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.

War of the Monsters

All the way back in my post about King of the Monsters, I briefly mentioned the 2003 Playstation 2 title War of the Monsters, a game stomping the same grounds as SNK’s monster wrestling dust-up, but separated by an ocean and a decade’s worth of technological development in video games. I’ve stressed it over and over again that giant monsters are a topic that has been woefully underrepresented in the video game sphere—a situation that annoyingly does not right itself in the time between posts where I talk about it (although that GigaBash game from last year might be worth looking at)—and for the longest time, War of the Monsters was probably the highest profile entry, or at the least the highest profile one that didn’t have Godzilla’s name plastered on the box. It had the pedigree of being a first-party Playstation game released during the PS2’s unstoppable reign as the top console, and was developed by Incog Inc. (formerly the much more sensibly-named Incognito Studios), a company formed by the lead developers of Sony’s popular Twisted Metal series, alongside Sony’s stalwart Santa Monica Studio—the “original concept” was provided by Twisted Metal and God of War lead David Jaffe, back when he made video games instead of embarrassing Youtube videos.

There is an obvious logic to getting some the leading minds behind the car combat genre to tackle a giant monster game—they are both, after all, concepts that revolve around massive property damage, and in terms of raw tech, Incog could probably carry over the physics engine that powered the PS2 Twisted Metal entry that released a year-and-a-half earlier. You can feel the car combat roots in the basic feel of War of the Monsters, the way it moves and the way it’s structured, although it also attempts to go back to Twisted Metal‘s origins in the fighting game genre in a more direct manner, with hand-to-hand combat rather than a back-and-forth bombardment of projectiles (although there’s plenty of projectiles in this as well). It’s easy to see that this game is making a genuine attempt to be both a appealing competitive smash-em-up and a loving homage to the giant monster movie genre—in some ways, it represents the last hurrah for a specific view of creature features, and a last ditch effort to take what King of the Monsters was trying to do and get it “right.”

“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.

The Monolith Monsters (1957)

This movie poses a real conundrum: does something have to be alive to be considered a monster? In this case, the filmmakers obviously don’t think so, because they put “monster” in the title—but make no mistake, the titular Monolith Monsters are simply space rocks whose reign of terror is caused by chemical reactions, an inanimate cycle of cause-and-effect. In that way, they’re probably closer to a natural disaster than a monster. Still, it was 1957, and I imagine that in the minds of the bigwigs at Universal (because yes, The Monolith Monsters should technically be part of the same Universal Monsters canon as Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the fifties Sci-Fi inflected counterparts like The Creature From The Black Lagoon) it was a lot easier to sell a movie with “monster” in the title to the kids who went to see Tarantula and The Deadly Mantis than if it were “just” a science fiction disaster movie. So, these rocks became monsters.

Part of the reason I started writing these reviews in the first place was to highlight creature features that fell outside the norm, so this that is about giant rocks fits right into it. How the rocks operate and how the story progresses is really not that different from the movies featuring flesh-and-blood (or mechanical, I guess) monsters, and applying those tropes to something outside the usual alien invader scenario does provide some interesting new ways to look at them. For example: the space-themed paranoia that is a constant in so many of these genre movies in the fifties being projected onto something as seemingly simple as minerals from a meteorite indicates to us that anything that comes from outside our planet, be it animal, vegetable, or mineral, is potentially a world-ending intruder. This is so pessimistic as to be outright existential, imagining a universe so hostile that even rocks are to be feared, and so The Monolith Monsters intentionally or unintentionally brings that particular recurring Cold War era theme to its peak intensity.