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 Cremators (1972)

So, who were the people behind all the drive-in filler in the seventies? Sometimes, it was small-time movie industry outcasts, as we saw in Blood Freak—but in this case, it was Hollywood veterans trying desperately to stay in the game in whatever way they can. The Cremators was written and directed by Henry Essex, who was the writer or co-writer of both It Came From Outer Space and The Creature From the Black Lagoon, two of the most significant entries in the fifties Sci-Fi and monster movie canons. He otherwise mostly stuck to either crime films or TV, but apparently thought he could return to his glory days in the seventies, writing and directing both this movie and the previous year’s even more infamous Octaman. You can certainly find a vein of that fifties B-movie energy in Cremators—it’s based on a high concept monster and features a lot of standing around trying and mostly failing to make sense of that high concept monster—but unlike the mid-sixties movies I’ve written about previously, this is very clearly trying to feel contemporary. Maybe that’s part of the issue: reminding you that it is 1972, with colour and almost two decades of movies to compare it to, does something like this very few favours.

Mimic (1997)

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.

Deep Dark (2015)

Although very different in execution, Deep Dark reminded me a lot of previous subject Splinter: both feel like short independent films that were expanded into feature length (it won’t surprise you to learn that writer/director Michael Medaglia’s only other credits are for short films), and both rather knowingly hinge themselves on the novelty of their intentionally strange central monster. Splinter used this as a vehicle for pure, undistilled horror filmmaking, while Deep Dark is aiming for more of a comedy-horror, although it never goes that far in either direction. It’s also attempting to spin a sort of dark modern fairy tale, one set in the absolutely-not-overused-at-all world of modern art, and with the freedom from traditional logic that would allow, the biggest question becomes just how hard it pushes into the strangeness of its own premise. The answer to that is “just hard enough, sometimes.”

Bad Milo! (2013)

This really brings me back to when I voraciously read movie websites ten or so years ago—I distinctly remember reading about Bad Milo! when it was new, as it’s the exact sort of high concept, mid-tier film that those websites loved to give attention to, with a real “ha ha can you believe this?” vibe. That felt like the beginning of a time when bigger names in Hollywood were trying to half-jokingly reach for the schlock heights usually left to disreputable, low-budget movies—and it usually begins with a premise that, on paper, is meant to sound incredibly stupid. Most reviews from relatively mainstream sources would begin with that premise, either to say “it certainly lives up to it!” or “it turns out to be more than that!”, and in either case the rest comes off as a slightly bewildered spiral around the gravity of the premise. It’s not hard to see why: just saying “a monster comes out of man’s butt” will automatically make you think it’s a gross-out parody, and the cast of comedy veterans would lend to that view. But, in fact, Bad Milo! is not a parody, and turns out to be rather sincere in many places—which is something that works for and against it.

The Lift (1983)

For this Halloween season, I have lined up a selection of some of the odder monster movies I could find. First up, this Dutch production directed by equally Dutch filmmaker Dick Maas (director of the perfectly-named Amsterdamned), who like Razorback‘s Russell Mulcahy came from the world of music videos, gaining notoriety for his videos for the Golden Earring songs “Twilight Zone” and “When the Lady Smiles” (which was banned in the US.) Maas does not make The Lift (De Lift) nearly as stylistically wild as Mulcahy did with his creature feature, although there is certainly a style to this—more importantly, this has a much more unusual premise, because as the name implies, this is a horror movie about a killer elevator. The purpose in watching a movie about a killer elevator is to discover just how strange the execution of such a premise could be, and what I discovered is that, as unusual as the central conceit is, many of the things surrounding it are equally unusual in some unexpected ways.

Creature Classic Companion: The Tingler (1959)

To understand The Tingler, you have to understand the one part of The Tingler that no one now can actually experience: Percepto! Maybe the most elaborate theatre-going gimmick created by producer/director William Castle, Percepto! was a series of electrical buzzers attached to the backs of random seats in the theatre, and during a specific scene in the movie, operators would use the buzzers to jolt audience members in those seats, leading to reactions both in and out of said movie. As Castle puts it in his clearly Hitchcock-inspired prologue:

Some of the physical reactions which the actors on the screen will feel—will also be experienced, for the first time in motion picture history, by certain members of the audience…But don’t be alarmed, you can protect yourself. At any time you are conscious of a tingling sensation, you may obtain immediate relief by screaming…And remember, a scream at the right time may save your life.

Castle was all about driving people towards his movies through a promise of audience participation that feels almost like a dare. I can imagine it was probably far more frightening to the theatre owners who were stuck having to rig up this thing for every screening.

Castle became infamous for the silly gimmicks in movies like House on Haunted Hill and 13 Ghosts, but if you actually watch his movies, you quickly realize that the jocular nature of those gimmicks is very much present in them. The Tingler is a knowingly ludicrous movie, one that incorporates the meta nature of its presentation into the narrative and regularly one-ups itself with a series of imaginative scenes. The titular monster, literally a creature of pure fear, is only one bizarre element in a film full of bizarre elements, never quite reaching self-parody but coming close without necessarily calling attention to it, and it acts as yet another perfect vehicle for horror legend Vincent Price to play his witty, sinister self.

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.

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.

The Stuff (1985)

This one is belatedly tying into a few of my previous themes: another in the “non-animal monsters” series, the final entry in the Tubi overview (consider it a bonus since they took Rubber off the service as soon as my post ran), and also my interest in covering some of what I would consider the “Old Creature Canon”, which is to say monster movies that are already sort of vaunted but I haven’t seen yet (my post about Matango was technically the first one of those.) I’d been planning to do this one for a while, and we already passed its 35^th anniversary, but hey, better late than never. Anything to keep your memory alive, Larry.

One of the earlier monster-based reviews I wrote for this blog was about the late Larry Cohen’s bonkers classic Q The Winged Serpent, a giant monster movie filled with eighties grime and wackiness. The Stuff was Cohen’s horror follow-up released three years later, and in some ways is even more heightened and ludicrous than Q—but that’s what made Cohen’s work so special. All of his genre films have some sort of animating idea behind them, and will boldly express those ideas in whatever ways he finds striking and entertaining, no matter how out there it gets. There’s something very heartening about an artist with that much confidence—even if it means that they end up eternally niche, they stand by their aesthetic convictions, and their output becomes all the more distinct because of it. Something like The Stuff is not afraid to look implausible or even utterly nonsensical in order to get its point across (that goes for both the script and the acting choices), and sometimes in spite of itself the point it’s making still resonates. Fact is, for as silly as the basic premise of the movie is (killer dessert, one of those pitches that probably either gets you greenlit immediately or tossed out the door, with no response in between), many of the satirical observations about consumerism and corporate culture are actually remain fairly realistic, which only makes the monster angle that much better—it’s reality taken to its illogical extreme.