Danse Macabre (34 page)

George Romero's film
Dawn of the Dead
came out at about the same time as
Prophecy
(June-July 1979) and I found it remarkable (and amusing) that Romero had made a horror film for about two million dollars that managed to look like six million, while Frankenheimer made a twelve-million-dollar movie that managed to look like about two.

Lots of stuff is wrong with the Frankenheimer film. None of the major Indian parts are played by real Indians; the old Indian wallah has a teepee in a northern New England area which was populated by lodgebuilding Indians; the science, while not completely wrong, is used in an opportunistic way that is not really fair considering the fact that the movie's makers purported to have made a movie of "social conscience"; the characters are stock; the special effects (with the exception of those weird baby mutants) are bad.

All of that I will cheerfully agree to. But I come stubbornly, helplessly back to the fact that I liked
Prophecy
, and just writing about it has made me long to rush out and see it a fourth (and maybe a fifth) time. I mentioned that you begin to see and appreciate patterns in horror

movies, and to love them. These patterns are sometimes as stylized as the movements in a Japanese
noh
play or the passages in a John Ford western. And
Prophecy
is a throwback to the fifties horror films as surely as the Sex Pistols and the Ramones are throwbacks to the "dirty white boys" of the rockabilly explosion in 1956-1959.

For me, settling into
Prophecy
is as comfortable as settling into an old easy-chair and visiting with good friends. All the components are there; Robert Foxworth could as easily be Hugh Marlowe from
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
or Richard Carlson in
It Came from Outer
Space
or Richard Denning in
The Black Scorpion
. Talia Shire could as easily be Barbara Rush or Mara Corday or one of half a dozen other monstermovie heroines from that same Big Bug era (although I would be lying if I didn't admit to some disappointment in Ms. Shire, who was brilliant as Rocky Balboa's shy and hesitant
amour
Adrian; she's not as pretty as I remember Mara Corday being, and she never appears in a white one-piece swimsuit, when everyone knows that this particular type of horror movie demands that at one point the heroine must appear—and be menaced—while wearing a white one-piece swimsuit).

The monster is pretty hokey-looking, too. But I loved that old monster, spiritual sister to Godzilla, Mighty Joe Young, Gorgo, and all the dinosaurs that were ever embedded in ice-floes and managed to get out so they could go thundering slowly down Fifth Avenue, squashing electronics shops and eating policemen; the monster in
Prophecy
gave me back a splendid part of my misspent youth, a part which included such irascible friends as the Venusian Ymir and the Deadly Mantis (who knocks over a city bus on which, for one splendid moment, the word TONKA can be clearly read). She's a pretty fine monster all the same. The mercury pollution causing all those monsters is pretty good, too—an updating of the old radiation-caused-these-Big-Bugs plot device. Then there's the fact that the monster gets all the bad guys. At one point she kills a little kid, but the kid, who is on a hiking trip with his parents, really deserves to go. He has brought along his suitcase radio and is Defiling the Wilderness with Rock 'N Roll. All that is missing from
Prophecy
(and its omission may have only been an oversight) is a sequence where the monster stomps the rotten old paper mill flat.
The Giant Spider Invasion
also comes equipped with a plot straight out of the fifties, and there were even a lot of fifties actors and actresses on view in it, including Barbara Hale and Bill Williams . . . halfway through it, I had the feeling that what I had really stumbled on was a crazed episode of the old
Perry Mason
series.

In spite of the title, there is really only one giant spider, but we don't feel cheated because it's a dilly. It appears to be a Volkswagen covered with half a dozen bearskin rugs. Four spider legs, operated by people crammed inside this VW spider, one assumes, have been attached to each side. The taillights double neatly as blinking red spider eyes. It is impossible to see such a budget-conscious special effect without feeling a wave of admiration. Other bad movies abound; each fan has his or her favorite. Who could forget the large canvas bag that was supposed to be
Caltiki, the Immortal Monster
in the 1959 Italian movie?

Or the Japanese version of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—The Manster
? Other favorites of mine include the flaming Winston cigarette filter that was supposed to be a crash-landing alien spaceship in
Teenage Monster
and Allison Hayes as a refugee from a pro basketball team in
The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman
. (If only she could have wandered across into Bert I. Gordon's
The Amazing Colossal Man
. . . . Think of the children if they had clicked!) Then there was the wonderful moment in the 1978 film Ruby, a routine terror job about a haunted drive-in, when one of the characters punches a button on the Coke machine and gets a cup of blood. Inside the machine, you see, all of the tubes have been hooked up to a severed human head. In
Children of Cain
, a Western horror picture (almost, but not quite, up to the level of
Billy
the Kid Meets Dracula
), John Carradine goes West with barrels of salt water instead of fresh strapped to the sides of his Conestoga wagon. All the better to preserve his collection of severed heads (maybe because the historical period would have made the Coke machine an anachronism). In one of those lost-continent-type pictures—this one starring Cesar Romero—all the dinosaurs were cartoons. Nor should we forget Irwin Allen's
The Swarm
, with its unbelievable matte jobs and its cast of Familiar Faces. Here is a picture that manages to even better
Prophecy
's time; it is a twelve-million-dollar picture that manages to look like a buck-ninety-eight.

2

From
Castle of Frankenstein
:

The Blob

This sf-horror comes out as a slightly flat imitation of both "Rebel Without a Cause" and "The Creeping Unknown." Oozing out-of-space horror consumes humans until destroyed in ridiculous ending.

This uncharacteristically out-of-patience review of a film which was the first starring vehicle for an actor who then billed himself as "Steven McQueen" ignores several fine touches: the theme song, for instance, by a group that sounds suspiciously like the Chords doing outtakes from "Sh-Boom," is played over a happy little cartoon of expanding blobs. The real blob, which arrives on earth inside a hollow meteor, looks at first like a melted blueberry Popsicle and later quite a bit like a giant jujube. This film has its genuine moments of unease and horror: it smoothly engulfs the arm of a farmer who has been unwise enough to touch it and the blob turns a sinister red as the farmer screams in agony; later, after McQueen and his girl friend discover the farmer and take him to the local doctor, there is a scary moment when McQueen can't locate the blob in the darkened examining room. When he sees it at last, he throws a bottle of acid over the thing, which flashes briefly yellow and then returns to its former ominous red.

Also, the
CofF
review is uncharacteristically wrong about the film's conclusion: the blob proved immortal. It was frozen and flown up to the Arctic to await the sequel,
Beware the Blob
(also released as
Son of the Blob
). Perhaps the film's finest moment for those of us who consider ourselves connoisseurs of bad special effects comes when the blob swallows a small diner whole. We see the blob oozing slowly across a color photograph of the diner's interior. Admirable. Must have made Bert I. Gordon envious.

Concerning
Invasion of the Saucer-Men
, a 1957 American-International picture, CofF regained some of its more customary
savoir faire
:

Ludicrous sf quickie, on lowest teenage level. Space invaders are cute little saucermen who inject alcohol into victims' veins. The ending is quite funny (hic!).
Invasion of the Saucer-Men
comes from AIP's Brass Age (it really can't be called AIP's Golden Age; that came later, during the spate of films loosely based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe—most of those were pretty stupid, wandering far afield from the source material, but at least they were pretty to look at). The picture was shot in seven days, and in the conclusion, the Heroic Teenagers use their hot-rod headlights to "light" the monsters to death. The movie is also notable for the fact that Elisha Cook, Jr., is killed in the first reel, as he was so often, and Nick Adams can be seen in the background wearing his hat backwards—what a crazy kid, right? The monsters are like, all wasted, so let's go down to the malt shop, daddy-O!

In a later example of AIP low-budget mania,
Invasion of the Star Creatures
(1962) , a group of Army men stranded in the trackless desert encounter a group of female invaders from space. All of these female invaders have beehive hairdos and look like Jacqueline Kennedy. Much is made of the fact that these fellows are totally cut off from the outside world and must deal with the problem themselves, but there are jeep tracks all over the place (not to mention a lot of foam rocks and, in several scenes, the shadow of the boom mike used to record the sound). One suspects that the film's utterly sleazy look may have come about because the producers overspent on star power; the cast list included such well-loved lights of the American cinema as Bob Ball, Frankie Ray, and Gloria Victor.

CofF
had this to say about
I Married a Monster from Outer Space
, a 1958 Paramount release which formed the lower half of "summer shocker" double bills along with either
The
Blob
or the hilarious Pat Boone film
Journey to the Center of the Earth
: Kiddy-oriented sf programmer. Gloria Talbot marries a monster from outer space which is disguised to look like Tom Tryon. Good argument against hasty marriages, but not much of a movie.

Still, this one was a lot of fun, if only for the once-in-a-lifetime chance it offered to see Tom Tryon with a snout. And before leaving this one and proceeding on to what (sadly) may be the worst of the Grade-Z movies, I'd like to say something a little more serious about the peculiar relationship which obtains between terrible horror movies (of which there are a dozen for each good one, as this chapter testifies) and the genuine fan of the genre.

The relationship is not entirely masochistic, as the foregoing may make it seem. A film like
Alien
or
Jaws
is, for either the true fan or simply the ordinary moviegoer who has a sometime interest in the macabre, like a wide, deep vein of gold that doesn't even have to be mined; it can simply be dug out of the hillside. But that isn't mining, remember; it's just digging. The true horror film aficionado is more like a prospector with his panning equipment or his wash-wheel, spending long periods going patiently through common dirt, looking for the bright blink of gold dust or possibly even a small nugget or two. Such a working miner is not looking for the big strike, which may come tomorrow or the day after or never; he has put those illusions behind him. He's only looking for a livin' wage, something to keep him going yet awhile longer. As a result, horror-movie fans communicate their likes to each other by a kind of grapevine which is part word of mouth, part fanzine reviews, part convention-hall chatter at such meetings as the World Fantasy Convention, the Kubla Khan Ate, or the IguanaCon. Word gets around. Long before David Cronenberg made something of a splash with
They Came from
Within
, fans were muttering that he was someone to watch on the basis of an earlier film—an extremely low-budget flick called
Rabid
, starring X-rated queen Marilyn (
Behind the Green
Door
) Chambers—and Cronenberg got a bravura performance out of her, by the way. My agent, Kirby McCauley, raves about a small picture called
Ritual
, filmed in Canada and starring Hal Holbrook. These films don't get wide American release, but if you watch the papers faithfully, you may see one of them playing at the drive-in as a pick-up second feature below some overrated major studio flick. Similarly, I heard about a little-known early John Carpenter film called
Assault on Precinct 13
from Peter Straub, the author of
Ghost Story
and
If You
Could See Me Now
. Done on a shoestring (and Carpenter's first feature,
Dark Star
, is reputed to have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000 a sum that makes even George Romero look like Dino DeLaurentiis), Carpenter's talent as a director onetheless shines through, and Carpenter went on to do
Halloween
and
The Fog
. These are the nuggets, the horror-film fan's reward for sifting through films like
Planet of the
Vampires
and
The Monster from Green Hell
. My own "discovery" (if you don't object to the word) is a little film called
Tourist Trap
, starring Chuck Connors. Connors himself isn't very good in the film—he tries gamely, but he's simply miscast. Yet the film wields an eerie, spooky power. Wax figures begin to move and come to life in a ruined, out-of-the-way tourist resort; there are a number of effective, atmospheric shots of the dummies' blank eyes and reaching hands, and the special effects are effective. As a film that deals with the queer power that inanimate dummies, mannequins, and human replicas can sometimes cast over us, it is a more effective film than the expensive and ill-advised film made from William Goldman's bestseller,
Magic
.*