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.”
Sometimes, a movie is just a vehicle for a cool monster idea you had—it’s a time-honoured tradition, really, maybe as old as the genre itself, and it became even more noticeable when superstar effects and make-up people started getting the clout to direct their own movies (is it not what Zeiramor Pumpkinhead was, ultimately?) For as highbrow as I like to position myself on this, a site about monsters, I also enjoy just seeing a neat monster concept in action, even it doesn’t without go for any deep commentary on the world from which the monster emerged (not that it won’t stop me from trying to mine for it.) In the end, we are all fans of monster movies because we like the monsters themselves, with everything else just adding some additional spice to the proceedings. The risk in that proposal is that, with everything else in the story primarily serving as a conduit for the monster ideas, the execution of that monster better be there, and that monster better be something truly out there and original, because you have nothing else to latch on to. The independently-made Splinter is an example of that sort of movie, and thankfully, it succeeds in both the originality and execution of its monster, making for a swift, raw horror experience.
The theme for this week’s double feature turned out to be “monsters that suck.”
If there’s one thing I’m learning from watching so many of these British horror films from the fifties and sixties, it’s that they all seem to gradually escalate in terms of luridness—that was one of the things that distinguished Hammer’s output (such as previous subject X the Unknown), and other studios seemed to take on the challenge of pushing the shock value further. 1966 is pretty late in the game for this type of movie, but Planet Films still lived up to the lineage of UK creature features with Island of Terror, which was directed by genre pioneer Terence Fisher, who had also directed Hammer’s classic Gothic re-imaginings of Frankenstein and Dracula, as well as a few Sci-Fi flicks for good measure (the credits also inform us that the “Costume Artiste” is named Bunty.) Being a British horror movie made in this time period, it also features Peter Cushing in a starring role as a scientist (I’d imagine Fisher was probably among his most frequent collaborators)—or, I guess in this case, a medical doctor. Close enough! You might have a pretty good idea of how the story of this movie goes, but the imagery and tone of it will still find ways to throw you for a loop.
English author John Wyndham wrote numerous highly influential Science Fiction novels in the fifties, including the likes of The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, and The Midwich Cuckoos (source of the multiple Village of the Damned films)—but The Day of the Triffids, originally published in 1951, remains singular. Yes, it’s foundational to the post-apocalypse subgenre, providing some early and potent imagery of decaying social cohesion and a major city turned into a hollowed-out wasteland, but what really struck me was how the background of the story combines many contemporary-at-the-time fears: the dangers posed by arms race secrecy, unchecked scientific experimentation (for mostly economic purposes), and ecological distortion, all becoming a volatile chemical combination that eventually blows up in the face of the entire civilization. Unique among killer plants, the triffids are far more frightening for the way they become the ultimate invasive species, and how they’re not even the most immediate threat the surviving humans have to deal with—but they’re always there, spreading, and it’s only deep into the novel (and in the successful adaptations of it) that the survivors realize just what they’ve wrought upon themselves.
We have now entered It Month, where every post will be about its across the ages. Please be forewarned, though, that this does not include Cousin Itt, because it’s an Itt and not an it. Got it?
I wrote about Theodore Sturgeon’s “Killdozer!” two-and-a-half years ago, but as I mentioned in that post, it’s not the only influential monster story he wrote during his early years, but it is the only one with a title on the level of “Killdozer!” On the other hand, while “Killdozer!” has many singular fixations in the history of monster stories, Sturgeon’s 1940 short story “It” (starting the trend of excitable one-word titles that separate his work from the rest) has been imitated, or outright plagiarized, since it debuted—it is the story that introduced the world to the idea of an animate mass of vegetable matter stalking the wilderness, an idea that seems so obvious that you’d think it’d been around for all of recorded literary history. But it was in fact one of Sturgeon’s many innovations, and while the story itself is simpler than than much of his later oeuvre, it’s also one with a selection of strange ideas that raise it up past a basic pulp horror story, including giving us the perspective of the monster “It”self.
The Japanese studio Shochiku, one of the oldest of all of the country’s major movie makers, went on a bit of a Sci-Fi/horror streak in the late sixties—last year, I wrote about their giant monster movie The X From Outer Space, which was the first in that loosely related group of films. Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell followed the next year, and while The X is a clear attempt to emulate Toho’s Godzilla movies (with its own idiosyncrasies, to be fair), part me wonders if this movie is taking some cues from another Toho creature feature: Matango. Much like that movie, Goke focuses on a group of stranded survivors, pulled from all over modern Japanese (and international) society, whose cooperation frays at the seams while a supernatural threat looms in the background—it’s also filled with psychedelic imagery and an overwhelming sense of bleakness and despair, reflected in the unnatural colour choices used for the environments. Unfortunately for Goke, very little in it is as visually interesting as Matango’s lushly unnerving sets—but, thankfully, it makes up for it in the sheer brazen energy of its themes and its extremely harsh condemnation of the State of Things in the late sixties. Subtlety of any kind has no place here, and what is created is a uniquely feverish fusion of alien vampire terror and utter cynicism.
I don’t see any patterns in my choice of review subjects this month. Where did you get an idea like that?
Hammer’s run of Sci-Fi movies began in 1955 with their adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment, and they apparently wanted an immediate follow-up, which Kneale decided not to participate in (the next Quatermass movie would be released in 1957.) So, rather than continuing the exploits of master scientist Bernard Quatermass, they got together their usual gang (including writer Jimmy Sangster, who also scripted many of Hammer’s Gothic horror movies) and made up their own master scientist with a bizarre science mystery to solve (and maybe there was blackjack thrown in as well), which is what gave us X the Unknown. Despite kinda being a bootleg appropriation of Kneale’s influential SF/horror hybrids, X does capably capture a bit of the cosmic existentialism that makes productions like Quatermass (or even The Abominable Snowman, another movie based on a Kneale TV production) resonate—the idea of a unknowable, and possibly hostile, universe being unleashed upon us by pure happenstance. Its featured menace, a blob of radioactive mud that surprisingly predates The Blob, skirts the line of plausibility just enough that you really get the sense of it as a disaster unfolding, and the movie’s violence approaches the grossness of Caltikiwithout quite getting there, but is impressive nonetheless.
Here we are at the end of a month of Cormania, so it’s fitting to talk about what is maybe the quintessential Roger Corman monster movie. The Little Shop of Horrors checks all the boxes: it’s a low-budget dark comedy with an unusual premise, shot in under three days, starring a combination of Corman regulars and at least one rising star. It’s such a direct follow-up to Corman’s previous comedy-horror movie A Bucket of Blood that it reused the same sets just before they were supposed to be torn down. It embodies most of what Corman has been known for in the black-and-white movie days—and is basically a fount of film history trivia because of that—but it’s also one of those weirdly influential movies that people often forget about (beyond the fact that it later inspired a beloved stage/movie musical), which is the kind of thing I really like to dig into. Every depiction of a monster plant in media is in the shadow of this movie, which is not the kind of legacy that gets crowed about much, but it’s entirely true—you don’t get Piranha Plants in Super Mario Bros. without Audrey Jr.’s voracious, home-made interpretation of a Venus flytrap. As with Corman’s other horror-themed comedies, however, a ridiculous monster may be the draw, but it exists in an equally ridiculous world filled with equally ridiculous people, and the performances of those ridiculous people are what elevate this movie and kept it in circulation among cult filmgoers.
This one is belatedly tying into a few of my previous themes: another in the “non-animalmonsters” series, the final entry in the Tubi overview (consider it a bonus since they took Rubberoff 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 Matangowas technically the first one of those.) I’d been planning to do this one for a while, and we already passed its 35th 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.
Back in January, I wrote about the film Hardware, which in 1990 had become enough of a cult hit to make Hollywood interested in working with director Richard Stanley. This ultimately led to the debacle that was 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (featuring Marlon Brando in white makeup wearing an ice bucket on his head), an experience so unpleasant for Stanley (before he was replaced as director by John Frankenheimer) that he ended up abandoning the mainstream film industry for decades. That story, and whole lot more, was told in the 2014 documentary Lost Soul, which you should definitely watch, and may possibly still be on Tubi as you read this. This past year saw his return to directing a non-short/documentary film, and it just so happens to be a very Creature Compatible® one at that, so for the first time in a while we’re going to be taking a look at contemporary material (and the next visit to modern times may be sooner than you think!), as well as our first foray into the career of a master of weird, mind-bending fiction that makes you question the nature of reality: Nicolas Cage. Also Lovecraft, I guess.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 