Creature Classic Companion: It’s Alive (1974)

The late Larry Cohen may be the perfect B-movie director: someone who has no problem utilizing the absurdity found in the more disreputable genre films, with wacky premises and bizarre special effects and actors putting in heightened performances, in order to make something both memorable and meaningful. His films look dumb on the surface, but are full of inspired creative choices, comedic touches, and a devotion to pursuing ideas no matter how weird they get, producing movies that I don’t think anyone else could. This is the freedom one is allowed in those disreputable genre films, if you know how to work within certain limits.

While working in many genres, Cohen’s monster movies stand out for their particularly dogged combination of schlock and big ideas—Q and The Stuff are some of the most unique entries in the entire genre, hilarious and anchored by actors going all out to portray the kinds of characters you never really see in these types of movies. The heights of Cohen’s career are very much apparent in It’s Alive, his first foray into the realm of creature features, beginning with its simple, silly, and imaginatively fertile high concept: what if you had a baby, and your baby was a monster? The idea of a killer baby would probably be enough for people who just want to see some violence, and enough for it to be dismissed out of hand by people with good taste, but what’s amazing about this movie is how much it actually focuses on the social and emotional fallout of the situation, and especially the effects it has on the parents of the terrible infant. There’s an appreciable human centre to this off-the-wall pitch, and that’s the Larry Cohen difference.

Dark Star (1974)

As I’ve mentioned countless (countless!) times before, the early-to-mid seventies was definitely the weirdest period for Sci-Fi films, with the two biggest successes—and influences—on the genre being the heady 2001: A Space Odyssey and the grim Planet of the Apes. I think I can safely argue that this was the only point in time when a movie like Phase IV would be made at all. These bizarre and downbeat visions of the future would more or less be put out to pasture when Star Wars debuted, but the subsequent era of Sci-Fi movies still bore the mark of what had come before, sometimes in very direct ways.

Like previous subject Equinox, Dark Star was a short film picked up and expanded to feature length by The Blob producer Jack H. Harris, but this one was probably a much harder sell, and was only distributed briefly and in a small number of locations. Also like Equinox, Dark Star is the career beginnings for some of the most important people in creature feature history: director John Carpenter and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (with a special shout out to the late concept artist/designer Ron Cobb, who designed the titular spaceship), who a few years after their first project came and went would go on to separately redefine the horror movie. That’s all fairly well-known stuff at this point (as is the story of their tense working relationship and subsequent falling out, as told in Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value), and while Dark Star developed a cult following based on its initial showings, it would gain a bigger one after Halloween and Alien made the minds behind it famous—and it’s also fairly well-trod territory to suggest that Dark Star would become an antecedent to some of their more famous movies, Alien especially. It’s still an interesting thing to look at, though, and while it’s only partly a monster movie, the ways it reflects on (and parodies) present and past Science Fiction trends makes it one of the missing links that illuminates the through-lines of multiple genres’ histories.

Phase IV (1974)

Most people who know Phase IV know it for two reasons: (1) it’s the only movie directed by influential movie graphic designer Saul Bass, and (2) it’s weird as hell. It also has a direct connection to the very first movie I wrote about for this series, The Hellstrom Chronicle, as the insect footage in both was shot by Ken Middleham—and like Hellstrom, Phase IV recontextualizes nature documentary moments to make common insects, in this case ants, utterly alien. But it’s something else entirely in this movie, which depicts not regular ants, but ants granted an amalgamated hyper-intelligence through cosmic means, and humanity’s various attempts to understand and communicate with an organism whose mind works on a completely different level. Despite the lurid promises of the (decidedly not Saul Bass-designed) poster, this is not a thriller, but a borderline experimental Sci-Fi movie working with some heady ideas, and is maybe one of the oddest things I’ve watched for this series, which is really saying something given some of the bizarre subjects I’ve already covered.

Creature Classic Companion: Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974) & Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

The Mechagodzilla duology represents the end of Toho’s twenty year run of classic (and not-so-classic) monster movies, with a new one almost every year since the original Godzilla. Despite attempts to keep the series going, costs of production and declining box office (Terror of Mechagodzilla remains the least-attended movie in the series, theatrically) put the King of the Monsters on ice for a decade, when he could be revived in a rawer, meaner form with more modern SFX. Despite having the dubious honours of being in the last two entries of the Showa years, which deviated further and further from the seriousness of Godzilla ’54 with every entry, Mechagodzilla remains one of the more popular of the Big G’s opponents, I think for pretty obvious reasons—it looks like it was pulled directly from the collective imagination of every ten-year-old on the planet, with its endless supply of weapons and a sinister sneer frozen on its mechanical face. I definitely got the appeal when I was a kid who saw Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla on VHS, with many moments from that movie etching themselves into my memory. Nowadays, having a far greater understanding of their context within the history of kaiju films (and having just read Ed Godziszewski, Steve Ryfle, and Yuuko Honda-Yun’s Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film), these two movies don’t just represent the end of their era, but also of the directorial styles of the Godzilla series’ two most important directors: Ishiro Honda, the original and the one who directed most of Toho’s best-known special effects films, and Jun Fukuda, who became prominent during the series’ turn to more lighthearted fare aimed at kids in the late sixties and early seventies. Despite using many of the same elements, they end up producing movies that feel very different.

Killdozer

In memory of the late B-movie master Larry Cohen, I’d like to direct you to my post about his monster classic Q—The Winged Serpent from a few years ago.

Sometimes, a great title is all you need to have any sort of longevity—the name “Killdozer” is so blunt and over-the-top that it has somehow maintained some kind of cultural cache for over seventy years. There’s a band named after it, and to make doing video and image searches for it more difficult, there was even a real killdozer that went on a rampage in 2004. “Killdozer” probably got itself ingrained in the culture purely by being a fun thing to say, and so irregardless of its origins it kept being repeated, to the point where I knew the title without ever knowing where it came from.

Where it came from, though, is itself fairly interesting. The original “Killdozer!” novella was written by preeminent science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (the guy who originally said that “ninety percent of everything is garbage” and was the inspiration, at least in name, for Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout) in 1944, one of the many influential stories he wrote over his six decade career (another important monster story by him was “It” in 1940, which introduced the world to the concept of a monster made of decaying vegetable matter). It’s a quintessentially pulp concept, but also brought to us by one of the SF genre’s most important innovators, so I knew there had to be something more to it than just a story of a possessed bulldozer. I mean, a story about a possessed bulldozer (with a title that uses an exclamation point for emphasis) probably would have been embraced by the SF-reading kids of the forties regardless, but still.