This Island Earth

Last Exeter 
To Metaluna

This Island Earth
Directed by Joseph M. Newman
USA 1955
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Very minor spoilers.

It’s nice revisiting old movies you haven’t seen for a while and especially interesting when, as in the case of this absolute science fiction classic, This Island Earth, you have somehow wiped out most of the movie (apart from the last ten minutes), from your memory. So much here is not as I remember it but, of course, it has some iconic moments in it, largely due to the make up worn by Jeff Morrow as Metalunan scientist Exeter and also, naturally, one of the most recognised screen monsters of all time, the single (I remember a whole army of them from when I was a kid, the mind plays strange tricks), solitary Metalunan mutant. Even if people don’t, for whatever reason, remember the picture, everyone surely recognises the monster. It’s also guest starred in a cameo or two over the years and I’ve even seen it being used to sell whisky back in the 1980s, if memory serves. 

The plot is very simple... a scientist, Dr. Cal Meacham (played by Universal regular Rex Reason), after being rescued from a failed test flight by an unseen alien force, finds some ‘electrical components’  have been sent to his laboratory. Components he’s never seen which, eventually, lead him to construct an otherwordly technical gadget called an interocitor. Then, an alien called Exeter (played by Morrow), tells him he has passed his intelligence test and recruits him to join his scientific commune, some hundreds of miles away. He does so and he, and two other scientists, including his eventual love interest Dr. Ruth Adams (played by Faith Domergue), suspect there is a less benign agenda to their goal of manufacturing unlimited reserves of atomic power. 

Without going into much more of the plot, this leads Cal and Ruth to being the only two surviving scientists left, who are whisked away to the planet of Metaluna in a fruitless attempt to save Exeter’s race from being exterminated in an interplanetary war. It’s not long, however, before Exeter is the last survivor of his race, desperately trying to get Cal and Ruth back to Earth while keeping out of the pincer like claws of the Metalunan mutant that has stowed away on their space craft. 

So, yeah, it sounds fascinating and it is... it’s also a little dull in places too, it has to be said. The chemistry between some of the actors doesn’t seem all that great, truth be told but, what it lacks in emotional drama it certainly makes up for in all the other technical departments. It’s quite spectacular to look at, not only for it’s sophisticated special effects (for the time) but also in some nice clean, simply constructed shot designs, good editing and sound and, of course, the hotch potch soundtrack, half composed as an original score by Herman Stein and half recycled Universal sci-fi horror scores by the likes of Hans J. Salter and Henry Mancini (there’s an absolutely beautiful, authentic, modern re-recording of the score on David Schecter’s label Monstrous Movie Music which is well worth having. Schecter is also included on a commentary track and making of documentary on this wonderful Blu Ray transfer). 

I’ve not read Raymond F. Jones original omnibus novel version of his three serialised stories which make up the story This Island Earth (yet, it’s now on my radar) but the classic Metalunan mutant, who chases Faith Domergue around the flying saucer while she’s waiting for the men folk to be released from their decompression tubes, in a sequence which was absolutely the epitome of suspense to me as a kid in the 1970s (nowadays, perhaps less so) was actually designed, as is my understanding, not by the credited Bud Westmore (I don’t trust that name when I see it on credits at all) but by the lady he got fired for being a much better designer than him years earlier, Millicent Patrick. I think she pretty much designed a prototype of this (if memory serves and, see the fantastic book The Lady From The Black Lagoon, reviewed by me here) before she started working on her similarly iconic design of the Creature From The Black Lagoon (reviewed here). Either way it’s a classic monster and always fun to see around. 

There are some other interesting things to note... 

The enemy ships are also unusual in that the way they try and destroy the Metalunan saucers and, indeed, the planet itself, is by picking up and then hurling asteroids, more or less. And the mechanism used for the beautiful glass version of the Universal picture logo at the time became the mechanism for the spinning, atomic symboled Metalunan control machine on the saucer. And, of course, the interocitor can destroy things by triangulating three laser beams... surely an influence on George Lucas’ vision of the laser cannon on the Death Star in his Star Wars films.

All in all, This Island Earth is... in some ways a bit clunky and, I honestly can’t see it going down well with kids today. People who are slightly older, however, should enjoy this relatively fun romp and the Blu Ray version has an absolutely beautiful transfer of a mostly untroubled print. Definitely worth some of your time if you are a lover of 1950s sci-fi movies and the Blu Ray even includes a reminiscence about the film by Italian writer/director Luigi Cozzi (who directed such movies as Star Crash and Contamination). Definitely worth picking up on Blu Ray if you get the chance. 

It Came From Beneath The Sea

Depth Collector

It Came From
Beneath The Sea
USA 1955 Directed by Robert Gordon
Columbia/Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

“The mind of man had thought of everything... except that which was beyond his comprehension...”
From opening monologue from It Came From Beneath The Sea

It Came From Beneath The Sea is the first movie presented in Indicator’s excellent, three movie Blu Ray set, The Wonderful Worlds Of Ray Harryhausen Volume One: 1955 - 1960. I’m pretty sure, like the next film also presented in this set, that I’ve never seen this one... so I’m grateful to the people at Indicator (aka Powerhouse Films) releasing this bundle. That being said, I think this is going to be one of my shorter reviews because, having just watched it, I wasn’t too much taken with it, to be honest. It didn’t help matters when I came to the menu screen after I hit play and it gave me an option to watch a ‘colourised’ version if I wanted. Okay folks... people who try and colour up old films which are lit for and therefore meant to be watched in black and white... are evil. That kind of dumb attitude is a crime against filmanity and this way of watching really shouldn’t be encouraged. I wasn’t happy to see this option on the disc... and when I say wasn’t happy I mean horrified/disturbed/foaming at the mouth in anger. For the record, I watched this in its proper monotone format, thank you very much.

However, I was very interested in it. Let me get the very simple plot out of the way first. Kenneth Tobey, from The Thing From Another World (reviewed here) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (reviewed here) plays ‘atom powered submarine’ captain, Pete Mathews. He and his crew encounter something which grabs a hold of their submarine and, after lots of wobbling of the camera and actors appearing to stumble around, they get free but with a huge piece of organic matter in their propellors. The Navy call in top notch Marine biologists Dr. John Carter (played by Donald Curtis) and Dr. Lesley Joyce (played by Faith Domergue). After over a week of study, which sees Joyce falling for the charms of both men (before settling on rugged hero Captain Mathews), they realise they are dealing with a radiation emitting giant octopus which is moving nearer and nearer to its food source (culminating in it wrecking the Golden Gate bridge). It’s up to the three, aided by the military, to kill the creature via its new jet propelled missile Joyce has invented, which burrows into the skin and can then be detonated later when it reaches the brain. And that’s enough of the plot... I’m sure you can work out what happens from here.

It’s actually an important film in some ways... because it brought together stop-motion-giant-in-the-making Ray Harryhausen with producer Charles H. Schneer. It’s a partnership which would stick and see each man working together for film after film until their joint last movie together, Clash Of The Titans in the 1980s. Harryhausen’s animation is pretty good here on the titular giant octopus, managing to hide the budgetary problems of only being able to afford six legs for the octopus but, I have to say, there aren’t that many minutes of the creature in this film. It’s mostly a dry film apart from when Kenneth Tobey and Faith Domergue get together for the romantic scenes... Domergue is smoking hot as a somewhat ‘atypical of the time’, temptress of a scientist. Of course, only one month before the release of this movie, Domergue played in the role she will be forever remembered for in the hearts and minds of science fiction afficionados everywhere... as Dr. Ruth Adams in the sci-fi classic This Island Earth (review coming, relatively soon). The tension in that film as she awakes and is released from a suspended animation tube a few minutes before the others, then chased around the alien craft by an iconic Metalunan Mutant, is something I’m sure nobody forgets.

And, being as this is a Harryhausen movie... I can’t help but assume that the name of the other doctor in this film, Dr. John Carter, is a deliberate homage (in name only) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ much loved Barsoomian explorer of the early 20th century. Another homage, perhaps, is that the titular creature has been swimming down from Japan after being hit by H bombs so, yeah, perhaps a little sly reference to Toho studios successful kaiju eiga from the previous year, Godzilla (reviewed here)?

All in all though... it’s not a great film. There’s a constant voice over narrative filling in between the main scenes and I can only assume it was intended to add a documentary feel to the whole proceedings because, frankly, it’s pretty unnecessary and could, perhaps, have been done in better ways within the main storyline. There are some odd choices in the movie too... with a jeep going around a sign in the middle of the road with a quick swerve but, once it’s speeding away from the giant octopus, instead of doing exactly the same thing, it opts to go through the sign instead... for no apparent reason, as far as I could see.

And that’s me done already with It Came From Beneath The Sea, I think. A nice one to see lumped in with a load of similar movies in a marathon screening event, perhaps but, as a stand alone watch I mostly found it cold... although the chemistry between Tobey and Domergue is definitely warming up the scenes they share together, for sure. I’m glad I saw it though and will end by quoting William Hurt’s character when watching this exact same film on a television in the great movie The Big Chill... “Sometimes you have to let art wash over you.”

Perversion Story

Pervertigo!

Perversion Story
aka One On Top Of The Other
aka Una sull'altra
Italy/France/Spain 1969
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Mondo Macabro Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Spoilers right from the outset...

Una sull'altra was Lucio Fulci’s first crack at a giallo and it was released in various versions internationally under that title and, also, its English translation, One On Top Of The Other. The name doesn’t do much for me but it’s a ‘typically giallo’ title and I like it much more than his intended title, which is what it has now become better known as and which Mondo Macabro have released it as, in its longest cut... Perversion Story. This one makes even less sense as a title, especially if you are taking the first word to talk about some kind of sexual aberration because that’s really not depicted here at all either. But whatever it’s known as, in whatever territory, it’s still the first of Fulci’s gialli and also, as it happens, a first time watch for me.

My personal response to the films of Lucio Fulci is pretty hit and miss. Zombi (aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters, reviewed here) grew on me since my initial viewing but, generally, I am less appreciative of his horror movies than some of the other genres he’s worked in... although I do quite like City Of The Living Dead (reviewed here) and The Beyond (reviewed here). I much prefer his gialli with Lizard In A Woman’s Skin, made a couple of years after this movie, being one of the greats of the genre as far as I’m concerned and... probably my favourite movie from this director (there is a very old review on this site but it's from when I was first starting out and I think I need to write a new one at some point).

This film is very much the kind of giallo which eschews the black leather gloves and multiple murders of some of the post-Bava and soon to be post-Argento explosion of gialli onto the screen... it’s much more in keeping with the style of the mystery meaning of the genre, so comparable to such films as the ones made by the likes of Carrol Baker, Jean-Louis Trintignant and, of course, Jean Sorel who stars in this one opposite two iconic Italian actresses.

The film starts off well with various shots showing off its San Francisco setting and a burst of Riz Ortolani’s jazzy and enthusiastic score. We then find that the sensationalist Dr. George Dumurrier, played by Sorel, is trapped in a loveless marriage. Blimey, how many gialli is this guy going to find himself in where his home life is just falling apart like this? His wife, played by the late, great Marisa Mell, looks completely different to the kind of look I would normally equate her with. And I was supposed to think that... Fulci is very much playing games with the audience as much as Sorel’s main protagonist. Mell is his wife Susan, suffering from very bad asthma and not happy with hubby’s various, secret exploits away from home. One such exploit is the film’s other leading lady, whom Sorel is having an affair with, erotic photographer Jane, played by the great Elsa Martinelli.

Sorel has to leave his most recent business/pleasure trip when he finds his wife has been killed. Not only that, she’s taken out a two million dollar insurance policy and he now gets the pay off. So it all looks pretty good for him and Jane... until, that is, an anonymous tip off leads them to a sensational performer/escort working at a strip club. She’s the dead spit of his recently deceased wife... or is she. At this point, I found I was right in believing the movie to be a sideways remake of Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo... not just in the main plot device but also, of course, right down to the San Francisco setting. I say sideways because it turns out the ‘recently deceased’ wife really is the sex worker, planning the demise of George and working in cahoots with his hateful brother and her housekeeper (played by Faith Domergue, of such wonderful fifties science fiction films such as This Island Earth and It Came From Outer Space, reviews of both coming to this blog at some point soonish), to inherit the clinic and be free to go off with the brother. Things get convoluted, George ends up on death row and the movie has a couple of trick endings in terms of the right people being brought to justice... which I suspect wasn’t always the case but, yeah, I’ll talk about parts of the ending in a minute.

There’s a lot of good stuff going on here and although the cinematography is maybe not as creative as a lot of the gialli being made around this period (including Fulci’s later ones), it’s more than competent and it has a nice bright colour palette, enhanced by Ortolani’s wonderful score. There are some nice little flourishes which make for some good eye candy though... well, apart from the natural eye candy of Marisa Mell in her birthday suit, that is. When George and Jane have sex, Fulci cuts in a lot of shots of the couple from underneath where the mattress should be... shot through a red filter or red creased cloth (or both) to simulate the top sheet... presumably the two performers were filmed from under a glass sheet too. Later, when Jane tries to seduce Marisa Mell’s stripper personae to gain information, the floor becomes the thing Fulci is shooting up from... or rather, under it. Which is a nice stylistic choice for certain scenes here.

There are also some nice looking sets and costumes in this. Not least of which is the milieu of The Roaring Twenties strip joint, in which some of the girls wear revealing bras of two black leather gloves holding each breast, the nipples peeking out from the centre. Actually, thinking about it, those bras are pretty much a metaphor, almost, for what the giallo genre was about to become in its most popular form so, yeah, interesting costume choices to say the least.

Just a word now about the ending. The last 20 minutes are a protracted build up to Jean Sorel’s wrongful demise on death row and Fulci milks the suspense in a prolonged series of scenes, as George’s lawyer is still trying to prove his innocence, for all his worth. Then, two things happen which make me think the film has a different ending to the one originally intended. Firstly, the brother and George’s wife are both shot dead in a bar by an ex-client of Marissa Mel’s escort persona. Secondly, the ID of the victims leads to a stay of execution and George is released... but we don’t see that part. The last five minutes is perhaps reminiscent of Psycho, where Simon Oakland famously filled the audience in on what was really happening. A news reporter tells the story of the last moments up to and including the stay of execution and subsequent release of the main character over the space of a few minutes. Then the film ends... we never see Sorel’s character after the point where he is expecting to die. I can only conclude, from this strangely impersonal ending, that the innocent George was originally destined to die in the gas chamber and, perhaps, somewhere closer to release, the producers changed their mind about letting an innocent character go to his death. I don’t know whether the death of the brother and wife were always in there or just inserted to strengthen the ‘crime doesn’t pay’ message at this point but I strongly expect the stay of execution was an addition... and maybe Sorel wasn’t around to do any pick up shots by this point. I guess I’m not going to know the answer to that (or maybe I will when I finally get around to reading Fulci expert Stephen Thrower’s book on the subject but, for now, that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it).

All in all, I’d say I had a good time with Perversion Story (aka One On Top Of The Other) and it’s been given a nice transfer from Mondo Macabro here. It’s not near the top in my ranking of Fulci gialli but it’s certainly better than some of the horror films I’ve seen him make and, yeah, I’ll definitely be watching this Vertigo wannabe again at some point. Nice little movie, great score.... glad I picked up the CD which has been spun many times.