What’s it about?
Long after the fall of industrialized society in a destructive war, the remnants of humanity live in small colonies scattered throughout a world of wilderness. Much of the globe is also threatened by the advance of “the Sea of Decay” -- an expanse of toxic plants that blankets any area it can get its spores into. In this world, the people of the Valley of the Wind live in relative harmony with nature -- burning away the deadly spores when they come too close to their village, but also respecting and protecting the giant (and easily enraged) insects that live in the Sea of Decay.
But one day, an airship from the militaristic Tolmekian people crashes in the Valley of the Wind. The ship’s cargo is a “giant warrior” -- an ancient weapon of unbelievable power that the Tolmekians are hoping to use to destroy the Sea of Decay. Armies soon arrive to subjugate the Valley of the Wind and retrieve the giant warrior. But when Princess Nausicaa -- an inhabitant of the Valley of the Wind who has a special connection with nature -- discovers that the Sea of Decay has a place in the natural order, it becomes clear that the giant warrior must be destroyed.
Is it any good?
It’s probably time that I stop pretending that I don’t like cartoons. I’ve watched a bunch so far -- FANTASTIC PLANET (1973), WIZARDS (1977), HEAVY METAL (1981), THE PLAGUE DOGS (1982), THE SECRET OF NIMH (1982), and now NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND -- and you would think by now that I’d be able to point to one and say, “Yeah, see, this is an example of why I don’t like animated movies.”
Maybe I’m just picking really good cartoons, though it’s not like there are a bunch of animated sci-fi movies I’ve been passing up. But so far the biggest complaint I have about the animated nature of the movies is that HEAVY METAL too often fritters away its artistic potential on big breasts and geysers of blood. In fact, back when I was writing about HEAVY METAL, I suggested that the problem with cartoons is that a world where anything is possible is also a world where it’s very difficult to invoke real emotions -- real awe, real sympathy, real terror.
I still think that criticism holds true of HEAVY METAL, which is the least imaginative and least skillfully executed of the cartoons I’ve watched so far. (In general, I mean. HEAVY METAL does have its moments too.) But I was a bit hasty in applying that comment to animated movies in general. What I didn’t count on is that the limitless possibilities of animation -- when combined with imagination and skill -- can hit emotional notes with images that are impossible to create in the real world.
NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND is probably the best of the animated movies I’ve ever seen, so it’s possible that I’m letting the pendulum swing too far in the other direction now. After all, NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND is a pretty great movie in almost every respect -- not just the artistry of the visuals. It’s probably not even fair to focus on how nice it looks, since that wasn’t even the part that I enjoyed most. But it does look really awesome, and practically every new image -- from the monstrous insects to the Tolmekian airships to the giant warrior itself -- is crafted for the maximum impact. I’ve said before that none of the animated movies I’ve watched would be better if they had been filmed in live action instead. That’s doubly true of NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND.
I also really liked the story and the world of the movie. The action takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, long after a world-wasting cataclysm. Much of the world -- like the Valley of the Wind, for instance -- looks peaceful and idyllic, but characters talk about the toxic elements that still infect the soil and water. Presumably these are the remnants of industrial waste or nuclear radiation that are still polluting the earth generations later.
It’s not really clear what the effect of this pollution is -- trees and other plants still grow, people seem healthy, the world generally looks like a nice place to live. But it turns out that the Sea of Decay (really a forest) is a sprawling organic filter for these toxins. The reasons the plants in the Sea of Decay are deadly to people is that the toxins present in the topsoil and surface water are concentrated and accumulated in them -- a plant from the Sea of Decay raised on clean soil and pure water is as harmless as a daisy.
There’s some mumbo-jumbo about how the Earth created the Sea of Decay to cleanse itself of humanity’s pollution -- I could have done without that part. But I did really like what this revelation did for the central conflict of the movie. Throughout the first half of the flick, the Sea of Decay seems like a source of pollution itself -- a riotous overgrowth of toxic plant life that brings death and decay everywhere it goes, and which is expanding faster than the few human survivors can contain it. But if the Sea of Decay is actually a natural and necessary adaptation to the pollution that already exists, then it doesn’t seem so smart to destroy it then. It puts the environmentalist’s favorite choice into stark relief: either doom the planet for the convenience of mankind, or let mankind perish to preserve the planet.
I think I would have expected these kind of environmentalist themes to be more prevalent in science fiction movies, but now that I’m thinking about it I can’t really come up with many precursors to NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND in this respect. There are certainly movies that feature future Earths that have suffered some kind of unspecified environmental catastrophe -- like the desert world of A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975) or the ice world of QUINTET (1979). But the only movies I can think of that have specific pro-nature or anti-technology agendas prior to 1984 are SILENT RUNNING (1972) and WIZARDS (1977). There are, of course, many other sci-fi movies that caution against advances in science and technology -- but overwhelmingly those warnings are on behalf of mankind, not on behalf of a bunch of trees and pixies.
But NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND is unabashedly environmentalist in its sympathies and messages. I don’t really mind that since sci-fi partly exists to give shape to otherwise abstract fears. Environmental collapse is a possible danger we may have to face -- no different than the Communist invasions and out-of-control computers and overpopulated cities that science fiction helped us grapple with in earlier decades.
If you take the “prophecies” of these movies seriously, they start to be a bit much. But science fiction is a haven for hysteria -- partly because it makes for good stories, and partly because it’s actually comforting in the end. Despite the anti-science bent of so many sci-fi flicks, mankind usually wins out in the end -- and we win out over the most extreme and most unlikely versions of our fears. After all, Godzilla doesn’t show up in Tokyo and instigate a statistically significant rise in annual cases of skin cancer. No, he levels the whole city. (I know I’m mixing metaphors here, but you see what I mean.) If we can deal with Godzilla levels of carnage and destruction in our fantasies, then surely we can deal with our own messes in the real world. Of course, it remains to be seen whether that’s actually true or not -- but at least that’s what sci-fi seems to be telling us with all of its happy endings to gloomy situations.
Showing posts with label man vs. nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label man vs. nature. Show all posts
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Monday, September 21, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1974: PHASE IV
What’s it about?
Following a strange event in space, a biologist notices peculiar behavior in ant colonies in the American southwest. Specifically, ants from different species appear to be communicating and working together. He gets funding to research the phenomenon, and brings along a young mathematician who has done work with computers decoding animal languages. But conflicting personalities cause the biologist and mathematician both to stay tight-lipped about their suspicions and discoveries.
As the project’s funding begins to run out, the scientists still have not observed any interesting ant activity. They decide to destroy a series of strange geometric structures (presumably built by the ants) to stimulate a response. When the response comes, it’s in the form of an overwhelming attack by the ants. The scientists repel it using a powerful poison, but the ants quickly adapt and begin severing the scientists’ links to the outside world.
Is it any good?
I first saw this movie as a freshman in college during a science fiction marathon. At the time, I thought it was pretty great -- despite being very different from most of the movies I had seen until then. Having seen a lot more movies since those salad days, I can say that PHASE IV falls into a category of understated, low budget cerebral (or pseudo-cerebral) 1970s flicks with a cynical streak that bridge the darker B-movies of the 1950s with the dour independent movies of the 1990s. It fits very much with COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), PUNISHMENT PARK (1971), IDAHO TRANSFER (1973), and many others of the same sort.
It probably goes without saying at this point that I have a soft spot for exactly this sort of movie, so I enjoyed PHASE IV plenty the second time through as well. But I should say that the other person I saw this movie with the first time ten years ago thought it was horrible. He usually has pretty good taste in movies, so I guess the lesson here is that PHASE IV may affect people differently. If you decide to watch it, be warned. You may hate it!
PHASE IV is a thriller about ants that want to take over the world. They aren’t giant ants like in THEM! (1954) -- they’re just normal-sized ants that are super smart. How smart? They do communicate somehow, and the mathematician decodes a bit of their language. Mostly he translates the parts that mean “stop” and “go” and “turn right” -- sort of the LOGO level of ant communication. But there are implications in the movie that the ants are talking about a lot more that the humans can’t figure out.
More implausibly, the ants also seem very familiar with human technology and weaknesses. In their first attack on the research station, they disable the truck engine that the scientists are using for a generator. (It’s later revealed that it was left outside on purpose as “bait” and that there is a back-up generator inside the station as well.) I’m not totally clear how ants manage that -- presumably they gummed up the works in such a way as to cause an explosion. In later attacks, they focus beams of sunlight on the station to overheat the computers and people inside. Not only that, but they send commandos to specifically disable the air conditioner to make the roasting more effective.
The ants are also capable of building complex structures. To focus the beams of sunlight, for instance, they build mounds with highly polished surfaces pointing at the research station just so to catch the sunlight. So clearly some of the applications of this supposed ant intelligence are more plausible than others. But the humans have some fairly wacky technology as well. The mathematician, for instance, is somehow able to “hear” the ant language and correlate it with individual ant movements perfectly clearly -- despite there being thousands of ants swarming around. And the biologist manages to locate the colony’s queen without stepping foot outside the research station.
But those eyebrow-raising bits aside, the stand-off between man and ant is pretty interesting. It plays out like a chess game -- each side trying to penetrate particular weaknesses of the other. The ants, with their vastly superior numbers, get and keep the upper hand as soon as they are able to isolate the scientists. And since the biologist is weirdly stubborn, nobody on the outside really knows what is going on or that there may be any danger at all. (The mathematician didn’t even learn the truth until it was too late himself.) There’s a pretty obvious parable about working together versus keeping things to yourself not far under the surface of PHASE IV -- but luckily it’s pretty interesting for other reasons too.
The movie does have a lot of shots of ants doing a lot of ant-like things. I’m not sure exactly how these were created. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a mixture of real ants placed in artificial environments, and possibly some miniature or stop-motion work. Surprisingly, it is always pretty clear what the ants are up to. One long sequence where a series of ants sacrifice themselves to bring the poison into the colony so that the queen can adapt herself to it is especially good. There’s also another pretty funny and exciting bit where the ants trying to sabotage the air conditioner run into a preying mantis that the biologist left inside as a deterrent.
The ending of the movie (as with almost all of its kind) gets pretty silly. People do things for no other reason than to move the plot forward out of the stalemate. The ants remain unavoidably inscrutable, but there’s still a long monologue about what they want and how they will get it. I guess really the more I think about the movie, the goofier it sounds. But it is a movie about ants that want to take over the world, after all, and when compared to any other insect swarm movie by any metric, I think it acquits itself extremely creditably.
Following a strange event in space, a biologist notices peculiar behavior in ant colonies in the American southwest. Specifically, ants from different species appear to be communicating and working together. He gets funding to research the phenomenon, and brings along a young mathematician who has done work with computers decoding animal languages. But conflicting personalities cause the biologist and mathematician both to stay tight-lipped about their suspicions and discoveries.
As the project’s funding begins to run out, the scientists still have not observed any interesting ant activity. They decide to destroy a series of strange geometric structures (presumably built by the ants) to stimulate a response. When the response comes, it’s in the form of an overwhelming attack by the ants. The scientists repel it using a powerful poison, but the ants quickly adapt and begin severing the scientists’ links to the outside world.
Is it any good?
I first saw this movie as a freshman in college during a science fiction marathon. At the time, I thought it was pretty great -- despite being very different from most of the movies I had seen until then. Having seen a lot more movies since those salad days, I can say that PHASE IV falls into a category of understated, low budget cerebral (or pseudo-cerebral) 1970s flicks with a cynical streak that bridge the darker B-movies of the 1950s with the dour independent movies of the 1990s. It fits very much with COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), PUNISHMENT PARK (1971), IDAHO TRANSFER (1973), and many others of the same sort.
It probably goes without saying at this point that I have a soft spot for exactly this sort of movie, so I enjoyed PHASE IV plenty the second time through as well. But I should say that the other person I saw this movie with the first time ten years ago thought it was horrible. He usually has pretty good taste in movies, so I guess the lesson here is that PHASE IV may affect people differently. If you decide to watch it, be warned. You may hate it!
PHASE IV is a thriller about ants that want to take over the world. They aren’t giant ants like in THEM! (1954) -- they’re just normal-sized ants that are super smart. How smart? They do communicate somehow, and the mathematician decodes a bit of their language. Mostly he translates the parts that mean “stop” and “go” and “turn right” -- sort of the LOGO level of ant communication. But there are implications in the movie that the ants are talking about a lot more that the humans can’t figure out.
More implausibly, the ants also seem very familiar with human technology and weaknesses. In their first attack on the research station, they disable the truck engine that the scientists are using for a generator. (It’s later revealed that it was left outside on purpose as “bait” and that there is a back-up generator inside the station as well.) I’m not totally clear how ants manage that -- presumably they gummed up the works in such a way as to cause an explosion. In later attacks, they focus beams of sunlight on the station to overheat the computers and people inside. Not only that, but they send commandos to specifically disable the air conditioner to make the roasting more effective.
The ants are also capable of building complex structures. To focus the beams of sunlight, for instance, they build mounds with highly polished surfaces pointing at the research station just so to catch the sunlight. So clearly some of the applications of this supposed ant intelligence are more plausible than others. But the humans have some fairly wacky technology as well. The mathematician, for instance, is somehow able to “hear” the ant language and correlate it with individual ant movements perfectly clearly -- despite there being thousands of ants swarming around. And the biologist manages to locate the colony’s queen without stepping foot outside the research station.
But those eyebrow-raising bits aside, the stand-off between man and ant is pretty interesting. It plays out like a chess game -- each side trying to penetrate particular weaknesses of the other. The ants, with their vastly superior numbers, get and keep the upper hand as soon as they are able to isolate the scientists. And since the biologist is weirdly stubborn, nobody on the outside really knows what is going on or that there may be any danger at all. (The mathematician didn’t even learn the truth until it was too late himself.) There’s a pretty obvious parable about working together versus keeping things to yourself not far under the surface of PHASE IV -- but luckily it’s pretty interesting for other reasons too.
The movie does have a lot of shots of ants doing a lot of ant-like things. I’m not sure exactly how these were created. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a mixture of real ants placed in artificial environments, and possibly some miniature or stop-motion work. Surprisingly, it is always pretty clear what the ants are up to. One long sequence where a series of ants sacrifice themselves to bring the poison into the colony so that the queen can adapt herself to it is especially good. There’s also another pretty funny and exciting bit where the ants trying to sabotage the air conditioner run into a preying mantis that the biologist left inside as a deterrent.
The ending of the movie (as with almost all of its kind) gets pretty silly. People do things for no other reason than to move the plot forward out of the stalemate. The ants remain unavoidably inscrutable, but there’s still a long monologue about what they want and how they will get it. I guess really the more I think about the movie, the goofier it sounds. But it is a movie about ants that want to take over the world, after all, and when compared to any other insect swarm movie by any metric, I think it acquits itself extremely creditably.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1968: THE LOST CONTINENT
What’s it about?
A motley group of westerners fleeing Sierra Leone aboard a rickety boat (each for their own reasons) get a rude wake-up call when they discover that the ship is carrying a cargo of chemical explosives that react badly to moisture. As foul weather moves in, the hull starts to flood with water. Fearing an explosion, the captain orders the ship abandoned -- but not before mutinous activity by some crew members results in violence.
After weathering the typhoon (and losing a couple passengers to sharks) the lifeboat is blown into a massive patch of apparently carnivorous seaweed. Also caught in the seaweed is the ship they had all just abandoned -- apparently not in such danger of sinking as they had imagined. But the ship is not much of a refuge itself. Not only has the seaweed clogged its propellers, but soon they start to see strange creatures moving around out in the mist around them. When they are suddenly attacked by a raiding party of Spanish conquistadors, it’s clear that they are not trapped in your usual run-of-the-mill patch of carnivorous seaweed.
Is it any good?
I could fill another two paragraphs with additional plot -- the conquistador attack is only the beginning of the crazy hijinks to come -- but I suspect that it would all start to sound too much like I’m describing a dream I had once. And anyway, before I get into any of that, I feel like I should maybe explain why I am even writing about this movie. Most of the other ones I picked for this year are pretty widely recognized as “classics”, but what’s so great about THE LOST CONTINENT?
The short, unsatisfying answer is that there is nothing particularly great about it. I’ve never heard of the director or anybody in the cast, and I’d never heard of the movie itself before I stumbled across it on Netflix. It does have an interesting premise, and most of it is pretty well done. But it’s no better than half a dozen other movies I’ve watched that I enjoyed well enough, but didn’t think were compelling enough to write about. It’s a list that includes SPACEWAYS (1953), THE MONOLITH MONSTERS (1957), THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959), THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963), SECONDS (1966), and a few others.
For whatever reason, these are movies that just didn’t grab me strongly enough to write seven hundred words about them. Which is fine -- except that not wanting to write an essay about movie doesn’t mean that it’s not enjoyable. THE LOST CONTINENT could have very easily ended up in this category too, so I’m writing about it partly to atone for all the enjoyable movies I’ve skipped over simply because they weren’t notable or surprising or artful enough. But it’s nice to know that there are still a few layers of worthwhile sci-fi movies underneath the well-known classics. When I started this project, I was afraid that I had already seen most of the good sci-fi flicks in the world -- but now I am sure that there will always be a layer of solid and entertaining movies that just never get talked about because nobody ever bothered to call them classics.
The second, possibly slightly more satisfying reason to write about THE LOST CONTINENT is that it’s the last Hammer sci-fi movie I plan to watch. There are a few more Frankenstein movies that I could do, but Hammer in the 1970s increasingly specialized in horror and horror-tinged thrillers. I’m no film historian, but the consensus seems to be that changing standards and the emergence of more film makers willing to take sci-fi and horror seriously helped squeeze Hammer out of the market. Hammer was out-gored and out-sexed on one side, and out-classed and out-arted on the other, and by 1979 they were out of business altogether.
So in some ways, THE LOST CONTINENT is the last gasp of Hammer’s sci-fi productions. Even at the end, the studio stayed true to a lot of the conventions that I wrote about in my entry for THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957). The movie starts out like an ordinary thriller, building tension out of character relationships and the dangers of the natural world. In this case, the conflict is between the captain and passengers on one side (all of them criminals, fugitives, or exiles who will not return to port under any conditions) and the increasingly nervous crew on the other side (who grow outright mutinous as the captain insists they sail a leaky boat with explosive cargo straight into a hurricane). This particular story is one of the better ones they came up with -- there are maybe a few too many loose cannonballs rolling about, but the general situation is very exciting, tense, and mostly believable.
After the crew abandons ship, they disappear and never return again. And, in fact, very little of the first part of the movie is important again after the hurricane is over. The survivors discover that the ship somehow managed to weather the storm without sinking or blowing up, so they transfer from the lifeboat back onboard -- and then promptly get stuck in the carnivorous seaweed. One of the strangest things about the movie is that nobody really talks much about that seaweed -- after a couple of dramatic demonstrations of its killing power, they all just take it as a fact of life. And since they can’t unclog the propellers without being eaten by the plants, they have to find some other way out of the mess.
I think I’m on record somewhere already as saying that plant monsters are not very scary. I still stand by that statement, but THE LOST CONTINENT does a pretty good job at least making the giant patch of seaweed creepy. The actual tentacles and gullets look pretty silly -- there’s no doubt about that -- but the seaweed has trapped dozens of ships in its mass, and the glimpses of their rotting hulls through the misty air is pretty effective. It’s from one of these ships that the conquistadors (or, more accurately, the descendants of the original conquistadors) come. It’s not totally clear what they’re after -- it seems that they just attack any new ship and try to raid it for supplies and possibly female prisoners.
The real pay-off with the conquistadors is their social system, however. They are ruled by a boy monarch who takes his orders from a corrupted version of the medieval Catholic Church led by a Klan-hooded inquisitor. This leads to a little bit of myopic protesting by one of the more Protestant newcomers, but his theological objections are made moot when the conquistadors start doing things everybody can object to -- like throwing people down a hatch and feeding them to the seaweed monster.
In any event, I’m not really sure where else to take this. I could keep describing the events of the movie, but I’d hope that anybody could figure out from what I’ve said so far whether they’d be interested in seeing it or not. Everything -- the acting, the special effects, the sets, the story, the monsters -- are either pretty good or at least serviceable enough. It doesn’t add up to anything except an entertaining movie. And honestly, in a lot of ways I preferred the ordinary thrills at the beginning to the sci-fi ones at the end -- at least partly because the characters become pretty flat and dull as soon as they start getting picked off one by one. It would be nice if I had some insightful observation to close this out with, but like I said at the beginning -- it’s not that kind of movie.
A motley group of westerners fleeing Sierra Leone aboard a rickety boat (each for their own reasons) get a rude wake-up call when they discover that the ship is carrying a cargo of chemical explosives that react badly to moisture. As foul weather moves in, the hull starts to flood with water. Fearing an explosion, the captain orders the ship abandoned -- but not before mutinous activity by some crew members results in violence.
After weathering the typhoon (and losing a couple passengers to sharks) the lifeboat is blown into a massive patch of apparently carnivorous seaweed. Also caught in the seaweed is the ship they had all just abandoned -- apparently not in such danger of sinking as they had imagined. But the ship is not much of a refuge itself. Not only has the seaweed clogged its propellers, but soon they start to see strange creatures moving around out in the mist around them. When they are suddenly attacked by a raiding party of Spanish conquistadors, it’s clear that they are not trapped in your usual run-of-the-mill patch of carnivorous seaweed.
Is it any good?
I could fill another two paragraphs with additional plot -- the conquistador attack is only the beginning of the crazy hijinks to come -- but I suspect that it would all start to sound too much like I’m describing a dream I had once. And anyway, before I get into any of that, I feel like I should maybe explain why I am even writing about this movie. Most of the other ones I picked for this year are pretty widely recognized as “classics”, but what’s so great about THE LOST CONTINENT?
The short, unsatisfying answer is that there is nothing particularly great about it. I’ve never heard of the director or anybody in the cast, and I’d never heard of the movie itself before I stumbled across it on Netflix. It does have an interesting premise, and most of it is pretty well done. But it’s no better than half a dozen other movies I’ve watched that I enjoyed well enough, but didn’t think were compelling enough to write about. It’s a list that includes SPACEWAYS (1953), THE MONOLITH MONSTERS (1957), THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959), THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963), SECONDS (1966), and a few others.
For whatever reason, these are movies that just didn’t grab me strongly enough to write seven hundred words about them. Which is fine -- except that not wanting to write an essay about movie doesn’t mean that it’s not enjoyable. THE LOST CONTINENT could have very easily ended up in this category too, so I’m writing about it partly to atone for all the enjoyable movies I’ve skipped over simply because they weren’t notable or surprising or artful enough. But it’s nice to know that there are still a few layers of worthwhile sci-fi movies underneath the well-known classics. When I started this project, I was afraid that I had already seen most of the good sci-fi flicks in the world -- but now I am sure that there will always be a layer of solid and entertaining movies that just never get talked about because nobody ever bothered to call them classics.
The second, possibly slightly more satisfying reason to write about THE LOST CONTINENT is that it’s the last Hammer sci-fi movie I plan to watch. There are a few more Frankenstein movies that I could do, but Hammer in the 1970s increasingly specialized in horror and horror-tinged thrillers. I’m no film historian, but the consensus seems to be that changing standards and the emergence of more film makers willing to take sci-fi and horror seriously helped squeeze Hammer out of the market. Hammer was out-gored and out-sexed on one side, and out-classed and out-arted on the other, and by 1979 they were out of business altogether.
So in some ways, THE LOST CONTINENT is the last gasp of Hammer’s sci-fi productions. Even at the end, the studio stayed true to a lot of the conventions that I wrote about in my entry for THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957). The movie starts out like an ordinary thriller, building tension out of character relationships and the dangers of the natural world. In this case, the conflict is between the captain and passengers on one side (all of them criminals, fugitives, or exiles who will not return to port under any conditions) and the increasingly nervous crew on the other side (who grow outright mutinous as the captain insists they sail a leaky boat with explosive cargo straight into a hurricane). This particular story is one of the better ones they came up with -- there are maybe a few too many loose cannonballs rolling about, but the general situation is very exciting, tense, and mostly believable.
After the crew abandons ship, they disappear and never return again. And, in fact, very little of the first part of the movie is important again after the hurricane is over. The survivors discover that the ship somehow managed to weather the storm without sinking or blowing up, so they transfer from the lifeboat back onboard -- and then promptly get stuck in the carnivorous seaweed. One of the strangest things about the movie is that nobody really talks much about that seaweed -- after a couple of dramatic demonstrations of its killing power, they all just take it as a fact of life. And since they can’t unclog the propellers without being eaten by the plants, they have to find some other way out of the mess.
I think I’m on record somewhere already as saying that plant monsters are not very scary. I still stand by that statement, but THE LOST CONTINENT does a pretty good job at least making the giant patch of seaweed creepy. The actual tentacles and gullets look pretty silly -- there’s no doubt about that -- but the seaweed has trapped dozens of ships in its mass, and the glimpses of their rotting hulls through the misty air is pretty effective. It’s from one of these ships that the conquistadors (or, more accurately, the descendants of the original conquistadors) come. It’s not totally clear what they’re after -- it seems that they just attack any new ship and try to raid it for supplies and possibly female prisoners.
The real pay-off with the conquistadors is their social system, however. They are ruled by a boy monarch who takes his orders from a corrupted version of the medieval Catholic Church led by a Klan-hooded inquisitor. This leads to a little bit of myopic protesting by one of the more Protestant newcomers, but his theological objections are made moot when the conquistadors start doing things everybody can object to -- like throwing people down a hatch and feeding them to the seaweed monster.
In any event, I’m not really sure where else to take this. I could keep describing the events of the movie, but I’d hope that anybody could figure out from what I’ve said so far whether they’d be interested in seeing it or not. Everything -- the acting, the special effects, the sets, the story, the monsters -- are either pretty good or at least serviceable enough. It doesn’t add up to anything except an entertaining movie. And honestly, in a lot of ways I preferred the ordinary thrills at the beginning to the sci-fi ones at the end -- at least partly because the characters become pretty flat and dull as soon as they start getting picked off one by one. It would be nice if I had some insightful observation to close this out with, but like I said at the beginning -- it’s not that kind of movie.
Monday, April 20, 2009
1963: THE BIRDS
What’s it about?
Serious lawyer Rod Taylor and free spirit socialite Tippi Hedren have a classic screwball meeting in a San Francisco pet store. He despises her, she loathes him, and no sooner is he out the door than she’s hatching an elaborate prank/flirtation that involves two love birds, a strongly worded letter, and a two-hour drive to a hick town up the coast called Bodega Bay. When Hedren arrives in town, she slowly begins to realize that Taylor is the unblinking eye of a whirling cyclone of female attentions -- including schoolteacher Suzanne Pleshette, jealous mother Jessica Tandy, and an adoring ten year-old sister.
Hedren’s prank is barely implemented when she takes a nasty cut on the head courtesy of a dive-bombing sea gull. As her relationship with Taylor blossoms over the next couple of days, there are several more bizarre bird-related incidents. Things take a frightening turn when a flock of birds brutally attacks a group of schoolchildren -- and from then on out, Bodega Bay is under siege by birds. As more and more birds amass in the town, the residents try to flee -- but Taylor and his family end up trapped in his house for a long and terrifying night.
Is it any good?
So far as I know, THE BIRDS is the only movie that Alfred Hitchcock ever directed that has anything approaching sci-fi themes. And even though the premise is right out of the 1950s sci-fi book of plot lines (crazed animals attack town!), Hitchcock doesn’t really play the sci-fi elements straight. The beginning of the movie really does feel like a screwball comedy, and it’s a good while before the avian antics in Bodega Bay add up to anything worrying. But when they finally do -- watch out! This is also one of Hitchcock’s bloodiest and most explosive movies, with one bird attack ending with a gas station and several cars bursting into bright orange fireballs.
A lot of directors who took on sci-fi movies in the 1950s and 1960s had done work primarily in other genres -- including Howard Hawks, Robert Wise, Irwin Allen, Fritz Lang, Don Siegel, John Frankenheimer, Jack Arnold, and others. So it wouldn’t necessarily have been out of place for Hitchcock to turn out a more traditional sci-fi movie. But THE BIRDS is all over the place as far as tone and style goes, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The screwball opening quickly becomes a Gothic mystery when Hedren arrives in Bodega Bay -- the women who orbit Taylor in the tiny town are like characters out of a Flannery O’Connor story. Then, of course, there’s the frantic action of the bird attacks, long stretches of suspense, and a few horrifically gory moments. In fact, the one genre that Hitchcock doesn’t seem much interested in is sci-fi itself. No reason for the bird attacks is ever given (except for a hysterical accusation that Hedren somehow instigated it) and it’s taken as a given that there’s nothing anybody can do about it except to try and get away.
It’s pretty obvious that the birds are meant to be some kind of symbolic manifestation of psychological something or other. I have no doubt that plenty of papers and theses have been written on what exactly it all “means”, so I’ll leave any speculation in that department to the experts. Instead, I’ll talk about superficial things like special effects. In most of the attack scenes, the birds are superimposed on the film of the actors, presumably using some variation of a green-screen process. It all looks very good from a technical point of view, but there is a bit of a nagging feeling that the actors and the birds aren’t occupying the same physical plane. (Probably because they’re not.) So for me the creepy, suspenseful parts were much more effective than most of the actual bird attacks. The attacks that do work are those that don’t require the birds and actors to interact directly -- there’s a justly famous scene with Hedren trapped in a telephone booth as birds fly amok all around her. But I was equally chilled by neat little touches like a row of broken teacups in a silent house showing that the birds had been there.
I don’t think anybody likes all of Hitchcock’s movies -- not even all of the most famous ones. For me, NORTH BY NORTHWEST and VERTIGO are the weak links. I used to think that THE BIRDS belonged in that category too -- the first time I saw it, years ago, I thought it was horribly boring. These days, I think it’s probably one of the more interesting movies that Hitchcock directed. There are parts of it that I definitely think don’t work too well, but overall the weird world of Bodega Bay, the constantly changing styles, and a few sequences of terrific suspense really add up to something pretty great.
What else happened this year?
-- Jerry Lewis directed and starred in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR.
-- Roger Corman continued to move into the world of (relatively) higher budget pictures with X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES.
-- Ishiro Honda took a break from giant monsters to direct MATANGO, also sometimes called ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE.
If you watch only one sci-fi movie from 1963...
I am not usually a big fan of comedies, but in this case I’d say that THE NUTTY PROFESSOR is the best movie of the year. THE BIRDS isn’t far behind though.
Serious lawyer Rod Taylor and free spirit socialite Tippi Hedren have a classic screwball meeting in a San Francisco pet store. He despises her, she loathes him, and no sooner is he out the door than she’s hatching an elaborate prank/flirtation that involves two love birds, a strongly worded letter, and a two-hour drive to a hick town up the coast called Bodega Bay. When Hedren arrives in town, she slowly begins to realize that Taylor is the unblinking eye of a whirling cyclone of female attentions -- including schoolteacher Suzanne Pleshette, jealous mother Jessica Tandy, and an adoring ten year-old sister.
Hedren’s prank is barely implemented when she takes a nasty cut on the head courtesy of a dive-bombing sea gull. As her relationship with Taylor blossoms over the next couple of days, there are several more bizarre bird-related incidents. Things take a frightening turn when a flock of birds brutally attacks a group of schoolchildren -- and from then on out, Bodega Bay is under siege by birds. As more and more birds amass in the town, the residents try to flee -- but Taylor and his family end up trapped in his house for a long and terrifying night.
Is it any good?
So far as I know, THE BIRDS is the only movie that Alfred Hitchcock ever directed that has anything approaching sci-fi themes. And even though the premise is right out of the 1950s sci-fi book of plot lines (crazed animals attack town!), Hitchcock doesn’t really play the sci-fi elements straight. The beginning of the movie really does feel like a screwball comedy, and it’s a good while before the avian antics in Bodega Bay add up to anything worrying. But when they finally do -- watch out! This is also one of Hitchcock’s bloodiest and most explosive movies, with one bird attack ending with a gas station and several cars bursting into bright orange fireballs.
A lot of directors who took on sci-fi movies in the 1950s and 1960s had done work primarily in other genres -- including Howard Hawks, Robert Wise, Irwin Allen, Fritz Lang, Don Siegel, John Frankenheimer, Jack Arnold, and others. So it wouldn’t necessarily have been out of place for Hitchcock to turn out a more traditional sci-fi movie. But THE BIRDS is all over the place as far as tone and style goes, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The screwball opening quickly becomes a Gothic mystery when Hedren arrives in Bodega Bay -- the women who orbit Taylor in the tiny town are like characters out of a Flannery O’Connor story. Then, of course, there’s the frantic action of the bird attacks, long stretches of suspense, and a few horrifically gory moments. In fact, the one genre that Hitchcock doesn’t seem much interested in is sci-fi itself. No reason for the bird attacks is ever given (except for a hysterical accusation that Hedren somehow instigated it) and it’s taken as a given that there’s nothing anybody can do about it except to try and get away.
It’s pretty obvious that the birds are meant to be some kind of symbolic manifestation of psychological something or other. I have no doubt that plenty of papers and theses have been written on what exactly it all “means”, so I’ll leave any speculation in that department to the experts. Instead, I’ll talk about superficial things like special effects. In most of the attack scenes, the birds are superimposed on the film of the actors, presumably using some variation of a green-screen process. It all looks very good from a technical point of view, but there is a bit of a nagging feeling that the actors and the birds aren’t occupying the same physical plane. (Probably because they’re not.) So for me the creepy, suspenseful parts were much more effective than most of the actual bird attacks. The attacks that do work are those that don’t require the birds and actors to interact directly -- there’s a justly famous scene with Hedren trapped in a telephone booth as birds fly amok all around her. But I was equally chilled by neat little touches like a row of broken teacups in a silent house showing that the birds had been there.
I don’t think anybody likes all of Hitchcock’s movies -- not even all of the most famous ones. For me, NORTH BY NORTHWEST and VERTIGO are the weak links. I used to think that THE BIRDS belonged in that category too -- the first time I saw it, years ago, I thought it was horribly boring. These days, I think it’s probably one of the more interesting movies that Hitchcock directed. There are parts of it that I definitely think don’t work too well, but overall the weird world of Bodega Bay, the constantly changing styles, and a few sequences of terrific suspense really add up to something pretty great.
What else happened this year?
-- Jerry Lewis directed and starred in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR.
-- Roger Corman continued to move into the world of (relatively) higher budget pictures with X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES.
-- Ishiro Honda took a break from giant monsters to direct MATANGO, also sometimes called ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE.
If you watch only one sci-fi movie from 1963...
I am not usually a big fan of comedies, but in this case I’d say that THE NUTTY PROFESSOR is the best movie of the year. THE BIRDS isn’t far behind though.
Monday, April 6, 2009
1961: VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
What’s it about?
A fancy new atomic submarine on its first mission in the Arctic Circle is buffeted by giant blocks of sinking ice. Though nobody seems particularly concerned about the fact that ice suddenly has a greater density than water, the sub surfaces anyway to see what’s going on. What they discover is that the entire sky is on fire -- apparently something to do with the gases in the Van Allen Belt igniting and bathing the Earth in deadly radiation that has already raised surface temperatures to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. (Presumably all this happened while the sub was submerged.) Two scientists aboard the sub -- one of them the admiral that designed the boat -- quickly calculate a solution to the problem: shoot a nuclear missile into the Van Allen Belt that will cause the energy to disperse harmlessly outward. (If you don’t quite follow how any of this could be remotely possible, I’m sure a science professional would be happy to explain it to you.)
The sub makes full steam for the United Nations in New York City, where the scientists plan to present their solution. However, they find that the U.N.’s scientific advisors have already decided on a bold “well, let’s just see what happens” course of action, believing that the Van Allen Belts will burn themselves out when surface temperatures on the Earth reach a mild and balmy 170 degrees Fahrenheit. (So why worry?) Not happy with this, the scientist/admiral commandeers the atomic sub, intending to launch the missile anyway. For reasons so stupid that the movie doesn’t even try to explain them, the missile must be launched from a specific point in the Pacific Ocean at a specific hour on a specific day. To save the world, the sub must make that rendezvous -- but first it must survive a bevy of underwater perils and the combined forces of the world’s navies (i.e., one other sub) trying to stop them.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Golly goodness, no. VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA was produced and directed by “master of disaster” Irwin Allen, who would later be responsible for movies like THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and THE TOWERING INFERNO. But whatever you may think about his disaster flicks (personally I like them), he is clearly not a man who cares much about science fiction. Everything about this movie is either stupid, boring, cheap, or some combination of the three. But it is a pretty good case study of a certain kind of overblown sci-fi epics that would be infuriating if they weren’t so dumb.
As in his later disaster movies, Irwin Allen pulls together a motley crew of recognizable but mostly second-string actors to fill his sub, including Walter Pidgeon, Barbara Eden, Joan Fontaine, Michale Ansara, Frankie Avalon, and Peter Lorre (in full-on slumming mode). Yet despite the medium wattage star power of the cast, none of the characters are particularly interesting. The conflict between the monomaniacal admiral and the sub’s more humane captain is meant to be a tense human drama running parallel to the end-of-the-world plot. But nobody is going to mistake VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA for THE CAINE MUTINY (or even THE GHOST SHIP) anytime soon. It’s pretty indicative of the movie’s leaden handling of its characters that it requires not one, not two, but THREE different saboteurs (all with different motives, mind you) onboard to wring the tiny bit of drama from the crew dynamics that it gets.
Effective -- or even merely enthusiastic -- special effects cover a multitude of sins in dull sci-fi flicks, but VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA falls flat on its face in this department too. Irwin Allen was a notorious cost-cutter, and it shows. One anecdote about the 1960 re-make of THE LOST WORLD has it that Willis O’Brien was slated to do stop-motion effects, just as he had in the 1925 original. But to save money, Irwin Allen instead decided to glue plastic horns onto lizards and pretend that they looked like dinosaurs instead. VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA is rarely as bad as that, but it does include the world’s most boring fight with a giant squid -- boring because its tentacles apparently only move when its victims kindly offer to thrash them about. Besides the squid, the crew also survives dull encounters with the sinking ice blocks mentioned above, an onboard fire, a couple of sharks, a giant octopus (that’s right: this movie has a giant squid AND a giant octopus), and a hostile submarine. One sequence with a field of undersea mines actually seems like it might turn out to be suspenseful or exciting, but fortunately it comes to a quick conclusion before anything really interesting can happen.
The most disappointing thing about VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA is that it clearly isn’t the product of an incompetent, exuberant madman like Ed Wood -- instead, it’s the product of competent professionals who just don’t seem to care that much. The film makers didn’t care about writing a plausible sci-fi story, or about depicting any actual undersea dangers or wonders, or about creating interesting characters, or even about showing whiz-bang special effects. The only hints of personality come from the cheesy theme song performed by Frankie Avalon, and during a short scene where Barbara Eden dances spastically to his searing hot trumpeting. But otherwise it’s just a lot of people blandly going through the motions of a forgettable sci-fi pseudo-epic.
What else happened this year?
-- Though not nearly as stupid as VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen’s THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND is one of the less interesting epic adventures those two collaborated on. Still, it features a great fight with a giant crab.
-- The world was introduced to another one of Godzilla’s many future foes in MOTHRA. (This one is a giant moth.)
-- Fred MacMurray starred as THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR in the first of Disney’s sci-fi comedies about the bouncy substance known as flubber.
-- And fans of goofy (but imaginative) B-movies should find many things to enjoy in THE PHANTOM PLANET.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1961...
It’s been many years since I’ve seen it, but I remember MOTHRA being one of the best Japanese giant monster movies.
A fancy new atomic submarine on its first mission in the Arctic Circle is buffeted by giant blocks of sinking ice. Though nobody seems particularly concerned about the fact that ice suddenly has a greater density than water, the sub surfaces anyway to see what’s going on. What they discover is that the entire sky is on fire -- apparently something to do with the gases in the Van Allen Belt igniting and bathing the Earth in deadly radiation that has already raised surface temperatures to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. (Presumably all this happened while the sub was submerged.) Two scientists aboard the sub -- one of them the admiral that designed the boat -- quickly calculate a solution to the problem: shoot a nuclear missile into the Van Allen Belt that will cause the energy to disperse harmlessly outward. (If you don’t quite follow how any of this could be remotely possible, I’m sure a science professional would be happy to explain it to you.)
The sub makes full steam for the United Nations in New York City, where the scientists plan to present their solution. However, they find that the U.N.’s scientific advisors have already decided on a bold “well, let’s just see what happens” course of action, believing that the Van Allen Belts will burn themselves out when surface temperatures on the Earth reach a mild and balmy 170 degrees Fahrenheit. (So why worry?) Not happy with this, the scientist/admiral commandeers the atomic sub, intending to launch the missile anyway. For reasons so stupid that the movie doesn’t even try to explain them, the missile must be launched from a specific point in the Pacific Ocean at a specific hour on a specific day. To save the world, the sub must make that rendezvous -- but first it must survive a bevy of underwater perils and the combined forces of the world’s navies (i.e., one other sub) trying to stop them.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Golly goodness, no. VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA was produced and directed by “master of disaster” Irwin Allen, who would later be responsible for movies like THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and THE TOWERING INFERNO. But whatever you may think about his disaster flicks (personally I like them), he is clearly not a man who cares much about science fiction. Everything about this movie is either stupid, boring, cheap, or some combination of the three. But it is a pretty good case study of a certain kind of overblown sci-fi epics that would be infuriating if they weren’t so dumb.
As in his later disaster movies, Irwin Allen pulls together a motley crew of recognizable but mostly second-string actors to fill his sub, including Walter Pidgeon, Barbara Eden, Joan Fontaine, Michale Ansara, Frankie Avalon, and Peter Lorre (in full-on slumming mode). Yet despite the medium wattage star power of the cast, none of the characters are particularly interesting. The conflict between the monomaniacal admiral and the sub’s more humane captain is meant to be a tense human drama running parallel to the end-of-the-world plot. But nobody is going to mistake VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA for THE CAINE MUTINY (or even THE GHOST SHIP) anytime soon. It’s pretty indicative of the movie’s leaden handling of its characters that it requires not one, not two, but THREE different saboteurs (all with different motives, mind you) onboard to wring the tiny bit of drama from the crew dynamics that it gets.
Effective -- or even merely enthusiastic -- special effects cover a multitude of sins in dull sci-fi flicks, but VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA falls flat on its face in this department too. Irwin Allen was a notorious cost-cutter, and it shows. One anecdote about the 1960 re-make of THE LOST WORLD has it that Willis O’Brien was slated to do stop-motion effects, just as he had in the 1925 original. But to save money, Irwin Allen instead decided to glue plastic horns onto lizards and pretend that they looked like dinosaurs instead. VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA is rarely as bad as that, but it does include the world’s most boring fight with a giant squid -- boring because its tentacles apparently only move when its victims kindly offer to thrash them about. Besides the squid, the crew also survives dull encounters with the sinking ice blocks mentioned above, an onboard fire, a couple of sharks, a giant octopus (that’s right: this movie has a giant squid AND a giant octopus), and a hostile submarine. One sequence with a field of undersea mines actually seems like it might turn out to be suspenseful or exciting, but fortunately it comes to a quick conclusion before anything really interesting can happen.
The most disappointing thing about VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA is that it clearly isn’t the product of an incompetent, exuberant madman like Ed Wood -- instead, it’s the product of competent professionals who just don’t seem to care that much. The film makers didn’t care about writing a plausible sci-fi story, or about depicting any actual undersea dangers or wonders, or about creating interesting characters, or even about showing whiz-bang special effects. The only hints of personality come from the cheesy theme song performed by Frankie Avalon, and during a short scene where Barbara Eden dances spastically to his searing hot trumpeting. But otherwise it’s just a lot of people blandly going through the motions of a forgettable sci-fi pseudo-epic.
What else happened this year?
-- Though not nearly as stupid as VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen’s THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND is one of the less interesting epic adventures those two collaborated on. Still, it features a great fight with a giant crab.
-- The world was introduced to another one of Godzilla’s many future foes in MOTHRA. (This one is a giant moth.)
-- Fred MacMurray starred as THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR in the first of Disney’s sci-fi comedies about the bouncy substance known as flubber.
-- And fans of goofy (but imaginative) B-movies should find many things to enjoy in THE PHANTOM PLANET.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1961...
It’s been many years since I’ve seen it, but I remember MOTHRA being one of the best Japanese giant monster movies.
Monday, February 16, 2009
1954: THEM!
What’s it about?
A string of strange disappearances, killings, and sugar thefts in the New Mexico desert leaves the local authorities and FBI stymied, so a father-daughter tag team of scientists is called in to give their opinion. The two scientists have a theory, but refuse to share it until it’s been conclusively proven. The sudden arrival of a nine-foot carnivorous ant renders their silence moot, and the hunt is on to find and exterminate the nest of giant ants.
Once the nest is found and neutralized, the scientists realize that at least two young queens and their male consorts have already left to start their own colonies. Yet another hunt is on for the location of this new threat, tracking the fugitive queens as far as Texas and the California coast. The survival of mankind ultimately hinges on a final showdown of man vs. giant killer ant in the storm drains of Los Angeles.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
It’s a heckuva lot of fun. The movie is structured like a police procedural, so it moves along swiftly from clue to clue as the true nature of what’s happening becomes apparent. None of the characters (except possibly the father-daughter scientist team) are the least bit memorable -- but neither does the movie really ask you to care about any of them. There’s no paper-thin love story or family melodramas or even any fresh-faced army privates hoping to get home to their best girls. There’s literally nothing else besides a desperate search to find the giant killer ant nests before it’s too late.
The 1950s saw an awful lot of sci-fi movies of widely varying quality about giant animals -- mutated, prehistoric, or both. Like most of the best ones, THEM! doesn’t try to pass off cheapo rear-projected footage of real animals for monsters. All the giant ants here are life-size puppets with moving parts that often get shot full of holes or burned up by flamethrowers. I actually started to wonder how many ant puppets they had to build to make all the destruction possible. But even though the ants are not realistic (or mobile) enough to be really scary, the fact that they are big and real and able to interact with actors does make them creepy in a way that close-up shots of live ants never could be. The movie also makes the most of spooky ways of framing the ants or their shadows or evidence of their murderous rampage. Even though the puppets look pretty silly, it’s still chilling to see one dropping a picked-clean human rib cage among a pile of other bones and skulls.
If there’s any downside to the movie, it’s that the best part comes almost exactly halfway through when a small team of humans is exploring the ant nest in New Mexico to confirm that all the ants have been gassed to death. (Spoiler: They haven’t been!) The dead ants and gestating eggs that fill the nest are very eerie, and the whole sequence ends far too quickly. The scenes that follow of flags being pinned into maps and reports rolling off teletype machines somehow just don’t hold the same tension as a handful of humans penetrating a nest of giant ants to torch the egg chamber. There is another climactic hunt through the storm drains of Los Angeles at the end of the movie, but it’s not nearly as gripping as the first bit in the nest. Still, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and fast-paced giant monster movie.
What else happened this year?
-- Another giant animal that owes its existence to the atom bomb menaces a different major city in GOJIRA. For better or for worse, this was the first monster movie to forgo stop-motion or puppet effects in favor of the man-in-a-suit approach.
-- Universal introduced its last big monster movie franchise (and one of the best) in THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, originally shot and shown in 3-D.
-- Walt Disney’s 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA was also released this year. I’m not really a fan of any of his big budget, all-star sci-fi spectaculars, but this one is probably the best of the bunch thanks to a very likeable (and often shirtless) Kirk Douglas and a suitably misanthropic Captain Nemo played by James Mason.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1954...
You might as well make it GOJIRA, though you can’t steer too far wrong with THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON either.
A string of strange disappearances, killings, and sugar thefts in the New Mexico desert leaves the local authorities and FBI stymied, so a father-daughter tag team of scientists is called in to give their opinion. The two scientists have a theory, but refuse to share it until it’s been conclusively proven. The sudden arrival of a nine-foot carnivorous ant renders their silence moot, and the hunt is on to find and exterminate the nest of giant ants.
Once the nest is found and neutralized, the scientists realize that at least two young queens and their male consorts have already left to start their own colonies. Yet another hunt is on for the location of this new threat, tracking the fugitive queens as far as Texas and the California coast. The survival of mankind ultimately hinges on a final showdown of man vs. giant killer ant in the storm drains of Los Angeles.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
It’s a heckuva lot of fun. The movie is structured like a police procedural, so it moves along swiftly from clue to clue as the true nature of what’s happening becomes apparent. None of the characters (except possibly the father-daughter scientist team) are the least bit memorable -- but neither does the movie really ask you to care about any of them. There’s no paper-thin love story or family melodramas or even any fresh-faced army privates hoping to get home to their best girls. There’s literally nothing else besides a desperate search to find the giant killer ant nests before it’s too late.
The 1950s saw an awful lot of sci-fi movies of widely varying quality about giant animals -- mutated, prehistoric, or both. Like most of the best ones, THEM! doesn’t try to pass off cheapo rear-projected footage of real animals for monsters. All the giant ants here are life-size puppets with moving parts that often get shot full of holes or burned up by flamethrowers. I actually started to wonder how many ant puppets they had to build to make all the destruction possible. But even though the ants are not realistic (or mobile) enough to be really scary, the fact that they are big and real and able to interact with actors does make them creepy in a way that close-up shots of live ants never could be. The movie also makes the most of spooky ways of framing the ants or their shadows or evidence of their murderous rampage. Even though the puppets look pretty silly, it’s still chilling to see one dropping a picked-clean human rib cage among a pile of other bones and skulls.
If there’s any downside to the movie, it’s that the best part comes almost exactly halfway through when a small team of humans is exploring the ant nest in New Mexico to confirm that all the ants have been gassed to death. (Spoiler: They haven’t been!) The dead ants and gestating eggs that fill the nest are very eerie, and the whole sequence ends far too quickly. The scenes that follow of flags being pinned into maps and reports rolling off teletype machines somehow just don’t hold the same tension as a handful of humans penetrating a nest of giant ants to torch the egg chamber. There is another climactic hunt through the storm drains of Los Angeles at the end of the movie, but it’s not nearly as gripping as the first bit in the nest. Still, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and fast-paced giant monster movie.
What else happened this year?
-- Another giant animal that owes its existence to the atom bomb menaces a different major city in GOJIRA. For better or for worse, this was the first monster movie to forgo stop-motion or puppet effects in favor of the man-in-a-suit approach.
-- Universal introduced its last big monster movie franchise (and one of the best) in THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, originally shot and shown in 3-D.
-- Walt Disney’s 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA was also released this year. I’m not really a fan of any of his big budget, all-star sci-fi spectaculars, but this one is probably the best of the bunch thanks to a very likeable (and often shirtless) Kirk Douglas and a suitably misanthropic Captain Nemo played by James Mason.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1954...
You might as well make it GOJIRA, though you can’t steer too far wrong with THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON either.
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