The Flying Saucer!

I didn't know what to expect when I first watched The Flying Saucer. But I was disappointed, that I can tell you straight up. The 1950 movie is the first flick to address or perhaps the better term is exploit the Flying Saucer phenomenon of the later 40's and early 50's. It's so early in the treatment of the concept that there are no aliens in this one, not even fake ones.

Mike and Vee take in the sights-dog seems bored

First let me warn you. This is a terrible, terrible movie. It's long and dull and often stupid. It's craftsmanship is suspect and as a comment on the times its hardly definitive nor instuctive.

The story begins when flying saucers scare Americans in all corners of the country and the government turns to our hero Mike Trent (Mikel Conrad), a drunken playboy who happens to have ties to Alaska to return to his home state and investigate sightings in that remote region. Along for the ride is an actual government agent and obligatory femme fatale Vee Langley (Pat Garrison). They proceed to  bore the hell  out of you as they meander up the coast eventually finding a remote cabin from which they rarely stray. It's odd espionage, I'll tell you that. Trent spends most of his time trying to put the moves on Vee or find a drink. Meanwhile the caretaker of the shack is clearly up to no good. At the same time Soviet agents are running amok causing all kinds of damage as our American team ambles in the woods. Eventually, after a bender Trent stumbles across some actual intel but he's almost killed several times before he can get that information up the chain. In fact he's captured along with Vee and the scientist who created the saucer. The last several minutes are actually pretty exciting, but man does it take a long time to get there. 

The only really good look we get of the saucer

The trouble is pretty easy to spot. This movie appears to have almost no budget and an amazing amount of screen time it taken up with stock footage of some admittedly beautiful Alaskan scenery with dodgy voice overs added to make it somewhat stick to the story. Add to that the fact that Conrad, who also directed and partially wrote the script for this movie, spends most of his on-screen time lighting an endless array of cigarettes and trying to sound like Humphrey Bogart, and you have some notion of how irritating this flick can be.

This wants to be a spy thriller, but it features hapless spies and doesn't remotely qualify as a thriller. Trent spends a lot of time getting soused and admittedly his drinking binge does yield the only clue they stumble on, but it's hardly because of his acute planning. You are left wondering how the United States will ever take on the Soviet menace with lunkheads like this in charge of our security.

The Flying Saucer holds a notable place in the lore of sci-fi films, it was first. But that doesn't make it foremost by any conceivable stretch of anyone's imagination. This one is for the most stout-hearted of film watchers only. Beware!

This is the second of three reviews from the DVD set Watch the Skies from Image Entertainment.

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The Cosmic Man!

The Cosmic Man from 1959 is a vintage sci-fi knock-off of the much more esteemed The Day the Earth Stood Still, but that doesn't mean that this little cheapie doesn't have some distinctive charms of its own.
Among the two strongest things working in the favor of this science fiction flick are the fine acting jobs turned in by John Carradine and Bruce (formerly Herman Brix) Bennett. Any movie that sports not only a former Dracula but also a former (and arguably best) Tarzan can't be all bad. And this movie is far from that.

Cosmic Carradine in disguise

The story is pretty simple. A giant alien orb appears in a relatively remote California canyon and is quickly surrounded by the military while it hovers a few feet above the ground imperious to harm. From that intergalactic sphere there emerges "the Cosmic Man" (actually called that in the story several times) who wanders the countryside raising a ruckus, scaring half-naked girls, and making the military even more resolute to take firm action.

Bennett thinks hard about the problem

Actually the "Cosmic Man" (Carradine) is benign and shows up here and there, sometimes in disguise, to comment on the action and to slightly miss talking to Dr.Karl Sorenson (Bennett) who argues consistently for restraint and understanding when it comes to the alien. (I'm guessing Carradine never shot at the same time as Bennett since they don't share any scenes together exactly.) Very much in the tradition of The Day the Earth Stood Still, the Cosmic Man evokes a Christ-like quality when he heals the precocious Ken (Scotty Morrow), the crippled son  of obligatory love interest Kathy Grant (Angela Greene) who happens to own the Grant Lodge where much of the action centers.

The alien orb hovers as the cast looks on helplessly

A lot of the time of this movie is taken up with conversation, often by Sorenson, a scientist and former military man, who seeks peaceful solutions since his days as a researcher helping to develop the atomic bomb. In these post-war days, his guilt over that creation informs his approach, in spite of the fact it throws him into conflict with the military, often personified by Colonel Mathews (Paul Langton). Also on hand is the spritely Lyn Osborn (Space Partol and Invasion of the Saucer Men) as a slight-comedy relief sergeant named Gray. Tragically Osborn died soon after shooting this movie.

The Cosmic Man is a movie that never gets off simmer, though it approaches a boil once and again. Just when you think it's going to bubble over, it slows down and the talking sets in again. That sounds more critical than I mean. I found I enjoyed this movie, it had some decent banter and the ideas weren't unimportant. Despite its lack of budget this movie doesn't shirk a desire to talk about some important things, and that's just how we might as people respond to changing the world around us. In 1959 this was pretty heady stuff, but then again when is it not.

This is the first of three reviews from the DVD set Watch the Skies from Image Entertainment.

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Another Captain America Movie!

Another Captain America movie hits the theaters today. The last one,Captain America The First Avenger was spectacularly good. I have high hopes for this new one too. I'm eager to see the Cap and Falcon team on screen.

Meanwhile there's yet another utterly fabulous Captain America "movie", a film of the late and most certainly great Big John Buscema drawing the "Sentinel of Liberty". Take a look here. The first half is dedicated to Buscema.

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War Of The Dead!

I saw World War Z a few weeks ago, and I will give it its due -- it delivers the zombies. There are zombies clambering all over the screen almost all the time in this wild ass action flick. It's supposed to be a horror movie, but it's not really. You might dub it a "monster movie" since it features acres and acres of zombies, but there's almost no tension nor little suspense to be had. They try it a few times, but it doesn't really work.

The movie's best sequence (and there are a few worthy ones I'll admit) is the fall of Jerusalem.  It's the sequence which made me want to see this movie, the infamous scene in which squirming towers of zombies wriggle up one another to ascend like relentless and  malevolent undead ants.

The story behind this blockbuster sequence is a relatively simple one. A plague of zombies strikes across the globe and United Nations troubleshooter Gerry Lane, who has to leave his family after being run out of  Philadelphia by way of Newark, investigates the outbreak. He travels to Korea where clues suggest the plague began, then to Jersualem where it's suggested that Israel might've had forewarning, and later still to Wales where facilities might remain to develop a response to the infestation.

Everywhere Gerry goes, he finds zombies moaning and wailing and gnashing their teeth eager to spread the plague which moves and motivates them still. Human beings are reduced to aggressive messengers for a plague which turns you from human to zombie in a few seconds. The distinctive thing about this particular zombie apocalypse is the rate of expansion, which is monumental and results in waves of zombies overwhelming the humans who flee before them.

I'm usually impressed with Brad Pitt. I actually like him on screen, though his real life persona is so strange and unappealing. He has for many years demonstrated a willingness to play off-the-wall characters. This movie showcases him and he's frankly not that interesting. For one thing he needed to cut his hair; the long hair Lane sports in this movie annoys me no end, as Pitt is forever knocking it out of his face. He's too much like real-world Pitt. I don't know why precisely, but he doesn't come across convincingly, something Pitt usually does for me. Many of the supporting cast are great, especially Danielle Kertesz who plays an Israeli soldier who ends up tagging along with Lane. David Morse pops up out of nowhere in a small part as a slightly mad CIA agent who has some real insights into the horror and steals the show for a few minutes. 

World War Z is a perfectly fine disaster movie, with zombies filling in for the requisite comets, tsunamis, earthquakes, sharks, or volcanic eruptions. What the movie is about really is what all such movies are about and that's how fragile human society is, how little it takes to undermine the connections which make modern culture click. Like all disaster movies it shows human beings in dangerous scenarios behaving bravely, cowardly, or some way in between. Like most such flicks, the message is that human society is soft and fragile, but human beings as individuals can be resilient and can maintain in the most severe circumstances. WWZ fits right into this mold.

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Downward Spiral!

When I first began to see ads for Syfy's Helix, I have to admit I was intrigued. It had a lot of characteristics I find fascinating in sci-fi adventures -- a remote isolated location, a medical premise, and what appeared to be a pretty compelling variation of the techno-zombie. And truth told it began quite well, with a well cast team of CDC scientists (led by The Rocketeer's Billy Campbell) heading off to the extreme reaches of the Arctic to confront an outbreak of a puzzling disease. We quickly meet the head of the Arctic lab, an enigmatic and Machiavellian type who with his armed guard lorded it over a few hundred scientists of various disciplines and loyalties in a lab which we quickly learn spirals down deeper into the Earth than we first suspected, and which hides secrets upon secrets upon secrets.

And soon enough we learn that the ties among the victims and the CDC team are more elaborate than we might've first suspected. Enter a mysterious and highly nefarious organization called ILARIA and the action begins to heat up quickly despite the cold weather battering the lab at all times. It's all there, a neat premise with promising stories which at first supply neat twists, surprise deaths, frozen monkeys, and even doses of suspense. And zombies were interesting and scary too. But then sadly it all goes away after the twisting becomes ceaseless and the deaths remove some of the most interesting characters from the stage. The suspense is replaced with tedium.

I won't bother spoiling this story. Now that I've finally seen all of the first season, I'm pretty sure I won't be returning next year for the rest of the story. The storytelling became increasingly complex, thinking I suppose that endless turns was the way to win friends. Alas it only became tiresome as everything you thought you knew disappeared in a single plot quirk and the ceaseless complications became predictable, not in how they'd twist, but that they'd twist, making you less than confident that you understood what you were seeing.

The most grating part of this show is the extraordinarily poor and sometimes puerile writing. The creators may have the big overarching plot thoroughly in hand, but specific scenes between characters became increasingly cliched and deadly dull as the season ground on. I more and more found myself talking back to the screen as characters mouthed pointless and tired lines at one another, lines seemingly extracted from defunct soap operas of years past. It all became hard to listen to as the heroes became villains and the villains became heroes, with the always-increasing body count putting the lie to all of the mopey philosophies spouted endlessly by characters who never seemed to have a compass or sacrificed same at the drop of a mote of blood.

Helix should've been better; it could've been better.

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Shambleau!

Wally Wood

"Shambleau" by C.L.Moore is one of those vivid tales which once read, cannot be unread. It transforms the way you see the world, especially its shadowy parts, for all time. I've read the story several times over the decades.

C.L.Moore (the gender-erasing pen name of Catherine Lucille Moore) created Northwest Smith for the pulp Weird Tales. Smith is the template for Han Solo, a swashbuckling protagonist of suspect morality but ruled by an internal integrity and embued with a fundamental courage. In this most famous 1933 Northwest Smith story, the first story ever published by Moore, he rescues a mysterious woman (he almost always did) who turns out to be more and strangely less than she seems.

The secret of Shambleau is that she's not human, in fact humans are a source of sustenance for her. What kind of sustenance is the core secret of the story. Moore creates a wonderful and terrible synthesis of beguiling beauty and weird horror all in one exotic intoxicating package. If you've never read "Shambleau" you must. I don't want spoil it, but I fear I've said too much already.

Here is a link to the collection in which I most recently read the story. Below are some covers for editions which have included the tale, which has been widely reprinted.

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The Movie You've Been Waiting For!

Sanjulian

And always will be.

"The movie you've been waiting for" did not happen, not that way at least.

Once upon a time there was a simply fabulous comic magazine producer called Warren Publishing, the notion of Jim Warren and an ever-changing stable of incredible writers and artists who called back classic horror comics in the grand tradition of legendary EC Comics but with an oddly effective black and white gloss.

Once upon a time there was a delightful movie company called Hammer Films which carved out a highly successful niche with horror films in the grand tradition of the legendary Universal Pictures but with a brightly colored and bloody difference. 

Once upon a time there was a moment when both of these monster-themed companies were on the ebb and they thought it might be prudent to join forces and produce a movie based on a resilient comic character by the name of Vampirella. Vampi was in production at Hammer for quite some time, the details of which can be read here.

Barbara Leigh as Vampi Painted by Bob Larkin

What came from that fusion of two horror enclaves was alas not a movie, but mostly disappointment. There was an exception though. Barbara Leigh, a vivacious and spectacularly beautiful woman was tapped to portray Vampirella, a chance she only got to pursue in photos and in conventions in support of the aborted film project. Some of those photos though became a series of evocative covers during 1978 and 1979 for the Vampirella magazine itself.

Here they are:

That's what we got. No movie, only the wonderfully imaginative thoughts of what might've been. No movie was made starring the "Darling from Drackulon" until 1996 when a beauty named Talisa Soto got the role in an action/horror flick alongside The Who lead singer Roger Daltrey.

I've never seen this one, not all the way through. But here is a glimpse at the trailer.

Sanjulian

Soon sadly both Hammer and Warren were gone (at least in their original forms), impressive and influential in their time in the world of horror narrative. They never got together on what might've been one of their most memorable projects. It's a classic "what if", and a significant shame it didn't happen. 

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