The Mother of Sci-Fi Movie Franchises Was Also the Darkest

Warning: The Spoilers will damn you all to hell.

Star Wars gets all the credit for being the first major science-fiction movie franchise, segueing off into a plastic avalanche of every product imaginable from the ubiquitous toys to clothing, house wares, books, hygiene products, food, and so on and so on. First appearing a decade before George Lucas’s juggernaut, Planet of the Apes wasn’t quite as over-commercialized as its successor (what is?), but kids could still get their paws on a plethora of Apey action figures, mugs and bowls, t-shirts, comics, puzzles, piggy banks, Ben Cooper Halloween costumes, and so on. They could also get a healthy dose of harsh reality by actually watching the movies. Forget Darth Vader’s traumatizing revelation in The Empire Strikes Back and even all the skin-charring nastiness and off-screen “youngling” killing of Revenge of the Sith. The Planet of the Apes series is by far the darkest, downright cruelest film franchise ever pitched at kids.

Cult Club: 'Wake in Fright' (1971)

In this feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll. 

Wake in Fright is a horror movie without the things that define a horror movie. There are no ghosts, though it is terribly haunting. There are no serial killers, unless you count the drunken hunters who wantonly slaughter kangaroos in perhaps the most disturbing scene I’ve ever had the displeasure to watch. There are no monsters, unless a town can be a monster. That town is Bundanyabba, or “The Yabba” as the locals call it. They are the demons who do the monster’s bidding. They stupefy its victims with beer. They drain its victims’ resources with sub-moronic gambling events. Then they go in for the kill with a methodical but swift dehumanization process.

Cult Club: 'The Man from Beyond' (1922)

In this feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

Harry Houdini the escape artist is legendary. Houdini the movie star is less celebrated. This may be due to the poor state of the four features he made: the first two, 1919’s The Grim Game and 1920’s Terror Island, are apparently missing reels. Perhaps it is also due to the quality of the surviving films. I cannot speak of Houdini’s final film, 1923’s Haldane of the Secret Service, which I have not seen. The Man from Beyond, the film he wrote and starred in the previous year, I have.

What initially drew me to this movie, in which Houdini plays a man unfrozen after 100 years in a block of ice, was the simple curiosity of seeing the guy in action. The thing is, there isn’t a ton of action in The Man from Beyond. The set up, in which a pair of explorers chip Howard Hillary (all of Houdini’s feature-film characters share his initials) out of his chilly tomb, goes on for an eternity. When he’s out, he only performs a single escape. Those who paid their four cents, or whatever a movie ticket cost in 1922, to see a film starring Harry Houdini must have been disappointed by this dearth of the man doing what he was famous for doing. They were probably further disappointed that he slips from his straight jacket in an extremely long shot that gives no indication of the artistry behind the escape. It’s the kind of thing any old actor could have accomplished with no greater special effects than a few poorly fastened buckles. His subsequent shimmy up a rope and out the window of a prison-like asylum is more impressive, but nothing any reasonably athletic stuntman couldn’t have done. In short, there isn’t much of what made Houdini HOUDINI in The Man from Beyond.

Houdini's tiny, blurry escape.

What there is is a surprisingly effective supernatural love story. Before becoming trapped in ice, Hillary was in love with a woman named Felice Norcross. After his revival, he finds the spitting image of her just as she’s preparing to wed the nefarious Dr. Trent. By far-fetched coincidence, this woman’s name is Felice too, but her surname is the more appropriate Strange. Not yet knowing that he’d spent a century in hibernation, Hillary insists that Felice is his girlfriend, and she gets some serious déjà vu pangs. This is when Hillary ends up getting carted off to the asylum. With his escape comes the most exciting portion of the film as he and Felice hustle to spring her dad from Trent’s clutches. There’s a decent bit of fisticuffs and a nice climax in which Hillary and Felice almost pop over Niagara Falls. In the end, there is talk of how Felice Strange is the reincarnation of Felice Norcross, who makes a ghostly appearance in the film’s most overt special effects shot.

Even with Houdini’s climb from the asylum and the Niagara Falls incident, it is the love story that most resounds in The Man from Beyond. Houdini and Jane Connelly give effective performances as the multi-generation-spanning couple (Connelly is particularly impressive, so I was surprised to see that her only other credit on imdb is an uncredited role in Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr.), and the appearance of Norcross’s apparition makes for a quietly transcendent epilogue. This ending is all the more poignant because within four years, both Harry Houdini and Jane Connelly would suffer early deaths. 

 Harry Houdini and Jane Connelly

I may have heightened that poignancy a bit with my choice of soundtrack, and Kate Bush’s The Hounds of Love—with its sweeping romance, eeriness, and side-long concept about a man who freezes to death after falling overboard only to be reincarnated at the last minute—was an appropriate choice (Bush had her own fascination with Houdini, to whom she paid tribute on her previous album The Dreaming).

Despite its flaws—its slowness, its paucity of great escapes—The Man from Beyond was still worthwhile viewing for its romance and for the very reason I checked it out in the first place: the opportunity to see Harry Houdini move and breathe, the chance to see history come to life.

Cult Club: 'Dragonslayer' (1981)

In this feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

Sound cinema’s first half century had no shortage of magicians, from the Kong-conjuring Willis O’Brien to his greatest protégé Ray Harryhausen, from the filmmaking team that brought L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz to the screen to the one that realized Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes. Of course, no name was so consistently responsible for dazzling fantasies as Walt Disney. Beginning with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Disney seemed to effortlessly role out fairy tales tailored for children but with enough pure artistic craft and cinematic scope to enthrall parents too. The trend continued beyond Walt Disney’s 1966 death with such box office breakers as The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, and The Rescuers. The latter film was released in 1977, and we all know what happened that year. Suddenly, cartoons would not be good enough for young filmgoers. Adaptations of old fairy tales and talking mice wouldn’t be either. The new generation would require high-tech hardware and state-of-the art effects. The name Walt Disney would instantly seem as though it was echoing from a quainter past. The name George Lucas was roaring in from the future.

Cult Club: 'Primitive London' (1965)

In this feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

Oh, those kids today with their potty-mouthed comedians, tattoo parlors, licentious pop stars, key parties, and bowling. What of Victorian values? What of the days when women didn’t merely remove their clothes in degenerate strip clubs but did so while sharing the stage with good, clean vaudevillians telling corny jokes and crooning cornier songs? What of the Empire?

Alas, the sixties put an end to the England of old, the one The Kinks lamented, often with tongue-in-cheek, on Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur: The Decline and Fall of the British Empire. Primitive London laments similarly, though its long, lascivious tongue is never out of its cheeky cheek for a second.

Arnold Louis Miller released his movie in 1965 when the mores of old were being swung aside by Swinging London’s new libertine ways but films still had to pay tisking lip service to traditional “morality” in order to stay out of the porno theaters. Three years earlier, filmmakers Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi, and Gualtiero Jacopetti assembled stock footage of animals mutated by the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, cross-dressing Gurkha soldiers, Reeperbahn drunks, bikini girls, and other verboten delights into Mondo Cane, creating a box office sensation and pioneering the shockumentary form that would be Miller’s cup of tea. He’d already been making nudist camp pictures with titles such as Nudist Memories, Nudes of All Nations, and Take Off Your Clothes and Live since 1961. With 1965’s Primitive London, Arthur L. Miller expanded his interests to include sports, music, business, and youth culture, though sights of skin are never far away.

The first is the decidedly unsexy image of a woman graphically giving birth to a smurf-blue baby, the attending obstetrician’s “most difficult delivery ever” if you are to believe narrator David Gell’s voice over, and it’s probably best to never trust anything you see or hear in Primitive London. Nevertheless, that baby does not look healthy and it is hard to believe that the kid we see at the end of the film contentedly tugging on its milk bottle is the same one. Getting hung up on such issues, or expecting the unfiltered look at life and death our narrator indicates Primitive London will be, is to miss the point and the fun. Arthur L. Miller is hip to this and his libertine leer always undermines the rote conservatism of his screenplay, which waves its finger at the “true delinquents” with their “incapacity to postpone present excitement in the hope of future happiness” attending a wife-swapping key party one moment while fixing its gaze on the pastie-festooned glamour girls of an old-fashioned burlesque club tellingly called Churchill’s the next.

While Primitive London apparently wants us to find all the radical new developments of Swinging London to be shocking, it slyly and regularly reminds us of the city’s sordid past with Churchill’s, a recreation of the Jack the Ripper murders, and the Turkish baths where quite a bit of “misbehaving” once took place, but apparently no longer does. A visit to a chicken processing plant where conservative looking folks look bored while slitting the throats of and de-feathering birds in gruesome detail makes us long to spend more time with those crazy long-haired kids and their immoral ways.

Primitive London’s cluelessly reductive portrayal of youth culture is one of the more delightful aspects of this shock doc, as Miller divides kids into three categories—beatniks, mods, and some very sweet-faced rockers—that, naturally, the kids reject. Their crazy pop music is represented by the always old-fashioned and already-past-his-prime Billy J. Kramer and the groovier beat combo The Zephyrs. Quite unexpectedly, “Can’t Buy Me Love” makes an appearance on the soundtrack; unexpected both because it’s surprising Miller got the rights to use a Beatles song in his movie (assuming he bothered with such legal formalities) and because he implies that this is the kind of music rockers fancy.

Elsewhere we get a breathless freak show of London life, in which weightlifting, bowling, the advertising industry, and millinery are all made to seem as bizarre as a goldfish undergoing surgery for a fungoid growth. Every six minutes or so, the raincoat crowd that was Primitive London’s chief audience were rewarded with strippers, fan-dancers, beauty pageant contestants removing padding from their underwear, mod girls sharing a bathtub to shrink their Levis to fit, and nude dudes in Turkish baths. Miller’s sense of humor could be a real boner-killer though, as he overlays a striptease with the dancer’s own narration about the exhaustiveness of her work and cutting straight from her gripe about the toll stripping plays on her tootsies to a pair of exceptionally ugly feet having corns removed. Not great for titillation but terrific for titters, and 45 years removed from the Swinging London era it parodied and preserved, Primitive London holds up best as a work of surprisingly smart, often self-aware comedy.

Cult Club: ‘The Baby’ (1973)

In this feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.
 

According to John Waters, the only sexual peccadillo that disturbs the man who made a 300-pound transvestite eat dog shit is the adult baby. Apparently, there are folks who get off on donning giant Pampers, tossing tantrums in over-sized cribs, and dribbling Pablum down their stubbly chins. To each his or her own, says I.

Call me sheltered, but my only exposure to adult babies was in Waters’s most recent film, 2004’s A Dirty Shame (2004? Get cracking on a follow up, Johnny!). Perhaps that’s why I expected The Baby to be super campy, Waters-style. It isn’t, and its straight-faced delivery makes a really twisted film that much crazier.

Our adult baby is named, rather unimaginatively, Baby, and he’s played by David Mooney (with the vocal talents of an actual rug rat). Mooney was a good-looking man in his early twenties when he made this film. That he doesn’t look like Officer Alvin— the big-boned, elderly adult baby Alan J. Wendl played in A Dirty Shame— is an early tip-off that The Baby isn’t mining laughs.

And unlike Officer Alvin, Baby doesn’t act like a baby because it gets his diaper going; his horrible, horrible mother and sisters have forced him into perpetual infancy through negative reinforcement. When Baby tries to walk, sadistic sis Alba (Susanne Zenor) zaps him with an electric cattle prod. Yet, Baby is sexualized by horny sis Germaine (Marianna Hill), who mounts him in his crib in a scene that may be more disturbing because it cuts away before we see any of the incestuous action. No, that’s not true. Showing it probably would have been more disturbing. The sisters’ horrible behavior is down to the horrible parenting of their horrible mother (retro T.V. regular Ruth Roman), who so resented Baby’s father leaving her that she decided to force their baby to remain a baby.

Enter Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer), one of several child-protection social workers dispatched to the Wadsworth home to yank Baby into long-overdue adolescence. Ann is determined to get the job done even though previous social workers didn’t have much luck with the kid. In fact, they all mysteriously disappeared just as they were on the verge of making progress with him. What could possibly be the explanation for their disappearances? What, I ask you? What?

Turns out, one of the reasons Ann is so adamant about the Baby case is that she is in her own state of arrested development since her husband was killed (or “hurt”, as she tells a jackass at Baby’s birthday orgy) in a car accident. Ann now lives with her mother-in-law (Beatrice Manley) and spends her nights watching old home movies of happy times with hubby and weeping, “It should have been me.” Perhaps helping Baby out of his seriously dysfunctional household will help her bounce back from despair.

For most of its 85 minutes, The Baby is really hard to assess. The premise is wack-a-doo ten fold. No doubt about it. But the rather excellent acting from the totally committed cast and the moody direction by seasoned T.V. director Ted Post (who helmed “Mr. Garrity and the Graves”, one of the best episodes in the sketchy final season of “The Twilight Zone”) kind of rule out the possibility that it’s a bad movie. Still, it’s hard to peg as a good movie, because the raw ingredients—a twenty-something man crawling around and cooing like a six-month old, the elder Wadsworths’ hard-to-swallow motivations, Ann’s increasingly strange behavior, a baby-sitter who gets a little too into Baby’s urge to breastfeed, Germaine’s massive hairdo —seem to sound the “bad movie” alarm. The Baby doesn’t divulge its true quality until its final reel, which reveals a completely unexpected twist that is— no exaggeration— brilliant. These final moments make sense of the particularly crazy turns the film had taken in the preceding scene.

Although Wikipedia classifies The Baby as a “Cult classic,” the first I ever heard of it was in the watch instantly section of Netflix. I’m not aware of there ever being midnight showings of the film in which attendees came dressed in their best onesies and shot breast milk at the screen whenever Baby feels peckish. But if there’s a film crying out for a cult—or at least renewed interest—it’s this obscurity. Just be sure to wear your burp cloth.

Cult Club: "Batman" (1966 - 1968)

In this new feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

When The Dark Knight Rises opens next week, you can bet your cowl that the punches won't be punctuated with cartoon Pows, there will be a distinct lack of villainous canted angles, and at Christian Bale's personal request, Robin won't be invited to the grand finale. Not a "Holy this!" or a "Holy that!" to be heard. Even more so than Tim Burton's Batman movies of yore, Chris Nolan and friends have distanced themselves from William Dozier's campy sixties super sitcom as assuredly as possible. With several decades of dark, dark Dark Knights by way of graphic novels such as Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, in which The Joker severs Batgirl’s spine, and hate-fueled Frank Miller's Year One, in which Catwoman is given a fun new back story as a prostitute, Batman had basically cleansed himself of his goofy past with a Brillo pad dipped in lye. The Bat fans who groaned every time Neal Hefti's theme tune started pumping welcomed this return to the superhero’s supposed grizzly, gritty essence.

Those of us who don't feel that ample doses of nihilism and streetwalking are necessary to justify our comic reading may be amenable to the existence of several Batmans. The black armor-clad Dark Knight has his intriguing place as a noir-ish tortured hero/anti-hero willing to cause zillions of dollars in urban damage to bring the baddies to justice and give us our daily dose of existential angst. But so does that milk-drinking square in the grey leotard who always cautions Robin about driving safety and pows us into guffaws whenever he batclimbs up a skyscraper or breaks into an impromptu Batusi.

Even in the sixties, there were Batfans who squirmed at the series that debuted on ABC in January of 1966. Longtime fan and former D.C. Comics editorial director Mike Gold dismissed TV’s Batman as “regrettable” in his introduction to The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told. In his afterward to the Batman: Year One graphic novel, Miller grumbled about “Adam West and Burt Ward exchanging camped-out quips while clobbering slumming guest stars like Vincent Price and Cesar Romero… For me, Batman was never funny.” He goes on to recall picking up his first Batman comic at the age of eight and marveling over Gotham City’s “cold shafts of concrete lit by cold moonlight, windswept and bottomless.” Now there was a fun kid.

Of course, in the sixties, comic books were for kids, and a vocal adult fanbase of the medium would not emerge for a decade or two. The Batman series, however, was embraced by all ages because it was comic booky and TV’s first direct link to the burgeoning pop art movement. A single episode of Dozier’s series was worth its weight in an endcap of Warhol soup cans. There was much for kids to enjoy at face value, with its colorful villains and action-packed punch ups. For adults, Batman was an unprecedented exercise in irony. No weekly series was so self-aware and so funny. Standards for humor change, which is why it isn’t likely many modern viewers will find much to giggle about when Dick Van Dyke flops over his ottoman for the zillionth time. Batman holds up because its humor was so far ahead of its time, seemingly responding to viewer criticisms in the same way current shows often do in the wake of Internet outcry. Batman acknowledged the ridiculousness of Commissioner Gordon not recognizing that the voice of Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred was the same one he heard at the end of the Batphone, the fact that Wayne and Batman never appear in the same place at the same time, and how Batman and Robin managed to escape seemingly inescapable death week after week. Though the series’ formulaic structure would cause it to wear out its welcome before finishing its three-season run of 120 episodes (for its first two seasons, the show ran twice a week),  it largely excused its clichés by acknowledging and poking fun at them.

Batman could be knowing, but its humor was equally dependent on the brilliantly broad comic performances of its cast. West’s humor was almost solely derived from his nearly comatose even-temper in the most ludicrous situations, while his friends and foils contrasted his hurricane eye with whirling lunacy. Stand up comic Frank Gorshin transformed the minor comic book villain The Riddler into one of Batman’s arch and most manic nemeses. As the best of three Catwoman portrayers, Julie Newmar was a master of drawing out the double-meanings in her sexually suggestive, often sadistic (to a captive dynamic duo: “Your eardrums will shatter and your brains will turn into yeccchh”) dialogue. Victor Buono channeled W.C. Fields for his King Tut. On the side of justice, Burt Ward bordered brilliance when lapsing into randy delinquent mode after Catwoman’s assistant slipped him a Mickey in the “That Darn Catwoman”/”Scat Darn Catwoman”, the series’ funniest arc. A great deal of the fun of Batman is watching its great cast have fun.

Batman’s humor—both clownish and ironic—and vivid imagery (the characters and blatantly artificial sets were painted in a primary palette pulled right from the comics) made it a sensation among the psychedelic crowd. The year it debuted, both The Kinks and pop-art champions The Who aligned themselves with the series by covering Hefti’s theme in concert and on disc. The producers did their best to cash in on the Rock-and-Batman connection by enlisting a few agreeable pop stars like Leslie Gore, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and Chad and Jeremy to guest star. The older generation got in on the hipness when Sammy Davis, Jr., Edward G. Robinson, and Art Linkletter appeared in the iconic Batclimb gag (while Batman and Robin were taking their sexually suggestive scale up the building of the week, a celebrity would open a window, whom the Dynamic Duo would engage in an awkward, action-halting interview). Some respected sources, such as Variety (which noted the “action, clever sight gags, interesting complications and … all out … batmania” of 1966’s feature-length Batman), got the joke.

The very perks that endeared Batman to its generation of viewers were those that made it a thing of derision among later-day Dark Knight fans. But if we look back on the comics, they were ripe with what we now call camp from the days when Bill Finger and Bob Kane first hatched the Caped Crusader. 1946’s “1001 Umbrellas of the Penguin” finds our fine-feathered fink feigning partnership with the Dynamic Duo to convince his auntie she’d raised him right. In 1952’s “The Joker’s Utility Belt”, the clown prince of crime harrumphs at not being inducted into Gotham Museum’s Comedian Hall of Fame. That latter story was way-out enough to pull the rare feat of directly inspiring an episode of the series (Cesar Romero’s coming out “The Joker Is Wild”). In the years immediately preceding the series, Batman and Robin had taken to time traveling and battling space dinosaurs in the comic, leaving the series looking positively sober in comparison.

Much like The Monkees (which I gave a more thorough once over here on Psychobabble last year), Batman is a series that skews hopelessly dated and corny in hindsight. Also like The Monkees, its wit and innovation is unmissable when actually reviewing the series. Something to be remembered, not swept under the Batcape.

Cult Club: ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’ (1965)

In this new feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

Cult cinema became a self-conscious movement in the ‘70s when audiences hopped up on goofballs and near-lethal doses of irony started convening at urban cinemas to hoot along with midnight showings of Pink Flamingoes and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s amazing to consider that Russ Meyer made Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! a decade earlier when every aspect of it seems consciously contrived for the midnighters. Perhaps that’s because it was so influential among the makers of those ‘70s cult items. Pink Flamingoes-director John Waters has called Pussycat “the best movie ever made… possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.” Waters, a master ironist himself, may have been joshing a bit when he wrote this in his autobiography Shock Value, but was he at least a little right?

Legions of critics would catcall, “Not even close!” Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has been derided for its obvious offenses for decades (certainly one reason Waters holds it so close to his mustachioed heart). Even its entry in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die tisks at its "troublesome sexual politics." Russ Meyer is perhaps history’s most famous breast-fetishist, and there is certainly no shortage of female objectification in his best-known picture. The man was no less enamored with violence, which is well present, too. So sex and violence, eh? That’s why Meyer is so much more horrible than every other filmmaker, none of whom would ever indulge in such things? Well, the naysayers say “nay” because Meyer so lingers on his actresses’ cleavage, he so revels in his character’s violence. His plot hangs on sex and violence as wispily as Tura Satana’s catsuit hangs on her bodacious frame.

In Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Varla (Satana), Billie (Lori Williams), and Rosie (Haji) are a trio of go-go dancers who dig nothing more than swinging with each other and tooling around the California desert in their hot rods. When they run into a square (Ray Barlow) and his bikini-clad girlfriend Linda (Susan Bernard), Varla challenges the dude to a drag race. As he starts gaining on her, she forces him off the track. When he gripes about her poor sportswomanship, Varla karate chops him to death (with a twist of back breaking). Linda gets all bent out of shape after watching her boyfriend bite the dust, so Varla commands her go-go underlings to drug and kidnap the girl until they can think of what to do with the potential squealer. While refueling at a gas station, Varla learns about a local wheelchair-bound man (Stuart Lancaster) who lives on a farm with his sons: sensible Kirk (Paul Trinka) and a muscleman known as The Vegetable (Dennis Busch). The Old Man also happens to be sitting on a big pile of cash. At the farm, he tries to get his paws on Linda, Billie tries to get hers on The Vegetable, and Varla tries to get hers on the scratch. Mayhem ensues, leaving all but our two dullest characters, Linda and Kirk, dead.

Tura Satana
Meyer uses this goofy plot as an excuse to exploit the boobs and bashing for which he is infamous. While Meyer couldn’t have possibly conceived Faster, Pussycat! as a mainstream film, he still seems bound by the restrictions of mid-‘60s American cinema. Nudity and graphic bloodshed are taboo. So is the triumph of his villains, hence the plethora of deaths that end the film. For those criticizers who’ve actually seen the film, the opening monologue about the “rapacious new breed” of violent women and Varla’s death are the strongest arguments for Meyer as misogynist, but the time in which his film was made has to take some of the blame. If we can forgive the rote moral and our antihero getting her rote comeuppance, we have without a doubt the strongest woman to appear in an American film thus far.