Microreview [film]: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

Look! A creature that survived 90,000,000 years! Kill it!

In some ways, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is the perfect 1950s creature feature. It’s not great, but it’s certainly not terrible, and it checks all the boxes:

• Military shenanigans? Yep.
• Atomic bomb? Indeed. 
• Cheesy sets? Covered in snow, no less. 
• Stop-motion monster? We wouldn’t be here talking if it didn’t. 

The plot’s pretty standard fare. The military tests an atomic bomb above the Arctic Circle — Why? Who knows? — and unwittingly unleashes a dinosaur that had been frozen in a sheet of Arctic ice for 90 million years. The only survivor of an avalanche caused by the dinosaur isn’t believed after he recovers from his injuries, but finds an unlikely ally in a lady paleontologist from “the university.” Just in time, too, as the dinosaur begins making its way down to the States, snacking on lighthouses and fishing boats along the way. Naturally, the response to discovering the sole surviving prehistoric creature of its kind is to blast it to smithereens. It's a 1950s American sci-fi movie, after all. There is a bit of a rationale thrown in, cribbed from War of the Worlds, in reverse. But still. There isn't a character in the film who advocates, even just to play devil's advocate, not blasting this dinosaur into the stone age. See what I did th— yeesh. That was a bad idiom/pun combo, even for me.

Where the movie shines is in the stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen. Sure, his masterwork was much later, arguably the skeleton army in Jason and the Argonauts or Medusa in Clash of the Titans, and perhaps his greatest character animation was in 20 Million Miles to Earth, but the animation here is still breathtaking, particularly in the finale — which inexplicably takes place at a roller coaster. Yep. At a roller coaster. This sequence alone is worth the price of admission.

Just a couple more things I'd like to point out with this one. The first is that yes, Lee Hunter (played by Paula Raymond) is a woman and actually a paleontologist. She is Dr. Elson's assistant, but his research assistant, not his personal or executive assistant. Yes, she brings out the coffee when she and the hero, Nesbitt, are trying to identify the dinosaur from sketches of known extinct species, but she's really a scientist. She gets a small monologue about it, even. This is remarkable in a 1950s sci-fi film. There are always women present, but they're wives, or girlfriends, or helpless stowaways, or occasionally a reporter. And it's not a trivial matter that I bring this up. My daughter walked through the room while I was watching this and asked what was going on in the aforementioned dinosaur sketch scene, and what followed was something like this:

Me: That guy there saw a dinosaur and the paleontologist there is trying to help him figure out what kind.
My daughter: She's a paleontologist?
Me: Yep.
My daughter: Huh. I'm going to need to watch this one.

"Did the monster look like this concept drawing our art director made?"

 The second thing I'd like to bring up is the predominance of the military in almost all of these movies. I had always assumed the prevalence of the military and military exercises in the whole 1950s sci-fi scene had to do with a) the prevalence of inexpensive military stock footage, and b) Cold War fears about The Bomb, but this movie was just uninteresting enough in parts for my mind to wander. I wondered if it didn't also have to do with the residual effects of World War II, where the lives of the vast majority of the audience for these films were directly and profoundly shaped by military action. This movie went into production about seven years after VJ Day. Not enough time to forget, and not enough time for a new generation to be the primary driver of movie ticket sales. I don't know the answer, and probably scholarly books have been written on the topic, but since the main character, Nesbitt, was clearly a foreign-born, non-military scientist who was along on this mission for scientific, rather than tactical reasons, the rub there was a little closer to the surface (only a very little closer) than in most of the contemporary genre films where every male lead looked like some All-American quarterback who had just missed going pro.

Finally, I want to give a shout-out to the TCM Greatest Classic Films collections. The version of this film that I have is part of a "Sci-Fi Adventures" set released under that banner. These collections, if you haven't seen them or have skipped past them in the stores, feature four classic films bundled together for about $20. I have this collection and a Cary Grant collection. There are many, many others — Astaire & Rogers, Musicals, Horror, Best Picture Winners, collections built around particular actors, etc. These are all good-quality transfers and discs with special features (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms has three mini-documentaries about the film, Ray Harryhausen, and Willis O'Brien), and they're really a gem if you're into classic films.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for that sweet Ray Harryhausen animation; +1 for a female lead who's actually a scientist;

Pentalties: -1 for, let's say charitably, a "lack of self-awareness" regarding the knee-jerk decision to just straight-up try to kill something older than the human race

Cult Film Coefficient: 7/10. It's not the best 50s sci-fi movie you'll see, but it'll scratch the itch.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, Emmy-winning producer, no-good musician, and sometime animator.

SIDE QUESTS: The Theremin!

SIDE QUESTS is an occasional essay series where we explore some of the other stuff we geek out about. A nerd cannot live on but sci-fi and fantasy alone...though it's certainly fun to try.

What Are We Talking About?

Today, we're talking about the theremin — an electronic instrument invented in the 1920s, that became the sound of science fiction in the 1950s, and which a performer plays without actually touching. It is way hard to play (believe me, I try), and when successfully done, it appears to be accomplished by magic. The theremin is a wonderful, inexplicable oddity, and if someone ever described me in similar terms, I could die happy. This may be part of my attraction to the instrument.

The Basics

You've heard a theremin, or at least something that is intended to fool you into thinking it's a theremin (but is likely some kind of synth that is actually comprehensible to mortals without perfect pitch). Basically, the theremin is a box with an antenna sticking up out of one side, and a second, looped antenna sticking out of the opposite side. The one sticking up controls the pitch, the loop controls the volume, and you literally wave your hands in the air to make it work.

Leon Theremin patented the instrument in 1928, and in 1950, Bernard Herrmann used it to score the film The Day the Earth Stood Still. It had been used in other prominent films before then, including Hitchcock's Spellbound, but after The Day the Earth Stood Still, the instrument and its ethereal sound seemed to become a hallmark of the sci-fi genre. Forbidden Planet, for instance, doesn't use a theremin in the score, but it sure sounds like one. The sound became so iconic and so identified with genre movies that in 1994, it was the focal point of Howard Shore's score for Ed Wood, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. The performer on that score was Lydia Kavina, who learned the instrument from Theremin himself. How cool is that??

The Rabbit Hole

I've been fascinated with the theremin since I saw one played in a music store while I was in college. It's only been in the last couple of years that I considered trying to obtain one, and I finally did so at the end of 2017. How to learn to play this crazy thing except via YouTube? And what better for plunging down fathomless rabbit holes than...well, YouTube?

My "teacher" has been Carolina Eyck, who, as it happens, learned the instrument from Lydia Kavina, who learned it from Leon Theremin. I mean, I'm to the point where I can play "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" right about half the time. Maybe almost half. These women can play Rachmaninoff. It is mesmerizing to watch. So I watched a lot of theremin videos.

But then.

But then I discovered that "playing Ennio Morricone on theremin" is a thing. Spaghetti Western music played on a magic sci-fi box? Friends, I was lost. My nerd heart was enraptured. Enjoy!

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, multi-instrumentalist, Emmy-winning producer, and all-around rabbit hole dweller.

Microreview [film]: The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr.

In which we see that Ed Wood's story is better than...well...any of Ed Wood's stories

I'm on record as saying I think Ed Wood is probably the best movie ever made about making movies. It came out in 1994, and a year later, apparently to capitalize on the sudden name recognition generated by the Tim Burton movie, the independently-produced documentary version of the same events came out. It is very odd, but also very touching.

If you are not familiar with the events of Ed Wood, it's going to be hard for me to summarize what this documentary's about, but I'll give it a go. Edward D. Wood, Jr. was a World War II veteran who moved to Los Angeles after the war to try to get into the picture business. When the story of Christine Jorgensen — one of the first Americans to openly undergo gender-reassignment surgery — hit the news, Ed Wood managed to land the job of directing an exploitation picture called, I Changed My Sex. Ed landed the job because he was secretly a transvestite, which he revealed to the film's producer. After promising to shoot the movie in three days, Ed wrote a script about the life he was leading, keeping his transvestism secret from his girlfriend Dolores Fuller. Dolores would go on to write hit songs for Elvis Presley and Nat King Cole. The resulting movie, ultimately released as Glen or Glenda? is one of the most incomprehensible things ever set to film. And it stars Bela Lugosi. Ed and Bela met somehow, I guess there are a couple different versions of what went down, and became...probably...friends. Bela hadn't worked in a while, and needed money. Ed would keep Bela employed until Bela's death, and I kid you not, beyond. The three films they made together are widely thought of as some of the worst movies ever made. Also appearing in them are Tor Johnson, a Swedish professional wrestler, Vampira, an out-of-work late-night horror TV host who was the inspiration for Disney's Maleficent and, later, Elvira, and a group of friends, some actors, chiropractors, girlfriends, investors' kids, and whoever else would be in them for nothing. Ed's "masterpiece," which was finished after Bela died, was actually financed by a Baptist church in Beverly Hills, and Ed got the cast and crew to agree to be baptized as a condition of financing.

Phew. Ok, so all that is in Ed Wood, and familiar to anybody who's seen it. But it is remarkable to hear the people who were actually involved tell the story. The filmmakers got EVERYBODY. They got Bela's only son, they got Dolores, and the woman who stole Dolores' part in Bride of the Monster because of a misunderstanding about her investing in the production, they got Ed's ex-wife and step-son, they got surviving members of Ed's casts and crews, they got Maila Nurmi (Vampira), they even got the pastor of the Baptist church that paid for Plan 9 from Outer Space. And things you think, "Well, that probably didn't happen like that," while watching Tim Burton's movie, you find out, no, it pretty much happened like that.

Ed's story was not a happy one, though. He died a homeless alcoholic at the age of 54. While not lingering on it, the movie doesn't skip over Ed's last years, in which he was usually drunk and making pornographic films. Similarly, Ed's relationship with Lugosi has been the subject of a lot of speculation and some recrimination. Was Ed a heartless, exploitative fraud who ruined Bela Lugosi's legacy (a position held by Bela Lugosi, Jr.), or were they actually friends? Did Ed give something to Bela in the legendary but then-forgotten actor's final years that Bela cherished? To hear Ed's stepson recount visits to Lugosi's house, for instance, you might be inclined to think that, yeah, the two were odd but close friends. As the film ends, and each of the interviewees signs off on their final memories of the actual man — not the character named "The Worst Director of All Time," but the actual human being that they knew for better and worse — the movie is profoundly touching. To hear these people express their regrets for not understanding Ed's cross-dressing at the time, for not being there when they felt he may have needed them most, or for some, how much it meant to them that they were with him right to the end...it's moving stuff.

Ed Wood was not a good filmmaker. But he was loved, and he was complicated and frustrating and misunderstood, and when he was gone, he was missed. And for all of its complexity and murkiness, I think his story is a meaningful one, and I'm glad we have it.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for getting all the interviewees they got; +1 for an unexpectedly evocative emotional experience; +1 for being quite frank about topics that were emotionally perilous for some of the people on camera; and +1 for Maila Nurmi's sorry-not-sorry admission that Orson Welles gave her an STD

Penalties: -1 for a little bit of narrative unevenness in terms of who-did-what-when; -1 for being mostly talking heads, but what are you gonna do?

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. I feel like this is a must for fans of Wood, but also a good watch for anybody invested in independent or cult filmmaking

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather since 2012. For reviews of other documentaries about cult film figures, check out Corman's World and Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story.

Fright vs. Fright: The Fly

Fright vs. Fright is a series of comparisons between classic horror films and the lesser-known works that inspired them, or subsequent remakes that stand on their own merits.

The Film: The Fly (1958)

The Plot: Starting with a bang, The Fly introduces us to Helene Delambre as she smushes her husband Andre in a hydraulic press, then calls his brother Francois and tells him what she's done. Not sparing a thought for Andre, Francois comes over to make sure Helene's all right. The police arrive, and after careful sleuthing, determine that yes, Helene did turn her husband into a blood puddle in the press. But why??? After a nice long rest, Helene recounts the story of how Andre had begun experimenting with transporting matter from one place to another, lost the family cat in the ether, but successfully transported a guinea pig, and then accidentally scrambled his own atoms with those of a fly when he tried to send himself through. Up until the last possible moment, there was some hope that a certain "white-headed fly" (presumably a fly with Andre's head, since Andre's body now sported a fly head) might be the key to reversing the experiment. But Andre was becoming more beast than man rapidly, and asked Helene to smush him before he lost all reason and turned dangerous. Dangerouser?

The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent: This is not the first time I've tackled The Fly for this site, but it's been several years, so I revisited my old review to see if my opinion had changed any over the last five years. It hasn't. The Fly has a few indelible moments, but those are linked together by a whole lot of not much. And not yet in his horror heyday, Vincent Price is largely wasted. That said, this movie is not without its charm, and if you have kids you'd like to introduce to creature features, this is not such a bad way.

Remade As: The Fly (1986)

How It Stacks Up: This re-imagining is just a flat-out better movie than its predecessor. While the broad strokes of the plot are the same, David Cronenberg and co-writer Charles Edward Pogue sifted the original film through a sieve and got out everything extraneous — including the little kid at the center of the original who keeps asking, "When's Daddy coming home?" What remains is a tight drama with only three characters, which could really happen on stage (and would no doubt be really cool). I could spend a long time talking about all the things this movie does right, and how great Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis are in it, but it should be sufficient to say, as our reviewer Molly wrote when we first looked at these films in a different context, "this movie is a disturbing, lasting experience." She's right.

Worth a Watch? Slam dunk, must-watch for horror fans.

Fun bit of connective tissue: Jeff Goldblum also appeared in the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, last week's installment in this series.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Perennial watcher of dozens of horror movies each October. Avoider, in general, of telepods, unless they're from the Angry Birds universe.

Fright vs. Fright: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Fright vs. Fright is a series of comparisons between classic horror films and the lesser-known works that inspired them, or subsequent remakes that stand on their own merits.

The Film: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

The Plot: Dr. Miles Bennell stumbles into a police station raving about not being insane, and needing people to listen to him. A psychiatrist arrives and agrees to hear Bennell's story. It goes like this: Miles returned from a medical conference to news that many of his patients had called and made appointments in a panic while he'd been gone, and then a day or so later, all called to cancel. When a friend says that she thinks her uncle isn't really her uncle, Miles is concerned for her. But then when a little boy comes in with his grandmother saying that his mother isn't really his mother, Miles begins to worry more generally. Stuff gets really weird when Miles gets called to his friend Jack Belicec's house because Jack's wife seems to have found a...body. It's a strange body. Sized and shaped like Jack, but without distinct facial features or fingerprints. Miles remembers his would-be girlfriend Becky saying she thought her dad was behaving strangely, and he darts to Becky's. In the dark basement, he believes he sees a doppelganger body of Becky in a locker down there, but afterward can't be sure. When he and Becky return to the Belicec place, though, the four of them discover giant alien pods in the greenhouse, each pod growing a copy of each of them. They've uncovered an alien plot to replace humans with unfeeling clones, and now they have to try to get away...and stay awake.

The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent: Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about as good as 1950s horror/sci-fi gets. There's not a lot of "guilty pleasure" here — this is lean, taut storytelling that is maybe not as visceral today as it would have been in 1956, but is no less thought-provoking. That this movie can be claimed as both a tacit endorsement of McCarthy-ite Red Scare paranoia and a rejection of that very same ideology speaks to how engaging it is. The filmmakers all went to their graves insisting that there was no political motivation or didactic intent behind the film, but there's no denying that it is a product of its zeitgeist. Can we be saved from the threat of secret Communist infiltration? Or, can we be saved from the reactionary forces in control that insist on homogeneity? This is in many ways the best of genre storytelling — a metaphorical treatment of existential forces that a society is wrestling with.

Fun bit of connective tissue: Carolyn Jones (later Morticia Addams), was in last week's installment, House of Wax, and also plays Teddy Belicec in this movie.

Remade As: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

How It Stacks Up: I'm not sure which of these two version is "better," so suffice to say that when it comes to the daunting task of remaking classic movies, this is about as good as they come. There are some elements that are a little dated — like the super-fake nosebleed on the pod-body of Jack Belicec (this time played by Jeff Goldblum) — but on the whole the practical effects hold up, and Philip Kaufman's film does a great job of painting on a broader canvas than the original film. Set in San Francisco, instead of a small town, the stakes begin much higher, and the barriers to stopping the alien pod-people from spreading are much more daunting. The ick-factor is ratcheted up in this version, and one additional characteristic added to the pod people in particular really heightens the creepiness. It's the shrieks. The shrieks of the pod people. It's unsettling and kind of chilling, and such a great reminder of how the well-chosen little things can be used to much better effect in horror than gore-for-gore's sake.

Worth a Watch? Absolutely. I think it's hard to go wrong with either of these two versions. There are more versions out there, but these two I can recommend without reservation.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Perennial watcher of dozens of horror movies each October. Not a pod person. As far as you know.

Microreview [film]: Fiend Without a Face

Brains. Filled with telekinesis goo.

Look, I’m going to cut to the chase — you’re going to want to watch this movie for the last fifteen minutes, when killer brains start attacking all the stock characters. Before that, it’s pretty standard fare.

There’s a wonderful scene in Ed Wood where Ed pops in to see an old editor on the studio lot that just got a batch of stock film, and Ed laments it all ending up filed away, saying,

“Why, if I had half a chance, I could make an entire movie using this stock footage. The story opens on these mysterious explosions. Nobody knows what's causing them, but it's upsetting all the buffalo. So, the military are called in to solve the mystery.”

The reason why I love that line so much is because it almost perfectly describes so many actual, low-budget sci-fi movies from the 1950s. In film after film, the entire first reel is just stock footage of various military exercises and two guys in Army uniforms in a nondescript office describing some mysterious problem. Fiend Without a Face is no exception. The problem the guys talk about in the nondescript office is the locals complaining that the nuclear tests from the base are messing up milk production from the family cows.

Little do they know there’s a bigger problem brewing. I’ll keep it simple and just say the nuclear tests don’t play well with a local professor who has been perfecting his theory of telekinesis, and an invisible killing machine that sucks out its’ victims brains is the result.

When those brains reappear at the end of the movie, it is more than worth the wait. They still have the spines attached, and have grown these sort of eye-stalks, like a slug. They can climb, these brains, they can jump, and they can ooch along the floor. They can also, when shot with an Army .45, make a disgusting gurgling sound and belch out black goo. We’ll call it telekinesis goo.

This movie has been called the goriest of its era, and I won’t argue that point. If you think sentient, malevolent, crawling — and then exploding — brains are up your alley, not only are you my kind of person, but you should probably also put this movie up at the top of your list.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 5/10

Bonuses: +2 for all the stuff I said about the brain monsters, +1 for the line, "You ever consider trying sleep instead of Benzedrine?"

Penalties: I think I've made it pretty clear what to expect

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 (which is pretty dang high, given our scoring system)

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, folk musician, and Emmy Award-winning producer.

Microreview [film]: The Invisible Boy

Oh...boy. Just, yep. I'm gonna leave the pun right there.

Forbidden Planet is an undisputed classic of sci-fi film. At the time it was produced, it was a tremendously expensive film, and a disproportionate amount of that budget went to pay for a single prop: Robby the Robot. That sure must've seemed like a good investment when the breakout star of the film was not sexpot Anne Francis, or strapping, not-yet-gray Leslie Nielsen, or even venerable actor-with-gravitas Walter Pidgeon. Nope, the breakout star was Robby the Robot.

And with good reason. Robby is amazing. Robby is better than Gort, and I love Gort. I don't even care. We can fight. So given the success of Forbidden Planet and Robby, the studio wanted a sequel, naturally. That sequel was The Invisible Boy. Now, The Invisible Boy is bonkers, so rather than write a straight review, I wanted to try something different. Here, then, is An Imagined Conversation Between Screenwriter Cyril Hume and the Producers of Forbidden Planet and The Invisible Boy.

The scene is a small, executive office on the MGM lot. A PRODUCER sits behind a mahogany desk. It's nice. Swanky digs, sure, but it's second-class fancy, for Golden Age Hollywood. The really nice offices start a floor up. But this producer's doing ok. We'll give him a cigar. Because 1956.

In walks CYRIL HUME, screenwriter. He's in a suit, also because 1956, but you can tell. It's the 1956-everybody-wears-suits equivalent of a Foo Fighters concert-T. Still, this has been the biggest year of his professional life — three hits. Ransom!, with Glenn Ford (big star), Forbidden Planet, and Bigger Than Life directed by Nicholas Ray right after Rebel Without a Cause.

PRODUCER: Cyril, baby. Have a seat. Have a seat! You want a cigar?

CYRIL HUME: Scotch and soda? Just, Scotch with a ray of sunlight that passed through a bottle of Schweppes.

PROD: That's a writer for you! I'll have my girl mix it right up for you.

He pushes a button on the intercom.

PROD: Stella, mix up a, er? Is it "Stella"?

VOICE ON INTERCOM: Sheila, sir. But keep trying.

PROD: Great. Listen, baby. I need a Scotch and soda for our writer friend, and that's Scotch with a...what was it?

CH: It's just Scotch and soda. Just...really?

PROD: That's just Scotch and soda, Shirley. In a glass. With ice, maybe.

(ANNOYED CLICK FROM INTERCOM)

CH: So...?

PROD: Right. Listen, baby. This Forbidden Planet, it's a humdinger. It's doing gangbusters. We need a sequel, ready to shoot, right away.

CH: I told you a science fiction version of Shakespeare's Tempest would work.

PROD: Whatever, whatever. This Shakespeare guy, friend of yours? If he's got other ideas, great. But listen, we need another movie with Robby the Robot, right now. Like, yesterday. Something real...science fiction-y. For the, uh, for the geeks and stuff.

CH: Yeah, that's great. Making a film on such a huge canvas was fantastic. We could explore other worlds...maybe on their way back to Earth...

PROD: You kidding me? No, they're on Earth. Jesus, that fake planet cost me a fortune. And black-and-white. Color film was a nightmare. I chewed through three pillows in my sleep just from seeing the lab bills.

CH: So...a black-and-white sequel, on Earth, to a Technicolor space tragedy that takes place 300 years in the future?

PROD: On the nose, baby! And present-day. No space cities, or future science, or none of that. Just put the robot in it.

CH: The robot won't be invented for 300 years.

PROD: Then make it come back with time travel or something. That's a thing, right? People from the future? All that?

CH: Wow, yeah. There's never really been a serious time travel film. This could be pretty amazing.

PROD: Yes! There you go! But don't spend too much time on that part. We don't want to have to build any fancy time machines, or go to other times, where the costuming...oh the costume costs, just give me an antacid. So it's now, but there's a robot from the future. Go! Oh, no wait! Listen, I got this cousin...or, second cousin? I don't know. But they got this kid, he wants to be in pictures, he's, whatever, he's kid-aged. Like, we'll say 10. Put him in it.

CH: Look, not to tell you your business, but "dogs and kids," you know? Never work with them?

PROD: He doesn't have to be in the whole thing. Just, I don't know, make him invisible halfway through and then forget about him.

Sheila enters, gives the screenwriter his Scotch and soda. It disappears in a single toss of the head.

CH: Two more, please.

Sheila cocks an eyebrow, then looks at her boss. Gets it totally. She leaves.

CH: So it's a black-and-white picture about a time-traveling robot and a little kid who turns invisible halfway through?

PROD: Solid gold. We'll call it...The See-Thru Kid! Or, something like that. As long as it's eight reels long.

CH: What if, and I'm just thinking out loud, what if the sequel to the fantastic, futuristic space picture took place in space. In the future? We could re-use the ship from the first movie, we could --

PROD: Cyril, baby. We already sold the ship to CBS, and they're going to use it in a bunch of TV shows this cat Rod Serling is making. The ship is gone. Damn, sailed. The ship has sailed. Let's pretend I didn't flub that joke, ok? Where were we?

CH: You had just put my career in a time machine and sent it backwards twenty-something years to when I was writing Tarzan movies.

PROD: Right, right. You know what else is hip these days, is computers, and aliens. I have definitely seen those words on the covers of magazines.

CH: So you want eight reels about a kid who plays with a space robot from the future, but then turns invisible halfway through, with a computer that may or may not be from another planet?

PROD: Perfect. You're a genius.

Sheila appears with two more Scotch and sodas.

And...scene.

Let me just say that our hero, screenwriter Cyril Hume, accomplished everything that was asked of him in this imagined meeting. If you think that sounds like it'll make a good movie, than The Invisible Boy is right up your alley. I will say, and this is no B.S., the movie has one of my most favorite lines of dialogue ever from any movie. I will sometimes put this movie on at home just to watch that moment. And if that's not a cult film punching above its weight, I don't know what is.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, Emmy-winning producer, and also folk singer.

The Roger Corman Interview

Roger Corman has been, arguably, the single most important voice in the history of independent cinema. It was an absolute honor to be able to sit down with him in his office to discuss his new film, Death Race 2050, and specifics from a career that spans seven decades.


For the uninitiated, Roger Corman began writing, directing, and producing in the mid-1950s. He launched the careers of actors like Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, and revived or reinvigorated the careers of Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and others. As a producer, he gave directors like Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, and James Cameron their starts in filmmaking. He worked extensively with writers such as Twilight Zone alumni Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, who were also seminal sci-fi and horror writers in their own right. His distribution company won foreign language Oscars for the films of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.

But at the end of the day, this is a guy who just made a lot of great movies. From the 1950s beatnik satire A Bucket of Blood to the 1960s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, to the 1970s punk hallmark Rock n Roll High School and beyond, Roger Corman may have spent a career working with low- and medium-budget films, but he managed to create lasting art, documents of the times, and just goddamn fun movies, and he continues to do so.

If you haven't, check out Death Race 2050, streaming on Netflix and on DVD and VOD or watch the original, Death Race 2000, on DVD or streaming on FilmStruck. And enjoy the interview. I sure as hell did.

Posted by Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer for nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, musician and songwriter, and Emmy Award-winning producer.

ESSENTIALS: 24 Cult Films for Late, Late Nights

I feel like I should preface any list of "Best" cult films or "Most Important" cult films with the disclaimer that there is no list. The thing that makes cult films memorable is that they are a representation of a unique voice, and different voices appeal to different people. Plus, there are just so, so many movies out there, nobody can see them all. If you've got a film that you (or you and your friends) love and quote and everybody else thinks you're nuts, I think you're doing the thing right, and it doesn't matter if that movie's on a list anywhere or not.

The other key thing about cult films is that they are usually produced outside of the mainstream, so a lot of lists of "Best Cult Films" that I see online are rehashes of movies like The Big Lebowski or Office Space, which were box office flops, but gained a second life through word-of-mouth after their disappointing theatrical runs. I love both of those movies, and they certainly have cult followings — Office Space prompted Swingline to actually make a red stapler, and The Big Lebowski started a religion — but now they're so well-known I don't need to invoke them here.

Since I get to make this list, I wanted to focus on movies that didn't show up on the other lists. I also wanted to stay away from "The Worst Movie Ever" kinds of films (plus, I already covered that ground), and try to share movies that I think are legitimately good, or moving, or compelling, even if you can see their seams sometimes.

These are in no particular order, but they are all perfect for late nights or rainy days:

1. Carnival of Souls

After a traumatic accident, a woman becomes drawn to a mysterious abandoned carnival. - IMDb

Mistakenly thought to be in the public domain for decades and widely available in grainy, garbled versions, Carnival of Souls has a new blu-ray release from Criterion with restored picture and sound that really shows off this movie for what it is. It's a legitimately eerie movie, beautifully shot, full of evocative imagery and intelligent subtext. This movie also has special significance for me, because seeing the original Criterion Collection release of this movie alongside films by Renoir, Godard, Kurosawa, and Bergman was the first time I really understood that cult films didn't have to be a guilty pleasure. That release made me realize that there were other people like me who loved both art house cinema and outsider cinema and took them equally seriously.

2. Chimes at Midnight

The career of Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff as roistering companion to young Prince Hal, circa 1400-1413. - IMDb

For many years, the crown jewel of my DVD collection has been a DVD-R of this movie, which was only briefly released on VHS and was extremely difficult to find and even more difficult to own. But this is another movie that Criterion has recently rescued from the pit of abysmal picture and sound quality. And good thing, too. This movie and the never-completed Don Quixote were Orson Welles' dream projects. Constructed from texts pulled from four Shakespeare plays, Welles made John Falstaff, who has more lines than any other character in Shakespeare, the tragic hero of his own movie. The larger-than-life Welles plays the larger than life mentor to Prince Hal, later King Henry, and the thread of wasted talent and unbridled excess that runs through the film cannot help but reflect on the former boy-wonder of Welles himself. It is a movie that was financially and logistically hard to make and it shows, but it is full of stunning images, and a truly heart-rending conclusion.

3. A Bucket of Blood

A frustrated and talentless artist finds acclaim for a plaster covered dead cat that is mistaken as a skillful statuette. Soon the desire for more praise leads to an increasingly deadly series of works. - IMDb

I will go to the mat with anybody who says Roger Corman isn't a good director. He's certainly known as a producer of exploitation films and for launching the careers of people who went on to be iconic directors, but his directorial work (which he pretty much stopped doing in the late-1970s) was extremely sharp, both in terms of visual style and intelligence. A Bucket of Blood is one of the best satirical take-downs of the art scene I think I've ever watched, and it wraps it inside the costume of a schlocky horror movie. It's funny, full of gentle social commentary, and has just enough of an "ick" factor to create some intentionally cringe-worthy moments. If you've ever wanted to see the Beat Generation get some comeuppance, this one's for you.

4. Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill

Three go-go dancers holding a young girl hostage come across a crippled old man living with his two sons in the desert. After learning he's hiding a sum of cash around, the women start scheming on him. - IMDb

I'm much more of a Corman guy than a Russ Meyer guy, but when it comes to exploitation films, you have to give Russ Meyer his due. Meyer is most closely associated with busty women with quick tops, but there's actually no nudity in this, his best-known movie. Busty women, sure, and car races, and inexplicable danger aplenty. This movie is also notable for being the source of most of the movie dialogue samples used in White Zombie's breakout album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1. That's actually what got me to watch this movie in the first place.

5. Blacula

An ancient African prince, turned into a vampire by Dracula himself, finds himself in modern Los Angeles. - IMDb

There are a lot of 1970s blaxploitation movies you can watch and have a pretty great time with, but the thing I love about Blacula is how William Marshall's performance really elevates this movie way past what you think it would be from the amazingly schlocky title. He was primarily a Shakespearean actor, plays the character of Prince Mamuwalde totally straight, and sells it. This movie is at its heart a love story, and despite some *ahem* lines that ring out particularly jarringly to modern sensibilities, the performances in this movie should earn it far more prominence among horror fans than I think it currently has.

6. Killer of Sheep

Stan works in drudgery at a slaughterhouse. His personal life is drab. Dissatisfaction and ennui keep him unresponsive to the needs of his adoring wife, and he must struggle against influences which would dishonor and endanger him and his family. - IMDb

This underground film shot in south Los Angeles in the early 1970s is not to be confused with a blaxploitation film. This is a poetic and deeply touching movie that went unseen for over two decades because of rights clearance issues with the music in the film. The picture of daily life in Watts that it shows is both stifling but also affirming and moving. When it was added to the National Film Registry in 1990, that helped raise awareness for the movie, and ultimately led to a limited theatrical release in 2007. It is now available on DVD.

7. I Bury the Living

Cemetery director Robert Kraft discovers that by arbitrarily changing the status of plots from empty to occupied on the planogram causes the death of the plots' owners. - IMDb

I came across this one on a Public Domain movies site years ago, and I was pleasantly surprised. What the description here doesn't include is that the director doesn't want to be killing people, and begins thinking that he's descending into madness. As this starts to happen, there are a couple of visual effects sequences that are really striking, and take on the air of a twisted re-imagining of Fitzgerald's "eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckelburg." The film suffers a little from a Scooby-Doo ending, but there are rumors that there was a different ending originally shot. That's going to have to be one for the angels, though, because in 1958 nobody was keeping alternate endings of B-pictures around for archivists to find later.

8. Billy the Kid vs. Dracula

Dracula travels to the American West, intent on making a beautiful ranch owner his next victim. Her fiance, outlaw Billy the Kid, finds out about it and rushes to save her. - IMDb

I reviewed this movie before, and you can read that at your leisure, but for our purposes here I will simply quote one line of that review: "At some point in 1965 or '66, some actual human being must have had this thought: 'Let's get John Carradine to play a vampire again, but this time we'll stick him in the Old West, name the movie after two characters not actually appearing in the movie, and shoot the thing for a nickel in, say, my back yard in Encino!'" The IMDb description is actually not correct: Carradine is never identified as Dracula because they didn't want Universal suing them, and "Billy" in the film did not have a previous career as a notorious outlaw. So if this sounds like it's up your alley, it probably is. If it doesn't, man, you've been warned.

9. Plan 9 from Outer Space

Aliens resurrect dead humans as zombies and vampires to stop humanity from creating the Solaranite (a sort of sun-driven bomb). - IMDb

This is also an objectively bad movie, but Edward D. Wood Jr. deserves a place on this list if for no other reason than that Ed Wood is maybe the greatest movie ever made about movies. Plan 9 is also, and I don't know anybody who would argue with me on this, the closest Ed Wood ever got to making a decent movie. The idea of a bomb made out of the sun's rays is not the worst sci-fi idea ever, and the story is more or less coherent. As opposed to, say, Glen, or Glenda?. Plus, the reach of this movie has been remarkable, from the Tim Burton biopic to the name of Glenn Danzig's record label, so it's worth watching if you haven't actually seen it. May I recommend watching Ed Wood and then Plan 9 as a double-feature?

10. Primer

Four friends/fledgling entrepreneurs, knowing that there's something bigger and more innovative than the different error-checking devices they've built, wrestle over their new invention. - IMDb

Of course, if you'd actually like to see a good sci-fi movie made for no money, you might want to skip ahead a few decades to Primer. This movie has a reputation for being quite a mind-bender of a time-travel movie, and it does not disappoint. I would argue that only with (many) multiple viewings and some graph paper could you actually untangle what's happening in all the different timelines, but at a certain point, it doesn't matter. The storytelling is dizzyingly complex, but you get the impression director Shane Carruth knows what's going on, and that he's going to take you somewhere worthwhile, so you go along. It's a tense and confusing ride, but I'm not aware of another movie like it. I actually prefer Carruth's poetic, disjointed follow-up Upstream Color, but start here.

11. It's Such a Beautiful Day

Bill struggles to put together his shattered psyche, in this new feature film version of Don Hertzfeldt's animated short film trilogy. - IMDb

As long as we're talking about bending minds, let's also dip our toes into the animation end of the pool. Don Hertzfeldt bends minds with the best of them, and I am truly at a loss as to how he is able to tell such elliptical stories with stick figures and still elicit powerful emotional responses from me. I am a big fan of Don Hertzfeldt, and this re-packaged collection of three of his related short films is a perfect example of why. Bill seems to be emotionally falling apart, but then it seems like he's actually mentally falling apart. His journey yo-yo'ing closer to and farther away from "sanity" and "reality" is both tremendously imaginative and tremendously moving. Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow short film was absolutely robbed of an Oscar, too, for whatever that's worth.

12. Sita Sings the Blues

An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. - IMDb

Animator Nina Paley made this animated feature film on her own. By herself. Alone. Feature film. Bill Plympton does the same kind of thing, and I am simply in awe of these artists. Paley's movie tells the story of Sita and her lover Rama from the Hindu epic Ramayana, and intertwines that tale with the story of the dissolution of Paley's own marriage. It's simply a beautiful, enthralling piece of work that not only explodes with imagination, but is full of beautiful visual design, too. It blurs the line between myth, fiction, and documentary, and is set entirely to torch songs. What's not to love?

13. The Beaver Trilogy

It begins in 1979 with the chance meeting in a Salt Lake City parking lot where filmmaker Trent Harris is approached by an earnest small-town dreamer from Beaver, Utah. - IMDb

And speaking of blurring lines...man, this one's something. As quick as I can tell it: Trent Harris was working at a TV station in Utah when they got their first video camera, and he was testing it in the parking lot when a guy called "Groovin' Gary" spotted him and came over.Gary always wanted to be on TV, and had his car adorned with images of Olivia Newton-John. He invited Harris back to Beaver for a talent show that Gary wanted recorded. In it, Gary dressed in drag and performed *as* Olivia Newton-John, to the befuddlement and ridicule of the small, conservative town. That really happened. A couple of years later, Harris moved to LA, and fictionalized the story a bit, and shot it as a short film with a pre-Fast Times Sean Penn. A couple of years later, while at USC film school, he made another go at the same story with a pre-Back to the Future Crispin Glover. If you can't find this amazing, unique gem, track down the new documentary The Beaver Trilogy, Part IV, which tells the whole story in stunning fashion.

14. The Sid Saga

Spurred by house guests Bob Sandstrom and Karlene Sandstrom leafing through his scrap book and asking about photographs in it, Sid Laverents begins to tell his life story. - IMDb

This is simply one of the crown jewels of amateur cinema. I don't know how to find it, except UCLA shows it sometimes and it occasionally airs as part of the sporadic TCM Underground series. But it is truly unforgettable, with Sid Laverents taking viewers through a stunning, three-part filmic biography that not only tells the story of Laverents, but of 20th Century America, too. It begins in poverty and vaudeville, goes through World War II, the 1950s and Cold War, the aerospace boom and introduction of the space program, and finally the rise of amateur film and videography that put storytelling tools into the hands of everyday people. And it's all told first-hand from Laverents, who lived it all. I reviewed this film a couple of years ago, and it is absolutely worth tracking down.

15. Head

The Monkees are tossed about in a psychedelic, surrealist, plotless, circular bit of fun fluff. - IMDb

Whoever wrote this IMDb summary can suck it. This is anything but "fan fluff." This is the weirdest damn thing, and as far from the Monkees TV show as I can really imagine. It's a smart, self-indulgent, self-reflexive piece of meta-storytelling made by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, who would immediately after this project go on to collaborate on Five Easy Pieces, with Nicholson exploding into the mainstream world in Easy Rider in between. The Monkees got a bad rap at the time, and I think it persists, that they were just a slapped-together attempt by a record company to make an American version of the Beatles. That may have been their genesis, but their songs are great, the guys were interested in things beyond the show, which came through in songs like "Randy Souse Git" and this film, which was reportedly the first time Americans had seen the now-famous footage of  the South Vietnamese Chief of Police executing a handcuffed Viet Cong prisoner. Fan fluff, right? This was Tor Johnson's final film, and also, in a restroom, Peter Tork gives Davy Jones the advice that, "Nobody ever lends money to a man with a sense of humor."

16. The X from Outer Space

The spaceship AAB-Gamma is dispatched from FAFC headquarters in Japan to make a landing on the planet Mars and investigate reports of UFOs in the area. - IMDb

In the 1960s, the Shochiku studio in Japan, which was known for more serious, art-house films like those of Yashujiro Ozu, decided it wanted to get in on some of that sweet Godzilla money that Toho was pulling down, and this film was their attempt. In it, some swinging astronauts jet back and forth between Earth, the moon, and Mars for reasons that are clear, but don't make any logical sense. While exploring, they get some goo on the ship, which hatches into a giant space chicken called Guilala. The English dub of this movie is legitimately terrible, but the original Japanese version, subtitled, is wonderful. It is everything I love about silly, 1960s monster movies, and may even exceed some of the Godzilla movies with shady aliens in them.

17. Suspiria

A newcomer to a fancy ballet academy gradually comes to realize that the school is a front for something far more sinister and supernatural amidst a series of grisly murders. - IMDb

This movie, by Italian horror icon Dario Argento (who also co-wrote the unmatched Once Upon a Time in the West), is the real deal. It's creepy, scary, grisly, bloody, mysterious, and atmospheric. It hits all of my favorite notes of horror movies, and has an ending that is serious nightmare fuel. Emerging from the giallo scene in Italy, it took things a step farther, and is really not for the faint of heart. But man, this is such a great horror movie. I've written before about the line that connects certain films between the 1950s and early 60s, ultimately resulting in Rosemary's Baby, and I think Rosemary in turn made Suspiria possible.

18. Bay of Blood

An elderly heiress is killed by her husband who wants control of her fortunes. What ensues is an all-out murder spree as relatives and friends attempt to reduce the inheritance playing field, complicated by some teenagers who decide to camp out in a dilapidated building on the estate. - IMDb

Staying in Italy with a giallo contemporary of Argento's, we have Mario Bava's Bay of Blood. Bava was making his mark a decade before Argento hit the scene, so a lot of what Argento would build on came from Bava. And it goes way beyond that. Because Bay of Blood is not a "proto-slasher" movie, it is a full-bore, perfect example of a slasher movie, made almost a decade before slasher movies were a thing. You could pretty much take the cliched rules laid out in Scream that govern slasher movies and apply them one-for-one to this movie, but if that's the case, that means this movie invented those rules. I don't know if American filmmakers in the early 1980s looked at this movie and drew inspiration, or if Bava was simply ahead of his time, but this movie is about as good as straight slashers get, and it accomplished that while creating the lexicon, so I think that's one hell of an achievement.

19. The Wicker Man

A police sergeant is sent to a Scottish island village in search of a missing girl whom the townsfolk claim never existed. Stranger still are the rites that take place there. - IMDb

When I was in college and found 1) the Internet and 2) a pair of amazing video stores near my dorm, I spent some time combing a bunch of lists to find movies to rent. The Wicker Man consistently showed up on lists of "the scariest movies ever made" and that sort. So I rented it and I thought it was stupid. But I just sort of missed it — there's something sticky about this movie. Even though I didn't think I liked it, something made me want to revisit it, and when I did, a switch flipped and I fell in love with this movie about the collision of modern life, Christianity, and very, very old pagan beliefs that have still never really gone away. It's a movie with a lot going on under the surface, and which was also plagued for decades with a "the movie that could've been" legend that told the tale of how we never got to see the director's real vision of the movie. That has since been solved, despite the original camera negatives being used as fill underneath the M1 motorway connecting London to Leeds. And for what it's worth, my copy of The Wicker Man DVD actually came in a wicker box.

20. Equinox

Four friends are attacked by a demon while on a picnic, due to possession of a tome of mystic information. Told in flashbacks by the sole survivor. - IMDb

To be honest, this movie is mostly remarkable because of the people that worked on it. As a film on its own, it's only ok, and the present-day framing device of a police detective interviewing a survivor of all that went down is...clumsy at best. So you've really got to have some patience to get to where the movie begins to cook. This film was created by friends who met through Forest J. Ackerman (Uncle Forry), who founded Famous Monsters of Filmland in Los Angeles, and decided to make their own film. These friends, including Jack Woods and Dennis Muren, went on to become transformational figures in Hollywood through their contribution to sound and visual effects. It's truly remarkable to see their first film, knowing that they went on to redefine the modern cinematic language. No hyperbole. There are entire passages of The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 that are cribbed directly from this film, and while the humans-talking-to-each-other portion of the movie is clunky, the finale, made from stop-motion, rotoscoping, and glass mattes, is legitimately badass.

21. Incubus

On a strange island inhabited by demons and spirits, a man battles the forces of evil. - IMDb

You notice how vague the plot summary for this movie is? That's about right. I mean, what I remember from this movie is William Shatner and some girl hiding in a barn, and then I think they ran for a bit...and maybe one of them was briefly possessed, but I couldn't swear to that. This movie is totally forgettable except for one kinda important thing: it was spoken entirely in Esperanto. You know what Esperanto is, right? It's an invented language that blends elements of the Romance languages, English, and probably a few other languages into what was hoped to be a universal language. Created in the 1880s, it took almost 100 years to make a movie in the language, and that was Incubus. So if you want to watch a movie where Bill Shatner speaks a made-up language, this is your only option, folks. Who gives a shit if it is entirely, and utterly, forgettable otherwise? But look: I have friends who have learned Swedish to watch Bergman movies in the native language, and friends who have learned Japanese to watch anime in its native language (I have undeniably awesome friends), so if you want to be able to turn the subtitles off in Incubus, you can currently learn Esperanto in the free language-learning app Duolingo on your phone.

22. Venus in Furs

A musician finds the corpse of a beautiful woman on the beach. The woman returns from the dead to take revenge on the group of wealthy sadists responsible for her death. - IMDb

This is definitely an outsider kind of film. I haven't seen any other of Jesus "Jess" Franco's films, but from what I know, a number of his films have veered into the more hardcore elements of mixing sex and cinema. Venus in Furs certainly has sex and nudity, but what it has more of, and in spades, is atmosphere and intrigue. The story is told through the eyes of Jimmy, a jazz musician, who sees a beautiful girl at a swanky party, then finds her merdered body on the beach, then sees her again, walking around. There's a wonderful current of I Spit on Your Grave-style cosmic retribution for sexual violence that runs through the movie, but mainly it's just sort of out-there and entrancing. Like the jazz musician at the center of the movie, you're never quite sure what's going on, and you're kind of ok with that because it's a unique ride you want to get to the end of.

23. The Masque of the Red Death

A European prince terrorizes the local peasantry while using his castle as a refuge against the "Red Death" plague that stalks the land. - IMDb

To be honest, I didn't realize this was my favorite of the Roger Corman/Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe movies until I wrote songs about a bunch of horror movies, and the one I wrote for this one turned out to be my favorite. Like in Bucket of Blood above where Roger Corman is a good director, and in Blacula where performances can elevate an otherwise straight exploitation film, for me Hazel Court makes this movie. There are a number of wonderful things in this one, from the dwarf circus performer who murders a friend of Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) to avenge an insult to a girl he loves, to the amazing set design that was the apotheosis of the Corman/Price/Poe look, that if I have to let this one movie stand in for all the wonderful films in this series of movies, I'm happy to do so. If you can only watch one Roger Corman movie this Halloween season, I recommend this one.

24. Perversion for Profit

This anti-porn short film shows a flood tide of filth engulfing the country in the form of newsstand obscenity. - IMDb

This is maybe a bit of a cheat. This isn't a narrative film or documentary, but I guess you could say it's a sort of outsider cinema. This instructional film was created in 1965 to warn America of the dangers of the secret filth hiding in the newsstands in the form of comics, men's, and women's magazines. This film is amazing in many ways. There's the slice-of-life sense of giving the modern-day viewer a picture of what life was like in the mid-1960s, and what people could see walking into the corner drug for a magazine, but mainly it's a totally un-self aware look at the hypocrisy of the morality police. The fact is that this movie is a half-hour of words talking about how terrible the "smut" problem is in America, while showing the "smut" in question in full detail. There are very tiny black bars over nipples or eyes, but it's clear to see that this film became, in a sense, exactly what it beheld. By damning pictures of nude women while showing pictures of nude women, today this seems like a way to get soft-core porn into the hands of moral crusaders who could only enjoy nude bodies if they felt they were also condemning them. This movie is a really interesting artifact that says a lot more about the people who made and watched it than it does about they people they were trying to denigrate. It's a fascinating time-capsule that conveys a very different message these days than it was originally meant to.

Posted by Vance K — Emmy-winning producer, folk musician, and cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012.

Microreview [book]: The Sundial by Shirley Jackson

It's not her best, but nobody did what Jackson did best any better.

Shirley Jackson is best remembered for her short story The Lottery, and it's a puzzle to me why that story never made more people seek out more of her other work. Shirley Jackson should've been a rock star, and not just of genre fiction like The Haunting of Hill House, which spawned arguably the greatest black-and-white horror movie ever made. Sure, many genre aficionados like Stephen King, notably, consider her a legend, and her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one of the great books you're likely to read. All that is to say that I am a happy man when I find a stray copy of a Shirley Jackson book at my local used book store, and I approach them expecting quite a lot.

On the one hand, The Sundial isn't her best book. But on the other hand, it has a lot of what she does better than anybody in it, and it presages her greatest works, which were yet to come.

The Sundial tells the story of the Halloran House and its inhabitants, none of whom are what you'd call "likable characters." Out of the huge cast of characters, especially for such a slim book, the most prominent is Orianna Halloran, whom we meet when the book opens, just after the funeral of her only son, Lionel. Other members of the family, notably Lionel's widow and young daughter, openly accuse Orianna of killing Lionel by shoving him down the stairs, so that she could inherit the house. Orianna is a piece of work — she's cunning, ruthless, shrewd, and really just smarter than anybody else in the house. It's this characterization that makes her at least a fascinating character to read, if not root for, and her biting, clear-eyed manipulation of everyone else in the house is where Jackson's perceptive writing just absolutely shines. The extended Halloran family and staff who populate the home are put on their heels when Aunt Fanny, Orianna's sister-in-law and daughter of the late Mr. Halloran, who built the sprawling house, sees a vision of her departed father in the garden, by the sundial, and he informs Fanny that the world will shortly be consumed by flame, and all will perish, with the exception of those living in the house. Those, he can protect. Little-by-little, the house acquires a small handful of new residents (including a stranger Aunt Fanny picks up on a street corner in town and dubs "The Captain," for reasons known only to her), and what seems like the confused hallucination of beleaguered Aunt Fanny gains more credence with subsequent visions, and all who live in the home begin making preparations for the coming apocalypse.

I cannot stress enough how awful these people are. There is a long sequence late in the novel where they invite the townspeople up to the house and grounds for a barbeque, to give the little peons one last moment of happiness before the end of days — of which said peons are totally unaware. Because what joy in life could working people possibly have unless it is gifted them by the fabulously well-to-do Hallorans from the sprawling estate on the top of the hill? But Jackson's gift for capturing human behavior, and pettiness, sometimes, with such finely observed detail really shines in segments like this. It's a joy to observe Aunt Fanny's foolish entitlement juxtaposed with scenes of the villagers interacting with her, in which we realize she is so transparent in her cluelessness that everybody is in on the joke except her. The book's themes of wealth, entitlement, and gender roles still resonate today, and I think in large part that's less a statement about the stagnation of progress or anything like that, but more a tribute to Jackson's ability to grab onto the fundamentally human, and show us sad realities of how we interact with each other on a day-to-day basis.

On the whole, there are too many characters for such a short book, so we see some characters in razor focus, while others recede into a sort of literary soup, where it becomes difficult to remember which tertiary spoiled young woman is which. And even though the book is intended to leave some questions about the future, I felt it ended perhaps a page too early. After a shocking twist at the end that literally dropped my jaw (but was totally earned and set up deftly from the first page), I felt I'd been left dangling a little. So Shirley Jackson's best book about a sprawling house with its own personality is undoubtedly The Haunting of Hill House, and her best book about a wealthy, reclusive family is undoubtedly We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but The Sundial is still a fine example of the kind of writing that made Shirley Jackson such a force.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for Orianna Halloran; +1 for "The Captain"; +1 for just getting human beings right, warts and all (even if sometimes more wart than not)

Penalties: -1 for too many characters; -1 for too abrupt an ending; -1 for being essentially a rough sketch of better works to come

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. "A mostly enjoyable experience."

REFERENCE: Jackson, Shirley. The Sundial [Farrar, Straus & Cuddahy, 1958]

Our scoring system demystified.

Posted by Vance K — Emmy-winning producer, cult film reviewer, and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012.

Vance's Summer Reading List

I love Summer Reading List time at NoaF because my life is generally an overwhelming, downhill-rolling snowball of demands on my time/mental capacity, so I sometimes find myself suddenly realizing in horror that I haven't actually held a book in my hands for weeks at a time. But our Summer Reading Lists give me a chance to blow the dust off of my TBR pile and actually make some kind of plan-of-attack. These are the books I'll be laying siege to over the next three months.


1. Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic by Jeff Smith [Cartoon Books, 2004]

At WonderCon this year, I told my daughter she could pick out a book at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund table, and with wide eyes she selected the 1300-plus page complete edition of Bone. She's a couple of hundred of pages in, but I'm planning on stealing it from her. Or at least installing my own bookmark that I can march forward after she's in bed for the night. This all-ages comic is truly epic in scope, unfolding the story of three Bone-creatures who get kicked out of Boneville and wind up unwittingly sparking a battle of good and evil between the forces of The Spirit of the Locust, great dragons whom very few people still believe in, bizarre "rat creatures" who inhabit the forest, and the disbanded kingdom of humans who are caught in between. The black-and-white illustrations (just black and white, no grey, even) owe a debt to Walt Kelley's Pogo comics, and are tremendously engaging. It's like Lord of the Rings, but funny.

2. The Sculptor by Scott McCloud [First Second, 2015]

Author of the seminal Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud's new graphic novel received all kinds of raves upon its release last year. It's a story that takes the idea of pouring your life into your art in a very literal direction, and I'm very much looking forward to reading something that I think will have a lot of interesting things to say about the emotional process of creativity. The premise of asking the question "What art would you make if you knew you had less than a year to live?" is a profound one, and one that, as a songwriter particularly, resonates very deeply with me.


3. Radiance by Catherynne Valente [Tor, 2015]

I picked this one up after reading the glowing review that appeared here on Nerds of a Feather because the prospect of exploring the solar system as depicted in early silent films sounded amazing and fun. But I have to admit, I've started this one already and I'm not sold. It's not particularly fun and the narrative device of different characters essentially monologing each chapter has me pretty put-off by the unmotivated infodumping. May have to put this aside in favor of something else on this list and circle back.



4. The Sundial by Shirley Jackson [Ace Books, 1958]

I love me some Shirley Jackson. I was browsing aimlessly in my local used book shop and found an ancient paperback of this book lying sideways on the wrong shelf, so I counted it a happy accident and snapped it up. The back matter suggests that a bizarre family gathered together in their large home receives a vision of the apocalypse and has to decide what to do about it. I can pretty much guarantee that the decisions they make won't be what you'd consider solid, healthy, well-reasoned ones.



5. Harry Potter À L'École des Sorciers by JK Rowling [Folio Junior, 2011]

Tia recommended revisiting Harry Potter via audiobook, and I'm attempting something...similar? This week I finished the entire French course in Duolingo, and in my hubris, I ordered the first Harry Potter book in French. They still talk too fast for me in the French movies I have on DVD, and I needed to do something to expand my skills and keep learning, so I thought this might be a good way. I have Google Translate on my phone for words I don't know, and an optimistic outlook that may or may not disapparate once I actually attempt this feat. I'm about thirty years past when they say the best time to learn a new language is, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.


6. Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire [Tor, 2016]

The premise of this book is so amazing it feels like one of those "How did nobody think of this before??" moments: what happens to kids like Dorothy after Oz, or the Pevensie kids after Narnia, or any of the countless child protagonists we all grew up identifying with after they are forced back into the hum-drum everyday of life-as-we-know it? If the premise wasn't enough to hook me (and it would've been), Joe Sherry's enthusiastic review helped seal the deal. It's currently checked out at my local library, and I wait for its return...


Posted by Vance K -- Cult film reviewer and co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together since 2012. Studier of foreign languages on iPhone apps since 2014.