Flavor of Childhood

Leave a comment

Giant, telepathic crabs whose molecular structure make them impervious to bullets, explosives, and fire, and that know how to use dynamite and who plan to take over the human world?  A group of scientists trapped on an irradiated Pacific island that is slowly sinking into the ocean?  This must be Attack of the Crab Monsters!  I was born during what is generally considered the dearth  period of the American horror industry.  Roger Corman, however, was working hard outside of the studio system to cater to that new demographic—teens with spending money.  Drive-in theaters were big and for about $100,000 you could shoot a double-feature and bring in ten times that much.  If you shoot quickly enough you can produce several of these in a year and not have to worry about the big studios.

It’s been fashionable to laugh Corman off, but he knows how to live the teenage dream.  Monster movies were part of the childhood of many of us during this “dearth.”  Yes, sophisticated frights were yet to come, but these creature features were full of creativity and escapism.  And so many unanswered questions.  How did those giant crabs chop all the radio wires to bits with those indelicate giant claws?  If they could smash through the outside wall of a house, why couldn’t they break through a light-weight door once inside?  And why, knowing that bullets and grenades can’t possibly hurt them, do scientists keep firing away?  What was that oil subplot all about anyway?  And how do you end a film with the lines “He gave his life,” followed up by “I know”?  This is stuff, like Strawberry Quik, I couldn’t get enough of as a kid.

No, this wasn’t intelligent horror—it was often laughable—but it made an impression.  As an adult I can’t recall which of these movies I’ve seen before and I suspect it would take a lifetime to watch all the films Corman directed or produced.  Along with his contemporary indie director/producer William Castle, Corman may be inordinately responsible for my tastes as an adult.  I’ve grown more sophisticated (I hope) in some ways, but I’m at a pay grade where free on Amazon Prime often decides a weekend’s entertainment.  Besides, these movies struggle to top out an hour’s running time.  You can still get a lot done in a day and still have time for a monster crab, giant leech, or wasp woman.  With enough radiation, and imagination, anything can happen.

Stinging Days

Leave a comment

It doesn’t take much to encourage wasps.  Even after a few unseasonably cold weeks in autumn, one warm day will bring them back, poking along the siding looking for a nesting place.  My most recent stinging incident occurred in October.  It’s fitting, then, I suppose, that to try to keep awake late one October weekend afternoon that I watched The Wasp Woman.  These creature features were what I grew up with, and this was a Roger Corman brief film from 1959.  In fact, it was so brief that eleven minutes had to be added to make it a stand-alone television release.  It was originally part of a theatrical double feature.  Finding out about added time explained why Dr. Zinthrop’s accent changed from the first eleven minutes to the rest of the film.

Women have the same right as men to be made into monsters, of course, but there’s a poignancy to this storyline.  Janice Starlin is the owner of a cosmetics company but profits have been declining since she’s showing signs of aging.  Her customers want a younger looking woman providing their beauty products.  As is to be expected for a movie from the fifties, it’s a pretty sexist storyline.  Still, through the plodding plot the viewer can’t help but to feel for Ms. Starlin.  So when Zinthrop shows up with an extract made from wasp royal jelly (a secretion that actually comes from honey bees) that reverses aging who can blame her for trying it?  Of course it turns her into a giant wasp woman.

These kinds of mad scientist movies with their inevitable results perhaps injected a sense of caution into those of us who grew up watching them.  They weren’t great works of art, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have something to say.  What I heard, watching this one, was that women exploited for beauty products suffer from natural aging processes.  And any formula that reverses aging come with its own set of problems.  The only other scary part of the film was when employees have to get to the upper floors to prevent Starlin from killing people, they have to wait for the elevator.  Their sense of frustration, although funny, is nevertheless a reality of working in a high-rise.  These movies from the late fifties seem to me to be a cry for help.  The sexist, button-down, white shirt world isn’t all it’s advertised as being.  Mad scientists are needed to help us cope.  Or at least stay awake on a sleepy October weekend afternoon.

Pitfalls

Leave a comment

While watching Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum, it occurred to me that these movies have improved with age.  The series of American International Pictures’ Corman Poe productions do manage to capture a mood.  One of the reasons, I suppose, is that Vincent Price was an able, often underrated, stage performer.  No, these aren’t like modern movies.  They’re clearly fictional and the backdrops are pretty obviously fake and it always seems to be thunder-storming outside. They are going for a mood, and for those who watch films for the feelings they generate, this can work.  Although based—very loosely—on Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum was screen-written by Richard Matheson, an able novelist in his own regard.

The Poe story hinges on the terror of the slowly descending pendulum and it has been used and reused in various guises over the years in everything from horror films to James Bond movies.  Corman’s Poe movies often set trends.  For example, in the backstory to Pit and the Pendulum, Nicholas’ (Price) father was a member of the Inquisition.  He kept a personal torture chamber in his basement—well, he lived in a castle, after all.  One of the victims of his father was Nicholas’ mother, an event the young Nicholas witnessed.  A very similar scenario, with even some similar shots, occurs in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow.  I’m sure it must occur elsewhere as well, but in making a narrative of the story, this is my own unprofessional observation.

Yes, Corman is often over the top.  His films know they’re for entertainment purposes.  He’s not above camp and gimmicks.  The strange juxtaposition, in my own case, is that movies are meaningful.  Ninety-minutes to a couple of hours relieved from the constantly pressing demands of work and trying to maintain some sort of social life.  (And yard work.)  In ancient times, I suspect, myths served a similar purpose.  They still do.  Our myths have become more Technicolor over the years and have evolved from celluloid to pixels.  Their function has also evolved from escapism to a location of meaning.  On a recent weekend on my own I ended up watching five movies, feeling guilty between times for not painting the porch or doing that plastering that’s requiring attention in the attic.  The movies, however, give meaning to these other more mundane tasks such as work or housekeeping.  They’re not literally true, I know, but we need not disparage Roger Corman for stating the obvious.  Myths entertain as well as inform.

Lovecraft’s Palace

Leave a comment

So, to see Witchfinder General I had to buy a set of Vincent Price movies.  Complex copyright deals mean that not everything can be streamed—there’s a movie I’ve been waiting months to see because Amazon Prime says “not currently available in your area.”  That word “currently” tells you that it’s a rights issue.  In any case, that box of Price movies contained a few goodies I’d never seen and had wanted to.  And one that I hadn’t heard of: The Haunted Palace.  Legendary producer Roger Corman had Price star in a variety of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations.  (Witchfinder General wasn’t one of them.)  Corman wanted to make an H. P. Lovecraft movie, but the studio insisted it stay within the identity of this Poe series.  This movie is an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” but titled after a Poe poem, “The Haunted Palace.”

Suffice it to say, I knew little of this before I sat down to watch it.  I didn’t know, for example, that this was the first big-time movie based on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.  I didn’t realize it would involve the Necronomicon and perhaps the first, blurry—to preserve the sanity of viewers—view of maybe Cthulhu.  The movie doesn’t specify which of the Old Gods is kept in this pit, so it could be Yog-Sothoth instead.  You see, as a child I watched some of the movies in this series.  They would’ve had to have been the ones showing on television, likely on Saturday afternoon.  The one that I clearly recall, and remember thinking “that’s not how it goes!” was The Raven.  And as a child I had never been exposed to H. P. Lovecraft.

Some of us have our own brand of cheap or free entertainment.  The small number of friends I had growing up didn’t care to read.  My family wasn’t literate, and most high school teachers couldn’t suggest much to a kid who’d somehow found Poe and liked what he read.  As I’ve said before, Goodwill was my bookstore.  I discovered Lovecraft on the internet during a lonely stretch of teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.  Like many visionaries, Lovecraft didn’t achieve fame in his lifetime, but is now considered a bizarre American treasure.  The Cthulhu mythos is everywhere.  Even my auto-suggest is quick to fill in his name as I type.  The Haunted Palace isn’t a great movie—this is Roger Corman—but it’s a pretty good movie.  And its history in the cinematography of Lovecraft makes it worth part of a Saturday afternoon.

Various Plagues

2 Comments

At the encouragement of a friend I watched Roger Corman’s version of Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.  As I’ve mentioned from time to time lately, making short fiction into movies requires padding.  Poe’s tale is easily summarized: Prince Prospero and his wealthy friends attempt to socially distance themselves during the plague of the red death.  During a masquerade, one of the characters is the red death and they all succumb.  Getting about 90 minutes out of this was something to which Corman was well suited.  The interesting thing, and the reason my friend, I suspect, recommended it, is that Corman did so theologically.  Vincent Price’s Prospero is cruel to others to make them face reality.  He’s also, and not unrelatedly, a worshipper of Satan.

When the red death breaks out in a small village, Prospero holes up in his castle where he tries to win over a local girl that has caught his attention.  He’s drawn to her not only for her beauty, but for her faith.  Francesca believes in the goodness of God as strongly as he believes that Satan will welcome him.  The film is further padded out by blending it with Poe’s story “Hop-Frog.”  Despite the Corman hallmarks of quick production and low budget, this adaptation draws much from conflicting religious views.  In fact, this story centers on them.  Granted, this was in the sixties, but the ideas still resonate these decades later.  Rumors of Satanism still spread panic and spark the same kinds of discussions.

Interestingly, the film ends up suggesting that death is stronger than Satan.  And that justice dictates that at least some of the faithful will survive.  Those dedicated to their faith, their family, and their friends make it through alive.  Death specifically lets them go.  Prospero, however, seals his fate by his selfishness.  Apparently his explanations of his motives do him no good.  Death doesn’t condemn him for his devotion to Satan.  The treatment of his fellow humans, it seems, is the ultimate measure used.  Some would argue that theology is best left to theologians, but it seems to me that we all work with the same data.  Philosophers attempt to convince based on the power of their reason.  Theologians try the same, but there’s always something external and unknowable in the equation.  How you know this unknown is on the basis of sacred texts and sacred tradition, as well as reason.  Why does it seem unlikely that writers and directors might have something to add to the conversation?

Falling Usher

2 Comments

Roger Corman is a name well known to film buffs.  The producer of many low-budget, obviously cheaply filmed movies shot over a matter of days, his early career was prolific.  Often working in genre films, he directed horror (among other projects), occasionally drawing on Edgar Allan Poe.  The problem of adapting a short story to a length required for cinema release could be solved in a number of ways, but padding out the story was common.  I had only a few minutes to watch a horror movie over the weekend, so I pulled out a Vincent Price collection I’d bought some time ago.  A number of them are Corman films and I may have seen them when I was younger, but if so the path recall is completely eroded.  I decided to watch The Fall of the House of Usher.

This story by Poe remains my favorite for its sheer moodiness and imagery.  The premise is brief and the action little.  I knew Corman would have had to have changed quite a bit.  It turns out that he’d brought Richard Matheson in as the writer.  Many films can be made or broken by the writer.  While it doesn’t improve on Poe it is certainly a watchable effort that develops a mood in its own right.  The low budget is evident, but despite that the story is a slow build using many of Poe’s famous concerns such as premature burial and isolation in dangerous locations.  While not scary in the same way as modern horror, and stretched out by a dream sequence and overture, it nevertheless works.

Given my particular angle on horror, I noticed the introduced religious aspects.  While identification is difficult due to the lack of focus, there seem to have been two large, iconic Bibles in the story.  Indeed, the Ushers have a private chapel in which Roderick prays over his dead (?) sister.  The curse of the Ushers has to do with family evil that is being punished, causing Philip Winthrop to quote the Bible in his denial of the passing down of divine wrath.  The paintings of the Usher ancestor as Roderick explains this are the scariest part of the movie.  Not all Corman adaptions of Poe work well, but with the ministrations of Matheson and the rich ground for development from the original story, this is an atmospheric contribution to early horror.  And it works if you only have a few minutes on a busy weekend for your favorite avocation.

Last Genesis

Leave a comment

Roger Corman was famous for saving a buck on his movies. When it came to low-budget sci-fi and horror, he could be counted on to stretch pennies into dollars. The B quality with which this impresses most of his films makes them all the more addictive. I watched my share growing up, but I’m still discovering ever more as an adult. The Last Woman on Earth is one I recently found and the religious implications of the film were so obvious that they seemed worthy of a little exegesis. The plot is simple enough, three skin-divers, a man, his wife, and his lawyer friend, are the only survivors of an anoxic episode. When Harold Gern (the man) wonders what happened his friend Martin says, “A new and better bomb, act of God, it doesn’t really matter.” The destruction of humanity is a time-honored divine pass-time, so no one considers the statement blasphemous.

Naturally enough, within a short time Martin starts to feel that Harold’s claim on his wife Evelyn (clearly, by choice of name, an Eve figure) is a bit unreasonable under the circumstances. Biology is, in this instance, the misogynic element as the men increasingly step up their hostilities. Evelyn eventually decides to run away with Martin, but Harold is in hot pursuit. The entire episode takes place on Puerto Rico, and so there are a limited number of places to hide. Martin tells Evelyn to await him in the church, which she dutifully does. Harold catches up with Martin and blinds him. Martin finds his way to the church and when Harold comes in Martin provides a final homily (including some lines from Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out”) declaring that there is no more God. He then dies on the church floor.

The movie ends with Harold and Evelyn leaving the church to try to learn what life is all about. Reading up on the movie, I learned that Corman wanted to keep the costs down so that the writer of the script was cast as Martin for the film. The script wasn’t finished before they started shooting. Nevertheless Robert Towne’s story brings the overall trajectory back to an updated Garden of Eden story. Puerto Rico, a tropical paradise, where the one woman is Eve, is the scene of the first sin—the murder of Martin by Harold. Throughout the movie, Martin is clearly the Abel character while Harold is selfish, unsympathetic, and emotionally absent. Cain wins the epic struggle and God, we are told, is no more. Not the most profound of story-telling, but the themes and concepts are very much biblical. And when the final couple leave the church the remainder of world history is set to begin. I’d gladly give this one a B.

Terror Able

Leave a comment

Saturday afternoons were made for B movies. After a hectic week, nothing soothes like grainy picture quality and poor dialogue. This weekend offered a chance to view The Terror. This 1963 Roger Corman film won its bad marks the honest way – by earning them. Nevertheless with Jack Nicholson playing against Boris Karloff and a plot so convoluted that I had to draw a chart to figure out what I’d just watched, the movie lived up to its grade. Throw in Francis Ford Coppola as an associate producer and it’s party time. Corman’s legendary cheapness and fondness for disproportionate claims of scares that never materialize only add to the charm. After watching the opening sequence one gets the distinct impression that Franklin J. Schaffner had watched this film before setting up the climatic scene of Planet of the Apes.

In keeping with a recent trend on this blog, the plot involved a witch. An old woman from Poland resettles in France to avenge her murdered son. The crone casts a spell transforming a bird into a beautiful young woman. The first words of the spells sent me fumbling for the “rewind” button. “Tetragrammaton, tetragrammaton,” the old woman intones to begin her spell. In a movie fraught with dialogue problems, this might be considered simply a choice of foreign-sounding, mysterious syllables to be uttered for an audience not expected to know that tetragrammaton is the title of the sacred four-letter name of Yahweh. By this point the plot was so convoluted that making God the agent behind a pagan curse seemed almost natural.

The analog with the Bible soon became clear. The Bible holds its sway over many because of its often beautiful rhetoric. Sparing the time to study what the rhetoric might have meant in its original context is an exercise few believers can afford to undertake. Our world has become so full of things that taking time to explore the implications of one’s religion must compete with ever increasing Internet options, thousands of channels of television, and plain, old-fashioned figuring out how to get along. Religion is a luxury item and, as experience tells us, it is best not to look too closely at luxuries – their flaws too readily appear upon detailed inspection. Allowing religion its exotic sounding mumbo-jumbo preserves its mystery and power. And if a witch says a theologically freighted word we can just chalk it up to entertainment. We are too busy to examine what our religions really say. Roger Corman may have unintentionally discovered a real terror in a movie that will keep no one awake at night.