setsuled

Zombies are known for being pretty slow movers but apparently if you put a topless woman and a shark in front of one he perks right up. You can see this in the best scene of 1979's Zombi 2, which isn't actually a sequel to anything. It was put out as a sequel to Dawn of the Dead but there's nothing in Zombi 2 to explicitly connect it with George Romero's film. Zombi 2 reintroduces Voodoo to the zombie story, a classic component of zombie films that Romero's movies broke ground by moving away from. Most of the virtues of Zombi 2 are in that one incredible action sequence, the rest of the film is mostly a bit silly and lazy.



Well, this fellow has some nice screen presence. A boat drifts into New York Harbour and a couple cops board it to find no-one aboard but a big zombie who chomps the throat out of one of them. This movie's zombies really like to go for the jugular and there are a lot of shots of ripped neck with blood splurting out.



The boat belongs to the father of Anne Bowles, a young woman played by Tisa Farrow who gets top billing despite being little more than a wide eyed, swooning sack of potatoes throughout the film. If you want a textbook example of women and minorities getting short shrift in a horror film, this one covers the bases.



The zombies originated from an uncharted Caribbean island where Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson) is trying to save everyone despite the furious verbal abuse from his wife, Paola (Olga Karlatos). He also has to deal with the childlike superstition of the film's only black character, Lucas (Dakar), whose fearful dependence on the white man's wisdom makes him seen retrograde for 1934 in this film from the late 70s.



Anne meets a man named Peter (Ian McCulloch) she can unwisely tag along with into dangerous situations and allow to make all decisions for her and the two head to the Caribbean. They hitch a ride with a couple of vacationers played by Al Cliver and Auretta Gay. Auretta Gay really deserved top billing for this film.



Swimming practically naked with a tiger shark, she's part of the film's three way action sequence when a zombie taps in, springing from a mass of coral.



She fights off the zombie by grabbing a handful of coral and smashing it in his face, something which seems like it really shouldn't work but this guy is far from your average zombie. Using clear strategy and agility, the fellow actually wrestles with the shark.



If all the film's zombies were like this guy we'd have had 28 Days Later twenty three years early. It's a great scene, I certainly hope the poor shark wasn't traumatised by it. Both Auretta Gay and the actor playing the zombie--Ramon Bravo, who was also the shark's trainer--deserved the salaries of every other actor in the film put together.



Otherwise, the film has a really convincing shot of someone's eye getting pierced by a piece of wood, but you're better off watching Un Chien Andalou if you want to see something like that. There's a really ridiculous sequence where a car goes off the road after hitting a zombie and Peter, sitting in the rear passenger seat, somehow breaks his ankle when the car gently butts up against a tree. It's like the man's ankle burst in a nervous reaction or something. There are a few scenes of dopey, standard zombie fight choreography where characters inexplicably back into the slow moving corpses that come from nowhere and women, of course, can't seem to handle guns and tend to freeze up when faced with reanimated dead. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Auretta Gay is so dynamic in that underwater sequence--nothing else in the film equals it.

Sometimes in a really bad storm the only place you can rely on is the creepy house filled with murderers, madmen, and Boris Karloff. 1932's The Old Dark House is a sterling example of one of my favourite kinds of stories--the one where a bunch of people get trapped in an old house or hotel. In this case, director James Whale conjures some breathtakingly spooky atmosphere perfectly balanced by light comedy from a good ensemble cast.



This effective mixture of tones is introduced in the first scene as a car bearing three people pushes through a very convincingly constructed special effects storm. Sheets of rain, cascading mud, and a landslide are all so effectively created it makes it even funnier when Melvyn Douglas, sitting in the backseat, gamely starts singing "Singin' in the Bathtub", much to the irritation of the two newlyweds in the front, Philip (Raymond Massey) and Margaret (Gloria Stuart).



There's more to Douglas' character, Roger, though, than peculiarly steady nerves. We later learn that he's a World War I veteran and offers a slightly glib psychological profile of himself over a glass of gin: "War generation slightly soiled, a study in the bittersweet, the 'man with a twisted smile.' And this, Mr. Femm, is exceedingly good gin."



Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger) is in charge of the titular old dark house, an intensely nervous man who is terrified by the idea that the storm will cause a landslide that destroys the house. His ill tempered sister, Rebecca (Eva Moore), scoffs at her brother's fears, telling him she knows this house better than he does.



She takes Margaret to her bedroom so the young woman can change clothes in a scene of brilliantly, subtly escalating tension. Once in the room, Margaret strips to her underwear without thinking, half listening to the old woman rambling her condemnations of electric light and hedonistic youth. Gradually, though, Margaret realises there's something more than a little threatening about the woman who in her religious fever seems about to attack her. The old woman leaves, though, without harming her--there's still an emotional undercurrent to the scene that builds and explodes when Margaret opens a window without thinking and the room is immediately dominated by the storm.



All the same, it seems rude for her to just leave the room like that and it prompts mixed feelings when the old lady later complains at the state Margaret left the room in without even mentioning it when she came to supper. Margaret is an uninvited guest, after all.



And then Charles Laughton shows up, in his first film role, as a boisterous Welshman named Sir William Porterhouse. He's accompanied by an equally carefree chorus girl named Gladys (Lilian Pond) who's delighted when the handsome Roger helps her change her wet shoes.



The only flaw in this movie is the rapidly developed romance between Roger and Gladys. When the two go out to the car for a bottle of whisky, they much too quickly start talking about marriage. The performances from the protagonists which had been so delightfully natural up to this point suddenly take on the worst, stiffest characteristics of silent film acting. But the scene does have an interesting moment where she tells Roger how Sir William won't mind at all about the two of them--William's a widower but, although he likes to sit on Gladys' bed with her telling stories, he's shown no sign that he wants to have sex with her. Gladys even says that Sir William tries to come off as "gay"--it's uncertain if the audience would've picked up on this word as meaning homosexual or if it was intended to. I would argue that Cary Grant's use of the term in 1938's Bringing Up Baby was definitely meant to mean homosexual but it was not known well enough for the censors to have caught it.



If Porterhouse is meant to be homosexual, though, it's nice that he's in no way sinister or a villain in this film. It would fit in, too, with the dialogue establishing both Roger and Gladys as misfits--Roger for his war trauma and Gladys because she's a chorus girl, something she spends a lot of time talking about with a defiant lack of shame. In this context, the moralistic condemnation from the old woman takes on a new significance. As does the name "Femm", the fact that the gender roles between Horace and Rebecca seem reversed, and the fact that the Femm patriarch, Roderick, is played by a woman (Elspeth Dudgeon).



On top of all this, the film has Boris Karloff as the deaf butler, Morgan. Karloff plays him as someone who performs his duties on automatic and is mentally cut off from everyone else, something that becomes really sinister when you see has no sense of guilt about the violence he might inflict.

This film has terrific atmosphere, great performances, and some really intriguing characters. And it already had me with the people trapped in the house concept.

Twitter Sonnet #1075

The plate collates a dozen gobs of rice.
In glowing space the number turned to blue.
The first tomato pulled us homeward twice.
No glancing beam could prove the car was true.
Inverted hooves have pushed a sky to turf.
A hidden stone absorbed a shock to good.
Surprising steps alert the sickened Smurf.
Sapphire gnomes'll always count and should.
A spacious temp'rature unwraps the shoot.
The stars are masks for oxygen above.
A flying tube conveys the human boot.
A mirror hall creates the multi-dove.
The table welcomes butlers, ghosts, and souls.
A storm disrupts the laces, heels, and soles.

Reinterpreting classic monster stories as sympathetic portrayals of misfits is nothing new but Guillermo del Toro reaches new heights with 2017's The Shape of Water. An unabashed ode to Creature from the Black Lagoon and, to a lesser extent, King Kong, The Shape of Water teases out the hints of erotic and romantic subtext in those films into a lovely, full blown fantasy romance film.



Arguably Del Toro's most political film, even more than The Devil's Backbone or Pan's Labyrinth, the action is set in 1962, rather than Black Lagoon's 1954. The civil rights movement, the Red Scare, and the Cold War are all integral aspects of the film's backdrop and occasionally its plot. The film's two central protagonists are a mute--but not deaf--woman named Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and a gay man named Giles (Richard Jenkins). Their thematic connexion to the "Amphibian Man" (Doug Jones), trapped in a lab by the white, Christian, heterosexual men of the U.S. government is not ambiguous. Giles agrees to help Elisa rescue the creature after he's cruelly rejected, in an effectively brutal scene, by a man in a cafe. He understands then why Elisa might feel some camaraderie with the beast.



Thankfully, the movie doesn't simply render the monster a thoroughly safe and passive version of the Gill Man from Creature of the Black Lagoon. One scene that will be especially unpleasant to cat lovers shows the Amphibian Man is, like the Gill Man, a wild animal capable of killing with little discrimination. I also liked that Giles was surprisingly understanding about it. Jenkins is very good in the film as the often put upon and mildly exasperated voice of reason.



Creature from the Black Lagoon is already a film that puts much more blame on human arrogance than on any ideas the monster might have. The true villain of the 1954 film is arguably the one scientist who wants to kill or capture the creature for his own glory. The other humans are pretty vocal about not wanting to kill it and wanting to allow it to remain in its natural habitat. I watched Creature from the Black Lagoon again last night and I was surprised how many little things Del Toro references in Shape of Water. Even the odd idea that study of the Gill Man can somehow be utilised for space travel. Like the male protagonist of Black Lagoon, a Russian spy working under the name of Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) in Shape of Water voices the assertion that it would be more valuable to study the creature alive than dead. His adversary is Colonel Strickland played by Stuhlbarg's Boardwalk Empire co-star Michael Shannon.



Shannon's great talent for playing violent men is further emphasised by two severed figures that were reattached early in the film. They become more and more discoloured over the course of the film and work nicely both to add to tension and to add the sense that the colonel himself is becoming monstrous.



Doug Jones is fantastic as usual as the Amphibian Man and his make-up and costume pay homage to the great Gill Man costume with the addition of more expressive eyes. But it's Sally Hawkins as Elisa at the heart of the film.



Quite fearless in scenes depicting her masturbating in the bath, Hawkins helps the film express fully the erotic undertones of Black Lagoon by providing more intimacy with the female protagonist's internal motives and needs. Her vulnerability and determination in her identification with the monster are also beautifully expressed resulting in a surprising, and surprisingly effective, musical number.



Octavia Spencer plays a kind of a stock character as Elisa's friend and coworker. Spencer's comedic timing is nice enough but Colonel Stickland's casual racism talking to her doesn't quite make up for her unimaginative character. Her and Elisa being the cleaning women adds kind of a nice remark on classism, though.

It almost goes without saying, but really, it's worth repeating--the film is visually stunning.

What does communicating with the dead have to do with being a celebrity's assistant? Well, Kristen Stewart does both in 2017's Personal Shopper, a movie that never quite gets on its feet, but is a nice enough excuse to watch Kristen Stewart try on clothes and star in some well constructed, tense sequences.

Maureen (Stewart) is in Paris working as a personal shopper for a celebrity named Kyra (Nora von Waldstatten). She's also in Paris because her brother recently died there and he'd promised her that after he died he'd send her a sign. Like her brother, Maureen is a medium, but as she explains to a friend, she never shared her brother's certainty that the beings they contacted were spirits of the dead instead of some other phenomenon.



So she's spending a lot of time in her brother's old house, waiting for him to give her a sign. There's an inexplicable subplot about two of her brother's friends having a romantic relationship, which they slowly break the news to Maureen about over the course of the film in several casual conversations. It's really bland and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything. A red herring? I guess.



Writer and director Olivier Assayas wisely seems to feel he can't really settle the question about the afterlife for Maureen but he doesn't seem happy with leaving us with ambiguity. One special effect in a later scene seems to confirm the existence of the afterlife, then an encounter Maureen has makes her doubt it more. The moral seems to be, "Sometimes ghosts play pranks and we should be very solemn about it."



A fairly effective subplot about a stalker who starts texting Maureen builds tension nicely. Conversations in texts aren't as boring as you'd think because Assayas makes sure to have Maureen on train journeys through Paris and London or changing into a kinky harness for a designer while she's exchanging the texts. Maureen starts to get turned on by her anonymous correspondent, confiding she wants to be someone else, and telling him that she's trying on her employer's clothes because forbidden things turn her on. It's never quite enough to build a personality for Maureen but, along with the fact that we know she has a heart problem, it makes for some scenes that effectively make you afraid for her.

By the mid-70s, Vincent Price was already known well enough for horror roles that he could star in a tongue in cheek murder mystery homage to them, 1974's Madhouse. The film's awareness of its own camp never amounts to the joy of a Rocky Horror Picture Show or Little Shop of Horrors serving instead merely to undermine tension. It amounts to a soft serve vanity piece for Price but it has some fun in its way.



Price basically plays himself, an actor named Paul Toombes known for his roles in horror films from the 50s and 60s, particularly for a recurring character named Doctor Death.



Unlike Price--or at least, so I suspect--Toombes is constantly beset by beautiful young women trying to get into his pants and advance their careers. The novel on which the movie is loosely based, according to Wikipedia, has Toombes in a more predatory role regarding women, familiar to to-day's headlines about powerful men abusing women in Hollywood. Maybe Price objected to playing a character so close to himself behaving so apprehensively though the film does retain an almost uncannily Harvey Weinstein-ish producer named Oliver Quayle (Robert Quarry) who's trying to revive Toombes' career.



Toombes career had stalled some years before because, as we see in the prologue, his fiancée was decapitated by someone in a Doctor Death costume. Toombes has spells of memory loss but there are also several likely suspects in the film for the crime that, of course, is soon repeated as other girls are murdered once Quayle brings Price back onto the scene. Did Toombes commit the murders? Was it Quayle? Was it Faye Carstairs (Adrienne Corri), his former costar whose love he rejected? Or was it former Doctor Death screenwriter and wouldbe actor who warmly invites Toombes to stay with him in his weird mansion, Herbert Flay, played by Peter Cushing?



It's not hard to figure out, really. The film does a lot of silly things to keep us off the trail, though. One of the murders takes place on set of the new Doctor Death movie where the director is crushed to death by a slab of metal that lowers over a bed, something meant to be a device of Doctor Death. It's weird how often movies about movies portray filmmaking in such an unrealistic way--why would some goofy effect actually be lethal?



The movie's attempts at ghoulish fun mostly made me feel impatient. I longed for a more sincere vehicle where Cushing and Price had more screentime together.

Twitter Sonnet #1052

A mountain like a puppy placed a call.
In scrawling inks of hist'ry signals float.
Above the rains now shining down the wall.
The snowy tops with steps're surely wrote.
In cordless mazes fit for phones we walked.
Approaching beams appeared to hold the car.
Facades in shades of marble sweetly mocked.
Discursive pipes could not the throatless mar.
Reminding ghosts of screens the sand arose.
In timing roofs to hit the store they built.
From amber dust horizons were composed.
From massive forts and castles came the silt.
A giant foot eclipsed the canopy.
In sleep, the ghost reversed an entropy.

It would be sort of comforting to think that influential men in the entertainment industry who prey on women are also talentless. That's part of the fantasy presented in the 1962 Hammer version of Phantom of the Opera, and a big part of why the film never rises above moderately interesting. It does, though, have some really gorgeous cinematography by Arthur Grant, beautiful makeup and costumes, and is a surprisingly lush production next to the typically low budget movies released by Hammer.

Directed by Terence Fisher, the female lead is renamed Christine Charles from Christine Daae for the story's relocation from Paris to London. She's also reduced to the pretty sack of potatoes one usually sees in Fisher's films. Played by Heather Sears, her singing voice was dubbed by an opera singer named Pat Clark pretty seamlessly and there are some really nicely put together scenes featuring bits of an opera about Joan of Arc composed for the film.



Michael Gough plays Lord Ambrose D'Arcy, the film's real villain. He uses his position as the composer of a series of successful operas to abuse the women who appear in them and it looks like Christine is going to be his latest victim until the opera's producer, Harry--the dull Edward de Souza in a role supposedly written for Cary Grant--rescues her from dinner with D'Arcy. The Phantom, played with some elegance but little dimension by Herbert Lom, is mostly portrayed as a victim in this film, having no control over his Igor-like assistant (Ian Wilson) who perpetrates the murders the phantom is guilty of in the original story. He murders a rat-catcher played by Patrick Troughton in one of the film's more enjoyably macabre scenes.



The Phantom's interest in Christine is apparently entirely in her singing voice and at worst he comes off as a much too strict instructor. The film actually seems like its makers took the plagiarism subplot from the beginning of The Red Shoes and took out all the complications to create a simpler story of a downtrodden artist and a thoroughly villainous liar. Gough does play a good villain, though, and the sets are truly extraordinary. The Phantom's lair is fantastic, perfectly paired with the makeup and costume on Herbert Lom.

You have to figure insane asylums are filled with stories. Robert Bloch wrote five featured in the 1972 Amicus anthology film Asylum. Solidly directed by Roy Ward Baker and featuring a great cast that includes Patrick Magee, Charlotte Rampling, Peter Cushing, Herbert Lom, and Britt Ekland, it's a morbid pleasure with plenty of nice, lurid atmosphere. It also contains some rumination on identity and the validity of sanity as a concept.



The framing story involves a young, confident doctor named Martin (Dr. Martin) interviewing for a job at an asylum now being run by Dr. Rutherford, played by Patrick Magee, who was forced to take over the place recently after the previous head of the asylum went mad and joined the inmates. As a test to see if Martin is worthy of a post at the asylum, he's tasked with interviewing each patient and figuring out which one is the previous head of the asylum--he or she has invented a whole different name and past. I enjoyed this device a lot--it adds another spur for the viewer's attention as one is forced to contemplate not only if the subject is the one Martin's looking for but if the story they're telling has any truth to it. And, of course, it's always possible Rutherford is an inmate who's taken over, it wouldn't be surprising given that Rutherford is Patrick Magee with his idiosyncratic twitchy performance.



The first interview is with a woman named Bonnie (Barbara Parkins) whose story is mostly about her lover, Walter (Richard Todd), who murders his wife for her. This was the least effective story of the group, its tension derived from dismembered body parts coming back to life in a not entirely convincing manner.



The second story is very nice, featuring Peter Cushing as a mysterious Mr. Smith who comes to the subject of the interview, a tailor named Bruno (Barry Morse), to hire him to make a suit out of strange glowing fabric. Bruno is only too eager to accept the job because he's behind on his rent. The story is filled with wonderful gloom from the darkness of Bruno's shabby store to the rain-slicked exteriors and it plays nicely on economic tension as Bruno, faced with the loss of his livelihood, is dependent on the bizarre, weird, fanciful, and what turns out to be ghoulish, needs of the bourgeois Mr. Smith.



The third story is good mainly for Charlotte Rampling's performance. She plays the subject of the interview, Barbara, and she recounts a story of her life being upended by her relationship with a woman named Lucy played by Britt Ekland. Ekland and Rampling are a very strange pair, Rampling giving a complex performance of a woman sinking in feelings of addiction, dependence, and abandonment and Ekland not managing much more than a pretty flutter of her eyelashes. But it makes sense for the story which partly seems to draw on anxieties related to the stigma of homosexual relationships at the time and it's another way the movie subtly pushes against prevalent notions of what constitute insanity.



Herbert Lom plays the last subject, Dr. Byron, who makes weird little mannequins in his room. Inevitably, he brings one to life in order to exact revenge, this story not quite as effectively creepy as the Doctor Who serial Terror of the Autons from the year before, ironically because the inferior special effects on Doctor Who were in this case much creepier.

Twitter Sonnet #1047

We wake as breezes stop in subtle light.
As coats in thinning fog conduct a song.
The silent push attends to guide the sight.
A rippling grass remains and moves along.
The sun returns on reddish days to watch.
Behind a fork of jelly beans it burns.
The distant tops of fossil trees are notched.
What leaves'll dream the highest flower learns.
In plain developed film a dress appeared.
A turning hail could not sustain its wrath.
In iris shot a motor car's a tear.
In silver steps the snow aligned a path.
Imposed beyond the furnace flames array.
Withdrawing shreds of cloud concede the day.

For all the wonderful things about them, one can't ignore the inherent chauvinism that often turns up in Hammer horror films. Usually it manifests in a female protagonist who likes to wander naively into dangerous situations wearing negligee but sometimes, as in 1966's The Reptile, there's a little more too it than that. With the emphasis on "man" in the old concept of "white man's burden", the film follows in a tradition of horror fiction where a white man has been overwhelmed by a devilish foreign power and brought it back home with him to England. And like many such stories, The Reptile is concerned with how that foreign power has usurped the white man's perceived custody of women's bodies. As with the original novels of Dracula or The Beetle, one can appreciate the film's manifestation of the complex irrational anxiety provoked by such conceptions of obligation but the characters here are dim shadows of the more complex ones crafted by Stoker.



The film has some lovely visuals, opening with gnarled tree limbs over gloomy landscape. It uses many sets and locations seen in Plague of Zombies, released the same year, including this backlot set.



I'm pretty sure I can see the edge of the facade of that row of buildings.

Ray Barrett and Jennifer Daniel play Harry and Valerie Spalding, a newly married couple who've arrived in town following the death of Harry's brother. They plan to move into the dead man's cottage despite sullen, mysterious discouragement from the townsfolk. Harry carries Valerie over the threshold to find all the furniture is wrecked.



Jennifer Daniel played one half of the gerbil couple I talked about a few days ago in Kiss of the Vampire and she's basically as flatly innocent and guileless here. But while she was matched with a man equally sheeplike in the earlier film, here she's paired with the worldlier Harry, a retired soldier who's had experiences in India, something that will come into play later.



Noel Willman, who played the head vampire in Kiss of the Vampire, here plays the mysterious Dr. Franklyn, owner of the nearby manor house; he's in the traditional place of authority in England but implicitly deprived of those powers. He's also unable to control his daughter, Anna (Jacqueline Pearce), whom he's furiously searching for when he first sneaks up on Valerie.



There's some hint that Franklyn may be the villain but it becomes increasingly clear that his manservant, credited as "The Malay" (James Marne Kumar Maitland), has some kind of power over him. When we finally meet Anna, Valerie finds her inside the cottage, filling it with flowers.



Right from the start, Anna is overstepping the boundaries of the civilised world to introduce a riot of organic material where it doesn't belong. And as the film progresses, it's clear that the strange powers and needs of her body are a big problem. And it's a problem related to Franklyn's loss of control, something that's played out by the actors in a not entirely subtle exchange of looks when Anna defiantly plays a sitar while Franklyn tries to maintain an attitude of cool authority in his armchair.



Eventually, Valerie follows her destiny as a common Hammer female lead and sneaks into the house with no apparent strategy in mind, apparently drawn there just to get captured. The conclusion of the film presents less of a clear cut villain versus hero scenario than usual because all of the tension is based on responsibility and victimhood. Pearce does a nice job in her role but one wishes her character could have pushed a little more against the ideas at play, something Ingrid Pitt does more effectively a few years later in The Vampire Lovers.

Siamese twins, a woman who eats man eating crabs, an imposter for a dead men, circus abductions, poison administered via the ceiling--can you have all these things in one movie that still reasonably holds together? 1969's Horrors of Malformed Men (江戸川乱歩全集　恐怖奇形人間) has all these things and more. Produced just at the beginning of the proliferation of exploitation film in Japan, the film has some kink, too, though it often feels out of place. But mainly the film succeeds for how it introduces strangeness in a way that feels simultaneously reasonable and disorientating, very like a dream.



The film starts with a young man, Hirosuke (Teruo Yoshida), locked in a cell being menaced by mad topless women with a collapsible pocket knife. It turns out he's also an inmate here, a medical student who was committed for unknown reasons--he clearly doesn't feel like he belongs.



He's haunted by dreams of a rocky beach with a strangely gesticulating man with long hair. The man is played by Tatsumi Hijikata, the creator of a dance performance art called Butoh and the strange gestures seen in the film are presumably part of this art. There's something both animalistic and robotic about him--it's no wonder Hirosuke can't decide if the man is human.



Hirosuke eventually escapes after hearing a woman outside singing the song from his dream. One thing leads to another and Hirosuke's implicated in a circus murder, sees an obituary for someone who looks exactly like him in a paper on the train, and goes to a remote seaside town to assume the influential dead man's identity. The rapidity with which strange events occur in itself suggests something's not quite right and I found myself wondering if Hirosuke really deserved to be in the mad house.



This all takes a back seat, though, to tension surrounding Hirosuke's attempts to live as the dead man, fooling his wife, mistress, and household servants. And then a new mystery develops as the women are beset first by snakes and then by strange, deformed men in the bath.



I wonder if these scenes were originally set in the bath in the source novel. This is another film based on a book by Edogawa Rampo and his famous detective, Kogoro Akechi, eventually shows up played by Minoru Oki. But it feels almost like an afterthought.



There's some post modern humour here and there, like a scene where three people who discover a dead body deliberately sabotage their characters as if to show up the inevitably artificial quality of film. Despite this and some gratuitous nudity, the film has some really effective subtext about identity and guilt. And not all the kinky stuff is a detour--Hirosuke discovers the strange man is the leader of a secret society of deformed men and beautiful women who engage in weird body paint performance art.

Sometimes a movie is great in spite of its lead actor and that's the case with 1955's The Quatermass Xperiment. A classic in weird science fiction dread, this is a film that shows an understanding of how the unimaginably strange might interact with the perfectly mundane to horrifying effect.



The director, the effects people, the producers, and most of the actors seem to have understood. Certainly the source material, the 1953 television serial, understood and in the two surviving episodes one can still appreciate the terrible mixture of anxiety, sorrow, and desperation in Reginald Tate's performance as Quatermass. But sadly, Tate's death and Hammer's desire to appeal to American audiences led to the casting of American actor Brian Donlevy in the first film adaptation.



To compare the two works is to see how much it matters when an actor understands the fundamental issues at play in the work as a whole. Donlevy doesn't get it and probably didn't care--he flatly barks orders to police and scientists, delivering lines about the importance of detaining the infected space man and the strange alien plantlife like he's ordering his secretary to get coffee. He keeps the film from being a masterpiece but there is still plenty to appreciate about it.



The television serial putting the site of the rocket's crash landing in a flat probably helped the show's budget and allowed the strangeness of the ship's presence alongside the ordinary residents and cops to have an effect. But the film version putting the rocket in a country field makes a wonderful impression and nearby residents are established well enough to give an idea of the existential disruption of the thing.



Richard Wordsworth as Victor Carroon is very good as the monster to Quatermass' Dr. Frankenstein, the man infected with some kind of space virus slowly turning him into a man eating plant. It's a nice transposition of the kind of experience with disease resulting from European contact with the Americas and considering how much of Carroon's story involves his inability to connect with others because of his body one could say it works as a metaphor for syphilis. The impending catastrophe promised by the full effect of his disease might be taken as the effect of European disease on Native American peoples.



And as in that case, it's clear the framework of civilisation has no means of coping with it or even recognising it. A television broadcast on a restoration Westminster Abbey can't even contemplate stopping production until the menace is actually visible on camera.



It's a lovely, mostly effective film filled with great atmosphere.