by Randy Palmer
Like the outer brain hemispheres, the vile visage of the Saucer Man was first rendered in water-based clay over a plaster base. Drops of water were periodically added to the clay to keep it soft and pliable, allowing Blaisdell to tweak the design until it satisfied him completely. He began by shaping the brow, the main portion of the skull that would later be attached to the brain. Oversized eye sockets and a unique, triple-lipped mouth were added, as well as the suggestion of a nose cavity. The ears and eyes were fashioned separately.
Blaisdell made a total of five latex faces from a positive mold. Each was texturized with special tools to give the skin a porous appearance. Veins made out of latex ribbons were added around the mouth and along the cheekbones. Each face was later joined to a fiberglass shell and painted.
Elongated ears, resembling a cross between those created for the three-eyed Atomic Mutant of Day the World Ended and the amphibious She-Creature, were fashioned separately from latex brushed over a positive mold. When dry, the rubber was removed and stuffed with cotton to preserve the original shape, then resealed with an additional layer of latex.
Instead of plastic, Blaisdell made eyes out of Styrofoam for Invasion of the Saucer Men. There were two reasons for choosing Styrofoam over plastic. Most importantly, for a scene in which one of the Martians has its eyeball gored by an irate bull, Styrofoam would make the effect much easier to pull off. Secondly, for the climax of the film, there was going to be a scene in which the Martians’ eyes suddenly constrict as the creatures are surrounded by blinding car headlights. Although this effect was never filmed, Blaisdell made the necessary preparations for it by creating a series of slitted, snakelike pupils, each set smaller than the one before it, that could be made to stick to the Styrofoam. The plan was to film the effect in a series of stop-motion sequences. With the camera locked into position, one frame of film would be exposed of the normal eyes. Blaisdell would then remove the pupils and replace them with the next set, another frame of film would be exposed, and so on. This process would continue until the pupils disappeared completely from the white of the eye, and the film would return to live action as the Martians exploded in a puff of smoke. The interchangeable pupils were made out of bits of black, self-sticking “blooping tape” (used during the 1950s to produce “wipes” and similar effects on previously exposed film). This method would have allowed for quick changes between exposures of the film, but the idea was nixed during preproduction.
Special Styrofoam eyeballs that had been hollowed out on the inside were made separately for the hero head. This consisted of just the face and part of the exterior brain. It was left open in the back so that Blaisdell could operate the mouth and eyes from inside. By pressing his fingers against the hollowed-out Styrofoam spheres, Blaisdell could make the eyes shift slightly, even getting them to look cross-eyed if he wanted. He was also able to wrinkle the rubber material between the eyes and the top of the “nose,” making it appear as if the creature was snarling like a werewolf. (Actually the Martians had no noses, merely triangular nostrils.) The lips could also be made to move by manipulating a wire attached to them from inside the head. Twisting the wire would pull the rubber to either side or push it outward, giving a little bit of animation to otherwise immobile features. Unfortunately, like many of the attributes found in other Blaisdell creations, these effects were never really utilized. (Blaisdell did manage to pull off some of his Saucer Man tricks in a couple of self-produced featurettes he offered for sale to readers of his own magazine, Fantastic Monsters of the Films. More about that later.)
The hero head was rigged with an inexpensive system of pumps and tubes which allowed Blaisdell to squirt “venom” (actually ordinary tap water) through the open mouth. Although the effect was seen only very briefly on screen, it was effective for its time. The venom effect was not something which had been written into the film script; it was an effect Paul originated. The idea was that the Saucer Man would “spit” at an approaching enemy as a sort of warning to keep away. The effect was achieved by filling a rubber ear syringe with tap water and squirting it through a tube fitted to the syringe that ran to the mouth of the head. When the film began rolling, Blaisdell pumped the “venom” up the tube so that it shot straight toward the camera lens in a thin stream. The same equipment was used to film a similar scene in which a Saucer Man begins drooling, but that shot did not make it into the final cut of the film.
While Blaisdell and Burns were filming these insert effects (which were, incidentally, directed by Blaisdell himself), an effects artist named Wah Chang was working in the same studio on a picture called The Black Scorpion, which was master animator Willis O’Brien’s swan song. Chang was involved in setting up The Black Scorpion’s single live-action effect, an oversized, drooling head of the title monster. On this particular day, he had forgotten to bring an ear syringe, which he was using to make the scorpion drool. When he noticed that Blaisdell was using the same device for Saucer Men, he wandered over and asked if he might borrow it. “Paul did better than that,” Burns noted. “We had two ear syringes, so Paul just gave him one.”
Paul had planned on using the second ear syringe to create a “tearing effect” for the climax of Saucer Men. He had drilled “tear ducts” into the inside corners of the eyes of the Martian hero head, where he could insert plastic tubing that would carry water forward from the ear syringes. The idea was that the bright lights that doomed the aliens to extinction would first cause the monsters’ eyes to tear up. Paul and Bob rehearsed the effect and it worked perfectly, but it was just one more thing that got discarded along the way.
These minor effects—the shifting eyeballs, the constricting pupils, the spitting venom, the wrinkling of the “nose”—were a testament to Blaisdell’s ingenuity and ability to solve problems on a nearly nonexistent budget. But inventive as his handiwork was, these were merely minor appurtenances when compared to the film’s major effects set pieces: the flying saucer, the disembodied walking claw, the battle of the beasts (Martian and bull), and the “hypo-nails.”
Blaisdell later spoke about the disembodied hand:
The “seeing-eye hand” was one of the funniest elements of the story, and one that was going to be used extensively throughout the filming. The way I designed the eyeball on the Martian hand, it could look all around, back and forth, and signal the hand that everything was okay by nodding it up and down, and just tell the hand to go on about its business. If somebody had sneezed, for example, the eye on the hand would whip right around and look at him. But, except for one or two brief shots, they never used it in the film. “No time, no money, no film. Blah, blah, blah!’’
Blaisdell made just a single fully functioning “seeing-eye claw” for Saucer Men. Each of the claws worn by the actors playing the aliens had its own eyeball, but it wasn’t necessary (nor would it have been practical) to make them all operational. The claws were built directly over store-bought vinyl gloves. Almost every inch of the gloves was covered with rubber latex veins which were air-brushed the same desert-brown color as the headpieces. A subassembly consisting of a raised cavity outfitted with a plastic eyeball was later glued to the top of each hand to complete the design. (Blaisdell opted to use plastic spheres instead of Styrofoam for the hand-mounted eyeballs because plastic was easier to paint.)
The disembodied Martian claw was fashioned out of a glove and latex in much the same way as the standard claws. But whereas the eyes on the claws designed for the actors were stationary, the “hero claw” possessed a fully rotating orb. Its degree of rotation as well as its speed could be controlled by a removable crank mechanism which Blaisdell made out of coat hanger wire. Although Paul later modified the gimmick so that it would work with his hand inside the claw-glove, at the time Saucer Men was made he couldn’t wear the claw at the same time he wanted to use the revolving eye effect.
The disembodied claw that menaces the teenagers in Invasion of the Saucer Men contained a crank mechanism Blaisdell could use to turn the eyeball on the
back of the hand. Push-rods attached to a small length of wood on the underside of the claw were used to extend the “hypodermic fingernails” for close-ups.
To make the eye move back and forth, Paul inserted one end of the wire through an opening in the rubber latex palm and threaded the other end into a small hole that had been drilled into the bottom of the plastic eye. The wire protruded from the latex about an inch from the palm, and this end was bent into an L-shape. Twisting the wire caused the plastic eyeball to turn. Because Blaisdell had to use his free hand to turn the crank on the underside, scenes of the rotating eyeball had to be filmed in extreme close-up.
(By the time Blaisdell’s Filmland Monsters was produced in the early 1960s,† Paul had altered the mechanics of the device so that it was possible to rotate the seeing-eye while wearing the claw. In this instance a much longer wire was used. It ran from the bottom of the plastic eye down the interior of the claw and out of the wrist. Blaisdell would wear the claw just like a glove, with the wire resting on top of his hand. He could then wiggle his fingers to give the claw a semblance of life while twisting the wire protruding from the wrist with his free hand.)
Quite a bit of footage was shot of the seeing-eye claw, but not much made it into the final cut of the film. A single close-up of the eyeball looking from right to left was edited into the scene in which a Saucer Man’s hand detaches itself from the arm, just to introduce the idea to the viewer that this five-fingered beast knew exactly where it was going and what it was doing. Eddie Cahn eliminated almost all the other shots of the rotating eye, however, probably because he thought additional close-ups were superfluous.
In addition to its articulated eyeball, the disembodied claw was also empowered with comprehensive autonomous locomotion, at least in a sense. The script required the hand to crawl across a country road under its own power, scurry up the back seat of a moving automobile, and perform several other sleight-of-hand movements. Given the technological limits of 1957, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to manufacture an automatized, self-propelled claw without access to significant chunks of time and money.‡ That meant Blaisdell was forced once again to rely on his own ingenuity to pull off the relatively complicated effects.
The seeing-eye claw effect turned out to be easier to perfect than Blaisdell had originally believed possible. His first thought was to make a multijointed marionette claw that could be manipulated off-camera with a set of wires, but he eventually dismissed this idea as clumsy and inflexible. “Sometimes the simplest answer is the best answer, depending on circumstances,” Blaisdell said. He ended up cutting a slit large enough to accommodate his hand in the underside of the wrist section and extended the length of the wrist by building up additional layers of latex rubber which were sculpted to look like ragged, torn flesh. The wrist extension was filled with foam rubber to maintain its shape, and the foam was covered with latex and painted. A wedge of plastic with a jagged end was inserted into the open end of the wrist and bonded into position with spirit gum. After it had been painted, the plastic looked just like a broken wrist bone protruding from a dismembered claw. For a final gruesome effect, Blaisdell added dangling veins and ganglia—lengths of thin plastic tubing coated with painted latex.
Besides adding a touch of the grisly, the protruding wristbone and shredded flesh served as a kind of camouflage. Instead of wearing the claw in the ordinary (glovelike) fashion, Blaisdell pushed his hand through the wrist slit and let the extended bone section rest on top of his own forearm. When it was time to shoot the scenes featuring the crawling hand, Blaisdell wore a long-sleeved, black pullover shirt which further served to camouflage his arm. For the effect to work, it was necessary to photograph the claw against dark backgrounds. Fortunately, since Invasion of the Saucer Men took place entirely at night, this didn’t present much of a problem.
The final addition to the lineup of Martian materials was Blaisdell’s hypodermic-fingernail rig. For this effect he did not make a complete working claw, but relied on a four-finger version made out of a vinyl glove which had been cut in half above the third knuckle. Since the camera would be photographing the effect in extreme close-up, a full-figured claw was not only unnecessary, it would have made the effect more difficult to pull off.
The hypo-nails consisted of four tiny, hollow aluminum rods attached to a block of wood which fit inside the open end of the glove. When Blaisdell slid the block forward, it pushed the rods out through small holes in the latex fingertips. Each rod was attached to a tube which hooked into an ear syringe pump. Pressure on the pump bulb caused tap water to squirt through the tubes and out the fingertips. The mechanism was concealed by the material of the glove which was painted with liquid latex and covered with dozens of latex veins to match the appearance of the other claws.
After finishing up work on the Martian heads and hands Blaisdell turned his attention to designing an otherworldly “hammer” for a scene in which one of the Saucer Men pounds an incriminating dent into the fender of Johnny’s car. Paul opted to make the hammer out of plywood because the thinness of the material made it easy to work with. The design he wanted to use consisted entirely of curves, arcs, and round holes; there wasn’t a single straight line or hard edge anywhere in sight.
The extraterrestrial hammer never appeared in the film because it was broken in two just moments after Paul handed it to Angelo Rossito, one of the actors playing a Saucer Man. “Be careful with this, Angie, it’s delicate,” Paul warned. “You’ll have to fake the scene.” Rossito decided to test the hammer by smacking it against the nearest table. Sure enough, the plywood splintered on impact. Angelo turned around and dropped the pieces in Blaisdell’s lap. “Now I really will have to fake it,” he muttered. Blaisdell was able to patch the prop back together but Eddie Cahn decided not to use it after all, opting instead for a mechanical drill that one of the prop men happened to find lying around the studio. (Paul’s Martian hammer did turn up in a couple of AIP promotional photos. If you look closely, you can see a line near the top of the prop where it was glued back together.)
The broken hammer was actually the least of Paul’s worries. When he arrived at the AIP offices to show Jim Nicholson the finished alien outfits, coproducer Robert J. Gurney, Jr., took one look and said, “Oh, no! Those heads are way too big.” Dumbfounded, Blaisdell turned to Nicholson and reminded him, “But that’s what we all agreed on. Little green guys with big brainy heads and bulging eyes. Remember, Nick?”
“I don’t care,” Gurney interrupted, “we can’t use those heads. They’re just too damn big.” The soft-spoken Nicholson could barely get a word in during Gurney’s oral onslaught. Bob Burns later recalled how annoyed his friend was about making a last-minute change:
Paul had built the Saucer Men heads bigger than he normally would have because that’s what AIP told him they wanted. “Real big brain heads, that’s what we want. Make ’em as big as you can.” Those were the instructions they gave Paul. Then, when he saw them, the coproducer said, “Oh, we don’t want them that big. You’ll have to make them smaller.” Make them smaller? How do you make them smaller without starting over? They’ve been made out of fiberglass, they’re completely molded and painted and ready to go. It really pissed Paul off.
Since there wasn’t time to construct new heads from scratch, Blaisdell did the only thing he could do under the circumstances: he lobotomized his Martian monsters. Making a fiberglass and rubber monster mask smaller was, naturally, a bit more complicated than making it larger. Blaisdell already knew that film producers could sometimes be shortsighted with their eleventh hour demands for cosmetic changes to costumes and props, having been through some nerve-wracking situations with the folks at American International on previous occasions. Whipping up a monster mask and pair of paws as part of Cat Girl ’s 48-hour rescue mission and redesigning Harry Thomas’s dreadful Voodoo Woman mask were just a couple of instances. The producers’ decision to pull an about-face so late in the game when it came to the cranial meas
urements of the Saucer Men infuriated Blaisdell, who thought that Gurney was making unnecessary waves in what had so far been a relatively calm sea. But Gurney had Nicholson’s ear, and the order had been given. Now the ball was in Blaisdell’s court.
The only practical way to “shrink” the Saucer Men heads was to literally attack them with knives and scissors. By cutting a pie-shaped wedge out of the back of each fiberglass unit, Paul could reduce the overall volume by nearly a third. After the material had been cut away, the exposed edges were pushed together and fastened in place with bonding cement. Because the Saucer Men heads had been constructed out of two sections to start with (the fiberglass brain and the rubber face), altering the measurements of the brain had a negligible impact on the existing facial structure. (Some twisting or wrinkling of the rubber features was easily fixed with patches of latex and coloring.) When Paul and Jackie finished lobotomizing the Saucer Men, they no longer resembled the big-brained beings of Nicholson’s original vision; instead, as Bob Burns was fond of pointing out: “They became cabbage heads. They were more rounded and looked just like heads of cabbage. Promotional photos survive of the original design, however.”
Once the reconstructed masks were delivered to the cast and crew, Invasion of the Saucer Men began its short seven-day shooting schedule, which included three days of monster footage with the dwarf actors and a day of special effects utilizing the Martian hero head and other props.
All of the shots of the creatures’ extended hypo-nails were filmed on the final day of shooting. Only minimal participation was required from the cast and crew, so nearly everything during this stage was done by Blaisdell and Bob Burns. Burns stood in for Steve Terrell in several scenes, most notably during the crawling hand sequence in the police cruiser, and also doubled Lyn Osborne, who had a problem working with some of the effects.