Prophecy (1979)

The Hollywood fascination with eco-horror seemed to diminish significantly by the end of the seventies, probably when all the leftover moralism from the sixties had finally faded and the culture seemed perfectly fine with doing everything without a social conscience, from movie-making to voting. It probably didn’t help that many of the environmentally-minded movies made that decade were quite bad, and were made to look even worse when a new wave of thrillers in the latter half of the decade like Jaws, Alien, and Halloween were actually, you know, good. The thing is, Hollywood and environmentalism were never really a good mix, because it’s a subject too nuanced and important to be properly conveyed by the average broad, dumb motion picture experience, and the need to make a movie a movie often superseded even the best of intentions. This also had the additional effect of cheapening genuine environmental concerns, or making them look hyperbolic or shrill, any reality or humanity sacrificed for blunt sermonizing and melodrama.

All of those things apply to 1979’s Prophecy, a film that makes a interesting contrast to Frogs, a similar film from earlier in the decade. Frogs was pure B-movie schlock, while Prophecy is ostensibly a big studio picture by a big name director (John Frankenheimer, as far away from his Manchurian Candidate heyday as he was from his Island of Doctor Moreau nadir)—in reality, Prophecy being a Paramount movie just means it has a few slightly bigger-named actors, some better camerawork, and an orchestral score. It’s certainly not any smarter than Frogs, though it’s a lot slower, and also doesn’t have the excuse of being an animal attack movie made in a pre-Jaws world. It’s almost fascinating how out of step this movie feels with its times, especially when you consider that Alien premiered just one month prior—it was obsolete before the first reel started.

Monster Multimedia: Maggots: The Record

Time to be honest: I’m only familiar with the bizarre career of punk/metal vocalist Wendy O. Williams because her name is referenced in the Mario series (thank you, late eighties American localizers and your random pop culture pulls.) In general, I don’t go out of my to check out the kind of high-octane guitar + screaming music that Williams specialized in, but there is something sort of liberating about being that loud, angry, and abrasive. Music so unadorned and designed to rattle your brain into submission can be pretty fun, and it can also get a point across pretty plainly—when there is a point, at least (with shock rock, it’s never a guarantee that it means anything other than “Look at me! Look at me!”) Williams and her band the Plasmatics’ 1987 release Maggots: The Record (so we don’t confuse it with any of the other maggot-based entertainment that was all over the place at the time) does seem to have a point—an extremely bleak point—when it’s not just going out of its way to be gross.

Bagi, The Monster of Mighty Nature (1984)

The one thing that I find invariably fascinating whenever I take in the work of Osamu “God of Manga” Tezuka (one of the most respected and influential cartoonists of all time, if you didn’t know) is that it always comes off as his work, no matter what the subject matter is. He was inspired by the style of Disney and other American cartoons, adapted it to his own ends (he literally wrote the book on making comics), and in his five-decade-long career jumped from genre to genre (inventing a few along the way) and audience to audience (making kids comics and comics for adults, back and forth)—but his creations still maintained all the very cartoony elements that he utilized in, say, Astro Boy in the fifties and sixties. Look at most of his “serious” comics or animation projects (which includes philosophical Sci-Fi and fantasy, historical fiction, psychological thrillers, and erotica), you’ll still find highly exaggerated or cute characters in major recurring roles, or comical sequences right out of a Twenties Mickey Mouse short—it completely boggles the tone, but at the same time I have to admire the commitment. Tezuka wants to make stories with very important or personal themes (and he succeeds at just as much as he fails, given his voluminous output), but he never wants them to not be cartoons at their heart.

Frogs (1972)

Let’s try something fun: a theme month! April’s batch of entries will all be examples of eco-horror, a subgenre I find fascinating, not just as someone interested in nature (and how it’s depicted in fiction), but as someone who is also interested in examining the ups and downs of storytelling trends. There are specific periods in time when eco-horror seemed to proliferate in movies especially (although it seems like they haven’t been as prominent in recent years for whatever reason), and one of those periods is represented in this first entry…

One of the lasting legacies of the counter-cultural movements of the sixties was the creation of modern environmentalism, which became one of the more prominent offshoots in the seventies and beyond as the free love types mostly stuck to getting stoned and selling ice cream. Although the movement took close to a decade to have some mainstream influence (following its first major event, the publication of Rachel Carson’s expose Silent Spring), there did seem to be an attempt by the mainstream to acknowledge or address the issues they brought up, as you saw the establishment of the EPA and the creation of Earth Day—but as was the style of the time, the supposed good vibes masked a widely held apocalyptic belief that modern society was on the edge of collapse. The environment and the human abuse of it became yet another thing to be afraid of, and another thing for grody schlock to exploit—thus we have the creation of eco-horror, a genre that seemed to be at its peak in the seventies. This new wave of creature features benefited from a much more intimate scale than their B-movie predecessors: compared even to monsters created by nuclear power (which was still a cultural fear at the time, mind you), monsters created by everyday pollution seem a lot closer to home. It’s especially true when the monsters aren’t even “monsters”, but everyday organisms who are simply pissed.