Play Time

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Of course I’ve seen Child’s Play before—what kind of poser do you think I am?  But that was back before I started blogging.  After writing a post about Puppet Master, I thought I should watch it again because it didn’t really strike me as memorable the first time around.  Probably the reason for that is I knew the basics of the story before I saw the movie and, like zombies, possessed dolls are a little hard to buy into.  Still, on this second viewing I was a bit more impressed.  The idea of the monster that won’t stop coming is a scary one, and I’d forgotten just how much Chucky had to be dismembered before being stopped.  And there are some legitimately scary scenes, despite unanswered questions.  In case you’re not familiar: criminal Charles Lee Ray is shot to death in a toy store, but not before transferring his soul, through voodoo, into a Good Guy doll.  This doll is bought on the black market by a widow who can’t afford one, for her son’s birthday.

Chucky befriends the boy but starts taking revenge on those who’ve wronged him, including the police officer called to investigate his first murder.  The officer happens to be the one that shot Ray at the beginning of the film.  Nobody believes that the doll is alive until it attacks them personally.  Nobody, that is, except Andy, the six-year-old owner of Chucky.  (Although it isn’t cited as such, I have to wonder if Toy Story’s Andy wasn’t actually based on this one; that’s not the official story, but still…)  Child’s Play wasn’t the first horror film to portray an animated doll, but it was perhaps the most influential.  Chucky went on to become a repeat slasher villain with wide recognition.

I’d completely forgotten the appropriation of voodoo as the animating force behind Chucky.  Of course, that leads to the very obvious weirdness of a doll using a voodoo doll to kill someone.  To modern sensitivities, the use of Vodou feels inappropriate, but this was in the eighties, and other religions were fair game for horror.  In fact, religion was fair game.  Without it, no animated Chucky, and no threat to Andy and his mother.  Religion and horror have played together from the very beginning.  The possession aspect also ties into religion and there have been no end of possessed dolls since Chucky first lunged out the screen with his knife.  It was a good play date, it turns out.

City Children

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Some movies are very difficult, if not impossible to classify.  City of Lost Children is one.  One label that seems to have stuck is steampunk, and I think that’s accurate.  A touch confusing, not least because it’s in French, it is visually stunning.  So, the lost children are kidnapped by a kind of mad scientist who cannot dream.  He takes the children’s dreams (with pre-echoes of Inception).  The initial dream sequence of multiple Santa Clauses could be horror—much of the film is unnerving, as well as disorienting.  This mad scientist is attended by a set of clones, a tiny wife, and a brain in a fish-tank.  Meanwhile, thieving orphans, controlled by women who are conjoined twins, steal valuables.  A circus strongman, One, sets out to find his kidnapped “little brother,” and finds the orphans.  He helps them on one job but one of the lead orphans, Miette, takes pity on him and tries to assist in finding his brother.

The brother is in the hands of the mad scientist.  Miette is nearly drowned but saved by an amnesiac submarine pilot.  She leaves to fine One, whom the twins tried to kidnap.  One and Miette team up once again to rescue “little brother.”  They find the mad scientist’s lair, but the submarine pilot is about to blow it up.  One and the children escape, but at the last minute the submarine pilot regains his memory and realizes that he was the creator of the mad scientist and clones, but he is blown up along with the lab.  Accompanying this there are striking visuals in a world that is a cross between Existenz and The Matrix, but with steampunk overtones.  I suspect multiple viewings may be needed to get it, but the cinematography would make that a pleasure.

The cyclopses (did I mention them?) are the religious part of this world.  They believe in the plucking out of eyes in order to see.  This they do with eyes from the scientist and the cyclopses, in turn, capture the children for him.  Their religion is violent but somewhat biblical.  Although this is an alternate universe, it’s one where such features as religion might cross over.  Often religion is neglected in world-building, even though it comes naturally to our species.  It’s easy to get lost in this kaleidoscopic world.  Even so, you come to care for One and Miette and the value of loyalty.  Funny, creepy, confusing, and emotional, City of Lost Children is a movie that has to be seen to be believed.

Precedes Essence

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Lars von Trier makes existentialist art films that sometimes veer into horror.  Antichrist was such a film, and one of the more disturbing that I’ve ever seen.  Melancholia was initially welcomed in a kind of reserved way, as I recall, when released in 2011.  A few years ago I sat down to watch it and didn’t quite make it halfway through.  The pacing wasn’t terribly moving and the story depressing.  These days Melancholia has been upgraded to one of the best movies of this century, so far.  It was a rainy Saturday and I decided to steel myself to try again.  It is an art movie, but not horror.  There are horror elements, but it is more about the torment of existence—existentialism again—as two sisters anticipate and face the collision of the earth with a rogue planet called Melancholia.

The ultra-slow montage at the beginning lets the viewer know that earth will not avoid or survive this collision.  Then Justine, one of the sisters, is shown heading toward her wedding reception.  She’s already depressed and the first hour or so of the movie shows the troubled interactions at the reception.  When things finally begin to wind down near dawn, she refuses to consummate the wedding and sends her new husband away.  Cheerful stuff.  The focus then shifts to Claire.  She and her husband John, and their son, are enormously wealthy.  They are also aware that Melancholia is approaching.  John insists that the calculations show it will be a near miss, but one nobody would want to miss seeing.  Claire isn’t so sure.  Justine comes to stay with them.

As the effects of the larger planet’s proximity begin to be felt, John realizes the calculations are wrong and dies by suicide.  Claire and Justine have opposite views of the impending end, with Justine declaring life is evil and should be wiped out (again, existentialism).  Then worlds collide.  This is a disturbing, but beautifully shot film.  I found out that it is, after Antichrist, the second of von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy.”  As someone seeking joy in melancholy, I’m glad to have seen the film.  I knew the planet collision plot, but I try not to read about movies in advance, so I wasn’t sure if this would be horror or not.  It was pretty clear from Antichrist that von Trier suffers from depression.  Melancholia confirms this and is a poignant cry of distress at being helpless in an uncaring universe.  And it invites viewers to ponder this as well.

Another Picnic

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It’s curious, the desire to see a movie based on a novel you’ve already read.  I was intrigued to see how Peter Weir might handle Picnic at Hanging Rock.  As my post about the novel points out, the book, as it stands, is ambiguous about what happens to the missing girls.  It was only as I saw the film that I realized just how complex a story was crammed into a relatively brief novel.  Film directors have to make choices and although this one follows the book to quite a large extent, some elements were more clearly implied in the cinematic version.  The suspicion on Michael Fitzhubert was clearer, as was the fear that the girls had been molested.  The character of Mrs. Appleyard, although not exactly kind, is treated somewhat sympathetically.  It’s not implied that she might’ve killed Sara, for example.  Her treatment of the orphan, however, does lead to suicide.

This story isn’t simple to untangle even in the book.  Being literature, it isn’t clear exactly what is happening throughout.  It allows for ambiguity.  The novel never explains how the girls went missing or what happened to them.  Hanging Rock is presented as mysterious, almost a portal.  One way the movie deals with this is by invoking Poe.  It begins with a voiceover reading “Dream within a Dream.”  Indeed, the movie is shot with a dream-like quality.  The roles of the male characters is, appropriately, understated.  The story is about women and coming of age.  It’s often considered an example of dark academia.  Appleyard College isn’t a school at which fair treatment is doled out and Miranda, the most accomplished student, is compared to an angel, adding to the dreamlike quality of it all.

Using Poe to frame a film may not be entirely fair.  It does signal the viewer that what follows may or may not be reality.  Although Wikipedia can’t be considered the final authority—anyone can edit it—it lists (as of this writing) the movie Picnic at Hanging Rock as an adaptation of Poe’s famous poem.  Maybe by implication, but the story is clearly that of Joan Lindsay’s novel.  She presented this, in the sixties, as an account of an actual event, which it is not.  I found it interesting that dialogue was added to the film that doesn’t appear in the novel.  Overall, however, this seems to work as an art film.  The movie has been hailed as the greatest Australian movie of all time, and just this year was rereleased in theaters.  I’m glad to have seen it, but remain curious.

Folk Kill

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Kill List is a movie that I wish came with some interpretative material.  It’s a touch hard to follow.  The basic idea is that Jay and Gal are Army buds who take a job as hit men.  Jay is married, but not exactly happily.  Gal’s girlfriend leaves him early on.  It seems that Shel, Jay’s wife, knows what he does for a living but seems strangely unconcerned.  Jay is recognized by his victims, but he doesn’t know why.  He becomes insanely brutal on the second of their third jobs, torturing his victim before killing him and then going after his accomplices (not on the eponymous kill list).  At this point Gal and Jay want out of the deal but their unnamed employer won’t release them.  Jay is presented as a man traumatized by a past military action.  He fights frequently with Shel but is very devoted to their son.  Spoilers follow.

The last job is a hit on a member of parliament.  The MP, however, is in a folk religion group that requires human sacrifice.  Jay begins shooting them but he and Gal are outnumbered.  Gal is killed and Jay is subdued.  He then has to fight a hunchback in front of the masked believers.  He frees the knife and kills the hunchback only to discover it is his wife with their son attached to her back.  A rather bleak ending for a rather bleak film.  Kill List is generally considered folk horror.  That is to say that fear derives from both the landscape (less rural in this example) and from the native religion of the non-Christian traditions.  What exactly this religion is is never specified, and it seems that, unbeknownst to himself, Jay is a pretty major player in it.

Perhaps not surprising for a film titled Kill List, this is quite a violent movie.  The somewhat constant fighting of Jay and Shel is unnerving in its own right, and Jay’s berserker-like attacks are also disturbing.  There is a religious element involved, however, beyond paganism.  The first victim on the hit list is a priest.  The reason’s not explained, but the expected religious imagery is there.  This is never tied in with the folk religion exposed at the end.  Although effective as a horror film, it leaves quite a few questions unanswered.  That being said, this Euro-horror is one that I’m unlikely to go back to.  I’m not even sure who made the recommendation to me in the first place.  Folk horror is a fascinating genre and this movie has been compared to The Wicker Man in that regard.  Only in the latter case the plot was easy enough to understand.

Nibbles

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With a career as prolific as Roger Corman’s was, it’s difficult to keep up.  I knew his horror movies mostly from the sixties and maybe early seventies.  Having stumbled upon Humanoids from the Deep, which he produced rather than directed, I was pointed to Piranha.  I knew about this movie, of course, but never had a reason to watch it.  Well, Corman rabbit holes are easy to tumble down.  Corman was the executive producer of Piranha and since I was already splashed with water-themed horror, well, why not?  As with Humanoids, it has a different feel from movies Corman directed, but some of the trademarks are there.  Piranha has so many shark-sized holes in it it’s not difficult to believe that it was exploiting the popularity of Jaws.  In fact, the movie opens with one of the characters playing a Jaws video game.

So the government had been weaponizing piranhas to help in Vietnam but when the war ended they kept the program going.  A woman who finds missing persons releases these fish into a Texas mountain stream.  Anyone on the river is in danger and, of course, it flows past a new resort that is having its opening weekend downstream.  The government wants a coverup because the colonel in charge has invested heavily in the new resort.  You get the picture.  Lots of people screaming in the water and a gratuitous use of movie blood and a story that keeps the viewer asking “why?” The film has a way of somehow steering just clear of bad movie territory.  Also, it becomes obvious, that even without appropriate music cues, this is a horror comedy.  I lost track of how many unanswered questions there were within the first fifteen minutes.

Piranha is a sort of fun knockoff from Jaws.  There’s nothing really profound here, although one scene did make way for a little social commentary.  When Maggie (the skiptracer) wants to distract an army guard with her feminine wiles, she wonders if he might be gay.  This was in 1978, well before “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and she asks with a pre-Trumpian nonchalance that it’s downright refreshing.  Otherwise it’s pretty much your typical exploitation film.  The concept has led to a couple of remakes, so watching swimmers getting nibbled to death obviously has some appeal.  The plot is so outlandish that there’s nothing scary here, even though it’s clearly horror.  There’s even a scene with some stop-motion animation of a creature in a subplot that’s simply dropped.  There are worse movies for summer escapism, given that we’re now post-pre-Trump again.

Cut-Rate Black Lagoon

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I stumbled upon Humanoids from the Deep while looking for a different film on Tubi.  I had to make a quick decision (don’t ask) and I saw that Humanoids was a Roger Corman movie and figured I knew what I was getting into.  In a sense I was, but B movies can surprise you sometimes.  As the story unfolded my first thought was “this doesn’t look like a Corman movie.”  Indeed, the direction didn’t come from Corman but from Barbara Peeters.  But that wasn’t the end of the story.  What is said story?  Well, it’s a kind of ecological Creature from the Black Lagoon, but with a bit more of a disjointed plot.  A large cannery wants to open in Noyo, California and the local fishermen all like the idea except the American Indians.  Pollution has been driving off the fish and the cannery will make things worse.  From the beginning humanoid creatures have been stalking the town at night.

The creatures start killing the men and raping the women.  The female scientist brought in speculates that a certain hormone intended to grow larger salmon faster had leaked and coelacanths that had been eating the modified salmon became humanoid and felt the need to reproduce with human women.  The creatures were inspired by the Gill Man but have ridiculous tails that give them a kind of Barney vibe.  During a local festival the creatures attack the town en masse and a real melee breaks out, but the creatures are defeated with a combination of high-powered rifles, gasoline on the water set ablaze, and a kitchen knife.  It’s all a bit of a mess.

Apparently Corman felt the movie wasn’t exploitative enough and hired another director to spice it up a bit, having it edited together without the director’s knowledge.  To complicate things, a second, uncredited director had already been involved, so the film has three.  That might help to explain why the story doesn’t really hold together.  As a cheap creature feature it’s not horrible.  It borrows ideas from Alien, Prophecy, and Jaws (and apparently Piranha, which I’ve never seen).   It turns out to be rather nihilistic when it’s all said and done, but the creatures, apart from the tails, aren’t that bad.  There are a couple of legitimately scary moments.  Those of us who watch Corman movies might know to expect some deficiencies, but I was caught off guard by some of the cinematography and even some of the acting.  Not bad for a movie picked with only a few minutes to decide.

Cat Curse

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In researching Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, I watched every feature-length movie of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” that still exists.  I also watched many other productions, based, however loosely, on the Legend.  I was unaware that The Curse of the Cat People should’ve been included.  There is no database of all cultural references to Sleepy Hollow, and although Curse of the Cat People has many fans, nobody advertises it as related to the Legend.  But it is.  I happened to watch this 1944 film because I’d been thinking about Cat People.  My jaw dropped when the film opened with a teacher taking her children on a walk and explaining that this was Sleepy Hollow.  My book had been published just last month and I was discovering new material!  The movie is a bit disjointed, apparently because studio executives wanted new material added and some of the edited pieces explaining the story were lost.  Still, it is well worth seeing.

Six-year-old Amy Reed has no friends.  A daydreamer who has a rich fantasy life, she frightens her father, Oliver, who had been married to Irena—one of the cat people.  Oliver never believed Irena was really a cat person and is afraid his daughter is suffering under similar delusions.  This is because Amy is given a ring that grants wishes by an old widow who tells her a version of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  The wish Amy makes is for a friend and Irena, the ghost of her father’s first wife, shows up.  There are no cat transformations here, but there is a great deal of psychological subtlety.  Is Amy really seeing Irena or is her loneliness filling in the voids in her life—her father is distant and refuses to accept what his daughter tells him. Instead he punishes her for it.

When Amy gets lost on Christmas Eve, Irena saves her from the murderous daughter of the widow who gave her the ring.  It’s clear that some of the connective tissue is missing, but the story is sincere and smart, even if only very loosely a sequel.  The story of the headless horseman, pre-Disney for those of you who’ve read my book, presents the horseman as collecting unwary wanders on the bridge and compelling them to ride with him.  He’s not after anybody’s head.  Indeed, this is the way he’s described in Irving’s story.  Just as I’ve begun collecting films for Holy Sequel, it looks like I should begin keeping a list for Sleepy Hollow as American Sequel.  Curse of the Cat People will be first on the list.

Carpenter Ward

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Surveying my streaming service for something free, I found The Ward.  It advertises itself as “John Carpenter’s The Ward,” and Carpenter has proven his mettle more than once.  I found out afterwards that this 2010 film is his last, to date.  Although it has jump startles and scary sequences, it isn’t as frightening as his best work, such as Halloween and The Thing.  The eponymous ward is a psych ward.  A young woman with amnesia is brought to the facility in 1966.  She’s somewhat violent but begins to make friends with the other four girls in the ward.  It won’t be satisfying to discuss this without a major spoiler, but I’ll try to hold off for another paragraph before giving it.  Overall the movie is creepy and atmospheric, but not really a classic.  Movies about mental hospitals have built-in scary material, and The Ward meets expectations there.

Kristen, the girl with amnesia, is resourceful and nearly escapes a few times.  She’s worried because a ghost in the asylum is killing the other girls.  Nobody will believe her, of course, since she’s an inmate.  Now the reveal: the other girls are all projections of Kristen’s personality.  Actually, Kristen’s name is Alice, and she’s been at the asylum for some time, a patient with multiple personality disorder.  The other girls that are killed by the “ghost” are part of a new therapy her doctor uses to try to get Alice back.  The other girls, or personalities, had banded together and “killed” Alice and her “ghost” is now seeking them out and killing them.  In reality, only Alice is there.  While the viewer is rooting for the other girls, they are preventing Alice from being cured.

In some ways this is similar to Split, but that would come six years later.  The horror here is the loss of self-knowledge.  The little backstory that is given shows Alice suffering trauma as a child, forcing the dissociation that leads to her split personalities.  As a horror movie The Ward has the jump scares and eerie atmosphere that often work in the genre.  There are chase scenes and a monster.  The story, however, rides heavily on that final reveal.  It really doesn’t live up to Carpenter’s full potential.  It does, however, take the final girl trope seriously.  It’s not really a surprise that it failed at the box office.  Although Split came later, other such films had been produced earlier.  What this one lacks is Carpenter’s characteristic flair.  Still, there are many other films that deliver less when they stream for free.

Monkey Shines

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While religion isn’t a major part of the story, it appears enough in The Monkey to be noted.  The movie presents probably the most inarticulate priest in cinema, played for laughs.  But then again, there is quite a lot of comedy in among the gore.  It’s difficult to say if the movie would’ve succeeded had it been straight horror.  Based on a Stephen King short story, the plot revolve around a toy ape, actually, a drum-playing chimp that is wound up with a key.  The problem is, when the last drum-stick comes down somebody nearby dies in a bizarre way.  As is the way in such stories, if the “monkey” (I’ll just give in and call it that) is destroyed, which it is from time to time, it keeps coming back.  When purchased by a father for his twin sons, tragedy follows until only one is left standing.  The religion comes at the funerals.

The twin sons, Hal and Bill, the main human focus of the film, hate each other.  This is mainly because Bill, the firstborn, bullies Hal, driving resentment.  They discover the monkey among their absentee father’s effects and when they wind it up they soon end up as orphans.  When it kills their guardian uncle, they put it down a well where it stays quiet for 25 years.  Bill acquires the toy as an adult and harboring resentment, believing Hal killed their mother, he sets the monkey off again in the hopes that it will kill his estranged brother.  A string of bizarre deaths occur, cluing Hal in to the fact that his brother is back at it.  Only one of them survives while the town lies in ruins.  The deaths, although gruesome, are comedic, making them bearable.

The story is dark enough that director Osgood Perkins’ decision to make it comedic appears to have been the only way to make it palatable.  Horror comedy is often difficult to pull off well.  Many such films wind up being simply silly or losing any potential to be frightening.  The Monkey manages to blend fun and fear effectively.  It also continues the long line of horror films that animate toys of various sorts, making all kinds of commentary about childhood.  Of course, this film begins with Bill and Hal’s childhood and has them learning to deal with death at an early age.  At the end even Death on his pale horse has a cameo. Handled differently, it could’ve been quite terrifying.  Especially since the religion in this world is so completely ineffectual.

Not Trembling

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Tremors is one of those monster movies I just plain missed.  Of course, it was released while I was working on my doctorate in Edinburgh, and although we saw some movies we couldn’t afford many.  We certainly didn’t go to any creature features.  I only found out about it because DVD extras on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds had a little debate as to whether that film was a monster movie.  They interviewed Rob Underwood, the director of Tremors, for his opinion.  A short clip was included, so I knew I’d need to see it eventually.  It took a few years, but now I can stake my claim.  Tremors is one of those quasi-funny horror movies, maybe edging into comedy-horror, but not quite.  Although not recalled as an inspiration, the story has some resemblance to Frank Herbert’s Dune.  At least as far as the monsters go.

In the remote Nevada town of Perfection, two handymen, Val and Earl, are ready to leave the population of 14 for bigger things.  But then strange deaths begin to occur.  A local seismologist has been noting unusual readings as locals find a dead creature that appears to be some kind of snake.  They want to go for help but find themselves trapped.  The seismologist and handymen try to unravel the mystery of this creature, which the handymen kill.  She (the seismologist) informs them that there are three more.  Warning their fellow citizens of the danger, the underground creatures begin attacking.  As in Dune, they “hear” people walking and use that information to hunt them.  A couple of survivalists manage to kill one of the sand worms, but the surviving townies know they have to escape to the mountains.

One of the final two monsters is dispatched with a homemade bomb, but I’ll let you watch to figure out how the last one is handled.  The movie starts out with folksy humor and nothing too serious.  When the monsters begin to attack, however, they prove relentless and give some scare to the affair.  Although the film didn’t perform especially well at the box office, it led to a franchise with sequels and a prequel (the origin of the monsters is never explained).  Filmed in bright desert sunlight, the movie isn’t typical of horror.  At the same time, it’s built around monsters, so there’s no doubt that it fits.  It probably won’t scare anyone these days, but it has become part of the repertoire, and it remains good fun on a rainy afternoon.

Q’s and P’s

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I finally had to break down and buy it.  Quatermass and the Pit has been on my “to see” list probably longer than any other single movie.  I managed to stream the first two of this telinema series for free, so I guess it was like getting three movies for the price of one.  Aired in the United States as Five Million Years to Earth, this isn’t the greatest sci-fi-horror movie ever, but it isn’t bad.  The pacing is a bit slow but the story is intriguing.  Rocket scientist Quatermass gets involved in the excavation of what turns out to be a buried rocket ship from Mars.  Surrounding the ship in the five-million-year-old matrix are the remains of apparently intelligent apes.  The scientists discover that the apes were artificially enhanced by insectoid martians that resemble the devil.  It’s pointed out that any time digging has taken place near Hobb’s End, strange phenomena occur.  It’s noted that Hob used to be a nickname for the devil.

This detail leads to a perhaps unexpected connection to religion and horror.  Quatermass and Barbara, a scientist who has the ability to “see” the creatures via collective memory, realize that the hauntings that have taken place around Hobb’s End for centuries may have been the image of demons, or the devil, emanating from the evil of these would-be invaders.  At one point a priest argues that their influence is essentially demonic, but the scientists realize that these modified apes are actually the creatures from which humans evolved.  All the human tampering with the ship eventually frees the spirit of the martian insects, resembling a devil.  The way to destroy it is with iron, relying on folklore which, in this instance, works.

The four Quatermass movies (I don’t plan on seeking out the last) were theatrical reshoots of television serials.  The last movie is essentially the TV series stitched together as a movie.  From at least the seventies on (Quatermass and the Pit was released in 1967) the first and third installments were considered fairly good horror films.  They aren’t always available in the United States, probably due to digital rights management.  It seems ridiculous that in this day and age that companies still restrict access, even to those willing to pay a modest fee, for movies that are essential parts of the canon.  Hammer (all three Quatermass movies are Hammer productions) films are still difficult to access in the United States.  At least, with the willingness to wait half a century, I’ve finally be able to see Quatermass and the Pit.

Dyatlov

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Dyatlov Pass is a name well known to paranormal enthusiasts.  With good reason.  In 1959 a group of nine experienced hikers were killed in the region now named for their leader.  Dying in the wilderness is, I suspect, not that unusual, but the circumstances surrounding these deaths were puzzling.  In the wintery mountains of Russia, some were undressed.  Three died from blunt trauma and six from hypothermia.  One victim had a missing tongue and two had missing eyes.  One least one tent had been cut out of from the inside, and one body had evidence of radiation.  While many theories abound, no satisfactory explanation has ever emerged.  Devil’s Pass is a found-footage horror movie based on this incident.  For horror, it’s low-hanging fruit.  This is a scary episode in history, whether an avalanche or wild animals, or a combination, killed the young people.

Devil’s Pass is set up as a documentary with five Americans following the same route to try to determine what really happened.  The majority of the film is the story of how they arrived at the location, anomalously hours ahead of schedule.  Along the way some kind of creature passed close by and sharp-eyed viewers can see them moving in the background of one shot.  At the place of the 1959 incident, the Russian military starts an avalanche that kills one of the women and breaks one of the men’s legs.  A couple of soldiers come, chasing the three mobile youths into a bunker, and killing the one with the broken leg.  In the tunnels in the mountain, they discover evidence of teleportation experiments—citing specifically the Philadelphia experiment—that leave people monstrous and distorted.

A bit over the top.  Still, the incident itself grows more and more bizarre when it’s examined.  I first learned of the Dyatlov Pass incident many years ago.  It would’ve never occurred to me to make a horror movie about it, but those who did made reference to pretty much all of the strange facts associated with the real incident.  As a horror film it partially works.  The last fifteen minutes or so strain any credulity, but they wrap up in such a way that they make sense of factors planted earlier in the film.  Over all, the movie is intriguing enough to retain viewers’ attention.  It was filmed in Russia, which lends it verisimilitude and it rewards those who like to speculate about paranormal explanations for events that just can’t be explained otherwise. 

Quatermass Again

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Quatermass, as I’ve noted before, is a name I knew from boyhood, but with no frame of reference.  Having watched The Quatermass Xperiment, and still seeking Quatermass and the Pit, I found a freebee of Quatermass 2 on a commercial streaming service.  Hammer films are notoriously difficult to find in the United States, unless you’re willing to pay serious money for them.  In any case, Quatermass 2 is a passible bad movie in the sci-fi-horror genre.  Quatermass is supposed to be a likable character, but for the film versions American “tough guy” Brian Donlevy played Quatermass in the first two movies.  But I need to take a step back.  Quatermass was a BBC television serial.  There were four series, each eventually made into movies.  The first three were reshot and the final one (The Quatermass Conclusion) was cobbled together from the serial rather than being refilmed.

Of this set of movies, The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass and the Pit are considered proper horror.  Brian Donlevy doesn’t garner a ton of sympathy in Quatermass 2.  This is mainly because of poor acting and a small budget.  Reputedly suffering from alcoholism, Donlevy has trouble with his lines and often appears curt and short-tempered (he was replaced in Quatermass and the Pit).  Even so, Quatermass 2 has monsters and some reasonably scary moments.  Here’s the story: alien invaders are taking over a secret government plant preparing for moon colonization.  Quatermass discovers the base and finds that everyone acts odd.  Interestingly, they’ve stolen his plans for the base.  The aliens take over people, body-snatcher style.  Quatermass and an angry mob manage to get into the base where the alien-infected fight them.  Eventually the huge monsters break loose and Quatermass has his own rocket converted to a bomb to destroy the mothership in geosynchronous orbit.  The infected people return to normal.

It’s fairly easy to see why few people comment on Quatermass 2.  I wouldn’t have watched it had I not stumbled across a clip showing some of its horror chops.  I’m glad, in a strange way, that I saw it.  I knew Quatermass was a telinema [link to Fire Walking]  product, but I wasn’t quite sure how the television serial fit together with the movies.  Quatermass 2 was bad enough to make me look it up.  From all my reading about horror movies, Quatermass and the Pit is the scariest of the four.  At least at this historical moment it’s not available on streaming services.  And that, I submit, is why we still need DVDs.  Digital rights management is rather like an alien invader…

Experimenting with Quatermass

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Hammer films are coy.  In these days of digital rights management, they’re often difficult to locate in the United States.  Even on streaming services.  I’d known about Quatermass since I was a kid.  I’d heard about Quatermass and the Pit as a pretty scary early science fiction-horror offering.  I’ve still never seen it.  Quatermass was a BBC television character, a kind of mad scientist figure.  The Quatermass Xperiment was the first of a set of four Hammer films based on him.  Also known as The Creeping Unknown, it was cast with an American Quatermass (ironically, it turns out) to appeal to American viewers (who can now seldom access the film).  In any case, one of the streaming services finally acquired rights to the 1955 movie.  The special effects were naturally primitive, but that doesn’t stop this from becoming a scary film.

Watching these early movies is like studying history.  Other films were influenced by The Quatermass Xperiment, most notably Lifeforce.  I couldn’t help but think of Night of the Living Dead as well.  Quatermass, a rogue scientist, sends a rocket into space with three astronauts.  Since this was before we had any kind of conception of how this might actually be done, the idea seems implausible, of course.  The rocket returns with only one of the three crew members, and he’s morphing into something else.  Despite his arrogance, Quatermass realizes he has to cooperate with the police to contain the menace.  Inspector Lomax describes himself as a “Bible man,” unacquainted with science, and Quatermass considers his work superior to that or mere police.  When the hybrid is finally located and destroyed, however, it is in Westminster Abbey.

Although the runtime is just over an hour and some of the acting is quite wooden, this is an affecting story.  The scene where the transforming man encounters the little girl’s tea party bears elements of the pathos of Frankenstein.  Without the budget, science, and even acting resources of modern productions, The Quatermass Xperiment manages to fall squarely into horror with a monster I’d been waiting since childhood to see.  In those days you were at the mercy of your local television offerings.  Now that we have worldwide content on the worldwide web, we still restrict viewing so that the most money can be made from a movie that’s seven decades old, and its cohort.  In any case, this experiment has left me determined to find what Quatermass discovers in the pit.  Once that becomes available on a service I use.