The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001)

As we’ve frequently seen (even as recently as last week), the spirit of fifties B-Movies remained—and arguable remains—strong in creature features, and one part of that legacy is embracing the poor reputation the low-budget monster movies in the black-and-white era often had. Making fun of that particular oeuvre—their overly-expository and unnatural dialogue, their toy-like special effects, their nonsensical plots—has been a go-to for decades, and I can imagine that seeing so many of those movies turned into comedy fodder on something like Mystery Science Theatre 3000 broadened their audience and extended their period as laugh material for another few decades. A movie like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is an obvious outgrowth of all that: a conscious pastiche of lousy programmers, their most ridiculous traits amplified while still keeping as much of the look and sound of the real deal as possible. Even with the ubiquity of this particular brand of parody, I’m sure there was still a sense of novelty to seeing a movie like this in the early aughts, especially when it was distributed by a major studio like Tristar (three years after it premiered at film festivals), who even let their logo be shown in black-and-white to match the spirit.

There was a time where I would have taken this sort of thing at face value, but after years of watching the kinds of older movies that inspired Cadavra, the experience of watching it feels a bit different. When these fifties B-movies were something a bit more distant—a strange and infrequent discovery on late night television, all blurring together in your memory—the kind of schlock being mined for comedy here probably felt accurate to the general atmosphere. But when you really drill down into the lesser-known genre flicks of this period, you find that they are often much more interesting than their reputation says, offering weirder sights and sounds and wilder ideas even with their budget-constrained nature. Shockingly, you also find that these movies were entirely capable of making fun of themselves in the moment, the filmmakers knowingly playing up their own ridiculousness at a time when irony was not expected. If the targets of mockery have already been cracking all the same jokes this whole time, then what, exactly, can a comedy pastiche made over four decades later bring to the table?

Monster Allergy

The popularity of the Godzilla films in their heyday did not just lead to homegrown competitors and imitators—as we saw with Yongary and Gorgo, film makers worldwide sometimes made their own attempts at similar monster material. I’ve written about that particular “Monster Boom” period pretty extensively, but a very similar pattern emerged following Pokémon, a later monster-based phenomenon that was clearly inspired by nostalgia for the original Monster Boom. That series’ thundercrack emergence in the late nineties led to a plethora of other media based on the idea of monster collecting and battling, especially in Japan, and I’ve written about some of those as well (you can also find a surprisingly deep recollection of even more Pokémon coattail riders in Daniel Dockery’s 2022 book Monster Kids)–but wouldn’t it be interesting to see how the basic ideas of a monster collecting franchise could be filtered through a completely different cultural lens?

This brings us to Monster Allergy, an Italian kids comics-turned-attempted-franchise that doesn’t outright announce its indebtedness to Pokémon and the other kids monster series of its era, but come on—it’s about “monster tamers” capturing monsters in small objects, and that alone makes the connection obvious. It’s certainly no rip-off, as any similarities largely disappear past those barest of surface elements, and instead follow more traditional western low fantasy storytelling. But regardless of the degree of intention, this does represent a very European take on some of Pokémon‘s core ideas, a kid-focused adventure in a monster-filled world, and In this way, it is to Pokémon what a Gorgo or a Reptilicus was to the original Godzilla.

“The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (S2E4-9)

So, The Outer Limits is not the only monster-heavy Science Fiction series to be celebrating a sixtieth anniversary this year—in fact, only a month or two separates the debut of that series and the debut of the BBC’s own Doctor Who, which I have written about before as a Creature Classic. That means another series of posts about classic television for the next few months, with each entry analyzing a monster-focused storyline from multiple eras of the show. Considering that its original run lasted for twenty-six years, from 1963 to 1989, and its current one has been airing for eighteen, there are a lot of different eras to choose from.

Even so, I think it’s best to go back to the beginning (or close to the beginning, at least), not only to the original cast, but to the very first, and ultimately most famous, monsters to appear on the show. As I laid out in the “Ark in Space” Creature Classic, the original direction for Doctor Who was for it to avoid Science Fiction cliches in its tales of alien time travellers, which included the deployment of “bug-eyed monsters”—but writer Terry Nation had already penned a storyline, submitted under the title “The Mutants” (although back then, each episode had its own title), involving a battle against an alien foe on a distant planet, and a lack of other suitable scripts meant that his serial was not only given the greenlight, but ended up the second aired story in the series’ history. That in turn meant that, almost as soon as Doctor Who started, it was already moving away from its own internal edicts, and would only move further away when audiences got a glimpse of the first alien menace to appear on the show.

That serial introduced the Daleks, which Nation had specified in the script would be “legless”—it was up to series production designer Raymond Cusick to come up with a final design, a job that was originally assigned to another BBC employee who became unavailable…Ridley Scott (seriously.) It was Cusick who gave the Daleks their distinct pepper pot shape, an inhuman, mechanical appearance that immediately set them apart from the men-in-suits aliens of so much of the 1950s creature features—combined with their staccato, electronically-modified voices, they became mass culture figures almost instantly, recognizable to the large swathe of public in the UK. They became so popular that not only were they figures of reference and parody, and not only was their debut story the basis for the Amicus-produced film version starring Peter Cushing, but Terry Nation, who maintained a controlling stake in them, even attempted to create separate Dalek media projects outside the BBC, sometimes leading to periods where they did not appear on Doctor Who itself. As I said in the older post, the reason why Doctor Who has continued to make imaginative monsters such a core part of its identity is almost certainly because of the perfect notes that Cusick and Nation manage to hit at the beginning of the series.

A follow-up to the original story—now generally referred as “The Daleks”—was essentially guaranteed, and so in the second season, Nation was back again to apply a novel twist to the Daleks: bringing them to our planet. This is the central conceit of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, which aired in six parts from November 21^st to December 26^th 1964, once again the second storyline in the line-up. As the original Daleks story inadvertently set the tone of the series by introducing iconic monsters, this story evolved the series’ approach to monsters by introducing the conceit of monsters appearing in familiar English locations, contrasting the everyday with the extraordinary, which would prove to be one of the series’ frequently recurring motifs.

“The Children of Spider County” (S1E21)

In our final study of classic Outer Limits (for now), we’re going back to February 17^th, 1964 (the day after the Beatles’ second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, just to place it in time), in another episode that roots itself very firmly in its era. I mean, most of the episodes I’ve written about do that to some extent, but having the opening narration begin with “In light of today’s growing anxieties…” reminds you of the Cold War mood that permeates so much of this series, even an episode that doesn’t address it specifically. To further establish that atmosphere, we have it opening in Washington, with an intelligence agency meeting discussing a mysterious matter under the veil of the series’ trademark shadowy intensity, once again provided by “Zanti Misfits” director Leonard Horn. All these things could be considered Outer Limits cliches even at this point in the series, but when viewed on their own, they feel like stylistic trademarks and idiosyncrasies, and this episode goes on to show that there can still be some decent story variety even while using these consistent tics.

Rawhead Rex (1986)

Okay, gang, it’s time to talk about Clive Barker. In the eighties, Stephen King contributed the highly-publicized pull quote “I have seen the future of horror…his name is Clive Barker”, based primarily on Barker’s six-volume short story collection The Books of Blood, which were published in 1984 and 1985. Among the stories first seen in those collections were classics like “The Midnight Meat Train” and “The Forbidden”, the latter the basis for the film Candyman—but it was a story in the third volume, “Rawhead Rex”, that ended up becoming the first of Barker’s works to make it to the big screen, with a script by the author himself and direction by George Pavlou, who had collaborated with Barker earlier on the 1985 horror film Underworld (aka Transmutation.) Unfortunately for Barker, this early stab did not go off as he hoped.

The Invisible Boy (1957)

An example of how context matters: Robby the robot in 1956’s Forbidden Planet, one of the most beautiful of all the fifties Sci-Fi classics, was a prominent supporting character and very clearly not a monster (that movie already has a pretty great monster anyway); he proved popular enough that the studio heads at MGM decided to put him in another movie a year later, and suddenly he’s “The Science-Monster Who Would Destroy The World!”, as proclaimed on the poster of The Invisible Boy. This is not just a case of them reusing the character or the suit, either, although he is credited in the opening credits as an actor (voiced, uncredited, by Marvin Miller), but by all accounts this is the same Robby the robot from Forbidden Planet, who in the backstory of this moviehas been taken from twenty-third century back to the 1950s by a time travel experiment. If a fantastical character goes from one setting or story to a different one, even if technically in the same genre, are they suddenly so out of place that they become a monster? It’s the kind of meta thought you get while watching this movie, which at times feels like a lighthearted parody of Science Fiction made for the kinds of kids who probably already loved Robby, before it suddenly turns into a serious thriller that is surprisingly well-constructed, and then back into a comedy again. It’s an unusual, interesting time capsule of a movie.

Invaders From Mars (1953 & 1986)

The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch has had me thinking about horror stories for children on and off for the last few months—that was a movie that completely homed in on a very specific kind of dread aimed squarely at kids, the sense of a family in collapse, the people you love suddenly turning against you, or authority figures simply not listening. An older and influential movie in that vein is Invaders From Mars, an early entry in the 1950s Science Fiction film boom that was apparently made in a rush in order to beat the George Pal-produced War of the Worlds to theatres (giving it the distinction as the first colour alien movie in American theatres)—it’s a smaller film, very clearly, but trades the spectacle of the bigger alien invasion movies with a nightmare scenario that aims squarely at the kids in the audience, utilizing many of the same triggers that Snake Girl eventually would. Although it might come off as hokey to modern audiences at times, its sometimes very inventive concepts scarred/inspired a generation of genre film fans—and to prove that, we need only look at the fact that one of the most influential horror directors of all time remade it in the mid-eighties, attempting to retain its atmosphere while updating its visuals to appeal to a modern audience.

The Man From Planet X (1951)

1951 was the year the extraterrestrial film really established itself, with the release of both The Thing From Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still cementing many of the aesthetic trends for Science Fiction boom that encompassed the rest of the decade—which is definitely interesting when you consider how utterly different their depictions of alien life are. Intentionally and unintentionally, they approach the tension of the Cold War from opposing angles, a call for peace and understanding contrasted with fighting off an implacable, shadowy enemy, and while the latter probably became more common in subsequent movies, the concept of a sympathetic alien visitor was seeded very early on. The Man From Planet X was a smaller affair in 1951 compared to the high prestige of the other two, shot in six days on a relatively small budget (and yet Roger Corman was not involved), but it also showcases the pre-formula possibilities of alien-based movies, somewhat bridging the gap between the two opposing approaches. It’s also a bridge between the Gothic horror movies of the thirties and forties and the Sci-Fi thrillers of the fifties, using the environments and moodiness of the former and the ideas of the latter—this is likely due to the influence of director Edgar G. Ulmer, who is mostly known for the Lugosi/Karloff thriller The Black Cat and the noir Detour (he also claims to have worked on German expressionist classics like Metropolis and The Golem, but apparently there’s no evidence of that, so nice try, Eddy!) There’s a lot of history to be found within this thing.

Space Amoeba (1970)

We now travel from the early days of Toho monster movies to their waning days, with increasingly diminished budgets and increasingly diminished audience numbers. Space Amoeba (called Gezora, Ganime, and Kameba: Decisive Battle! Giant Monsters of the South Seas in Japan, and alternatively titled Yog – Monster From Space in North America) turned out to be the penultimate monster movie directed by Ishiro Honda, and while at this point these movies were expected to mostly cater to monster-loving kids, it carries on a number of his recurring themes, and even has a surprising number of parallels to Varan, despite the twelve years between them. This could have potentially been his last go-around in the genre, so it was entirely possible that Honda wanted a chance to get as much of the old gang back together, including several actors and composer Akira Ifukube, to make one of these—and while at times it, like Varan, feels like a composite of other movies, its place in the history and the ideas it utilizes make it interesting all the same.

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.