Some nine years after It Lives Again, Larry Cohen returned to his monster movie debut for one final bow—but this was Cohen returning after expanding his repertoire and innovating in the genre in the eighties, first with Q – The Winged Serpentand then The Stuff, both classics in their own right. The increasingly over-the-top and comedy-infused styles of those movie do in fact continue in It’s Alive III—sometimes in very direct ways, considering the actors involved—keeping it in line with Cohen’s eighties filmography; at the same time, it develops many of the themes and emotional beats that made the original It’s Alive and its supplementary first sequel into something genuinely special. Yes, these movies about murderous mutant babies carry all the marks of schlock genius, but as weird as it sounds, they also have a heart, and that makes something like Island of the Alive stand out just as much as…well, everything else in it.
Most people seem to accept that Creature From the Black Lagoon is part of the classic Universal Monsters line-up, sitting alongside Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy on home video covers, in theme park attractions, and on twelve-packs of soda and bags of potato chips—but in terms of context and content, it is at a removed from the films of the thirties and forties. Those films carried a certain Victorian literary flair (even when they ostensibly took place in “modern” times), set in a Gothic version of Europe (and maybe some other places) frozen in time, full of old foreboding castles and supernatural curses; the 1950s, often favoured science-based horror, and not the theatrical mad science of Frankenstein or The Invisible Man, but the kind that discovered and unleashed the atomic bomb, or that probed deeper into the prehistoric past or into outer space, and finding signs of man’s ultimate insignificance. In that sense, Black Lagoon is closer in spirit to its contemporaries, the less-commented-upon run of Sci-Fi monster movies put out by Universal that spanned everything from It Came From Outer Space and This Island Earth to Tarantula and even something like The Monolith Monsters. These films were about contemporary scientific thought—or, as close as movies like these actually get to it—and grapple with the idea that the more we learn about our universe, the more strange and terrifying it becomes, which is something a bit different from the otherworldly horrors of older stories.
But Black Lagoon still feels like a bridge between the “classic” monsters, which were gaining a new following thanks to television re-airings, and the new breed of mutants and space aliens haunting horror films—while the style of fifties-style monsters and the “classics” differed, that’s not to say that they were completely incompatible. This movies demonstrates that there are, in fact, many places where the two eras both diverge and meet: while steeped in the modern conventions and trends of the day, it maintains a good deal of the spirit of its predecessors, especially in characterizing its lead monster as an individual, tragic figure as well as a terrifying force. There is indeed a reason why this Creature gets to be part of the gang.
This summer, the theme will be “B-Movies vs. Blockbusters”: I’ll be alternating between a big budget monster movie and a double feature of less mainstream fare. How much of a difference does money and Hollywood prestige make for this type of movie? Does schlock transcend all? These questions will probably not be answered here, but they’re interesting to think about.
Mimic‘s biggest claim to fame is being the Hollywood debut of Guillermo del Toro, one of the most important figures in monster movies in the past few decades—and as one would expect for a Hollywood debut for a director who started outside Hollywood, the experience was so great that he disowned the final film for several years. A director’s vision being heavily compromised by the Weinsteins of all people, how unusual! In 2010, del Toro made a director’s cut that he says is at least closer to what he wanted—but despite all the meddling in the original version, you can still see del Toro’s stylish horror sensibility. The burgeoning hallmarks of his approach is especially noticeable after watching The Relic, which released a few months before this: that one felt you like a classical creature feature presented with the tone of a violent nineties procedural—in Mimic, which is based on a Sci-Fi story from the forties (by prominent Golden Age author Donald Wollheim), you get the sense of a classical creature feature that is attempting to evolve the format, or at least give it a much more modern and specific aesthetic.
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.
There are certainly Sci-Fi/creature feature/horror movies made throughout the ages where it may not be unjustified to question why an alien that is apparently intelligent enough to build a spacecraft capable of interstellar travel would land on Earth and immediately start acting like a violent, mindless animal. It’s a recurring logic hole generally papered over, thinly, in order to justify traditional genre entertainment. Even The Thing From Another World, the starting point for many of these extraterrestrial thrillers, only provides a vague sort of justification for its monster’s behaviour, and it actually does more plot logic legwork than many of the films that followed it. In general, the alien’s perspective is not always given a lot of thought in these things, although it’s an area where even an otherwise rote story can really distinguish itself…when there’s the motivation to do so.
Speaking of The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 remake is another one of those movies where the question applies, probably even more than the original. It features one of the most inventively-portrayed alien creatures in film history, but its true form is so incomprehensible that it seems almost impossible to imagine it piloting a spaceship—but it not only does that, it also has the knowledge to build another one from scrap parts. I’ve always thought of the titular Thing as being like an intelligent communicable disease, seeking only to propagate itself and absorbing whatever knowledge and technical skill it needs to do so. Other people have their own theories about this, but only Sci-Fi writer/marine biologist Peter Watts, author of the evocative first contact novel Blindsight, managed to get his version published in Clarkesworld, one of the leading English language SF publications. “The Things”, his re-interpretation of the dynamics of John Carpenter’s version of the story, focuses entirely on the alien’s perspective, giving us a surprisingly benevolent take on the shapeshifting flesh beast that infects everything around it—as it turns out, such a thing is possible.
This month, I’ll be focusing on sequels to movies I’ve written about previously—and while there’s a really tendency in horror movies especially to push out a series of cheap follow-ups made by workman creatives to capitalize on even mild amounts of brand recognition (which was accelerated during the heyday of the VHS market), sometimes you’ll find sequels that have more going for them. Larry Cohen’s 1974 killer baby classic It’s Aliveis the kind of simple shock concept that an exploitative producer may want to turn into cheap grindhouse fodder, but both sequels were written and directed by Cohen himself, which indicates to me that the B-movie auteur still had ideas worth exploring. Larry hasn’t led me astray yet!
Even so, the surprisingly human-focused and emotional story of the original It’s Alive seems like a trick that you can only pull once—and I can say that It Lives Again/It’s Alive II does not equal its predecessor on that front. Despite that, Cohen is doggedly intent on actually following up on the implications of the original’s ending, where we learn that murderous mutant babies are being born across America. As one would expect from Cohen, this new story goes in some weird directions, sometimes logically considered and sometimes pure nightmarish grotesque, and the ways it parallels the beats of the first one continue many of its themes while presenting them in a slightly different light. Although escalation is certainly at play here, it’s not as simple as just multiplying the number of monster babies and car chases.
Always on the lookout for monster movies that venture outside the norm, writer-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s Spring caught my eye—it even received plaudits from Guillermo del Toro, who referred to it as a “Lovecraftian film.” I personally think you’d have to have a pretty broad definition of “Lovecraftian” for this to fit the label, but I guess I can also see where he’s coming from—this is dealing with things strange and ancient that span across human history, things with a certain inexplicable nature, and things that really blur the line between Science Fiction and Fantasy (which is sort of theme in the movie itself.) Despite what some websites will tell you, though, this is definitely not a horror movie, even with some of the grotesque imagery and violent moments (this is the same sort of dispute with online resource genre tags I got into with Lamb—why must these massive websites be so very wrong all the time!), but a fantastical romantic drama, which is certainly unique, and is totally up del Toro’s alley given his own monster filmography.
The last time I wrote about something in the orbit of UK comics writer Pat Mills, it was the seventies sharksterpiece Hook Jaw, and he wasn’t even the writer on that (although if you know anything about British comics of that time, you’d know that the editor could still be very, very hands on with the writing)—and there’s still plenty to mine from Mills’ own credited work inside and outside 2000 AD, the comic that he helped define. He has had an incredibly varied career in fifty-plus years, but his genre work specifically has a number of idiosyncrasies that give them a genuinely unique blend of unabashed over-the-top absurdity and thinly-veiled ideology. Comics like ABC Warriors and Nemesis The Warlock are sci-fi action stories that are also heavily anarchist in nature, contemptuous of authority and sympathetic towards the lower classes of society, but also feature morally ambiguous anti-heroes; there is also a strain of Mills’ work based on the conflict between nature and humanity where the story’s sympathies lie almost entirely with nature, as seen in the series Flesh, Shako, and of course, Hook Jaw. To Mills, the true nature of the animal world is sheer brutality, but that’s also what makes it fascinating, and also a fun subject to base comics around.
Mills’ comics also benefit from his close friendship with some of the UK’s best artists, particularly Kevin O’Neill, whose combination of baroque design and cartoon expressiveness/exaggeration makes him perfect for stories about robots and monsters, both subjects that Mills returns to quite frequently. After co-creating ABC Warriors and Nemesis (O’Neill would cede regular art duties on both after a while), the two produced the comic Metalzoic, originally published in 1986 as part of DC Comics’ original graphic novels line and reprinted as a serial in 2000 AD after that (it is currently out of print, as DC apparently nixed a reprint several years ago.) Metalzoic feels like a dedicated vehicle for O’Neill’s knowingly ridiculous design sensibility and Mills’ pet themes about nature (and his general disregard for actual science): here is a story where the machinery created by man is left to fill an ecological void, artificial life taking over for the biological kind in the most direct way possible—and it is very clearly a world that we are supposed to like on some level.
As I was saying before, British horror became increasingly salacious as the years wore on, as evidenced by The Mutations (known in some places as The Freakmaker)—by1974, a typical mad scientist yarn was given additional sensationalist subject matter and multiple gratuitous scenes of topless women. On top of that, it attempts to mash up a storyline swipe from a thriller classic with a barely compatible monster movie plot, just like It!/Curse of the Golem (and, hey, Jill Haworth is in this one, too!)—in this case, that would be Tod Browning’s 1932 cult favourite Freaks, with its cast of real sideshow performers providing authenticity to a bit of drama set at a travelling carnival. Some of the lifts are really quite blatant, too—but a little lack of originality was apparently worth it to make something that could capitalize on the spectacle, and seems to revel in the truly downbeat and icky feeling of seventies exploitation films, even while saddled with a Sci-Fi element pulled right out of the fifties.
Released in the same year as Varan, The H-Man sees director Ishiro Honda return again to ideas and imagery from Godzilla, just four years old at the time, beginning with more footage of a nuclear bomb test and another invocation of the Lucky Dragon 5 incident. What’s different here is that while the kaiju films visualized the fear of nuclear fallout and ongoing weapons testing through the creation of a walking natural disaster, this one is entirely human-based: men transformed into nightmarish new forms, completely unlike anything seen in nature (this is, in fact, yet another blob movie that predated The Blob—there must have been something gooey in the air in the late 1950s.) While treading some similar ground to other Honda/Toho genre films on the surface, the smaller scale and bizarre nature of the threat lead to something far different from the other monster movies of the Showa era.
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