Review: 'Alien Invasions! The History of Aliens in Popular Culture'

Because it isn’t very likely that aliens from other worlds have ever visited Earth, they can be imagined in any number of ways. Are they tentacled, bulbous-brained beasts? Are they green-skinned seductresses in brass bikinis and weird headgear? Are they friendly little, big-eyed chaps who just want to go (and phone) home? Are they hostile? Neutral? Are they super advanced or super primitive? Are they from distant galaxies or our very own moon?

Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors: #4

Halloween season simply isn’t Halloween season without a regular dose of golden age Universal horror (1923-1963). Every day this October, I’ll be giving you a steady IV drip of it by counting down Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal Horrors!

#4. The Invisible Man (1933- dir. James Whale)

James Whale found his voice with The Old Dark House. He started shouting from the rooftops with The Invisible Man. Its blend of horror and humor are seamless. The plot is pretty faithful to H.G. Wells, but that guy didn’t have a funny bone in his body. Whale and writer R.C. Sheriff find the humor in a mad scientist who can do as he pleases—so long as he’s totally naked— without going in any of the obvious gross or prurient directions. Really, Dr. Jack Griffin just wants to have fun, whether that means dancing down a road as a pair of floating pants while singing “Here we go gathering nuts in May” or throwing a few beer mugs about. OK, he takes the joke too far when he derails a train and murders his arch rival for the affections of Gloria Stuart, but can you blame him for that last one? That Dr. Kemp is such a bore! The same cannot be said of Griffin, and Claude Rains fleshes out his invisible role with a brilliantly expressive voice. However, the real stars of The Invisible Man may very well be the special effects team of John P. Fulton, John J. Mescall, and Frank D. Williams, whose disappearing act will still make you marvel “How did they do that?” Oh…and Una O’Connor. Never forget Una O’Connor.

5 Superior Adaptations of Horror Lit

Adapting literature for the cinema is always tricky, and this can be especially true when dealing with stories intended to raise shivers. What is terrifyingly evocative on the page can flop like a sack of wet leaves when realized with a dude in a zip-up monster suit on screen. Acts unimaginably awful when described cease to play on the imagination when depicted with a rubber knife and karo-syrup blood. Some of horror’s greatest literary works, such as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, It, and I Am Legend, have never received ideal screen adaptations. Some page-to-screen trips have been more lateral with stories such as Frankenstein and Dracula offering very different yet equally essential elements when turned into movies or ones such as The Haunting of Hill House and Rosemary’s Baby being faithful enough to be genuine cases of “six of one/half dozen of another.” On occasion, a film goes above and beyond, reinventing the story upon which it is based in ways that make the original text virtually irrelevant. Here are five of those superior horrors.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 169

The Date: March 17

The Movie: Island of Lost Souls (1932)

What Is It?: Considering how full of cinematic possibilities H.G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau is, it’s quite impressive and a bit confounding that Erle C. Kenton’s 1932 adaptation still has not been topped. Charles Laughton is the portrait of self-delighted evil as the beast-rehabilitating doc. Richard Arlen is all sweaty angst as the lone survivor of the shipwreck of the Lady Vain.

Why Today?: On this day in the novel, the Lady Vain wrecks.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 96

The Date: January 4

The Movie: First Men in the Moon (1964)

What Is It?: Underrated adaptation of one of H.G. Wells’s most underrated stories starts slowly and goofily, but it takes an exciting and dark turn when the crew of a moon rocket meet up with Ray Harryhausen’s BEMs.

Why Today?: On this day in 1959, Luna 1 becomes the first spacecraft to near the moon.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 69

The Date: December 8

The Movie: Time After Time (1979)

What Is It?: Malcolm McDowell is H.G. Wells, who uses his own Time Machine to pursue David Warner as Jack the Ripper from 1893 London to 1979 San Francisco. There, Wells meets kooky Mary Steenbergen and pure, air-headed delight ensues.

Why Today?: Today is Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day. I’m not imaginative enough to make this shit up.

Review: 'First Men in the Moon' Blu-ray

A crew of U.N. astronauts think they’re the first Earthlings to set foot on the moon. Imagine their surprise when they find a Union Jack planted there already. The strange discovery leads U.N. representatives to a rest home where they meet the man who helped transport that flag to the seemingly barren satellite. Back in 1899, Arnold Bedford (Edward Judd) was a ne’re-do-well playwright living in a cottage near mad scientist Joseph Cavor (Lionel Jeffries), inventor of a metallic goo capable of deflecting gravity. Together the men scheme to use this “Cavorite” to lift a little vessel straight to the moon where they encounter a race of insect-like aliens.

Nathan Juran’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’s First Men in the Moon is like two very different movies. The first 45 minutes, concerned with everything that goes down on Earth, plays like a goofy Absent Minded Professor Disney flick for kids. The second takes a dark turn as Cavor suddenly becomes less hapless and more philosophical and Bedford succumbs to a disturbing hawkishness. Here First Men in the Moon falls in line with fifties science-fiction monster movies, and it is by far the more interesting section of the movie. On the moon, Cavor, Bedford, and Bedford’s fiancé Kate (Martha Hyer), who accidentally comes along for the ride, move from strange environment to stranger environment, while the assortment of creatures—some wondrous Ray Harryhausen stop-motion creations; some kids in rubber monster suits—apparently threaten them, though it’s possible that the humans are the real threats. The moon portion of First Men is surprisingly complex, with our ostensible heroes either making genuine sacrifices for the sake of pacifism and good will or succumbing to Eisenhower-era paranoia. By the time we get to the last scene, in which a man takes satisfaction in the death of an entire civilization, it’s hard to even remember that 45 minutes of family-friendly comedy ever took place.

That’s a good thing for First Men in the Moon, since it leaves the picture feeling better than it probably is. Edward Judd and Lionel Jeffries are both very good comedic actors, but their Earth-bound capering feels like it goes on forever. The decision to shoot in widescreen Panavision depleted the budget, which may account for why so much of the film takes place on Earth and certainly accounts for the costumed aliens that are so much less effective than their stop-motion overlords. The difficulty of constructing sets long enough for Panavision accounts for the preponderance of traveling matte shots. Despite those issues First Men in the Moon  is still half a great movie  willing to deal with some pretty weighty matters. Plus, Harryhausen’s psychedelic sets and creepy creatures are superb.

Twilight Time’s blu-ray is pretty terrific too, presenting First Men in the Moon without a blemish but with its natural grain. Aside from a couple of passing mildly rough elements, the film looks great and it’s a relief that Harryhausen’s effects hold up so well under the HD microscope. Twilight Time supplements the feature with a fun but very short vintage featurette that ties the film to NASA’s actual space program, a brief video introduction from Randall William Cook (a special effects artist whose work includes animation design in the Lord of the Rings movies), and Cook’s feature commentary with Ray Harryhausen. Recorded shortly before the master’s death, the commentary is a bit slow moving and Cook is a bit too insistent about the film’s “perfection,” but there are still some interesting tidbits here and there and it’s always a pleasure to hear Harryhausen discuss his own work. First Men in the Moon also includes an isolated score track and is available in a limited run of 5,000 units. Get one on Screen Archives.com here.

Monsterology: Mutants

In this new feature on Psychobabble, we’ll be taking a look at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

You’re an animal. So’s your mom and your dad and your sister and all your friends. We humans like to think of ourselves as far removed from the animals we eat, shoo, experiment on, and patronize as pets. But though we may have opposable thumbs and cell phones, we are basically shaved apes with unwieldy brains. As Charles Darwin pointed out 150-odd years ago, we’re also mutants. We are the result of sudden biological jolts in unexpected directions, which is why most of us no longer live in trees or employ butt sniffing when choosing a mate (did prehistoric people actually do this? I like to think so). Despite war, genocide, environmental destruction, racism, sexism, homophobia, extreme narcissism, reality television, and Rick Santorum, we turned out pretty well. But a little tweak in the wrong direction and we could have been murderous men-fish with big webbed claws or underground-dwelling mole ladies. Terrifying to consider, eh? Perhaps that’s why mutants have been such reliable monsters since the dawn of Horror fiction.

H.G. Wells was one of the first artists to address such mutations, which he did in The Time Machine (1895). The writer sent his protagonist back to 802,701 A.D. where he meets two alternate early versions of his own species. Wells chiefly used the lazy Eloi and the brutish Morlocks as metaphors for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, respectively, but he may not have conceived of these particular creatures had Darwin not made us aware of the strange side roads we walked on our journey toward humanity. The following year, Wells gave us a more explicit glimpse at our bestial past, but he did so without the trappings of revisionist history. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, the title doc is the maddest of modern scientists, conducting enforced evolution in a lab his hairy charges fear as the House of Pain. Wells intended his novel as a denunciation of one of “evolved” man’s great crimes, vivisection, yet it also functions as a raging criticism of the arrogance, cruelty, and whimsy of an evolution-crazed God. Moreau sees himself as The Creator, a noble entity who would erase the savagery of nature and replace it with the refinement of civilized humans. In actuality, he is an egomaniacal puppeteer and torturer, and like the God of Biblical fiction, his creations are ultimately destructive. Was Wells telling us we would have been better left grazing in the fields? Perhaps, and perhaps he wasn’t too far off the mark.

H.G. Wells later described The Island of Dr. Moreau as “rather painful” and “an exercise in youthful blasphemy,” yet it solidified a Horror archetype that had yet to take a shape of its own but may have always existed. What are werewolves and vampires if not mutants of sorts? Could they be supernatural suggestions of what might have been had humans evolved from wolves or bats instead of apes?

Such “what ifs?” gave us some of our most memorable monsters when Horror mutated from the printed page to the screen in the twentieth century. What if there was a direct missing link between us and that fish that crawled from the sea some 360 million years ago? Perhaps there might still be one of these creatures doing the backstroke in a black lagoon in the Amazon, mooning over a woman with whom he may have had a shot had he been fortunate enough to follow the same evolutionary path as the rest of us. As scientifically unlikely as it is, that fish/man missing link became one of Horror’s iconic monsters and a belated last hoorah for the golden age of Universal horror.

A true testament to natural selection, the Gill Man has withstood time better than the big-eyed mutants of the charmingly campy The Mole People, Universal’s less successful attempt to justify weird creatures with dicey science. Quite unlike evolutionary science, the “Hollow Earth Theory” had been roundly dismissed a century and a half before Virgil Vogel’s movie premiered in 1956. That didn’t stop phony-boloney scientist Frank C. Baxter from lecturing about mutant mole men running amok in the Earth’s core during the uproarious prologue:


Silly? Yes. But apparently not unworthy fodder for serious horror, as we learned almost fifty years later when Neil Marshall explored both the evolutionary undercurrent of vampires and the speculative hooey of mutant monsters dwelling under the Earth in the genuinely terrifying The Descent. Of course, the film’s claustrophobia-inducing scenes of spelunking are so scary that the mutant bat people are somewhat less overwhelming when they finally show up halfway through the picture.

In the interim, Horror and science fiction pondered strange mutations time and time again. In 1984, cult favorite C.H.U.D. took another dive below ground to visit with mole people of a different sort: urban homeless people mutated into monstrous cannibals by toxic waste. The classic 1963 novel and 1968 film The Planet of the Apes wondered what might result if apes continued evolving while retaining their signature ape flourishes while humans were relegated to lower-beast status. The three film adaptations of The Island of Dr. Moreau work as a devolutionary timeline, descending from the great (1933) to the good (1977) to the abysmal (1996) over time. Dagon, Stuart Gordon’s underrated 2001 adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, melds weird mutations and weirder religion with its Gill Man-esque creatures who worship a freaky fish god. Evolution and religion merge at last. The mutant continues to stalk our nightmares.

So before you go to bed tonight, thank your god—if you’re inclined to believe in such things—that you managed to make it to 2012 without gills or fangs or the need to take residence deep in the Earth. Better yet, toss The Creature from the Black Lagoon into the DVD player and thank Jack Arnold, H.G. Wells, Neil Marshall, and the rest for finding the riveting Horror in the strange-but-true science of evolution.

Essential Mutant Viewing:
Island of Lost Souls (1933)
The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
Revenge of the Creature (1955)
The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)
The Mole People (1956)
The Time Machine (1960)
The Planet of the Apes (1968)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)
C.H.U.D. (1984)
Dagon (2001)
The Descent (2005)

Review: ‘Karloff as The Invisible Man’

A swarm of potential Karloff vehicles materialized in the vapor trails behind Frankenstein. Universal jolted many into existence: The Old Dark House and The Mummy and The Black Cat. Several were stillborn, including films that would eventually be realized with different actors in their lead roles. Too bad for Boris, but The Wolf Man would make a star of Lon Chaney, Jr., and The Invisible Man would do the same for Claude Rains, even though the actor’s face is only non-invisible (or visible, if you prefer) for mere seconds before the credits roll. Of course, Frankenstein made Boris Karloff a star, and such scant screen-time hardly befitted a creature of his stature. Director James Whale saw his latest horror project (and his latest project to delay his career-long obsession, The Road Back) run through a number of variations before he deemed it suitable for filming. By that point, Karloff was off the project because studio execs Carl and Junior Laemmle had failed to give him the salary increase he deserved.

A voice as distinctive as Karloff’s dulcet lisp would have made the actor as recognizable as an invisible man as a visible one, but early drafts of the film would have given viewers far more glimpses of his equally iconic face than the completed film starring Rains. In the latest essential volume in his essential “Alternate History for Classic Film Monsters” series, Philip J. Riley collects all that remains of the discarded swipes at The Invisible Man. After his brief overview of the film’s history, Riley hands over the reins to R.C. Sherriff, who would ultimately compose the script James Whale filmed in 1933. In an extended excerpt from Sherriff’s 1968 autobiography, No Leading Lady, the screenwriter spends much time wringing his hands over the faithfulness of his accepted script. Apparently, Universal expected its screenwriters to use their source material as the merest seeds that might sprout almost completely original ideas (it is unclear whether this was Sherriff’s interpretation of the studio’s desires or if the Laemmeles specifically demanded originality). Indeed, his plot is the most similar to the one in H.G. Wells’s novella, though the author took issue with Sherriff’s decision to have the invisibility formula turn Dr. Griffin into a madman.

One can only guess how violently Wells would have reacted to James Whale and novelist Gouveneur Morris’s treatment, which recasts the Invisible Man as a sort of evil faith-healer, who lives in seclusion because of his horribly scarred face like the Phantom of the Opera and fears crucifixes like Dracula. Or Richard Shayer’s distasteful unfinished treatment/script, which would have set Karloff off on a rape-spree through Manhattan. John Huston’s treatment is the eeriest, but Sherriff clearly made the right decision by adapting Wells faithfully while working in the humorousness of the Shayer draft. And Sherriff quite sells himself short in his autobiography by suggesting he did little more than reformat Wells’s novella as a screenplay. He enriched that tale by inventing the madness-inducing drug Monocane, introducing the love interest that would somewhat humanize the otherwise deplorable Griffin, and nudging in the humor that surely appealed to cheeky Whale and helped make his film a classic. Because the unfilmed treatments all end abruptly, Riley includes the complete first draft of Sherriff’s shooting script, which is most notable for missing some of the film’s funniest flourishes.

May 27, 2009: Psychobabble recommends Village of the Giants

One of the most fabulously ludicrous literary adaptations ever made, Village of the Giants (1965) is part sci-fi monster movie, part Beach Blanket Bingo, and all groovy. The first laugh is a big one, as the words “Based on ‘The Food of the Gods’ by H.G. Wells” flash on-screen during the opening credits. I can only surmise that Wells never intended giant, bikini-clad go-go dancers, wild musical interludes by the Beau Brummels and Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon, or Beau Bridges in the original outline of his bizarre sci-fi classic (which would be more faithfully—but no less weirdly—adapted in 1976).

11-year old Ron Howard is “Genius”, a freckle-faced imp of a junior chemist who is privileged enough to have his own fully equipped, Frankenstein-style laboratory in the basement of his parents’ house. Genius concocts the “goo,” which instantly transforms any creature that eats it into a giant. When Bridges and his gang of teen miscreants get hold of the goo— Oh, Daddy!— that shindig gets way, way out! Scattered throughout, we get baffling lingo like “Dig that nitty gritty!”, massive ducks and tarantulas, massiver hairdos, an especially shaggy Beau Brummels hot off of scoring their biggest hit with “Just a Little” (and a couple of years away from recording their underrated cult classic Triangle), a memorable appearance by Toni Basil as a redheaded cage dancer, hotrods, some seriously out-of-proportion props (a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland is roughly the same size as a little girl), and some daring close-ups of Joy Harmon’s leathery midriff. Dig that nitty gritty!