The potential pitfall of all those self-aware, meta-referencing pieces of genre entertainment—a particular specialty of the nineties—is a sense of having your cake and eating it: they point out all the tropes and cliches while actively using them, without necessarily demonstrating any original or truly subversive ideas of their own. The Faculty aims for that style of storytelling, but has at least one new-ish angle up its sleeve: it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers set in a high school, leading to all sorts of new metaphorical possibilities for a well-worn concept. Of course, because of the style of writing, it’s a version of that concept where characters directly talk about Jack Finney’s original Body Snatchers story as well as Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, signposting all of those metaphorical possibilities before you even get a chance to really take them in. That part of the movie was, not surprisingly, the contribution of Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who was assigned by the supervillains at Miramax to revamp a script by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel, with the directorial role given to Robert Rodriguez, coming off of From Dusk Till Dawn and his support work on Mimic. As aggressively 1998 as any movie could be, this does make some honest attempts to straddle the snarky hipness of the meta dialogue with a nominally serious Sci-Fi horror take on teenage alienation.
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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 18th, 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.
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.
There are innumerable places out there recounting the long and complicated history of Doctor Who (which will be celebrating its sixtieth anniversary next year), its place within the history of Science Fiction television, its importance to the BBC and UK TV in general, and its dedicated fandom. All of that has already been thoroughly interrogated, and by people far more knowledgeable than me.
So, instead, let’s talk about monsters.
As the old story goes, when the series was being developed in the early sixties, the top brass at the BBC explicitly told the writers to avoid stories about “bug-eyed monsters.” However, the second serial ready to be produced completely ignored this edict, and due to a lack of other suitable scripts, it went ahead—and unfortunately for the anti-bug-eyed-monster producers, the monsters introduced in that second serial were the Daleks, who became immediate pop culture icons in the UK, complete with novelty Christmas records. The show’s time and space-traversing format allowed the stories to theoretically go anyway and do anything, but from that point forward that anywhere often involved some kind of alien monster.
Unlike the other influential creature TV series I’ve written about from around the same time period, like The Outer Limitsand Ultraman, there was never a requirement for a Doctor Who story to include a monster, and there are many that don’t—but the monsters in that series have become such a tradition (almost certainly because of the popularity of the Daleks, due as much to the distinctive visuals invented by production designer David Cusick as it was to the scripts by Terry Nation, although it was the latter who got the copyright) that the series, from the original 1963-1989 run or the current one that began in 2005, has never veered away from them. With a basic concept that gives them a near endless choice of settings and storylines, the possibilities for just what kind of monsters can show up are equally as endless, which has led to a panoply of highly imaginative monsters, some of them becoming recurring presences on the show like the Daleks did, while others only appeared once, but may still have left an impression. As in many classic monster movies, the creativity on display in the stories and monsters is crucial because the limited budget of a BBC production means that the special effects, back then and today, are never going to be impressive or believable, so they have to find other ways to engage, or terrify, the audience.
The original series reached its peak popularity in the mid-seventies, after the starring role of the Doctor was given to Tom Baker (whose pre-Doctor career we briefly touched on in the post about The Mutations—although the performance that got him the job was his turn as the villain in the Ray Harryhausen effects vehicle The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, another monster connection), the fourth actor to take the part, who brought a particular laid-back quirkiness to a role that had been defined from the beginning by eccentricity. Due to the length of his tenure (seven years, the longest any actor has played the Doctor) and the fact that his were the first episodes to air on US TV, Baker ended up becoming the most well-known lead for many years (it sounds like he was aware of this at the time, too, leading to some notoriously diva-ish behaviour on set.) His second ever storyline, the four-episode “The Ark in Space”, aired from January to February 1975, and is a fan favourite—it’s also an important one for the history of the show and its approach to monsters, signalling a new direction that has cast a long shadow over the entire series.
So, how exactly did we get a found footage monster movie from the director of Rain Man? According to the backstory, Barry Levinson was tasked with directing a documentary about the ecological problems of Chesapeake Bay, but not unlike the creatures at the heart of The Bay, the project mutated into something else entirely. It was 2012, right in the middle of the much-groused-about-at-the-time trend of found footage horror movies mostly instigated by Paranormal Activity (the producer of those movies, Jason Blum, is also a producer on this one), as well as what still felt like the early days of the mass adoption of camera-equipped smartphones—a perfect confluence of trends that inspired the idea of watching a disaster unfold from personal and media video footage, a collage of reactions and non-reactions from normal citizens, experts, and people in places of authority. The verisimilitude offered by this style of film might even bolster the real environmental issues that inspired the far more gory events in the movie! One could hope!
Of course, the other obvious inspiration for this movie comes from a place I’m sure we’ve all been to: finding out some random (maybe true?) fact on the Internet, especially about weird nature stuff. I imagine that most people only recently learned about Cymothoa Exigua, also known as the tongue-eating louse, probably from some listicle containing the same few photos of that oceanic isopod and its peculiar form of parasitism, where it sucks the blood from the tongues of fish until they shrivel up and fall off, and then replaces the tongue in the fish’s mouth. It’s hard to blame some writer for seeing those images and thinking “now, there’s a movie!”
Last year, I said that hospitals were effective and underutilized settings for monster stories—and for reasons both similar and different, I think the same about farms. Like hospitals, farms are a place where the most biological aspects of life are no longer hidden, all the gross internals and externals of the animal (human or other) made part of everyday existence—the difference is that while the gleaming, artificial walls and stainless steel implements of the hospital contrast the blood and sickness in between those walls, a farm by its nature (even the most systematized, industrial version) has to wallow in the mud and dust-encrusted world. You’re never far away from dripping fluids, disease, injury, and death. The Irish horror film Isolation plays up the grotty visuals of the farm in many ways—a desolate blue-gray blankets the world, the surrounding land seems vast and shadowy, living spaces are modest and unkempt, animals exist in either lonely spaces or crowd together anxiously in their pens, and the camera peers at human activity from down below or through slats, showcasing every dark corner of the barns and sheds. If one were to choose any place to make a new variation on The Thing—which Isolation very much is—a farm is certainly a good place to go.
Just as a heads up, the next few posts in this series will be insect-themed. Now, you may be asking, “If you’re writing about insects, then why are you reviewing a movie called Blue Monkey?”; well, smart-ass, I’ll have you know that the movie Blue Monkey features absolutely no monkeys, let alone blue ones, but does have multiple giant mutant insects. The title is a non-sequitur likely aimed at attracting the attention of video store patrons* (although it’s based on actual dialogue from the movie), and it also has the much more appropriate, but also much more boring, alternate title Insect! In a battle between something nonsensical and potentially misleading and something accurate but plain, I know what I prefer.
This one hits close to home, in that it is very, very Canadian, no matter what it does to make you think otherwise (including getting actors to speak with shifting, unidentifiable accents.) Although made outside the era when con artist filmmakers produced low budget genre films in the Great White North as a tax shelter, this is still in the spirit of the low budget Canuxploitation, answering the success of Aliens the previous year with a cost-efficient movie about giant mutant bugs in a hospital, which is an underutilized setting for a monster movie, complete with minor body horror. The director is William Fruet, an old hand at the low budget horror game who otherwise has had a long, varied career in the Canadian film industry, and after making movies like Blue Monkey in the eighties he would eventually go on to direct 27 episodes of the Goosebumps TV series. Honestly, you could look at this as a movie-length episode of Goosebumps aimed at adults—and, in that light, it’s not a disagreeable bit of schlock.
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.
For our third and final Shudder selection, I thought I’d go into something that seemed to more accurately represent the kind of movie that makes most of the service’s offerings—or so I thought. Yes, Brain Damage is a gory horror comedy complete with an ethereal synth soundtrack, but it’s also so odd as to defy any attempt to give it a high concept label—it simply wouldn’t accurately describe the experience here. This is a movie that starts at an eleven and just keeps going from there. It is to eighties horror comedy what Super Inframanis to whatever genre Super Inframan is supposed to be.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 