the last fifteen minutes of this movie and being disappointed. The first hour is a decent sci-fi procedural that alternates between invisible monster attacks, the official military investigation, and vigilante action by the angry Canadians. It’s pretty standard stuff, with its fair share of both neat moments and silly ones. But nothing in that part of the movie can prepare a person for the exuberant insanity of the last fifteen minutes. It starts with frightened people looking out the windows as disembodied brains and spinal cords menacingly climb the trees outside, and only gets crazier from there.
Why the monsters look like brains and spinal cords is never really satisfactorily explained. That’s what the scientist who was doing the thought-materialization experiment envisioned, and that’s what appeared. But as to why he decided to envision that -- well, who cares? The important thing is that everything about them is totally creepy. They are, after all, essentially motile internal organs with little eyestalks waving around on top. The way they inch along the ground is creepy. The way they sound as they approach is creepy. The way they fly through windows -- well, that’s hilarious actually.
I’m not even really sure what else to say about the movie because after you see the ending the rest of it just doesn’t matter anymore. The fiends are rendered in a combination of stop-motion and rubber prop effects, both of which are done fairly well. Although they are very squicky and creepy, they are not particularly scary and there were definitely moments during the climactic fight at the end where I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. So this is neither the tense claustrophobic horror of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), nor is it the cruddy campiness of an Ed Wood movie. But it has its own brand of unabashed audaciousness that makes it both utterly indelible and completely unique. And even though this is far from the best movie of the decade, it is still absolutely something that every fan of 1950s sci-fi or horror should see for themselves.
What else happened this year?
-- Vincent Price gave his budding career as a horror icon a big boost by starring in THE FLY, one of my favorite movies of all time.
-- Meanwhile, Steve McQueen was fostering his own career by starring opposite a blob of purple silicon jelly in, well, THE BLOB.
-- ATTACK OF THE 50 FT WOMAN is one of the cheapest and worst sci-fi movies I have ever seen, but somehow it is still considered a camp classic.
-- I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE puts its own spin (and social commentary) on the bodysnatcher premise by swapping a bridegroom for an alien invader on the eve of his wedding.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1958...
It ought to be either THE BLOB or THE FLY.
Monday, March 2, 2009
1956: THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US
What’s it about?
In the third and final installment of Universal’s Gill-man franchise, a party of scientists again go looking for the creature after he escaped from a Florida marine park at the end of REVENGE OF THE CREATURE (1955). During a test dive to calibrate their sophisticated sonar equipment, the scientists spot the creature but are unable to get near enough to capture him. The creature then leads them upriver into the dark waters of the Everglades, until the scientists are forced to follow in a small open boat. Having evened the odds a bit, the creature forces a confrontation which ends with his capture -- and with him being badly burned in the process.
The scientists take the creature back to the waiting vessel where they’d hoped to study him, and find that the creature’s gills have been almost entirely burned away. However, they discover that he also possesses an unused set of lungs, so they perform emergency surgery to make them operational. Once the creature begins breathing through his lungs, he undergoes strange physical changes -- shedding many of his fish-like qualities and becoming increasingly human in appearance. Unsure as to whether the “humanizing” of the creature will extend to his behavior as well, the scientists bring him ashore for observation. But rivalries and jealousies among the scientists soon lead to a catastrophe.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Universal’s famed horror unit produced a handful of movies after this one, but THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US is the last installment of their last major franchise. It also happens to be one of the best monster movies Universal ever produced, and is well worth watching both on its own merits and also as the conclusion of a film making epoch. In the first two Gill-man movies, the creature is presented as a missing link between man and his distant marine ancestors. (Don’t think too hard about that one.) Though he has some human characteristics, he never does much more than kill intruders in his lagoon, kidnap pretty women, and flee from superior force. But in THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US, the creature becomes more cunning, more human, and possessed of a great deal more personality.
The first part of the movie -- the hunt and capture of the creature -- is much longer and considerably more exciting than a similar sequence in REVENGE OF THE CREATURE. The Everglades locations (or their studio equivalents) are plenty creepy, and the underwater photography is crystal clear. The creature seems to know he’s being hunted, and leads the scientists on a long chase that draws them into less safe territory. And although the scientists are aware that the creature is leveling the playing field, they have no choice but to follow and attempt the capture anyway. It’s all very tense and suspenseful, and really my only complaint about it is that the three male leads are all so square-jawed and hunky that it takes a little while to learn to tell them apart. But as the movie progresses, it becomes clearer that they each have different personalities and agendas -- something that you can’t always take for granted in these kinds of flicks.
But the real payoff is what happens after the creature is captured. The pseudo-scientific explanation of the physical changes doesn’t make any sense -- supposedly the mere act of breathing through lungs instead of gills causes spontaneous mutations that tip the balance of evolution away from fish and towards human. But the changes make the creature far more sympathetic, as does his sudden lack of interest in kidnapping and killing. (There’s a pretty funny bit where he comes across a woman and looks at her for a moment -- apparently ready to snatch her up -- but then moves along without a second glance.) Rather than a killer, the creature here is a pathetic figure who is hunted, persecuted, and stranded by physical mutations in a world he doesn’t understand.
Although I am an unabashed fan of the original CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954), I think I’d nevertheless have to say that this is an even better picture than that one. It’s a shame that Universal didn’t make many more monster movies after THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US, since they finally seemed to figure out how to fuse their usual sensational sensibility with a more psychological and ambiguous style of horror. But starting in 1957, Universal turned over the rights of its horror franchises to England’s Hammer Studios -- which would go on to produce many, many monster movies (almost all of them featuring either Baron Frankenstein or Dracula) in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.
What else happened this year?
-- Don Siegel directed the first (and, as far as I’m concerned, still the best) iteration of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, and managed to turn a pretty silly story into a creepy and tense thriller.
-- The other big sci-fi spectacular from 1956 is FORBIDDEN PLANET, an outer space updating of Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST that introduced the world to Robbie the Robot (among many other things).
-- Stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen and producer Charles Schneer turned their collective attention to the problem of mechanical marauders in EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS.
-- The 1954 Japanese monster flick GOJIRA was re-edited and released in America with 100% more Raymond Burr as GODZILLA, KING OF ALL MONSTERS.
-- Hammer released X THE UNKNOWN, a sci-fi/horror flick about a blobby menace haunting the Scottish marshes that was originally intended to be a Quatermass sequel.
-- Universal’s THE MOLE PEOPLE is a surprisingly interesting story about archaeologists stumbling upon a superstitious underground society descended from ancient Sumerians. Actual mole people are also both promised and delivered.
If you watch only one sci-fi movie from 1956...
As terrific as THE CREATURES WALKS AMONG US is, I’d say go for INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS if you can only do one.
In the third and final installment of Universal’s Gill-man franchise, a party of scientists again go looking for the creature after he escaped from a Florida marine park at the end of REVENGE OF THE CREATURE (1955). During a test dive to calibrate their sophisticated sonar equipment, the scientists spot the creature but are unable to get near enough to capture him. The creature then leads them upriver into the dark waters of the Everglades, until the scientists are forced to follow in a small open boat. Having evened the odds a bit, the creature forces a confrontation which ends with his capture -- and with him being badly burned in the process.
The scientists take the creature back to the waiting vessel where they’d hoped to study him, and find that the creature’s gills have been almost entirely burned away. However, they discover that he also possesses an unused set of lungs, so they perform emergency surgery to make them operational. Once the creature begins breathing through his lungs, he undergoes strange physical changes -- shedding many of his fish-like qualities and becoming increasingly human in appearance. Unsure as to whether the “humanizing” of the creature will extend to his behavior as well, the scientists bring him ashore for observation. But rivalries and jealousies among the scientists soon lead to a catastrophe.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Universal’s famed horror unit produced a handful of movies after this one, but THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US is the last installment of their last major franchise. It also happens to be one of the best monster movies Universal ever produced, and is well worth watching both on its own merits and also as the conclusion of a film making epoch. In the first two Gill-man movies, the creature is presented as a missing link between man and his distant marine ancestors. (Don’t think too hard about that one.) Though he has some human characteristics, he never does much more than kill intruders in his lagoon, kidnap pretty women, and flee from superior force. But in THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US, the creature becomes more cunning, more human, and possessed of a great deal more personality.
The first part of the movie -- the hunt and capture of the creature -- is much longer and considerably more exciting than a similar sequence in REVENGE OF THE CREATURE. The Everglades locations (or their studio equivalents) are plenty creepy, and the underwater photography is crystal clear. The creature seems to know he’s being hunted, and leads the scientists on a long chase that draws them into less safe territory. And although the scientists are aware that the creature is leveling the playing field, they have no choice but to follow and attempt the capture anyway. It’s all very tense and suspenseful, and really my only complaint about it is that the three male leads are all so square-jawed and hunky that it takes a little while to learn to tell them apart. But as the movie progresses, it becomes clearer that they each have different personalities and agendas -- something that you can’t always take for granted in these kinds of flicks.
 |  |
But the real payoff is what happens after the creature is captured. The pseudo-scientific explanation of the physical changes doesn’t make any sense -- supposedly the mere act of breathing through lungs instead of gills causes spontaneous mutations that tip the balance of evolution away from fish and towards human. But the changes make the creature far more sympathetic, as does his sudden lack of interest in kidnapping and killing. (There’s a pretty funny bit where he comes across a woman and looks at her for a moment -- apparently ready to snatch her up -- but then moves along without a second glance.) Rather than a killer, the creature here is a pathetic figure who is hunted, persecuted, and stranded by physical mutations in a world he doesn’t understand.
Although I am an unabashed fan of the original CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954), I think I’d nevertheless have to say that this is an even better picture than that one. It’s a shame that Universal didn’t make many more monster movies after THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US, since they finally seemed to figure out how to fuse their usual sensational sensibility with a more psychological and ambiguous style of horror. But starting in 1957, Universal turned over the rights of its horror franchises to England’s Hammer Studios -- which would go on to produce many, many monster movies (almost all of them featuring either Baron Frankenstein or Dracula) in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.
 |  |
What else happened this year?
-- Don Siegel directed the first (and, as far as I’m concerned, still the best) iteration of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, and managed to turn a pretty silly story into a creepy and tense thriller.
-- The other big sci-fi spectacular from 1956 is FORBIDDEN PLANET, an outer space updating of Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST that introduced the world to Robbie the Robot (among many other things).
-- Stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen and producer Charles Schneer turned their collective attention to the problem of mechanical marauders in EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS.
-- The 1954 Japanese monster flick GOJIRA was re-edited and released in America with 100% more Raymond Burr as GODZILLA, KING OF ALL MONSTERS.
-- Hammer released X THE UNKNOWN, a sci-fi/horror flick about a blobby menace haunting the Scottish marshes that was originally intended to be a Quatermass sequel.
-- Universal’s THE MOLE PEOPLE is a surprisingly interesting story about archaeologists stumbling upon a superstitious underground society descended from ancient Sumerians. Actual mole people are also both promised and delivered.
If you watch only one sci-fi movie from 1956...
As terrific as THE CREATURES WALKS AMONG US is, I’d say go for INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS if you can only do one.
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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