The theme for this week’s double feature turned out to be “monsters that suck.”
If there’s one thing I’m learning from watching so many of these British horror films from the fifties and sixties, it’s that they all seem to gradually escalate in terms of luridness—that was one of the things that distinguished Hammer’s output (such as previous subject X the Unknown), and other studios seemed to take on the challenge of pushing the shock value further. 1966 is pretty late in the game for this type of movie, but Planet Films still lived up to the lineage of UK creature features with Island of Terror, which was directed by genre pioneer Terence Fisher, who had also directed Hammer’s classic Gothic re-imaginings of Frankenstein and Dracula, as well as a few Sci-Fi flicks for good measure (the credits also inform us that the “Costume Artiste” is named Bunty.) Being a British horror movie made in this time period, it also features Peter Cushing in a starring role as a scientist (I’d imagine Fisher was probably among his most frequent collaborators)—or, I guess in this case, a medical doctor. Close enough! You might have a pretty good idea of how the story of this movie goes, but the imagery and tone of it will still find ways to throw you for a loop.
The action takes place on an island off the coast of Ireland, which I imagine was a budget-minded way to have some “exotic” flavour for the English audiences—how unusual, the ways of these rural Irish! As always, a group of scientists have secluded themselves in a big mansion on this island, working on a project that inevitably goes awry, which is shown in a pretty novel pre-credits sequence where it very quickly flashes from them activating a machine to them on the floor dead to the opening credits played over a solid rusty red background. Soon enough, the local constable finds the body of a local farmer in a condition so disturbing that he immediately rushes to the local doctor to try to piece out what he saw—which is to say, a body that had no bones. The constable describing the farmer’s face as looking “like a horrible mush, with the eyes sitting in it” is surprisingly grotesque, so much so that I thought the actual thing could never possibly live up to it (we’ll get back to that.) The doctor (Eddie Byrne, featured in Fisher’s version of The Mummy and one of the various veteran British actors to appear in Star Wars) can’t make heads or tails of this, so he goes to London to get the help of pathologist Dr. Brian Stanley (Cushing) and bone disease specialist Dr. David West (Edward Judd, an uncredited bit player in X the Unknown and the star of Sci-Fi disaster classic The Day the Earth Caught Fire), who come back to the island. Also there to be cute and provide some romance is West’s lady love Toni (Carole Grey, who also appears in Curse of The Fly), who bargains her way onto the team by offering the use of her father’s helicopter—the dress-up scene that introduces her doesn’t go as far as the titillating moments of the following year’s It!/Curse of the Golem, but they are clearly there for the same gratuitous reason.
The two doctors gradually piece together the situation: the scientists from the pre-credits scenes were attempting to create an organism that could eat away cancerous cells, but instead created giant black amoeba-beasts with impenetrable exoskeletons and long proboscis-tentacles that they use to inject people with bone-melting enzymes so they can suck up the calcium. Whoops! The monsters, called Silicates by the docs because of their silicon-based composition, have already gotten their fill of bones in the big mansion, and are moving out into the wilderness and towards the town, de-boning every man or cow they come across and leaving floppy flesh sacks in their wake (look, you come up with a better description.) The entry for the movie on the SF Encyclopedia asks the obvious question of how things that sludge around as glacially as the Silicates could ever overtake their prey, but these things have a real tendency to drop on people from above—we never see them climb up anything, so you have to use your imagination.
The design of the Silicates are such that even if you don’t find them and their constantly probing feeler particularly believable, they are at least bizarre, truly unique and alien creations (maybe not surprisingly, this movie evidently had the uncredited involvement of Fiend Without a Face Executive Producer Richard Gordon.) Fisher often chooses to shoot them in long shots, with several of them laying about in open spaces with their proboscises in their air like they just don’t care, and this often gives them a sense of encroaching menace that they might not otherwise have with their limited movement—no matter how many Silicate puppets they actually have around, it gives off the vibe a true infestation. Likewise, the aftermath of a Silicate attack is shown using what are probably the simplest Halloween decoration effects, but the concept and shots of the empty husks remain effectively ghoulish (enjoy the many moments of people poking the bodies with sticks.) This is a film that makes good use of its base concepts, creating memorable horror in individual moments rather than in the broad strokes.
We quickly learn that these things reproduce through binary fission, an effect portrayed inventively (and disgustingly) by employing a bucketful of chicken noodle soup—our leads calculate that the Silicates split every six hours, and will soon overrun the entire island, classic monster movie stakes. They end up having to corral the local population of traditional small town Irish folk into the community centre while the men (all men, because Toni is playing camp counsellor for the shut-in townies) try to figure out how to off the slugs before the slugs off them. Eventually, the doctors realize that the Silicates are killed by radiation—as are most of us!—and enact a plan which involves injecting all the island’s cattle with Strontium-90 and letting the Silicates get those contaminated bones. Misuse of nuclear material and animal abuse rolled into one! And who wouldn’t want to have to clean up an island full of dead, irradiated blobs? Apparently 1966 was the year people in the UK stopped being terrified of radiation, and embraced it as a solution to their monster problems rather than the cause (at least Cushing and Judd wear what I assume to be plausibly accurate translucent hazmat suits when handling the isotopes—although they did remind me of the full-body condom joke from The Naked Gun.) Our two heroes even defend the experiment that created the Silicates, because science and progress and all that—that would posit this as being different from the paranoid SF of the fifties, although to be honest, as noble as a search for a cancer cure is, surely there could have been some changes made to the process that make it less likely to lead to bones dissolving.
Stanley and West, the only two characters who matter (given that even some of the local authority figures are killed off surprisingly early), have to get the material from the mansion, which ends in the genuinely unexpected moment where the former must be saved from a Silicate attack by having his hand cut off with an axe. It really does come out of nowhere, is fairly bloody, and it ratchets up the suspense by showing that not even our marquee names are safe. Cushing spends the rest of the movie in shock, although he still has opportunities to let loose with his famous pithy remarks, so he at least retains his presence. It’s worth noting that while there’s definitely some wit in the dialogue, and Cushing is playing the sort of semi-arrogant intellectual that he would nail in Horror Express, the rapport he has with Judd as the younger playboy doctor just doesn’t have the magic of Cushing paired with Christoper Lee. That’s a tough act to follow, I know, but still.
What’s impressive about the climax of this movie is how tense it gets to be—our heroes enact their plan while the people inside the building slowly begin to panic, but the effects of the isotopes on the Silicates is not immediate and gives them enough time to break in and start going after the supporting cast in scenes of grand bedlam. The cast is pushed further and further into the building, their desperation and fear growing more and more as the monsters slowly advance (slowly is the only way they do anything), and only at the last minute do the things begin to die off. For a movie about bone-drinking blobs, these scenes are played with such grim intensity that there are moments where you really don’t know what’s going to happen. The base under siege scenario is yet another classic monster movie trope, but the cramped setting and the common folk it involves do contribute to the bleak atmosphere.
Once that’s all said and done, do we get a triumphant ending? Hell no, we don’t. The doctors wearily talk about how lucky they were that the Silicates were trapped on an island, and how disastrous it would have been if they had been created in a city. Cut to a lab in Japan, where a parallel experiment is taking place, something we knew about from the scientists’ conversation in the opening scene—guess what the Japanese scientists have also created? What vaults this past the usual “THE END…OR IS IT?”-type conclusion is just how pessimistic it is—the way it completely repudiates everything our heroes have said, including their defence of scientific experimentation, feels almost grimly humorous. I guess Science really did screw this one up! It’s almost too simple in execution to count as a real “twist” ending, but thematically it plays right into the nastiness that was always on the edges of this oftentimes ludicrous story, and especially the almost unrelenting third act. Island of Terror is completely willing to take creature features to a bleak place.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 