Spectreman

After all of these years of covering lesser-known tokusatsu series, we’ve finally come to Spectreman, which I’ve mentioned multiple times while discussing other topics—and in its way, it is rather important. This is another series by P Productions, the studio formed by former cartoonist Tomio Sagisu that brought us both The Space Giants/Ambassador Magma and Monster Prince, and managed the feat of sparking a second Japanese “Monster Boom” in 1971, a few years after the mid-to-late-sixties boom petered out. As pointed out in previous posts, it managed to beat both Return of Ultraman and Kamen Rider to the punch by only three months—P Productions was a smaller outfit than Tsuburaya Productions or Toei, but they showed themselves to be pretty on the ball when it came to televised kaiju delivery systems. Crucially for this series’ unexpected legacy, they also had something their bigger rivals did not: distribution outside of Japan.

Bug (1975)

I hope you didn’t get your fill of cockroaches from the last entry, because here’s even more of them! Bug comes with two major distinctions off the top: it’s the fourth movie I’ve written about with animal and/or plant photography from Ken Middleham, master of the artful micro-creature shot since at least The Hellstrom Chronicle, and it’s the final film produced (and co-written) by William Castle , master of the gimmick horror movie since at least The Tingler. Middleham’s contributions are front-and-centre, with the same sort of creative creepy crawly camerawork that you saw in Phase IV, which had been released the previous year. The contributions of Castle are maybe not as obvious—when I think of his classic movies, I think of things with a bit more macabre joviality to them than what you see in this; it also lacks one of his signature theatrical gimmicks, although he claimed to have taken out a one million dollar life insurance policy for the movie’s “lead cockroach”, and apparently tried to find some way to give random audience members the sensation of things crawling on their legs. On the other hand, Castle has always had fairly eclectic tastes when it came to thrillers, and this is a very eclectic movie, the sum of many different clashing ideas that produces something truly and memorably strange.

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 Crawled Out of the Woodwork” (S1E11)

Unlike “Corpus Earthling”, this episode has a proper cold opening, rather than just a preview of a scene from the episode itself—and it’s a real humdinger of a cold opening, jolting viewers with a bizarre sequence that makes them ask just what this thing is going to be about. It starts out mundane enough, with a cleaning lady vacuuming in a lab and coming across a particularly large and stubborn dust bunny in the corner, and eventually leads to an abstract splotch exploding out of the vacuum. Needless to say, we are dealing with another strange “bear”, and it’s a particularly ingenious idea to just have it appear in full as early as possible, while making the audience wait to learn just what the heck they’re dealing with. As it turns out, the inexplicable nature of the monster is maybe part of the point.

The Thing From Another World (1951)

Let’s go back to the beginning…or one of the beginnings, at least.

This movie has been brought up several times before—in reference to the general tone of the Sci-Fi monster movies of the 1950s, and in all the times it’s been ripped-off directly in the ensuing decades. In truth, most monster movies made after The Thing From Another World are ripping it off in some way: this type of movie, with this kind of structure and these themes, didn’t really exist before 1951—The Man From Planet X, an alien-based movie that released at almost the same time, still has a foot in the days of the Universal Monster movies, and while The Thing also does in certain ways we’ll get into, it also loudly asserts its time and place, the early fifties of it all. This is the movie that made paranoia the central feature of so many creature features of the era, literalizing the fears of all that is unknown and inscrutable in a wider universe humanity was gradually discovering—but what became increasingly generalized and irrational as the decade wore on still has a shocking clarity and specificity here at the point of origin.

Konga (1961)

In order to better understand the essence of the classic Giant Ape Movie, I’ve sought the many riffs on King Kong that have improbably filled movie theatres over multiple decades, and I think I may have finally seen all the most notable examples—which is really not saying much. Konga is one of the only ones that was released well before the banana gold rush of big apes that occurred around the release of the 1976 Kong remake, and so has a unique late fifties/early sixties B-movie vibe when compared to the others—I can imagine it was at least partially made because of the successful theatrical re-releases of the original Kong throughout the fifties, which really raised that movie’s cultural stock. But despite being from an entirely different era of movies, it still ultimately falls in line with the brazen schlock that came to define the giant gorilla genre, setting a standard for the films that followed, and not a particularly high one.

The Monster and the Girl (1941)

Bonoho-ho-ho! With December comes the jolliest time of year—Christmas Apes season!

While researching what movies to watch, I try to find details that make them stand out, or possibly resonate with what I’ve written about before, allowing me to compare and contrast. When I decided upon the obscure forties B-movie The Monster and the Girl, it was at least partially because it’s another example of a movie which revolves around a brain transplant, a once ubiquitous plot device that we previously saw in The Colossus of New York. It also has “monster” in the title, which makes it seem like a pretty obvious subject for this series. However, what actually drew me to track this movie down are some quotes from a contemporaneous review from Variety, which described it as “a chiller-diller that will send fans of goose-pimply melodrama from the theaters amply satisfied” and “red meat of the bugaboo ticket buyers.” How could you not want to see whatever it is this apparent human being is describing? You know how much I, a bugaboo ticket buyer, love chiller-dillers.

The Blood Beast Terror (1968)

It just wouldn’t be Halloween without at least one British horror movie starring Peter Cushing in a lead role. Apparently Cushing considered The Blood Beast Terror (US title The Vampire Beast Craves Blood, and we can only hope that whoever came up with these titles lived a happy, contented life knowing that they made the world a brighter place) the worst movie he ever worked on in his long and storied career—of course I can’t definitively state whether that’s true or not, as I haven’t seen every one of his movies. Among the ones I have seen, there have been excellent ones (The Abominable Snowman, Horror Express), solid ones (Island of Terror), and interesting but flawed ones (The Creeping Flesh)—Blood Beast is probably the least interesting of these, the one that feels the most like a procedural monster movie, but that’s not to say it isn’t interesting at all. As has been the case many times before, while it proceeds in a predictable manner, all the little details (or, in some cases, the lack of details) build up a pleasingly melodramatic mix of Victorian moralism and Gothic ghoulishness.

Creature Classic Companion: The Brood (1979)

David Cronenberg’s name is synonymous with body horror—he spent the first three decades of his career defining it (and recently came back to it after a long absence), pushing the envelope when it came to fleshy protuberances and disturbing hybridization. But as repulsive as the effects could be in his movies, they’ve never really felt like puerile shock for its own sake, as there has always been a sense of fascination about the way bodies could be warped, and an equal amount of fascination with how physical changes affect people. They are visceral both physically and psychologically, and that’s why Cronenberg’s filmography is a thing unto itself, an idiosyncratic fusion of horror and science fiction.

It all started in low-budget exploitation films of the seventies, beginning with Rabid and Shivers, all shot in his home town of Toronto (where all, or at least most, of his movies have been filmed), which overcame moral outcry from local sources who took umbrage at their combination of sex and violence to be reasonably profitable, allowing him to continue making increasingly larger-scale movies. All of his obsessions were there from the beginning, from bizarre body modifications and infections to, yes, a combination of sex and violence (and music brought to us by regular collaborator and future Lord of the Rings composer Howard Shore)—and his seventies run culminated in The Brood, distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, which was the big leagues, comparatively speaking. Here, Cronenberg went beyond just the parasitic terror of his first two movies and turned to both parenthood and psychotherapy, and with those themes created some of those notably Cronenbergian images that would define his aesthetic. But this is a movie that is also deeply personal in a way that his other movies aren’t, which makes it all the more disturbing.