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.”

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms

Full Fathom Thrive

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
USA 1953 Directed by Eugène Lourié
Warner Brothers/HMV UK Exclusive
Blu Ray Zone B

I think I must have been four or five when I last watched The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms... which would have been a TV broadcast in the early 1970s. So it’s good to finally revisit this classic film on a nice Blu Ray edition because, frankly, I remembered absolutely nothing about it. At the time I first saw it, I certainly wouldn’t have been that aware of the pedigree of the movie. I may have associated the spectacular stop motion animation with the great Ray Harryhausen as something similar to what I might have seen in a Sinbad movie. This was only the second feature length film on which he’d worked, after his uncredited contributions to the great Mighty Joe Young. I’d certainly not yet quite heard of (I suspect) his friend on whose short story the film was cribbed as a starting point, the great writer Ray Bradbury. But I’m pretty sure I would have enjoyed it at the time, although I might well have gotten it mixed up with Gorgo in my head, to some extent... which I’ve just myself found out was directed by the same guy.

Okay, so the plot is simple... a giant dinosaur is awakened from hibernation due to a test nuclear explosion overseen by some scientists in the arctic. Two of the people who go out onto the snow to bring back some post explosion readings, see the dinosaur but, one is killed and the other injured. That other being the film’s main male protagonist, Professor Tom Nesbitt, played by Swiss actor Paul Hubschmid. Everyone thinks he’s crazy... even his friend Col. Jack Evans, played by Kenneth Tobey, the star of 1951’s sci-fi/horror classic, The Thing From Another World (reviewed by me here). However, after meeting a paleontologist played by Cecil Kellaway (who you may remember from The Mummy’s Hand, reviewed by me here) and his gorgeous assistant Lee Hunter, he finds the dinosaur in some sketches and gets corroboration from a witness who has also seen the ‘sea serpent’. Hunter is played by Paula Raymond, who eventually ended up in Al Adamson’s movies Blood Of Dracula’s Castle (reviewed here) and Five Bloody Graves (reviewed here)... not to mention playing Margot Lane in an unsuccessful 1954 TV pilot of The Shadow.

Eventually, the creature makes its way to New York but the army have trouble dealing with it because, in a detail which is not usual with these kinds of movies (at least it seems that way to me), exposure to the blood and general vicinity of the monster leads to catching a debilitating virus. Luckily, Nesbitt is a nuclear physicist and suggests shooting the creature with a radioactive isotope into an open wound caused by a bazooka earlier in the film. I’m not very scientific myself but I can only assume this is a good cure for destroying both the creature and the virus... which is what they eventually do, killing the creature as it demolishes a rollercoaster in Long Island, standing in for Coney Island.

So yeah, simple plot but an entertaining film... if not one you have to keep your brain turned on for. Other actors of note in the film are the wonderful King Vidor from such movies as Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (reviewed here) and Singin’ In The Rain (turning up as the psychiatrist asked to diagnose Nesbitt after his crazy dinosaur sighting) and the youngish, unknown actor portraying the army sharpshooter who is none other than the legendary Lee Van Cleef, who would go on to ‘appear’ in such westerns as High Noon (reviewed here) before finding his star in a variety of classic spaghetti westerns (For A Few Dollars More, The Big Gundown, Days Of Anger and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly... among many such oaters) and, of course, in his wonderful turn in John Carpenter’s Escape From New York.

And while the film is simple, it does have some nice touches to it, such as a wonderful shot of a whirlpool on which the title card is superimposed and, some pretty good and thoughtful animation by Harryhausen of the titular beast, it has to be said. Okay, so maybe on occasion the lines where the live action footage is matched up to the stop motion animation footage can be a little blurry at times but, it’s mostly pretty good stuff with a lot of attention to detail, I would say. I mentioned the inclusion of Kenneth Tobey from The Thing From Another World in the cast but, it’s interesting to note that when they first bring in Nesbitt to the arctic camp infirmary, they are reusing a set from that film. 

And like I said, the movie has a few things which you wouldn’t expect from a relatively formulaic monster movie, such as the inclusion of a virus subplot... not explored in detail but it’s certainly there and relevant to the plot mechanics, for sure. But another unusual thing it does is keep up the bluff of people not believing various eye witness reports (including that of Nesbitt) for a good deal of the way through the movie, focussing on the professor going to great lengths to get people to believe him, with odd punctuations of the dinosaur attacking more people who won’t be believed until the dinosaur finally pitches up in New York city.

One last thing though. If you are a lover of 1930s Hollywood Screwball comedies (and frankly, why wouldn’t you be?), you might want to take note that the big fake, prop dinosaur skeleton seen in Cecil Kellaway’s work area is actually the same model used in the truly great 1938 Katherine Hepburn/Cary Grant movie Bringing Up Baby. So, yeah, now you know... a good prop not wasted.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was made in response to the massive success of a re-release of the 1933 version of King Kong (reviewed here) from the year before (that must have been the slightly censored version of the film) and this movie was also a runaway success at the box office. So much so that Toho studios in Japan turned their gaze westward to come up with their own beast, which would of course materialise the very next year in the form of Godzilla (which I reviewed here). That being said, although the film is vastly entertaining and probably better written than many of the other 1950s behemoth movies, this isn’t up near the top of them for me. I prefer a whole host of others before I get to this one but, regardless, I would still recommend it to anyone who likes their giant monster movies and it would certainly be a great one to include in a marathon viewing session of such creature features for sure. Worth having a look at if you’ve not seen this one before.

The Thing From Another World

The Thing And I

The Thing From Another World
USA 1951 Directed by Christian Nyby
HMV Premium Collection Blu Ray Zone B

The Thing From Another World is based, somewhat loosely (although not as loosely as many believe, by all accounts... in many ways it’s more faithful on story progression and mechanics than the remake), on John W. Campbell Jr’s novella Who Goes There? And I’m going to make some very clear statements to start off this review by way of caveats which may well put some of you off from reading on but I’m going with what I see as the facts on this one.

My least problematic point is that I’ve not actually read the original novella (although I do intend to at some point... just saw a free copy online). So I can’t tell you blow for blow how great it is as an adaptation other than what I can gather from the comments of others, which I’ve encapsulated in the paragraph above. My next two statements might anger some, though.

The Thing From Another World was not, as people seem to want to believe these days, directed unofficially by auteur Howard Hawks. Sure, he had a hand in it as he produced it and turned directing chores over to one of his editors but any good producer makes suggestions on the set and I suspect Nyby directed it just as much as Steven Spielberg directed the Indiana Jones movies with producer George Lucas on the set making suggestions (remember, it was Lucas’ wish that Temple Of Doom starts off with Indy in a tuxedo, which is something Spielberg really didn’t like the sound of). There are varying conflicted reports by actors and crew members as to how things went... including from Hawks himself who originally said he just made a few suggestions on set but, over the decades, his perceived involvement in it seemed to grow. So, yeah you may think that some of the signature, directorial flashes come from Hawks but, then again, people often don’t credit the work of a close collaborator when it comes to picking up on certain stylistic similarities (take Ennio Morricone’s famous, early scores, for example, which were orchestrated by Bruno Nicolai and vice versa).

One of the reasons that Hawks chose Nyby was that, as his editor, he knew that he was familiar with the kinds of cuts and rhythms that were synonymous with the visual language that Hawks used. In fact, it was apparently Nyby who came up with the suggestion of using damn near no close ups in the film whatsoever because, as a former editor, he knew that the film could easily change shape in the cutting room if they were not careful so... he decided to go more for master shots or mid range shots so that it couldn’t be cut any other way. Hawks agreed with the idea and that’s why there are very few close ups in the movie... and it really doesn’t hurt it at all.

So in terms of responsibility for the movie... let me say I think it’s time we gave Nyby his due as the man listed as the director on the credits. It’s my belief it’s him to whom the ownership of the film belongs... as much as a collaborative venture like the piecing together of a major motion picture could be birthed as anything like the work of an auteur anyway, that is.

Lastly, and many people are really going to disagree with this one too... of the three adaptations (or two adaptations and one prequel, if you prefer) of this story, this 1951 version is by far the superior version. Yes, I do love John Carpenter’s remake, The Thing... I think it’s an utterly brilliant movie and, although he threw out a lot of the story points (he kept a couple of nice homages to this one in, more on those when I review that version), his version addresses the shape shifting nature of the alien. In this original version it’s just James Arness (future Sherif Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke) in a pseudo-Frankenstein monster suit. However, as much as I absolutely adore Carpenter’s version with it’s gory and surrealistic, body horror tone and paranoia... I find this 1951 version much more entertaining on every other level. The Carpenter version is an absolutely brilliant, classic piece of sci-fi horror... and so is this one. They’re just very different and, for me, the 1951 marginally scrapes to first place for the win in terms of sheer watchability.

The film starts off with a slowly materialising piece of typography saying The Thing (followed quickly by From Another World once it’s done it’s... err... thing). Carpenter’s version totally echoes this typography and the way it materialises in his version. The first of a few very blatant homages to this original. Here’s it’s underscored by Dimitri Tiomkin’s fine score, which was the first of two very important science fiction films in this year to make use of the infamous electronic instrument the theremin (the other would be Bernard Herrmann’s score to The Day The Earth Stood Still, which used a whole bunch of them). This popular 1920s musical instrument (which has a whole story of intrigue and 'long game' espionage attached to it in its own right, due to the antics and shenanigans of the musical inventor from which it takes its name) was popularised in film by Dr. Miklos Rozsa, who used it in two of his scores for 1945 movies, The Lost Weekend and Spellbound.

Then we get to meet some of the main players. Kenneth Tobey as Captain Hendry and some of his men are sent to an Arctic research station to check up on an unexplained air crash and some strange magnetic field readings. He takes with him his new acquaintance Scotty, played by Douglas Spencer, who is a newspaper reporter he meets in the opening scene, while playing poker with two of his men. There’s a terrible cut in this scene, actually. I’ve seen this film maybe five times now in my life and this time I noticed that Hendry deals out two rounds of cards for a hand and then it cuts to them picking up five cards each. So what went on between cuts (or retakes or alternate cuts) I guess we’ll never know. It’s a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moment because the conversation continues over the cut as normal.

We then follow these people as they fly to the arctic and meet the team... including lead professor and ever-so-slightly human villain (misguided by science, I guess you would say) Professor Carrington, played by Robert Cornthwaite and, in her debut movie, Margaret Sheridan as his assistant Nikki. Actually, she didn’t make that many movies or TV show appearances after this but, somehow, she is first billed in the cast list and, all I can say is, good job too. I can’t believe this lady didn’t make major stardom because she’s an absolute hoot in this movie. Her personality really shines through and, although a female presence was not in the original novella, she is not just a fifth wheel here. Asides from an early BDSM reference where she ties Hendry’s arms behind him to a chair to have a drink with him... it’s she who comes up with the idea of what you do to a vegetable when the creature of the title is found to be an advanced form of humanoid plant life (it even grows a new arm back after one of the husky dogs it kills bites one off). She’s just amazing and I wish she’d been in many more movies.

After more introductions and slow burn character enhancement we get the scene where the crew find the crashed saucer and, in a famous moment, determine its size by circling the shape under the ice (another thing Carpenter homages on a video diary of what happened to ‘the other’ base camp in his version). After inadvertently destroying the saucer, the crew chop a block of ice carrying ‘the thing’ free and take it back to base. Then, the inevitable happens and a mistake with an electric blanket accidentally thaws the creature out and it wants to conquer the earth, using the blood of two hanging, slain scientists (a visceral image we never see but hear described) to feed some native vegetation the plasma to create an army of creatures like itself. From then on it’s humans versus thing as the alien enemy tries to freeze our heroes out from the base while they try to defend and destroy.

And it’ a really great film. Most especially because of the razor sharp, witty dialogue which has a lot in common with some of Howard Hawk’s screwball romantic comedies of the 1930s such as the excellent Bringing Up Baby (on which Nyby didn’t work but, then again, Hawks didn’t write this script either, okay?). The dialogue in this film is very slick and the other thing... and I’m always impressed with this each time I watch it because it’s a trick which has always been attributed to what Robert Altman was doing in film in the 1960s and 70s... is that there’s lots of overlapping dialogue in the movie as different groups of people in the same shot hold different conversations. It’s absolutely brilliant for giving the scenes a naturalistic feel and it really helps to ground a film which, in the words of Scotty, involve the bloodthirsty, rampaging shenanigans of ‘an intellectual carrot’.

And because of the way the characters are built up and, additionally, because they’re all such nice and pleasant people who you would happily hang out with in a bar (even Dr. Carrington), it really helps you to identify with them and root for them against the title villain as the film accelerates to its electrifying climax. It really is one of the best science fiction/horror movies of the 1950s and I think more people these days, especially those who worship the Carpenter classic (which is also a good thing to do), should check this out because it’s fun, doesn’t outstay its welcome and is just so expertly crafted. Even Dimitri Tiomkin’s B-movie style score, which nobody could ever accuse of being subtle (not a term I’d ever associate with this composer), works towards unsettling the viewer and even ramps up some red herring moments which are totally created by the music to sow unease where they wouldn’t be seen as such by another composer, maybe.

So, yeah... that’s my take on a film that, with it’s much quoted ‘Watch the skies!’ end monologue from Scotty, has become so well loved and so influential to other directors... you can’t get to Ridley Scott’s crew of the Nostromo tracking down the Alien by counters recording micro changes in air density without the main protagonists here using a Geiger counter to track down the creature, I suspect. Yeah, I know, a Geiger counter to an H. R. Giger counter, for sure. But there you have it, The Thing From Another World is still one of the greatest sci-fi/horror movies of the 1950s and absolutely one I will continue to watch over the years as death approaches. A masterpiece of cinema monster movies... as is the remake.

The Thing at NUTS4R2

The Thing From Another World (1951)
The Thing (1982)
The Thing (2011)

The Vampire

Blood Capsules

The Vampire (Mark Of The Vampire)
USA 1957
Directed by Paul Landres
MGM Midnite Movies Region 1

Warning: Spoilers oozing ostentatiously 
from the fangs of this review...

Not to be confused with the 1935 movie, Mark Of The Vampire, nor the 1957 movie, um, The Vampire, this one is another great B-movie discovery, in as much as I was expecting it to be really dreary when actually it’s quite entertaining and a lot more technically interesting than I expected it to be.

When young, single parent Dr. Paul Beecher goes to save the life of a dying mad scie... er... doctor, following the opening teaser and credits of this movie, he fails to do so but not before said doctor has thrust upon him a pill jar with the somewhat confusing, or at least quite non specific, dying words... “The pills! The pills.......” Dr. Beecher thrusts them into his jacket pocket and the pills in question are soon forgotten. At least forgotten long enough for the doctor to ask his daughter to fetch his migraine pills from his jacket pocket later that same evening. Which she obviously confuses with the "other" pills which coincidentally happen to look exactly the same. After taking the first pill the doctor blacks out for a spell, overnight, but the next morning he finds one of his patients, who has a weak heart, has been atttacked by someone/thing during the night.

The good doctor travels to the bedside of his patient and, when he wakes her from her sleep after noticing two tiny puncture wounds on her throat, finds that she is so afraid of him that she has a heart attack and dies. Now I don’t know much about doctoring but that’s some lousy bedside manner.

Although it’s not quite as obvious to the good doctor as it is to the audience as yet, the doctor has been affected by what are... and if you’ve bothered to read the name of the movie before buying a home video copy or attended a screening then this will be no big shock to you... the doctor has been affected by...

Vampire Pills!

Yep, That’s right. Vampire pills.

Don’t you just love it!

This film is very much a product of it’s time because it blends 50s-science-gone-mad with a Jekyll and Hyde plot and then mixes in just a little of the vampire legend purely, it seems, to add a little elegance to the proceedings... although there’s nothing elegant about this particular vampire... but I’ll get to that in a minute. The Jekyll and Hyde format is the really relevant plot element here, it has to be said, because, asides from having some kind of weird B-movie connection to a viral condition extracted from vampire bats, the many legends and traits surounding the typical silver screen vampire are all absent here. It’s more about a reworking of the Jekyll theme but, in this case, with a reluctant doctor who has become addicted to a specific set of pills (and once again... they’re Vampire Pills, folks) but who hasn’t invented these things and who hasn’t brought down this thing on himself.

Okay... so it sounds really cheesy, and it probably is, but I really got a lot more out of this movie than I was expecting...

Right from the outset, for example, the shot set ups are very clean and interesting and there are some nice camera moves and angles used throughout the film as it progresses. During the pre-credits a young boy delivers an animal to the dying doctor, presumably as one of his hideous experiments which will give the world something it’ll really need... such as "vampire pills", for example. When he rushes off on his bike to fetch Dr. Beecher, the opening credits play out to a beautifully focussed, extended, single take moving shot of the boy riding his bicycle three quarters on to the camera. It works really well.

That being said, I did find the placement of some of the actors in certain scenes to be a little less inspired but for the most part the performances are a hell of a lot bettter than I’d expected, too. Kenneth Tobey, who’d already played the young, military hero from the original The Thing (aka The Thing From Another World), and who some long in the tooth readers may also remember from an old TV show called Whirlybirds (among many others... was this guy ever out of work?), is likeable and suitably intense in the role of the local, concerned and flirtatious sheriff. It’s John Beal as Dr. Beecher who really deserves the applause though... as his character slowly starts to worry and panic about the fact that he might be the mysterious vampire that’s chomping on everyone’s necks in town. Not to mention emoting his gnawing addiction to the vampire pills he doesn’t want to swallow but knows he must... or become a raving, animalistic creature of terror.

Actually the movie is a bit vague about what happens if you don’t carry on taking the pills, to be honest. The choices seem to be... take the pills and become a raving, blood hungry vampire on a murderous rampage or, don’t take the pills and become a raving, blood hungry, animalistic creature on a murderous rampage. I’m not sure what the obvious choice to these two options would be, to be honest with you, but then again, that’s why I’m not a brainy scientist. Plus, I didn’t invent vampire pills either... I mentioned this movie has vampire pills, right?

Oh yeah, and about that vampire make up. It’s terrible. Less like the normal kind of creature one associates with the “sophisiticated vampire” as portrayed on TV and in film. This is more like a man beast with big old ‘eyebrows of doom’ which make him look like an agitated Lou Ferringo on a bad make-up day. I actually found it quite a shame when the excellent John Beal had to go around like this. He’s almost unrecognisable as the original actor and... well... let’s just say that this is one of those B-movies where the monster make-up tends to let it down quite a bit.

Also... “note to movie makers”. If you’re going to cut to a close up of a dead girl showing the wounds in her neck where she got “vamped up”, be sure you don’t take it so close that you can see her pulse still beating in her throat. Possibly should have just cut to a still photo for this moment, methinks.

Okay, so before I leave you I’ll just point out one more great thing about this movie because, although it is a little laughable in a lot of places, it’s also quite a little gem in some ways.

One of those ways is Gerald Fried’s amazing score. Lots of brooding and then pounding “ostinato of impending death” kind of moments which really works well and takes the edge off of those moments when it maybe gets too unintentionally funny for the audience to be able to suspend disbelief for the required amount of time. It’s not bad as a standalone listen either and if you can get hold of the limited edition double CD put out from Film Score Monthly years ago, which includes this score and three other Fried scores from this era and genre (The Cabinet Of Caligari, I Bury The Living and The Return Of Dracula) then you may be in for a pleasant surprise if you’ve not sampled this composer before. Definintely one of my better blind buys at the time.

And that’s really all I’ve got to say on this one. If you can get past the bad monster make up then this movie is a must have for fans of 50s B-movie sci-fi horror. If that’s not your thing then maybe give this one a wide berth but I suspect a lot of my readers here might be up for this one. The film is on a USA Region 1 Midnite Movies edition disc double billed with The Return Of Dracula (reviewed here) and if these kinds of movies are your thing, then this edition is definitely worth picking up. Right, who’s necks?