Frogs!

It's been a long time since I sat down and watched Frogs, an early 70's movie about relative weakness of man in the face of the natural world. I think another decent title for this movie might be The Revenge of Rachel Carson, Carson of course being the revolutionary researcher and writer of Silent Spring, the book which in no small order established the modern regime of environmental controls. This movie, with all its offbeat textures tells the story of what happens when nature fights back.

Sam Elliott is a photographer and ultra-cool hunk named Picket Smith who falls in with a discordant family named Roarke. They are a rich southern family with much of the baggage that suggests. The family is gathered to celebrate the birthday of hits patriarch played by Ray Milland. They quickly note the abundance of frogs, but assume that nature is just doing what it does, moving in waves of plenty and scarcity. Little do the people realize the attach as already begun.

Smith finds the body of a workman and before you know it the family members are falling victim to the creatures of the swamp as lizards create toxic gasses in an enclosed space and snakes strike at people constrained by the very vines of the swamp itself. The attack is slow and steady and that's the greatest power of this movie, the relentless power of nature which is presented. The film makers use very little music, just some spare sounds and that relative quiet adds to the power and tension of a movie which by all accounts shouldn't be scary at all.

Frogs is clunky in all sorts of ways, but I was struck by the idea that when nature rises up to strike down the blight of man we'll never see it coming.

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The Man With The X-Ray Eyes!

X - The Man With the X-Ray Eyes is one of those movies that begins as a bit of B-Movie schlock and somewhere along the way makes a left turn into profound. I'm not sure to what extent the makers of the movie knew this, but that's the result nonetheless.

The idea of X-Ray vision is a tantalizing notion which is most reduced to teenage boys grabbing quick glance of girls under their clothes. But while this movie does pay homage to that idea with a goofy scene of a private party in which our hero can see folks in their birthday suits, it's only a passing moment.

Perhaps that has to do with the man, played by veteran actor Ray Milland. Milland brings a gravitas to his role which a lesser actor might well have lacked and so diminished the potential seriousness of the idea of seeing beneath surfaces. And that's the point, we have a doctor here who seems to have a blend of altruism and the usual Frankenstein instincts which inform doctors in low-budget sci-fi, a shouting out for good, but hidden beneath a desire for recognition and sheer confirmation that his work hasn't been in vain. This doctor hits the jackpot and by injecting himself with his miracle drug can see beneath skin and muscles to perform life-saving operations as well catch a glimpse of a pretty dame underneath her knickers. But his mind is changed too and he kills his best friend and has to go into hiding as a carnival act. This leads to an understanding that he can make a killing at the gambling tables and despite the intervention of a worthy woman, he still ends up destroying himself when he sees behind the secret of the universe and cannot bear the sight.

This movie is a Roger Corman effort, an above-average one and one of the very few which was actually adapted to comic book form. Check out this link to get a closer look at the comic. If you haven't seen this movie I highly recommend it, it's a better than you'd think.

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Panic In Year Zero!

I've read about this movie for years. I'd not seen it until yesterday. I found a movie that was more involving than I frankly expected.

The story for those who don't know is basic enough. A family on vacation pulls away from their home very early one morning and soon find that the city has been hit by nuclear attack. The father (Ray Milland) quickly sees that swift action and hard choices will save the day and he and his son (Frankie Avalon) find food, fuel, and battle threats of all kinds to get the family into the hills and the relative safety of a cave. There they try to assemble some sort of life, but find threats all around. The family despite the father's best efforts are all damaged by the events of the choices they make challenge their very notions of civilized behavior.

There was an unexpected edge to the movie. I thought it would blithely dither along at the pontification level and mope about the frailties of human beings. It doesn't, but rather puts it characters in exceedingly tough situations and while they do desperate things, at no point do I feel that they make fundamentally wrong choices. The father and son murder two teenagers who have raped the sister and given the options, it seemed the only fitting solution. The father constantly chooses his family's needs over the needs of others and while at times his son's advice does cause him to relent, I cannot fault the father for what he does. The clarity of his knowledge about what's to come is probably the most frightening aspect of the movie, and Milland does an excellent job of showing us a man who has to make hard violent choices. Those choices leave a mark on him and his family.

This movie does suffer from its smallish budget. The small cast creates flaws in logic (they keep coming across the same people for instance) and the cave set is pretty classic Hollywood undercutting the sense of reality in much of the rest of the movie. But those are small flaws in a movie that is doing what it can to tell a small story about a gigantic event. There are no hordes of mutants roaming the countryside, there are no big special effects showing the deaths of millions, but what is missing does reinforce the sense of isolation the characters feel.

Apparently this movie is based on some stories called "Lot" and "Lot's Daughter". I've never read these stories, but they seem far darker than the movie. The movie doesn't indicate any source material, so who knows for sure.

This ain't a great movie, but it's a really good movie. And that surprised me.

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