The Man and the Monster (1958)

We return to the Golden Age of Mexican horror cinema in the 1950s and 60s, and to the work of producer-actor Abel Salazar, who we last saw in the bizarre brain-sucking Dracula-alike The Brainiac. As I said in that write-up, the defining features of this era of Mexican horror film is the influence the movies take specifically from the classic Universal horror cycle of the thirties and forties (and their imitators), with classically supernatural stories and moody black-and-white Gothic visuals. This is very evident in The Man and the Monster (El hombre y el monstruo), a film produced and starring Salazar and directed by the prolific director-actor Rafael Baledón—in particular, this takes cues from The Wolf Man, as well as the various film adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (of which Universal produced exactly zero), with a little bit of Faust for good measure. But this movie is more than the sum of its influences—and is a relatively more subdued affair than the off-the-wall Brainiac—learning all the right lessons to give this seemingly familiar story a unique sense of pathos and well-honed filmcraft that transcends any budgetary limitations it might have.

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (2007)

There have been films about the Loch Ness Monster pretty much from the beginning—the first movie about the monster released in 1934 (a film edited by future Lawrence of Arabia director David Lean), only a year after the first noteworthy sightings took place. Needless to say, very few of them are particularly noteworthy, so The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep can take the crown as both the most well-known Loch Ness Monster movie and the best one almost by default (I’ve already written about the only other contender.) Based on a novel by Dick King-Smith (whose book The Sheep Pig was adapted in the movie Babe), Water Horse is pitched as a traditional sort of whimsical family movie, with a cast of respected British thespians and the structure of a “child befriends an animal” story enlivened with fantastical elements ala ET. It burnishes this well-worn plot by taking advantage of the historical context of the Loch Ness Monster story, arguing why a legend like this may have resonated in an era of strife.

Splice (2009)

The movies that get the tag “Science Gone Wrong” on here are part of one of the longest lineages in the history of creature features—and probably one of that history’s most reactionary undercurrents, demonstrating a ceaseless anxiety about scientific discovery and experimentation. The deeper we dive into the mechanics of nature, the closer we get to inevitably crossing lines we were never meant to cross, with terrible consequences the equally inevitable result—or, that’s the way they see it, and it’s a structure and theme that has never really gone away, and manages to adapt itself to whatever the latest technological and scientific advances (although by “adapt to”, I don’t necessarily mean “understand.”) Splice is a film that very intentionally hearkens back to some of the more hysteria-prone versions of that Sci-Fi narrative, and even places it in the consistently hackle-raising field of genetic engineering, which has been the topic of more than a few monster movies over the decades. The innovation here is that the lines being crossed in this story are not necessarily being done in the name of science, but something far more personal—and so the ensuing terrible consequences have some different and sometimes more disturbing dimensions.

Beowulf (1999)

The last time we went over an adaptation of Beowulf, it was John Gardner’s Grendel, a very intentional reversal of the poem that made the monster the protagonist. I think it’s about time we studied a more straightforward re-interpretation, and so I went for the most obvious one: the 1999 techno-medieval movie version starring Christopher Lambert. What, were you expecting something different?

Shot in the backwoods of Transylvania, this Beowulf looks akin to a Renaissance Fair that was sub-themed around the late nineties, a world of castles and battle axes that also includes smokestacks, winding gears and machinery, and some stylish jackets and tops to go along with the royal robes and peasant rags. From the raging techno/industrial/metal score—including songs from Fear Factory, Anthrax, KMFDM, and many others—that ramps up to numerous fight scenes full of clashing steel and ninja flips (would you believe that Mortal Kombat producer Lawrence Kasanoff was involved?), you really get the sense that this is a bare knuckle attempt to make that musty old poem into a hardcore actioner for the fifteen-year-old boy audience, like a even less mannered and subtle version of Brotherhood of the Wolf. I feel that a movie that opens with a unique, silhouette-based logo is very loudly announcing its own brazen approach to the material, and does it ever live up, or down, to those early promises.

Little Otik (2000)

Little Otik (Czech title Otesánek, sometimes referred to as Greedy Guts) is about bringing the punitive moral logic of old European folk tales into the modern world. In those stories, no macabre retaliation is too over-the-top for a perceived slight against universal propriety, any deviation from tradition or against common sense justifying a horrendous course correction inflicted on people guilty and non-guilty—to most people hearing those tales today, they come across as horrors whose purpose is hidden under layers of sadism. There is some darkly humorous joy to be derived from these things, with their distinct lack of proportion, and Little Otik even amplifies the surrealistic and disturbing aspects by couching its story squarely in one of the most vulnerable aspects of humanity: birth and parenting. As with most of the work of Czech stop motion animator and director Jan Švankmajer, who made this movie with design work from his wife and fellow surrealist artist Eva Švankmajerová, what we experience is an artistically impeccable nightmare.

Pulse (1988)

Programming Note: I’ll be on vacation next week, so the next scheduled movie post will be sometime during the week of August 20th. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The idea that our increasingly technological lives set us up for trouble has been a recurring theme since the twentieth century (and probably before that), updating itself whenever some new convenience becomes entrenched in the routine of the average westerner. Pulse is the late eighties version of this, set in a home with such advanced appliances as VCRs, microwaves, and air conditioning units, all things that can be turned against us when under the influence of something sinister. In the mind of the devoted Luddite, our homes used to be a solidly independent thing of wood and stone, but the advent of appliances not only makes people overly reliant on them, but invites an outside presence that we do not even understand, let alone know how to control. In this case, the presence takes the form of a malevolently intelligent jolt of electricity, something that can undermine the entire modern home—it’s another high concept horror, but one with a surprising amount on its mind, fanning out not just into the technological aspects of contemporary living, but with a specifically eighties critique of suburbia.

The Reptile (1966)

Here’s another film from 1966, and similar to The Vulture‘s adherence to fifties B-movie stylistic tics, this feels like something from another era, with Hammer’s horror aesthetic potentially being long in the tooth (that’s a Dracula joke, kids) at that point in time. While Hammer’s mainstays like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are not present in this one, the Victorian Gothic setting and narrative tropes remain intact, which was one of the ways you knew it was a Hammer film even when they went outside the Dracula/Frankenstein/Mummy milieus that made them famous. Even more removed from the concerns of the mid-sixties, The Reptile hearkens back to a time of vague supernatural mysteries imported from the Darkest Reaches of the Far East, a different variety of colonialist narrative where the problem is not in barging in on other cultures, but bringing something of those cultures back home. It’s dusty stuff, elevated by Hammer’s honed sense of atmosphere, as well as some periodic ventures into a more personal sense of familial tragedy and regret, a sense of a curse not being some abstract magical thing, but a reality one must live with.

The Outer Limits (1995) – “The Sandkings”

We have now covered several episodes of the original Outer Limits, and while that series’ legacy can be felt in TV Sci-Fi across the decades, it’s worth looking into its actual successor series. In a complete contrast to every single attempt to revive The Twilight Zone, the resurrected Outer Limits series that premiered in 1995 managed to air for significantly longer than the original, with seven seasons to the 1963 series’ two and over three times as many episodes. The mid-nineties was possibly the height of TV Sci-Fi boom spurred on by the revival of Star Trek in the late eighties, and that likely carried this new version of a classic-but-short-lived series (you know, like Star Trek) across two US networks (Showtime for six seasons, and then the Sci-Fi Channel for one) and one Canadian network (Global, which was one one of the co-producers of the series), and allowed it to become a staple of syndication.

In order to keep some artistic continuity with its predecessor, the new Outer Limits had both original series creator Leslie Stevens and producer/writer Joseph Stefanoon as executive consultants (Stefano even wrote a remake of one of his own episodes.) Even so, the series broadened itself out from the beginning compared to the original, choosing to cover a wider array of Science Fiction stories (including adaptations of existing stories by writers like Harlan Ellison, who also wrote some of the more well-regarded episodes of the original) rather than adhere to the monster-based “bear” mandate that defined the 1963-64 season that I wrote about—so this is not a series that is as centrally important to our creature-centric niche. Which is not to say that there weren’t aliens and mutants featured throughout its seven-year run, and likely as a nod to the original, the movie-length first episode of the series, “The Sandkings”, does have a monster-focused plot, one adapted loosely from a 1979 novella written by some guy named George R.R. Martin.

The Return of Swamp Thing (1989)

As previously reported, there was much ado about Swamp Thing between the 1982 release of Wes Craven’s film adaptation and its belated 1989 sequel—on the back of that original movie, DC relaunched the comic series, and a year or two into that run, it was given to Alan Moore, John Totleben, Stephen Bissette, Rick Veitch, et. al., who reinvented the character through their journeys into “Sophisticated Suspense.” The opening credits for The Return of Swamp Thing features a montage of comics covers from the entire series run, showcasing striking images by Totleben, Bissette, Richard Corben, and character co-creator Bernie Wrightson, among others—playing over that montage is, of course, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Born on the Bayou”, indicating that the tone of this movie is probably nothing like those comics. Nor is it anything like Wes Craven’s movie, which was sincere to a fault, while, for better or for worse, this doesn’t have a sincere bone in its swamp debris body.

It Lives Again/It’s Alive II (1978)

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 Alive is 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.