by Wallace, Amy
11. Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Tony Randel, 1988): A marked improvement over the first film in the long-exhausted Hellraiser franchise, Hellbound takes us to some very Lovecraftian regions that Lovecraft implied, but never quite had the nerve to visit himself.
12. Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro, 2004): This adaptation of Mike Mignola’s comic culminates in one of the most visually delightful encounters with the Great Old Ones ever filmed.
13. The Blob (Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., 1958): When all is said and done, this archetypal fifties horror flick owes much to the pernicious meteorite from “The Colour Out of Space” and the shoggoths of At the Mountains of Madness.
ROBERT KURTZMAN’S TEN FAVORITE
CREATURE FEATURES
Robert Kurtzman is a director/producer and award-winning FX creator. He directed such horror films as Wishmaster, Buried Alive, and The Rage. He wrote the original storyline for Quentin Tarantino’s script From Dusk Till Dawn, and coproduced thefilm as well. He was also executive producer of the Albert Brooks/Leelee Sobieski film My First Mister for Paramount Classics.In1988he opened KNB EFX Group with partners Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero. His credits appear on hundreds of movies, including John Carpenter’s Vampires and In the Mouth of Madness, Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness and Evil Dead 2, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
1. John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982): This film still stands up after twenty-five years and in my opinion is the greatest rubbermonster film ever made. With outstanding creature effects by a then very young Rob Bottin, it was one of the films that made me want to become an FX artist. The effects were created practically before the advent of CGI. It came out the same summer as ET and Poltergeist. I was seventeen and so blown away by the film and the effects that I went to see it every day for a solid week.
2. James Cameron’s Aliens (1986): I saw this film while working on EvilDead2 and it brought tears to my eyes. I love the original film and was skeptical a sequel would be as good. But the mixing of sci-fi, action, and horror created a whole new direction. The film is a nonstop, adrenaline-fueled slice of movie heaven, and isn’t just one of the best creature effects films, but one of my favorite films of all time. The Queen Alien, designed by James Cameron and executed brilliantly by Stan Winston’s FX team, is one of the best creature creations ever put on film. The power loader fight between Ripley and the queen mixes one-quarterscale miniature cable-controlled puppets with a life-size animatronic version to perfection.
3. Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979): My mom dropped me and a friend off at the movies on a Saturday afternoon while she went shopping. We told her we were seeing a different film, and snuck in. We’d seen the trailer with the egg cracking and the green light coming out and truthfully, we weren’t sure what we were getting into. We just loved the title and you could count us in for anything sci-fi with monsters and special FX; after all, it was only two years after Star Wars came out. We got our popcorn and Cokes and took our seats. We were only ones in the theater. The lights dimmed and the movie began. For the first half-hour or so we felt pretty secure, intrigued but on familiar ground . . . until the chest-burster scene. After that, all bets were off. We had no clue where it was going to go. We were horrified, but our eyes were glued to the screen. We were never the same again. That image would be burned into my mind’s eye forever. And I’m thankful for that.
4. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975): This is one of those films that, no matter when it’s on, I have to watch it. I was only 11 years old when it came out, erupting into a summer of shark fever. It was the first of the big summer blockbusters and it changed the summer movie experience forever. To me, it’s a perfect film, even though the mechanical shark doesn’t really hold up by today’s animatronic standards. It’s Spielberg’s masterful handling of suspense and minimalist approach to how he shows the shark which keeps Jaws from showing its age.
5. Jack Arnold’s Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954): The technical perfection of the Creature suit was way ahead of its time. Beautifully sculpted, designed, and constructed by Milicent Patrick under supervision of Bud Westmore, it is still to this day one of movie history’s greatest creature suits, both in design and execution. From the time of its release to today, it has inspired generations of effects artists.
6. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933): Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion Kong was completely convincing at the time and even for me as a child, in the sixties, I was completely mesmerized. It was on TV every Thanksgiving and every year I couldn’t wait to sit with a bowl of chips and a Coke and enjoy the magic. It was one of the earliest films I’d seen that stirred my imagination and my interest in visual effects.
7. Gordon Douglas’s Them (1954): I first saw this film on a late Friday night as a kid. I was watching a late night horror host show, and at the time, my dad was working second shift and he got in a little after midnight every night. The night my dad came home and found me watching Them, he told me a great story about when he first saw the film as a kid. He’d saved up his money to go see it at the local theater in my hometown called the Crest Theater. It was a 1950s single-screen theater in the center of town. He and his friends were terrified after seeing it, and he had to walk all the way home from the theater that night, which was about a mile. It was a windy night with tree branches creaking all around him. He ran all the way home, terrified that “Them” were right behind him, ready to snatch him up in their pinchers! He told me it was the scariest film he’d ever seen as a kid. For me, those giant ants were a marvel to behold as a kid. I’ll never forget the cold stare of the little girl when she sits up in the car after hearing the sounds from the ants out in the desert.
8. Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968): John Chambers won an honorary Oscar for his makeup FX work in creating a future planet Earth ruled by talking apes. The performances brought the makeups to life and elevated what could have been a really cheesy concept to a sci-fi classic. It was also one of the first films that introduced me to the idea of a paradox. The film was followed by numerous sequels and was one of the first films to take advantage of mass merchandising. I remember having the Planet of the Apes action figures and lunch boxes as a kid. A few years ago I purchased the re-issue of the figures in yet another attempt to recapture my youth, or at least, on occasion, glimpse at it.
9. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003): Peter Jackson and his FX team, led by Richard Taylor, had to be very creative and frugal early in their careers while working on no-budget horror films in New Zealand. They put every dime onto the screen, no matter what they had to work with. It’s that ability to make movie magic with limited resources that made Peter and Richard the perfect team to tackle Lord of the Rings. Don’t get me wrong; the series is far from cheap at $300 million for three films, but Peter and Richard and their partners and collaborators put $600 million on the screen. They packed so much heart, incredible images of Middle Earth, and fantastic creatures into those films that it brought back the child in all of us. It reminded me of the first time I’d seen King Kong or Jasonand theArgonauts as a kid and how blown away and inspired I’d felt. The trilogy is one of the best cinematic experiences I’ve ever witnessed and features some of the most incredible creature FX, both CGI and practical, ever achieved.
10. Ridley Scott’s Legend (1985): Darkness and Meg Mucklebones: two incredible creatures and two amazing performances (Tim Curry as Darkness and Robert Picardo as Meg Mucklebones). Rob Bottin, hot off his groundbreaking work on Joe Dante’s The Howling and John Carpenter’s The Thing, creates more classic movie creatures.
BOB BURNS’S EIGHT WORST
MONSTER MOVIE COSTUMES
BobBurns began his career as an apprentice to legendary makeup man Paul Blaisdell in the mid-fifties, working on the monsters in Invasion of the Saucermen, The She Creature, and It Conquered the World. Burns serves as the technical consultant for the Discovery Channel’s Movie Magic series, and co-hosts the “Bob’s Basement” segments on the Sci-
FiChannel’s news magazine Sci-Fi Buzz. He lives in Burbank, where he curates the Bob Burns Museum, which contains one of the largest collections of movie props and antique toys in the United States.
1. Creeping Terror: It looks like a rolled-up rug that goes around eating people by sucking them into it. I think it was an old, used rug.
2. Phantom Planet: The monster looks like Goofy or Pluto with a rubber body that has craters on it. His tongue is even sticking out.
Phantom Planet (Photograph provided by Bob Burns)
3. Beast from the Haunted Cave: A chicken-wire frame covered with a bunch of angel hair. The rest of the body is anybody’s guess.
4. Giant Leeches: They look like black rain coats with doughnutsize tentacles glued on.
5. Frankenstein’s Daughter: One of the worst makeups in history.
Frankenstein’s Daughter (Photograph provided by Bob Burns)
6. Killers from Space: These guys wore tights and hoods, and had ping pong balls for eyes.
Killers from Space (Photograph provided by Bob Burns)
7. Night of the Blood Beast: This monster had a big head that looked like a parrot’s, and the body looks like a piece of crap with horse hair glued on it.
8. Eye Creatures: This is a horrible remake of Invasion of the Saucermen, and the costumes are really bad. They look like jumpsuits with eyeballs glued all over them, and big heads with gaping mouths. It also looks like they could only afford one complete costume, as the rest are only the top torso with jeans for the rest of the suit. This film is so bad that it makes the original Saucermen that Paul Blaisdale and I worked on look like an A-film.
PROFESSOR PAUL M. JENSEN’S TEN FAVORITE
TWO-CHARACTER SCENES FEATURING BORIS KARLOFF
(PLUS ONE BONUS)
Professor Paul M. Jensen teaches courses in film history and appreciation at SUNY–Oneonta. He is the author of four books: The Cinema of Fritz Lang (1969), Boris Karloff and His Films (1974), The Men Who Made the Monsters (1996), and Hitchcock Becomes “Hitchcock” (2000). He has also contributed articles on film related subjects to numerous periodicals, including Film Comment, Films in Review, Scarlet Street, Headpress, and Video Watchdog. He appears in documentaries on the DVD releases of seven Universal Studios horror classics—Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Phantom of the Opera, It Came from Outer Space, and Creature from the Black Lagoon—and also provides an audio commentary for The Mummy. Paul also memorably played “the Blind Man” in the classic grindhouse horror film Last House on Dead End Street (1973),written and directed by the late Roger Watkins.
1. With Clark Marshall, in The Criminal Code (1931)
Karloff is consistently impressive as Galloway, a hardened criminal who nonetheless projects a kind of unsentimental decency in this prison story. The scene in which he “executes” Runch, a squealer, is played in long shot, with Karloff’s back to the camera, emphasizing the dynamic stillness and abrupt, compact movements of his lean frame. In this pasdedeux, he flicks a knife into view, then blocks his cringing quarry’s attempts to escape, first with a slight shift to the right, then four graceful steps to the left, and finally a slow advance that herds Runch into a back room—while the sound of yelling prisoners outside provides counterpoint to the silent stalking within.
2. With Edward G. Robinson, in Five Star Final (1931)
Karloff has several notable scenes as Isopod, an unctuous newspaper reporter who is also a sexual predator. It is especially gratifying to see him share the screen with Edward G. Robinson, playing his editor. Isopod has tricked some embarrassing information out of an inoffensive couple, and now, heavy-lidded inebriation heightens his smug self-satisfaction and phony moral indignation as he declares, “I was shocked, Mr. Randall, shocked!” The vibrant Robinson takes it all in, as Karloff dominates the scene and, for the moment, his boss.
3. With Robert Young, in The Guilty Generation (1931)
An early scene between a successful gangster (Karloff) and the son who has disowned him (Robert Young) captures more nuances than its creators may have expected. The smooth-faced youth is righteous, preachy, and sure of himself. His father, seriously flawed as a person and a parent, shifts between relaxed openness and a mixture of hurt and anger, with anger dominant. The muscles in Karloff’s face tense as the son describes how horrible it was to have him as a father, making this “bad” man more complex and comprehensible than his “good” but shallow offspring.
4. With Zita Johann, in The Mummy (1932)
When Ardath Bey (Karloff) and Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann) first meet, they feel a riveting connection without either person knowing why. Locked in a mutual, hypnotic stare, they speak mundane, polite dialogue (“I called to see Sir Joseph.”; “He’s in the study.”) that is belied by the haunted quality of their voices and the strength of their gaze. Time seems to stand still as they hover in the dimly lit room, interacting in the present, yet existing apart from the concrete world around them. For once, Karloff is granted a scene with a woman who, like him, looks and sounds exotic but in a muted, natural way.
5. With Lawrence Grant, in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
The first encounter between this Chinese villain-hero (Karloff) and an Englishman introduces some surprising racial implications. Sir Lionel Barton (Lawrence Grant), as if unaware that he is a prisoner, automatically talks as if he has power and authority. “I want to know the meaning of this!” he demands. “You’ll answer my question!” When Barton asks, “You’re Fu Manchu, aren’t you?” his captor responds, “I am a doctor of philosophy from Edinburgh. I am a doctor of law from Christ College. I am a doctor of medicine from Harvard. My friends—out of courtesy— call me ‘Doctor.’ ” This elicits only sarcasm and condescension from Barton, and when the Doctor speaks of having some ancient artifacts returned, Barton snaps back, “Our English people like to look at them on holidays!” In short, Fu Manchu, for all his mercilessness, has dignity, wit, and polite sophistication— qualities alien to the Englishman’s knee-jerk assumption of natural superiority. As a result, whether intended or not, the film makes clear why Dr. Fu Manchu could resent what he later calls the “accursed white race.”
6. With Bela Lugosi, in The Raven (1935)
Although this movie as a whole belongs to Bela Lugosi, in their first scene together Karloff (as Bateman, a murderer) and Lugosi (as Dr. Vollin, a surgeon) are perfectly balanced, so that the reluctantly violent Bateman’s helpless physicality contrasts dramatically with the enthusiastic sadism of the intellectually superior Vollin. In the process, Karloff speaks what has become one of my favorite catch-phrases, Bateman’s sad rationalization of his brutality: “Sometimes you can’t help—things like that.”
7. With O. P. Heggie, in Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
In his second scene with the elderly blind man (O. P. Heggie), the Frankenstein Monster (Karloff) experiences a wide range of emotions—including that rarity, happiness—and passes through several compressed stages of education. We have the privilege of watching this dangerously bewildered victim gain knowledge and insight. The scene is an audacious one that courts absurdity, but director James Whale and his actors maintain a steady tone of honest feeling and human comedy instead of slipping into sentimentality and broad parody.
8. With Karloff, in The Black Room (1935)
Karloff plays twin brothers with very different personalities, so seeing them interact is both a technical accomplishment and, more important, an acting achievement. True, at this point the arrogant Gregor is pretending to be friendly to the naive Anton, so the scene does not strike the hoped-for confrontational sparks. Nonetheless, it provides a gratifying contrast between the disheveled, sprawling crudeness of Gregor and the gentle, rather prim stability of his brother, and between the guttural speech of the former and the latter’s softer tones.
9. With Henry Daniell, in The Body Snatcher (1945)
Two of the most resonant voices in film history—belonging to a pair of powerfully intense a
ctors—speak this script’s literate dialogue when Cabman Gray (Karloff) and Dr. MacFarlane (Daniell) converse in a pub. Many complex qualities emerge during the second such scene, including the men’s mutual hatred and equally mutual need for each other. As they discuss the difference between knowledge and understanding, the grave robber and sometime murderer reveals a sensitive, even gentle, side, while the healer emits icy ruthlessness. It’s safe to say that neither actor was ever better, as each builds on what the other provides.
10. With Peter Bogdanovich, in Targets (1968)
In a scene of fictional autobiography, Karloff portrays an aging horror star and Peter Bogdanovich, this film’s writer/director, plays his on-screen writer/director. In one scene, we spend several minutes with what appears to be a relaxed, natural, and very human Karloff, as well as a relaxed, natural, and very human Bogdanovich. The scene also brings Karloff’s career full circle when the two men watch The Criminal Code on television and react to the very scene cited above. Bogdanovich disappointedly declares, “All the good movies have been made,” and Karloff states that he couldn’t “play a straight part decently anymore,” but these comments are belied by the very film we are watching.
