SPACE AMOEBA

d. Ishiro Honda (1970)

Japanese monster movies are a little like sushi: they look great and they are lots of fun, but they’re not exactly what you might call filling. Nevertheless, like sushi, I enjoy them very much. I like the rubbery monsters, the comical mugging, the stock characters. I like the way that the films only really come to life when the monsters are on the screen, and only really catch fire when you have one or more fighting and smashing things up.

The Space Amoeba in question attaches itself to an unmanned space probe, which crashes into the sea near a desert island, one of the many isolated atolls in the archipelago of greater Japan. The amoeba resembles an electrical current, or a neon sneeze, and attaches itself to living organisms, taking control of their minds and greatly increasing their size and aggression levels. Over the course of the story we see a giant cuttlefish (erroneously described as an octopus), two giant crabs and a giant turtle. They are all angry and like the taste of human beings, particularly the wriggling, screaming ones.

The amoeba clearly has its red beady eye on world domination but is somewhat thwarted by its inability to conquer a small island populated only by a superstitious native tribe and a half dozen city slickers with guns, grenades and lots of petrol. Eventually, it takes over a human being, who gains super strength and a maniacal glow. In the version I watched, this character is dubbed by an Australian, which is slightly confusing for a Japanese man but not a disaster. The problem is that, along with his chin beard, black glasses, white safari suit and constant chuckling to himself, the Aussie twang only accentuates his resemblance to Rolf fucking Harris. Happily, he throws himself into a live volcano when his humanity briefly returns. Maybe Rolf could go and do the same.  

THE MANSTER

d. George Breakston and Kenneth G. Crane (1962)

Regular readers may have noticed that many of the films written about here are concerned with transformation, mainly of the uncontrolled and uncontrollable sort: people shrink or grow; they die but stay alive; they become bestial and unhinged or taken over, mostly at the gnarled hands of bad science, pure evil or alien conquest. Is that the worst thing, do you think? To become other, to turn into someone or something that you can't manage, and to know it is happening, to feel yourself slipping further and further into the void. Is it a metaphor for the human condition? Does transformation evoke old age, illness, death? Yes, in these films transformation is death, and can only be cured by more death including, ultimately, your own. I need some Propranolol.

In The Manster, jaded US foreign correspondent Larry Stanford is on his last assignment in Japan when he meets genius geneticist, Dr. Suzuki. Suzuki is interested in 'the beginnings of life' and seems nice enough despite keeping his brother and wife in the basement, having turned them into a hairy white ape and a disfigured hag respectively. While Larry has a Mickey Finn induced nap, Suzuki injects him in the neck with a serum designed to turn the hapless journalist into an entirely new life form.

In time honoured fashion, the first Larry knows about it is when he notices he has a very hairy hand. Next, he is startled to discover an eyeball embedded in his shoulder. After a few out of character homicidal rampages, an additional head emerges from him, malevolent and wizened, resembling a fairground coconut with comedy teeth. Head two is murderously angry with everything and everybody, not least Larry, who he wants to get away from as quickly as possible, ultimately leading to a violent split between host and parasite. 

As Larry reverts to human form, his erstwhile spare head and body conveniently having fallen into a live volcano, there is barely a second to wonder if Larry will pay for his crimes before the film's abrupt end. Let's hope the Japanese police are prepared to blame it all on the psychopathic man monkey and let Larry go home.  

THE CURSE OF THE STONE HAND

d. Jerry Warren (1964)

The Curse Of The Stone Hand only really makes sense if you know the story behind the production, so here it is. Producer Jerry Warren, a man who revelled in his reputation as a hack, grew tired of the expensive and time consuming process of making his own films, so took to buying foreign productions, hacking them to bits and dubbing them, filming a few inserts, recording some narration and putting them out with a sensational new title. It's not art, baby, but it is most definitely commerce.

This film is made up of two other movies, one from Argentina and one from Chile, and there are some new and poorly matched framing sequences making it a sort of poor man's portmanteau, or poormanteau as I have now decided it must be called. 

The first story looks like it might have been quite good in its original form, an occasionally stylish tale of a man who joins a gambling club where the price of membership is to kill or be killed, depending on the turn of a card. The editing is so choppy to render it almost unintelligible, but you are just able to get the gist. It doesn't help that Warren compulsively cuts any scenes that feature more than a couple of lines of dialogue (too hard to dub) and clearly has no idea that Durham is not on the outskirts of London. It's a frustrating experience.

The second story is completely incomprehensible, but is something about a depressive nobleman and the terrible way he treats his family. Again, it looks like it was probably quite well crafted at one time but, apparently cut by a third, the edited version provides little more than movement and sound. There is endless, meaningless narration and new clips of old John Carradine to pad out the running time (and give Warren a directing credit) but none of it helps. The ending, a new sequence, posits the idea that the nobleman locks himself in a basement and paints a series of self-portraits as he dies. It's ridiculous, but his mouldering skeleton provides a minor shock to close on.

So, a terrible film, but a fascinating concept. Warren was clearly some sort of monster but, luckily, he was in the film industry, one of the few professions where that really isn't a problem. It's a shame in many ways, as, every now and again, there are glimpses of a much better film waiting to be coaxed out. Oh well. As Jerry might say 'fuck it, it's only a movie''.  

THE MAD MAGICIAN

d. John Brahm (1954)

It's the late 19th century, and curly haired Don Gallico (Vincent Price, one of the patron saints of this blog) wants to be a stage magician but, because he is a humble and rather nervous sort of person, he is stuck making tricks for other less talented and far less pleasant performers. When Don's big chance is ruined by his horrible. grasping employer (a man who also stole Gallico's wife and keeps bragging about it), something pings under the pressure (it might located be in his eye, which keeps twitching) and he becomes a committed maniac, wearing homemade masks and murdering people all over the place: by buzz saw, by strangulation, by cremation. 

Like a lot of murderers, once he solves his first problem by killing someone he soon finds that he becomes extremely busy. As the film progresses he becomes less sympathetic, more ruthless, increasingly unhinged and, because this film was originally made in 3D, he also has to keep throwing stuff at the audience, too - playing cards, water, flames, sawdust - it's just a relief that there are no sex scenes.

The Mad Magician is reminiscent of director John Brahm's earlier film Hangover Square (1939), even down to the scene where Gallico disposes of a corpse using a handily placed bonfire. The great Mr. Price gets to play several roles under a variety of latex disguises but reserves his best characterisation for 'The Great Gallico', a shy guy who is simply too nice for show business, and too crazy to live. 

The film is also worth watching if you have ever wondered what Zsa Zsa Gabor did before she became Zsa Zsa Gabor: she was an actress, apparently, though not so you'd notice. 

MANSION OF THE DAMNED

d. Michael Patacki (1975)

Somewhere there's a film about a respected surgeon /scientist who driven by an obsession for discovery, or in order to save a loved one, breaks his Hippocratic oath and leaves his ethics behind in order to conduct an illegal experiment / perform an illegal operation. It all works out, and the doctor spends the rest of their life making amends for their lapse. This is not that film.

When eye specialist Dr Chaney's beautiful young daughter is blinded in a car accident,  he and she are almost driven mad by grief, and he sets out to make good his mistake (he was driving). Strangely, he picks on his daughters boyfriend, a colleague of his from the local hospital where he works. It's a odd choice as his sudden disappearance is always going to raise questions. It works temporarily, but soon he is on the look out for fresh eyes. He's not very good at the random murder game, so he sets up pretend job interviews and fake house viewings - later he tries hitch-hikers, winos and, in the creepiest section, abducts a young girl and promises to take her to Disneyland (when she escapes and he is chased by two men, he captures them and uses them instead). None of this works, and his daughter, now horribly scarred by excessive surgery, is utterly miserable.

Worst of all, the doctor's victims are in a conveniently placed jail cell beneath the titular mansion, sleeping on mattresses and constantly screaming and groaning about their lack of eyes. I'm a pretty peaceful sort of person (most of the time) but it took me about ten seconds of wailing before I started wondering why he just didn't kill them all.

Slightly murky, dreamy, the film only has credibility because it stars Richard Basehart and Gloria Grahame, formerly award winning stars between fifteen and twenty years past their prime. Oscar winning Grahame has little to do and, with an immobile top lip (caused by, ironically, too much surgery), has little she can do, although it's nice to see her (she died in 1981). Richard Basehart was a always a pretty good actor, slightly hammy and fruity, but of a tradition. Unfortunately, that tradition was no longer required in New Hollywood so he ended up making a hundred or so episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, a show that started out inexpensive and unpretentious and ended up cheap and embarrassing. No wonder he was drunk for most of the latter part of his life.

Finally, it's worth noticing aliens star Lance Henrikson here in an early supporting role. His early life was fairly itinerant and his education was broken up to the extent that he didn't learn to read until he was thirty. I hope he at least got a few of the classics in before this script arrived.

Finally finally, given its obsession with sight loss, shouldn't this have perhaps been called Mansion of the Dimmed? Well, maybe, I don't suppose it matters now.

HITLER'S CHILDREN

d. Edward Dmytryk (1943)

At first I wondered why, in 1943, US audiences were watching a film about the dangers of Nazism set in 1938, especially as America had already been at war with Germany for two years. Then I thought about the timing and realised that it was probably preparing them for D-Day: when there is sacrifice ahead, it's a good idea to remind people what it's all for.

In order to connect with audiences, the film uses a handsome boy and a pretty girl, a sort of Nazi Romeo and Juliet: he is a German born in America; she is an American born in Germany, and they love each other, despite their political differences. In the early days, it's picnics and sing-a-longs in the stereotypical hale and hearty way of the old Fatherland, all jolly rucksacks and strudel. When Hitler begins his conquests, however, things change. The boy joins the SS and the girl, because she has 'German blood' is sent to a re-education centre for lessons in National Socialism. 

Being a decent, freedom loving girl she doesn't take to the teachings of Herr Hitler one bit, of course, so is publicly whipped and scheduled for enforced sterilisation. The boy, belatedly realising that Nazism is as fucked up a philosophy as you can get, tries to save her, but is arrested. He has time to denounce Hitler at his trial before he and the girl are shot.

Heavy stuff, but then what else could it be? A light musical would have been completely inappropriate. Behind the fractured love story we occasionally get glimpses of other heinous policies: the rounding up of Jewish schoolchildren, no doubt destined for concentration camps; talk of the extermination of the physically and mentally impaired to further the bloodline of 'the master race'; the suggestion that it is the girl's duty to get pregnant by an approved Aryan at the soonest opportunity, no relationship required. The overall picture is of a sick, almost surreally inhuman society presided over by sadists who are either thugs or pseudo-intellectuals or an unsavoury combination of the two. 

Hitler's Children was an absolutely enormous box office success. Propaganda is always propaganda, of course, no matter which side it comes from, no matter how many facts (or lies) it contains. It's purpose is to create the collective frame of mind where it is okay to hate, to fight, to kill, to die - and this film, with its emphasis on the way the Nazis stamp down on personal expression and individual liberty, chimed absolutely with American audiences. They've always been very big on the old freedom thing in the US of A - for Americans, anyway.         

GIRLS IN PRISON

d. Edward L. Cahn (1956)

There’s not much to distinguish Girls In Prison as anything other than a very generic b-movie: a mass stabbing, perhaps, a slight allusion to lesbianism, an earthquake that facilitates an escape, a prison chaplain who is a bit too interested in one of the new inmates. Much of the film is just as you’d expect, and given the advanced ages of most of the cast, the definition of 'girls' is fairly loose, to say the least.

The best thing in it is Adele Jergens as Jenny, top dog and matriarch of the prison. Jenny is fairly genial most of the time, even likeable and kind, but is hard as nails when it comes down to tin tacks, a gun wielding, wavy peroxided, scarlet lipped force of nature. She’s also absolutely gorgeous, even when chewing gum whilst simultaneously smoking a cigarette (actually, especially when chewing gum whilst simultaneously smoking a cigarette). The film would be almost insufferably dull without her.

After an hour and twenty minutes of molasses slow mayhem, the film climaxes in a bruising brawl and a gun fight. It’s a good way to end any drama, I find. After the dust has settled and the wonderful Jenny has gone the way of all pistol packing mama's, we end on a close up of a church steeple while some quasi-religious music plays, as if God has in some way been responsible for the restoring the balance of law and order. Rubbish. God was not responsible, although maybe he set off the earthquake to punish some other sinners in the general area. As for the rest, omniscient he may be, but micro management is not exactly his style.