Once again, I watch a monster movie made in what would seem to be a more modern time (albeit, over twenty-five years ago), and what strikes me is how much it still adheres to the half-century-old structures and ideas. Opening with a white researcher experiencing something strange among a mysterious indigenous tribe in the Amazon rainforest, and then sending something equally mysterious back home in marked crates, is one of the hoariest old cliches in the book—you could easily see a version of this story made in 1957, the details changed but the spirit intact. The details, ultimately, are the things that make something like The Relic feel like a 1997 movie, planting this classical B-movie plot into the violent, flippant world of an R-rated nineties thriller, with a monster that can be portrayed more “realistically” by Stan Winston Studio’s advanced animatronic puppets and a smattering of nineties CGI rather than a guy in a suit.
Last month saw the passing of fifties B-movie mainstay director Bert I. Gordon at age 100, an appropriately large number for Mr. BIG himself. Beginning with 1955’s King Dinosaur, Gordon was one of the most prolific producers of monster movies in one of the golden eras of monster movies—he directed (and, alongside is wife, provided the special effects for) three movies in 1957 alone—but his reputation in later decades was mostly as a figure of light (and sometimes not-so-light) mockery. The reason is fairly obvious: his most consistent theme in his movies is making things gigantic (or in the case of Attack of the Puppet People, making them tiny), a single-minded pursuit of one of the recurring trends in Sci-Fi movies of the time, and he did it through the use of rear projection, mattes, and split-screens, effects that, being charitable, do not impart a sense of realism. Even though the generations following Gordon’s heyday have often looked down on the special effects of the fifties monster movies as almost inherently phony, his were singled out as the cheapest of the lot, which is probably one of the reasons why he was the single most featured director on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, where most people outside the monster movie historian circles know him from exclusively. I’d like to say that he took this ribbing later in life in stride, but most stories I’ve heard indicate that he most certainly did not.
We can all get a laugh from stills or clips from Gordon’s movies where actors run away from hazy projections that seem to exist solely in the foreground or background, or watching objects clipping through transparencies in the monster’s limbs, but I myself cannot go to the level of genuine mockery of the man’s work. For as silly as something like The Amazing Colossal Man or Earth vs. The Spider looks to us now, these movies remain fixtures of monster history, producing the kind of imagery that, realistic or not, speak to their era and its fixations as much as the more unanimously agreed upon classics (and some of those would likely be sneered at by the same people making fun of Gordon’s movies.) I can’t imagine anyone would have had the kind of filmography he had in the fifties without some kind of enthusiasm for what he was doing—and he had so much enthusiasm for it that he would go back to making the exact same sort of movies in the seventies, a completely different cinematic epoch that still had drive-ins to fill—and simply did what he could with the resources he had. That is something I can relate to as a fellow enthusiast.
So, to honour the memory of Mr. BIG and his gigantic love for gigantic creatures, I viewed his second feature film, Beginning of the End. Within it you can see all the things that defined his films, for good and for goofy.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 