E=MC2 is as easy as
By JOE KANE
MUSHROOM MONSTERS
or: The Day The World Ended & Ended Part 3
A baneful bestiary of atomic behemoths bumbles thru our brilliant burgeoning pages this issue as Joe Kane Joekanely pokes fun of the mushroom monsters who showed up a few millennia too late invited by that ghastly ghostly host with the most, your friend and mine, the ever-popular (and present) Mr. Atomic Bomb. You know, that fellow with the glowing (in-the-dark) personality … well, here are some of his old-fashioned friends…
Last time I talked about films that demonstrated what might happen (as seen through the Holly wood eye) when muddled man and monstrous mushroom mixed — usually with disastrous results (the mixture, that is, not my article.). All too often the results were artistically disastrous as well. In this installment, I’d like to talk about another species of mushroom monster – the Prehistoric Menagerie re-awakened by nuclear energy in the 50’s and 60’s to embark on a mission of primal revenge.
invoke a monster or your digestion
This subgenre (which I will term The Bestial-Invocation Film –some fancy phrasing, that) proved to be very popular, not only in this country but in Japan as well. Rooted in the myth that nature’s will is ultimately stronger than man’s, and that the struggle ‘tween the twain can take place on a (more or less) conscious level, these films involve a resurrection of the Primal Beast – the dinosaur and its grotesque brethren – as an instrument of Nature’s punishment for our nuclear abuse, capable of catapulting man all the way back into the iron chops of primitive struggle and brutal daily survival. In the true Hollywood tradition, studio filmmakers found a basic fundamental formula for this kind of film and repeated it ad infinitum or ad nauseum, whichever came first. If memory serves, it was the latter.
So the formula they developed usually entailed an atomic blast disturbing the lair (a mountain volcano, or shelter on the ocean floor) of a long-sleeping prehistoric beast (e.g.. THE BEAST FROM 20.000 FATHOMS), or has the fallout contaminate and magnify and/or multiply a once-normal animal or insect (ala THEM!). The nuclear misbegotten are then usually destroyed either by nuclear energy (stressing the Jekyll-Hyde idea that said energy is a force that could potentially be used for survival as well as for suicide) or through a return to more traditional means, like fire (showing a reaction against technology – “See, with all the genius that went into the harnessing nuclear energy all it did was bring Hell down upon our heads and in the end it was a simple thing like fire (or water or whatever) that saved us, dig?”). It was a simplistic means of revoking the dangers of nuclear misuse, and one which was repeated, as I’ve mentioned, over and over again. Anyway, the range of revived and magnified monsters was pretty impressive. Outsized ants (THEM!), spiders (TARANTULA, THE BLACK SCORPION, THE SPIDER); grasshoppers (BEGINNING OF THE END); a praying mantis (THE DEADLY MANTIS); dinosaurs (THE GIANT BEHEMOTH, THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS); and spontaneously-generated weirdos like the things who turn up in THE COSMIC MONSTERS all found their ways to the screen during the ’50’s. The Primal Beast films were generally even less imaginative than the Human-Mutation types discussed last installment. In this genre the monster or monsters are hatched or re-awakened; they stomp the local yokels; they are, in turn, destroyed. The Primal Beast-type monsters depended too heavily on sheer size and special effects like those awkward back projection techniques and the obvious miniature models. Also these films posed the question, “How will it be destroyed?” while the Human-Mutation films only asked, “What can happen to a man once he has been touched and contaminated by the devil’s paw of radioactivity?”
hobbling their way into your heart…
Most of the Primal Beast films were cheap hack jobs and their monsters unbearably lame. Witness the paper-mache octopus Bela Lugosi keeps caged in his mad doctor basement in his lamentably last, and worst, film role (discounting his silent, stock footage appearance in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, a Grade-Z quickie whose ineptitude reaches previously untapped depths of film depravity! in BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, which was alternately called BRIDE OF THE ATOM. Or how about the obviously superimposed back projection spider who, by stepping on the local movie house (unfortunately the wrong one), provides a convenient outlet for adolescent aggression in AIP’s THE SPIDER. Or the shapeless mass of seaweed with the huge eye in its center who hassles the crew of THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE. And if you think some of those are bad, pick up on some of the following titles when they hit your TV screen: tasty items like THE ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, BEACH GIRLS AND THE MONSTERS, THE GIANT LEECHES – not to forget THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH – a real live number about human remains lying on the ocean floor coming to life in the form of walking fish-monsters after chemical waste material had been inadvertently dumped on their “heads”. But these beach monsters adapt to the California culture with remarkable ease. In fact, the first thing they do after getting themselves oriented is to crash a pajama party inhabited by a bunch of bubble-brained beach girls and devour the whole lot – one of filmdom’s greatest camp achievements.
THE BEAST WITH 1,000,000 EYES, a 1956 winner produced by Roger Corman and directed by an unsung worthy named David Kramarsky, saved money in the special effects department by having real animals go berserk and attack a group of actors who, admittedly, deserved no better fate. Although technically outside the realm of the nuclear film (the animals are influenced not by radioactivity but by an “alien intelligence”), this rarely-screened gem merits mention for its sheer weirdness. In it a cow goes crazy and brutalizes its owner. An Alsatian dog freaks out and stalks a middle-class home in search of something to kill. A mentally retarded farmhand takes an axe and does a Carrie Nation number on some confused locals, and, to wind it all up, the “alien intelligence” transplants itself into the brain of a small desert rodent who is promptly swooped into the sky by an American eagle! Talk about a deus ex machina! Talk about fantasy! The American “Bald” Eagle has just about become extinct, due to pollution & insecticides, which keep its eggshells from hardening. A true-life horror story!
But, back at the bestiary, Hollywood was turning out films of occasional quality, films like Warner Brothers’ THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS – which ranks as one of the better efforts in the Primal Beast genre. French director Eugene Lourie, a former art director for Jean Renoir and Rene Clair and a collaborator with Sacha Guitry, was assigned the handling of that particular film. Based on a Ray Bradbury story called “The Fog Horn” and scripted by Lou Morheim and Fred Friebarger (the producer who didn’t save STAR TREK), Lourie managed to establish a powerful mood in the film, combining his models and special effects with a conventional script to convey a feeling of stark fantasy.
The Colossus Rhedosaurus
An archetypical (that critic-talk for “classic”) film of this genre, BEAST, begins with an atomically. induced awakening of an ancient Rhedosaurus frozen in the Arctic ice. After offing a few local folk, it stumbles back to its ancestral breeding grounds (which happen to lie right off the coast of New York City!), rumbles with the urban populace, smiles at his pork dinner (he eats a meddling cop), steps on heads and infects attackers with special germs, before being trapped in the Manhattan Beach Amusement Park perishing in a burning roller coaster, destroyed by a radioactive isotope, shot into an open wound.
Despite its phony philosophizing (something Hollywood screenwriter hacks can’t seem to resist) and predictable romantic sub-plot, THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS works primarily because of the special effects concocted by Lourie and veteran special effects ace Ray Harryhausen. The final scene brings it all together in an orgy of frightening images – the monster writhing about among the ferris wheels and roller coasters, crazy thrill machines that have a nightmare quality of their own, while men in white radiation suits sneak through the carnival carnage and scale the giant coaster in hot pursuit of the Beast. When the park catches fire, the Beast strikes out blindly at the flaming wreckage surrounding him, and is brought down by a radioactive lance.
The fact that Lourie employs a night setting greatly enhances this scene. The highly atmospheric ambiance created by Lourie and Harryhausen (when we first espy! the beast, for example, he is half-hidden by a raging Arctic blizzard) was soon abandoned by the studio and Warner’s next Primal Beast production, THEM!, although a classic in its own right, was bereft of such moody details. The odd thing about the scrapping of Lourie and his counterparts’ moody, European style was the fact that THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, brought in at a cost of $250,000, eventually grossed over $5 million. But, considering the nature of Hollywood studios, I suppose it isn’t really “odd” at all. They are the only enterprises (save for the U.S. Government) that makes business of short-changing themselves. The Hollywood studios are today dying.
Other worthwhile titles in this genre include THE DEADLY MANTIS which, despite its inept special effects, managed to achieve a great degree of tension thanks to the taut and skillful direction of Nathan Juran. Juran was also responsible for 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH in which a tiny Tyrannosaurus Rex (another Harryhausen creation) arrives in Italy via a spaceship returning from a space probe on Venus and grows up to terrorize the land of grapes and gangsters. But not only were America and Italy feeling the effects of the sudden and drastic comeback of the Primal Beast and other gangsters, residents of England, Sweden, and especially Japan were hearing their thundering footsteps as well.
Eugene Lourie went to work in England where he was responsible for the birth of the GIANT BEHEMOTH in 1959. The following years saw the emergence of GORGO and his mother who slouched through London, wreaking innocent havoc wherever he went (Gorgo, in dinosaurian terms, was only a little kid at the time and did his damage without malice aforethought ), Sweden fell prey to REPTILICUS in 1962, who considerably altered the face of their previously beautiful countryside. But it was Japan who couldn’t escape the rampaging onslaught of those prehistoric monsters who loved nothing more than to take Tokyo apart in film after film. Their dedication to the destruction of Japan remained unparalleled, at least until we undertook a similar crusade in Vietnam.
Japanese monsters attack world: World giggles to death!
Throughout the late 50’s and 60’s, Japan suffered (and continues to suffer — as does anyone who has to sit through these films) from the destructive advances of the hordes of the strangest spawn of the Bomb ever to crowd the screen. Included in Japan’s filmland zoo, were bullies named RODAN, GODZILLA, MOTHRA, GAMERA, GHIDRA, YOG (among many, many others!), and even a playful looking version of KING KONG, Many of them were created by Ishiro Honda, who set the tone for Japanese horror films for years to come, beginning with Godzilla and with no end in sight.
Not that they have fared any better in terms of artistic success than their American counterparts. With washed-up American actors like Brian Donlevy, Rhodes Reason, and Myron Healey (yes, Myron Healey, who starred in VARAN THE UNBELIEVABLE), unsteady special effects, and execrable dubbing, they became little more than imitators of a previously established mediocrity.
It all depends on what you think is worse – the rotten egg or the sick chicken who hatched it.