What's it about?
Young scientist William Hurt experiences an apparent flashback to a primitive proto-human state while experimenting with sensory deprivation. Believing that he has somehow tapped into a genetic memory of man’s ancestry, Hurt goes to South America to retrieve an untested hallucinogenic fungus that he thinks will intensify his head trips.
The fungus seems to do just that -- but Hurt also comes to believe that it is causing physical changes in his body which could cause him to revert to a primitive state. When his colleagues urge him to stop his experiments, Hurt pushes on alone with predictably disastrous consequences. Only the love of a good woman is able to break his descent into a Jekyll and Hyde tailspin.
Is it any good?
Back in the 1950s (or at least back when I was watching lots of sci-fi movies from the 1950s), I got so very sick of stories about scientists. Practically every movie had either a handsome scientist or astronaut for its hero, and they would always come up with some implausible scientific scheme to save the day at the last minute. Movies like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) and I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958) seemed revolutionary to me at the time because they were about normal people with hardly a scientist anywhere in sight. (I still think they are both excellent movies, by the way, but there was a bracing freshness at the time that was mostly a result of comparing them against all the scientist movies that had come before.)
There’s no period of sci-fi movie history where scientists and astronauts aren’t common fixtures in the lists of heros or villains. But it’s certainly true that in the 1960s and beyond, movies that aren’t about scientists start to outnumber the ones that are. Many of the scientists who do remain are just as one-dimensional as their 1950s counterparts -- but they are increasingly likely to be the ones causing the problems rather than the ones fixing them.
All of this is a long preamble to the admission that I was actually excited by the scientist protagonists in ALTERED STATES. Almost all of the main characters are scientists and (to my untrained ear) they seemed like pretty realistic ones. They are passionate about their work, intellectually curious, more likely to come up with hypotheses than improbably certain answers, and a little too prone to arguing philosophical points. More than anything, I think it’s the enthusiasm in Hurt and his colleagues that make them seem both real and also the kind of people you might want to know. These aren’t the all-knowing, ever-calm hero scientists of the 1950s, but neither are they the dour, self-important meddlers of paranoid 1970s thrillers.
After creating such fine scientist characters, it’s a bit of a shame that ALTERED STATES sticks them in such a cliched dilemma for the genre. I really enjoyed the beginning of the movie, when Hurt and his friends were discovering the ability to flash back to primitive states while undergoing sensory deprivation. But before long, Hurt finds himself almost literally in a Jekyll and Hyde situation. Though at first addicting, his experiments have become terrifying. But he’s powerless to stop their effects, as his body now starts slipping into its primitive state against his will.
Oh yeah, I haven’t really mentioned that part yet. Hurt’s experiments eventually do suggest that the flashback state triggers physical changes in the subject’s body. Latent genes are tripped or some hooey like that, and the result is that Hurt’s body transforms itself into that of a primitive man -- heavy brow, underdeveloped vocal cords, hair all over the body, the works. This is kind of a cool idea, so I don’t really mind that it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Actually, it’s really two cool ideas. The first is the idea of a modern man reverting back to a less evolved form, and the second is the idea that mental exertions can result in physical changes.
ALTERED STATES is not the first movie to suggest a link between the mind and the body. (A link beyond the normal one, I mean.) SOLYARIS (1972) is partly a movie about telekinetic powers -- though the mind in that case is that of a planet-sized organism. A bit more to the point, I almost wrote about a movie called THE BROOD (1979), in which an experimental form of therapy called “psycho-plastics” results in physical manifestations of the patients’ neuroses. Psychology in THE BROOD is presented almost like Edwardian spiritualism, with trance states and mediumistic role-playing and ultimately bodily manifestations that are not unlike ectoplasmic emissions. It’s this last bit that gives pyscho-plastics its name, and also that is most like the “mind over matter” powers of ALTERED STATES.
Having set up the science of the movie in this way, I am perhaps starting to see for the first time what the ending of the movie is really about. Hurt subjects himself to risky experiments despite the warnings of his colleagues, and the result is that he eventually emerges from the sensory deprivation tank in the form of a hairy proto-human with limited impulse control. The situation worsens later when Hurt begins to revert to this ancestral form at times he can’t control.
But the very ending is what I wanted to talk about. There’s one last experiment that Hurt convinces his colleagues to help him with, to prove and document once and for all these unaccountable physical changes. But Hurt either regresses too far or just does it once too often, and he somehow experiences the terrifying nothing that existed before the creation of life. Hurt changes first into a monstrous form, and then into a swirling whirlpool. He also seems to phase in and out of reality, like a picture going in and out of reception on an old television.
Hurt is then saved not once, but twice, by the love of his wife. This is what I mean when I said I was starting perhaps to understand this part of the movie. She first retrieves him from the brink of nothingness during the experiment by daring to wade into the psychic maelstrom in the laboratory and physically pulling Hurt out. Then she saves him agin by convincing him to fight against an unexpected regression back to the nothingness. I get pretty annoyed with movies when they seem to be suggesting that “love is all you need” or that “love conquers all”. Those may be truisms, but they are hardly universally true. ALTERED STATES wasn’t really any different in that respect -- I got pretty annoyed at its lame (and highly controversial) pro-love message.
What I did realize just now though is that the whole movie is about “mind over matter” -- using only the power of the brain to make physical changes in the world outside. Love, in this case, would reside in the mind. So simply by changing one’s mind -- transferring creative passion from scientific pursuits to a loved one, for instance -- one can also change the reality of the world. In this way, the message is not so much “love conquers all” but rather more like “the mind conquers all”.
I’m being pretty generous to ALTERED STATES with this interpretation, and I’m making it sound better than it really is. I still think the beginning of the movie is great, but the end is just a mess. It’s practically impossible to tell what’s happening to Hurt -- both from the dialogue and from the visuals. The initial regression into a proto-human form is pretty straight-forward, but the later transformations just don’t seem to make any logical sense. And the images themselves aren't shocking or terrifying enough to make the exact whys and wherefores superfluous. And even though the “love conquers all” ending arguably fits with the rest of the “mind over matter” themes in the movie, it’s still pretty lame when threatening forces are instantly dissipated when the main character finally admits that he loves his wife.
Through much of ALTERED STATES I was also reminded of Francis Ford Coppola’s YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (2007). At the end of that movie, there’s a sequence where Tim Roth’s supernaturally intelligent and supernaturally young linguist has hooked up with a woman who babbles in ancient languages while under hypnotic trances. By using past life regression techniques, Roth is able to send her further and further back into history until she is speaking the ur-languages of primitive humans. Such experiments take a spiritual and physical toll on the woman, but she’s eager to keep helping Roth isolate the first moment when human language is created.
I’m not really sure how I feel about YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH in total, but that part of the movie has stuck with me ever since I saw it a couple years ago. For one thing, these experiments are seemingly the only way for Roth to complete the history of language that he’s been writing for a lifetime (or two), so it’s obvious why he’s willing to take these risks. And the fact that he’s gambling with somebody else’s sanity and life only makes the stakes even higher (and makes it a more realistic parallel for actual scientific research). Finally, the ancient babbling of the woman (and its effects on her) is both logical and pretty darn creepy.
The parallels with ALTERED STATES are obvious, but the differences are also instructive. At the beginning of the movie, Hurt doesn’t really have any stake in research into primitive humans. He’s monkeying around with sensory deprivation and drugs to study altered states of consciousness. The caveman hallucinations (and eventually the physical changes) are an unexpected discovery, so it’s not clear why Hurt is willing to risk everything to hurtle headlong down this path. The movie seems to suggest it’s just Hurt impulsively seeking generic “truth”.
Likewise, Hurt putting himself in danger is pretty boring. A lot of science fiction is surprisingly anti-scientific, but even if Hurt ended up turning himself permanently into a monkey man, that’s not really much of a cautionary tale. One scientist goes too far, gets turned into a caveman, and is presumably hunted down. Hardly on par with Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita in regret at the first test of the nuclear bomb. Changing the nature of the threat to Hurt -- from regression to annihilation -- does make things more interesting, but it also makes no sense at all. So despite its promising beginning, I don’t really see myself thinking about any particular scene from ALTERED STATES years from now.
Showing posts with label mutation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mutation. Show all posts
Thursday, February 18, 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.
Monday, June 29, 2009
1970: BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES
What’s it about?
Astronaut James Franciscus arrives on the planet in question, hoping to find out what happened to the missing space expedition led by Charlton Heston from the first movie in the series. He soon discovers that he has traveled two thousand years into the future and has landed on a planet where talking apes rule over mute, primitive humans. While escaping from the ape city into the desert waste of the Forbidden Zone, Brent seeks refuge in a cave that turns out to be an entrance to the ancient ruins of the New York City subway system.
Making his way through the subway, Franciscus encounters a colony of psychic mutants who live underground and worship an atomic bomb with incredible destructive powers. (Say that ten times fast.) He is briefly reunited with Charlton Heston before an attacking ape army forces them to try and stop the mutants from detonating the atomic bomb.
Is it any good?
I wanted to write about PLANET OF THE APES back when I was doing 1968, but I’m glad now that I didn’t since it means I won’t end up repeating myself. And since most folks are already pretty familiar with the first movie in the series, it’s maybe a bit more fun to talk about this one instead. Not that it’s anywhere near as good as the original -- BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES was actually my least favorite of the series for a long time. (There are five ape movies in all, not counting Tim Burton’s 2001 remake.) These days I think it’s one of the best, but honestly there are things I like a heck of a lot about all of them.
One of the reasons I used to dislike BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is that the first half of the movie is really just a condensed and lower quality version of the original PLANET OF THE APES. The movie even starts with abbreviated versions of the scenes that end the first movie where Charlton Heston discovers that the planet of the apes was actually Earth all along. These scenes use the original footage from the first movie, but they are shortened and they aren’t nearly as effective as a result.
The rest of the first half follows James Franciscus as he rapidly picks up all the pieces he needs to figure out the mystery of the planet of the apes. The very first person he meets on the planet is Charlton Heston’s primitive girlfriend, Nova. She’s mute, but Franciscus recognizes the dogtags of the man he’s looking for, so he links up with her and they ride off in search of Charlton Heston. Next, he comes to the ape city where a gorilla general is publicly whipping up support for an attack on suspected human habitations in the Forbidden Zone. While in the city, Franciscus meets sympathetic chimps Zira (still played by Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (not Roddy MacDowell, alas), who give him aid and comfort before hustling him out the door. Zira later helps Franciscus escape from some gorillas who have captured him, and after that the first half ends with the discovery of the subway station that reveals the planet’s true origins.
I still don’t really like the beginning of the movie. The producers had naturally wanted Heston to star in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, but he would only agree to appear in a cameo. (Besides a couple short scenes at the very start of the movie, he doesn’t show up until almost the end.) I have no problem with James Fransiscus -- he’s fine in THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI, for instance -- but his Brent is no replacement for Charlton Heston’s cynical and independent Taylor. It doesn’t help that he looks a lot like Charlton Heston too.
Kim Hunter and the not-Roddy-MacDowell who plays Cornelius don’t get much more than cameos either. The only character who gets as much screen time as Franciscus is Linda Harrison’s Nova. And sadly, she is pretty much the most boring major character in the whole series -- no doubt in large part because she can’t talk and so just stands around looking surprised or afraid.
But that’s enough about the first half of the movie. Once Franciscus enters the ruined New York subways, things quickly get pretty amazing. For one thing, the subway sets are nifty, and though watching Franciscus put together the truth about the planet of the apes doesn't have the same kick as it did in PLANET OF THE APES, it’s still a great scene. It’s deeper in these same subways that he encounters the colony of psychic mutant humans that the apes are hoping to hunt out and destroy.
The mutants are underground survivors of the nuclear war that laid waste to the Earth and allowed apes to become the dominant species. (The other surviving humans are the dumb, animal-like surface dwellers like Nova that the apes round up and slaughter in organized hunts.) They have psychic powers -- defending their home with frightening illusions and piercing sounds -- and worship a powerful atomic bomb capable of destroying all life on the planet. They also wear masks that hide their horribly disfigured mutant faces.
This seems like a good time for an aside about that atomic bomb worship. It’s not totally clear what BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is trying to say about religion with these scenes -- that is, if it’s really trying to say anything at all beyond throwing up the wildest images possible. Religion is sometimes portrayed in science fiction simply as rote ritual with no serious thoughtful underpinnings -- people just keep doing things because their ancestors did them, and on and on down through the generations. That’s not really my experience with religion, but it also doesn’t seem to be what BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is positing either. The mutants aren’t dumb -- they seem educated and intelligent. But they also seriously believe that the atomic bomb is their god, and they refer to it as a “holy bomb of peace”. So if I had to guess, I’d say that the portrayal of religion in the movie is not really about religion at all. If anything, it’s more a satire of how educated and intelligent people can somehow accept an absurd idea like “mutually assured destruction” as necessary for peace.
Franciscus is captured by the mutants and put into a prison cell with Heston, and they are both then compelled to fight to the death. (“We are a peaceful people,” says one of the mutants. “We don’t kill our enemies. We get our enemies to kill each other.”) But of course the two astronauts manage to escape that particular fate by working together -- that’s all as it should be. But the interesting thing about BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is what they end up escaping to.
By this time, the ape army has busted through the mutants’ psychic defenses and are pillaging the underground city, making their way to the cathedral where the atomic bomb is kept. Knowing their city is lost, the mutants are preparing to detonate the bomb. So Franciscus and Heston race to the cathedral and find the bomb almost entirely armed and gorillas everywhere. As they sneak towards the detonator to disarm it, they are both fatally shot by a hail of ape bullets. Franciscus in particular is pretty shockingly dispatched in a Bonnie-and-Clyde or Butch-Cassidy-and-the-Sundance-Kid type of excessive fusillade. As he’s sliding down the wall with blood pouring out of the bullet holes in his forehead, it suddenly becomes clear that the sharp cynicism of the original movie has just been lying dormant in the sequel, waiting to erupt at the worst possible time for the heroes.
Things only get darker from there, though, as Heston survives just long enough to crawl towards the detonator and finish setting off the bomb. The screen goes white and a narrator drily informs us that the third planet from the sun has been destroyed. It’s an incredible ending -- and especially incredible for the time. Charlton Heston’s sci-fi flicks (the other famous ones are THE OMEGA MAN and SOYLENT GREEN) always have a thick sour streak, but having the ostensible hero destroy the entire planet is taking things a bit beyond the pale. Reportedly, Heston suggested the ending himself -- largely because he thought it would ensure that there wouldn’t be any more sequels. (Spoiler: There are three more -- but none with Heston.) But it’s in keeping with the endings of almost all the other movies in the series. These are movies with grim and depressing endings (most of them) that don’t pull any punches (most of the time). I’ll be re-watching all of the movies as I go along through the seventies, and I expect I’ll write about at least one more so I’ll save the rest of that discussion for later. For now I’ll just say that BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is not nearly as good as the original, but it’s still pretty amazing in its own way and well worth seeing because of it.
What else happened this year?
-- The 1970s version of Skynet seizes control of the world's nuclear arsenal and starts issuing orders to world leaders in COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT.
-- Peter Watkins returns to his faux documentary style with far less interesting results in THE GLADIATORS, which follows a squad of young soldiers playing a deadly televised war game.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1970...
Pickings are pretty slim this year, but BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is pretty great. Or at least the second half is.
Astronaut James Franciscus arrives on the planet in question, hoping to find out what happened to the missing space expedition led by Charlton Heston from the first movie in the series. He soon discovers that he has traveled two thousand years into the future and has landed on a planet where talking apes rule over mute, primitive humans. While escaping from the ape city into the desert waste of the Forbidden Zone, Brent seeks refuge in a cave that turns out to be an entrance to the ancient ruins of the New York City subway system.
Making his way through the subway, Franciscus encounters a colony of psychic mutants who live underground and worship an atomic bomb with incredible destructive powers. (Say that ten times fast.) He is briefly reunited with Charlton Heston before an attacking ape army forces them to try and stop the mutants from detonating the atomic bomb.
Is it any good?
I wanted to write about PLANET OF THE APES back when I was doing 1968, but I’m glad now that I didn’t since it means I won’t end up repeating myself. And since most folks are already pretty familiar with the first movie in the series, it’s maybe a bit more fun to talk about this one instead. Not that it’s anywhere near as good as the original -- BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES was actually my least favorite of the series for a long time. (There are five ape movies in all, not counting Tim Burton’s 2001 remake.) These days I think it’s one of the best, but honestly there are things I like a heck of a lot about all of them.
One of the reasons I used to dislike BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is that the first half of the movie is really just a condensed and lower quality version of the original PLANET OF THE APES. The movie even starts with abbreviated versions of the scenes that end the first movie where Charlton Heston discovers that the planet of the apes was actually Earth all along. These scenes use the original footage from the first movie, but they are shortened and they aren’t nearly as effective as a result.
The rest of the first half follows James Franciscus as he rapidly picks up all the pieces he needs to figure out the mystery of the planet of the apes. The very first person he meets on the planet is Charlton Heston’s primitive girlfriend, Nova. She’s mute, but Franciscus recognizes the dogtags of the man he’s looking for, so he links up with her and they ride off in search of Charlton Heston. Next, he comes to the ape city where a gorilla general is publicly whipping up support for an attack on suspected human habitations in the Forbidden Zone. While in the city, Franciscus meets sympathetic chimps Zira (still played by Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (not Roddy MacDowell, alas), who give him aid and comfort before hustling him out the door. Zira later helps Franciscus escape from some gorillas who have captured him, and after that the first half ends with the discovery of the subway station that reveals the planet’s true origins.
I still don’t really like the beginning of the movie. The producers had naturally wanted Heston to star in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, but he would only agree to appear in a cameo. (Besides a couple short scenes at the very start of the movie, he doesn’t show up until almost the end.) I have no problem with James Fransiscus -- he’s fine in THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI, for instance -- but his Brent is no replacement for Charlton Heston’s cynical and independent Taylor. It doesn’t help that he looks a lot like Charlton Heston too.
Kim Hunter and the not-Roddy-MacDowell who plays Cornelius don’t get much more than cameos either. The only character who gets as much screen time as Franciscus is Linda Harrison’s Nova. And sadly, she is pretty much the most boring major character in the whole series -- no doubt in large part because she can’t talk and so just stands around looking surprised or afraid.
But that’s enough about the first half of the movie. Once Franciscus enters the ruined New York subways, things quickly get pretty amazing. For one thing, the subway sets are nifty, and though watching Franciscus put together the truth about the planet of the apes doesn't have the same kick as it did in PLANET OF THE APES, it’s still a great scene. It’s deeper in these same subways that he encounters the colony of psychic mutant humans that the apes are hoping to hunt out and destroy.
The mutants are underground survivors of the nuclear war that laid waste to the Earth and allowed apes to become the dominant species. (The other surviving humans are the dumb, animal-like surface dwellers like Nova that the apes round up and slaughter in organized hunts.) They have psychic powers -- defending their home with frightening illusions and piercing sounds -- and worship a powerful atomic bomb capable of destroying all life on the planet. They also wear masks that hide their horribly disfigured mutant faces.
This seems like a good time for an aside about that atomic bomb worship. It’s not totally clear what BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is trying to say about religion with these scenes -- that is, if it’s really trying to say anything at all beyond throwing up the wildest images possible. Religion is sometimes portrayed in science fiction simply as rote ritual with no serious thoughtful underpinnings -- people just keep doing things because their ancestors did them, and on and on down through the generations. That’s not really my experience with religion, but it also doesn’t seem to be what BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is positing either. The mutants aren’t dumb -- they seem educated and intelligent. But they also seriously believe that the atomic bomb is their god, and they refer to it as a “holy bomb of peace”. So if I had to guess, I’d say that the portrayal of religion in the movie is not really about religion at all. If anything, it’s more a satire of how educated and intelligent people can somehow accept an absurd idea like “mutually assured destruction” as necessary for peace.
Franciscus is captured by the mutants and put into a prison cell with Heston, and they are both then compelled to fight to the death. (“We are a peaceful people,” says one of the mutants. “We don’t kill our enemies. We get our enemies to kill each other.”) But of course the two astronauts manage to escape that particular fate by working together -- that’s all as it should be. But the interesting thing about BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is what they end up escaping to.
By this time, the ape army has busted through the mutants’ psychic defenses and are pillaging the underground city, making their way to the cathedral where the atomic bomb is kept. Knowing their city is lost, the mutants are preparing to detonate the bomb. So Franciscus and Heston race to the cathedral and find the bomb almost entirely armed and gorillas everywhere. As they sneak towards the detonator to disarm it, they are both fatally shot by a hail of ape bullets. Franciscus in particular is pretty shockingly dispatched in a Bonnie-and-Clyde or Butch-Cassidy-and-the-Sundance-Kid type of excessive fusillade. As he’s sliding down the wall with blood pouring out of the bullet holes in his forehead, it suddenly becomes clear that the sharp cynicism of the original movie has just been lying dormant in the sequel, waiting to erupt at the worst possible time for the heroes.
Things only get darker from there, though, as Heston survives just long enough to crawl towards the detonator and finish setting off the bomb. The screen goes white and a narrator drily informs us that the third planet from the sun has been destroyed. It’s an incredible ending -- and especially incredible for the time. Charlton Heston’s sci-fi flicks (the other famous ones are THE OMEGA MAN and SOYLENT GREEN) always have a thick sour streak, but having the ostensible hero destroy the entire planet is taking things a bit beyond the pale. Reportedly, Heston suggested the ending himself -- largely because he thought it would ensure that there wouldn’t be any more sequels. (Spoiler: There are three more -- but none with Heston.) But it’s in keeping with the endings of almost all the other movies in the series. These are movies with grim and depressing endings (most of them) that don’t pull any punches (most of the time). I’ll be re-watching all of the movies as I go along through the seventies, and I expect I’ll write about at least one more so I’ll save the rest of that discussion for later. For now I’ll just say that BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is not nearly as good as the original, but it’s still pretty amazing in its own way and well worth seeing because of it.
What else happened this year?
-- The 1970s version of Skynet seizes control of the world's nuclear arsenal and starts issuing orders to world leaders in COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT.
-- Peter Watkins returns to his faux documentary style with far less interesting results in THE GLADIATORS, which follows a squad of young soldiers playing a deadly televised war game.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1970...
Pickings are pretty slim this year, but BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is pretty great. Or at least the second half is.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1963: MATANGO
What’s it about?
Seven hard-partying jet-setters run into trouble when their yacht is disabled in a storm. After floating aimlessly for days, they wash up on a deserted island far south of Japan. While looking for food and water, they discover the rotting shell of a derelict ship on the beach. It’s covered in a weird mold and is missing all its mirrors, but they do find some food inside and after scrubbing down the decks the castaways decide to move in.
The supplies from the ship doesn’t last long and food is scarce on the island, forcing the castaways to spend most of their time foraging for wild potatoes and digging for clams and turtle eggs. Strangely, the island seems bereft of all non-aquatic animal life and even the birds won’t land there. Before long, the castaways start seeing strange things moving in the jungle, and then eventually on the ship itself. Ultimately they learn that the ship’s missing crew have not exactly left the island yet -- and that unless they find a way off the island they are likely to share their fate as well.
Is it any good?
MATANGO is a surprisingly slow movie -- it’s twenty minutes until the castaways even land on the island, and a good forty-five until anything seemingly out of the ordinary happens. Even once the science fiction elements start asserting themselves, MATANGO still doggedly sticks with the human side of the story -- leaving the monsters mostly (but thankfully not entirely) in the shadows. Though not exactly dull, the movie consequently feels pretty draggy in places. But, on the other hand, the restraint of the first eighty-five minutes makes it all the more trippy when it finally pulls out all the stops at the very end.
For the most part, the cast and the script are not really good enough to make the human focus as riveting as it otherwise might be. But the characters do make the situation at least somewhat interesting. They’re selfish and petty people, and most are perfectly will to steal food for themselves, extort a profit from the situation, or use violence to get what they want. Another interesting element is that the island does abound in one particular kind of food: mushrooms. But log books from the derelict ship seem to indicate that the mushrooms are toxic in a peculiar (but non-fatal) way, and as starving characters resort one-by-one to eating the mushrooms they are ostracized from the group as though they have become toxic themselves.
Like a lot of other sci-fi and horror movies about island castaways, MATANGO is not really interested in what it takes to survive on an uninhabited island. The island is simply an excuse to strand the characters alone someplace where weird things can happen in a way that may or may not double as commentary on contemporary society. Some of the weird things -- like the moldy abandoned ship -- are really pretty neat. The long sequence where the castaways explore the derelict and search it for useful items is probably the best part of the movie. (Except, perhaps, the wild and crazy final five minutes.) There are also two neat bookend segments at the very beginning and very end where one of the survivors recalls the story in a Tokyo that looks as weird as any alien city.
It’s also very easy to read the mushrooms as a societal metaphor. The obvious parallel would be something to do with drugs, but there are a couple of scenes where they are pretty clearly linked with sex instead. The conclusions are not exactly the same ones that most horror movies seemingly arrive at, but when all is said and done MATANGO still doesn’t leave you with too much to think about it. Any metaphorical level is strictly a slight added bonus, rather than a major theme.
Seven hard-partying jet-setters run into trouble when their yacht is disabled in a storm. After floating aimlessly for days, they wash up on a deserted island far south of Japan. While looking for food and water, they discover the rotting shell of a derelict ship on the beach. It’s covered in a weird mold and is missing all its mirrors, but they do find some food inside and after scrubbing down the decks the castaways decide to move in.
The supplies from the ship doesn’t last long and food is scarce on the island, forcing the castaways to spend most of their time foraging for wild potatoes and digging for clams and turtle eggs. Strangely, the island seems bereft of all non-aquatic animal life and even the birds won’t land there. Before long, the castaways start seeing strange things moving in the jungle, and then eventually on the ship itself. Ultimately they learn that the ship’s missing crew have not exactly left the island yet -- and that unless they find a way off the island they are likely to share their fate as well.
Is it any good?
MATANGO is a surprisingly slow movie -- it’s twenty minutes until the castaways even land on the island, and a good forty-five until anything seemingly out of the ordinary happens. Even once the science fiction elements start asserting themselves, MATANGO still doggedly sticks with the human side of the story -- leaving the monsters mostly (but thankfully not entirely) in the shadows. Though not exactly dull, the movie consequently feels pretty draggy in places. But, on the other hand, the restraint of the first eighty-five minutes makes it all the more trippy when it finally pulls out all the stops at the very end.
For the most part, the cast and the script are not really good enough to make the human focus as riveting as it otherwise might be. But the characters do make the situation at least somewhat interesting. They’re selfish and petty people, and most are perfectly will to steal food for themselves, extort a profit from the situation, or use violence to get what they want. Another interesting element is that the island does abound in one particular kind of food: mushrooms. But log books from the derelict ship seem to indicate that the mushrooms are toxic in a peculiar (but non-fatal) way, and as starving characters resort one-by-one to eating the mushrooms they are ostracized from the group as though they have become toxic themselves.
Like a lot of other sci-fi and horror movies about island castaways, MATANGO is not really interested in what it takes to survive on an uninhabited island. The island is simply an excuse to strand the characters alone someplace where weird things can happen in a way that may or may not double as commentary on contemporary society. Some of the weird things -- like the moldy abandoned ship -- are really pretty neat. The long sequence where the castaways explore the derelict and search it for useful items is probably the best part of the movie. (Except, perhaps, the wild and crazy final five minutes.) There are also two neat bookend segments at the very beginning and very end where one of the survivors recalls the story in a Tokyo that looks as weird as any alien city.
It’s also very easy to read the mushrooms as a societal metaphor. The obvious parallel would be something to do with drugs, but there are a couple of scenes where they are pretty clearly linked with sex instead. The conclusions are not exactly the same ones that most horror movies seemingly arrive at, but when all is said and done MATANGO still doesn’t leave you with too much to think about it. Any metaphorical level is strictly a slight added bonus, rather than a major theme.
Monday, March 9, 2009
1957: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN
What’s it about?
While cruising the ocean in his brother’s yacht, a man is exposed to a strange shimmering mist. The event doesn’t seem to have any ill effects at first, but six months later the man suspects he is getting smaller when his clothes no longer seem to fit. After several trips to the doctor, a set of X-ray photographs prove that he’s not just losing weight but is in fact gradually shrinking. Eventually the man reaches a height of about three feet -- at which point his doctors discover a method of arresting the shrinking, but still no way to reverse it.
Treated like a freak and hounded by the media, the man and his wife stay confined in their home where their nerves soon fray. The man finds brief solace in the friendship of another little person, but soon discovers that he is shrinking again despite his treatments. Ultimately reduced to a height of just a couple inches, disaster strikes one day when the family cat chases and traps him in the basement. His wife believes he’s been killed, and the man soon finds himself faced with several seemingly insurmountable challenges -- supply himself with the necessities of life, evade a monstrous spider, and contact the others in the house to let them know he still lives. And all the while, he continues to grow smaller and smaller.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
I knew that this would be my kind of movie as soon as the jazzy, hip opening credits started to roll. (Pro tip: Jazzy, hip opening credits are always a good sign.) And when I realized just minutes later that the main character isn’t any kind of scientist -- well, that was just the icing on the cake. Until I started watching a lot of 1950s sci-fi flicks all in a row, it had never registered just how many of them have scientists for main characters. Movies with scientist protagonists tend to be largely about the heroic leads trying desperately to solve whatever fantastic problem they’re facing with the vigorous application of (more or less ridiculous) science. But since the hero here, played by Grant Williams, isn’t a scientific person at all, it shifts the focus of the movie from problem-solving to simply coping with a strange condition and then eventually to surviving in an weird and hostile world. It’s a much easier kind of story for me to relate to, and the fact that it was different from most of the other movies I’ve been watching is a bonus as well.
The first half of the movie follows the shrinking man as he incredibly diminishes in size. This is taken in a few stages, and there’s a long interlude where he’s about three feet tall (the height at which his shrinking is temporarily arrested) that’s full of terrific over-sized props. Everything looks very realistic, and the movie never tries to play the difference in scale for laughs. Don’t get me wrong -- it’s always funny when a tiny man talks into a giant telephone, but the movie does its best to show the horror and humiliation of the situation rather than just the absurdity. This is also the section where Grant Williams is the least likeable -- he’s self-pitying, jealous, paranoid, angry, petulant, and frightened. Afraid to leave his house, he pouts and seethes and is pretty believably unpleasant.
It’s not until he’s left entirely to his own resources to survive in the basement that the shrinking man really starts to show his heroic side. Reduced to only a couple inches in height, ordinary tasks (like climbing the stairs back up to the first floor) become impossible. But he quickly finds a hitherto untapped resourcefulness that lets him claw his way -- ever so briefly -- to the top of the basement food chain. The only real weakness of this part of the movie is the melodramatic first-person narration that crops up from time to time. The screenplay was written by Richard Matheson (based on an earlier novel of his own), and the blame for the purple prose no doubt falls on his shoulders. I’d almost say that the narration ought to have been cut entirely, but it does help to reinforce the ultimate desolation of Grant Williams’s situation -- even as he surmounts the challenges of the basement, he continues to shrink all the time and even problems he’s already solved grow continually more difficult. And, of course, even being reunited with his wife won’t be more than a temporary happy ending since he’s quickly approaching a size at which he’ll be too small even to communicate with other humans. Consequently, the ultimate ending is surprisingly uncertain -- not the only ambiguous ending in the annals of 1950s sci-fi, but one of the few.
What else happened this year?
-- 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH is probably the best movie of the decade to feature Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion effects. This one follows an alien from Venus that starts out tiny and cute, but quickly grows to a frightening size, goes on a rampage and then climbs a famous urban landmark.
-- THE MONOLITH MONSTERS is another Grant Williams picture that casts him in the more typical role of a geologist trying to solve an extraordinary problem. But, uncommon for the 1950s, the challenges he faces are not actually monsters at all but simply forces of nature that are running out of control.
-- Hammer Studios officially took over Universal’s monster franchises with THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Starring Peter Cushing as the Baron Frankenstein, it helped set the course Hammer would follow for the next several decades.
-- Peter Cushing also stars in Hammer’s THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN, about a Himalayan expedition dangerously beset both by personality conflicts and by psychic Yeti.
-- Willis O’Brien, the other great stop-motion animator of the time, lends his talents to THE BLACK SCORPION, a decidedly low budget entry in the giant monster sub-genre.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1957...
Make it THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN.
While cruising the ocean in his brother’s yacht, a man is exposed to a strange shimmering mist. The event doesn’t seem to have any ill effects at first, but six months later the man suspects he is getting smaller when his clothes no longer seem to fit. After several trips to the doctor, a set of X-ray photographs prove that he’s not just losing weight but is in fact gradually shrinking. Eventually the man reaches a height of about three feet -- at which point his doctors discover a method of arresting the shrinking, but still no way to reverse it.
Treated like a freak and hounded by the media, the man and his wife stay confined in their home where their nerves soon fray. The man finds brief solace in the friendship of another little person, but soon discovers that he is shrinking again despite his treatments. Ultimately reduced to a height of just a couple inches, disaster strikes one day when the family cat chases and traps him in the basement. His wife believes he’s been killed, and the man soon finds himself faced with several seemingly insurmountable challenges -- supply himself with the necessities of life, evade a monstrous spider, and contact the others in the house to let them know he still lives. And all the while, he continues to grow smaller and smaller.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
I knew that this would be my kind of movie as soon as the jazzy, hip opening credits started to roll. (Pro tip: Jazzy, hip opening credits are always a good sign.) And when I realized just minutes later that the main character isn’t any kind of scientist -- well, that was just the icing on the cake. Until I started watching a lot of 1950s sci-fi flicks all in a row, it had never registered just how many of them have scientists for main characters. Movies with scientist protagonists tend to be largely about the heroic leads trying desperately to solve whatever fantastic problem they’re facing with the vigorous application of (more or less ridiculous) science. But since the hero here, played by Grant Williams, isn’t a scientific person at all, it shifts the focus of the movie from problem-solving to simply coping with a strange condition and then eventually to surviving in an weird and hostile world. It’s a much easier kind of story for me to relate to, and the fact that it was different from most of the other movies I’ve been watching is a bonus as well.
The first half of the movie follows the shrinking man as he incredibly diminishes in size. This is taken in a few stages, and there’s a long interlude where he’s about three feet tall (the height at which his shrinking is temporarily arrested) that’s full of terrific over-sized props. Everything looks very realistic, and the movie never tries to play the difference in scale for laughs. Don’t get me wrong -- it’s always funny when a tiny man talks into a giant telephone, but the movie does its best to show the horror and humiliation of the situation rather than just the absurdity. This is also the section where Grant Williams is the least likeable -- he’s self-pitying, jealous, paranoid, angry, petulant, and frightened. Afraid to leave his house, he pouts and seethes and is pretty believably unpleasant.
It’s not until he’s left entirely to his own resources to survive in the basement that the shrinking man really starts to show his heroic side. Reduced to only a couple inches in height, ordinary tasks (like climbing the stairs back up to the first floor) become impossible. But he quickly finds a hitherto untapped resourcefulness that lets him claw his way -- ever so briefly -- to the top of the basement food chain. The only real weakness of this part of the movie is the melodramatic first-person narration that crops up from time to time. The screenplay was written by Richard Matheson (based on an earlier novel of his own), and the blame for the purple prose no doubt falls on his shoulders. I’d almost say that the narration ought to have been cut entirely, but it does help to reinforce the ultimate desolation of Grant Williams’s situation -- even as he surmounts the challenges of the basement, he continues to shrink all the time and even problems he’s already solved grow continually more difficult. And, of course, even being reunited with his wife won’t be more than a temporary happy ending since he’s quickly approaching a size at which he’ll be too small even to communicate with other humans. Consequently, the ultimate ending is surprisingly uncertain -- not the only ambiguous ending in the annals of 1950s sci-fi, but one of the few.
What else happened this year?
-- 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH is probably the best movie of the decade to feature Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion effects. This one follows an alien from Venus that starts out tiny and cute, but quickly grows to a frightening size, goes on a rampage and then climbs a famous urban landmark.
-- THE MONOLITH MONSTERS is another Grant Williams picture that casts him in the more typical role of a geologist trying to solve an extraordinary problem. But, uncommon for the 1950s, the challenges he faces are not actually monsters at all but simply forces of nature that are running out of control.
-- Hammer Studios officially took over Universal’s monster franchises with THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Starring Peter Cushing as the Baron Frankenstein, it helped set the course Hammer would follow for the next several decades.
-- Peter Cushing also stars in Hammer’s THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN, about a Himalayan expedition dangerously beset both by personality conflicts and by psychic Yeti.
-- Willis O’Brien, the other great stop-motion animator of the time, lends his talents to THE BLACK SCORPION, a decidedly low budget entry in the giant monster sub-genre.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1957...
Make it THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN.
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 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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