When Monsters Ooze!

Before I launch into a month-long celebration of the works of the "Father of the Blob" it might be salient to take some time and look at the long history of blob-like monsters. We'll start with the debut issue the esteemed Weird Tales from over one hundred years ago in 1923 which showcased as its first cover feature "Ooze" by Anthony Melville Rud. 

"Ooze" was apparently a favorite story of H.P. Lovecraft, and I can see why. The structure of the story is very much Lovecraftian, in that we get the information in a backhanded fashion. The primary participants are either missing and presumed dead or insane. And it's left to a family friend to unravel the mystery of what lies behind the hastily erected wall around the demolished house deep in the mysterious and rather nasty swamp. 

Apparently, a scientist found a way to grow an amoeba beyond microscopic levels and things got out of hand, almost quite literally. The locals involved in building the wall aren't talking and it's only when he finds a singularly drunken inhabitant that he's able to decipher the gruesome tale. I rather enjoyed reading it again. It's available online at this weird link. 

On a side note, the story "Ooze" puts in mind of Marvel's classic monster comic tale "Sporr, the Thing that Could Not Die!" from the pages of Tales of Suspense in 1960. Sporr seems a little bit more aware of its surroundings and is attracted to sugar, whereas the Ooze is just hungry for meat. 

I love the Quatermass stories. I didn't always know about them, and when I did learn of them there was little practical way to access them. But in recent years both the original BBC serials and the feature film versions have become available. The first of the series is The Quatermass Xperiment, which was dubbed The Creeping Unknown in its American feature length release and it compresses the story of a three or so hour serial into a brisk hour and a half or so. In this one case we do not have the original serial which did survive the rigors of time and disdain.

The creator of Quatermass and writer Nigel Kneale posited three methods that the Earth might encounter extraterrestrials -- we find them, they find us, they've always been here. In the three main Quatermass yarns he explores each of these scenarios. With The Creeping Unknown he explores what happens when man ventures into space and brings home something dangerous.

Of course Quatermass refers to Dr. Quatermass, the leader of a rocket group dedicated to getting mankind off the planet and into space. To that end of course dangerous missions are undertaken and one such mission ends tragically when the rocket returns to Earth in a farmer's field. The only survivor, in fact the only man aboard the vessel is overcome with some sort of infection which is steadily stealing his mind and transforming his body as it has more swiftly done to his compatriots.

The Creeping Unknown is on one level a classic science fiction monster movie with an eventual giant creature threatening the population. On a second level it's also a horror film following the slow and inevitable destruction of one man's self as he is transformed. What makes this transformation so potent in many respects is that the man himself never speaks but only communicates through posture and through his eyes the desperation.

It's well documented that Nigel Kneale's opinion of Brian Donlevy, the American selected to portray Quatermass, is quite low. It's equally documented that Val Guest, the director of the cinematic verson of the story found Donleavy with his abrupt surly attitude to be an excellent choice. The disagreeable combative nature of Quatermass reminds me of Arthur Conan Doyle's second great creation Professor Challenger, the often agitated protagonist of The Lost World and The Poison Belt among other tales.. I'm always impressed with the professional craftsmanship of British monster movies and always know when I'm watching one the story will make sense.

X the Unknown was to have been the sequel to The Creeping Unknown, but Nigel Kneale refused to allow Hammer to use the Quatermass names, so Jimmy Sangster and the gang at Hammer just finagled it a bit, dropped the Quatermass references and produced a nifty little monster movie. This time the menace erupts from inside the Earth itself. Dean Jagger is our protagonist, a Quatermass-like scientist with a less grumpy attitude. Dean Jagger as the resident scientist who leads the defense against the strange enemy is good deal less histrionic than he might have been if he were portraying Quatermass. 

 

X the Unknown hits all the marks. It's a slow build to a larger menace. We follow a group of soldiers which include a very young Antony Newly as the run up against a strange radioactive enigma. Michael Ripper is on hand as the Sergeant barking orders in fine fashion. After a little boy dies, Dr. Adam Royston (Jagger) gets involved. He's soon assisted by Leo McKern as "Mac" McGill a cop from London and Peter Elliot the son of the stuffy project director. This critter rises from the depths of the Earth seeking sources of radiation. Anyone caught between the creature and its radioactive goal gets burned, sometimes even melted. 

This is a movie in which I rather liked all the characters more or less and it was rare for the story to pick a victim and make the deserving of their demise The deaths of true innocents always elevates the concern of the viewer. A dandy flicker indeed. 

I'm not sure when my consciousness was properly invaded by knowledge of Caltiki The Immortal Monster, but it hasn 't been all that long. This is a 1959 Italian black and white movie set in Mexico and featuring one of the more intriguing of the amorphous monsters which were a bit popular at the time.

The trend began with The Quatermass Xperiment  which had a oozing monster come down from space to threaten mankind by absorbing many individuals before getting fried with electricity. It continued with X the Unknown which had a creature bubble up from beneath the Earth to irradiate and kill many a man before being sent packing. 

This movie feels amazingly like a filmed version of one of Marvel's monster stories from its heyday. An ancient Mayan site is being explored and a mysterious pool is found and before you can say "Run" a giant monster is up and oozing all over everyone. The "heroes" make a getaway but not before getting a sample. One of the team is killed outright, another is infected and goes mad becoming a dangerous murderer, while the third member tries to save himself and his buxom wife from the crazy guy and the monsters at the same time. Innocent bystanders are killed and many toy tanks and trucks are sacrificed to end the threat. If you like monster movies I cannot see how you cannot like this one. It's got ancient menace, radioactive monsters, crazed maniacal killers, and a big old finale with tanks and guns and havoc galore. 

Thanks to TCM I discovered viewed four of the five "Gamma-1" movies. The best of these, and technically not really part of the series I guess is The Green Slime, a 1968 Japanese sci-fi effort starring Robert Horton and Richard Jaeckel. The Gamma-1 series was produced in Italy by Antonio Margheriti under the named "Anthony Dawson". I was first attracted to this oddball series when I discovered that Batman co-creator Bill Finger had a hand in the scripting of some of these. The movies are strictly low-budget, but with some surprisingly interesting special effects in places (the jet cars are impractical but pretty cool). 

The four movies - Wild, Wild Planet, Battle of the Planets, Battle Between the Planets, and Snow Devils - were all produced at the same time and were prepared for television presentation in the United States. All the movies feature many of the same actors and some the characters as the Earth is assaulted by various alien threats. For examples, four-armed androids abduct humans a madman seeking a perfect race, gaseous aliens occupy the forms of humans and link them in a hive mind, and the legend of the Yeti is inspired by aliens seeking to alter Earth's climate to suit themselves.

Part of the same scenario, though produced in Japan by the Toei Company for MGM, The Green Slime is a great improvement on its predecessors with brisk pacing, much more deliberate and focused acting, and a goofy if dangerous alien threat. The Earth is threatened by an oncoming asteroid which threat must be met by Jack Rankin (Robert Horton) and Vince Elliot (Richard Jaeckel), two former partners who have had a falling out over leadership styles and the obligatory women, a sexy doctor played by Luciana Paluzzi. They work together and use the resources of "Gamma-3" to stop the asteroid, but the space station is then overrun by a green slimy life form which proves exceedingly dangerous and damned difficult to remove.

This movie is helped by really excellent pacing throughout, and an actual back story of animus between the two leads which gives some vigor to the proceedings. The Toei special effects are dandy and up to the task of telling the story effectively, and while the monsters themselves are pretty hilarious, they nonetheless are pretty lethal too. The Green Slime is a surprisingly effective movie. 

I close with Larry Cohen's The Stuff seems to be a movie that wants to hit a number of the same notes as the The Blob, but with perhaps a bit more pointed humor and a little sharper satire. The Blob came from outer space, but the 1980's Stuff seems to come from the depths of the Earth itself.

An old man finds a bit of the Stuff in a mine and finds the white goo tastes surprisingly good. We cut forward many months and discover that The Stuff is a popular food product which is taking the nation, if not the world by storm. We are treated to some well-designed ads for The Stuff and then we meet our hero, an industrial spy with a wild wit and perverse attitude. (To put this movie within a very narrow time frame of pop culture awareness, Clara Peller of "Where's the Beef?" fame has an exceedingly appropriate cameo. )He quickly finds that this Stuff is something which has a profound effect on people, even to the point of making them not people anymore. Those who have come under its spell fight mightily to keep it safe and to keep its secret.

The only problem with this movie is that its got some dissonance in tone, with some characters played too broadly to fit in with the overall scheme of biting satire. But that aside, the movie still lands many punches not the least of which is how modern culture is addictive to pleasure at its core and all too susceptible to the whims of modern marketing.

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The Abominable Snowman Of The Himalayas!

I don't remember when it was exactly during my boyhood, but some Halloween or other during one of those luscious all-night film fests they used to have I stayed up, clinging to wakefulness and watched this Hammer movie through. It scared the bejeezus out of me then, and still unsettles me a little today. It plays neatly against expectations, setting up a somewhat chatty and somber story about the usual gaggle of Western types (a hunter, a huckster, a scientist, a sensitive) and throws them up on a mountain to find the elusive myth. Whether they will find anything at all is kept at bay for a good long time, and then only in masterfully controlled bits and pieces.

It turns out the Abominable Snowman is real, but he isn't all that "abominable" after all. These are wisemen of the mountains, incredibly long-lived giants with thoughtful eyes and gentle ways who don't harm people directly, but sadly do act as catalysts that cause men to bring harm to themselves. It's that Val Guest chose consciously to hide the creatures, giving only glimpses that makes them such powerful images in my mind. I've seen scuds of bigfoot and yeti movies, but none are so moving or memorable as this one which shows us almost nothing. Guest knew quite well that my mind could conjure a creature far more awesome than anything possible by special effects of the time. He was right.

 

There is a curious commentary on the DVD, offering up both the comments of both Val Guest the director and Nigel Kneale the writer. It seems that these two have squabbled a bit about this movie in the past, or at least done interviews expressing contrary views. The two are interviewed separately but the interviews are run concurrently. This creates some duplication in information, but does offer up some interesting counterpoints as well. Both men seem to respect one another's talent, or express that anyway, but clearly they differed on how this movie should've worked. Guest defends his decision to keep the creatures off camera and Kneale clearly thinks though it was a brave decision it undermines the final effect. Kneale seems in particular to want to say nicer things about the movie than he has perhaps in the past, and is in the unique position to contrast the film version with the BBC TV version first done. He ultimately says that changes in the film version help the story.

One thing I did learn is that the Himalayas shown in the movie are actually the Pyrenees and finally getting to see the movie in widescreen, it's possible to really enjoy the setting completely. Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker star in this B&W Hammer movie, and they form a neat contrast. Cushing offers a quiet if nimble screen presence while Tucker is bombast personified. The other actors, typical of Hammer films, are solid pros and the movie though a bit stagey in places nonetheless delivers a pointed morality tale of man looking for the unknown, and as most often is the case, finding only the truth about himself.

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Doctor Syn - The Movies!

One of my all-time favorite movies is Dr. Syn alias the Scarecrow.  The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh is the title given to the production when was aired three one-hour episodes on American television. This movie starring Patrick McGoohan in the days after he was a secret agent but before he became a prisoner is a rousing adventure yarn which delighted me as a youngster on The Wonderful World of Disney. The Scarecrow as portrayed by McGoohan actually frightened me and still gives me goosebumps. 

Before the days of VHS and DVD, the way to "own" a film was to buy the novel adaptation and I snapped up the one by Vic Crume for the Disney story. It goes to show how much they changed from Russell Thorndyke's novel that there even needed to be a novel adaptation. The original source for the story wasn't in fact a later Thorndyke novel but a variation of it by William Buchannan. I've never read this version. The gem pictured above is hidden somewhere in the many boxes of books in this house. I despair finding it really, save by accident. 

The story was also adapted into comic book form by Gold Key Comics. They also produced two additional issues with fresh stories. The Scarecrow is given more of a role similar to the novel in this movie and is more of the dashing rogue in the Robin Hood tradition. 

Hammer's 1962 Night Creatures (alternately title Captain Clegg) adapts Thorndyke's original novel (or possibly an earlier film I'll discuss in a moment). 

Hammer was beat out by Disney for rights to the name, but they did a pretty decent job of translating the events of the first novel to the screen. I was underwhelmed by this one when I first saw it, as it's a weaker effort than the classic Disney adaptation, but it is truer to the source material, even though Doctor Syn cannot be called that but is referred to as "Doctor Bliss". He is played rather energetically if more sanely by Peter Cushing. 

The very first adaptation called simply Dr. Syn starring George Arliss from 1937.  It's possible this film served as the inspiration for the later Hammer effort because there are scenes the two share which are not in the novel. Syn is played in this movie by George Arliss, a beloved actor who was approaching seventy. His relative fragility does hurt the movie at times, but overall, he's a worthy if somewhat stiff Syn. The movie underplays Syn's seeming madness and gives the viewer a typically more upbeat ending than does the novel. 

 NOTE: This is a Dojo Revised Classic Post. 

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Lands Of The Lost!

Mankind's fascination with unknown territories is the very stuff of myth and legend and adventure. We are a species not content to live within our established habitats, we have constantly sought out the mysteries of hidden lands and then converted them. if possible, to our use. We even imagine it is our right to do so as the dominant species on this planet, either by dint of a god's imprimatur or

seeming evolutionary superiority. With our globe largely settled now (at least the terrestrial parts) we feel an impulse to push into space or beneath the waves to find yet more "lands of the lost". What we will find in these hidden territories we don't really know, but as often as not thanks to our popular literature we suspect we'll find dinosaurs.

Land of the Lost was a terrifically entertaining television show by Sid and Marty Krofft productions. It hails from those halcyon days of the 1970's, an era much put upon by modern opinion the days. 
the show concerned itself with a family of a father, a son and a daughter who fall into a strange land by a means unexplained and have to not only survive but use their wits and strengths to solve the abounding mysteries so that perhaps one day they can return home. And they do find dinosaurs. It was a very entertaining show in a cascade of Saturday morning fair that had often lost its luster in the 70's. It was also a show that had some fascinating science fiction at its core, a commodity all too common in popular entertainment today but rare and of great price back then.  So look for a Land of the Lost review each Saturday this month. 

Hanna-Barbera got in on this kind of story with Valley of the Dinosaurs. This cartoon series was about yet another family which became stranded in a prehistoric world. Given the freedom of animation and a lighter tone we get a different kind of interaction. Also, the prehistoric people in this one are bit more designed along traditional caveman tropes. There was also a Charlton Comics series developed from this show. 

Another Saturday morning offering about a Stone-Age family was Korg:70,000 B.C. which was live action despite also being a Hanna-Barbera offering. This was a surprisingly relaxed and serious presentation which attempted to show a Neanderthal family dealing with the rigors of their dangerous world. The narration by Burgess Meredith is warm and friendly and does much to make the show enjoyable. Bronson Canyon gets showcased in this TV effort. Charlton Comics produced some dandy work by Pat Boyette in support of his show as well. 

Pellucidar was the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs and a magnificent world it is. It's at the center of the Earth and operates with entirely different physics than does the world we live in here on the surface. David Innes in At The Earth's Core went to Pellucidar by means of an iron mole and found there the love of his life, the vivacious Dian. DC adapted some of these stories when the picked up the license for ERB's creations in the early 70's. 

Burroughs also created Caspak, another strange land in which evolution is explored with some startling differences. Caspak was presented in a trio of novels beginning with The Land that Time Forgot. Later Russ Manning had Tarzan himself visit the bizarre island in two beautiful adventures. 

One of the earliest Burroughs efforts is a strange story originally titled The Eternal Lover. Given the more robust title of The Eternal Savage it and its companion story Nu of the Neocene tell how an ancient caveman came to live in modern times on the Tarzan estate in Africa. 

More Tarzan thrills as I wrap up my look at Burne Hogarth's spin on the Lord of the Jungle. We'll look at his final comic strips as well as the lush 70's work he did on the Ape Man. 

Skull the Slayer is an oddball little item from Marvel's hectic Bronze Age. It's a vintage lost world story with the obligatory dinosaurs but loaded up with much more, including aliens, deadly Incans, and the Black Knight to boot. 

One of my favorite Indy books was Mark Schultz's Xenozoic Tales (also known as Cadillacs and Dinosaurs) for Kitchen Sink. This black and white beauty showcased Schultz's developing art and takes the reader on a grand tour of a world which has survived an apocalypse but with some startling changes. 

And dinosaurs are also on the schedule for Showcase Presents: The War that Time Forgot. This series became a mainstay of Star-Spangled War Stories with many tales of dumfounded G.I.s battling an astonishing array of prehistoric monstrosities. This volume doesn't quite have all of the stories, but it has quite a lot. Catch it in this month's "Showcase Corner". 

And The War that Time Forgot was too good a concept to ignore and so DC has brushed it off and brought it forward a few more times over the decades, often blending it with their other creations. In this version by Bruce Jones we see a clutch of DC's vintage heroes from many periods of time come together to stand up to the dinosaur menace. 

And no look at lost worlds would be complete without including Turok Son of Stone who with his staunch ally Andar was stranded in the Lost Valley fighting cavemen and "Honkers" for several decades in those Dell and Gold Key classics. "Sundays of Stone" will return this month. 

All this and even more exciting prehistoric ephemera in this first full month of Spring. Keep your head on a swivel for deadly dinosaurs amigos. 

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Dojo Classics - Captain Kronos!

Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter is a 1974 Hammer Films entry, in which they try to change up the status quo by focusing on a "charismatic" hero as opposed to a "fascinating" villain. Captain Kronos, a 16th Century former military officer is the man of the hour. He travels the countryside, aided and assisted by the hunchbacked Professor Grost, looking for vampire outbreaks. He then uses his outlandish ways and Samurai sword to dispatch the blood suckers when he comes across them. At least that's the theory.

In this first installment (it was intended apparently to be a series) the duo is joined by a lovely Gypsy girl and they go to a village which is preyed upon by vampires who kill with a kiss and suck the life essence (as opposed to just blood) from their victims, mostly young girls. An old army buddy who is the local doctor has sent for Kronos and they set about solving these crimes using all manner of peculiar and quaint methods.

As Hammer movies go this is an oddball for sure. It's Spaghetti western meets horror flick, and the blend is not always smooth. The action sequences can be clunky, as the swordplay looks a bit uneven in some scenes. The acting, much of it overdubbed, is stiff, and despite some clever visuals from time to time, it's a movie that fails to deliver much of a scare.

The movie is meant to be seen through the eyes of the Gypsy girl, but I think it forgets that sometimes and we lose track of her for some stretches. Also for all her physical beauty, Caroline Munro is not the most subtle actress all the time, and perhaps is not up to what is requested here. I think that is true of the hero Captain Kronos too played by Horst Janson, who has all his lines dubbed by some Brit.



On the other side of that John Carson turns in a credible job as the local and tragic Doctor and John Cater as Professor Grost is quite good.

There are some interesting settings, but for some reason, probably cost, not a single shot that I can remember happens at night. The omnipresent sunshine might be good for the western style, but it damages the ultimate effect of any horror offering. The director, who is also the writer, Brian Clemons, ends up with a movie which is neither fish nor fowl, and lacks the pace or budget to overcome its weaknesses.

All in all, Captain Kronos is a passably entertaining movie with some neat touches, but minus a true emotional core, or at least the personnel capable of communicating that. It was adapted (minus the approval of Clemons who indicates he owns the character) into comic form.

UPDATE: These many years later, I've seen the movie a few more times and as I read this review again, I think I was a bit unkind to the lovely Ms. Munro in regard her acting. There is an arch quality to this whole spectacle and that affected all the performances, hers included.

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Seven Golden Vampires!

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is one of those movies I have long wanted to catch. It's the last of Hammer's classic Dracula series because of the appearance of Peter Cushing as Professor Van Helsing who is drawn to the mysterious land of China to battle an ancient threat which it turns out is more familiar than he at first suspected.

This movie is known by several titles, one of which is The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula.The movie was made in 1974 in a partnership between the waning Hammer Films and the Shaw Studios of Hong Kong. As a consequence it has the flavor of both the vintage Hammer horror shows and the then-current popular martial arts films.

It could be argued that the movie, despite its robust and attractive title fails to satisfy either of the genres it seeks to please. There's not enough vintage horror for the Hammer fans and not enough classic fighting for the Shaw regulars. The movie does seem to wander around a bit and despite some interesting settings it doesn't seem much interested in establishing creepy mood.

The plot is pretty simple. An acolyte of Dracula, a Taosit monk named Kah seeks out the vampire and is possessed by him. He then goes home to China and establishes his vampire rule with the help of seven vampire who have ravaged the villages around them for many years. The Seven Brothers (and one sister) seek out Van Helsing for advice and with his son and a right lovely English dame in tow they travel to the distant villages to face the threat.

It's one of those that won't make sense if you shine too bright a light upon it, so it's best to simply ride along with the adventure as the Brothers and Van Helsing's gang take on the vampires and their ghoulish army in a series of battles which seem destined to destroy them all. This movie is notable in that it is the only Hammer flick of the classic era which features Dracula but doesn't star Christopher Lee in the role.

It was less of a movie than I expected, but it was an entertaining romp nonetheless.

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Classic Horror!

Picked up a set of four flicks gathered under the title Classic Horror from a local shop the other day and have thoroughly enjoyed them all, each in its own way.

Terror of the Tongs starring Christopher Lee is the reason I dropped a few dollars to begin with for this set. Though the reviews of this movie are generally tepid, I still had a hankering to see what Lee did with an Oriental menace clearly in the Fu Manchu tradition. He didn't disappoint, though he's not on screen all that much, he does chew the scenery in dandy fashion when he does. The story is a rather hoary one admittedly, though with some real surprises. A sturdy and forthright sea captain finds himself pitted against the local criminal outfit, the Dragon Tong. Their murderous ways strike close to him and he seeks vengeance and goe about it in the most ham-fisted way possible. But there are some neat ruckuses along the path he chooses as he pits his good guy power against the murderous hatchet men of the Tong.

Five is a post-apocalyptic tale, according to some sources the first post-nuclear movie fable ever. It's a cheapie for sure, filmed largely at the house of the writer and director Arch Obloer. The actors are largely unknowns and the film has that spare quality many such low-budget efforts have, though there is a grace to certain scenes many of these films do not aspire to. It's largely the story of five people who gather together (eventually) at house in the mountains after the bombs have dropped. They each have their own tale of survival though we mostly follow the saga of the sole woman who it turns out is pregnant. One of the male survivors is black and race does become an issue in the story. One of the notable features of the movie is that the house was apparently designed by Frank Loyd Wright and it's a handsome ediface for sure.

Vincent Price is outstanding (per usual) in The Mad Magician. The story is straightforward enough. Price is a master builder of great illusions who seeks the limelight for himself but is forestalled by his partner who demands he remain a faceless technician. They also shared the same woman as wife and that tension results in a flurry of murders, each carried out with aplomb and style and ferocious energy. Lots of fun characters, especially a married couple who dabble in solving murder mysteries and a pretty assistant make this one a totally watchable bit of fluff. My favorite moment is when Price loses track of one of his decapitated heads and has to chase across the town to locate it before it falls quite literally into the hands of the police. Humor like this gives the movie a grisly quality that is quite effective.

And finally we have The Man Who Turned to Stone. I expected little of this story of a girls reform school haunted by a mysterious killer, but it turns out there was much more to it thanks to a completely competent cast filled with the likes of Victor Jory. It turns out the killer works for a deadly cabal who run the joint and use the hapless girls as guinea pigs in experiments which have gone on longer that anyone can suspect at first. A well-meaning young woman seeks to investigate the mysterious deaths and is helped by the local young and handsome doctor. The two conduct an investigation that's filled with blunders, but of course we all know justice will eventually win out. This one has some really rather creepy scenes in it and the back story is quite rich.

All in all, a completely solid set of four movies which one might be inclined to overlook. They are worth the time and money (small money really) for any fan of horror. Highly recommended.

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