The Deadly Mantis

Year 9, Day 294 - 10/21/17 - Movie #2,759               

BEFORE: This is last film before I go on break AGAIN - the three weeks off in September without watching a movie seemed much too long, and now I'm out for another week.  We're flying to Dallas later today to hit the last day of the Texas State Fair, see our first rodeo and visit Southfork Ranch, then we're driving to Little Rock, Memphis and Nashville on a BBQ Crawl.  This is a real thing, I've watched a show called "BBQ Crawl" and enjoyed it, but now it's time to live it.  And I'm guessing there's a reason why it's called a crawl and not a "BBQ Sprint" or "BBQ Trot".

Meanwhile my Watchlist has been slowly growing, I kept it at 135 for a good long time, but taking too much time off makes it balloon up again - it's 145 now, and I'm not done recording all of the Dracula movies that TCM's running this month - plus I've got about 15 more current movies that I need to record before cable stops running them, so I think it will be up at 150 really soon.  I'm going to program as few as possible to record while I'm away, because I can't have the DVR filling up while I'm not home.  I'll have to push as many of them as possible into November, when at least I'll be watching films again and trying to make some bit of progress before the year ends.

Bing Russell carries over from "Tarantula" where he played "Deputized Townsman", tonight he moves a step up to "State Trooper at Train & Bus Wrecks", whatever that means.

THE PLOT: A giant prehistoric praying mantis, recently freed from the Arctic ice, voraciously preys on American military and works its way south.

AFTER: You can tell a film was made during the Cold War when it opens with a 3-minute segment about the line of radar stations in Canada that protected the U.S. from a Soviet missile strike, which was called the D.E.W. Line (Distant Early Warning).  Only then could the audiences relax for 80 minutes and enjoy the show, after being reassured that an atomic bomb would not interrupt their big night out at the movies.  What big balls we had back in the 1950's, placing our radar stations all over Canada like we owned the place - Canada, you were way too nice.  If I were in charge of Canada in the 1950's, I would have said, "Sorrey, eh, you can't put your radar stations on our land.  If you get blown up by Russia we're going to wait a few years for the radiation to die down, then we can move down south into your land and finally get away from all this snow, eh?"

There's a connection here to "Creature From the Black Lagoon", which is a belief that it could be possible for prehistoric creatures to survive over the millennia, either by failing to evolve or by getting stuck in the ice, and then manifest in the present day to attack humans.  It seems the horror filmmakers in the 1950's were starting to figure out how evolution worked, and began using that knowledge to scare the moviegoers.  Like a fly stuck in amber, the giant mantis here got frozen in an ice floe or something many eons ago, and released by a volcano.  OK, two things, that volcano is in the South Seas, how does that melt the ice in the Arctic?  People didn't know about "global warming" back then, so there's a B.S. line about how "every action has an equal and opposite reaction".  That may be true, but thousand of miles away?  That's not how weather works.  Secondly, how the heck did the giant mantis get up in the Arctic in the first place, in order to get frozen?

Then we've got to deal with the very suspect distinction that the mantis is the "deadliest" of all creatures.  Why, just because the females eat their mates?  I guess maybe if you count all the aphids that a mantis eats over the course of its life, probably thousands, but who gives a crap about aphids?  We're talking about being deadly from a human point of view, so I'm not buying it.  No tiny mantis ever killed a human, I'm willing to bet - meanwhile, more humans die from diseases transmitted by mosquitoes each year than from shark attacks.  (725,000 deaths from mosquito bites vs 10 killed by sharks) Even the lowly SNAIL is responsible for about 10,000 human deaths each year.  So take that, sharks.  Hippos even beat sharks 50-1 (500 vs. 10) but the second deadliest animal is apparently man himself, responsible for 475,000 human deaths each year.

Back to the giant mantis - which does seem to be trying to skew the statistics, since this one eats human flesh.  And it knocks down jet fighter planes, which were the things that took down "Tarantula" last night.  And when the Air Force is helpless, the U.S. calls in the next line of defense, which is a paleontologist and a museum magazine editor.  (Wait, what?)  They're able to figure out just what it is that's eating all the soldiers, even though they haven't seen it up close yet.  Too bad they weren't in time to save that Eskimo village.

Romance blooms between Joe, the commanding officer at one of those Northern radar stations (and later he's a renegade fighter pilot, apparently) and Marge, the editor of that museum magazine.  Ah, but what chance do two crazy kids have in this world when there's a giant mantis lurking about?  Can their love survive a giant insect that wants to eat us all?  (Might as well go for it, Marge, since your paleontologist friend apparently wasn't picking up on any of your signals...)

After climbing the Washington Monument, the mantis gets wounded in a battle with the Air Force (Joe's in one of those planes, apparently, taking matters into his own hands) and heads for the "Manhattan Tunnel" between NYC and New Jersey.  They don't say whether it was the Lincoln Tunnel or the Holland Tunnel, but it doesn't matter, we all know nothing can survive in either one for very long.  If you can't "kill it with fire", by all means, try car exhaust fumes.

This is the third and final of my "giant bug" films for this year, after "Them!" and "Tarantula".  When I get back from vacation next Sunday, I'll have just three films to go, and three days left in October to watch them.  No more bugs, only giant lizards left on the docket.

Also starring Craig Stevens (last seen in "Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"), William Hopper (last seen in "Rebel Without a Cause"), Alix Talton (last seen in "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956)), Donald Randolph (last seen in "The Caddy"), Pat Conway, Florenz Ames, Paul Smith (last seen in "Funny Face"), Phil Harvey (last seen in "Touch of Evil"), Floyd Simmons, Paul Campbell, Helen Jay.

RATING: 3 out of 10 civilian observers

Tarantula

Year 9, Day 293 - 10/20/17 - Movie #2,758                            

BEFORE: Another birthday today - so I commemorate the day 9 years ago when I turned 40 and came up with the idea for this blog.  Really, I just wanted to watch more movies, and now I can't seem to stop the damn thing.  (Kill it with fire?)  When you make a life-plan like that, it's hard to look into the future and envision a day when you'll feel really old and are forced to spend part of your birthday watching a film about a giant spider.  But hey, Dunkin Donuts has new Halloween-themed donuts available, and they cleverly put a chocolate Munchkin on top of a glazed donut and gave it little frosting legs to look like a big spider.  I had one of those this morning, so I've got that going for me, at least.  I guess it's just a spider-themed day...

Three actors carry over from "Revenge of the Creature", Nestor Paiva makes his third appearance in a row, and John Agar is here again too.  Plus there's another cameo from Clint Eastwood, though he wasn't really famous at the time, but "cameo" is still the best word for this.  After playing the bumbling lab assistant in last night's film, tonight he's got an uncredited role as a jet pilot - this seems more "in the pocket" for Clint as a future action hero.

THE PLOT: A spider escapes from an isolated desert laboratory experimenting with giantism and grows to tremendous size as it wreaks havoc on the local inhabitants.

AFTER: Let me see if I've got this straight: a dead man is found in the desert, and he had suffering from a condition called acromegaly, which involved physical abnormalities caused by an excess of growth hormone.  Only he looks like he's had the condition for years, but the man had been seen without these symptoms just a few days before.  How the hell do we get from that to a giant spider?

Ah, it turns out he's been working at a lab that's been experimenting with making animals bigger in order to (somehow) solve the problem of world hunger.  Huh?  (Please note, overexposure to growth hormone makes your face all puffy and droopy - are you listening, GMO farmers?)

How is making animals bigger going to solve hunger?  Aren't giant animals going to have bigger appetites?  Shouldn't they be working on making the food bigger, not the things that eat the food?  This just doesn't make any sense.  I get that they've been working with various solutions of "nutrients", but here's another problem - more nutritious food doesn't make animals larger overall, it would just feed them more efficiently.  OK, maybe they'd get fatter, but not LARGER in scale.  This is junk science, no matter how you slice it.

(I'll allow that a better diet could create larger animals over a period of a few thousand years, like people today are generally taller than their prehistoric ancestors, and the theory is that this is due to a better diet, along with things like orthopedic footwear.  But it takes centuries, man, it doesn't happen overnight - we've got more nutritious dog food on the market now, but it doesn't make dogs the size of horses, now, does it?)

Oh, wait, are we supposed to eat the giant rabbits?  I didn't even think of that, because normal people these days don't eat rabbits, that must have been a thing back in the 1950's.  I guess if you can make giant rabbits, then you can make giant chickens and giant cows and then maybe you can start feeding some starving people, at least the ones that don't get killed by all the giant man-eating rabbits.  But even this doesn't explain the giant spider - who the hell would want to eat a giant tarantula?

At least this time the audience gets to SEE the giant spider long before the people on screen do - and they used real spider footage blown up to giant size and super-imposed into the desert scenery, not giant puppet ants like they used in "Them!".  So it looks sort of realistic, even though it's extremely unlikely that a spider bigger than a house could walk around the desert, where there's absolutely nothing to hide behind,  and somehow NOT BE SEEN.

Other campy nitpicky moments include a character finding a giant pool of deadly spider venom and confirming its nature by dipping in a finger and TASTING IT, then referring to it as some kind of "insect venom" when we all should know that a spider is NOT an insect, it's an arachnid.  How do I know more about this stuff than the damn scientists in this film?  Could the screenwriter maybe have spent 5 minutes to do a little genuine research?

Up until this point, I was only familiar with this film as a referenced point in the lyrics of the song "Science Fiction Double Feature" that opens "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" - which go as follows: "I knew Leo G. Carroll was over a barrel as Tarantula took to the hills".  The song also references films like "Forbidden Planet", "King Kong", "The Invisible Man" and "It Came From Outer Space", and if you catch all the references, you're a bigger film geek than I am, since I still haven't seen "Doctor X", "When Worlds Collide" and "The Day of the Triffids".

And I realize now that the wording was probably done to fit the rhyme scheme, but it was still disappointing to learn that at no point during this film was that actor "over a barrel".  There were no barrels at all in this film, come to think of it.  What a shame. 

Also starring Mara Corday (last seen in "Sudden Impact"), Leo G. Carroll (last seen in "The Swan"), Ross Elliott, Edwin Rand, Raymond Bailey (last seen in "Vertigo"), Eddie Parker, Hank Patterson, Bert Holland, Steve Darrell, Don Dillaway, Tom London, Bing Russell (last seen in "Sunset").

RATING: 4 out of 10 clipboards

Revenge of the Creature

Year 9, Day 292 - 10/19/17 - Movie #2,757               

BEFORE: Come on, did you really think that would be the end of the Creature, disappearing into the murky depths?  Of course, he came back.  You can't join the pantheon of Universal Monsters if you only appear in one movie, and get taken down by a simple harpoon gun!  Nestor Paiva carries over from "The Creature From the Black Lagoon", and so does Ricou Browning, who played the Gill-Man in the underwater scenes.

THE PLOT: Men capture the creature from the Black Lagoon and make him an attraction at an aquarium, from which he escapes.

AFTER: Captain Lucas's boat steams back to the notorious Black Lagoon, and a new exposition expedition is on board to have conversations that remind us all what took place in the previous film.  Thankfully these guys all come from the Institute of Marine Biology and Mansplaining.  Seriously, they over-narrate everything that they do, whether it's playing cards or raising things with winches or fishing with dynamite.

Jesus, last time the "scientists" poisoned the whole lagoon just to force the Gill-Man to come out of the water - now they're using dynamite?  How many species of rare fish have to die just to catch one prehistoric anomaly?  And can blowing up the lagoon really count as science?  It certainly doesn't seem sporting, but it does get the job done - Old Gill floats to the surface, unconscious, and is soon netted up and brought to the Ocean Harbor Aquarium (sorry, "Oceanarium" just isn't a word).  Because why study him at a research center when you can make him an attraction like the dolphin show?  Step right up and see the underwater freak, right this way...

What little "science" is involved at this point consists of striking Gilly with an underwater electric prod to try to teach him basic commands like "Stop".  Because that could be helpful later, if he were somehow able to break out of his chains and walk among the public.  Wouldn't ya know, that's exactly what happens?  But I've gotta side with the Gill-meister here, considering what he's been through.  You can't put a beautiful 1950's dame like Helen in the tank with him and then expect him to not fall in love with her, right?  I mean, it just doesn't make any sense, they took the creature out of the ONE lagoon in the entire world where his species still survives, so if there's a potential mate left on the planet for him, she's BACK THERE in freakin' Brazil!

Or maybe he's not lovelorn, maybe he's just pissed that he's a freshwater creature from the Amazon River, and he's been placed in a SALT-water tank near the ocean in Florida.  Jesus, isn't that the first thing people should learn in marine biology class?  What a bunch of incompetent dopes.

So Gill breaks free and tracks down Helen in her bungalow, and I think he kills her dog.  (Not cool, Gill, that's not how to win a gal's heart...)  NITPICK POINT: Earlier in the film, Helen had called the dog her "boyfriend" - what did she mean by this?  Nah, she couldn't have meant that...  NITPICK POINT #2: When Helen can't find her dog, she still goes off on a sailing trip with Clete Ferguson.  That doesn't seem like any dog-owner I've ever known.  What about, "Sorry, Clete, I can't go sailing with you because my DOG IS MISSING!"

Gill-Man then tracks down Clete and Helen at a party, which is being held at a seafood restaurant. (Awkward...!)  Old Gill grabs Helen and jumps into the ocean with her - there you go, Gill, keep chasing the dream, maybe this time your sweetie will learn how to breathe underwater!  But the cops and the coast guard come together to track down the creature to where he's just chilling on the beach with Helen's unconscious body, and once again, any chance for a little inter-species romance is foiled again.  Maybe it's for the best, Gill-Man seems a little Cosby-esque in his practice of grabbing women, drowning them until they're unconscious, and then (presumably) making out with them.

NITPICK POINT #3: The marine biology institute is seen performing an experiment with a cat sharing a cage with a number of white rats.  Umm, they do know that cats and rats are not sea creatures, right?  Plus, what the hell could this experiment possibly be testing?  I guess this is in the film as something of a joke, or to allow for the first screen appearance of a VERY famous actor, as a lab assistant who finds the missing mouse in the pocket of his lab-coat.  Again, how is this possible - how could you have a white rat in your pocket and NOT know it?  It's patently absurd.

Will the Creature return?  Will he ever find love?  Should he be allowed to?  Will the aquarium commissary ever stop serving tuna fish sandwiches?  Perhaps these questions were answered in the next sequel, "The Creature Walks Among Us", but I kind of doubt it.

Also starring John Agar, Lori Nelson, John Bromfield, Grandon Rhodes (last seen in "Them!"), Dave Willock, Robert Williams (last seen in "North by Northwest"), Charles Cane (last seen in "The Big Heat"), Sydney Mason (also carrying over from "Revenge of the Creature"), Brett Halsey (last seen in "The Man from the Alamo"), Don C. Harvey, Tom Hennesy, Bob Hoy, Bob Wehling, with a cameo from Clint Eastwood (last seen in "True Crime").

RATING: 4 out of 10 flare guns

Creature from the Black Lagoon

Year 9, Day 291 - 10/18/17 - Movie #2,756          

BEFORE: This is another film like the original "Dracula" that's considered a classic, and I'm not sure how it slipped through the cracks over the years.  Why have I never gotten around to this one before? I guess I just had bigger fish to fry, so to speak.  These 1950's horror films aren't exactly great dramas, the early creature films just have an air of camp about them, unlike today's horror films that are all about serial killers and people being forced to escape from torture devices and holidays where all crime is legal for 24 hours.  Hmm, maybe the 1950's films weren't so bad.

Whit Bissell, who played Dr. Hill in the framing sequences in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", carries over to play Dr. Thompson tonight - talk about typecasting, right?

THE PLOT: A strange prehistoric beast lurks in the depths of the Amazonian jungle. A group of scientists try to capture the animal and bring it back to civilization for study.

AFTER: This is another instance where you don't really see the full creature for the first half of the film - but at least here there are about a dozen shots of a webbed hand reaching dramatically out of the water, coming close to somebody's ankle (or in some cases nothing at all) before the camera cuts away.  I mean, they really tried to wring as much suspense as possible out of that webbed hand.

The mystery here starts with a webbed hand, too, or at least the remains of one.  An archaeologist in the Amazon jungle finds a hand buried in some limestone - and it's a hand like nothing he's ever seen before.  He immediately realizes he's got to take this hand to the institute for analysis - because why bother looking for the rest of the body?  There's just no chance that any further digging will reveal anything else, I think that's the first thing you learn when you study archaeology - if you find something good, you should stop digging in that spot right away, because chances are you'll never find anything else in the same place.

His fellow scientists at the Institute for Stating the Obvious are all impressed by the find, especially since they all have definitely never seen anything like it before, which is the technical definition of a discovery, so they feel that an expedition should be mounted AT ONCE to return to that very spot that the guy was just at.  Again, don't even think that it would have made sense for the guy to just stay there and keep digging, if you think like that you'll never become an archaeologist yourself.  Then the scientists realize, "Hey, there are 6 of us here in this very room!  We could go on an expedition together!"  Note that most of the conversations at the Institute for Stating the Obvious are centered around how many people are in the room involved in conversation at the time.

The scientists believe that the Amazon jungle is a magical place, where somehow evolution has not taken place, so many of the jungle creatures are the same as they were millions of years ago, or represent nature's failed attempts to get sea creatures up on land.  And thus we have "The Creature", also called "The Gill-Man" who represents some sort of evolutionary dead-end and is definitely not just a man in a rubber suit, despite the fact that he looks exactly like that.  The Creature acts much like your average Frankenstein Monster or zombie, in that he approaches humans in a lumbering sort of fashion, with arms outstretched - either menacingly or not, depending on your own personal rate of speed.

But the Creature has one advantage over those other monsters - he SWIMS.  Perhaps he is the last one of his race, because he seems to have a propensity for capturing females in his arms, then diving down to the depths of the ocean with them, bringing them to his underwater cavern.  Which raises the question about how many women he's brought down there, only to wonder why none of them seem to survive the trip to get there.  Why, it's almost like they can't breathe underwater or something.

The creature tries to take down the crew, one by one, presumably to get to the girl, but the crew fights back with a lantern (kill it with fire!) and then bullets and harpoons.  The creature blocks the boat in the lagoon by damming up the entrance with logs, but the crew of the boat has a winch.  So technology beats monster once again.

When TCM ran this last year, the evening's programming was hosted by Dennis Miller, who noted that two men played the Creature in this film, Ben Chapman in the above-water scenes, and Ricou Browning in the underwater scenes.  Miller snarkily noted that he could see why the "walking" actor might not be able to do the "swimming" scenes, but why couldn't the "swimming" actor do the "walking" scenes?  It's a funny joke, perhaps, but the real answer has everything to do with the process of filmmaking, and the fact that Chapman's scenes were filmed in California, while the underwater scenes were filmed by the second unit in Florida.  See, it's just logistics.

Also starring Richard Carlson (last seen in "Hold that Ghost"), Julie Adams (last seen in "The Man From the Alamo"), Richard Denning (last seen in "An Affair to Remember"), Antonio Moreno (last seen in "Notorious"), Nestor Paiva (also last seen in "Hold that Ghost"), Bernie Gozier (last seen in "Dream Wife"), Henry Escalante, Ricou Browning, Ben Chapman, Perry Lopez (last seen in "Bandolero!"), Sydney Mason, Rodd Redwing.

RATING: 5 out of 10 menacing music stings

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Year 9, Day 290 - 10/17/17 - Movie #2,755                             

BEFORE: I snuck out to see "Blade Runner 2049" last night - I'm still processing what I saw.  I'm going to need a few days to figure it all out, but since I'm right in the middle of the horror film chain, I'm not going to post my review now anyway.  I've got a Ryan Gosling chain coming up in the first part of November, but I think I need to save "Blade Runner" for later on in November, as it represents the link between another Harrison Ford film and another film with Robin Wright.  So that's the plan.

Richard Deacon carries over from "Them!", where he played a reporter, and if you don't know who Richard Deacon is, then you don't know your classic television.  He's most famous for playing TV producer Mel Cooley, Rob Petrie's boss on "The Dick Van Dyke Show", and he also played Lumpy's father on "Leave it to Beaver".  He had supporting roles in several Jerry Lewis films, too, like "The Patsy" and "The Disorderly Orderly", and I'm sure he had other acting roles too, but most people probably remember his work with Dick Van Dyke.

Tonight he plays a doctor or something, as the plant people try to take over once again - but this is the ORIGINAL version, so I suppose this was really the first time the plant people tried to take over.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1978) (Movie #1,203), "Body Snatchers" (Movie #2,186), "The Invasion" (Movie #2,479)

THE PLOT: A small-town doctor learns that the population of his community is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates.

AFTER: It took me a while to recognize where I'd seen the lead actor, Kevin McCarthy, before - sure, he had a cameo in the 1978 remake of "I.O.T.B.S.", but that wasn't it.  In his later years, he played the mean old rich TV station owner in the Weird Al Yankovic comedy "UHF".  That's probably why he seemed so familiar to me.  Like Richard Deacon, he probably had a lot of other acting roles, but we all have our own frames of reference for these things.

Finally, a film that's a metaphor for Communism, right?  People invading small town America with a different way of thinking, making everyone conform and work for the benefit of the collective, right? Trouble is, the film's director swore time and again that it wasn't about that, and he was just trying to make a scary movie.  But the idea behind this film caught on, and I think the zeitgeist of 1950's paranoia gave it an additional, if unintended, meaning.

Those three German horror films I watched at the start of the month gave great insight into the fears of the German people in the 1930's - the worst thing would be to have one's fate controlled by a demon ("Faust") or a vampire ("Nosferatu") and have no say in the matter.  To be a pawn in the game of life, subject to forces beyond one's control.  Ah, the bitter angst of existentialism.  But for Americans in the 1950's, perhaps the fear was quite different, that someone would come along with new ideas like Communism, or vegetarianism, or hippie Communist vegetarian, and change the minds of other people with the power of their ideas.  Then, suddenly, those with the great American values of capitalism and meat-and-potato dinners would find themselves in the minority - the horror!

You still see it today, I don't have to draw much of a line to connect this fear of "the other" to today's apparent fears of immigrants and people of color, or men's fear of women's reproductive rights, or even fears of gay marriage or trans people serving in the military.  It all comes from people fearing the things they don't understand - what if someone woke up one day and found their town full of people of a different race or sexual orientation, what would happen then?  Well, probably nothing, but the fact is that white people are on their way to becoming the minority in the U.S., and deep down that probably scares the crap out of the more conservative ones.  And I think we've all seen how certain people have been able to play upon those fears to get themselves elected, which almost doesn't seem fair.

A worse fear might be knowing, deep down, that something is very wrong with one's town, or country, then going out and sounding the alarm, only to have no one believe you, or to find out that you acted too late.  That's what happens here to our main character, after he's called back from a medical convention to his home in Santa Mira.  But when he returns, all seems well, and the people who were demanding to see him just a few days ago are suddenly feeling much better.  Or are they?  Certain people in town are swearing that not only is Uncle Ira not acting like himself, they feel like he might not really BE himself.  And just as our hero starts to put the pieces together, finding a body here and a seed pod there, people try to convince him that everything's fine, it's just an outbreak of a little mass hysteria.

In the framing sequences, our everyman narrator is telling his story to the doctors in a mental hospital, and boy, I sure have seen my share of those this October!  From the asylum run by Count Orlok in "Nosferatu" to the many incarnations of Renfield, always seen in the asylum run by Dr. Seward and/or Prof. Van Helsing, to the asylums frequented by Dr. Victor Frankenstein as he harvested body parts from their inmates...

The special effects here are also quite laughable, as with "The Thing From Another World", if you're looking for scary visuals you're better off watching the more modern remakes.  And the music is horribly annoying as well, as my wife pointed out.  She joined me for the latter half of this film, and I really should watch more movies with her, because she has a way of cutting to the quick when something seems ridiculous.  She picked up on the 1950's vibe right away, since the man here made all the decisions, and his girlfriend was really just along for the ride.  Outside of making a sandwich for him now and then, she really didn't serve much purpose - and in "The Thing From Another World", the two women on the Arctic base don't seem to do anything but make coffee for the men.  Ah, good old sexism, going strong in 1956.

Also starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter (last seen in "Airport"), Larry Gates (last seen in "Some Came Running"), King Donovan (last seen in "The Caddy"), Carolyn Jones (last seen in "The Tender Trap"), Jean Willes, Ralph Dumke (last seen in "Artists and Models"), Virginia Christine, Tom Fadden, Kenneth Patterson (last seen in "Being There"), Guy Way (last seen in "How Sweet It Is!"), Eileen Stevens, Everett Glass (last seen in "The Thing From Another World"), Dabbs Greer (last seen in "Julius Caesar"), Sam Peckinpah, Whit Bissell (last seen in "Destination Tokyo"), Robert Osterloh (last seen in "The Wild One").

RATING: 5 out of 10 farm trucks

Them!

Year 9, Day 289 - 10/16/17 - Movie #2,754                                          

BEFORE: James Arness carries over from "The Thing From Another World", where he played the title villain, and today he plays a human, the male lead in this invasion story.  But the invasion this time is home-grown, it's giant ants attacking humans...

THE PLOT: The earliest atomic tests in New Mexico cause common ants to mutate into giant man-eating monsters that threaten civilization.

AFTER:  I guess I should have realized by setting up a week of 1950's films that I'd have to suffer through some very fakey special effects.  These are obviously some kind of puppet ants, large-scale models that were made to rock back and forth to simulate life-like movement.  As opposed to using close-up footage of real ants and superimposing it against the live-action footage of people, which would have been another way to go.  Something tells me that neither method would have looked realistic, but maybe the use of real ant footage might have worked a little better, but I guess we'll never know.

I thought that most 1950's Hollywood horror films were symbolically about the spread of Communism, but I guess not, I'm hard pressed to find a connection to politics here.  Maybe they're Red ants, but that's hard to tell in a black-and-white movie.  They're green on the poster, which is weird because I've never seen green ants in nature.  And these are supposed to be real ants that were enlarged somehow with radiation, even though we know now that excessive radiation doesn't make things bigger, it just kills them.  But I guess in the 1950's filmmakers didn't worry too much about science, because that would just get in the way of the premise that they wanted.

Anyway, a child is found wandering in the desert by some New Mexico policemen, and they then discover a couple of forced-entry break-ins where the residents or shopkeepers are found dead, but nothing is stolen, although they do find a pile of loose sugar at each crime scene, along with a mysteriously shaped footprint.  Naturally, it's a long time before they're able to put the pieces together and come up with "giant ants", because who the hell knows what shape an ant's leg is?  The FBI is called in, and so is the country's leading ant expert, whose knowledge of ant society becomes instrumental in determining whether there might be queens spreading to new nests in order to lay more eggs.

Oh, and the ants are super-strong, of course, and have suddenly developed a taste for human flesh, because that means they're a threat to society and must be eliminated, despite the fact that our radiation created them in the first place, so the ants aren't really at fault here.  It's the human invention of atomic weapons, and the desert testing that created the giant ants, so that means they're connected to the American guilt for dropping the atomic bombs in World War II.  We did feel guilty about that, right?  Just checking.

A task force is quickly formed, and though everyone present is briefed on the social habits of ants and their likely behavior, what does all that matter when the proposed solution for dealing with them is "Kill Them With Fire"?  In fact, this is the third film in a row where that solution comes in handy - burning the villain down in his lair is starting to feel like a huge cop-out for when the screenwriter can't think up an original ending and needs to wrap things up so he can move on to the next screenplay.

Also starring James Whitmore (last seen in "Who Was That Lady?"), Edmund Gwenn (last seen in "The Trouble With Harry"), Joan Weldon, Onslow Stevens (last seen in "The Three Musketeers" (1935)), Sean McClory (last seen in "Bandolero!"), Chris Drake, Sandy Descher, Mary Alan Hokanson, Don Shelton (last seen in "Somebody Up There Likes Me"), Fess Parker (last heard in "Harvey"), Olin Howland, Richard Deacon (last seen in "Kiss Them For Me"), Ann Doran (last seen in "You Can't Take It With You"), with cameos from Dub Taylor (also last seen in "You Can't Take It With You"), Leonard Nimoy (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Dick York.

RATING: 4 out of 10 Wilhelm screams

The Thing From Another World

Year 9, Day 288 - 10/15/17 - Movie #2,753                                      

BEFORE: A word about the linking, since "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed" is a dead-end for me - it wasn't always that way, since when I set up this chain I was planning to have Peter Copley carry over into "Five Million Years to Earth", a 1967 film that I'm fairly sure I saw as a child, but I was going to watch it again in the chain for the first time as an adult.  And that film was going to link to another film with a similar name that I haven't seen, which is "20 Million Miles to Earth".  And they both were going to be part of this 10-film chain that's all about invading creatures, whether they're aliens or giant insects or whatever.

But then I wanted to add one more Chris Hemsworth film to November's chain, and that meant I had to drop something from the last 60 films on the year's schedule - the easiest thing to drop was the film that I had seen before, but this eliminated the connection between the films in the first half of October with those in the second half.  In fact, this film and the next seven films, all made in the 1950's, form an interconnected loop, so I could basically start it anywhere, and consider it complete within itself.  So now I'm moving "20 Million Miles to Earth" to further down in the chain, to be next to the 1956 film "Godzilla", which it seems to share some DNA with.  And I may watch "Five Million Years to Earth" right after that, but I'm not going to count it, because as I said, I've seen it before.

My last-minute second-hand link, however, is that Victor Harrington from "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed" was also in "The Diamond Wizard" with Margaret Sheridan.  I know it's lame, but at least it's something.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Thing" (2011) (Movie #2,181) & "The Thing" (1982) (Movie #2,182)

THE PLOT: Scientists and American Air Force officials fend off a bloodthirsty alien organism while at a remote arctic outpost.

AFTER: Having seen two more recent versions of this same story before, both with much better special effects, what else can I learn from watching the original?  First off, I've probably got a bunch of laughable not-so-special special effects in the days to come, so I'd better get used to that.  The alien here never really looks like anything other than a big man in a suit with a mask - isn't a little weird that the alien is supposedly plant-based, but also humanoid?  It seems like an awful coincidence that a plant creature would evolve on another world, but instead of roots and leaves, it would have two legs and two arms.

Of course, the original story this was based on ("Who Goes There?", written by John W. Campbell) featured a shape-shifting alien, something featured in the 1982 and 2011 remakes, but not in this 1951 version.  That's a shame, because it removes much of the suspense here - thanks to a Geiger counter, the men at the Arctic base always know when the alien is approaching, but in the remakes, the alien could already be among the men, disguised as one of them.  So that little fact really upped the paranoia factor - there's much less reason for the men to distrust each other here.

Or is there?  One scientist in particular seems keen on keeping the alien alive, no doubt for the chance to study a plant-based humanoid that apparently drinks blood - he even keeps a bunch of seed pods drinking from a vial of plasma, without telling the other men at the base.  So this is basically a primer on what NOT to do if you discover a flying saucer.  Don't use explosives to free the saucer from the ice, don't bring the alien pilot back to your base in a big block of ice, but if you have to do that, be sure to stow the block of ice in a very cold place, or else it could thaw out...

This one's generally regarded as a horror classic, despite the fact that it was made so cheaply that you never really see the alien in close-up, because the make-up was so poorly done.  As a result people felt a heightened sense of mystery and suspense, due to hardly ever seeing the creature, but this seems like a dodge to me.  The audience shouldn't be required to adjust their reactions to the film presented to them, especially if shoddy filmmaking was involved.  This sort of reminds me of the movie "Jaws", which had trouble with the mechanical shark.  "Oh, it's brilliant and suspenseful, because you hardly ever see the shark!"  Umm, no, that was due to technical difficulties, not as a conscious method of heightening tension.

Starring Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey (last seen in "Marlowe"), Robert Cornthwaite (last seen in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"), Douglas Spencer, James Young, Dewey Martin, Robert Nichols (last seen in "The Out of Towners"), William Self, Eduard Franz (last seen in "Dream Wife"), Sally Creighton, James Arness, Paul Frees (last heard in "Bells Are Ringing"), John Dierkes (last seen in "Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"), George Fenneman, Everett Glass (last seen in "Pal Joey"), Edmund Breon (last seen in "Gaslight"), David McMahon, Robert Stevenson.

RATING: 4 out of 10 thermite charges