Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Frankenstein Meets The Spacemonster (1965)



Back in 1985 I saw Return of the Living Dead (1985) at our local, long-ago demolished cinema, upstairs on the small second screen. It's a great little film, which I recommend to anyone who likes their horror movies with a side of self-referential humour. One of the stars was the then 60-something actor James Karen, who plays Frank, the foreman at a medical supplies warehouse. During an effort to impress the new guy, Frank accidentally awakens a zombie plague, and well, that's another movie. The point is that James Karen, a guy who has been working hard in movies and TV since the 1950s, had his first leading role in this wonderfully over-blown, preposterous and lovable sci-fi cheapie.

Karen plays Dr Adam Steele (a decent heroic name), who is working on a mission to send a man to Mars. Because NASA have lost a number of recent missions, (more on that later) they don't want to send a human astronaut. Instead Dr Steele has perfected an android who will play the part of an astronaut. At first appearance he seems totally human, and even gives a press conference. Unfortunately his face gets stuck with a toothy grin, and he has to be hustled away. Despite this major glitch at a simple press event, they decide to send him into orbit in charge of a multi-million dollar spaceship anyway. All fine so far, right?

Dr Nadir & his Princess
The previous missions had been shot down by aliens, who have come to earth to get breeding stock for their dying world. These are without doubt some of the most camp aliens of all time. The leaders of the mission are Princess Marcuzan (played by Marilyn Hanold, who will be 80 this year but hasn't made a TV or movie appearance since 1970) a statuesque pin-up brunette, who is dressed like a cross between a 1960s Batman villain and a burlesque dancer; and the amazingly over-the-top Dr. Nadir (Lou Cutell, probably best known as Amazing Larry from Pee-wee's Big Advenure (1985)). The good Dr. Nadir has the worst bald wig and biggest Spock ears you've ever seen. I'm convinced that this guy was a big inspiration for Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies. Both Dr and Princess portray their evil natures through a fruity mixture of smirks, sly glances, moustache-twirling dialogue, and other pantomime muggery. It's frankly hilarious to watch. This is Plan 9 country, although it seems that initially this movie was intended as a comedy, whereas Ed Wood wanted to be taken a bit more seriously.

"And now... Maximum Energy!"
On the space ship, alongside the aforementioned hams and a bunch of alien astronauts with the same bald head/ears combo as Dr. Nadir, there is a creature called Mull who is so bestial and uncontrolled that he has to be caged. This is your titular 'Space Monster'. Trivia: The alien astronaut with the most dialogue, and Mull, are both played by Bruce Glover, Crispin Glover's dad.

Space Monster...
...meet Frankenstein
The aliens shoot down the Mars mission with Frank(enstein, because he's a man made of parts, natch) aboard, but Frank isn't killed. He loses his memory banks and gets half his face melted off. Wandering about the countryside he unwittingly kills a few people, and is hunted by the aliens who want to silence him so their lady-stealing plans aren't revealed. It's all very thrilling.

There's way too much great stuff in this movie to talk about, as almost every bit of it is fun and warms your heart with its amateur audacity. There are a couple more things I love about it though. First off, the movie is about 30% stock footage. I've never seen so much in a film, and it's only 76 minutes long. There's footage of satellite dishes, space launches, space capsules parachuting into the sea, helicopters, tanks, troop movements, jet fighters, air transports, all kinds of stuff that would have been way too expensive for the two-bit company that made this.

The second thing is all the lovely travelogue footage. Near the beginning of the film we see the area around Cape Kennedy, shot from a moving car. It's fascinating to see all the space-themed diners and motels that have opened up around the NASA Space Centre, and it gives you a real idea of mid-60s Florida. Later on in the film, after the action has moved to Puerto Rico, where the Mars mission has crash-landed, we have a sequence in which Adam Steele and his female assistant (and maybe GF) ride along on a little motor scooter, heading to the scene of the crash. Although this should be a tense ride to an uncertain destination, which in some films might not even have been shown, in this movie the ride is a happy trip through the quaint old city of San Juan, with a sappy salsa ballad played over it. All very romantic, totally out of place, and wonderfully evocative, all at the same time.

San Juan by scooter
If you enjoyed Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), if you love guys in bad monster suits, and if you don't mind watching some kitschy shots of people on a scooter, this is for you. I should warn those of you expecting some kind of ding-dong Godzilla vs Whoever monster battles, that the meeting between the two title characters lasts less than two minutes, and is something of an anti-climax, but there is so much more to this movie. I didn't even mention the hip-swinging teens, menaced at a pool party, or the weird alien process that weeds out the unwanted 'breeders'. Enjoy.



Thursday, March 22, 2018

The Vision - Little Worse Than A Man + Little Better Than A Beast (Marvel Comics 2016)


If you know your Shakespeare, you'll be able to identify the titles of these two volumes that collect Vision #1-#12. They are from The Merchant of Venice:

NERISSA: How like you the young German, the Duke of Saxony’s nephew?
PORTIA: Very vilely in the morning, when he is sober, and most vilely in the afternoon, when he is drunk. When he is best he is a little worse than a man, and when he is worst he is little better than a beast. And the worst fall that ever fell, I hope I shall make shift to go without him.

Weaving a bit of The Bard into your graphic novel/comic is always a good way of looking smart, and adding a touch of gravitas to the proceedings, but Tom King has gone well past just showing off. This incredible tale, in turns touching and terrifying, asks some pretty deep questions about what it means to be human, and what it costs to be normal.

Even android teenagers worry about this kind of thing
It's been a long time since I was on top of all the ins and outs of The Mighty Avengers. When I was a kid I read a lot of the UK Marvel reprints, which included the classic Roy Thomas/John Buscema period of the late 60s/early 70s. That's when I first saw The Vision. An android created by Ultron (evil robot mastermind) who planned to use him to infiltrate and destroy The Avengers. The Vision caught a bad case of humanity, and sided with The Avengers against Ultron. He also had a complicated and tempestuous love affair with the Scarlet Witch.

The Vision & Scarlet Witch making out behind a tree
This was all many decades and multiple re-boots ago, so I wasn't sure if this new Vision story would make sense to me, but a couple of years ago I realised that you don't need to know all the history to enjoy the stories being written now. It's a bit like not watching a soap opera for a few years. You know many of the characters, there are some new ones, and some of the old ones are in relationships or situations that are unfamiliar, but there's enough to provide a platform to move on from. It's like that for me with Marvel, and I'm glad.

Anyway, this two-volume collection deals with The Vision's attempt to be 'normal'. In order to get there he has to do a few things that are about as far away from normal as you can get, although it does all beg the eternal question: what is 'normal'? To create a nuclear-family, white-picket-fence existence for himself, Vision has to actually make an android wife and two teenage android children (one of each naturally). They then move into a cookie-cutter house in a faceless suburban location. The Vision's idea of normal seems to have been gleaned from TV shows of the 1950s. It's a bit like David Lynch, but in this case, the town doesn't have a dangerous underbelly. Instead, the danger is the android family that moved in across the street. I suppose this is one of the points of the story. The Vision family don't face a lot of prejudice when they move in, in fact people are reasonably accepting of them, maybe due to the fact that The Vision is a famous superhero, and has (as he points out a number of times) saved the Earth thirty-seven times. Unlike all the other stories we're used to, where an ethnic group or an individual are singled out and persecuted although they're harmless, in this story the 'others' are really fucking deadly, in spite of their efforts to fit in.

Do Androids Dream of Chocolate Chip Cookies?
Although The Vision family try to 'get along' with the locals, they are obviously missing most of the necessary components. They are beyond Mr Spock in their questioning of human foibles, and because they can pass through solid objects at will, do not need to eat, and fly everywhere, there's not really any chance of them passing for ordinary. Also, they have no reason to, and that's the real problem. They simply are too 'different', and The Vision's need to be human is therefore impossible. Sadly it soon becomes obvious that things are spiraling out of control when Virginia Vision unnecessarily beats an intruder (who is also a major super-villain) to death with a baking tray, then buries the body, and doesn't tell her 'husband'.

I realise that I'm getting a bit bogged down in trying to make sense of all this, but I think that's because the story and the issues it raises are too complex to be simply summed up, by me at least. I'm still not sure I understood the ending, for example. The collection is everything you could want from a comic; smart and thoughtful writing from Tom King, and excellent artwork from Gabriel Hernandez Walta, combining to give us some beautiful storytelling. Although it helps if you have some grounding in Marvel's universe, it's not vital. This could be read by someone who had never picked up an Avengers comic before. It's a story about a struggle for humanity, and the fact that some people are simply incapable of achieving it.



Sunday, March 18, 2018

Dr. Cyclops (1940)

To all intents and purposes, Dr Cyclops is a B-movie. It is about a mad scientist who discovers how to shrink living things, and has no big stars, although some of the actors in it were well known as character actors. There are a couple of things that raise it above the average though. First of all, it is in Technicolor, beautiful beautiful Technicolor; and secondly, it has some great special effects.

In 1940, the rich palette of colour film was still something of a novelty. The first full-length, three-strip Technicolor movie had appeared only 5 years before (Becky Sharp starring Miriam Hopkins) and cinema audiences had only the year before been amazed by the spectacular Wizard of Oz (1939), a film which blew the dial on colour saturation. Dr Cyclops is basically a sci-fi/horror movie, and before its release only musicals, historical dramas and cartoons had been in colour. Fantastic movie fans were used to atmospheric black and white, not these vibrant, comic book tones.

Director Ernest B Schoedsack had been DP on Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1925), and had also directed a little-known movie about a big gorilla in 1933. (Like King Kong, Dr Cyclops is another classic of the 'actors being manhandled by giant mechanical hands' school of special effects.) EBS' direction is solid, and he did a good job with this small cast of six main characters, trapped in a jungle compound, somewhere in South America (actually the Paramount Ranch in California).

Albert Dekker. Just your average linen-suit-wearing scientific mad genius

Albert Dekker gives a great perfomance as the gently menacing and ruthless Dr Thorkel, who's big discovery is making big living things little. I always wonder about how useful this kind of thing would be, (and Hollywood is still wondering; see Downsizing (2017)), but apparently mad scientists spent a lot of time on it in the old days of Hollywood (see also Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and The Devil-Doll (1936)). In the first five minutes of the film Thorkel kills a man who threatens to shut down his radium-powered animal-shrinking experiments, so we know what kind of guy he is straight off. He's an unusual mad scientist, as he is a pretty big bloke, hampered only by the fact that he can't see five inches without his glasses.

Dr Stuffy and Dr Gorgeous

The rest of the cast consists of a stuffy old professor with a paint-brush beard (Charles Halton); a young woman who is apparently a whizz with a microscope (the very lovely Janice Logan, who sadly died at the age of 50, after making only six films, of which this is the best known); a cocky young minerologist (Thomas Coley, who apparently only made this one film. The rest of his career was in TV); the owner of the mules who insists on coming along (Victor Kilian, who would be very well known to you if you'd ever seen the late 70s US TV show, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. I've heard of it but never seen it. It looks amazing); and finally, Pedro, a local peasant who provides a bit of comedy relief (Frank Yaconelli, a WWI pilot as well as an actor).

Dr Thorkel does some science, with his giant Spanner of Science

Dr Thorkel summons Bulfinch and his team to the Amazon jungle to help him with his research. When they get there, after travelling for weeks we assume, he asks them to look at something under a microscope as his eyes are too bad to use it properly. The scientists give him an answer and Thorkel is like, OK thx bai. Understandably the group are a bit miffed, and stick around. This turns out to be a bad idea, as Thorkel then uses them to test his theory about shrinking things, making them all less than a foot tall. This leads to the excellent 'tiny people' special effects, which are as good as anything I've seen in a movie that doesn't have access to computers. The movie was actually nominated for a Best Special Effects Academy Award in 1941, but lost out to The Thief of Bagdad, which is fair enough.

My Little Pony
The rest plays out much as you'd expect, although the callous murder of two of the characters by Thorkel raises the stakes, making us wonder who exactly will survive. The use of 'cyclops' in the title has a double meaning, relating both to relative size and to broken glasses. Clever stuff. I really enjoyed this movie, and I think it stands up pretty well for its time, and did I mention the Technicolor is beautiful?

Menaced by Giant Chickens

Dr Cyclops and the Little People

 
Dr Cyclops Trailer


Friday, March 16, 2018

The Terminal Man (1974)

Probably best known to younger audiences as 'Pops' in the wonderful life-in-the-80s sitcom, The Goldbergs, for decades George Segal was a major film and TV actor. By 1974 he had played titular agent Quiller in The Quiller Memorandum (1966), held his own alongside Taylor and Burton in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (also 1966), played opposite Barbra in The Owl and the Pussycat (1970). His characters may have had a serious side, but his persona was generally that of a likeable, slightly goofy, slightly hangdog, nice guy. In this 1974 adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel he gets the chance to undermine that image good and proper, to play a kind of modern Frankenstein. As usual with Crichton stories, The Terminal Man concerns science gone wrong. I've only read a couple of Crichton novels over the years, but I can't think of a movie adapted from one of this books that doesn't portray scientists as the bad guys. Whether it's germ warfare, cloned dinosaurs, robots, or in this case, automated manipulation of the brain, those well-meaning boffins (who usually turn out to be callous, self-serving and dangerously reckless) are usually the ones making things worse rather than better.


Harry Benson (Segal) is a much-liked family man as well as a highly-paid computer scientist. After suffering a head injury he starts to suffer violent seizures that leave him in a state of frenzy in which his only thought is to harm others. He is released from prison to undergo a ground-breaking brain surgery that will leave him with a small computer in his head and a battery in his shoulder. The computer is supposed to stimulate a part of the brain which will distract Benson's violent nature when he has a seizure, leading him to avoid lashing out. The 20-minute long surgery scene, in which the surgical team are dressed as if they're going into space, is very slow and deliberate giving the impression that it is taking place in real time. The style of the movie (directed by Mike Hodges, best known for Get Carter (1971), Flash Gordon (1980) and Morons from Outer Space (1985)) proves divisive, with many wondering why everything has to take so long. I found it quite poetic and fascinating, but I can see how the pace could lose people. It's a very muted film, and there's a lot of glass and steel, and many of the hospital scenes are almost Expressionist in their cold austerity.



Apart from the operation scene, the real standout sequence is the interview between Benson and Dr Janet Ross, the one doctor who doesn't think all this is such a good idea. Played by the fragile-seeming yet steely Joan Hackett, who sadly died before she reached 50, Dr Ross questions Benson about his reactions while various parts of his brain are stimulated by the electrodes that have been planted there. The scene is equal parts amusing, horrifying and deeply uncomfortable as Benson goes through the gamut of emotions without any apparent reason; one moment laughing uncontrollably, then tasting a non-existent ham sandwich, then acting like a child, craving his mother's forgiveness. Unfortunately, the doctors settle on a sexual stimulation to counter the violent seizures. Dr Ross' elegant and stand-offish nature are interpreted as cold by many of the other characters, but Ross is the emotional heart of the film, attempting to help Benson at every opportunity, and courageously doing all can to save him. Also worth noting is Joan Hackett's hairstyle, which seems to have wandered in from the 1930s.

Another thing that interested me is that the two doctors who mastermind the experiment and perform the operation are played by Richard Dysart and Donald Moffat, who appeared together again in John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), one of my favourite movies.

Donald Moffat & Richard Dysart in The Thing
The Terminal Man is a slow-moving movie, which perhaps takes too long to make its rather simple point. The sporadic moments of violence are shocking when they happen, but the weight placed on these events are too much for the story to bear, and the whole thing doesn't really deliver on the promise of the premise. It's watchable for many of the performances, and I enjoyed the cinematography (by Richard H Kline), but it's clear why this isn't a very well-known movie.

 The Terminal Man - trailer

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Zombie Death House (1988)

Inspiring title sequence. Cost: $13
Oh I watch all the best movies. This one was a particularly stinky bit of cinematic nonsense. From the late 1980s when every horror film was an adventure, Zombie Death House has all kinds of things wrong with it. Bless the silly film, and pity the poor director, John Saxon. Yes, John Saxon. Respected actor in all kinds of wonderful roles and amazing films. Probably best known to non-cult movie fans as one of the stars of Enter the Dragon (a massive mainstream hit in 1973, which made Bruce Lee a star), and the persistent cop in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. According to imdb trivia, Saxon agreed to direct the film after the existing director withdrew. It seems the producers interfered with the filming and Saxon didn't really get the chance to make the film he wanted. To say that this is a dog's dinner is an insult to whatever dogs eat for dinner these days. The story is plain stupid, the acting is all over the place, and the sets, action, editing, sound and cinematography are all skewiff in fun and entertaining ways.
Poster better than film alert. Also, at least 4 people get out alive.
The film starts with the hero (played by Dennis Cole, who isn't very well known for anything, although according to imdb, he did play nine different characters in nine different episodes of Fantasy Island. Also he was married to Jaclyn Smith for nearly three years, so fair play to him) being hired as a chauffeur by a gangster with a big house and a hot blonde trophy wife. The hero is called Derek, not a common name among action heroes, and the first thing he does is start an affair with the big-haired blonde. The gangster (Anthony Franciosa, TV's Matt Helm, who was also in all kinds of cool movies, including Tenebrae, Death Wish II and Across 110th Street) finds out about the affair, drowns his girlfriend in the bath, and plants the body in Derek's motel room. After being chased around the bits of LA we've seen in a million films, he goes to the most rubbish prison you've ever seen, which has no proper lights, and seems to consist of one corridor, an office and a couple of rooms that have bars on them. Also in the prison with him is the gangster's brother played by the marvellous Michael Pataki, whose film career was just incredible (Five the Hard Way, Dracula's Dog and Rocky IV are just a few gems). In this movie he's the queen of the cell-block, and does his best with not much.
Poor John Saxon. Should have given it to Alan Smithee
The remainder of the story concerns a fiendish plan by Colonel Gordon Burgess, (played by Saxon) who wants to infect some inmates with a virus that will make them into an army of super soldiers. Obviously it all goes dreadfully wrong, and the convicts just start killing each other. For some weird reason Burgess sends a journalist (played by Tane McClure, who was Elle's mum in the Legally Blonde movies, and is the daughter of Doug McClure) in there to 'investigate'. As soon as she's in there he basically locks the place down and the army turn up to keep it under control. It's a right mess and I'm sure you'll never see the damn thing, because why would you? I enjoyed it though, so what does that tell you?

 
 Zombie Death House - trailer

Saturday, March 10, 2018

This One Summer - Jillian & Mariko Tamaki (2014 First Second)

First Second has to be one of my favourite comic imprints. Their books are so beautifully presented, and feature such wonderfully written and drawn stories. These are proper 'graphic novels'; a single one-off story that balances words and pictures. This One Summer is by two Japanese-Canadian cousins, and was apparently the 'most challenged' book in the US in 2016. This means that lots of parents didn't like the idea that their children should read about anything to do with lesbians. It's weird that people are like that, but as we all know, there are millions of these people. Anyway, this is the story of two girls, Rose and 'Windy', around 11 or 12 I guess, who meet up every year when their families go to Awago Beach for the summer. Awago Beach is in Ontario, it seems. The two girls do general kids-on-holiday stuff like swimming, watching horror videos on a laptop, going for walks, and collecting stones. Rose's parents are going through a rough patch, due to the mother's miscarriage and subsequent depression. There are also a bunch of teenagers who work in or hang around at the local store, and Rose and Windy become intrigued by their problems, as if they were a real-life soap opera. The artwork by Jillian Tamaki is sublime; soft brush strokes in a dark blue rather than black, that create a real sense of place. You can almost smell the surf and the trees, and the tang of empty beer bottles and general garbage around the store. The dialogue always rings true, and characters are consistent and emotionally-satisfying. It's a little melancholy masterpiece. If you're not sure about comics, because you don't like superheroes, this might turn you around.
http://jilliantamaki.com/illustration/
http://marikotamaki.blogspot.co.uk/ 


Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Another Bad Move on My Part


I heard something in the woods and went in to look. Found nothing.

Came back to the house, a huge bear was sitting on the porch steps, drinking my beer.

“You better get away from here, before I call my dad!” he shouted.

I slept in the woods.

(my first rejected story. I submitted this to a 50 word flash fiction site. I present it here.)

Monday, March 5, 2018

The Blood Circus by Thomas K Fitzpatrick

Because I'm a classy guy, I read this kind of rubbish. Back in the early 2000s I got a bit obsessed with buying old paperbacks from eBay and 2nd-hand shops, and the NEL books of the 60s and 70s were the kind of sought-after nonsense I picked up quite a lot of. One of my best jumble sale experiences was getting Skinhead and Chopper for 50p each. If you don't know what I'm on about, there's no explaining it.

Anyway, I've had this slender volume (110 pages, short even for this period of neo-pulp) for more than 10 years probably, and it finally pushed itself into my reading vision. It's average, but then really they all are. I suppose though it depends what you're used to. 

The story would have made a decent episode of some Quinn Martin production in the 1970s, and who knows, maybe it did. A young cop goes undercover with The Beasts, who are meant to make the Hell's Angels look like a bunch of disorganized school kids. The head Beast has a plan; to take over seven square blocks of LA, rob all the banks, stores and civilians, then hightail it for Mexico. They are heavily armed, and there are lots of weapon-related terms that I have no idea about - what the hell is a 'grease gun', for example? Even though the plan is pretty tight, it gets thwarted by the cops and the army, mainly because the Beasts have no discipline and the young cop has tipped The Man that shit is going down. That's the kind of thing you say after reading this kind of litterachur.

The cover is the usual tat that was used to draw the juvenile eye in the early 70s, but the original American version is much better. There was a late 80s band named after the book, who had a track on that seminal Sub Pop 200 compilation. 

Also there was an unrelated film of the same name in 1987, which sounds like the kind of thing I need to see. The imdb synopsis: Aliens come to Earth to fight has-been professional wrestlers. 

The original American version (1968, I think)

Thursday, March 1, 2018

In the Wake of Madness by Joan Druett (2003, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

Subtitled 'The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon'. I think I must have bought this when we were in Martha's Vineyard a few years ago. The whaling ships of the period sailed from New Bedford in Massachusetts, and most of the ship's officers seem to come from Holmes Hole, which is now part of Tisbury, the main port on the Vineyard. However, this is far from being a local history book. It is a story of murder, brutality, and the back-breaking conditions of life on a whaler in the 180s. The main story deals with revelations concerning the events that lead to the brutal murder of Captain Howes Norris on board the Sharon in 1842. The story also has connections with Herman Melville's masterpiece Moby Dick. Melville worked on whaling ships very similar to the Sharon, at the same time, and may have partly based the character of Captain Ahab on Norris. Druett has used journals written by members of the Sharon's crew, that had not been seen before by historians, to piece together a tale different to the one that has been handed down. It's fascinating stuff, and makes me think I should look more closely at the world of sea-faring literature. I loved Moby Dick, and the more modern Three Minutes' Silence by Georgii Vladimov, which was published in the late 60s. Druett has done a brilliant job, not only in telling a story of madness and murder, but also evoking the life of those who served on these ships, that sailed across the world in search of giant mammals to kill for their light-giving properties. 

Benjamin Clough, hero of the Sharon

The Giant Gila Monster (1959)

Although this is a very low budget 1950s monster movie with laughable special effects and some hokey acting, The Giant Gila Monster i...