Before I launch into a month-long celebration of the works of the "Father of the Blob" it might be salient to take some time and look at the long history of blob-like monsters. We'll start with the debut issue the esteemed Weird Tales from over one hundred years ago in 1923 which showcased as its first cover feature "Ooze" by Anthony Melville Rud.
"Ooze" was apparently a favorite story of H.P. Lovecraft, and I can see why. The structure of the story is very much Lovecraftian, in that we get the information in a backhanded fashion. The primary participants are either missing and presumed dead or insane. And it's left to a family friend to unravel the mystery of what lies behind the hastily erected wall around the demolished house deep in the mysterious and rather nasty swamp.
Apparently, a scientist found a way to grow an amoeba beyond microscopic levels and things got out of hand, almost quite literally. The locals involved in building the wall aren't talking and it's only when he finds a singularly drunken inhabitant that he's able to decipher the gruesome tale. I rather enjoyed reading it again. It's available online at this weird link.
On a side note, the story "Ooze" puts in mind of Marvel's classic monster comic tale "Sporr, the Thing that Could Not Die!" from the pages of Tales of Suspense in 1960. Sporr seems a little bit more aware of its surroundings and is attracted to sugar, whereas the Ooze is just hungry for meat.
The creator of Quatermass and writer Nigel Kneale posited three methods that the Earth might encounter extraterrestrials -- we find them, they find us, they've always been here. In the three main Quatermass yarns he explores each of these scenarios. With The Creeping Unknown he explores what happens when man ventures into space and brings home something dangerous.
Of course Quatermass refers to Dr. Quatermass, the leader of a rocket group dedicated to getting mankind off the planet and into space. To that end of course dangerous missions are undertaken and one such mission ends tragically when the rocket returns to Earth in a farmer's field. The only survivor, in fact the only man aboard the vessel is overcome with some sort of infection which is steadily stealing his mind and transforming his body as it has more swiftly done to his compatriots.
The Creeping Unknown is on one level a classic science fiction monster movie with an eventual giant creature threatening the population. On a second level it's also a horror film following the slow and inevitable destruction of one man's self as he is transformed. What makes this transformation so potent in many respects is that the man himself never speaks but only communicates through posture and through his eyes the desperation.
It's well documented that Nigel Kneale's opinion of Brian Donlevy, the American selected to portray Quatermass, is quite low. It's equally documented that Val Guest, the director of the cinematic verson of the story found Donleavy with his abrupt surly attitude to be an excellent choice. The disagreeable combative nature of Quatermass reminds me of Arthur Conan Doyle's second great creation Professor Challenger, the often agitated protagonist of The Lost World and The Poison Belt among other tales.. I'm always impressed with the professional craftsmanship of British monster movies and always know when I'm watching one the story will make sense.
X the Unknown was to have been the sequel to The Creeping Unknown, but Nigel Kneale refused to allow Hammer to use the Quatermass names, so Jimmy Sangster and the gang at Hammer just finagled it a bit, dropped the Quatermass references and produced a nifty little monster movie. This time the menace erupts from inside the Earth itself. Dean Jagger is our protagonist, a Quatermass-like scientist with a less grumpy attitude. Dean Jagger as the resident scientist who leads the defense against the strange enemy is good deal less histrionic than he might have been if he were portraying Quatermass.
X the Unknown hits all the marks. It's a slow build to a larger menace. We follow a group of soldiers which include a very young Antony Newly as the run up against a strange radioactive enigma. Michael Ripper is on hand as the Sergeant barking orders in fine fashion. After a little boy dies, Dr. Adam Royston (Jagger) gets involved. He's soon assisted by Leo McKern as "Mac" McGill a cop from London and Peter Elliot the son of the stuffy project director. This critter rises from the depths of the Earth seeking sources of radiation. Anyone caught between the creature and its radioactive goal gets burned, sometimes even melted.
This is a movie in which I rather liked all the characters more or less and it was rare for the story to pick a victim and make the deserving of their demise The deaths of true innocents always elevates the concern of the viewer. A dandy flicker indeed.
I'm not sure when my consciousness was properly invaded by knowledge of Caltiki The Immortal Monster, but it hasn 't been all that long. This is a 1959 Italian black and white movie set in Mexico and featuring one of the more intriguing of the amorphous monsters which were a bit popular at the time.
The trend began with The Quatermass Xperiment which had a oozing monster come down from space to threaten mankind by absorbing many individuals before getting fried with electricity. It continued with X the Unknown which had a creature bubble up from beneath the Earth to irradiate and kill many a man before being sent packing.
This movie feels amazingly like a filmed version of one of Marvel's monster stories from its heyday. An ancient Mayan site is being explored and a mysterious pool is found and before you can say "Run" a giant monster is up and oozing all over everyone. The "heroes" make a getaway but not before getting a sample. One of the team is killed outright, another is infected and goes mad becoming a dangerous murderer, while the third member tries to save himself and his buxom wife from the crazy guy and the monsters at the same time. Innocent bystanders are killed and many toy tanks and trucks are sacrificed to end the threat. If you like monster movies I cannot see how you cannot like this one. It's got ancient menace, radioactive monsters, crazed maniacal killers, and a big old finale with tanks and guns and havoc galore.
Thanks to TCM I discovered viewed four of the five "Gamma-1" movies. The best of these, and technically not really part of the series I guess is The Green Slime, a 1968 Japanese sci-fi effort starring Robert Horton and Richard Jaeckel. The Gamma-1 series was produced in Italy by Antonio Margheriti under the named "Anthony Dawson". I was first attracted to this oddball series when I discovered that Batman co-creator Bill Finger had a hand in the scripting of some of these. The movies are strictly low-budget, but with some surprisingly interesting special effects in places (the jet cars are impractical but pretty cool).
The four movies - Wild, Wild Planet, Battle of the Planets, Battle Between the Planets, and Snow Devils - were all produced at the same time and were prepared for television presentation in the United States. All the movies feature many of the same actors and some the characters as the Earth is assaulted by various alien threats. For examples, four-armed androids abduct humans a madman seeking a perfect race, gaseous aliens occupy the forms of humans and link them in a hive mind, and the legend of the Yeti is inspired by aliens seeking to alter Earth's climate to suit themselves.
Part of the same scenario, though produced in Japan by the Toei Company for MGM, The Green Slime is a great improvement on its predecessors with brisk pacing, much more deliberate and focused acting, and a goofy if dangerous alien threat.
The Earth is threatened by an oncoming asteroid which threat must be met by Jack Rankin (Robert Horton) and Vince Elliot (Richard Jaeckel), two former partners who have had a falling out over leadership styles and the obligatory women, a sexy doctor played by Luciana Paluzzi. They work together and use the resources of "Gamma-3" to stop the asteroid, but the space station is then overrun by a green slimy life form which proves exceedingly dangerous and damned difficult to remove.
This movie is helped by really excellent pacing throughout, and an actual back story of animus between the two leads which gives some vigor to the proceedings. The Toei special effects are dandy and up to the task of telling the story effectively, and while the monsters themselves are pretty hilarious, they nonetheless are pretty lethal too. The Green Slime is a surprisingly effective movie.
I close with Larry Cohen's The Stuff seems to be a movie that wants to hit a number of the same notes as the The Blob, but with perhaps a bit more pointed humor and a little sharper satire. The Blob came from outer space, but the 1980's Stuff seems to come from the depths of the Earth itself.
An old man finds a bit of the Stuff in a mine and finds the white goo tastes surprisingly good. We cut forward many months and discover that The Stuff is a popular food product which is taking the nation, if not the world by storm. We are treated to some well-designed ads for The Stuff and then we meet our hero, an industrial spy with a wild wit and perverse attitude. (To put this movie within a very narrow time frame of pop culture awareness, Clara Peller of "Where's the Beef?" fame has an exceedingly appropriate cameo. )He quickly finds that this Stuff is something which has a profound effect on people, even to the point of making them not people anymore. Those who have come under its spell fight mightily to keep it safe and to keep its secret.
The only problem with this movie is that its got some dissonance in tone, with some characters played too broadly to fit in with the overall scheme of biting satire. But that aside, the movie still lands many punches not the least of which is how modern culture is addictive to pleasure at its core and all too susceptible to the whims of modern marketing.
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