The Incredibly Strange Creatures...

The second half of tonight's craptacular movie double feature is "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies" (IMDB), a 1964 film about... um, I'm not entirely sure. Supposedly it's a zombie flick, but if you're looking for gory braineating living dead action you're going to be bitterly disappointed. Some brave Wikipedian tried to summarize the plot thusly:

Jerry (Steckler as "Flagg"), his girlfriend Angela (Sharon Walsh), and his buddy Harold (Atlas King) head out for a day at the carnival. In one venue, a dance number is performed by Marge (Carolyn Brandt), an alcoholic who drinks before and between shows, and her partner, Bill Ward, for a small audience. There Jerry sees stripper Carmelita (Erino Enyo) who hypnotizes him with her icy stare and he is compelled to see her act. Carmelita is the young sister of powerful fortune-teller Estrella (Brett O'Hara), and Estrella turns Jerry into a zombie by hypnotizing him with a spiraling wheel. He then goes on a rampage, killing Marge and fatally wounding Bill. Later, Jerry attempts to strangle his girlfriend Angela as well. It develops that Estrella, with her henchman Ortega (Jack Brady), has been busy turning various patrons into zombies, apparently by throwing acid on their faces.


Interspersed through the film are several song-and-dance production numbers in the carnival's nightclub, with songs like "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" and "Shook out of Shape". The titular zombies only make an appearance in the final act, where they escape and immediately kill Estrella, Carmelita, Ortega and several performers before being shot by police. Jerry, himself partially disfigured but not a zombie, escapes the carnival and is pursued to the shoreline, where the police shoot him dead in front of Angela and Harold.

If anything, the movie makes even less sense than the summary does. The one actual scary bit is that our hapless punk-kid protagonist (who's also the film's director) bears an uncanny resemblance to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. Not sure how they pulled that one off, to be honest. Everyone else in the movie comes off as bored or drunk. Maybe it's just the lighting, or the soundtrack, or the cast just didn't grasp the director's singular vision, or something.

It turns out that (so sayeth IMDB) this movie used the same sound stage as The Creeping Terror, which is the thin thread I'm using to tie this double feature together. Makes more sense than either of the movies, if you ask me.

The Creeping Terror

Tonight's crappy movie is "The Creeping Terror", an alien-monster-on-the-loose pic from 1964 (IMDB). The Creeping Terror is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made, and it's famous for two things that make it stand out from the crowd of low budget creature features:

• The creature is basically just a giant shag carpet with a few people shuffling around under it, and you can usually see their feet. Same basic idea as a Chinese festival dragon, but less convincing. It has no obvious way to eat people, so its victims have to crawl into the creature's sorta-mouth under their own power while trying to act like they're struggling.
• Instead of normal movie dialogue, the film relies heavily on a narrator who explains what the people on screen are saying to each other. Stories and recollections vary as to why the movie turned out this way. One colorful version claims that voice work was done but the recordings were lost, possibly dropped into Lake Tahoe by accident.
  

Wikipedia summarizes the plot, such as it is:

A newlywed deputy, Martin Gordon (Vic Savage), encounters an alien spacecraft that has crash landed in fictional Angel County in California. A large, hairy, slug-like, omnivorous monster emerges from the side of an impacted spaceship. A second one, still tethered inside, kills a forest ranger and the sheriff (Byrd Holland) when they independently enter the craft to investigate.

Martin, now temporary sheriff, joins his wife Brett (Shannon O'Neil); Dr. Bradford (William Thourlby, the original Marlboro Man), a renowned scientist; and Col. James Caldwell, a military commander and his men to fight the creature. Meanwhile the monster stalks the countryside, devouring a girl in a bikini, picnickers at a "hootenanny", Grandpa Brown (Jack King) and his grandson while fishing, a housewife hanging the laundry, the patrons at a community dance hall, and couples in their cars at lovers' lane.

The protagonists ultimately deduce that the monsters are mindless biological-sample eaters. The bio-analysis data is microwaved back to the probe's home planet through the spaceship.

Caldwell decides that the creatures must be killed, despite Bradford's objections. He orders his men to fire at the creature, which they do while standing close to one another as it moves towards them. Their gunfire proves ineffective, and all of the troops are devoured. Paradoxically, Caldwell decides a moment later to throw a grenade, and the creature dies instantly.

At the end of the film, both creatures are destroyed, but not before the signal is sent. The dying Bradford suggests that this bodes ill for the human race, but observes that since the galaxy to which the transmission was aimed is a million light years away, the threat may not manifest for millennia.

In modern terms this ending would be an obvious setup for a sequel. Which never happened, or at least hasn't happened yet. I could see the SciFi Channel going for something like this, I mean, you'd have a badly CG'd carpet monster, a crack military team of 40-something washed-up actors, and a woman in the inevitable white tank top, and it would be filmed in Canada, or maybe Romania, and most of the movie would just be our heroes standing around arguing in a room full of computer screens. But hey.

The Hideous Sun Demon

The second half of tonight's crappy movie double feature is The Hideous Sun Demon (1959). It's an interesting movie in its own way, sort of a film noir-ish journey through the seedy underbelly of 1950s Los Angeles, with a protagonist who occasionally turns into a big scaly lizard monster.

He's minding his own business, you see, toiling away as an obscure atomic scientist, when an accident turns his life upside down. Which, his boss says, is the result of working with unusual isotopes while nursing a killer hangover. "Whiskey and soda mix, whiskey and science don't", he says. Our hero, you see, is a complete lush, and is about to become the ugliest mean drunk ever.

We don't actually witness the atomic accident in the movie. The filmmakers obviously didn't have the budget for that. Instead we get wooden actors on a cheap set discussing the horrible thing that just occurred to our hero offscreen. This happens more than once in the movie, and -- other than the sun demon suit itself -- there are no special effects in the film. On the bright side, a low budget also meant that they generally filmed on location rather than a sound stage or studio back lot, streets weren't closed off, etc., so you do get an interesting slice of the real 1959 LA with this movie.

Anyway, those unusual isotopes work their magic, and our hero soon discovers that exposure to the sun makes him temporarily "revert" to a reptilian form. The doctors say it's bound to get progressively worse over time until eventually he's all sun demon, all the time. 50s creature movies always had to toss in a sciency-sounding reason for whatever's going on, and this one is actually less stupid than most: We're briefed on the well-known (but long abandoned) theory that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", and we're told that the isotopes have made the process reversible, so his cells periodically revert to their embryonic, reptilian stage. Complete fiction, obviously, but fiction cooked up by someone who paid attention in freshman biology. So there's that.

After he gets the bad news, our hero's life understandably goes off the rails -- even further than it already was. He quits his job, staggers around drunk in his isolated mansion (and how did he afford that swanky place, anyway?). He loses touch with coworkers, including a secretary who has a thing for him. She's nice and respectable and our hero never pays a moment's attention to her, even before he turns into a monster. He only goes out at night. He drives around in his flashy MGA sports car, and he hangs out in sketchy dive bars. He gets sorta-involved with Trudy, a Marilyn Monroe-sorta-lookalike nightclub singer who does the worst fake piano playing act you'll ever see in a movie. By "sorta-involved", I mean a not-at-all-ambiguous one night stand on the beach, which is something you usually don't encounter in 1959 movies. And the next morning he runs off and abandons her there because he's turning into a sun demon again. And later he shows up at the club wanting to see her. Naturally fisticuffs ensue with her mobster boyfriend and a few of his henchmen. Our hero ends up in pretty bad shape, and Trudy takes him in to nurse him back to health, or something. Mobster boyfriend shows up again & hauls him outside -- into the sun -- planning to finish the job. But round 2 is Sun Demon Smackdown time, and our hero makes short work of the mobster. Trudy sees him out the window, screams as he runs off (since she had no idea he was a hideous sun demon), and promptly vanishes from the film, never to be seen or heard from again.

A lengthy police chase ensues, into a strange landscape of pumps and tanks and oil derricks, and he offs a dog and squishes a couple of rats during the chase, because that's just how sun demons roll. Eventually he learns, as we do, that sun demons aren't bulletproof, and he plummets to his doom from atop a giant oil tank.

It turns out that the oil & gas scenes at the end of the movie were filmed in Signal Hill, California, which at the time was a major oil producing area near LA. Based on the photos I've seen, the landscape was even more surreal than what you see in the movie. The Wikipedia article has a panorama from 1923 that's just astonishing. There really, seriously, were tidy suburban houses and giant oil derricks all sandwiched together cheek by jowl. As the story goes, oil was discovered in Signal Hill right around the time the area was being subdivided and sold off for early suburban development. Many prospective homeowners decided there was more money in drilling for oil than in living here, and up went another derrick, even if there were suburban tract houses all around it. Imagine what it would have been like to grow up there.

Anyway, the key thing to understand about the movie is that our hero was already a drunk and kind of an asshole before he ever turned into an atomic monster. And everything that happens to him -- at least up to the point where he does in the mobster with his bare hands -- could just as easily have happened to him if he was a plain old non-reptilian boozehound on a downward spiral. It's a safe bet that the whole "sun demon" thing is a metaphor, and not exactly a subtle one.

The 50s were big on this sort of thing, movies about male anxiety and the awful things that happen if you stray from the straight and narrow for any reason. The Incredible Shrinking Man is probably the best of the lot, and The Manster is pretty entertaining, and there are countless others. The Hideous Sun Demon is far from the best, or the most entertaining, but you could probably get a term paper out of it if you needed to. Or a drinking game. Or both, most likely.

The Astro-Zombies

Tonight's crappy movie is The Astro-Zombies, a 1968 creature flick with John Carradine as the Mad Scientist, Wendell Corey as a CIA investigator, and Tura Satana as, well, Satana. The plot seems simple enough: Mad scientist creates ridiculous-looking creature. Creature goes on a berzerk killing spree, as creatures often do. Unlike most creatures, this one uses a machete, thus providing a bit of very unconvincing late-60s gore. The creature is also solar powered via some sort of crystal thingy on its forehead. At one point it's getting dark and the creature's running low on juice, so it grabs a flashlight, holds it to its forehead, and makes a run for the secret lab.

Meanwhile, a team of boring good guys in suits and Ms. Satana's team of international baddies go looking for the creature. Wendell Corey's character heads up the good guys, and whenever he speaks you can tell he's extremely drunk. This would be hilarious, except that Corey died of cirrhosis of the liver shortly after this film was completed. Actually it's still hilarious, it's just that laughing about it isn't very nice. A further odd detail is that Corey, a conservative Republican, was also on the Santa Monica, California, city council at the time he starred in The Astro-Zombies. Ahh-nold, eat your heart out.

There are basically four independent sorta-storylines going on in the movie: The Feds, the international baddies, the MS & assistant, and the creature at large. You never see John Carradine outside the lab, and nobody meets up until the very end of the film, which must have really simplified shooting the thing. It also makes for a distinct lack of drama; you can fast forward through the Carradine bits without missing anything at all, as he spends the whole film mumbling technobabble at his assistant and doing precisely bupkus. The Fed bits aren't overly thrilling either, and you can fast forward through them without missing a lot of essential plot twists. In fact it's fair to say, generally, that the less of the movie you actually watch, the less confused you'll be. You may as well stick to the creature parts, because the creature is a hoot, and the parts with Tura Satana slinking around being cruel to various people, which you don't want to miss, because, duh. Oh, and be sure to watch the title sequence & credits, which involve wind-up toy robots for some reason.

Anyway, after various semi-thrilling adventures, various characters arrive at the secret Carradine lab, and both he and the international baddies get theirs, and justice prevails. Believe me, this is as comprehensible a plot summary as you're going to get anywhere on the Interwebs. A review at Bad Movie Report goes into way more detail, and confesses to being utterly mystified by the movie. And that's coming from someone who's seen way more crappy movies than I have. If the pros can't make head or tail of the thing, what hope do the rest of us have?

reflected, 1000 broadway

A few photos of downtown Portland's 1000 Broadway building, mostly reflections of other buildings nearby, plus a couple of normal photos for context.

There are two things you're supposed to know about this building to be a "real" Portlander. First, it looks vaguely like a roll-on deodorant stick, due to the rounded dome on top. Curiously, I've noticed it's common for people to say it's called the "Ban Roll-On Building", but much less common for people to actually use that name themselves, I suppose because it's kind of a silly nickname. Or at least this is true of people I know, but most of them are engineers, and it's possible they're mystified by the deodorant reference.

The second thing is that there was a historic movie theater here before the current skyscraper went in. This is usually the cue for a historic preservation rant about the nostalgic glories of old movie theaters. I have to say, however, that I have no recollection of this particular theater or of its fondly-remembered marquee. As people tend to get all misty-eyed about old movie theaters, there's no shortage of stuff on the interwebs about it, including:

• Vintage Portland has a color photo and a few interesting user comments about the place.
• A long discussion thread about it at Cinema Treasures, with a lot of links to photos and other sources of info.
• Old Oregon has a few photos, with prints for sale.
• The theater seems to have had an organ at one point, so the Puget Sound Theater Organ Society has a page about the theater with a bunch of old photos. Apparently the organ now graces the equally historic roller rink at Oaks Park.

Even after looking at those photos, I still have no memory of the place. I do recall, quite clearly, once going to the nearby Fox Theater (also now demolished) to see Airplane!; the main thing I recall about it was the brief but memorable, uh, cameo by Kitten Natividad. I was young and impressionable, you understand.

For the most part, though, we went to theaters in Aloha & Beaverton. All of which are gone now, just like the Broadway & the Fox, but as far as I can tell none of them have fansites dedicated in their memory.

• I saw a lot of really awful (i.e. great) B movies at the old Aloha Theater, which was built from an old surplus Quonset hut, and mostly held together with duct tape. It finally went out of business in the late 1990s (I think the last film it showed was Jurassic Park in Spanish, if I remember right), and the building was converted into retail space, including a really excellent donut shop.
• The Westgate, in Beaverton, was part of the first generation of suburban multiplexes. It didn't have any particular charm about it, but I do remember waiting for hours in the hot sun to see both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. The Westgate was demolished a few years ago as part of the ongoing Beaverton Central urban renewal project. The site was still empty the last time I checked.
• The Washington Square Theater was similar to Westgate. Sometimes you had to make the drive out to the mall to see a movie, because both theaters had just a handful of screens (by today's standards). Closed a few years before the Westgate, I think, and the building was still empty last time I checked.
• The Beaverton Drive In was the local drive in theater, which is now part of TriMet's Merlo Road bus garage. Didn't go very often, and I wasn't fond of the bad sound quality or the long hike to the restrooms and snack bar. On the other hand, I remember, quite clearly, going there once to see some boring grownup movie, noticing that Airplane! was playing on the next screen over, and glancing over just in time to catch Ms. Natividad's brief cameo again. Which was even more impressive on the big drive-in screen. Like I said, I was rather young and impressionable.

Man/Beast

I occasionally gripe about having to clean out my Drafts folder. This was one of the older denizens of said folder, a bad movie post dated December 30, 2006. It's not really finished, and it's been long enough that I'd have to re-watch these movies to properly finish it. But I reread it and thought it would be a shame to let it languish in Drafts folder limbo forever, so here it is.

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A recurring theme in both pop culture and high culture is that within each man there's a beast clawing to get out, and it's a humongous societal problem if that ever happens. The tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the classic example, but 50's 'B' movies introduced some novel twists on the theme.

It's surprising how conservative, even pessimistic much of 50's SF was. Sometimes the mad scientist unleashed a creature or at least forces beyond his control, and the lesson was that there were some things Man was not meant to know.

conservative, conformist themes: animalistic man vs. forces of social control, bringing him back into the fold to hearth & home, or doing him in. and granted, the 'rebellion' of the times (Kerouac, Pollock, etc.) was animalistic, bad for women.

Bride of the Gorilla



Your basic man-goes-wild tale, set in the deep Amazon jungle. The Wikipedia article on the film sums up the plot thusly:

Deep in the South American jungles, plantation manager Barney Chavez (Raymond Burr) kills his elderly employer in order to get to his beautiful wife Dina Van Gleder (Barbara Payton). However, an old native witch witnesses the crime and puts a curse on Barney, who soon after finds himself turning nightly into a rampaging gorilla. When a wise but superstitious police commissioner Taro (Lon Chaney Jr.) is brought in to investigate the plantation owners death and a rash of strange animal killings, he begins to suspect that all is not as it seems. Dina is also becoming suspcious with Barney, who is seeming to grow more in love with the jungle than with her. She follows him one night into the jungle, only to be attacked by the feral Barney. The police chief follows her screams in the jungle and shoots Monkey-Barney, the jungles justice having been dealt.

set in the amazon jungle. Ranch foreman Barney Chavez spurns native lover in favor of the boss's wife. Has a hand in the boss's death (poisonous snake), and gets a curse, slowly turning into guy in gorilla suit, ignoring, spurning his new bride. Finally runs off into the jungle, attacks her, killed like an animal. Don't see transformation, it's possible he just thinks he's the beast. Or just low budget. Not actually a gorilla in the script, but some sort of Amazon forest demon that just happens to look like guy in gorilla suit. In a sense the title (studio-imposed?) is more honest about the creature than the film, how postmodern is that?

In the end, the woman is unresponsive and we don't know if she's alive or dead, for her efforts at sticking by her man through thick and thin.

Raymond Burr is not an obvious choice to be a Chavez, but he's burly, vigorous, ambitious, social-climbing, ruthless. If you only remember him from Perry Mason, you might enjoy seeing him in his younger and somewhat thinner days. He had a great voice, deep, calm and yet vaguely menacing.

Lon Chaney is even less obvious choice as the native cop working on the crimes. Talk about wooden. He was best used in costume, with as few lines as possible.

I doubt the name Chavez is any accident either: Theme #2, this is "Streetcar Named Desire" in the jungle, with a gorilla. Barney is Stanley Kowalski, the lusty ethnic type supplanting old-line northern european landed gentry. People think this is deep when it's really just an obsolete prejudice of the times that we can't really relate to.



The Manster



Another man-goes-wild tale, this time set in the exotic Orient. Again, a plot synopsis from Wikipedia:

American foreign news correspondent Larry Stanford has been working out of Japan for the last few years to the detriment of his marriage. His last assignment before returning to his wife in the United States is an interview with the renowned but reclusive scientist Dr. Robert Suzuki, who lives atop a volcanic mountain.

During the brief interview, Dr. Suzuki amiably discusses his work on evolution caused by sporadic cosmic rays in the atmosphere, and professes that he has discovered a method for producing evolutionary change chemically.

Suzuki serves Larry a drugged libation, causing him to fall into a deep sleep. Announcing to Tara, his voluptuous assistant, that Larry is the perfect candidate for his latest evolutionary experiments, he injects an unknown substance into Larry's shoulder.

Upon waking, Larry is oblivious to the true situation and accepts Suzuki's invitation to spend the next week vacationing with him around Japan. Over the next few days, Suzuki uses Tara as a beguiling distraction while conditioning Larry with mineral baths and copious amounts of alcohol, exacerbating the pain in Larry's shoulder.

Meanwhile, Larry's estranged wife has traveled to Japan to bring him back home with her. But when confronted, Larry refuses to leave his new life of women and carousing. After a few drinks that night Larry examines his painful shoulder to discover that a large eyeball has grown at the spot of Dr. Suzuki's injection.

Becoming aloof and solitary, Larry wanders Tokyo late at night. He murders a woman on the street, a Buddhist monk, and a psychiatrist, while slowly changing form, culminating in his growing a second head. Seeking a cure, Larry climbs the volcano to Dr. Suzuki's laboratory where Suzuki has just informed Tara that Larry has become "an entirely new species" and beyond remedy.

Entering the lab, Larry kills Suzuki and sets the building on fire as Tara flees. Larry splits into two completely separate bodies, bringing himself back to normal. The monstrous second body grabs Tara and falls into the volcano as Larry's wife and the police arrive. Larry, now cured, is taken away by the police, although it remains unclear how much moral or legal responsibility he has for his violent actions. The movie ends as Larry's wife and his friend discuss the good that remains in Larry.

Mother of all midlife crises. Generic whitebread guy is finishing up one last story for his paper's Tokyo branch, before heading home to wifey and 50's suburban domestic tranquility, when he's led astray by the exotic temptations of the orient, in the form of a funloving Japanese mad scientist and his alluring Eurasian assistant. Little does he know that the MS is using him as a test subject... Although at first it doesn't seem like a test. The physical metamorphosis into a monster is only the last step. It starts with booze, and geishas, and more booze, and coed baths, and extramarital nookie across the color line, and dancing to Japanese music, and on and on. He stops showing up for work, becomes surly and withdrawn, stops talking to wifey on the phone, and refuses to go home like he's supposed to. Wifey shows up to check on him, but he's well on his way to becoming a homicidal beast by then. His shoulder's been bothering him since the first injection, and suddenly an eye appears at the injection point, the classic shot everyone remembers this movie for. Soon an entire head bursts out. Not a good head / bad head thing, both heads are bad. Establishing which is which would require closeups, and there's never been a convincing two-headed monster. At least it requires an actor with broad shoulders, so there's somewhere to rest the second head. The beast goes on a nighttime rampage around the city, ending up at the MS's lab. The MS, I should mention, keeps his unsuccessful experiments in the lab, creatures that used to be his wife and his brother. Feeling guilty, the MS injects him with another serum to "complete" the transformation, and gets done in for his trouble. He was getting ready to do seppuku anyway (gee, no stereotypes there), but loses his chance.

So eventually the Manster splits in half. The beast half grabs the Eurasian assistant and they plunge into the inevitable volcano, while the man half goes back to normal. Having sown and discarded his wild oats, he reunites with wifey, and they presumably head back to the monocultural safety of New York City (!).

It's a very convenient 50's movie, in that it condemns the Manster's behavior, while also making excuses for it, the old "that wasn't the real me, I don't know what came over me" schtick. Once the external influence has been removed, he can go back to being a pillar of the community.

We should take a moment to note the absence of dual-identity stories involving women, at least that I can think of offhand. While a guy is supposed to have two sides and be "complex" and all, pop culture has usually insisted that a woman is either Good or Bad, period. Generally not in the absolute black-and-white 50's sense anymore, but you can still see the old rigid roles in how the media treats young Hollywood starlets and celebrities. If the entertainment media is to be believed, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and a raft of others are all stone dumb, of dubious virtue, and without any redeeming qualities whatsoever.

In any case, there's never been a two-headed woman movie that I know of, or a Jekyll-and-Hyde story, unless you count the Wasp Woman, it's an unusual film for the era , and even then it was just existing traits being accentuated.

Attack of the Crab Monsters

Today's awful movie is "Attack of the Crab Monsters", a 1957 semi-epic from Roger Corman. Wikipedia's article on the film gives a brief plot summary:

A group of scientists land on a remote island in the Pacific to search for a previous expedition that disappeared and to continue research about the effects of radiation from the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests on the island's plant and sea life. They learn to their horror that the earlier group of scientists have been eaten by mutated giant crabs that have gained intelligence by absorbing the minds of their victims. Members of the current expedition are systematically attacked and killed by the crabs, which are invulnerable to most weaponry because of the mutation in their cell structure. Finally, they discover the crabs are the cause of the earthquakes and landslides that are destroying the island. As the remaining expedition members struggle to survive on the ever-shrinking island, they must also find a way to stop the crabs before they reproduce and invade the oceans of the world.

The description makes the movie sound better than it is, believe it or not. Yes, there's a plot in there somewhere, sort of, but it just makes no freakin' sense at all.

There's a reason I haven't done any bad movie posts for a while. They always turn out to be a lot more work than you'd expect, or at least more than I'd expect. You watch a movie a couple of times, make some notes, and then try to mash those notes into a coherent form, no matter how confused and incoherent the movie itself happens to be -- and tonight's movie is more confused and incoherent than most. This post's actually been moldering in my drafts folder for a month now, and I've already sent the movie back to Netflix so I'm not going to see it again anytime soon. So I figure I might as well post my notes and observations and whatnot, along with assorted stuff I found on the interwebs. It's pretty much a random jumble, but hey, so is the movie.

• The trailer's on YouTube here. It looks like the whole movie may be there, split up in parts -- although I haven't verified that, and I'm not sure it's there legally. So if you look for it and it's gone, you're out of luck. Tough crabmeat.
  
  
• Or if you just want to see the climactic scene (such as it is), it's on MySpace here.
  
  
• The movie's page at BadMovies.org has a few stills and sound clips. I don't have any of those here, because a.) I'm not sure it's copyright-kosher, and I don't want the MPAA's jackbooted thugs giving me a hard time about it. And b.) it would require more effort than I feel like expending. So I do have a photo of the DVD. It's not a very good photo, but then, it's not a very good movie, is it? The only thing remotely special about the photo is that I took it using an ancient lens I found at Goodwill this morning (a preset Takumar 135/3.5, for anyone who cares), and I did this because the lens dates back to 1957, just like the movie. Incidentally, the only camera that appears in the movie is a TLR operated by the German nuclear physicist. As it turns out, TLRs have a distinct drawback here, in that you have to look down into the camera, away from the giant land crab, in order to focus and shoot. Most people don't realize this.
  
  
• More reviews at DVD Drive-In, Delirious, Fantastic Movie Musings & Ramblings, Horror-Wood, The Delirious review reads a hell of a lot into the movie, trying to make it sound deep. I remain unconvinced.
  
  
• A poem inspired by the movie. Seriously. It makes a lot more sense than the movie, if you ask me -- a situation that rarely occurs in the (in itself rather rare) translation from film to poetry.
  
  
• The animated title sequence is cool -- despite being mostly about octopi, which don't appear in the actual film.
  
  
• The intro takes an odd second-person tone, as if it's the start of a videogame (or maybe an old choose-your-own-adventure book):
  
  

  "You are about to land in a lonely zone of terror . . on an uncharted atoll in the Pacific!
  
  You are part of The Second Scientific Expedition to this mysterious bit of Coral reef and volcanic rock. The first group has disappeared without a trace! Your job is to find out why!
  
  There have been rumors about this strange atoll . . frightening rumors about happenings way out beyond the laws of nature..."

  
  
  
• And then we get a rotating globe, highly overexposed. And then nuclear tests, a bunch of stock H-bomb footage. Then floods due to the nuclear test, and people running away as their village is destroyed. Nice miniature work, considering the era and the budget.... Actually I wouldn't be surprised if the opening disaster footage with the miniatures and fleeing crowds is from some other movie with a bigger budget. That would be the Corman way, after all.
  
  
• Right after that, we get a dash of that ol' time religion, with a narrator intoning:
  
  

  "And the lord said, I will scorn man who I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast and creeping thing and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them."

  
  
  Anybody know if this is a real biblical quote? I mean, the actual bible, not just something Pat Robertson said when he was off his meds. I'm no expert on these things, and the general tenor of it does sound sort of Old-Testamenty, but the wording just doesn't sound right. "It repenteth me"? Say what?
  
  
• Actually I may have those intro bits out of order. I'm not sure now. I doubt reordering them would make them make any more sense, though.
  
  
• The crab costume is pretty awesome. You have to admit it's a highly cool, cheesy, crappy B-movie giant crab, so far as B-movie giant crabs go. It's not that the crabs are perfectly realistic, don't get me wrong. They have faces, with big googly Jim Henson-type eyes. They even have nostrils. And when the crab is trashing the house, it roars like a lion. Well, you hear a lion-ish roar on the soundtrack. You don't actually see it roar. Making its mouth move would've cost money, you know.
  
  
• Speaking of the giant-crab-in-da-house scene... Why do our heroes just stand on the other side of the door when there's a giant crab lurking behind it? And then they just hang out for a while and wait, and then look to see if it's gone?
  
  
• Lots of scenes of people reacting to things we don't see: "there was a mountain there yesterday, now it's gone" and "It has only appeared in the last twenty minutes. And it's over fifty feet deep." If the film was remade today, it would be an hour longer, and the other hour would be all CG showing the stuff they just tell us about.
  
  
• The interior sets are classic 50's den. Wood paneling, decorated with paintings and various tchotchkes, all shipped to the remote South Pacific just to make a bunch of scientists feel at home.
  
  Either a.) the interior scenes were filmed in someone's basement to save money, or b.) they were filmed on a home-sweet-home set left over from some other movie, to save money.
  
  
• The earthquakes aren't very realistic. This was a very early entry in the genre of reacting-to-fake-motion cinema, and clearly there was still much to be learned about getting the actors and the camera shake in sync. It's not Star Trek by any means.
  
  
• Philosophical implications of the crabs absorbing the minds & personalities of various people. Is the crab just impersonating them to catch prey, or do the people really continue to exist as part of the crab & just see things in a new light ("Preservation of the species. Once they were men. Now they are land crabs.")
  
  
• Too many plot holes and nonsensical twists to list. For example, why did their plane (a Catalina flying boat) explode? I suppose it exploded because they had some stock footage of one exploding. Also, they needed a quick plot device to maroon everyone on the island. But the explosion is never explained. Nobody even seems all that surprised by it. Our brave scientists adopt an "oh, that's too bad" sort of attitude, which I think is taking scientific detachment just a step or two too far.
  
  
• And if you like nonsensical plot twists, you'll love the bit near the end where the German guy discovers oil and rushes off into a cave to find more, ignoring the constant earthquakes and, oh, giant land crabs. Lesseee... obsessive secrecy, an all-consuming lust for oil... I have to wonder, did Dick Cheney see this movie as a kid and decide he wanted to be Weigant when he grew up? We'll probably never know for sure, but you have to admit it would explain a lot.
  
  
• The woman doesn't get to do much as a marine biologist, except swim around in SCUBA gear a couple of times. Even though the crabs are underwater part of the time (despite being land crabs). She wears a sort of short-shorts/swimsuit outfit in the water, with a bathing cap to keep the hair dry. On land, she wears the tight collared shirt typical of 50's SF movies, the ancestor of today's white tank top. Girdle & bullet bra, ancestor of silicone, I guess. It's all very tame; you have to have watched as many of these as I have to realize it's supposed to be T&A.
  
  
• There's no safer job than being the only female scientist on the expedition. You'll always make it out alive, along with one of the male castmembers. That's the good news. The bad news is he'll probably leer at you and make a crack about Adam and Eve before the credits roll. And if you do make it back alive, you've probably got a lifetime of cooking and cleaning to look forward to. Niiiice.
  
  
• Incidentally, that doesn't happen in this movie. As soon as our self-sacrificing second hero dies while offing the last(?) giant crab, there's a quick reaction shot from our two survivors, and wham, end of film, the lights go up and the ushers shoo you out of the theater to make way for the next batch of eager cineastes. Rescue? What's that?
  
  
• One of the less compelling love triangles to grace the silver screen. At first when our heroine started making eyes at the local handyman, I figured the filmmakers had just screwed up and forgotten which guy was the love interest. Which would be understandable really, as neither man really stands out in the mind. But no, later they make like they're going to kiss or something, and have a short chat about hero #1. Hero #2 seems crestfallen, even though it seems like she wouldn't entirely mind if hero #1 became crab chow. As soon as he figures out he probably won't get the girl in the end, we know he's a goner. That's how it always works.
  
  
• At one point, our heroine says she'd better fix food for everyone. Usually they just make coffee for the other scientists in this sort of film. Back in college, a sociology prof actually lectured about this, saying that this was a real-world phenomenon. Even when you were in theory equal to the men in the department/expedition/starship crew, somehow it was still your job to make sure everyone had food, coffee, and so forth. She called the phenomenon "waitressing", and wrote a paper on the topic after realizing she herself was doing it at a meeting with colleagues. I'd like to think society's progressed a bit since the Boomers were first entering academia. I don't know what academia is really like these days, but surely by now everyone realizes that fixing dinner, making coffee, and performing menial domestic chores are tasks beneath scientists of either gender. That's what graduate students are for.
  
  
• The film features a shifty German nuclear physicist, straight from Central Casting, who knows more than he'll say, or at least he implies he does. He gets eaten before he can fess up, probably because the screenwriters couldn't figure out what he was hiding. If you're hiding something, why the constant stream of cryptic, portentious comments? He arrives on the island in dark glasses and a trenchcoat. I can see the dark glasses, it being a tropical Pacific island and all, but a trenchcoat?
  
  
• An example of his secretive Teutonic shiftiness: "Are you hiding something from us, doctor? A theory, perhaps?"
  "Maybe."
  
  
• Another: "Doctor Weigant, you are a great nuclear physicist, while I am a provincial botanist. But there are things I do not understand."
  "there are many things I do not understand also, Jules. You had better climb."
  
  
• Jules, the provincial botanist, is the token French guy, again straight from Central Casting. He doesn't do much in the film, until he manages to get his hand sliced off by a falling stalactite (or was it a stalagmite? I can never keep those straight.) It's a remarkably clean cut for something done by a falling rock, but no matter. They bundle Jules back to the house and put him to bed, but his big scene is yet to come. He supplies the film's one real moment of pathos: The crabs call to him in the voice of a previously-eaten scientist. The wounded, half-delirious French guy stumbles out to follow the voices, only to get a giant crab claw around his neck. So, so sad.
  
  
• Then the crabs start talking with Jules's voice. I did enjoy that part, crabs speaking with a French accent. I'm not sure why exactly. The crabs already look like Henson characters, and with that silly accent, you half expect John Denver to show up and sing a duet with the damn things.
  
  
• Decent underwater footage, although obviously shot in a tank. The credits note the underwater scenes were shot at Marineland of the Pacific, an erstwhile aquarium in the LA area. Closed in 1987 and spend the next couple of decades as an abandoned amusement park, until developers finally got hold of it. Seems there's an entirely different movie in this.
  
  
• SCUBA footage was a B-movie staple back in the day, and it never really worked very well. There's no dialogue, of course, and faces are hidden by the scuba gear, and you can't tell people apart. And generally nothing really crucial to the plot happens during a scuba sequence. The story just comes to a screeching halt until the scuba stuff is over, and the scuba stuff tends to go on far longer than it needs to.
  
  
• Some choice crab-related quotes from the film.
  "Land crabs and seagulls. Everything else is dead." The seagull bit is never explained. And unfortunately we never encounter any giant seagulls. It's a real shame -- giant homicidal seagulls would be pretty damn creepy.
  "Nothing but land crabs"
  "What's down there?"
  "What could be, other than earth, water, and a few land crabs?"
  "Helpless, nothing. Did you ever see a bunch of them start on a wounded Marine? They finish him off in five minutes."
  
  
• Nesting sea turtles for target practice? Jeebus. The 50's really were a dark and primitive time.
  
  
• Nobody seems to be surprised when disembodied voices call to them. They just go, "Oh, that's McClain from the first expedition that disappeared, I'll go see him."
  
  
• Our heroine and one of the lesser scientists answer the disembodied voice of "McClain" and wander off to look for him. This involves rappelling down into a newly-formed pit, using primitive 1950's climbing technology (i.e. just a rope). The lesser scientist takes a tumble, and she faints or passes out or something. When she comes to, there's no sign of ol' whatsisname. "He went into the pit. He must have fallen during the quake", she explains. She conveniently fails to mention she was helping.
  
  
• People are commenting on someone down in the pit, either McClain or the other guy (I forget which), wondering if he might be alive down there:
  "He could be, assuming this was caused by a disturbance."
  
  
• At one point Weigand picks up a microscope and looks into it, handheld. Um, that's not going to work. Plus he's a physicist. So I guess he might not know about how to work a microscope.
  
  
• When the Navy grunts get eaten (after we no longer need them as comic relief), the crabs don't really use their voices much. The class divide continues, even after being assimilated by giant energy crab-monsters.
  
  
• Other than the dynamite-as-poker-chips bit, the Navy guys really don't serve much of a purpose. If the movie ever explains why the scientists needed a team of demolitions experts, the explanation must be so quick that I keep missing it.
  
  

Metzger Park: Kingdom of the Spiders

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You can always tell it's fall by all the spiders. Huge freakin' spiders, everywhere you look. I ran across these particular huge freakin' spiders down at Metzger Park, near Washington Square. The place has got to be prime habitat for gigantic spiders, at least for the moment.

If my spider field guide is right, these beasties are nothing but common garden spiders. Just inordinately well-fed ones.

Taking photos of spiders is a challenge with my puny little point-n-shoot camera. Its autofocus is arachnophobic, so spiders always end up as blurry blobs in front of nice sharp backgrounds. Manual focus was an afterthought when they designed the camera, and you have to twist a knob and press a couple of buttons to turn it on. Then you get a postage stamp sized region on the LCD that shows you what the camera's focused on, or it does if your target's big enough, and you squint a bit, and you're lucky.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that these are merely intermediate results in my continuing quest to take a decent photo of a spider on a web, similar to the third-rate squirrel photos I post here now and then. Focusing properly is one big issue. Another is that the little bastards just won't hold still for the camera. All you have to do is breathe on the web a little and they run away. I suppose it'd be a lot more worrisome if the spiders didn't run away. If a spider ever stands its ground, itching for a fight, I think I'll be the one running away, thank you very much.

The spiders are only one of the park's many horrors. Ok, maybe I'm overstating that, but they did film part of a stupid horror movie here back in 1992. I've never actually watched Dr. Giggles, but I have it on good authority that it's a truly rank piece of filmmaking, wretched even by filmed-in-Portland standards, and that's really saying something.

The Kingdom of the Spiders bit in the title refers to another cheesy horror movie I haven't seen (yet), this one starring the one, the only, William Shatner. I'm probably harming my bad movie street cred by admitting to two such movies I haven't seen in the same post, but hey.

If you're in the mood for a bad Shatner movie, and you can't quite stomach Star Trek V, may I recommend the Shat's singular work in White Comanche. Ok, not precisely singular, in that he plays twin half-breed Indians, one good (and "civilized"), the other psychotic, peyote-mad, and evil through and through. It's a real hoot. Trust me on this.... But I digress.

I suppose you could count zombies as the park's third horror, since the mall's just a short drive away. C'mon, you've seen 'em too. Waddling from a Suburban to a waiting table at the Fatcake Cheesery, devouring everything in its path. Splattering blood and gore everywhere during a frantic 3% off sale at Nordstrom. Oh, the horror of it all!

So anyway, I'll get to the park itself in a minute, if you're still interested. But first some flowers. Yes, there's more to the place than freakin' humongous spiders and crappy horror movies. Honest.

Before anyone complains, I realize I'm being patently unfair to the place, and I'm sure the park is in reality a perfectly nice and pleasant, if unremarkable, spot. I do realize that. It's just that with the spiders, and the horror movie thing, certain themes begin to suggest themselves. And, y'know, Washington County's extracted a fair chunk of tax money out of me over the years (although not at present), and my taxes went to support the park all that time, and this is the very first bit of enjoyment I've ever gotten from the place. So I think I'm entitled, don't you?

As longtime Gentle Reader(s) of this humble blog must've noticed by now, I have this occasional and rather silly hobby of tracking down local parks, monuments, greenspaces, and so forth, and taking some photos and writing a few words about them here. C'mon, I already admitted it was silly, and I saved it for the end, so you have to admit I still have some sense of perspective. C'mon. Please?

I'd been mildly curious about Metzger County Park for a while, and I happened to be in the area, so I thought I'd take a peek. I don't expect anyone other than me to find this intriguing, but Washington County has exactly two county parks: The huge one out at Hagg Lake, and this one. All other parks on the westside are either city parks, or part of the Tualatin Hills park district. So the place is kind of an anomaly in a bureaucratic sense, but other than that it looks like any other neighborhood park. I suppose it just happened not to be within an incorporated city or the Tualatin Hills district boundaries, so the county ended up with the job somehow. I recall reading some years ago that the county wanted out of the parks business, and wanted either the state or Metro to take over Hagg Lake. I imagine they also wanted to unload Metzger Park on someone else too, but so far they've still got both of them.

I wasn't entirely accurate earlier when I said there were two parks. Technically there's at least one more county park, a place called Rippling Waters Park, located on Gales Creek way out past Forest Grove. If you need another little bit of trivia you'll probably never be able to use, I've got more of the story here, although (as usual) no definitive answers. For what it's worth, that same post also mentions Multnomah County's sole remaining county park, a nano-sized one it kept after handing all the others over to Metro. See? I told you it was a silly hobby. Possibly even a stupid one. Although not as bad as trainspotting, though. Man, those guys are dweebs.

I'm afraid the photos I've got here will give you an unbalanced idea of the place. It's not just forests and flowers and titanic bloodsucking arachnids. There's also a grassy lawn for picnics, some tennis courts, a play structure, and a 60's-era community center building with some roses around it. Nothing here to go out of your way to see, really. Oh, well. Curiosity satisfied. Mission accomplished.

more wasted hours at the movies

If you number among this blog's nano-legion of longtime Gentle Reader(s), you may have occasionally, idly, wondered just how much time I waste on watching bad movies. Well, probably not, but let's suppose you did, purely for the sake of argument.

I've always had a thing for bad movies. As a kid, my two main sources for cinematic thrills were the late, lamented Aloha Theater, and afternoon movies on channel 12 (back when it was one of five total TV stations, the scrappy independent underdog against the 3 networks plus PBS). Stop-motion monsters? Great. Guys in rubber monster suits? Fantastic. Scripts that don't make any sense? Cool. Ridiculous dubbing? Yes, please, I'll have another.

I have a theory about bad movies, and about bad art in general. It may not be a very good theory, but it's mine. I'd suggest to you that if you want to understand what was going on in society at a given place and time, you'll learn more by studying that era's fourth-rate crap than you would by studying the timeless classics. First rate work reflects the artist and his or her unique vision, first and foremost. You can learn a lot about the artist, and that can be rewarding in its own way, of course. Fourth rate work generally doesn't proceed from someone's overarching, singular vision. Someone's churning out stuff they think will sell, in order to pay the rent and put booze, er, food on the table. In the "subsistence filmmaking" world, you can't afford to go too far out on a limb, or pander to too elite of an audience. To succeed, you figure out what the unwashed masses really want (whether they admit to it or not), and give it to them as best you can. The resulting work isn't an "objective" look at the society it came from, of course, but it can tell you something about the biases of the day, and how that society saw itself. Ok, so that's my theory, and it's not hard to come up with counterexamples. A prime virtue of both Dickens and Shakespeare is that they did say something about contemporary society. But then, they were both working out of economic need, and were only later recognized as geniuses. On the flip side, some bad art results from a singular but really cheesy vision. Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda is an extremely personal statement.


So here's the latest batch of B movies, for good or ill...

The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave

An Italian horror movie dubbed into English. I guess I don't really get Italian horror movies. Italy doesn't seem like a place where you'd get a lot of horror films; if you've got sunshine and wine and olives every day, why spend a single moment thinking about serial killers, or zombies, or cannibals? It doesn't make sense, but there you go. What I really don't get is that the film's serial killer turns out to be the "hero" of the film, in a late plot twist, and the baddies were out to lay their hands on his money. I suppose we can chalk this one up to Cultural Differences. The mod 60's cottage at the end is pretty cool, though. And although the film's supposed to be set in England, it's the least convincing imitation you'll ever see, which is sort of a hoot. I understand that the dubbed English version was seriously cut for US release, and I missed out on scads of luscious Euro-sleaze. Damn. I suppose there's no point in waiting around for the director's cut, is there?

Riders to the Stars

A very early SF film about a group of clean-cut white guys training for a flight into space. In the end, three are selected, and one survives, and I suppose you're supposed to draw some sort of "survival of the fittest" conclusion about who survives and who doesn't. I'm not sure. Also, there's the requisite love interest thing, and they live happily ever after, naturally. One interesting bit is that the omnipresent Richard Carlson is one of the guys who doesn't make it, having a legendary bad-movie freakout and trashing his spaceship in the process. Oh, and Carlson directed the film, too. Read into that whatever you like. There's a scene in the film where the ever-present icy female scientist automatically serves coffee to the menfolk. The movie generally strives for a sense of realism, and a prof back in college once told me this really was expected of you back in those days. You could get all the postgraduate degrees you liked, but when the ol' percolator started percolating, you were still nothing but a waitress until the boys had their caffeine fix. Ahh, the 50's, such a wholesome and innocent time. Feh.

Beast from Haunted Cave

This is an early Roger Corman effort. There's a gold heist in the beginning, and an icky spider monster at the end, and the rest of the movie is a whole lot of skiing. I think they were trying to cash in on the ski trend of the early 60's. I wasn't around back then, but I've seen my parents' home movies, and they look really similar to this film. Except without sound, and in color, with no spider-beast (in the surviving footage). It's kinda fun to see that snapshot of a bygone subculture, plus the creature holds its own. You don't see a lot of it, because it looks pretty crappy, but it captures people alive, traps them in spiderwebs, and feeds on them at its leisure, sort of like Alien, or Shelob in LOTR. That's way creepier than you'd usually see back in those days.

Them!

The prototypical giant ant movie. It's been a while since I watched this, so I can't comment in great detail like I should. But the large animatronic ants are just classic. And the grand finale in the L.A. sewers, near the Los Angeles River, are pretty great. TIght script, written pretty well, decent dialogue. It's just that everyone laughs because of the basic premise, I mean, giant ants? Jeez. That's crazy. But in the end, the movie exists because some moviemaker learned a little about radioactivity and went "oh, crap". So, ok, you can't really make ants grow to the size of elephants with a few gamma rays. But someone's heart was in the right place anyway. That ought to count for something.

Manos: The Hands of Fate

A lot of people call this the worst movie of all time, ranking up there with Plan 9 and Eegah! I think that's kind of unfair, really. The guy who made this was a fertilizer salesman in El Paso who decided he wanted to make a movie. He had a near-zero budget, zero experience, and he wrote, directed, and starred. Basically your classic indie filmmaker story, except a few decades too early, and with even less talent. The acting is about what you'd expect: The pool of top-rank acting talent in El Paso in the mid-60s seems to have been rather thin, and this movie didn't draw from that pool. We're talking high school play quality here. And making fun of Manos is like making fun of someone's high school play: It was a labor of love, they tried their absolute hardest, and even though they clearly knew next to nothing about their craft, they made up for it with a certain naive, earnest quality. It just isn't very nice to make fun of someone who's trying so hard, whether they succeed or not. Or to switch analogies, Manos is the movie equivalent of folk art, kind of like Grandma Moses, or a velvet Elvis, or the quilters down at the senior center. Again, making fun of it isn't very nice. Plus the guy cast himself as the remarkably clueless "hero" in a film with a decidedly downbeat ending, which ought to count for something. And that "Master" guy, with the robe with the gigantic red hands on it... That's an utterly awesome outfit. I think I may need a Manos robe for next Halloween. That would be the bomb, so long as you're around people who don't need you to explain it. If you have to explain the movie, you're sunk.

Monster a Go-Go

This baby makes a lot of "worst ever" lists. If you're a fan of that sort of thing, you may have heard of MaGG already. Otherwise, probably not. The key thing to know about this movie is that it's a splice job. Director A started movie B ("B movie", get it? Ha, ha.) but ran out of money part of the way through. Director C buys the footage, shoots a bit more of his own, and dumps the thing into the unsuspecting marketplace to make whatever cash he can. It turns out that may have been a good business decision, in the long term. If the original movie had been finished and released, it would've been just another unremarkable creature feature. But take two creature featurettes and awkwardly splice them together, and you've got box office gold. Eventually, anyway, once the ironic bad-movie nerds take notice. As splice jobs go, it's not the worst I've seen. Trail of the Pink Panther is way worse. You get a bit of Peter Sellers doing the usual Pink Panther thing, then he disappears (ok, dies in reality), and the rest of the movie is the world's most annoying female investigative reporter going around interviewing people about the "missing" Inspector Clouseau. Also, Horror of the Blood Monsters is pretty dire too, the usual Jerry Warren hatchet job. Although if you want a taste of vintage Philippine vampire cinema, this version's going to be a lot easier to find than an original film would be. Anyway, back to MaGG, the worst thing about the movie is the ending. It's like they wanted their saturday matinee audience to leave the theater angry, and go out and commit random juvenile offenses to blow off steam. I could say "Spoiler Alert" here, but c'mon, you really don't want to see this POS, do you? If you really don't want me to ruin the end for you, scroll down to the next movie, it's easy. There. Ok, so the good guys are chasing the monster (tall guy in bad makeup), it feels like we're at the climactic scene, the cops are in hot pursuit, etc. But then, the monster just disappears, never to be seen again. And the astronaut it supposedly mutated from is found alive and unharmed, thousands of miles away. So none of the movie's events ever happened, which is undoubtedly for the best. The End. Not very satisfying, is it? Kind of makes you want to go out and do some petty vandalism, doesn't it? Told you so. People usually talk about the bit where a phone rings, and you can hear a person making the ringing phone sound. It's funny, but I bet they just forgot to dub in the right sound later. There's enough awful crap in this movie (like the world's tiniest space capsule, for instance), so why bother taking cheap shots? Heck, there's a bit in Manos where they didn't quite get the clapper edited out at the beginning of the scene, if we're going to harp on bad editing. Besides, it happens so fast that you really can't savor the moment, and if you pause and rewind to see it again, your friends will call you a nerd.

13 Ghosts

One of the lesser-known works of William Castle, the theater gimmick guy. You've heard of him, the guy with the buzzers under the seats, inflatable skeletons, ushers running around the theater dressed as ghosts, that sort of thing. It doesn't hurt that his movies are fun on their own, apart from the gimmicks. Good, clean fun unfortunately, but fun nonetheless.

Monster that Challenged the World

A prehistoric creature hatches deep beneath California's Salton Sea, and sets out terrorizing the few people who live nearby. Can our heroes stop the beastie before it reaches the ocean? Because if it does, there's no stopping it. Present-day movies never present the hero as a grumpy, paunchy, clueless middle-aged guy. Male actors could get away with a lot more back then, I guess. So the movie as a whole isn't great, and the lead actor is the angriest old coot I've ever seen. And the title is laughable. But at least the outdoor settings are pretty creepy. I remember some years ago driving past the Salton Sea with a couple of other people. We knew it was nearby because of the smell, and it wasn't a great smell. Really the worst thing about the movie is the wimpy title. "Challenged"? Feh.

The Monster Walks

The Monster Walks 1932 - Watch more Tech Videos at Vodpod.

Bad gorilla-suit movie meets bad haunted house movie. It's been a while since I watched this, and there wasn't anything all that memorable in it. One ugly bit is that the token black cast member (a chauffeur, if I remember right) is credited as "Sleep-n-Eat". Not the as the character's name, the actor's name. Ugh.

Lost Jungle

This is a cinematic vehicle for one "Clyde Beatty", who I gather was quite the celebrity animal trainer back in the day. Sort of Siegfried & Roy put together, if they were both short sadistic little men with big bullwhips. It seems there was a whole series of Clyde Beatty movies at one time. Elvis, in his cinematic ouevre, would inevitably end up in a situation where he had to whip out his guitar and belt out a forgettable ballad or two. Beatty couldn't act any more than Elvis could, so he fell back on his strengths as well. Instead of crooning at adoring nuns or hula girls, Beatty would just whip the hell out of a lion or tiger or two. None of those wimpy "No animals were harmed in the making of this picture" notices for ol' Clyde. As far as I can tell, the audience loved it and kept coming back for more. And now that they're old, we call these people the "Greatest Generation". Ha. I only watched this because there's a cool 30's zeppelin in it, and all zeppelins are awesome. It's a law of nature, sort of. But it's only there for a short time, and it crashes, and then it's nothing but animal abuse until the credits roll. Yech.

Ghost Ship

Now this is a really, really good movie you've probably never heard of. It's another spooky, atmospheric Val Lewton movie, the same guy who brought us Cat People (the original), and I Walked with a Zombie. There aren't any ghosts here, actually. Nothing supernatural at all. Just a claustrophobic cargo ship with a sea captain who's warm, friendly, and homicidally insane. He's perfectly calm and reasonable as he explains it's his job to exercise power of life and death over every living thing on board. When he has to bump off a crewman, he comes across as rational and unapologetic. He's a tyrant at sea, but on land he folds up into a bitter, lost old man. And the ship puts to sea and he's a tyrant again. As with all Lewton movies, it's all in the details. The sound, and unforgettable visuals like the gigantic hook swinging madly around the deck during a storm, crewmen trying to dodge it.

Psyched by the 4d Witch

I tend to go easy on movies you see on "worst movies ever" lists, like Manos (above), or Plan 9. They really aren't the worst of the worst, not even close. For instance, take Psyched by the 4D Witch. Please. This is without a doubt one of the most godawful, incompetent, nonsensical movies I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot. I don't even know where to begin with this one. It's part groovy psychedelic drug movie, and part amateur softcore exploitation pic. So far so good. But it looks like it was filmed on silent Super 8 stock, and a soundtrack was added later: Inane narration, and music that alternates clumsily between classical (mostly Russian: Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Tchaikovsky's 1812 and Marche Slave) and the groovy "4D Witch" song of the title. In a way it might not be fair of me to pass judgment on this lil' movie. Watching it without drugs (which I did, I'll have you know) may be like watching a 3D movie without 3D glasses. You just aren't properly equipped. But from my admittedly limited perspective I'd have to say this movie would be a sad waste of perfectly good LSD. You could also be contrarian and argue this movie is so incomprehensible it must, simply must be High Art. I could probably write that film school essay myself if I really wanted to, although it'd be total BS. I gather that it's only Art if the auteur actually intended the work to be messy or incomprehensible. Godard's Breathless is full of awkward jump cuts and people sitting around smoking and talking aimlessly, but it's definitely High Art. Everybody says so, so you can be sure it must be true. On the other hand, there are any number of Doris Wishman films that are superficially similar: Jump cuts, long conversations, plot that doesn't amount to much. But Wishman movies are dreck. Maybe there's a subtle difference, or maybe it's purely a matter of consensus. Who can say?

Bridge Diner

Some photos of the old, historic Bridge Diner under the Broadway Bridge in downtown Portland. Ok, it's not actually old or historic. It's not even a diner. It's a movie set, a very detailed and believable set for the film Untraceable, currently shooting here in town. (The Mercury has a bit about it here, and there's a mention at CafeUnknown and I think I've seen it somewhere else too.)

Passersby could be forgiven for wondering how long it was here without them noticing. The movie folks did a great job making the thing look old, and it's small enough that it's conceivable it could've been overlooked. It looks like something you might find here, a half-forgotten relic of the old industrial days when the area was a working seaport.

I already knew the story when I set out to find the thing, so I just sort of walked around admiring it for a while, taking a few pictures and smiling at the bored security guard in a nearby pickup. Then my stomach growled at me. It sure would be nice if there was a real diner here, or around here somewhere. The surrounding area is mostly residential these days, but there's nowhere to eat, at least not anywhere that I've noticed. So a restaurant of any kind would be welcome here, I'm sure.

One fun bit: The "Diner parking only" sign is part of the set, but it serves precisely the same purpose in the real world too, keeping people from hogging the parking spaces around the building. It's like, postmodern, or whatever.

And since it's not really blogging unless I find something to be all anal-retentive and pedantic about, a couple of quibbles. First, a sign on the back of the building (photo 4) advertises "hero" and "grinder" sandwiches. Nobody uses those words here. Here they're always sub sandwiches. Don't ask me to explain that; it's just how it is. Second, the prominent "AIR CONDITIONED" sign on the front might not gotten that kind of billing here, even back when AC was a novelty. The whole damn state is naturally air conditioned about nine months out of the year. What you do see more often on old buildings are signs advertising "Color TV". Also, the building is even smaller than a Waffle House, which is really saying something. That's entirely too small. But that's not unusual for movie sets. Maybe one of the stars is really short and insecure, or something.

The thing with diners is that what people really love is the idea of diners. Maybe it's the architecture, or the music on the jukebox. Maybe they're seen as relics of a "simpler" and more wholesome era. Maybe it's even the food for some people, but not everyone, I'm sure. Case in point: Out in Hillsboro there's a place called the Blue Moon Diner. (inside photo here) It's located in a strip mall off TV Highway, across from a big Intel plant, and it's only been there maybe 10-15 years. But apart from that, it's the real deal, as far as I can tell. It's one of those airstream-style prefab aluminum diners from the Midwest, which are still in production, believe it or not. The owners bought one, had it shipped here, and set up shop. The food is exactly what you'd expect: Eggs, bacon, and waffles; burgers, fries, and shakes; the whole deal. I'm told (by people who should know) that the burgers are just like the burgers you'd have gotten way back when. Which is not the same thing as saying they're the best burgers you can find now in 2007. And in 2007, you don't always want a burger anyway, regardless of the setting. When we lived out in that part of town, we went to the Blue Moon now and then, but for every visit we probably made ten runs to the neighborhood Thai Orchid. But still, the building sure is pretty. Your cultural studies professor can call it "pastiche" all s/he likes, but it's hard to beat curvy shiny aluminum, since everything else for miles around is nothing but relentless beigeness. Some of the more adventurous buildings are beige with khaki accents. But it can be hard to tell from a distance.

If you're closer to downtown and looking for an "authentic" diner experience, you might try the Original Hotcake House, on SE Powell near Milwaukie Ave. Not quite a "diner" per se, but definitely a greasy spoon. The bacon's good, which is really all you need to know. Oh, and, it's open 24/7. Back when I lived nearby in the Brooklyn neighborhood, mumble-mumble years ago, I'd occasionally drop by there at 2AM for some greasy breakfast chow and coffee. I'm not as much of a night-owl-about-town as I once was, but I'm still awfully fond of the place.

But I digress. More than any concerns about regional or historical authenticity, or whether it's physically possible to stuff enough customers inside to pay the bills, what I really worry about is Oregon's movie curse. Nearly every movie made here has been jaw-droppingly godawful, although sometimes (rarely) they achieve so-bad-it's-good status. Think The Hunted, or Portland Exposé, or Body of Evidence (which I just saw over the weekend, but that's another story). I hope the latest production manages to avoid the curse, even if it's supposed to be yet another Northwest serial killer movie, like we really need another of those.

Anyway, I hope the movie doesn't suck, and if it does, I hope it sucks in a non-memorable way so we don't get buses full of tourists through here looking for the real Bridge Diner. If anyone asks about it, feel free to play oldtimer and make up stories for the wide-eyed tourists. Tell them Harry Truman ate here, or that Marilyn Monroe worked here for a month or two, just before she got her start in showbiz. Say it's haunted by the ghost of some mafia kingpin who got gunned down in the parking lot back during the pinball wars of the late 50's. Repeat a few off-color jokes and say you heard them from old Stumpy McGee, the legendary line cook at the Bridge who retired to Yuma just last year. Tell 'em the place hasn't been the same since, but you remember how it was in the old days...

Portland Exposé

So I recently got my hands on a copy of Portland Exposé, a cheesy grade-Z crime pic from 1957. It combines two of my favorite topics on this blog: local history, and awful, awful movies. The thing was actually filmed here, at least in part -- and as everyone knows, basically all movies filmed here are horrendous. It's pretty much a law of nature, but that's a subject for another post. Stumptown Confidential has a bunch of stills here and here, and there's a fun local review of the thing at Duck Duck Book Trying to figure out exactly where the thing was filmed is half the fun (including the top photo, which I'll get to in a bit.) Making fun of the movie is the other half. And the movie really is fun, at least in a so-bad-it's-good way.

The film is one half of a double-feature disc titled Forgotten Noir Vol. 1 (which Netflix has here), and once you see it, you'll understand why it was forgotten. And don't think it just hasn't aged well; the NY Times reviewed it when it came out, and the reviewer was highly unimpressed.



You might be wondering why Hollywood set the movie here, back in an era when our fair city was even more obscure than it is now. Seems there was a highly colorful corruption scandal here back in the 50's, as depicted in Phil Stanford's book Portland Confidential. (slabtown chronicle has more on the book here). Yes, it was an era of hard-drinking tough guys in fedoras, gun molls, crooked cops, the mob, the whole deal. We had it all, and half a century on it's pretty much impossible not to romanticize the whole thing. Anyway, the movie came out on the heels of the scandal, just in time to cash in on our city's fleeting notoriety. The plot isn't related to the actual scandal, though, except for the location and the mob angle. Everything else is the invention of the screenwriter's fevered, yet oddly prudish, imagination.

The executive summary version of our story: Our hero is a humble innkeeper, and he and his family have an establishment somewhere on the outskirts of our fair city. Everything seems idyllic and peaceful until organized crime moves in. They offer our hero a deal he can't refuse, and overnight the inn becomes quite the popular night spot. He's not happy, but he's making tons of money. But then, an icky henchman takes a liking to our hero's underaged daughter, and it's payback time. He takes what is apparently a middle-management job in the crime syndicate. They run just like a proper 50's business: Everyone wears a suit, and the accounting department keeps meticulous records, which is convenient. But little do the evildoers know that our hero is actually in cahoots with the G-men. He's going around taping conversations like mad, using a huge tape recorder he hides under his suit. This can't go on for long without being discovered, and it doesn't. But just when the baddies are about to do unspeakable things to our hero and his daughter, the G-men burst in, there's a nice big fistfight, and Public Order is restored once again. The End!

But this doesn't really do the film justice. For that, we'll need the traditional bullet-points-o-crap format:

• One important lesson we learn from the film: It's a slippery, slippery slope into the clutches of the mob, and it all starts with pinball. No, seriously, it does. Bear with me here. Sure, you start out thinking you're dealing with a reputable pinball dealer, but sooner or later the mob horns in on his turf, and then you belong to them. Pinball is fine for the kiddies, as we all know, but it has a vague corrupting influence on grownups who play. No, really, it's a 100% totally true scientific fact. Ask anyone.
  
• Since pinball turns responsible adults into amoral gambling fiends, from there it's a short step to slot machines, and once you've got slot machines all hell breaks loose: Drinking, dancing, carousing... At this point it just seems like the mob has a better idea of how to run a fun nightclub than our hero does. Oh, but they have bigger plans. Hookers, dope, guns, "illegal surgery", the whole deal. And once you've got that first pinball machine, there'll be no stopping any of it, so be warned!
  
• You'd think that as popular as pinball apparently was back then, they could've found actors who knew how to pretend they were playing. But noooo. Someone really ought to have explained what those little buttons on the sides were for.
  
• The old lady freaking out when she wins at the slot machine is a real hoot, too, shrieking and grabbing coins off the floor. I think we're supposed to gasp at the utter depravity of it all. You know, because only depraved people are happy when they win stuff. I gather that's the message we're supposed to get from this shot. I'm not entirely sure.
  
• A lot of the main characters in the movie are so old for their parts it's almost surreal. The teenage daughter looks about 28, and her allegedly clean-cut fraternity boyfriend looks about 40. And the mom looks about 60.
  
• A striking thing is what they leave out of the litany of lurid sins: Nobody suggests there's anything wrong with letting your customers get completely soused and then drive home in gigantic V8-powered sedans with knobby little tires and no seat belts or other modern safety equipment. And when the daughter's boyfriend decides she must be "easy" because her dad owns a popular night spot, everyone laughs off the attempted date rape as an innocent misunderstanding. Oh, and everyone smokes, of course. That goes without saying.
  
• On the other hand, in 2007 just about every bar in town has slot machines, in their modern "video slots" incarnation. And every last one of them is owned and operated by the state. We all have a patriotic duty to go down to the local watering hole and drop a couple of twenties on the video slots, to help keep the state solvent for another year. Although many of us continue to neglect our patriotic duties, present company included. I just don't see the attraction, myself.
  
• At one point there's a speech by a heroic labor union leader(!) who says the rank and file oppose all this organized crime business, and it's time to root it out. He even helps direct the police crackdown on the baddies, which is unusual given what little I know about the normal police chain of command. I guess this character's presence is supposed to combat the prejudices of the day, when in the public eye the unions were all a bunch of crooks and commies. This is one of the movie's rare attempts to be broad-minded, so I figured I ought to at least mention it.
  
• There's a guy in the movie who's the big boss in town, the capo de capos, who we only ever see from behind, talking on the phone. For all the movie's pious moralizing, it goes to great lengths to give the baddies a certain mystique. Kids, do you want to grow up to be our sour-faced hero, proprietor of the No Fun Cafe way out in the boonies, or do you want to be Mr. Big?
  
• Did I mention the huge tape recorder yet? We're talking almost shoebox-sized here, and somehow our hero hides it under his suit. Suits were baggy in those days, I guess. Not only is the recorder really freakin' gigantic, our hero couldn't be less discreet about recording people. He's got this microphone on a cord he whips out and waves around when he thinks the baddies aren't looking. Naturally that's how he gets caught.
  
• Frank Gorshin's character is really, really, really creepy. Surprisingly so for a movie of this age. When the other baddies off him for being a liability, you kind of want to cheer them on. Sadly, it's no longer possible for gangsters to dispose of unwanted persons by dumping them on the railroad tracks near Union Station. The area's full of upscale condos now. Someone would be bound to hear the commotion.
  
• The airport scenes don't look anything like the present-day airport. My guess is that we're seeing the old terminal that sat off of Marine Drive. I understand it's still in use today, strictly for cargo. On the other hand, the "new" terminal has been remodeled and expanded so many times that anything left from 1957 would be unrecognizable.
  
• The high-class madam our hero picks up at the airport seems like someone's grandma, and isn't very scary at all. When she explains her hopes to have a proper, classy operation, with all educated girls and no "dipsos" or "hopheads", it almost sounds like a civic improvement program, at least by the standards of the day. If the movie's to be believed, even the crooks of the day were quite a judgmental lot. There were unwritten, informal, but very rigid rules to the game, and the rules were strictly enforced. Laws on the books, not so much. Everyone agreed on what constituted "vice" and tut-tutted about it constantly, but at the same time society was happy to tolerate a bit of naughtiness here and there, so long as it stayed within certain boundaries. "Vice" never poked its head out of the back alleys, and polite society averted its eyes, and people seemed to be content with the hypocrisy for decades on end.
  
  And then the hippies came along a few years later and upended the apple cart. No wonder the older generation hated them so much.
  
• Although now in 2007, being a "hophead" is perfectly legal in Oregon, so long as you have a note from your doctor and an official state ID card. We want the program to be respectable, so it isn't quite PC to say that we have the hippies to thank for it, but we do. Admit it.
  
• The bridge and phone booth scenes (go check the Stumptown Confidential stills) look like the Stark St. bridge over the Sandy at Troutdale, and west-side approach to the bridge. But that's a wild guess. I don't think there's a phone booth there anymore. Actually you won't find a phone booth much of anywhere anymore.
  
• And about that top photo. It's of what I think was the baddies' lair in the movie, since there aren't a lot of buildings that style around here. It's at NW 11th & Davis, and although it's just a parking garage at present, it's right in the middle of a hugely desirable part of the ultra-upscale Pearl District. The Brewery Blocks are right next door, including the new theater in the old Armory building, and a bunch of top-tier chain stores. Powell's is about a block away. Our sleek Euro-licious streetcar has a couple of stops right nearby. The whole area is besieged with affluent shoppers and smug gazillionaire locals and their darling weimaraners. And everything's all so squeaky clean and glossy. Spend a few short minutes in the area and you'll start to miss those sleazy, film noir-ish days of yore.
  
  (Ok, more likely you'll miss the idea of those days. I suspect that life in the "wide-open" Portland of 50's could get pretty nasty, brutish, and short if you happened to know the wrong people. People weren't in the business just for the cars and broads and snappy suits.)