I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958)

I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE

(1958, USA)

Sex rears it's ugly head

There are some great movies with lousy titles. 'I Married A Monster From Outer Space' would be better as a tabloid headline or the title of a musical comedy. Looking past the screaming poster and the title, which deserves at least two exclamation marks, there's a sinister sci-fi horror lurking beyond. Not much of a budget, but moody black and white cinematography that money can't buy and a script brimming with sexual tension and subtext.

The decade of the 1950s, when you couldn't talk directly about sex or show it. But that's the core of this story. A newlywed couple has had the groom swapped out on his wedding night, replaced with an alien from outer space. The question looms in every scene - will she have sex with an alien? And what does he want? But they can't talk about it explicitly...

There are many 'aliens that look like humans' stories, the best being Invaders From Mars, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the TV series The Invaders - all obsessed with finding the details in appearance and behaviour that allow us to tell friend from foe.

Here the paranoia has reached the bedroom, which makes for an enduring theme - who are you sleeping with? Beneath the sci-fi story are layers of sexual angst and hints of impotence and frigidity. 

It's also enjoyable as sci-fi, played deadly serious by all involved. Creepy too, but the delicate way we learn about what goes on between these two newlyweds still has dramatic punch without showing everything. There's also a strong element of Rosemary's Baby (written nine years later) as the new bride turns to friends for help, only to find that they've been taken over as well...

The extraordinary alien make-up was sculpted by Charles Gemora, who also built (and performed) the alien E.T. in The War of the Worlds (1953).

After many rewatches over the years, This keeps on giving - the dramatic and visual shocks still work. This time round I recognised a young Ty Hardin (as one of Tom Tryon's beefcake swimming buddies). Probably missed him because he's credited here as Ty Hungerford. He later played the boyfriend of, gulp, Joan Crawford in Berserk (1967). Hardin was also the FIRST choice to play 1966 Batman - only because he was unavailable did Adam West get the part.

As the groom, Tom Tryon is very good at doing very little - a spaced out, distant look, similar to Keir Dullea after his brain was fried by the trip through the star gate.

The bride, Gloria Talbott, made a handful of low budget horrors (The Cyclops, Daughter of Dr Jekyll, The Leech Woman), but this is easily the best. Her performance anchors the entire story, undermined by being imprisoned in too-tight teenage angora sweaters, her chest lit as carefully as her face. Though this emphasises the limits of how sexuality could be portrayed at the time.

Director Gene Fowler Jr worked on as much TV as film, and mainly as an editor (one of his last credits was Skatetown U.S.A.!). His experience is evident in some seamless scene transitions, and a clever, subtle use of back projection and reflections.

Besides the other 'they look just like us' stories, this would make a great double-bill with I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957). The same director saddled with another silly title, but again a serious horror film with sexuality barely contained beneath the surface. This time the agonies of adolescence with a teenager who can't hide his raging lust (above).

The DVD is presented anamorphic widescreen, though it looks a little tight top and bottom. This isn't too distracting, but the lack of clean-up of film scratches in a movie that takes place mostly at night certainly is.

More posters on Wrong Side of the Art...

ROLLERBALL (1975) - televised deadly future sport

ROLLERBALL 

(1975, USA)

Amusing ourselves to death

A globally popular, deadly, televised sport. Before The Running Man, Battle Royale and The Hunger Games. But not before the 1968 'Bread And Circuses' TV episode of the original Star Trek had pointed out that the Romans did it first, with huge amphitheatres for the public to watch wholesale slaughter in the name of entertainment. The most deadly gladiators became superstars. Star Trek gave these games a futuristic twist by having the combat televised.

Rollerball expands on that scenario, and is able to show far more violent action. The story envisages a near-future where bloodshed returns as a public spectacle, mixing roller derby and American football, with no holds barred. The players' gloves even have sharpened studs on them, to maximise damage.

For years I thought that the motivation to allow real violence on TV was to satiate any and all violent urges in society and even extinguish war. I wasn't quite sure how this mechanism would psychologically work and I don't think that this reason is given in the film. Seeing Rollerball again, paying more attention to the story between the games, a clearer reason for the game emerged...

I first saw Rollerball in 1976 because it promised action and violence. The story is focussed on the games and the violent action is actually key to the story. Even though there was a stir in the press about how violent it was going to be, no censor cuts were made and it only had an 'AA' certificate in UK cinemas (no-one under 14 admitted). The rollerball matches are bleak, violent and convincingly staged, but the details of this future society are hazy, despite taking up most of the running time. 

Even then, I'd already seen some great predictive sci-fi where the central concept could easily be sumarised. Soylent Green was about food shortages and overpopulation, The Omega Man was a post-apocalyptic world of luddite mutants... But what was the premise of Rollerball besides the ultra-violent game? There's an interesting backstory that's barely given a chance to show itself. Between games, we don't see much of the world outside of the rollerball champion's luxury homes. 

Jonathan E (James Caan) is a global star who can get access where mere mortals aren't allowed. He's not interested in the world he lives in, he just wants to find the only woman he ever loved. For information he visits the library, which no longer contains any books. The librarian reveals that all books have been scanned into a computer and summarised. From which I took that it had been quietly censored.

If you're not paying close attention to the dialogue between Jonathan E and his trainer, and some of the locker room banter (in Caan's case the dialogue is also mumbled) you won't know that the world has been taken over by a few consolidated corporations. There's just one in charge of Energy, for instance. The corporations are more important than any country and have now divided the world up among themselves. The rollerball teams don't stand for a national anthem, but a corporation anthem. The real reason there's no more war is because there are no more international boundaries.

US lobby card - showing the scale of the stadium

The world watches Multivision, a huge TV screen with three smaller screens showing alternate angles. But there's only one channel. The women Jonathan E sleeps with are provided and chosen by a corporation. Music is piped into private homes. The future is peaceful, but totally controlled. The past has been edited, presumably to extinguish any references to dissention. 

Everyone is kept amused by extreme entertainment that takes their minds off what's going on all around them. That's what the game of rollerball is about. A barbaric distraction from a world of total control and zero choice.

Films Illustrated, September 1975 splash page

I guess the diverting tactics worked on me too. I didn't care that the story didn't seem to make sense, it was all about the games. And these seem to have derailed the film as well. James Caan was reputedly more interested in playing rollerball than anything else, and they're certainly the highlight. 

Staged on an Olympic German arena that doubles (triples?) for all three stadiums in the film, the skating skills of the cast and stunt performers are superb. Each game packs more excitement than the whole of the 2002 remake. The publicity also concentrated on the game, even the rules appeared in newspapers (though this may also have been because they weren't very well explained at length in the film).

Daily Mail, September 1975 - how to play Rollerball

The two teams have to fight for ownership of a steel ball (fired at a high speed onto the arena). The player with the ball has to complete a circuit of the arena before landing it an electromagnetic goal. The players are all on rollerskates except for the motorbike riders. They're allowed to punch and kick the opposition to gain possession of the ball. If it hits the floor, it's out of play.

Daily Mail, September 8th, 1975

I'm guessing the Daily Mail complained about the film, as well as Death Race 2000 and The Sweeney on TV as examples (and causes) of an increasingly violent society. However, the paper also publicised the film with three days of double-page centrespreads (the first is above) telling the story of the film, in the lead-up to its London premiere. 

James Caan looks great on skates and a totally convincing champion of the world. But he never convinces that he could evade and outwit everything that the corporations could throw at him, when he starts to disobey. As I mentioned, Caan isn't keen to say his dialogue clearly, in stark contrast to John Houseman who appears to be over-enunciating, especially the name "Jonathan E", in an attempt to improve Caan's diction by osmosis.

Co-star Maud Adams (above) had just been a Bond Girl in The Man with The Golden Gun. Jonathan E's easygoing sidekick on his Houston team is played by John Beck, who at the time seemed destined for leading roles and stardom, but after Sky Riders, The Big Bus and Audrey Rose he was soon back to TV. 

The cinematography is clinical but covers the action impressively and there's a great use of the futuristic architecture around Munich, Germany, including the multi-cylindrical BMW building that also appears in the middle of Suspiria.

William Harrison expanded his original short story, The Rollerball Murders, into the script. What happened to it then was up to director Norman Jewison (and apparently Caan). Shame that Harrison didn't then novelise his ideas for this expanded scenario of his script. The above tie-in only contains the original short story. Though he eventually published a set of essays about his life and work in 2010 - The Rollerball Mutations. While writing this, I've learned that Harrison recently passed away, in October.

Films Illustrated advert - March, 1976

Reading through old movie magazines, the exact timing of Rollerball's release in the UK threw up a mystery. The Daily Mail and Photoplay coverage support that it premiered in London in September, 1975. But the above advert for a wider release is from March, 1976. Did Rollerball run in the West End for six months before going on general release? That's unusual. It certainly means that it was popular and made money. It was repeatedly re-released over the next few years, once on a double-bill with Death Race 2000 (below) and I saw it again when it was paired less obviously with Juggernaut. 

The key art for the Rollerball poster (at the very top) was instantly an iconic image. It was painted by Bob Peak, responsible for many other beautiful posters for great films... More examples of the poster art of Bob Peak here on Steve Lensman's site.

Rollerball is on DVD in a special edition with commentary by director Norman Jewison, pointing out how many of his predictions have since come true. The cinematography alone deserves blu-ray treatment, besides the film's cult status.

ANTIVIRAL (2012) - body horror and celebrity culture

ANTIVIRAL

(2012, Canada)

All hail to the new Cronenberg!

The near future, a young man enters an expensive-looking salon. By appointment only, he meets a strange young salesperson who gives him a long careful pitch. They talk about media celebrities and what it means to get closer to them. The punter makes his choice, receives an injection and leaves.

Dedicated fans of intensely famous people have found a new mania - the chance to feel like their idols... when they're ill. Anyone can now experience exactly the same viruses they've suffered, but without the actual harmful effects. A bizarre, wonderful idea at the core of this intriguing sci-fi thriller.

In this world, the obsession with celebrity has reached the point where TV cameras go inside them during operations, and news constantly reports their state of health. There are big announcements of new mass-produced viruses, as if they were brands of perfume. But fanatics always want what others don't have, and not everyone can afford the exclusive prices. Hence, the murky world of virus bootlegging...

Admittedly, I started watched this out of curiosity, with no great hopes. How often is talent genetically passed down from a famous parent? But I soon found Antiviral, Brandon Cronenberg's first feature film, to be greatly rewarding and very different. While his father's 'body horror' stories were set in the near future, just far enough for science to have made a new breakthrough, they inevitably looked like 'now'. Antiviral looks sufficiently like the future.

David Cronenberg has also stopped making genre films. While Shivers, Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly are monuments in sci-fi horror, for over ten years he's stuck with drama. Quality films, but not the genre that originally set him apart. Brandon Cronenberg has begun with a body horror all of his own, and it's a treat to have a similar approach to satirical prediction as, say, Videodrome. But its completely in his own style, and a very different target.

I guess the other trait Antiviral shares with the films of Cronenberg Senior is that the story keeps a steady pace, without needing to resort to action scenes. I guess Gattaca would be a reasonable comparison for its tone, but without anywhere near the flashy budget. This is a great example of how good low-budget can now look, with sparingly-used digital effects, an antiseptic production design and precise 'future-look' cinematography.

The story is anchored by the creepy, extreme, but not exaggerated performance of Caleb Landry Jones, as the salesman who takes his work far too seriously. His pale skin is perfect for making him look really ill. I was recently struck by his resemblance to another intense young actor...

Udo Kier in Blood For Dracula

Malcolm McDowell is one of the familiar faces, but Nicholas Campbell is a welcome link to David Cronenberg's films, having appeared in The Dead Zone, The Brood and even Fast Company.

Antiviral demonstrates that sci-fi can still be original, inventive, predictive, weird and intelligent. And not need spaceships.

(I watched Antiviral on DVD, hired from LoveFilm. As a result, I've bought the region A blu-ray, which includes a commentary track and a 'making of' documentary.)

INVASION (1965) - the prototype for Spearhead From Space

 

INVASION
(1965, UK)

A Doctor Who story - without Doctor Who!

If you liked The Earth Dies Screaming or Night of the Big Heat, with their minimal alien invasions and earnest British reactions, this is for you. A far less well known entry into the genre, not seen on home video since VHS (above). The story parallels and predates the first Jon Pertwee Doctor Who adventure...

A series of minor electrical malfunctions are shrugged off around the edge of town in south-east England. But an Army tracking station thinks an unidentified rocket has crash-landed in the woods. Then a couple driving home from a party hit someone walking in the middle of the road, and wearing a strange, silver, rubber suit...

Even the lowest-budget British sci-fi from the 1960s is graced with solid acting and tight monochrome cinematography. The night time exteriors of Invasion have extra punch for not being faked with day-for-night filming.
 

The Frank Chickens started out as a garage band... 

The limited special effects are functional, mostly propped up by stock footage and only used where absolutely necessary. To compensate, the cast all play this 'first contact' scenario for real, though they snap into the extraordinary concept rather quickly!

Like an underwritten episode of the original Outer Limits, the situation quickly grips and draws you into the story. Every actor is on form and every character counts. Even the radar operator who tracks the UFO. Usually a thankless one-line role, but here someone with messy habits, a trashy taste in pulp fiction and a lax attitude to his commanding officer. He even thinks the blip on his screen might be an off-schedule car ferry!

Barrie Ingham and Glyn Houston puzzle over a strange rocket 

Meanwhile, the (gasp) unmarried couple run over a stranger with their car. The argument over whether they should leave him to die is chillingly real. This isn't a children's film, and there are several more plot-driven shock moments.

This is one of leading man Edward Judd's run of sci-fi adventures. He previously looked hot and sweaty in The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961, reviewed here). He also fought aliens in Island of Terror (1966), and the awesome Ray Harryhausen version of H.G. Wells' First Men in The Moon (1964). His moments of tenderness aren't nearly as convincing as his take charge, 'I know what I'm doing - I'll sort this out right now' attitude.

Valerie Gearon plays a blood specialist at the same hospital, where the wounded stranger is taken. In her first scene, she's allowed the time to show that her character really doesn't want to stir from a place by the fire to rush to an emergency at work. 

Also nice to see Barrie Ingham without his silver Thal wig, as seen in Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965). Here he's an Army man caught up in a potentially dangerous threat from outer space.

The aliens are played by South East Asian actors, like Yoko Tani (above). I wonder why?

This was the first feature film directed by Alan Bridges, who later made The Shooting Party (1985) and an aborted 1987 version of Stephen King's Apt Pupil, that would have starred with Ricky Shroder.

According to 'Doctor Who - The Seventies' (published in 1994), writer Robert Holmes recycled the core elements of his script for Invasion when he wrote the Doctor Who story 'Spearhead From Space' (1970). Specifically an injured alien (The Doctor) being analysed by medical doctors at a remote hospital. Gosh.

But while most Anglo Amalgamated movies of this period have made it to DVD, I last saw Invasion on late night TV. It was on VHS in the UK, but has never on DVD. I wonder if Network DVD have this in their vaults...

The BFI website has a few clips and more production stills from Invasion.

Invasion is one of the films made at the long defunct suburban Merton Park Studios, where Horrors of the Black Museum and Konga were filmed. More of the low budget Merton Park horrific mayhem is listed here.

 

THE CHANGES (1975) - post-apocalyptic children's TV!

THE CHANGES

(1975, UK, TV 10 x 25mins)

The image of a caravan in a quarry haunted me for nearly forty years!

I remember catching some of this children's TV series on one of its original showings. As a young teenager, I was open to the Day of the Triffids premise, where the whole country goes into a blind rage and destroys any and all advanced technology. To a young mind the first episode, where society completely breaks down, wasn't frightening but rather an interesting story.

It starts with everyone in a small town suddenly turning against all their electrical devices and petrol-driven vehicles, completely destroying them. When nothing is left, people start calming down but then want to flee the country because of the chaos and threat of disease. In the confusion, schoolgirl Nicky gets separated from her parents as they leave to head for the coast. Her father is more concerned about looking after her heavily pregnant mother. (All this happens in episode one!)

On her own, Nicky tries to catch up to her parents through the relatively deserted countryside, where the remaining population are already forming into superstitious, paranoid clans. She first joins up with a band of Sikhs, before running into a village full of racists, then a community of witchfinders, before finally stumbling onto the cause of all the changes...

What I didn't realise was this was in fact based on a trilogy of children's books by Peter Dickinson. The timeline of the story has been radically standardised, but many elements, like the boat Heartsease, are represented in the TV series.

Watching it all again, it's admirable that such a harsh apocalypse should be unleashed on children's television. The Tripods (1984), which had a more fantastical alien invasion, was shown in a Saturday Doctor Who slot when the whole family would be around for comfort. But The Changes went out midweek in the children's hour before The Six O'Clock News. But the series itself is about giving young people more credit for their intelligence and self-sufficiency, especially in a state of emergency.

It could be also be a radical way of comforting and preparing children for the unthinkable. The Changes bears comparison to the BBC adult drama, Survivors, which began a long successful run the same year. Almost seems like the BBC were preparing us all for self-sufficiency with dramas, and with the comedy The Good Life, to reassure us that if the nuclear bombs dropped, we'd still be alright if we knew how to live off the land!

The series of course suffers from having a children's TV budget, where the logistics of getting everything filmed probably took precedent over consistent acting performances. It often feels very 'padded out' with travelling shots and sometimes feels like the story is going nowhere.

While it often feels preachy, the agenda is extraordinarily wide: meeting different cultures, learning new languages, confronting racism and drastic change, life without parents, finding independence and responsibility. An alarmingly tough way to teach these lessons!

To its advantage, unlike many BBC programmes of the time, the series was all shot on film on location, with no distracting studio interiors and lighting to break up the look.

Nicky is ably played by Victoria Williams, who has to do most of her own little stunts as well. Among the few familiar faces are Jack Watson (From Beyond The Grave, Tower of Evil) as a witchfinder's deputy, and the recently departed Bernard Horsfall (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) as Nicky's father.

According to Wikipedia, the series was repeated only once on the BBC, in 1976, and again on UK Gold in 1994. It's never been released on home video, which seems strange considering the lasting memories it imprinted on many who caught it, not to mention its value for teaching, retrospective and social study.

I've only managed to revisit this because it briefly and recently reappeared on YouTube. I can only hope that someone like Network DVD pick it up for a release.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978) - creepy, paranoid, body horror

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

(1978, USA) 

A San Francisco health inspector (Donald Sutherland) and a friend at work, an analytic scientist (Brooke Adams), begin to start encounter people who've undergone a radical personality change. Despite calling in expert opinion from a psychiatrist buddy (Leonard Nimoy), they suspect that this creeping change throughout the city could be connected with a new strain of plant life. They missed the movie's prologue, where these strange new flowers grew from seeds that drifted from another planet...

Jack Finney's 1954 story The Body Snatchers, (probably influenced by Heinlein's 1951 novel 'The Puppet Masters') was quickly adapted as the 1956 classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers directed by Don Siegel. Itself a hugely influential movie across several genres, sparking discussion as to which particular political threat it might have been highlighting.

After Star Wars (1977), the science fiction movie genre was largely derailed into emulating its success, but without the budget or the creative and technical talents. It also gave me an appetite and expectation of huge dollops of space-fantasy and special effects in anything described as sci-fi.

I was also reluctant to see this new version of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when it was released at the cinema, because I hadn't yet seen the original, even on TV. I'm glad I decided to though, the shock moments have haunted me since. While I keep rewatching it partly out of nostalgia, I honestly think it's a fantastic adaption, if not the best.

It's excellent in conveying the growing paranoia and increasing panic that 'they're all out to get me' as the situation worsens. Donald Sutherland is about as far away from an modern action hero as you can get. Just an intelligent, normal guy in a surreal situation. I love his gasp when he sees a road accident - a realistic, natural performance. Brooke Adams and Veronica Cartwright (just before she appeared in Alien) portray the feeling of revulsion and loss of control. Leonard Nimoy is at pains to demonstrate he could play non-aliens, just before he sucked back into the Star Trek universe. An early, typical Jeff Goldblum performance is comfortably at home in the rambling, post-hippy mindset of self-help San Francisco.

While the long hair and floral furnishings date the movie (as do the overuse of camera zooms), the fashion is back in vogue now. Not that we've macrame hanging on the walls, just yet.

The organic special effects aren't overused and fairly low-budget, though largely convincing and imaginative, serving the story perfectly. At their best, you still can't quite work out what you're looking at. Particularly brilliant are the early stages of the seeds (all handmade effects, none of it taken from stock footage of nature). Some of the make-up effects are gloopy enough to prefigure David Cronenberg's 'body horror' cycle (in which Jeff Goldblum would again appear, in The Fly. Hmm, Art Hindle would also star in Cronenberg's The Brood).

The horror of the scenario is elevated by Ben Burtt's sound design. Hot off Star Wars (1977), but decades before Wall-E, his sound effects and mix maximise the experience of panic right up to the iconic closing scene. (To my ears, there's a little bit of T.I.E. Fighter in there.)

While this was a fresh adaption of the novel, it echoes the 1956 film and does what many remakes fail to, it pays homage to the success of the earlier version, with two brilliant cameos. I need to revisit Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers (1993), but remember it as very different, story-wise. I found The Invasion (2007) the least interesting - but it's approach is possibly a clue as to what the Videodrome remake will turn out like - a more action-oriented chase movie, thin on the essential paranoia.

The US blu-ray showcases the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers as well as possible, despite the low-light cinematography sometimes delivering an excess of film grain. But half the creepy fun is from the 5.1 DTS sound, that enhances one of the scariest ever horror soundtracks. There are also interesting retrospective interviews with the director Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff), the cast, Ben Burtt and more. Director's commentary track too.

Downside is the cover art that attempts to confuses this with the two, more modern adaptions when it should be pushing it as the best of them all.

Update November 2013
Now also available on blu-ray in the UK, with different extras, from Arrow Video.

Jack Finney's novel re-published

This reprint of the original novel baffled me recently, because the text had been updated to switch the action to San Francisco to tie in better with the film!

Late 1970s means Fotonovels too!