Monster From the Ocean Floor (1954)

Two movie posts in one week? Yes, I had so many things I wanted to write about that I’m starting my double features a bit early this summer. In June, you’ll be getting a new millennium subject early in the week, and something more vintage on Thursdays.

I was already planning on writing about this movie at some point, but the passing of Roger Corman (a few weeks ago as of this posting) made it a top priority, and I’m hoping to cover more of his movies in the near future. Of course, Corman had a big impact on the entirety of Hollywood film with his prolific filmography, general eye for talent, and, let’s say, economical methods, but the many monster movies he either directed (I’ve written about a few of them) or produced do have a special place in that vast filmography—with all their B-movie qualities, there were a few that offered genuine innovation in the category, or at the very least were uniquely bizarre and entertaining. There are also the times where he provided a starting point for filmmakers who would go on to become some of the biggest creative forces in monster movie history, including Joe Dante’s big break with Piranha. In a career that spanned everything from Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to women in prison movies and eccentric comedies, the monster movies are a crucial part of his legacy—beginning with Corman’s first-ever film as a producer.

As the story goes, Corman was irritated after seeing a script he wrote altered by the studio, so he decided to start his own production company to have complete control of the movies he worked on. Monster From the Ocean Floor was the first film he produced, and its six-day, cost-saving-whenever-possible production (the budget is somewhere between $12,000 and $35,000 depending on who you ask) was the beginning of the patented Corman method that would serve him for the rest of his career. The money he received up front from Lippert Pictures for Monster was used to fund his next movie, something called The Fast and the Furious(!), which was the first movie he worked on with distributors Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, the founders of his longtime distributor American International Pictures.

On a pure film history level, Monster From the Ocean Floor is actually significant, even if it is rather unassuming as a low budget fifties monster movie that could be best described as “quaint.” I would also argue that it, in its unassuming way, it’s also a fairly forward-looking piece of fifties creature feature history—released between more famous big studio fare, specifically Creature From the Black Lagoon and Them!, it gets into some of the major themes of the era early, signalling the specific form of nuclear paranoia that haunts a large number of these movies. Corman and his crew were not establishing their own distinct brand of monster movie, but developing the entire genre as a whole without really trying—and that’s a very Corman thing to do.

Quatermass II

Finally, we are rounding out Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass trilogy, three alien-heavy Sci-Fi films whose impact on the genre in the UK and beyond cannot be understated (maybe don’t expect to see coverage of the much-belated Quatermass/Quatermass Conclusion, which was made when Kneale was in full “Old Man Yells At Cloud” phase.) As with The Quatermass Xperiment, Quatermass II was originally written by Kneale as a six-part BBC television serial, which aired 1955 (commissioned partly to give the BBC a high profile answer to their first privately-owned competitor, ITV), and then adapted into film form by Hammer in 1957 under the slightly altered title Quatermass 2 (or Enemy From Space in other countries.) With Kneale demanding new terms following his displeasure with Hammer’s adaptation of the first Quatermass serial (that argument led to the creation of X the Unknown as a substitute for a second Quatermass in film in 1956), he was given a chance to write the first draft of Quatermass 2 himself, which was then revised by director Val Guest, who had directed both Xperiment and the other 1957 Nigel Kneale adaptation, The Abominable Snowman. Kneale was so pleased with the resulting movie that, when he gained controlling rights to it, he proceeded to remove it from circulation.

Watching both versions of this, it’s difficult to really agree with Kneale’s position—Hammer’s version of Quatermass II is a thoughtfully condensed version of the serial, and even Brian Donlevy returning to play Quatermass (which one of the things that Kneale disagreed with most vociferously) fits better here than he did in The Quatermass Xperiment. While the movie version of Quatermass and the Pit made over a decade later is a generally good adaptation where you can still feel the missing depth and detail of the extended TV serial, the Quatermass II film captures all the atmosphere and deliberate storytelling without much compromise, and in some ways the story is even enhanced thanks to the upped budget. Importantly, the themes that Kneale imbued in that story are fully maintained, and with Guest’s direction, often intensified.

All of the Quatermass stories deal with a loss of human agency due to the machinations of cosmic horrors—the first one featured a near-mindless extraterrestrial organism that altered a man inside and out, and Quatermass and the Pit showed human evolution manipulated by a self-destructive alien civilization in the distant past. By comparison, Quatermass II feels almost normal, as a variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers paranoia; the TV serial came after Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers but preceded the film version, a case of parallel thought reflecting the fears in the air in the mid-1950s of secret subversive plots and the battle between free will and conformity. What this version of that story emphasizes is the terrifying speed in which the outside influence seeds itself into positions of power, and how the machinations of our higher offices seem almost tailor-made to shield this invasion from the public eye. There is a specific set of very British observations and ironies animating Kneale’s writing, leading to something that is relatively more grounded than the other two Quatermass stories and their broader existential anxieties, while still suggesting that a malignant, inhuman universe can suddenly assert control over us.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation sought to continue and improve upon the naturalism seen in the work of his mentor Willis O’Brien, transforming fantastical ideas into living, breathing things, and demonstrating the new dimension film can bring to the collective imagination. There did come a point, though, where it no longer seemed like a creatively fulfilling challenge to animate colossal, city-wrecking creatures in movies that were, in truth, slight variations of each other (he had worked on at least four of them by 1957, if you include Mighty Joe Young)—and to really move into a new phase, Harryhausen and his producer partner Charles H. Schneer pivoted to fantasy films starting with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad in 1958, leaving behind the concerns of the age for a realm of pure story. No longer would Harryhausen be stuck contrasting his giant beasts with the concrete canyons of the modern world, but working in a wider variety of classical settings—and more than that, he was given the opportunity to apply his animation talent not just to the lumbering mutant animals and extraterrestrials that populated the fifties creature feature boom, but to the magical, implausible monsters found across legends and mythologies. Here, finally, was a new and rewarding challenge: bringing naturalism to the unnatural.

It was likely inevitable that Harryhausen would work on a story from Greek mythology, a setting in dire need of some technical craft after years of cheap Italian sword-and-sandal films. For fans of monsters of all shapes and sizes, those tales are among the inescapable urtexts, a boundless fount of unearthly creatures diverse in appearance and abilities, inexorably attached to the stories of great heroes that have influenced adventure stories across history. If any monsters could be said to be eternally iconic, the ones from these myth are at the top of the list, and to bring them to life on film would be a defining achievement for any monster maker. Jason and the Argonauts, the first (but not last) of Harryhausen’s Greek myth movies, ranks highly in his filmography both for its sense of wonder and its authenticity, conjuring the world as described in those stories on screen and populating it with larger-than-life figures.

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.

Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Consider this: an early sixties Roger Corman monster movie spoof made in three days is regularly recreated in high schools across North America. This is but one result of the unexpected cultural nexus point that is Little Shop of Horrors, a previous site subject transformed into an off-Broadway musical in 1982 and then adapted into a new film in 1986. These roots are long and deep: both versions were produced by David Geffen, and written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, whose work here would get them the job of reinventing Disney’s animated musicals starting with The Little Mermaid; meanwhile, the film attracted the directing talent of Jim Henson’s (sometimes literal) right hand man Frank Oz, who brought a team of Muppets-trained effects team (including the design work of Lyle Conway, a veteran of films like The Dark Crystal) to give new cinematic life to the stage musical’s central charismatic flora. It really does feel like a decade’s worth of legendary figures in the entertainment industry came out to produce this—which, again, is based on a low budget monster movie.

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.

“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.

“Corpus Earthling” (S1E9)

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This was a potential side project I alluded to all the way back when I first wrote about “The Architects of Fear” from the original 1963-65 run of The Outer Limits, but it’s finally here! For the next few months, I’ll be writing a monthly post about more notable episodes of the series. Outer Limits is a historically significant piece of television Sci-Fi, and a cornerstone of sixties monster fandom, but as “Architects” proved, it’s also a series with sophisticated writing and filmmaking that still holds up to modern scrutiny. Sixty years later, these stories remain interesting in a variety of ways, as we will see.

In my post about the 1957 film The Monolith Monsters, I posited that as a particular apex of fifties paranoid Sci-Fi, presenting a universe where even rocks from outer space were an imminent danger to all of mankind. In that story, the extraterrestrial menace isn’t even a living thing, but a series of destructive chain chemical reactions—but here on November 18^th, 1963 (giving this the dubious honour of being the last episode of the series to air before the assassination of John F. Kennedy), we are presented with alien rocks that are not just alive, but planning sinister things. Both the opening and closing monologues emphasize the ubiquity of these rocks, and the countless eons of not just Earth history but intergalactic history that they represent, specifically to jar you with the revelation that they are not what they seem. This, of course, plays on that all-encompassing sense of paranoia that I mentioned, the attitude that enemies are everywhere, but the surprising thing about “Corpus Earthling” (loosely based on a novel by Louis Charbonneau, with the teleplay by Orin Borstein) is how much it focuses on that sense of paranoia, and what it does to the mental state of a human being.