The Lure (2015)

We’re now on the third and final sample of Creature Canon Contenders found on The Criterion Channel, and since we were on the topic of deconstructionist monster stories: The Lure, a Polish horror/musical/fantasy recreation of the eighties directed and co-written by Agnieszka Smoczynska, is a highly deconstructionist take on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” Do you consider mermaids to be “monsters”? Well, this movie certainly does—in this, mermaids have a tendency to rip throats out and eat human hearts, which is slightly different from the norm, but not that far removed from their mythical origins. BUT, aside from being dangerous, flesh-eating demi-humans with beautiful voices (whose existence in the hyper-stylized world of the film seems to be not necessarily common knowledge, but no one seems to have their mind blown by it), they are also a metaphorical representation of how women are exploited, and how they try to change themselves to better fit societal expectations. Moving between flashy choreographed musical numbers and a grungy depiction of urban Europe in the eighties, you can really see both sides of the central argument: is this really a world worth giving up heart eating and underwater merriment for?

Hardware (1990)

The late eighties and eary nineties were certainly an age full of grimy, rusted, industrial hellscapes—even after the Cold War ended, there was a certain punk ideology that revelled in its own cynicism and loved to create images of modern civilization collapsed under its own moral decay, cites transformed into mountains of dilapidated junk. Hardware came from the beginning of the decade, and embodies many of the aesthetics that would show up in big studio films after it (everything from Tank Girl to Waterworld to Super Mario Bros.), presenting a grungy, blasted world full of horrible people and no escape. Amusingly for a movie about a killer robot, it gives off some serious heavy metal/industrial music vibes that run pretty deep— it has Ministry on its soundtrack while also resembling a Ministry music video (it also has cameo appearances by Lemmy from Motorhead, GWAR, and Iggy Pop as a sarcastic radio DJ.) This is the debut feature of Richard Stanley, whose success would later lead to the ordeal that was 1996’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, where he was hired and then fired, but secretly stayed on the set of the movie (there’s a whole documentary about it), and his style really puts the nineties music video feel on full blast, with everything that may imply.

Equinox (1970)

I always appreciate a movie whose trailer yells its title at me multiple times

Equinox is a home movie made by some dudes who would become major figures in the special effects sector that was later distributed as an actual movie—that sounds reductive, but it also means that this is part of the history of movie effects, which is definitely something notable. Mostly directed by Dennis Muren (later: Star Wars, Jurassic Park) with stop motion animation by David Allen (later: Q – The Winged Serpent) and Jim Danforth (later: a whole bunch of stuff, although I’m mostly familiar with his work on Jack the Giant Killer from 1962) with a budget of $6,500 (in mid-sixties dollars, mind you), this exists mainly as a showcase for creature effects in the Ray Harryhausen mould—would you be at all surprised that they had the direct support of Famous Monsters of Filmland’s Forrest J. Ackerman? This is pretty much the exact kind of movie you’d expect a Famous Monsters reader to make.

Horror Express (1972)

This really does feel like one last hurrah of a particular kind of horror movie, the quaintly lurid and darkly humorous sort that typified the genre in the fifties and sixties. Horror Express has many of the stylistic hallmarks of those films, not the least of which being that it’s a period piece that stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing—it even has a science fiction conceit that also feels of the previous era (it was produced by Bernard Gordon, who had a major hand in Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and Day of the Triffids). The early seventies was basically the transition point from these sorts of movies (which had mostly been dominated by Hammer Productions, and mostly starred Lee and Cushing) to more contemporary and hard-edged ones—this came out the same year as Last House on the Left (…and also Frogs), and a year before The Exorcist. It’s pretty clear that something like this wasn’t the kind of terror people were looking for in the theatre. Still, you probably couldn’t have asked for a better send-off than this, which is entertaining and stylish, all the more impressive because Spanish director Eugenio Martin had no previous experience in horror.

Monster Multimedia: When I Arrived At The Castle (2019)

Welcome to October. I usually use this series to examine older things, but as a change of pace, here’s something from this year that fits…

When I began writing these posts, I made the decision to leave out certain kinds of monster stories from the material I’d be analyzing, and it was mostly the most well-known ones: vampires, werewolves, the undead. I wanted to focus mostly on the nebulous “miscellaneous” category, because that is usually what falls into my wheelhouse, and I thought that was where I’d find ground that was not nearly as well-trodden. There’s only so much you can write about the potent symbolism of vampires and werewolves that hasn’t been written thousands of times before—that comes with the territory when you’re that ubiquitous in the culture. Even so, sometimes I make exceptions.

Emily Carroll’s comic When I Arrived At The Castle has a vampire in it, but also a cat-person, although for a few reasons I’d say that the cat-person is sort of analogous to a werewolf (at least it provides the same animalisic contrast that a werewolf would.) While utilizing some of the most well-worn horror tropes on the surface—beginning with a dark castle on a stormy night—the book has a distinct take on them, one that combines fairy tale storytelling, body horror, and interpersonal violence to tell a story about guilt, abuse, and the terrors that lurk deep within ourselves. Both the characters here are split between their surface humanity, rendered in monochrome, and red-drenched monstrosity that’s simmering beneath—this is all about the dual nature that lies at the heart of these things, rendered in all its gruesomeness.

Prophecy (1979)

The Hollywood fascination with eco-horror seemed to diminish significantly by the end of the seventies, probably when all the leftover moralism from the sixties had finally faded and the culture seemed perfectly fine with doing everything without a social conscience, from movie-making to voting. It probably didn’t help that many of the environmentally-minded movies made that decade were quite bad, and were made to look even worse when a new wave of thrillers in the latter half of the decade like Jaws, Alien, and Halloween were actually, you know, good. The thing is, Hollywood and environmentalism were never really a good mix, because it’s a subject too nuanced and important to be properly conveyed by the average broad, dumb motion picture experience, and the need to make a movie a movie often superseded even the best of intentions. This also had the additional effect of cheapening genuine environmental concerns, or making them look hyperbolic or shrill, any reality or humanity sacrificed for blunt sermonizing and melodrama.

All of those things apply to 1979’s Prophecy, a film that makes a interesting contrast to Frogs, a similar film from earlier in the decade. Frogs was pure B-movie schlock, while Prophecy is ostensibly a big studio picture by a big name director (John Frankenheimer, as far away from his Manchurian Candidate heyday as he was from his Island of Doctor Moreau nadir)—in reality, Prophecy being a Paramount movie just means it has a few slightly bigger-named actors, some better camerawork, and an orchestral score. It’s certainly not any smarter than Frogs, though it’s a lot slower, and also doesn’t have the excuse of being an animal attack movie made in a pre-Jaws world. It’s almost fascinating how out of step this movie feels with its times, especially when you consider that Alien premiered just one month prior—it was obsolete before the first reel started.

Monster Multimedia: Maggots: The Record

Time to be honest: I’m only familiar with the bizarre career of punk/metal vocalist Wendy O. Williams because her name is referenced in the Mario series (thank you, late eighties American localizers and your random pop culture pulls.) In general, I don’t go out of my to check out the kind of high-octane guitar + screaming music that Williams specialized in, but there is something sort of liberating about being that loud, angry, and abrasive. Music so unadorned and designed to rattle your brain into submission can be pretty fun, and it can also get a point across pretty plainly—when there is a point, at least (with shock rock, it’s never a guarantee that it means anything other than “Look at me! Look at me!”) Williams and her band the Plasmatics’ 1987 release Maggots: The Record (so we don’t confuse it with any of the other maggot-based entertainment that was all over the place at the time) does seem to have a point—an extremely bleak point—when it’s not just going out of its way to be gross.

Frogs (1972)

Let’s try something fun: a theme month! April’s batch of entries will all be examples of eco-horror, a subgenre I find fascinating, not just as someone interested in nature (and how it’s depicted in fiction), but as someone who is also interested in examining the ups and downs of storytelling trends. There are specific periods in time when eco-horror seemed to proliferate in movies especially (although it seems like they haven’t been as prominent in recent years for whatever reason), and one of those periods is represented in this first entry…

One of the lasting legacies of the counter-cultural movements of the sixties was the creation of modern environmentalism, which became one of the more prominent offshoots in the seventies and beyond as the free love types mostly stuck to getting stoned and selling ice cream. Although the movement took close to a decade to have some mainstream influence (following its first major event, the publication of Rachel Carson’s expose Silent Spring), there did seem to be an attempt by the mainstream to acknowledge or address the issues they brought up, as you saw the establishment of the EPA and the creation of Earth Day—but as was the style of the time, the supposed good vibes masked a widely held apocalyptic belief that modern society was on the edge of collapse. The environment and the human abuse of it became yet another thing to be afraid of, and another thing for grody schlock to exploit—thus we have the creation of eco-horror, a genre that seemed to be at its peak in the seventies. This new wave of creature features benefited from a much more intimate scale than their B-movie predecessors: compared even to monsters created by nuclear power (which was still a cultural fear at the time, mind you), monsters created by everyday pollution seem a lot closer to home. It’s especially true when the monsters aren’t even “monsters”, but everyday organisms who are simply pissed.

THOUGHTS ON Q – THE WINGED SERPENT

•As advertised, the outstanding element of this movie is Michael Moriarty’s performance, a never-ending bundle of tics and tone changes, like he’s playing an insane adult toddler (one of the highlights of the whole movie is the one-on-one between him and Carradine in the diner, where you get Moriarty demanding to get a picture with Rupert Murdoch, but also being casually racist because he’s pissy about how Richard Roundtree’s cop character manhandles him.) It’s a uniquely bonkers thing to see, you genuinely never know in what direction he’s going – the point of this character is that he gets involved with stuff way over his head and never seems sure how to react, except when he sees it directly benefiting him, but Moriarty takes that way further than that, making someone who is pathetic and unhinged and it’s not clear if he knows it or not. Most movies of this type wish they had an anchor as entertaining as him.

•Meanwhile, David Carradine barely seems to take the movie he’s in seriously at all (he probably didn’t), and his reactions are often as subdued as Moriarty’s are exaggerated. This kind of works for his own role, though – the whole god/monster complex this movie is working through needs him to be sort of the ultimate agnostic, someone who’s interested in seeing whether this supposed god is the real deal, primarily by filling it full of bullets. The ritual killings subplot doesn’t really connect to the main story that strongly, but it’s such a weird idea and gives the story a whole other layer to deal with. So just because he seems kind of laid back considering all the people being decapitated and/or having their skin flayed, he’s still invested in his own way.

•There’s lots of aerial shots of New York (obviously), and those and a lot of the street scenes really give off a lovably scuzzy vibe for the city throughout this movie – all crowded streets and dilapidation and people being jerks (really enhances the legitimacy of the scenes of raining blood and people getting being decapitated by a flying lizard.) I’m unfortunately not boned up on my NYC history, but this feels like a specific snapshot of the city at the time, all the more interesting because it’s one of several monster movies set there (for homework, compare and contrast between this, Kong ’76, and Ghostbusters.)

•The stop-motion effects for the monster are fine, but Harryhausen they are not – though, there’s a likeable quality to how chintzy they can be. The monster itself looks cool and is animated well, and the obvious dolls used when it throws people off of buildings feels almost like a throwback to the original King Kong – they also don’t show us the whole thing enough (though it is all during the day, bucking the usual sfx shortcuts) for it to be distracting, spending most of the movie in brief cuts. I do love the way they animated the thing’s shadow – it’s certainly not realistic, but man is it stylish.

•The best moment aside from Moriarty’s Murdoch lines are when the mime is revealed to be an undercover cop.

•After a certain point Q seems to stop eating people and starts instead tossing them off buildings, which seems like not very good survival tactics?

•Speaking of homages to King Kong, of course the movie ends with the bullet-riddled beast falling to its death off a building (according to the director, the whole movie was partially an attempt to give the Chrysler Building its own monster.) This follows closely behind the first remake of King Kong, and in a way rebukes it – that movie was more violent than the original but still posits Kong as the victim without any subtlety, and this movie is EVEN more violent and has no sympathy for the monster whatsoever! Despite the fact that it was clearly just an animal trying to survive and care for its young, it doesn’t belong so it needs to die. Good thing it’s not a god, just a monster – what kind of god has babies?