Brain Blasters

It must stop! Somebody has to take a stand, and I guess that somebody has to be me. But surely I will not be alone. Surely I will have comrades aplenty in my march to justice. Surely the day of victory cannot be too far over the horizon. With courage and determination, we can stamp out the scourge. What scourge? Surely I don’t have to spell it out. Surely you know I am referring to the twist ending.

And one particular brand of twist ending, at that.

When, in the 1950s, television became widespread and began to take a serious chunk of the audience away from cinemas, the movies fought back in a number of ways. Gimmicks were rife (hello, William Castle). Colour became standard. Widescreen arrived. But other than colour and widescreen, every other innovation turned out to be a brief novelty, never to be seen again. There was once exception, a gimmick that was more popular than most, never became a standard, but refuses to die, resurfacing again and again after periods of dormancy, and that’s 3-D.

Over fifty years after Arch Obler (ironically, the king of radio suspense) unleashed Bwana Devil, there are signs that 3-D might finally be achieving a somewhat more stable position in theatres. It’s a long way from being a mainstream standard, but it has found a niche. Saunter down to your local IMAX and check out the offerings. Most of them will be in 3-D, and that includes blockbuster films (though in their case, the extra dimension turns up only in selected scenes). In IMAX, 3-D has finally lived up to its potential. Gone are the awkward red-and-blue-lensed cardboard glasses. In their place are gigantic plastic units not unlike goggles, that fit very comfortably over the viewer’s own glasses. Gone, too, is the headache-inducing effect of old-school 3-D. The current release Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure deploys 3-D as we always imagined it might be. The effect absolutely convincing, and absolutely immersive.

One of the great oddities of film from the 1960s (or, indeed, ever) is a modest little horror film by the name of Incubus. Emerging in 1965, it was shot in Big Sur, and tells the mythic tale of a young soldier returning home to become the target of a female demon. His innate goodness, however, winds up seducing the demon instead, and the titular male demon vows revenge, specifically targeting the soldier’s blind sister. This is already a somewhat odd tale for a mid-sixties American horror film, and the fairy-tale setting is even more unusual. But the real oddities are yet to come. The lead is played by a William Shatner (in his last film before Star Trek). And all of the dialogue is in the artificial language Esperanto.

Why Esperanto? Why indeed. Phil Hardy cites director Leslie Stevens (the creator of The Outer Limits) as describing the language as “at once imaginary and universal, out of time and space.” There is no doubt that film’s effect is precisely that. The world the viewer moves through is completely alien, even if the settings themselves (forests, seasides) are very familiar. When I called the film a fairy tale, I did so advisedly. This is one of the most fairy tale-like horror films ever made (and horror partakes of that form of storytelling more than just about any other genre). This is thus a tale of no place and every place, of no time and every time. It takes very little time for the viewer to get past the strange spectacle of Shatner spouting Esperanto (doing so very naturally, I might add) and be swallowed up by this strange world.

Bert I. Gordon. Now there’s a man who knew no shame. Here was a director who combined the hucksterism of a low-rent William Castle (who wasn’t exactly living on the Boardwalk of Monopoly board of producer-directors, if you catch my drift), the willingness to pile on the spectacle of an even lower-rent Cecil B. De Mille, and the technical competence of a slightly (but only slightly) higher-rent Ed Wood. Here was a director who not only did his own special effects, but for some unfathomable reason thought they were good enough to show for extended periods of time. Perhaps he thought his back-projection techniques in The Amazing Colossal Man, Attack of the Puppet People and Beginning of the End (grasshoppers!) were actually impressive. They weren’t. But they had a certain goofy charm.

And goofy charm is what today’s offering is all about. Gordon’s last film, 1976's The Food of the Gods, has finally found a DVD release as part of MGM’s Midnite Movie series, and it’s about damn time. Here’s a movie that has both the honesty and nerve to claim to being based only on a portion of H. G. Wells’ source novel. I remember, in those heady, summer days of 1976, when Famous Monsters of Filmland trumpeted the film’s upcoming release, complete with plenty of FX shots that I thought were pretty cool. Of course, I was only nine. The film hit Winnipeg at the Pembina Drive-In, long since demolished to make way for highways. I didn’t see the film then, but when I at last tracked the film down decades later on VHS, it was exactly the kind of engaging nonsense I was hoping for, and it’s even better now in widescreen.

My very first horror film book, acquired in Grade 3, was Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. Among its many stills were a number for films identified by title, but with no other information provided. The result was rather tantalizing. One of those stills was for a 1969 Japanese ditty called Horror of Malformed Men. At long last, thanks to a new release from Synapse (with the title pluralized to Horrors of Malformed Men), my curiosity has been more than satisfied.

All right, seekers of the bizarre, try this plot on for size. The film opens with a man trapped in a cell with dozens of half-naked women. They’re all writhing about as if they’re performing some kind of avant-garde dance number, except for the one who is going after the guy with a knife. Eventually a guard intervenes and he hauls out the man (Teruo Yoshida), blaming him for the ruckus. Turns out the setting is an asylum, and Yoshida is an inmate, with no recollection of how or why he is there. After surviving an equally mysterious assassination attempt, Yoshida escapes. By chance (it seems), he runs into a circus performer who sings the same song that haunts Yoshida’s fragmented memories. She might have information about who he is and where he comes from, but she is killed before she can tell all. Yoshida is blamed for the murder, and he becomes a fugitive. On the run, he reads about the death of the scion of a respected family, a man who could be his twin. Yoshida takes the place of the corpse (!) and fakes a resurrection. He enters the man’s household, hoping to find out who he is, why the dead man is his exact double, and how that man really died.

The current issue of Rue Morgue has a retrospective look at Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, just ahead of yet another DVD release (September 11). Over the course of the interview with O’Bannon, interviewer Dave Alexander asks the director how much he had to do with the new release. This is his response:

“None. It was a surprise, a shock, to me when I was informed they were putting out what they call a ‘director’s edition.’ It runs something like twenety minutes more than the version I shot. The film I shot and edited was 88 minutes. I hear they’re putting out a 117-minute version. Once this thing comes out, I’ll take a look at it [...] and if they have tampered with it in a way that in my opinion hurts the film, then I will publicly abrogate it.”

A little while ago, I looked at a recent (and very strong) example of the Evil Kids movie. I mentioned some of the big names in the field (The Omen, the original Village of the Damned, The Bad Seed), but today, for your consideration, a half-forgotten effort from 1974 (smack in the midst of the golden era of grindhouse and drive-in sleaze): Devil Times Five.

Also known as People Toys and The Horrible House on the Hill, this cheap but satisfyingly unpleasant little movie sees a bus overturn, unleashing five homicidally demented children. They make their way through the snow to an isolated resort, whose only residents are the tycoon Papa Doc (Gene Evans, sporting a character name that is oh-so-tasteful), and his assorted squabbling relatives and associates. The children are taken in, and waste no time in bumping off the adults one by one by means mundane (hatchet to the head), creative (bizarre death swing contraption), and just plain wrong (one woman is drowned in the bathtub while pirana are dumped in with her).