Bride of the Gorilla (1951)

So this is Christmas Apes, and what have you done? Well, I’ve started watching another batch of ape-themed films to write about on this site. I hope you, the reader, have fun.

With a title as sensationalistic as Bride of the Gorilla, you’d probably expect something pretty bombastic—but things are not what they appear. That title was not the first choice for writer-director Curt Siodmak, screenwriter of The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (and author of the oft-imitated Sci-Fi story Donovan’s Brain), who began the project under the name “The Face in the Water”, something a bit more mysterious that maybe better reflects the film he was trying to make, something closer to a psychological thriller than a monster movie (also, technically, there is no gorilla in this movie.) Looking past the surface ridiculousness, one can detect traces of not only Siodmak’s previous work on The Wolf Man, with its cursed and agonized protagonist, but Jacques Tourner and Val Lewton’s acclaimed 1942 thriller Cat People (Siodmak had worked with both on the film I Walked With a Zombie), which kept the audience unsure of the movie’s reality. Well, this is trying for that level of ambiguity, at least, regardless of it it achieves it.

The Vulture (1966)

From what I’ve seen, the western-produced monster movies from the second half of the sixties very rarely show any real evolution from what was being produced a decade earlier—a movie like The Vulture could have been in theatres at any point from mid-fifties to the early sixties and would have been exactly the same, and yet it was produced well into a decade of major societal change. You wouldn’t know it from watching it, as it simply doesn’t reflect then-modern culture at all, staying in its B-movie bubble and acting as if its rather puzzling tale of science gone wrong has any bearing on anything. Based on what I’ve seen, it took years for drive-in filler like this to really start getting with the times, both thematically and visually.

Which is not to say that there is nothing novel about The Vulture—although its novelty is more in its particular choice of nonsense than in the movie itself. It was the final project of Lawrence Huntington, a British workman director with over thirty movies to his name stretching back to the thirties, and the fact that he both wrote and directed it (getting financial backing from American and Canadian studios and also an English football club?) leads one to believe that this was something of a passion project. It’s difficult to discern from the film itself what that passion was, but maybe it was in the aforementioned choice of nonsense, which represents not so much a development of the nuclear and scientific themes of the fifties creature features as it as a weird, borderline incoherent offshoot of it.

Creature Classic Companion: It Follows (2014)

It Follows managed to crack a certain critical barrier among horror movies when it was released, garnering the kind of widespread praise that these things only rarely get. Not being a horror fan, but reading a lot of movie websites at the time, I heard a lot about it, and saw it held up as a new sort of innovative, self-aware (but not self-parodying) fright flick, one of the select few from the middle of the previous decade being touted. I can imagine this was at least partially due to it straying away from the found footage-focused paradigm that proliferated back then. I also imagine that it has to do with its efficient pitch, one with a primal meaning at the centre of it that still allowed for a depth of symbolism: a sexually-transmitted curse that puts you in the sights of a methodically murderous shape-changing entity, one that only the cursed people can see and that will not stop until you are dead or you pass it on to someone else…but with the possibility of it going back to you once its current target has been dealt with. It’s a gimmick for sure, one that comes with its set of rules—and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s a subset of horror fans who love rules—but it also intelligently plays with the fears of its adolescent target audience, and director David Robert Mitchell uses the camera to show all the the ways that the gimmick can sow paranoia.