by Stephen King
Omega, the horror film sings in those children's voices. Here is the end. Yet the ultimate subtext that underlies all good horror films is, But not yet. Not this time. Because in the final sense, the horror movie is the celebration of those who feel they can examine death because it does not yet live in their own hearts.
CHAPTER VII
The Horror Movie as Junk Food
By now, serious horror fans may be wondering uneasily if I have lost my wits--always assuming I had any to begin with. I've found a few (very few, it's true, but still a few) good things to say about The Amityville Horror, and have even mentioned Prophecy, generally agreed to be a terrible horror movie, in a light not exactly unfavorable. If you are one of these uneasy ones, I must add to your feelings by telling you that I intend to say a great many good things about the Englishman James Herbert, author of The Rat, The Fog, and The Survivor in a later chapter--but that is a different case, because Herbert is not a bad novelist; he is simply regarded as one by fantasy fans who've not read his work.
I am no apologist for bad filmmaking, but once you've spent twenty years or so going to horror movies, searching for diamonds (or diamond-chips) in the dreck of the B-pics, you realize that if you don't keep your sense of humor, you're done for. You also begin to seek the patterns and appreciate them when you find them.
There's something else that needs saying here, too, and I might as well give it to you straight from the shoulder: once you've seen enough horror films, you begin to get a taste for really shitty movies. Films that are just bad (like The Comeback, Jack Jones's ill-advised foray into the field of the horror film) can be dismissed impatiently, with never a backward glance. But real fans of the genre look back on a film like The Brain from Planet Arous (It Came From Another World WITH AN INSATIABLE LUST FOR EARTH WOMEN!) with something like real love. It is the love one spares for an idiot child, true, but love is love, right? Right.
In this spirit, let me quote--in its marvelous entirety--a review from The Castle of Frankenstein's TV Movieguide. The Movieguide was published in the magazine at irregular intervals right up until the day when Calvin Beck's remarkable journal ceased publication. This review is, in fact, from the Movieguide which appeared in the last issue of CofF, #24. Here is what an uncredited reviewer (Beck himself, perhaps) had to say about the 1953 movie Robot Monster: It is a handful of flicks like this that makes all these listing chores [i.e., The Movieguide feature] something to look forward to. Certainly among the finest terrible movies ever made, this ridiculous gem presents as economical a space invasion as ever committed to film: one (1) Ro-Man invader consisting of (a) a gorilla suit, (b) a diving helmet with a set of antennae. Hiding out in one of the more familiar Hollywood caves with his extraterrestrial bubble machine (no, we're not being facetious: it actually is a 2-way "alien" radio-TV thing, consisting of an old war-surplus shortwave set resting on a small kitchen table, that emits Lawrence Welk-like bubbles), Ro-Man's trying to wipe out the last six humans left on earth and thus make the planet safe for colonization by Ro-Men (from the planet Ro-Man, where else?). This early 3-D effort has attained legendary (and richly deserved) status as one of the most laughable of all poverty row quickies, although the pic does make some scatterbrained sense when viewed as a child's eye monster fantasy (it's all a dream experienced by a sci-fi-crazed '50s tyke). Rousing musical score by Elmer Bernstein is great and keeps it all moving. Directed in three frenzied days by Phil Tucker, who also did the little-known and equally hysterical Lenny Bruce vehicle, DANCE HALL RACKET.
Stars George Nader, Claudia Barrett, John Mylong, Selena Royle.
Ah, Selena, where are you now?
I have seen the film discussed in this review, and will personally testify that every word is true. A bit further on in this chapter we will listen to what CofF had to say about two other legendary bad movies, The Blob and Invasion of the Saucer Men, but I don't believe my heart can stand it right now. Let me just add that I made a grave mistake concerning Robot Monster (and Ro-Man can be seen, in a mad sort of way, as the forerunner of the evil Cylons in Battlestar Galactica) about ten years ago. It came on the Saturday night Creature Feature, and I prepared for the occasion by smoking some pretty good reefer. I don't smoke dope often, because when stoned everything strikes me funny. That night I almost laughed myself into a hernia. Tears were rolling down my cheeks and I was literally on the floor for most of the movie. Luckily, the movie only runs sixty-three minutes; another twenty minutes of watching Ro-Man tune his war-surplus shortwave/bubble machine in "one of the more familiar Hollywood caves" and I think I would have laughed myself to death.
Since any affectionate discussion of really horrible movies (as opposed to horror movies) is in the nature of a breast baring, I must admit here that I not only liked John Frankenheimer's Prophecy, I actually saw it three times. The only bad movie to equal this score in my personal pantheon is the William Friedkin movie Sorcerer. I liked that one because there were a lot of close-ups in it of sweaty people working hard and laboring machines; truck engines and huge wheels spinning in soupy mud and frayed fanbelts on the giant screen. Great stuff. I thought Sorcerer was marvelous fun.1
But never mind Friedkin; onward into the Maine woods with John Frankenheimer. Except that the film was really shot on location in Washington State . . . and looks it. This film concerns a public health officer (Robert Foxworth) and his wife (Talia Shire) who come to Maine to investigate possible water pollution infractions on the part of a paper mill. The movie is apparently supposed to be set somewhere in northern Maine--perhaps in the Allagash--but David Seltzer's screenplay has somehow transferred an entire southern Maine county a hundred and fifty miles north. Just another example of the magic of Hollywood, I guess. In the TV version of 'Salem's Lot, Paul Monash's screenplay has the little town of Salem's Lot located on the outskirts of Portland . . . but the young lovers, Ben and Susan, blithely go off to the movies in Bangor at one point--a three-hour drive. Hi-ho.
Foxworth is a figure that any dedicated horror-movie buff has seen a hundred times before: the Dedicated Young Scientist with Just a Touch of Gray in His Hair. His wife wants a baby, but Foxworth refuses to bring a kid into a world where rats sometimes eat babies and the technological society keeps dumping radioactive waste into the oceans. He jumps at the trip to Maine to get away from patching up ratbites for awhile. His wife jumps at it because she's pregnant and wants to break it to him gently. As dedicated to the idea of zero population growth as he may be, Foxworth has apparently left all the responsibility for actually preventing the baby to his wife, who, played by Ms. Shire, succeeds in looking extremely tired throughout the film. We can readily believe she may be whoopsing her cookies every morning.
But once in Maine, this slightly odd couple finds a lot of other stuff going on as well. The Indians and the paper company are at swords' points over the alleged pollution issue; early on, one of the company men nearly opens up the leader of the Indian protestors with a Steihl chainsaw. Nasty. Nastier still are the evidences of pollution. Foxworth notices that the old Indian wallah (one dares not call him Chief) is regularly burning his hands with his cigarettes because he feels no pain--a classic sign of mercury poisoning, Foxworth tells Shire gravely. A tadpole the size of a salmon jumps up on the bank of the lake, and while fishing Foxworth sees a salmon roughly the size of Flipper.
Unfortunately for his pregnant wife, Foxworth catches some fish and they eat them. Very bad for the baby, as it turns out . . . although the question of exactly what Ms. Shire may deliver a few months down the road is left to our imaginations. By the time we finish the movie, the question seems less than burning.
Mutated babies are discovered in a net placed in a stream--horrible, rugose things with black eyes and malformed bodies, things that mewl and cry in almost human voices. These "children" are the movie's one startling effect.
Mother is out there someplace . . . and she makes her appearance soon enough, looking sort of like a skinned pig and sort of like a bear turned insid
e-out. It pursues Foxworth, Shire, and the motley band they are a part of. A helicopter pilot has his head crunched off (but it is a discreet crunch; this is a PG movie) and the Bad Old Executive Who Has Told Lies at Every Turn is similarly gobbled up. At one point the monster-mother wades across a lake that looks like it might be a child's wading pool shot from table-top level (bringing back fond memories of such Japanese triumphs of special-effects technology as Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster) and crashes its way into a cabin where the dwindling band of refugees has taken refuge. Although he is presented to us as a city boy from the word go, Foxworth manages to dispatch the monster with a bow and arrow. And as Foxworth and Shire fly out of the wilderness, another monster rears its shaggy head to stare after their departing light plane.
George Romero's film Dawn of the Dead came out at about the same time as Prophecy (June-July 1979) and I found it remarkable (and amusing) that Romero had made a horror film for about two million dollars that managed to look like six million, while Frankenheimer made a twelve-million-dollar movie that managed to look like about two.
Lots of stuff is wrong with the Frankenheimer film. None of the major Indian parts are played by real Indians; the old Indian wallah has a teepee in a northern New England area which was populated by lodge-building Indians; the science, while not completely wrong, is used in an opportunistic way that is not really fair considering the fact that the movie's makers purported to have made a movie of "social conscience"; the characters are stock; the special effects (with the exception of those weird baby mutants) are bad.
All of that I will cheerfully agree to. But I come stubbornly, helplessly back to the fact that I liked Prophecy, and just writing about it has made me long to rush out and see it a fourth (and maybe a fifth) time. I mentioned that you begin to see and appreciate patterns in horror movies, and to love them. These patterns are sometimes as stylized as the movements in a Japanese noh play or the passages in a John Ford western. And Prophecy is a throwback to the fifties horror films as surely as the Sex Pistols and the Ramones are throwbacks to the "dirty white boys" of the rockabilly explosion in 1956-1959.
For me, settling into Prophecy is as comfortable as settling into an old easy chair and visiting with good friends. All the components are there; Robert Foxworth could as easily be Hugh Marlowe from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers or Richard Carlson in It Came from Outer Space or Richard Denning in The Black Scorpion. Talia Shire could as easily be Barbara Rush or Mara Corday or one of half a dozen other monster-movie heroines from that same Big Bug era (although I would be lying if I didn't admit to some disappointment in Ms. Shire, who was brilliant as Rocky Balboa's shy and hesitant amour Adrian; she's not as pretty as I remember Mara Corday being, and she never appears in a white one-piece swimsuit, when everyone knows that this particular type of horror movie demands that at one point the heroine must appear--and be menaced--while wearing a white one-piece swimsuit).
The monster is pretty hokey-looking, too. But I loved that old monster, spiritual sister to Godzilla, Mighty Joe Young, Gorgo, and all the dinosaurs that were ever embedded in ice floes and managed to get out so they could go thundering slowly down Fifth Avenue, squashing electronics shops and eating policemen; the monster in Prophecy gave me back a splendid part of my misspent youth, a part which included such irascible friends as the Venusian Ymir and the Deadly Mantis (who knocks over a city bus on which, for one splendid moment, the word TONKA can be clearly read). She's a pretty fine monster all the same.
The mercury pollution causing all those monsters is pretty good, too--an updating of the old radiation-caused-these-Big-Bugs plot device. Then there's the fact that the monster gets all the bad guys. At one point she kills a little kid, but the kid, who is on a hiking trip with his parents, really deserves to go. He has brought along his suitcase radio and is Defiling the Wilderness with Rock 'N Roll. All that is missing from Prophecy (and its omission may have only been an oversight) is a sequence where the monster stomps the rotten old paper mill flat.
The Giant Spider Invasion also comes equipped with a plot straight out of the fifties, and there were even a lot of fifties actors and actresses on view in it, including Barbara Hale and Steve Brodie . . . halfway through it, I had the feeling that what I had really stumbled on was a crazed episode of the old Perry Mason series.
In spite of the title, there is really only one giant spider, but we don't feel cheated because it's a dilly. It appears to be a Volkswagen covered with half a dozen bearskin rugs. Four spider legs, operated by people crammed inside this VW spider, one assumes, have been attached to each side. The taillights double neatly as blinking red spider eyes. It is impossible to see such a budget-conscious special effect without feeling a wave of admiration.
Other bad movies abound; each fan has his or her favorite. Who could forget the large canvas bag that was supposed to be Caltiki, the Immortal Monster in the 1959 Italian movie? Or the Japanese version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde--The Monster? Other favorites of mine include the flaming Winston cigarette filter that was supposed to be a crash-landing alien spaceship in Teenage Monster and Allison Hayes as a refugee from a pro basketball team in The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman. (If only she could have wandered across into Bert I. Gordon's The Amazing Colossal Man. . . . Think of the children if they had clicked!) Then there was the wonderful moment in the 1978 film Ruby, a routine terror job about a haunted drive-in, when one of the characters punches a button on the Coke machine and gets a cup of blood. Inside the machine, you see, all of the tubes have been hooked up to a still-warm human corpse.
In Children of Cain, a Western horror picture (almost, but not quite, up to the level of Billy the Kid Meets Dracula), John Carradine goes West with barrels of salt water instead of fresh strapped to the sides of his Conestoga wagon. All the better to preserve his collection of severed heads (maybe because the historical period would have made the Coke machine an anachronism). In one of those lost-continent-type pictures--this one starring Cesar Romero--all the dinosaurs were cartoons. Nor should we forget Irwin Allen's The Swarm, with its unbelievable matte jobs and its cast of Familiar Faces. Here is a picture that manages to even better Prophecy's time; it is a twelve-million-dollar picture that manages to look like a buck-ninety-eight.
2
From Castle of Frankenstein: The Blob This sf-horror comes out as a slightly flat imitation of both "Rebel Without a Cause" and "The Creeping Unknown." Oozing out-of-space horror consumes humans until destroyed in ridiculous ending.
This uncharacteristically out-of-patience review of a film which was the first starring vehicle for an actor who then billed himself as "Steven McQueen" ignores several fine touches: the theme song, for instance, by a group that sounds suspiciously like the Chords doing outtakes from "Sh-Boom," is played over a happy little cartoon of expanding blobs. The tune, if you care, was written by a kid named Burt Bacharach. The real blob, which arrives on earth inside a hollow meteor, looks at first like a melted blueberry Popsicle and later quite a bit like a giant Jujube. In spite of this unpromising start, the film has its genuine moments of unease and horror. The blob smoothly engulfs the arm of a farmer who has been unwise enough to touch it, and then turns a sinister red as the farmer screams in agony. Later, after McQueen and his girlfriend discover the farmer and take him to the local doctor, the blob devours first the nurse and then the doctor himself in the shadowy office. Michael J. Rodi, who brought the exact sequence to my attention in a letter following the hardcover edition of this book (which means, dear friends, that I got it wrong the first time), adds that "McQueen and his girlfriend return . . . just in time to witness the doctor clawing at his venetian blinds before being consumed."
Also, the Cof F review is uncharacteristically wrong about the film's conclusion: the blob proved immortal. It was frozen and flown up to the Arctic to await the sequel, Beware the Blob (also released as Son of the Blob). Perhaps the film's finest moment for those of us who consider ourselves connoisseurs of ba
d special effects comes when the blob swallows a small diner whole. We see the blob oozing slowly across a color photograph of the diner's interior. Admirable. Must have made Bert I. Gordon envious.
Concerning Invasion of the SaucerMen, a 1957 American-International picture, Cof F regained some of its more customary savoir faire: Ludicrous sf quickie, on lowest teenage level. Space invaders are cute little saucermen who inject alcohol into victims' veins. The ending is quite funny (hic!).
Invasion of the SaucerMen comes from AIP's Brass Age (it really can't be called AIP's Golden Age; that came later, during the spate of films loosely based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe--most of those were pretty stupid, wandering far afield from the source material, but at least they were pretty to look at). The picture was shot in seven days, and in the conclusion, the Heroic Teenagers use their hot-red headlights to "light" the monsters to death. Wasn't Elisha Cook, Jr., killed in the first reel, as he was so often? And Nick Adams can be seen in the background wearing his hat backwards--what a crazy kid, right? The monsters are like, all wasted, so let's go down to the malt shop, daddy-O!
In a later example of AIP low-budget mania, Invasion of the Star Creatures (1962), a group of Army men stranded in the trackless desert encounter a group of female invaders from space. All of these female invaders have beehive hairdos and look like Jacqueline Kennedy. Much is made of the fact that these fellows are totally cut off from the outside world and must deal with the problem themselves, but there are jeep tracks all over the place (not to mention a lot of foam rocks and, in several scenes, the shadow of the boom mike used to record the sound). One suspects that the film's utterly sleazy look may have come about because the producers overspent on star power; the cast list included such well-loved lights of the American cinema as Bob Ball, Frankie Ray, and Gloria Victor.