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More Monsters

Jan 31st, 2022
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

Well, I asked yesterday, and I got: Reader Bob Wilson reminded me of the blob monster flick H-Man (1958; trailer) a Japanese effort featuring a transparent radioactive blob that has a trick I don’t recall seeing in other cinematic blobs: It can change its shape and become humanoid. It’s still transparent (and still radioactive) but it’s still a blob, with an appropriately radium-dial green tint. I only vaguely remembered it, but I did see it in the early ’60s. There were a lot of Japanese people running around, and more monster time-on-screen than most monster movies of that era could boast. YouTube does not have the full movie, so I can’t warn you if there’s kissing. You’ll have to take your chances.

Now, I deliberately left out a film from yesterday’s entry with one of the scariest monsters I’ve ever seen in cinema, for what you might consider a bogus reason: It’s not in a monster movie. It’s in a Disney movie. And not only do you get a really effective monster, you also get to hear a young Sean Connery … singing. Of course, it needs no introduction but I’ll give it one anyway: Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959.) I saw it first-run in the theaters when I was 7, and again in 1977, on a date with Carol. Seeing it the first time with my mom at the Gateway Theater in Chicago, I scrunched down in my seat as far as I could go when Darby first encounters…the banshee.

Ooooooh, did that damned thing freak me out! I’d never heard of banshees at age 7 and didn’t ask a lot of questions. (My mom was Polish, not Irish.) It didn’t look like a ghost, exactly. In truth, I’ve never seen anything quite like it, in cinema or my own fever dreams. I’m pretty sure it was an early use of motion-picture photographic solarization, melted into the main footage with considerable skill. And even 18 years later, at 25, I admired the effect. It was still scary as hell. The movie is good fun, and mostly silliness. (But not all, heh.) If you’ve never seen it before, rent it or watch it online. Prepare to twitch when the banshee first appears. I still do. You will too.

So what other effective monsters might have appeared in non-monster flicks? The obvious answer is the spate of films with Harryhausen monsters. Joe Schwartz reminded me of The Valley of Gwangi, which is basically a western with monsters. The monsters are dinosaurs, which may or may not count as monsters. After all, there really were dinosaurs. I’m pretty sure there aren’t banshees. The film was released in 1969, some years after my monster phase was over. I’ve never seen it, but here’s the monster-rich (not to mention cowboy-rich) trailer.

Now, I did see a few more Harryhausen monsterfests, the earliest of which was The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958). Lotsa monsters, including (among others) a (single) skeleton swordsman, a two-headed giant bird, a dragon, and of course the film’s emblematic cyclops, all beautifully done, and integrated into the actual story. I went to see it with my older cousin Diane at the Lyric theater in Blue Island. As with most Harryhausen films, the whole movie is not to be had on YouTube, but here’s another reasonably monster-y sampler.

By 1963, Harryhausen was the world master of stop-motion animation, and created another monster-saturated toga epic that is probably his best-known work: Jason and the Argonauts (1963; full 720p rip, not sure how they got away with it.) The Golden Fleece, Talos, the Hydra, a talking ship figurehead, harpies, Neptune (ok, not Harryhausen) lotsa dancing girls (ditto) and, oh, how marvelously: the Children of the Hydra’s Teeth. I was 11 and at the tail-end of my monster phase, but those guys scared me silly. Of all the wonders Harryhausen ever created, that climactic battle is what he’ll be remembered for a thousand years from now.

When I graduated 8th grade at 13, I traded monster movies for better things, like telescopes and electronics. Again, as I said yesterday, I’m sure I saw lots more that I don’t remember well enough to describe, probably because they were terrible. No matter. As the curtain came down on my monster era, I suddenly realized that I had a whole new category of Things To Be Afraid Of…girls.

But that’s a whole ‘nother story entirely.

Revisiting the Monsters of My Youth…

Jan 30th, 2022
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

…on YouTube. I’ve been poking around on YouTube in my odd moments, looking for tutorials, music videos, cartoons, and anything else that popped into my head that might be sound and/or video. The other day, I went looking for monsters. And not just any monsters. What I searched for were the monsters I saw on TV when I was quite young. Some of them scared the hell out of me when I was 8 or 9. Some of them were so cheesy that I laughed at them even then. The really scary thing about this YouTube adventure is that I found every last one of them. (Or at least their trailers.) On YouTube. Most were free to watch in their entirety–not that I did.

First on my list was The Creeping Unknown, (1955) which in the UK was called The Quatermass Experiment. This got a lot of play when I was in grade school, and my father, having seen it on the family-room TV a few too many times, dubbed it The Creeping Kilowatt Crud. You can see the whole thing on YouTube. I wasn’t expecting it to be remastered to film resolution, which makes it look way better than it did on any of our TVs. I didn’t watch all of it. I mostly ran the slider across until I found “the good parts;” i.e., where they actually show the monster or at least the cool Heinleinian spaceship it rode in on. I vividly recall my annoyance at seeing most monster movies having a lot of talking and running around and (occasionally) some kissing (yukkh!) but…not much monster. The Creeping Unknown was better than most in that regard, though the monster was a not-quite-a-blob creature who was originally an astronaut who brought back an alien infection from…somewhere…and gradually turned into the monster. It crawled around and was eventually electrocuited on a repair scaffold somewhere inside Westminster Abbey, hence my father’s nickname for it.

I remembered the monster badly; I thought it was a true blob monster, but hey–at late 1950s TV resolution, it might as well have been. If you like period pieces, watch the whole thing. For the monster genre, it was surprisingly well done.

Not all were. For a true blob monster (which were a sort of Hollywood cottage industry in that era) I had to dredge up X the Unknown (1956.) It was an obvious ripoff of The Creeping Unknown, done on the cheap. The monster was a big black tarry glob that bubbles up out of a hole in the Scottish highlands and starts eating people. The monster didn’t get much screen time, but I remember one very well-executed shot of the monster rolling toward a town. I recognized the technique immediately: They had mixed up something viscous but cohesive, colored it black, and photographed it rolling down a sloping miniature set, with the camera in the plane of the set. On screen, it was a house-sized blob monster rolling down a country road on its merry way. Well-done, and scary in spots, even if the seams were often visible.

Much scarier in a body-horror way is a blob movie called Caltiki, The Immortal Monster (1959.) (Italian titles; dubbed in English.) A sort of spaghetti monster movie, it came from Italy and scared the crap out of a lot of young Americans, myself included. A researcher in Mexico discovers that the Mayans didn’t just disappear; a blob monster ate them. And sunuvugun if the monster isn’t still there, and still hungry. The monster gets a reasonable amount of screen time, especially toward the end. And yes, it looks like a livingroom’s worth of bad ’70s carpeting dyed black with a couple of extras underneath it, pushing it around in bloblike ways. The scary parts are seeing what it does to the unfortunates it latches onto. Even when I was ten, I could tell the dialog did not match the lip movements of the actors. I didn’t care. Monsters are a language in and of themselves.

Sure, I watched it (back in the Sixties) but the less said about The Unknown Terror (1957) the better. I’ll give you a rank spoiler here and say that the monster looks a lot like…man-eating soapsuds.

Oddly, I never saw The Blob (1958) when I was a kid. Maybe the local TV stations thought it was too scary. Dunno. If it had been on Chicago’s Channel 7 (as most monster flicks were) well, I would have seen it. You can watch the whole thing (this time in color) at the link above. Lots of footage of the pinkish-purple Blob eating people, though as blobs go it was kind of featureless and, given the color they made it, did not carry much sense of menace.

So much for blobs. There are doubtless other blob movies that I haven’t heard of. (Got any?) Blobs, are, well, cheap, compared to dinosaurs or aliens. Now for a much better monster; indeed, one of my all-time favorites: 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957; the link is to a monster-rich excerpt) has a Ray Harryhausen animated monster. And, weirdly, the scriptwriter was the older sister of the nice lady who lived next door to where I grew up. Charlott Knight (1894-1977) used to come visiting from Hollywood circa 1960, and she would sit on the front porch of her sister’s house and tell stories to the neighborhood kids, including me. She told us she wrote 20 Million Miles to Earth, (which we had seen on TV more than once) and I admit I didn’t believe her at the time. It wasn’t until IMDB appeared that I could look her up, and…yes. That was her. She also played bit parts on Pettitcoat Junction. The monster in the movie (which Charlott called a “Ymir,” though the word is not used in the film itself) was the first I’d seen with a sympathetic edge. Astrononauts took an egg from Venus, brought it to Earth, and hatched the poor thing into a world its kind had never known. It grew quickly, though as best I recall the only thing it ate was sulfur. (The full movie, being a Harryhausen, is still being marketed and is not available on YouTube.) It gets loose in Rome, fights a hapless elephant, and is harrassed by the Italian military as it climbs around on the Colosseum, making a mess. By the end I felt sorry for it. Sympathetic monsters have since become a thing, but this is the oldest example I can think of. And I knew the person who thought it up, wow.

Now, I recall a childhood fear of robots. I dreamed once that a gigantic metal robot foot stomped on the Weinbergers’ house across the street. Where that came from is a bit of a mystery. Scary robots were less common than other monsters, and the ones I remember seeing weren’t all that scary. Gog (1954) starred two mini-tank robots built to ride a rocket into outer space. The robots were cool, though we don’t actually see them until half the film is over. In truth, they got very little screen time at all, and were not in fact the actual villains in the story. In Tobor the Great (1954) the robot was the good guy, as was Robbie in Forbidden Planet (1956).

For a real robot bad guy from my childhood, I have to cite Kronos (1957). The premise is stone-dumb: Aliens somewhere are running short on something, so they send a sort of gigantic robot battery to Earth to suck up all our electricity and take it home–so that the aliens can convert that energy into matter. (They must have run out of asteroids.) The robot itself, however, was unlike anything else in monster cinema: It consisted of two huge cubes connected by a neck, with a dome and a pair of antennae on top. It was several hundred feet tall. It had four cylindrical legs that went up and down, and some kind of rotating force cushion beneath it, or something. It lands on the Mexican coast, and marches north toward LA, stepping on Mexicans and sucking up energy from any powerplant it encounters. It even inhales the energy of a nuclear bomb, dropped on it by an actual B-36. Eventually they decide to short it out, and like any battery with a sufficiently low internal resistance would, it melts. Dumb as the premise was, Kronos the robot had considerable novelty value: It was not just some guy in a robot suit. The models and the opticals were pretty decent for 1957. It’s good enough to waste an hour and a half on the next time you catch a bad cold, though with a warning: There’s…kissing.

So, apart from Kronos, I’m not sure what gave me robotophobia as a five-year-old. Mutant dinosaurs like The Giant Behemoth (1959; nice 1080p rip) and Godzilla (1954) didn’t do much for me. Ditto Rodan (1956) and Gorgo (1961), though Rodan had his moments. Dinosaurs were already scary; making them even bigger did not make them any scarier. Mothra? (1962) A giant…moth? ummm…no. For real chills and grade-school nightmares, nothing in that era could compare to… The Crawling Eye (1958).

The film was made in England, and called The Trollenberg Terror over there. Mountain climbers in the Trollenberg (a German mountain range) start getting their heads torn off up at the summit. Cold-climate aliens are holed up in the crags somewhere, trying to get ahead. (Sorry.) When the supply of mountain climber heads thins out, they start edging down the mountain, looking for more.

I had literally not seen the film in fifty-odd years, and remembered the monsters badly. They were huge fat octopus-like things, with lots of squirmy tentacles and one great big bloodshot eye in the middle of it all. In 1965 or so, I thought the special effects people had cheaped out and painted a pupil on a beachball for the eye. It was better than that. You don’t have to take my word for it. And you don’t even have to watch the whole damned movie. Somebody with a serious monster fetish has copied out all the scenes that actually show the monster, and you can see it here. Got three and a half minutes to waste? That’s all it takes. Way back in the Sixties, we watched the whole thing for three minutes of monster. My research tells me that that’s not an aberration. That’s how the monster genre worked.

There were a lot of other monster flicks in that era. The ones I cite here are the ones I remember most vividly. The ones more easily forgotten had cheesy monsters or almost no monsters at all. Curse of the Demon was originally filmed without a visible monster. They put one in because everybody wanted to see the Demon. It was cheesy as…hell, heh. It was onscreen for maybe a minute and a half. I saw it once and that was plenty. I saw The She Creature, but it was a cheap ripoff of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and I confess I don’t recall anything but the fact that the monster was visibly female. The Monolith Monsters were gigantic crystals that grew and spread before the good guys do…something. (I forgot what.) My only clear impression is that the crystals would be relatively easy to outrun.

Oh, there were lots more. The Amazing Collosal Man (1957) and its way dumber sequel, War of the Collosal Beast (1958.) Reptilicus (1961) which I saw at an outdoor theater in Green Bay, with my cousins. The monster was a puppet; kind of like Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, with fangs. The Giant Claw (1957.) It looked like an enormous turkey buzzard. I already knew what turkey buzzards looked like. Making one huge only made it look silly.

And on and on and on. We have better monsters these days, including some really scary robots, like AMEE from Red Planet (2000). (AMEE may be the scariest robot in any movie, ever.) And, of course, Alien/Aliens (1979/86), Predator (1987), Cloverfield (2008) and numerous others. The big difference is that I wasn’t ten years old when I saw Alien. (I was 27.) As I wrote here some years ago, monster movies are how young boys learn bravery. It was certainly true for me. Now, I can look back at the whole silly-ass genre…and laugh.

That was a lot harder in 1962, trust me.

Odd Lots

Jun 23rd, 2018
by Jeff Duntemann.
7 comments
  • Lazarus 1.8.4 has been released. Bug-fix release but still worth having. Go get it!
  • From the Questions-I-Never-Thought-to-Ask Department: How was sheet music written after quill pens but before computers? With a music typewriter, of course.
  • How to become a morning person. Yes, there are benefits. The larger question of whether circadian orientation is born or made remains unanswered. Carol and I both lived at home during college. We’re both morning people. My sister and I had the same parents, grew up in the same house and obeyed the same rules (bedtimes were set from above and were not negotiable) and she went away to school. She is a night person. Proves nothing, but I find the correlation intriguing. (Thanks to Charlie Martin for the link.)
  • Here’s a long-form, highly technical paper on why human exposure to low-level radiation is more complex than we thought (hey, what isn’t?) and that some data suggests a little radiation experienced over a long timeframe actually acts against mortality. I’d never heard of the Taiwan cobalt-60 incident, but yikes!
  • Sleep, exercise, and a little wine may help the brain’s glymphatic system clean out unwanted amyloid waste products within the brain, preventing or staving off Alzheimer’s. This process may be the reason that anything with a brain sleeps, and why humans (who have more brain matter per pound than anything else I’m aware of) should get as much sleep as we can.
  • An enormous study on the benefits of the Mediterranean diet was found to be profoundly flawed, and has been retracted. The data was supposedly re-analyzed and the original results obtained again, but if the researchers made the mistakes they did originally (assuming that they were in fact mistakes and not deliberate faking) I see no reason to trust any of their data, their people, or their methods ever again.
  • How faddism, computerization, national bookstore ordering, a court case, and New York City cultural dominance destroyed (and continues to destroy) traditional publishing of genre fiction. The good news is that with indie publishing it matters far less than it otherwise would.
  • If you’ve followed the nuclear energy industry for any significant amount of time, you know that fusion power is always 30 years in the future. Now, I’ve also been hearing about thorium reactors for almost 30 years, and I got to wondering why we don’t have them yet either. Here’s a good discussion on the problems with thorium power, which intersect heavily with the problems plaguing ordinary uranium reactors.
  • Long-held myths die hard, especially when governments beat the drum for the myth. Eggs are good food. I eat at least two every day, sometimes more. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a study indicating that people on a lots-of-eggs diet lost weight and suffered no cardiac consequences of any kind. Good short summary here.
  • I don’t see a lot of movies, but I’m in for this one, crazy though the concept is. After all, spectacle is what the big screen and CGI are for. Mad Max meets Cities in Flight? Sold.
  • The contrarian in me has long wondered how much of what I put out on the street every week in the recycle can is actually recycled. The answer is very little, especially since single-stream recycling became fashionable. Almost all of it goes into landfills. The reasons are complex (there’s not a lot you can do with scrap plastic, for example) but apart from aluminum cans, the cost of sorting it far exceeds the value of the reclaimed materials.
  • The antivax movement has always boggled me for its indomitably willful stupidity. Having stumbled upon a research paper on who the antivaxers are I boggle further: They are almost all members of the educated elite in our urban cores. This was always a suspicion of mine, and now we have proof.
  • Here’s a fascinating piece on the effects of water vapor and continental drift on global temperatures. The topic is complex, and the piece is long and rich, with plenty of graphs. The comments are worth reading too. The primary truth I’ve learned in researching climate for the last ten or fifteen years is that it’s fiendishly complex.
  • Brilliantly put: “But anger isn’t a strategy. Sometimes it’s a trap. When you find yourself spewing four-letter words, you’ve fallen into it. You’ve chosen cheap theatrics over the long game, catharsis over cunning.” –Frank Bruni, NYT.
  • A few days back I got Leonard Bernstein’s quirky, half-classical, half-klezmer “Overture to Candide” stuck in my head all afternoon. One listen to this was all it took.
  • I got there by recovering an old memory, of a chap who came to SF cons in the 70s with a strange keyboard instrument that he blew on through a hose, which as you might expect sounded like a piano accordion without a bellows. He was a filker and played interesting things, and I always assumed that he had somehow built the device himself. (It was much-used and taped up in several places.) But no, the chap is Irwin S. “Filthy Pierre” Strauss, and the instrument is a melodica.
  • Finally, one of the creepiest articles I’ve seen in a couple of years. I considered and set aside a plotline in my upcoming nanotech novel The Molten Flesh that involved sexbots, real, fully mobile AI sexbots enlivened (if that’s the word) by the Protea device. Maybe I should bring it back. The original 1959 Twilight Zone episode “The Lonely” has always haunted me. Maybe sex is a sideshow. Maybe it’s about having something to care about that cares back, and therefore gives your life meaning. I could work with that.

Odd Lots

Apr 8th, 2018
by Jeff Duntemann.
11 comments

Odd Lots

Jan 6th, 2016
by Jeff Duntemann.
15 comments

Odd Lots

Mar 15th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
10 comments

Daywander

Sep 2nd, 2013
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

Feeling better. Some. Not lots.

Of course, “better” (as with other words like “warmer”) are inherently comparative and need reference points, or they’re meaningless. Better/warmer since when? Better since last week? Hell yes. Better since two weeks ago? Maybe a little. (It’s hazy; like the Ball says, “Ask again later.”) Better since three weeks ago? No way. I’ll be back with the docs again tomorrow. We’ll see what they say.

This is the first time I’ve done bedrest with a tablet. Read stuff, played Random Factor Mah Jong, checked in on email and Facebook. I have the Transformer Prime’s matching keyboard dock, which made many things easier. That said, most of Facebook, being as it is a mighty global confluence of Loud And Aggressive Persons, is a vexation to the spirit. By a week or so ago my body had had all the vexation it was willing to put up with, so to avoid its actually becoming a spirit, I pondered pleasanter things, like tweezing my armpits.

I did read one reasonably good book: Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, by Lee Sandlin. Great light reading, and full of interesting things. We’ve been a little too thoroughly romanced by Mark Twain and others: The Mississippi in the 1850s was just freaking nuts. The book is not a systematic history but a collection of vivid vignettes. A lot of it is well-covered elsewhere, like the siege of Vicksburg. Some of it was described with a hair too much vividness, especially the explosion of the Sultana. Much of it was new to me, like the phenomenon of Mississippi River moving panoramas. John Banvard’s signature product was a painted scene twelve feet high and literally half a mile long. (It was by no means the longest moving panorama ever done. It wasn’t even close.) It was displayed to an audience by slowly spooling it between one large roller and another. Banvard toured the country with his and made a great deal of money from an entertainment-starved populace, who had neither TV nor Facebook to kill time on. Sandlin’s description of the pandemonium at riverside camp meetings is wonderful, and aligns with other descriptions I’ve seen of revivals in that era. The revival phenomenon is a scary thing, far scarier than anything you’ll ever see on Facebook, or even TV. (It is also not exclusively religious in nature.) I was at a small one once. It was the best evidence of mental power at a distance I’ve ever experienced. It went well beyond hysteria or even mass hypnosis. It almost completely defies my ability to describe, which is why I probably won’t, at least here. I’ll write it up for my memoirs.

I did watch some TV. In doing so, I learned that “Mermaids” is the most-watched series that Animal Planet has ever run, egad. We were actually watching the “Too Cute” episode that included Bichon Frise puppies, but the channel was pushing its signature achievement with everything it had. Uggh. Can we please go back to Chariots of the Gods now?

Mostly, Carol and I watched episodes from the DVD gatherum of “Anything But Love.” It was a half-hour TV sitcom that ran from 1989-1992. We would watch it now and then while Carol brushed dogs, and it featured a brand of gentle humor that TV simply doesn’t understand anymore. 25 years is a long time, and I had completely forgotten Joseph Maher, who had a long run with the series. He’s one of those guys that you’ve doubtless seen and heard but probably can’t name, and his chemistry with stars Richard Lewis and Jamie Lee Curtis was damned near perfect. The series is about a magazine based in Chicago, so I paid attention to the details. Yes, magazine publishing really did sort of work like that back in the 80s, with a lot fewer people, a lot less screwing around, and a whole lot more work.

My most promising entertainment, however, was lying on my back and vividly imagining the Neanderthals who may star in a possible comic novel called The Gathering Ice. They’re homely but clever guys who have been hiding in plain sight for 20,000 years by pretending to be ugly humans, telling jokes at our expense and harnessing homo sap’s frenetic energy to make their lives easier. They wrote the Voynich Manuscript and gave it to Emperor Rudolf II just to torment him (along with a long line of homo sap cipher hobbyists.) When it looks like a new Ice Age begins setting in during the 2020s, the Plugs (as they call themselves) go looking for long-lost members of their tribe and the occasional throwback. Among other techniques, they break into the TSA’s top-secret Cloud database of traveler X-rays and look for conical ribcages and occipital buns. (I have both, but my Neanderthal blood is far from pure.) They have a plan that might in fact reverse the relentless march of the glaciers and short-circuit the end of the Holocene. Should they do it? (Of course they should. And of course they do. Duhhh.) It’s a sendup of steampunk, dieselpunk, reality TV, the Holy Roman Empire, global warming, Pythagoras, the Paleo Diet, and a great many other things. No dancing zombies. Cavemen throw good polka parties, though. And all those skinny-dipping ladies in Voynich? Neanderthal babes doing hands-on DNA research.

I will probably be a little quiet for a few more days. I’m still here. If I’m envisioning scenes from a novel, I’m probably going to be all right. Patience!