Karloff/Lugosi Double Feature: The Raven/The Invisible Ray

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

The Raven is a perfect example of a classic Hollywood horror film where virtually the entire pleasure of the film rests on its central actors, two icons of horror cinema: Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. This duo, together and separately, were responsible for much of the appeal of so many of the era's low-budget throwaways. They infused these otherwise disposable films with the timeless quality of their performances. Sometimes, these two — particularly Karloff, who was far more versatile an actor than he has ever gotten credit for — could elevate a film by locating unexpected drama, pathos and depth in their mad scientists, monsters and killers. Perhaps more often, their broad, campy performances could bring a spirited energy and intensity to films that would otherwise have been merely flimsy, poorly constructed B-movies.

The Raven certainly doesn't have much to recommend it beyond the appeal of its dueling central performances; as was so often the case when Lugosi and Karloff met onscreen, they are pitted against one another, Lugosi's smiling courtliness set off against Karloff's blunt, Frankensteinian strength. Lugosi plays Dr. Vollin, a brilliant physician who has now retired to conduct private research — and also to dedicate himself to his obsession with Edgar Allen Poe, constructing elaborate replicas of the death traps from Poe's stories in a hidden basement room. Karloff is the killer Edmond Bateman, escaped from prison and showing up on Vollin's doorstep, begging the doctor to perform plastic surgery on him, to transform his face. Vollin agrees, but instead he deforms Bateman beyond recognition, giving him a half-formed face with one staring, non-functioning eye and a melted texture to his skin. He needs Bateman's sinister services, and in order to ensure the escaped criminal's cooperation, he promises that he will restore his face only if Bateman helps him with his evil plot.

Vollin desires revenge for being denied the great love of his life. He had saved the life of the pretty young dancer Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware), but she was already engaged to another doctor (Lester Matthews) and her father Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) urged Vollin to back off. Vollin's not exactly a stable guy, and this is enough to drive him over the edge: he invites Thatcher and his family to his home for the weekend, plotting to use Bateman to exact his revenge. The plot is, obviously, beyond silly, really little more than a flimsy excuse to trot out some of Poe's elaborate torture devices, as well as providing a framework for Karloff and Lugosi's sparring. The film is strangely a bit like a Marx brothers movie, formally speaking, in that everybody else in the cast is playing it straight while the main characters are on an entirely different level. While Karloff and Lugosi are wildly gesticulating and enjoyably hamming it up, everyone else seems to be on the verge of falling asleep, and not just when they're exaggeratedly yawning to convey their sleepiness. It's like there are two different movies here, and nobody else seems to realize that there's a Gothic chamber horror story playing out in the basement, while up above the Thatcher family and Vollin's assorted other guests amiably sleepwalk through some melodrama and light comedy.

Needless to say, whenever the focus is off Karloff and Lugosi, the film is simply dreadful, featuring some of the most stilted, painfully horrible line readings imaginable. The supporting cast is composed entirely of forgettable non-entities, including even Ware as the love interest; it's hard to imagine this drone, pretty as she is, driving anyone truly mad. The cast alternates between melodramatic overacting and barely acting at all, rendering the already minimal plot even more irrelevant. No, this is strictly a two-man show, and thankfully both Lugosi and Karloff rise to the occasion. The former is especially good here, playing Vollin with a smarmy self-righteousness and sense of entitlement, always tinged with a note of madness even before he really goes mad. He's a smiling sadist, fascinated with pain and torture: "toooortuuure," he drawls the word out in his signature Hungarian accent, savoring its every syllable, rolling it around on his tongue as though tasting it. There's a chilling scene where he clumsily tries to seduce Jean after her surgery, running his hand along her neck to examine her wounds. "Does it still hurt?" he asks her with a gleeful smile on his face, eying a surgical scar with the pleasure of a small child playing with a puppy. His broad smile is creepy; he takes such obvious pleasure in doling out pain.

Karloff is equally good, playing a character with more dramatic and emotional shadings. His character is haunted by the things he's done, and obsessed by the idea that his crimes were a reflection of his ugly, brutish face: if only he could have a different face, he could be good. Instead, Vollin makes him even uglier, suited only to revenge and cruelty, using him as an instrument in his evil plans. Bateman is a poignant character, and Karloff conveys his despair with the use of only one eye and half his face, the other half frozen beneath thick makeup, an obviously fake eye staring dead ahead at all times. The makeup isn't necessarily convincing, but it's creepy enough to do its job, and the strength of Karloff's performance is such that after a while one forgets the makeup is even there. This is what Karloff unfailingly brought to these low-budget ventures, infusing his characters with depth and resonance far beyond what was called for, getting across his inner state even through the most formidable of barriers. His one good eye, casting desperately about as he tries to avoid further corruption, is all he needs to craft a powerful performance.

The interaction of these two greats is all the film has to offer, but it's more than enough. It's a flimsy, utterly ridiculous story, flatly directed (by journeyman Lew Landers, on his first film) and hampered by the overall low quality of its acting. Even so, Karloff and Lugosi manage to craft an entertaining and even dramatically satisfying opposition between mad cruelty and a crooked man who desperately wants to change.


Unlike its predecessor The Raven, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi's next film together, The Invisible Ray, was one even these legends couldn't quite redeem. The film has a convoluted plot and some absurdly funny science fiction contrivances, as well as special effects that pretty much guarantee its status as a camp classic of a certain kind. But in between scattered scenes of over-the-top silliness, it's surprisingly dull and monotonous, allowing much of its action to occur offscreen while focusing at interminable length on the least interesting aspects of the story.

Karloff is the star of the show here, playing the brilliant but isolated scientist Janos Rukh, who has studied by himself for years, mocked and ostracized by the scientific community for his unconventional theories. Frankly, I'm still not sure what those theories are, though he goes to great lengths to explain them during the unintentionally hilarious opening scenes, when he presents a demonstration of his ideas along with some proof that he'd been right all along. Basically, he gathers together a group of scientists for a big planetarium show, projecting rays into space and somehow getting an image of Earth from the distant past, just in time to watch a big glowing meteor crash into the planet and land in Africa — just as Rukh had predicted, how convenient! The scientists, led by Rukh's rival Dr. Benet (Lugosi), then head off with Rukh into the interior of Africa in search of the mysterious meteor that crashed there so long ago. They drag along Rukh's wife Diane (Frances Drake), who married the much older Rukh out of respect for his intellect rather than genuine love — which doesn't exactly explain why her eye wanders, once in Africa, to the fey, annoying Ronald Drake (Frank Lawton, who can't quite suppress a silly grin throughout the film, as though bemused by his own career choices).

Anyway, things quickly begin going wrong for Rukh. He discovers his meteor, but finds that it turns him radioactive and deadly, so that anything he touches will die. He also glows in the dark, a neat party trick rendered here with some of the laziest special effects ever trotted out for a Hollywood production. Benet is able to cure Rukh's radioactivity, but it's not permanent; Rukh has to continually take shots to counteract the effects of the meteor, or else he'll return to his lethal state before dying himself. Not long after, while Rukh is once again absorbed in his research, he finds that not only have Benet and the other scientists taken it upon themselves to report the discovery of the meteor, but Diane has left Africa, leaving him a note that she's in love with Drake. Rukh returns to Paris broken and enraged. He gets credit for the discovery of the miraculous "Radium X," which can cure all sorts of diseases when harnessed, but Benet and the other scientists wind up getting more attention for actually putting the substance to practical use. And in any event no amount of accolades are a consolation for seeing his wife with another man. So Rukh fakes his own death and begins stalking the other members of his expedition, killing them off one by one.

Despite the needless twists and turns of the plot, at this point the film's horror premise should kick into high gear, as Rukh tracks down his victims, merely touching them in order to infect them with his murderous radioactive emanations. This should make for a supremely creepy, horrifying movie. But director Lambert Hillyer, perhaps constrained by a limited effects budget, keeps the action almost entirely offscreen. Rukh's activities appear in newspaper headlines, but none of his murders are actually shown, nor are the incidents when he uses his invisible ray gun to symbolically destroys a set of church statues that represent, for him, his victims. This makes for a rather dull, plodding film, with a whole lot of exposition and irrelevant melodrama and build-up for suspense sequences that never actually come.

Karloff delivers a fine performance as the slowly unraveling scientist, and in a more straightforward and secondary role Lugosi does his best, exuding a cool reserve as Rukh's rival colleague. He also presides over a great scene in which he reveals for some police inspectors the irradiated handprints on a murder victim's throat, one of the most memorable images (besides the glowing Karloff) from this mostly visually undistinguished film. This is a minor sci-fi/horror offering from Universal, and a minor pairing for Karloff and Lugosi, who despite their best efforts can't manage to inject any real vitality into this lackluster project.

Sci-Fi Double Feature: The Deadly Mantis/The Leech Woman

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

One of the marks of the 50s sci-fi cinema was how seriously these films often took themselves. In spite of the crude effects, grisly monsters and ridiculous plots, these films were totally committed to their central ideas and themes. Just because a film's central character is a giant praying mantis left over from the prehistoric era, resurrected from a block of ice by volcanic disturbances, doesn't mean that the film can't incorporate an utterly straight-faced infomercial for America's Cold War defense systems. That's how The Deadly Mantis begins, with an incongruous semi-documentary segment that aims to educate viewers about the fascinating new technology of radar and how it's being used to protect America against an evil Commie invasion. Well, OK, the deadpan announcer doesn't actually say that, but that's the unspoken meaning of these scenes, which establish the 1957 film as a true product of the Cold War era.

The film is all about protecting America from threats that buzz in from outside the border. The threat in this case happens to be a massive carnivorous insect, but it could just as easily be enemy bombing planes or missiles. The film is a rallying cry for solidarity, uniting against the common enemy, and ultimately the big bug is defeated because common Americans — a ground force of dedicated ordinary citizens who volunteer to watch out for enemy activity — band together to help out, because civilian professionals leap to the government's aid at a moment's notice, and because the journalists trust the government's word implicitly enough to report only what they're told and no more.

That's the subtext, and the film's serious message. Even so, at its heart The Deadly Mantis is still just a film about a really big, really hungry bug, and as such it succeeds only to the extent that its voracious monster is creepy and frightening enough. Certainly, the mantis is about as good as one expects for this kind of creature, a giant puppet with an appealingly textured surface and an especially expressive face: oftentimes, the creature seems to be smiling as it plods towards its victims, a bit of anthropomorphism that somehow only makes it even creepier. Of course, pedestrian director Nathan Juran does the creature no favors by inserting long shots in which the camera pans across the length of the insect's body, shots that only call attention to the artificiality of the threat and the basic inertness of the puppet. Much better are the dead-on shots of the creature's face and threatening forelimbs, emphasizing the terror of facing this monstrosity.

Unfortunately, for much of the film's length the creature is offscreen altogether, as paleontologist Ned Jackson (William Hopper) investigates the mysterious deaths of several soldiers at a remote radar station near the Arctic Circle. Jackson heads to the area along with his inquisitive assistant and photographer, Marge (Alix Talton), and the duo join up there with Colonel Parkman (Craig Stevens). The script makes a few lame attempts to generate some sparks between Parkman and Marge, but the acting here is all so limp that such efforts are doomed. The mantis has more charisma than any of his prey; the filmmakers had a bigger chance of getting some romantic chemistry going with the insect. Of course, the lack of any human interest here doesn't stop the film from spending much of its time with the non-insect characters as they try to figure out what's killing people up at the North Pole. Hey, B-movie makers, I have a tip for you: if you want us to wonder what mysterious thing is causing so much damage for the first half-hour of your movie, don't name the film The Deadly Mantis. The result is that nearly half the movie is spent yelling at the screen: it's a really big mantis, you idiots, figure it out already so we can finally see the damn thing.

Still, at its best the film does generate some compelling suspense from its central premise. The insect soon enough escapes from the Arctic Circle, heading south into the mainland USA, where it terrorizes Washington, D.C., even climbing to the top of the Washington Monument like an exoskeletal King Kong. The film's best sequence is a long, eerily quiet segment when a thick, dense fog settles over the area. Marge and Parkman are driving near D.C., listening to reports coming in over the radio of the terrible "accidents" happening in the area. The monster creeps through this dark, foggy soup, occasionally looming up to attack a bus or derail a train. The fog helps obscure the ungainly nature of the creature, increasing its effectiveness — when only its blank, empty eyes are visible, glowing faintly through the fog, it's much more frightening when the thing is out in the light of day, revealed as a typical Hollywood construction. This is essentially a generic giant monster film, delivering a few effective scares but little else.


Edward Dein's The Leech Woman is startlingly rich and complex for a B-grade horror flick with such a sensationalistic title — it calls to mind the films of producer Val Lewton, who, given a pulpy title, would often mine unexpected depths while playing down the horror premise. Dein's film hardly reaches the visual beauty or sophistication of Lewton's best work, but his serious approach to the material recalls Lewton. What could have been a typical B-movie shocker is instead a poignant, insightful examination of aging, beauty and the differential treatment of men and women in a society obsessed with youth and beauty.

It's apparent from the film's very first scene that this is going to be something different than the usual B-movie fare. The scientist Paul Talbot (Phillip Terry) and his wife June (Coleen Gray) are arguing at his office, as June drinks and grows progressively more distraught. Paul is a distant, heartless man, openly disdainful towards his wife and turned off because she's middle-aged, no longer a youthful beauty. For her part, she is slightly worn, disheveled, her eyes ringed with black — she is aging and depressed and fading away, and the loss of her husband's love and affection have made her bitter, driven her to drink. It is a heartbreaking scene, one that makes the parameters of the couple's relationship apparent in the subtexts of their conversation, a tortured back and forth of insults and passive-aggressive retorts that ends with the ultimatum of divorce. Nevertheless, Paul hastens to make up with June after the shriveled old African woman Malla (Estelle Hemsley) visits him in his office, offering him the secret of reversing the aging process. Paul makes up with June and heads to Africa with her, pursuing the secret that rests with a mysterious African tribe.

They discover the secret, but they also find that it involves killing a man — the drug from an orchid is activated by plunging a hooked ring deep into the brain of a hapless victim, who dies for a woman's youth. June gets her youth restored to her, and she also gets her revenge on her despicable husband, who loved her only as long as she was young and beautiful, before growing distant from her as she aged, casting her aside. But when she returns to society, she finds that her newfound beauty is shortlived, and will only last as long as she continually replenishes her intake of the African tribe's drug. After going without it for too long, she shrivels up, aging far beyond her slightly worn middle age into a wrinkled old hag. So June becomes a parasite, living off the lives of men in order to retain her beauty, posing as her own niece in order to seduce the young lawyer Neil (Grant Williams).

Gray's performance is fantastic, covering a very wide range, from the despairing alcoholic of the film's first half, to a grieving old widow, to the predatory young girl she is when supplied with the drug. She plays her younger self with a peculiar urgency, as though eager for sensual experiences. In one particularly memorable scene, she blocks a doorway as Neil tries to leave, thrusting her body at him, smiling seductively, her body suggestively sprawled against the door as though offering herself to him. There's a desperate sexiness in her portrayal of the younger June, as well as an unearthly confidence: she's not just playing a young girl, she's playing a young girl with the mind of an experienced older woman.

The fascinating depth and complexity of Gray's performance is matched by the film's treatment of its themes. One early scene begins with a tight closeup of Paul talking to another man, planning their course of activity. Then Dein's camera tracks backward, expanding the shot until June appears in the corner of the frame, away from the men, away from the action, without a voice in their plans. This simple camera move subtly underlines the conventions of Hollywood films, where the woman disappears as soon as some action is called for. The men are the ones who are supposed to make the plans, but soon June will be acting for herself. Not longer after, Malla, describing her people's customs about old women, delivers a scathing indictment of the way society casts aside older women, treating them with pity, while older men are treated as wise, worthy of respect. During this insightful monologue, the camera cuts away to June's face, capturing her look of recognition, her wounded sidelong glance at her disinterested husband, her resentment and hurt. It's a moving shot, and one that helps set up her transformation into the needy leech woman of the film's title.

June may eventually become the villain here, but she's a sympathetic character anyway. The men are the film's real villains: fickle, transitory with their love, capable of immediate betrayal, only interested so long as a woman is beautiful. Even Neil, June's object of affection, cavalierly casts aside his own fiancée (Gloria Talbott) for the rejuvenated June. June doesn't see it, but this only demonstrates that he's just like the other men she's known, just as inconstant and easily distracted, just as careless about love and women.

This subversive subtext — questioning the values of a society that allows men to age gracefully while women are cast aside past a certain age — hovers just below the surface of a film that purports to be a simple shocker. As a horror film, it's effective enough, with some suitably creepy makeup effects for June's transformations (all of which occur conveniently offscreen or behind a curtain of fog). The African scenes are rather lackluster and clichéd, and the plotting is a bit light on suspense or thrills, perhaps, but despite its sensationalist surface, The Leech Woman isn't really that kind of movie. At its heart it's a character study of June, a woman driven to horrible deeds by her desire to once more be loved and accepted, to once more earn some actual attention rather than just suffering pitiably. It's a moving, harrowing tale, and a fascinating film.

Jack Arnold Double Feature: Tarantula/Monster on the Campus

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

Oh those crazy Hollywood scientists. They always mean well. They want to save the world, to end world hunger, to improve the human condition, imagining a future where everyone is healthy and well-fed. To do this, of course, their research requires that they create tremendous tarantulas, grown to massive size with a radioactive nutrient formula. It's only logical, right? Professor Deemer (Leo G. Carroll) is the mad scientist of Jack Arnold's sci-fi classic Tarantula. Deemer's a well-meaning soul, with a real vision for the future. But the problem of his escaped giant tarantula, which menaces a small desert community, sort of overshadows his plans for ending world hunger. It hurts his Nobel Prize chances, too, I'd imagine. Deemer's research suffers its setback when two of his colleagues, impatient with the slow progress of their work, decide to overlook the side effects of their nutrient and inject themselves with the formula as the first human test subjects. One of these men goes dramatically stumbling through the desert in the film's stark, powerful pre-credits sequence — a deformed and twisted man, his body contorted and bulging out as though subjected to tremendous internal pressures, staggering as the vast white sand of the desert and the big open expanse of the sky stretch off for miles all around him. Not long after, Deemer's other colleague, driven mad by the injection, assaults Deemer, injects him as well, and destroys their lab before dying. In the commotion, the spider, then "only" the size of a small dog, makes its creeping, crawling getaway.

Although this opening sets up the tarantula's triumphant return, the bulk of the film keeps the focus off of the titular arachnid. Instead, the story turns to the local doctor, Matt Hastings (John Agar), who is investigating the death of Deemer's colleague along with local sheriff Andrews (Nestor Paiva). Hastings is suspicious about what's going on out at the professor's lab, and when Deemer gets a pretty research assistant with the un-feminine nickname of Steve (Mara Corday), Hastings takes a renewed interest in the professor's mysterious research. Throughout all this, the tarantula is lurking in the background, just off-screen, a conceit that grows more and more comical and ridiculous the bigger the spider gets. I suppose it's possible that a giant tarantula could hide in the desert for a while, but once it gets to be the size where it dwarfs a large mansion, it's hard to figure out exactly why nobody ever sees the thing. At one point, it actually hides behind a big rock formation, playfully sticking up one of its hairy legs so we know it's there, even as the protagonists manage to miss it. One wonders what would happen if someone looked at the mountain from the other side: would they see the spider ducking down there, playing hide and seek? Or would it scurry quickly around to the other side of the rock pile?

At times, Arnold seems to be getting a kick out of this game of hide the spider as well, and there's something amusing about the way the tarantula's appearances become ever more outrageous as the film goes on. The thing is apparently skulking around in the night, killing cattle, picking them to their bare bones with its venom and powerful jaws. But no one sees it as it prowls the flat, open land, except a few unfortunate victims who get devoured as well. Perhaps the funniest moment is when Hastings and Andrews come across a car that was turned upside down off the road, with a pile of bones from the two passengers strewn around at the scene. "So do you think it was an accident?" Hastings deadpans, and the funny thing is that they seem to consider it a possibility.

Through optical printing, Arnold gets fairly realistic effects from the juxtaposition of a real spider, greatly enlarged, onto various landscapes. The spider's distinctive scrambling, eight-legged walk is eerie at such a scale, as it lumbers over the top of a hill or creeps up next to a country house. Arnold's style is blunt and efficient, and he interweaves the tarantula's increasing destructiveness with the story of Hastings and Deemer, as the former slowly uncovers the truth behind the latter's reclusive experiments. The pace is slow and deliberate, with much time given over to the development of a relationship between Hastings and Steve — not that either progresses beyond the level of the typical B-movie cardboard cutouts, but their relationship nevertheless has a cheery and natural camaraderie that lends some heft to the human element in this story of science gone awry.

Arnold also inserts some appealingly low-key character humor in the form of the hotel manager Josh (Hank Patterson), who noses his way into the town's business any chance he gets, listening in on Hastings' calls and asking prying questions of everyone he meets. His counterpart is the reporter Burch (Ross Elliott), another comic figure who does much the same things as Josh, except in a more official capacity. These touches of character humor — along with the rapport between Agar and Paiva's grizzled sheriff — help invest the film with some life and emotion, raising the stakes as the tarantula slowly grows and becomes more active, more deadly, its rampage developing mostly off-screen, waiting patiently for its eventual final showdown. The film is sometimes crude in its effects, particularly during the conclusion, when the tarantula is often transparent, as though already a ghost, anticipating its imminent demise. But on the whole the film is a raw, compelling piece of science-gone-mad sci-fi, as tough and direct as its central monster.


Jack Arnold's Monster on the Campus is a weird, unintentionally goofy bit of horror/sci-fi camp, saddled with one of the most inane, scientifically implausible, outright ludicrous plots in a genre not exactly renowned for its level-headedness or scientific acuity. College professor Donald Blake (Arthur Franz) is a scientist fascinated with the study of the primeval roots of things, with those creatures who have resisted the progress of evolution. So he acquires for his university the remains of a coelacanth, the prehistoric fish originally believed to be long extinct until living specimens were unexpectedly discovered in 1938. What he doesn't realize is that this fish had been treated with gamma rays during shipment — of course! — and so contact with the fish's corpse has the unfortunate and unlikely effect of reverting other creatures back to a primitive state. The fish's blood transforms a tranquil, friendly dog into a vicious wolf-like creature, attacking everyone he sees. When a dragonfly alights on the fish and bites it, it returns as a two-foot-long insect, buzzing with a sound like an airplane. Most notably, the fish regresses Blake himself, turning him into a Neanderthal monster, a hairy ape-like creature with a murderous temper.

What's interesting about the film isn't its premise, but what's left unsaid in between the lines. There's a sense in which the film isn't really about what it seems to be about on the surface — or maybe that's just what I'm hoping, since what is there on the surface is frankly pretty lousy. But there's something appealingly seedy about the way the film sets up Blake's regression as a descent into an alternative lifestyle. When he first transforms, he's in the company of the young research assistant Molly (Helen Westcott), and despite the fact that he's happily engaged to the equally pretty Madeline (Joanna Moore), his interactions with Molly are flirtatious and sexually charged. This is the beginning of his downfall, his illicit thoughts about another woman, who obviously stirs him up; she "scares" him, he says, but it's obviously more than that. Things really get bad when Blake, woozy and destabilized — by Molly or the poisoning of the coelacanth? — has her drive him home. Hours later, he wakes up in his backyard. His house has been destroyed (and his photo of his fiancée notably torn in two), his clothes are tattered, and in a grotesque, startling image, Molly is hanging by her hair from a tree in the backyard, her eyes glazed.

So begins Blake's regression to the form of an inhuman monster, a transformation characterized not just by his ape-like appearance, but by the increasing strangeness and distance of his behavior in his ordinary life. He is cool with Madeline, ignoring and neglecting her, even as he draws further and further into his obsessions with the coelacanth. He's convinced that something about this fish is causing regression and creating an ape-like murderer on the campus — he just doesn't realize that he's the killer. The film is strikingly similar in its themes to Paul Landres' The Vampire from the year before, another film that used such violent regression as a metaphor for the degradation of a good man's lifestyle. Blake is just a decent guy, an eager scientist, seemingly very much in love with the perky Madeline, but his one little moment of innocent flirtation ends horribly: he takes a female student home with him and she winds up dead, hanging from a tree, while he remembers nothing. Later, Blake's increasing exposure to the coelacanth's blood plasma begins to resemble a drug addict's desire for a fix. He prepares a syringe of the stuff, injecting himself in the name of science, rationalizing his behavior as a desire to learn if the blood is really making him a killer or not.

The undercurrents of sexuality and drug abuse buried within the film are undoubtedly interesting, but such threads can hardly distract from the basic clumsiness and silliness of the film. The makeup that transforms Blake into a monster is laughable, a cheap rubber monkey mask that is way funnier than it is scary. The film's one real creepy shot is, notably, one achieved entirely through shadows, a shot of the monster's shadow stretching across the pavement as it shuffles threateningly towards a man at a phone box. Whenever the monster must emerge into the light, the film's cruddy effects can't bear the weight of the horror premise. Landres' The Vampire survived a similarly silly monster with the strength of its lead performance, by John Beal, but Arnold's film has only bland, occasionally awkward acting to distract from its low-budget effects. It's a strange film, interesting for its confrontation with the darkness within ordinary men, but only fitfully translating this theme into actual compelling cinema.

The Fountain

Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain was an ambitious project, a major detour for the director whose previous two features (Pi and Requiem for a Dream) were decidedly small, introspective personal dramas. The Fountain is instead a time-spanning, mythological epic, a grand statement about tragic love and the desire to conquer death, in which stories from different times and different levels of reality — some of them undeniably "real," some of them possibly fiction or fantasy — interact to tell the story of the enduring love between Tommy (Hugh Jackman) and his dying wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz).

There are three layers of reality in this film. In the most tangible and focused of these, Tommy is a research scientist desperately trying to devise a treatment for brain tumors before his wife dies of the one affecting her. He performs surgery on a succession of primates, finally in desperation turning to an obscure medicine derived from the bark of a South American tree — a concoction that miraculously reverses the ape's aging but seems to leave its tumor untouched. This story is presented as the memories of a different, later version of Jackman's Tommy, a shaved-head mystical initiate floating through space in a bubble he shares with a patch of fallow earth and a dying, dried-out tree, the fabled tree of life from the Garden of Eden and also presumably the same tree that had such a stunning effect on that long-ago Tommy's research. Finally, there is a third story in which Jackman is a conquistador loyal to Spain's Queen Isabel (played by Weisz, naturally), who faces a rebellion from the evil, self-flagellating Grand Inquisitor (Stephen McHattie). The Queen protects a great secret, the location of a mythical tree in South America that may grant eternal life to all who eat of its bark, and she sends Jackman's conquistador off on a mission to locate the tree and bring its secrets back to her. This story is told by Izzi herself, a writer whose final book, left unfinished when she dies, is based on Mayan mythology in an attempt to come to terms with death. She leaves the final chapter unwritten, asking Tommy to finish the book after she's gone.

The film itself is in many ways a multi-faceted attempt to fulfill Izzi's request, just as the conquistador's tale recounts his ill-fated attempt to fulfill the Queen's orders, to return to her as Adam to her Eve and live forever together. The time-jumping structure repeatedly returns to the same junction points, as though trying to rewrite the story, to change the narrative in order to reach a happy ending. It's building towards a myth, towards the achieving of eternal life, and yet ultimately this happy ending folds in on itself, as Jackman's Tommy reaches towards a very different kind of enlightenment: the realization that death is a part of life, that death cannot be conquered and should instead be accepted, that what matters is not struggling violently against the end of life but enjoying the moments we have. The story ends, not with the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, not with a grand romantic gesture to achieve an endless love, but an acceptance of transitory, earthbound love. Life and love will end eventually for all of us, but they are no less sweeter for their brevity. This is what makes this film especially tragic, and especially intelligent: it incorporates our myths, our desperate need for stories about eternity, but it acknowledges that these are just our ways of dealing with death, of denying what we all know, that everything has an end.


Aronofsky has crafted a sublime, complex structure here, a wonderfully evocative expression of the human anxiety over death, which has over time migrated from the realm of myth and religion into the strivings of science to conquer disease, as though the human race is forever working towards eliminating our transitory status in life. Thus, Tommy's desperate efforts to save his wife exist along a continuum that stretches from his past incarnation as a conquistador in search of a mythical tree of life, to a future incarnation as a man who has eaten of that tree and thus lives forever.

This is a gorgeous film, achingly romantic and heart-breaking, and sumptuous in its visual style. Working on a tight budget after an earlier version of this film (slated to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) broke down, Aronofsky eschewed CGI and instead created organic effects by photographing chemical reactions in petri dishes. This technique gives a raw, dazzling beauty to the sequences of Tom floating through space, his form silhouetted in black against a field of pin-prick stars, or drifting into the heart of a glowing gold nebula that represents the Mayan underworld. It's also appropriate for a film about the processes of life and death that so many of its images from outer space evoke the swift foldings and fissions of cell divisions, of molecular structures forming and dissolving. It's as though the inside of the human body, the microscopic foundations of life and biology, have been writ large on the blank page of space itself, the micro blending into the macro, just as Tom and Izzi's story represents larger ideas about mortality and human impermanence.

The ethereal, haunting beauty of these images is matched by the pulsing, repetitive music composed by Clint Mansell for the Kronos Quartet and the Scottish post-rock combo Mogwai. The muscular, Krautrock-inspired rhythms of this music continually return to the same motifs over and over again, synced with the ouroboric enfoldings of the narrative. As the film goes on, the insistent drive of the music becomes overpowering, its cycling of motifs accelerating even as the tempo of the editing speeds up, blending together the film's three distinct stories into one, orchestrated by the man floating through space towards a final confrontation with mortality. It's at this point that Jackman's character definitively rewrites these stories, finally providing them with the endings that Izzi's book had lacked: all three endings constituting an acceptance of death as the endpoint towards which all our stories inexorably move.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

There is a simple idea at the center of the Michel Gondry/Charlie Kaufman masterpiece Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: memory is the foundation for all of our relationships, with our world and with each other, an idea so obvious that it should hardly need elaboration. And yet this obviousness is exactly what this film is about. We take for granted the power of our own memories, rarely cherishing them, rarely delving as often as we should into the good ones, lingering instead in the sad memories that we allow to drown out those few magical memories that should shine out of the past like brilliant gems. Screenwriter Kaufman's has devised a perfect way of exploring the power of memory, through a mysterious company that allows people to selectively erase their memories, eliminating traumatic incidents or, especially, the memories of old relationships that have gone sour. This is what happens to Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), who discovers that his girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has, after a particularly angry break-up, erased the memory of him from her mind completely. Seeking to make up with her, he goes to see her at work and finds that she doesn't even seem to recognize him, that she treats him like just another customer.

Shattered and hurt, Joel soon tracks this puzzling situation back to Lacuna, Inc., a small company that specializes in this mind-wipe procedure under the supervision of Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson). Joel decides to undergo the procedure as well, completely erasing the memory of Clementine and their tormented relationship from his own mind just as she had with him. Perhaps the most ingenious aspect of the film is its convoluted structure, which shuffles this chronology around freely in order to amplify its emotional and thematic resonances. The film opens with the meeting of Clementine and Joel, on a beach at Montauk: they both seem out of sorts, aimless, wandering along the beach, drawn to each other as if by some mysterious force of magnetism. As it turns out, this opening — lasting twenty minutes before the credits roll — is not the couple's first meeting, but only their first meeting after having their memories erased. It is, actually, a variation of their true first meeting, which also took place on this beach, but at a party where neither of them fit in and were drawn to each other from their individual states of isolation.

The remainder of the film is largely an extended journey through Joel's mind as he goes through the memory-erasing procedure. The structure is, as a result, loose and free-associative, mimicking the twisty trains of thought that characterize memory: one memory leads to another leads to another, with subtle emotional linkages between incidents. This is what Dr. Mierzwiak's procedure seeks to erase, using a kind of emotional "map" derived from objects provided by the patient, objects that mark various memories of the person being erased. The film follows the map of Clementine and Joel's relationship, beginning mostly with unpleasant memories from the end of their relationship, perhaps because these thoughts are freshest in Joel's mind and also because emotional wounds tend to leave a deeper impression than sweeter memories. The trip through Joel's mind doesn't strictly follow a backwards chronological path, but its general trajectory is to move backward in time, starting with the fights and boredom and awkward moments and slowly beginning to weave in happier memories, romantic nights together, heartfelt sexual experiences, the little quirks and humor that made Joel fall in love with Clementine in the first place. The effect is that, although Clementine is in the process of being erased, Joel experiences it like falling in love with her all over again. By tracing the progress of their relationship in reverse, he can see why they drew apart, can see his own role in pushing her away, can see the seeds of their later troubles in earlier times. And he can also see everything that he loved about her, things he'd maybe forgotten consciously or at least started to take for granted, things that had moved him so deeply about her.


This is an extraordinarily clever and emotionally satisfying way to explore the intricacies of love and relationships. As Joel's memory is erased, he begins fighting back, resisting the process, desperately trying to hold onto the memories he treasures about Clementine. Before the process is over, he already regrets what he has done, and he begins — along with his mental doppelganger of Clementine — struggling fiercely against the procedure, trying to hide away his image of Clementine in childhood memories or deeply repressed corners of his mind, running with her through a landscape that crumbles around them, people and places disappearing or fading to white as the memories are extinguished. The film is a wonderful blend of Gondry and Kaufman's genius, with Gondry a seemingly perfect choice to visualize Kaufman's concepts.

There's a playful, visually creative sensibility that leavens the bittersweet tone of the material, having fun with the imagery from within Joel's unraveling mind. Faces are distorted and blanked out, warped into clay-like distorted lumps atop people's bodies. At one point, trying to turn a man around and discover the identity of Clementine's new boyfriend, Joel finds he's continually confronted only with the back of the man's head. In one of the best sequences, Joel tries to hide Clementine in a childhood memory of being in his mother's kitchen, and Joel appears as a shrunken figure hiding underneath the table, a child-sized adult dwarfed beneath Clementine, who stands in for one of his mother's friends, in a sexy 60s dress that bares her long legs, which look like great tree trunks from Joel's childish perspective. Gondry's tireless visual inventiveness provides the perfect toolbox for a film centered around the narrative gimmick of traveling through a man's mind. Another director would view a script like this as an opportunity for show-offy visual trickery, but Gondry's imagery, as wild and fanciful as it is, is never less than integral to the film's emotional undercurrents. This trip through the mind of a man in love is so evocative and moving because its visual conceits make concrete the feelings and ideas at the story's core.

Joel's reverse travel through his relationship with Clementine is especially heart-rending and moving because it is constantly set against the film's opening, which is a second take on the same romance. The film's emotions are complex and multi-layered; the opening is romantic and beautiful, but as Joel's memories reveal, this relationship has happened before, progressing from that sweet, charming starting point towards bitterness and fighting. Clementine and Joel's mutual memory loss gives them the chance to start over, to try again, but it also provides them the opportunity to make the same mistakes over again without even realizing it, to relive the past as though for the first time.

This idea is made apparent through the complicated subplots woven into Joel and Clementine's story, involving the various employees of the memory-wiping company as they perform their procedure on Joel. Although the film is undoubtedly focused on Joel and Clementine, there are surprisingly rich supporting performances from the technicians Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood), along with Stan's girlfriend Mary (Kirsten Dunst), the Lacuna secretary who doesn't realize that her girlish crush on Dr. Mierzwiak is the fresh beginning of a cycle she's already lived through at least once before, in a time now erased from her memory. Ultimately, this film is about the importance of memory and continuity, the importance of maintaining a connection to the past — of not forgetting what makes the people we love special to us, of not losing track of the mistakes we've made before so we might not make them anew.

The Thing From Another World

The Thing From Another World is one of the great classics of sci-fi horror, a taut minimalist study of a group of military men and scientists under pressure, hemmed in by an extraterrestrial monstrosity that crash-landed at a remote research station near the north pole. The film was produced by Howard Hawks, and though ostensibly the first directorial feature of editor Christian Nyby, it's well-known that Hawks was on the set giving, at the very least, comprehensive advice, and most likely taking over the directing chair for himself. Certainly, though the science fiction premise is unlike anything else in Hawks' filmography, the film bears the director's aesthetic signature and deals with some of his typical concerns. Indeed, the alien monster appears only sporadically, in brief flashes, mostly obscured by darkness. The film's emphasis is not on its horror elements but on the dynamics within the tight-knit professional groups doing hard, dangerous work in the midst of this snowbound wasteland.

Among these men is Air Force Captain Patrick Hendry (Kenneth Tobey), who fulfills the role of the romantic hero even though, like Hawks' Air Force before it, this is a film where individual characters matter far less than the group as a whole. The research station is populated mostly with minor, little-known actors (Dewey Martin, James R. Young, Robert Nichols, etc.), including several recurring Hawks bit players, which only enhances the impression that the individual personalities of these men are not meant to stand out. They exist only as a part of the group and, symbolically, as members of the human race. Hendry and his crew of military men are summoned to a research station near the north pole after a mysterious aircraft crashes with a tremendous impact some fifty miles away from the station. The crash immediately begins triggering strange phenomena: communications are disrupted and measuring instruments go haywire, while Geiger counters pick up traces of radiation from the vicinity of the crash. Hendry's men are summoned by the brilliant scientist Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) to help investigate the crash site and determine what happened. Of course, the crashed aircraft is no ordinary plane but a flying saucer, and though the military accidentally destroy it while trying to free it from the ice that hardened around it, they do recover the frozen body of one of the craft's inhabitants, a massive alien trapped in a block of ice.

Of course, soon enough the alien escapes and begins stalking around the base, largely unseen, feeding on the blood of the base's human and canine inhabitants. But the film's focus is not so much on the horror of the alien's violence but on the effect his mere existence has on the people at the base. Carrington sees the creature as a specimen, an unprecedented opportunity for scientific discovery and new knowledge. Hendry sees the alien as a threat to be contained and possibly eliminated. And the eager reporter Scotty (Douglas Spencer) sees only a phenomenal story, one that unfortunately he isn't able to tell thanks to military stalling and spotty communications. The alien itself is rarely shown, even after it emerges from its icy prison. The first time it attacks one of the base's soldiers, it's just a hint of a shadow falling across the man, who turns and fires his gun at the offscreen monster. Later, the alien, played through bizarre makeup by James Arness, is only seen from a distance or bathed in shadows, its hulking menace enhanced by this indirectness.


Hawks and Nyby spend much more time with the gathered inhabitants of the base, who huddle together in tight circular compositions, clustered around tables where papers and scientific demonstrations and endless cups of coffee hold their interest as they discuss what to do about the alien. These tight, cluttered compositions are purely Hawksian and perhaps the most obvious indication of Hawks' influence on the film. Despite the looming threat, the dialogue is crisp and light, with the actors delivering their lines at Hawks' characteristic brisk pace. The camaraderie between the men, especially the military men, is established through their continual exchanges of jokes and banter, particularly at the expense of Hendry, who the men rib for his interest in the scientists' assistant Nikki (Margaret Sullivan). Nikki is a typically Hawksian woman, strong and assertive and capable of verbally sparring with Hendry and even pulling jokes on him just like one of the boys. She even gets the drop on him, tying his hands behind his back for some playful S&M foreplay, feeding him drinks and then giving him a kiss once he's passive and restrained.

In the film's second half, Hawks and Nyby slowly build the tension, compressing the station's staff into tighter and tighter spaces, keeping the monster mostly out of sight but allowing his unseen presence to spread terror throughout the compound. There's also the queasy fascination of such unforgettable images as the severed hand that slowly comes back to life and begins flexing its fingers, or the bed of alien plant buds, fed on human plasma, that throb as though breathing and cry like hungry babies. The special effects are crude and simple, but these roughly crafted images contribute to the film's minimalist intensity. Considering that this was Hawks' sole contribution to the sci-fi or horror genres, he proves startlingly adept at it. An assault on the creature with kerosene and a flare launcher in a small, dark room is awash with frenzied terror (as well as being a very early experiment in setting stuntmen on fire), with the flaming alien careening around the confined space, flailing its arms around and unleashing an inhuman howl.

Towards the beginning of the film, there are several stark exterior sequences in windy, barren white landscapes with snow blowing past in flurries. As the film progresses it becomes increasingly claustrophobic and enclosed, culminating in the final sequence where the group backs into a corner within the isolated, cut-off station, waiting for the alien to come for them, their cold breath letting out trails of steam in the chilly air. The Thing From Another World is a fascinating, quietly intense masterpiece, with Hawks bringing his unique perspective to the sci-fi horror genre and truly making it his own.

Watchmen

It is nearly impossible to separate Zack Snyder's Watchmen from its source material, the landmark 80s comic miniseries written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons. In Snyder's film, Moore's words find a new home, as do Gibbons' images, the framings reproduced with impeccable accuracy. Incidents are shuffled around and altered, dialogue is sometimes changed, and everything is necessarily condensed from the density and complexity of Moore's original work. But as adaptations go, this is, like Snyder's 300 before it, an extraordinarily faithful translation of a work from one medium to another. Snyder's faithfulness makes him reliant on his source material in a way few great directors are. Frank Miller's 300 is a truly nasty, fascistic piece of work, a comic that manages to be both homophobic and homoerotic at once; Snyder's adaptation followed suit, if anything amplifying the repellent qualities of Miller's worst writing. Moore's Watchmen, on the other hand, is an iconic and enduring work, a moving, sophisticated Cold War fable about the destructiveness of humanity and the hypocrisies and contradictions at the heart of the superhero archetype. To the extent that Snyder's film translates even a fraction of Moore's brilliance to the screen, the film is successful.

More than that, Snyder's Watchmen is frequently breathtaking. What comes through more than anything is how strong Alan Moore is as a writer: long passages are taken verbatim from the comic, and surprisingly they actually work on screen, coming out of the mouths of actors. Moore's prose is often verbose and heavily stylized, particularly the voiceover monologues taken from the journal entries of the psychopathic vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), but the writing maintains its dark wit and verve when translated off the page. The story takes place in an imagined alternate universe in which America won the Vietnam war thanks to the intervention of the god-like Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the world's one true super-powered being, a man made unfathomably powerful by a scientific accident. Dr. Manhattan's mere existence changed the status quo in many ways: Richard Nixon, riding high on post-Vietnam public acclaim, is still in office in 1985, when the story opens; Manhattan's near-omniscient intellect fostered great leaps forward in science and technology; a legislative act sent all the other non-powered superheroes, now irrelevant, into early retirement. Both the book and the film open with the murder of former costumed hero the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), more recently a government operative. Snyder chooses to build up to the comic's famed opening page, its slow pullback from a blood-splattered smiley-face button lying in the gutter, all the way up to the high window from which the Comedian plunged to his death. Snyder draws out the fight that preceded this image, tracing its fast, brutal details. He then cuts from the smiley face to the opening credits, a montage of photographs and press clippings that cleverly establishes the contours of Watchmen's imaginary world, including a hilarious variation on the famous image of a returning World War II soldier jubilantly kissing a nurse.

It's undeniable that Snyder's Watchmen is an immersive experience, a distillation of the comic into moving images, each frame packed with details and subtle in-jokes that will be especially resonant for those who know the Moore comic backwards and forwards — like the shot of Mothman getting dragged away to an asylum during the opening credits, an image that could only be puzzling to those not versed in the comic. The film is a love letter to the book it is adapted from, which is both its greatest asset and its greatest failing. Because when the film soars, as it often does, it does so on Moore's wings, and when it falters, as often as not, it does so at those points where it has attempted to leave him behind. Snyder gets a lot right: his way of visually expressing the fluidity of past, present and future that marks Dr. Manhattan's experience of the universe; the awkward middle-aged despair of Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), formerly the superhero known as Nite Owl but now only a lonely failure; the hateful rhetoric of Rorschach, a heroic crimefighter who's also a right-wing crackpot. Snyder's heavily CGI-processed images are crisp and beautiful, and yet also dark, evoking a futuristic world that is nevertheless grimy and decaying. The framings of the images are often reproduced from the comic panels, but the film's visual palette draws only perfunctorily from the art of Dave Gibbons or colorist John Higgins. Even so, the final effect is not so far from the comic's distopian worldview.


As is often the case in a work like this, where Snyder for the most part slavishly follows his source material, the points at which he diverts from the Moore/Gibbons comic are especially telling. Of course, no adaptation of a book as dense and complex as Watchmen could carry over everything to the screen, and some of Snyder's changes are obvious: he jettisons the pirate comic that served as a metatextual parallel to the main story, along with the text interludes that purport to provide excerpts from primary documents of the Watchmen universe. In many ways, Moore's comic is impossible to adapt completely to the screen, since so many of the effects he achieved could only be done in comics, depending as they do on the juxtaposition of word balloons and the layout of panels in relation to one another.

Some of Snyder's changes are thus unavoidable, and a lot of smaller plot elements are gone or significantly condensed in order to make the film come in just under three hours, already a lengthy blockbuster. Some of these changes are damaging, though: the sex scene between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) is considerably drawn out from the comic, and laughably accompanied by Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." Snyder seems to have made the scene so explicit only to include some T-and-A, though the sequence's capping joke — the couple accidentally setting off the flamethrower on the front of the Nite Owl's airship at the climactic moment, a gag Moore hinted at but didn't quite deliver — nearly redeems the silliness that precedes it. Even worse, though, is that Snyder then substantially cuts the couple's post-coital conversation, which was actually the whole point of the scene in the comic: the sense of power and sexual awakening that these two former superheroes rediscover when they once more don their costumes, the transformation from ordinary nobodies with screwed-up lives into something more. Snyder seems not to have gotten the emotional and psychological undercurrents in the developing relationship between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, seeing only the opportunity to show Akerman's naked body for an extended period of time.

More ire from Watchmen fans will likely be directed at the film's ending, which is considerably altered from the comic. In some ways, though, the film's version of the mad scheme of Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) is actually preferable to Moore's ending, at least as it plays out on screen: it's hard to imagine the faked alien invasion scenario of the comic being anything but silly in a film version. The problem with the film's ending is thus not necessarily in the changes it makes from the comic, but in its pacing, which is noticeably off. The comic's climactic showdown at Veidt's Antarctic stronghold is actually an anticlimax, the book's supposed heroes arriving too late to stop the ambiguous "villain" from... well, saving the world, actually, albeit through truly horrifying means. The comic's ending is a slow, elegiac cool-down, as the heroes come to the realization that they must accept the horrors they have witnessed for the good of the world: to preserve peace, they must maintain a terrible secret. This resolution is sad and low-key and quiet, and Snyder is of course adept at none of these moods. He shatters the lonely snowbound death of Rorschach with the piercing scream of the Nite Owl (a cartoonish "nooooo!" that is, believe it or not, not in the comic), and insists on inserting one more brutal beating afterwards.

Whenever Snyder runs roughshod over the subtlety and grace of moments like this, one wonders how he even got so much right in this film. And yet it's undeniable that he does. For every place where his inclinations towards slo-mo violence and grotesquerie run away with him, there's something like the beautifully executed Mars sequence, with Dr. Manhattan ruminating on his life and his understanding of the universe while creating alien designs on the red planet's surface. He has a fine cast — with the exception of the consistently flat Akerman, who is often distractingly awful — and a shiny, richly textured visual aesthetic, and he's building from one of the great works of superhero comics. And yet Watchmen could have easily been an embarrassing failure, yet another brilliant Alan Moore-scripted comic adapted into a watered-down movie. It might sound like faint praise to credit Snyder with finally making a Moore adaptation that doesn't outright suck. In fact, the film is often compelling and smart, even if just as often it seems to miss the point. Snyder has made a fascinating but flawed film that hints at the richness of its source material, suggesting though never quite realizing the depth of the heady concepts and potent ideas at its core.

Dr. Cyclops

In its opening minutes, Dr. Cyclops promises something incredibly rare in the annals of trashy B movies: a lurid, creepy tale of sci-fi horror shot in gorgeous, eye-popping Technicolor, its sickly green hues and expressionist lighting schemes enhancing the schlocky horror of the premise. The film opens in a dark laboratory where strobing lights send ever-changing shadows flitting across the walls, while the mad scientist Dr. Thorkel (Albert Dekker) bends down over strange glowing tubes. The whole thing is bathed in green light, and the atmosphere is eerie and unsettling even before Thorkel's confrontation with his morally outraged colleague Dr. Mendoza (slumming character actor Paul Fix), who demands that Thorkel halt his mysterious experiments with radiation. Mendoza quickly meets a gruesome and horrifying end, with Thorkel using radioactive materials to mutate the other doctor's face into a skeletal death mask. It's a creepy, beautifully handled special effect, and this opening scene is just about the best horror movie introduction possible. Already it's apparent that the acting is stiff and the script ridiculous, but this scene seems to promise at least a film that takes full advantage of its Technicolor format and the possibilities of bringing color to an ordinarily low-budget shocker.

I think you know where this is going by now, though. The opening scene of Dr. Cyclops unfortunately seems to be where all of the ingenuity and imagination of the cinematographer and lighting crew were focused. The rest of the film provides plenty of for-the-time dazzling special effects and trick shots, but nothing with the aesthetic jolt of that unforgettable opening, nothing that provides the same frisson of sloppy, almost accidental beauty that characterizes the best B pictures. The remainder of the tale takes place in bright sunlight in a backlot jungle, eventually becoming a "shrinking" adventure story of the kind that would become so popular in 50s sci-fi cinema. The first scene turns out to be merely a prologue, with the bulk of the action taking place two years later, when Thorkel suddenly summons together a group of three scientists to assist with his research at an isolated South American lab: the proud Dr. Rupert Bullfinch (Charles Halton), pretty young Dr. Mary Robinson (Janice Logan), and the lazy mineralogist Bill Stockton (Thomas Coley). Before arriving at the mad doctor's lab, the trio meets up with the mule driver Steve Baker (Victor Killian) and Thorkel's Spanish assistant Pedro (Frank Yaconelli).

Upon arrival, the group is insulted to find that Thorkel wants them not so much for their scientific expertise, but only because his failing eyesight has prevented him from doing much of his routine lab work himself. He has them peer into microscopes for him, confirming some test results without explaining what he's doing, and then tries to send them off. Of course, the curious scientists stay on, and as such fall victim to Thorkel's crazed experiments: using radioactive materials, he is shrinking living beings, getting off on the God-like control he exercises over nature. He shrinks the whole group of scientists, including Pedro and Baker, and then tries to experiment on these new subjects. But despite the horrific opening, the premise plays out more like a light, even farcical adventure, never generating any genuine horror or thrills out of its shrunken heroes and towering villain.


The film has an odd, cheery tone that's reinforced in its incongruously bouncy score, and in the silly ethnic humor provided by Pedro's caricatured character. Once the group is shrunk down, they look ridiculous dressed in toga-type garments that Thorkel apparently made for them out of handkerchiefs; Pedro, on the other hand, seems to be wearing a diaper beneath his paunchy belly, accentuating his status as comic relief. Even more absurd is the sequence where, when the group gets some time away from Thorkel to plot and think, the men get to work customizing weapons and tools from whatever they can find, while Mary begins sewing and is apparently able to make whole new, more colorful outfits for the group while Thorkel is sleeping. This film is nothing if not intent on confirming stereotypes, often in the most ludicrous ways.

Thorkel himself hardly proves to be a particularly intimidating villain, either. His jovial manner with his victims is faintly absurd and funny, but he certainly never again seems like the creepy force of evil that he was in his first appearance. The film's appeal lies largely in its Oscar-nominated special effects, which were surely revolutionary for the time, combining rear projection and various double printing techniques with judicious use of miniatures and over-sized sets. These effects often convincingly portray the miniaturization of the doctor's victims, though the rear projection shots simulating attacks by chickens, alligators and cats are laughable today. Even the best effect shots — like the one where the mad doctor grabs the squirming Bullfinch in his giant fist — can't distract from the essential dullness of the film, its meandering plot basically just providing an excuse to get from one flashy effects sequence to the next.

Director Ernest B. Schoedsack, most famous as one of the masterminds behind King Kong, can't manage to bring any depth to this inherently thin material, despite some clumsy attempts to reference the tale of Odysseus and the Cyclops. Too much of the film is spent following around a group of miniaturized over-actors through one trick shot after another, all at a plodding, deadened pace. This would be par for the course for a lousy B-movie if it weren't for that opening scene, which for a few brief minutes promised something much greater.

Crimes of the Future

Crimes of the Future is, like its predecessor Stereo, an early example of director David Cronenberg's eccentric vision. Made as student films on extremely small budgets, both films betray their economical origins at every point. Unlike Stereo, Crimes is in color rather than black and white, but it shares the earlier film's minimalist aesthetic. Shot silent, the soundtrack consists entirely of a measured, stilted voiceover which appears only at intervals to tell the film's story, interspersed with noisy, crackling industrial soundscapes. The film is abstracted, its narrative willfully obtuse and elliptical. It is set in an unsettling future world in which a mysterious and incurable plague has wiped out most of the adult women, and now seems to be spreading to the men as well. The plague is, as bodily transformations and deformations so often are for Cronenberg, both disturbing and fascinating for its victims: the patients emit strange white (semen-like) foam from their orifices and bleed thick black fluid from their eyes and mouths. These discharges are, for some strange reason, almost irresistibly attractive; anyone who comes across these fluids is seized with an urge to touch them, to smear them across their hands, and to taste them, sensually licking the disease's syrupy discharges from their fingers.

It's apparent that Cronenberg's signature obsessions are almost completely intact even in this early student effort: his conflation of the gross and the sublime; his treatment of abnormal sexuality as both frightening and hypnotically erotic; his fascination with the creation of new worlds, new ways of living, through biological transformations. The world of this film is truly an alien world, a fact that Cronenberg communicates through the strange, slow-moving quality of the narrative, as well as the surreal, nonsensical actions that his characters perform, often with a ritualistic air that only increases further the feeling of something being, somehow, off. The story ostensibly centers around a certain Adrian Tripod (the gaunt, ghostly pale Ronald Mlodzik), a researcher of some kind who wanders from one obscure job to another: the head of a strange dermatological facility called the House of Skin; an observer at an STD clinic where a man has been infected with a disease that causes him to sprout countless bizarre, functionally useless new internal organs, a phenomenon his doctors have deemed a "creative cancer;" a courier whose sole function seems to be ferrying clear plastic bags of socks and underwear back and forth between silent men who solemnly arrange the garments into piles based on obscure criteria.

Tripod, who delivers the film's oddly hesitant voiceover, is less a proper character than a focal point for the weirdness of Cronenberg's images. There's no explanation for the narrator's sudden switches of jobs, nor his decision to fall in with a group of "subversive" pedophiles in the film's final act. It's telling that over the course of the film, his narration changes from the first person to the third person; by the end, he's referring to himself by his full name every time he speaks. Despite his severe appearance, with his pale eggplant-shaped head hovering above his all-black outfits, Tripod's interactions with the many people he meets tend to be sensual, bizarrely erotic. While serving as some kind of foot therapist, Tripod treats a young man who leers at the researcher while Tripod strips off the man's boot and sock and begins caressing and massaging his foot, finally pressing it against his forehead and beginning to vibrate as though electrified. Cronenberg shoots this scene like a homosexual seduction, with the young man reclining back, a knowing smile on his lips, his legs slightly spread, with Tripod kneeling between the other man's outstretched feet.


There's something unsettling about the way Cronenberg deploys gay and feminine iconography here, as markers of strangeness: the recurring image of brightly painted toe- and fingernails, the sensuous embraces between men in a world mostly devoid of women, the way Tripod kisses the cheeks of a dead patient in order to drink up the dried blood that poured out of the corpse's mouth. The film's vision of sexuality is immensely disturbing, and never more so than in the final scenes, when Tripod and his new pedophile allies kidnap a prepubescent girl. Tripod's voiceover calmly discusses the necessity of trying to "impregnate" this girl, who's treated as a test subject, and the scene where Tripod begins stripping while the girl watches, coloring pictures on the floor, is unbelievably creepy and queasy. Cronenberg is walking a tight rope here, verging on exploitation, especially when he cuts to reverse shot closeups of the girl in frankly seductive poses, her fingers twirling through her hair. There's just something icky about the whole thing, something more disturbed than disturbing. One watches a scene like this and is unsettled more by the implications for what went on during filming than by what might happen in the fictional scenario. The scene inevitably triggers unpleasant thoughts of Cronenberg directing this girl to pose in these ways, arranging her gestures and posture to suggest things she couldn't possibly understand herself; it's exploitative and more than a little uncomfortable to watch, in ways entirely different from the discomfort so often generated by Cronenberg's later work.

Even if one ignores, for the moment, the ethical implications of these scenes, Crimes of the Future can't really be called a successful film. It's sporadically interesting for its glimpse into Cronenberg's developing themes and ideas, but it's also often dull and soporific. The film is characterized by long, meandering, near-silent scenes that are often never explained, never developed into a part of a coherent story. There's a dream logic to the film's narrative structure, which switches without warning from one mostly self-contained vignette to the next, and this can be effective at times, producing the odd, hallucinatory quality of the film's most striking images and moments. More often, though, there are long stretches of utter boredom, like the seemingly endless scenes of sock-folding and sorting. The film is undeniably intriguing, and is clearly the foundation for Cronenberg's later work, a laboratory in which he could experiment and develop his unique cinematic obsessions. As a whole, though, it's a flawed and disturbing work best seen as a curiosity of the director's early career.

The Incredible Shrinking Man

There is perhaps no better way of tracing the fears and obsessions of a particular culture than by observing the kinds of fantasies they concoct in their storytelling arts. This is why, of course, the horror and science fiction movies of 1950s Hollywood so often centered around the terrifying effects of radiation, around the idea of science gone mad: after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the Cold War seeming to threaten even more widescale nuclear devastation, hadn't the whole world gone mad? In these films, science and radioactivity created warped, bizarre creatures, never before seen; unleashed murderous monsters on the streets; and blew up ordinary earthly creatures to terrifying proportions. The horror and monster movies of the 50s are thus often barely disguised allegories for the damage done to the world in the nuclear age, visions of a grim future in which nuclear atrocities will do even greater harm. Among these films, Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man provides perhaps the most striking and elegant vision of nuclear age horror, because it turns the effects of science directly onto man himself, rather than on the world around him. If monster movies like Them! imagined that radiation could create massive ants, towering over ordinary humans, this film instead shrinks down man, leaving the world untouched but humanity smaller, more inconsequential, an infinitesimal particle of dust in comparison to his own creations, a mere speck lost within the industrial, nuclear world he's created for himself. This is a poetic vision of the tragedy humanity has wrought for itself, a vision of a self-created world that leaves the individual an ever smaller, more unimportant role within it.

The roving cloud of radioactive mist that sparks the shrinking process of an ordinary man named Scott Carey (Grant Williams) is never explained except in the most vague, pseudo-scientific terms. It hardly matters: the cloud's very randomness and mysteriousness enhances the sense that Carey's predicament is universal, that it could happen to anyone, that he is only one among potential waves of victims of human "progress." The film's horror arises from Carey's increasing impotence, his loss of the usual signifiers of manly accomplishment. His initial shrinkage merely makes him comical in his business suits, like a child trying on his father's clothes, the sleeves too long and the material lying in baggy ruffles around his slightly smaller frame. As he shrinks further, he soon becomes distant from his wife Louise (Randy Stuart), his child's size body implying the impossibility of sexual contact, making their relationship strained and bizarre. There is a brief possibility of a different kind of "normal" life, with a midget woman (April Kent, not an actual midget but a woman shrunken down by optical printing, just as Williams is), but as Carey's shrinking accelerates that hope slips from his grasp as well. He's soon living in a dollhouse, completely divorced from the ordinary world, creating his own much smaller domain wherever he can. And following a harrowing cat attack, he is thrown into the basement, thought dead by his wife and brother (Paul Langton), forced to fall back on primitive hunt-and-gather means of survival in a harsh world made alien by his small size.

The film is thus a potent allegory for the reversal of progress, for the imagined point at which humanity's thirst for forward motion might backfire, unleashing consequences that would send us back to ground zero. Carey is continually forced to start his life anew, to adjust to his new circumstances with compensating actions, figuring out how to survive in each new state he progresses through as he shrinks. Carey loses his grip on the modern world, eventually becoming nearly a caveman, creating makeshift shelter, building tools and weapons in order to find sustenance, navigate his suddenly massive world, and fight off potential predators. The markers that formerly stabilized and drove his life — success in business and sexual love with his wife — become irrelevant, forgotten as early as the scene where Carey, preoccupied with the beginning stages of his shrinkage, shrugs off his wife's question about something that happened at work. It is not insignificant that the film is about a shrinking man rather than a shrinking woman. Carey is definitively a 1950s masculine archetype, the strong, career-driven man who provides for his family, and his shrinking is emasculating and embarrassing as much for the way it strips him of occupation and potency as for its inherent physical effects.


The film visualizes Carey's astonishing transformations with a combination of optical printing and oversized set construction, and despite some occasionally crude tricks (Williams' legs are noticeably transparent in at least one optically printed scene) the overall effect is convincing. When Carey, shrunken down to doll size, is attacked by his own pet cat, the actual mechanics of the attack are clumsy, but it is nevertheless a terrifying sequence, the urgency of the cutting and the soundtrack's emphasis on the cat's enraged shrieks overcoming the awkward use of rear projection. Later, the scenes where Carey struggles with a nasty, hairy spider in the basement are even scarier and better executed, perhaps because the filmmakers could resort to models as well as footage of a real spider in assembling this sequence. The film is raw and forceful in its aesthetics, never hiding its origins as a low-budget sci-fi/horror B-film, but director Jack Arnold takes full advantage of the story's straightforward progression. The film rarely deviates from Carey, particularly in the second half, once his isolation from his wife and the rest of the world becomes complete. At this point, everything is filmed from the tiny Carey's perspective, creating a world in which ordinary objects become towering and insurmountable, where the four walls of a basement encompass the entirety of the known world. The basement staircase, filmed from an extreme low angle, looks like it ascends into the stratosphere, so high does it go, and so large are the tremendous gaps between each step.

This claustrophobic commitment to Carey's outlook, to his worm's eye viewpoint on the suddenly massive confines of his own home, makes The Incredible Shrinking Man a startlingly effective piece of genre filmmaking. It is frightening, exciting, and also almost unbearably sad: Arnold never lets his audience forget that Carey's predicament is not only a physical one, not only a question of survival and facing threats like killer spiders, but an existential dilemma, the loss of a man's sense of his own place in the universe. The finale thus locates its climax, not in Carey's tense, violent confrontation with the spider, but in its aftermath, in the hero's existential voiceover as, finally shrunken small enough, he slips through the grating of the basement window and out into the massive frontier of his backyard. At this point, Arnold begins pulling back, revealing the hero as a speck amidst the overgrowth of the yard, as tiny and insignificant as a blade of grass. The image then fades into the cosmos, into a field of stars and galaxies, pulling back even further, pulling back until even individual stars appear small and dot-like. From a wide enough perspective, this finale suggests, everything is unimportant, everything has only the smallest of places within this vast universe. Carey's situation is not unique; it is shared with all of humanity, and with the world as a whole.

Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers is at once a thrilling, ultra-violent, energetically paced sci-fi action flick, and a viciously clever, uncompromising satire of exactly the kind of movie it purports to be, and of the militaristic, proto-fascist attitudes and assumptions underlying such films. It's the story of a war between an intelligent alien species of bugs and a human society of the future, when the world has been united under an international government in which citizenship is not assumed but granted only to those who earn it by serving in the military. The nature of this society is never thoroughly explored in the film, which instead focuses on the military itself, but director Paul Verhoeven makes it very easy to read between the lines and imagine the kind of society he's depicting here. It's a totalitarian world government with an iron grip on the media, which is used as a tool of indoctrination, encouraging military service and vilifying the enemy bugs to the extent that kids on earth senselessly stamp out harmless cockroaches as their mother enthusiastically cheers them on. The military leaders are the only figures of authority shown in the film, suggesting that the military and government are closely related if not interchangeable. And the leaders take no real responsibility for their actions; after a particularly grave military disaster, the "sky marshall" who had been in charge makes a show of calmly stepping aside, ushering in his replacement and then standing behind her on the podium as she delivers the newest commands. It's as much of a blatant mockery as the reasons for the war in the first place: the media continually blames the alien bugs on their distant planets for sending meteors towards Earth, but this never makes much sense even if the film neither explains nor explicitly questions it. The absurdities peddled by the media and the government are simply allowed to stand, their ridiculous contradictions and blatant non-sequiturs obvious to anyone who looks.

The government's enthusiastic propaganda for military service — and the extra rights and privileges granted to those who serve and thereby become "citizens" — makes many youths willing slaves ready to feed themselves into what one army recruiter half-jokingly calls "the meat grinder." He immediately retracts his jest, though, proudly announcing that the army made him into the man he is today: a man missing both legs and one arm, as it turns out. Still, kids join up for a variety of reasons, many of them familiar from our own armies (poverty, lack of options, the desire for a college scholarship), and some predicated on this future government's increasing stranglehold on the lives of its people (one young woman says she enlisted because it's easier for citizens to get permission to have children).

Among these new recruits, a quartet of friends are sent to vastly different fates within the military apparatus: brainy psychic Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) becomes a military intelligence officer; brash, talented, ambitious Carmen (Denise Richards) is sent to pilot training; and the slow-witted but earnest Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien), who enlisted only for his love of Carmen, is sent to be a lowly grunt in the mobile infantry, where he's joined by Dizzy (Dina Meyer), who just wants to be close to Johnny. The film follows these friends through the initial stages of the war against the bugs. Verhoeven deliberately populates the film with mannequin-pretty young actors who go, glassy-eyed and uncomprehending, into the maw of an industrial machine that churns them out like bloody meat. None of them know why they're fighting these bugs, beyond the fact that they're blamed for meteor showers, but they nevertheless charge into action without hesitation.


And there's certainly plenty of action. The film is swarming with fierce, terrifying bug creatures. There's surely a lot of CGI at work here, but these aliens feel real and physically tangible when it counts; the close encounters with the bugs have a messy, sticky, gory emphasis on viscera and bug-goo that is reminiscent of the best of David Cronenberg's body-horror special effects. Verhoeven focuses equally on the casualties of humans and aliens alike; neither is spared horrible, bloody deaths in which limbs are shredded apart and hacked off, and blood sprayed everywhere. The human carnage is often harrowing (though in its aftermath, the dead strewn around frequently look more like discarded crash test dummies than real corpses), but the deaths of the aliens are often felt less intensely, since the obvious impulse is to root for the humans.

Still, Verhoeven keeps subtly reminding his audience that the aliens are not simply expendable cannon fodder: a bombing raid on their planet emphasizes the way huge swaths of the creatures, who are seemingly doing nothing aggressive for once, are simply obliterated by the waves of fire. It's the bug equivalent of a civilian massacre, and Verhoeven's composition deliberately recalls popular representations of the Pearl Harbor attack and of American napalm bombing raids in Vietnam. The bugs also cease being quite so intimidating in the film's increasingly lurid final sequence, in which the troops are tracking what's known as the "brain bug," the central intelligence driving the creatures. This turns out to be a massive, nearly immobile lump with a nakedly vaginal face, a row of curiously soulful black eyes surrounding its labial, muscus-squirting mouth. Once the troops capture this creature, Carl reads its thoughts, triumphantly declaring that "it's scared" to the cheers of the soldiers, who rejoice at the revelation that their enemy can feel emotions, and that they've frightened it. Finally, the scientists who study this captured bug complete the vaginal metaphor by inserting metallic probes into the creature's mouth, accompanied in the media propaganda by censorial black bars, a subtle joke that links top-secret military intelligence and low-grade smut. The victors complete their victory by literally fucking the enemy, a final act that definitively establishes Verhoeven's sympathy for the bugs rather than humans. At the same time, the human specificity of the film's actual protagonists is de-emphasized, not only by the wooden acting but by the way that human life is so casually expended in pointless battles. At one point, the military commanders knowingly send a small group of soldiers onto a planet where they're pretty sure the troops will be slaughtered — "that mission had a very low probability of survival" is the euphemistic explanation — just to prove a theory. The film is all about the low value of life in militaristic and totalitarian society, and the high costs of pointless wars fought by a docile, brainwashed populace.