by Randy Palmer
In his personal quarters, Johnson uses a remote control device to open a concealed door that houses an interplanetary matter transmitter. Through this device he is able to communicate with his home planet and receive instructions from the Controller (also Paul Birch), who outlines a six-part plan to subjugate the human race.
Periodically Johnson fries the brains of unfortunates who happen to cross his path (including Dick Miller in a cameo role as Joe Piper, a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman) and transfuses their blood into glass containers which he then refrigerates in his cellar. A Chinaman (Harold Fong) is the first live specimen sent through the matter transmitter for Davannian research, but the body is compressed by the teleportation process and arrives on Davanna crushed beyond recognition. Johnson learns this from a Davannian female (Anne Carroll) who uses the teleportation device to escape her dying world. In need of an immediate transfusion, she and Johnson break into Rochelle’s office to obtain the required plasma, but Johnson unwittingly transfuses blood from a rabid dog into the girl’s body. She later expires in a hospital. When her body is examined, the telltale dark glasses and white eyeballs give Harry further reason to suspect Johnson’s motives.
Johnson surprises Nadine and Jeremy while they are examining the matter transmitter. Johnson fries Jeremy’s brain, then pursues the fleeing Nadine through the woods. Not used to driving an automobile (Jeremy had always chauffered him), Johnson comes perilously close to death. Harry gives pursuit in his police cruiser and turns on the siren, which breaks Johnson’s concentration. The alien’s hearing is so acute that the sound shatters his senses, and his car plummets over a cliff, killing him on impact.
Later, at the gravesite (“Here lies a man who was not of this earth”), another Davannian, a double for Johnson, appears in the distance.
Corman asked Blaisdell to supply a variety of props for Not of This Earth, including the blood suitcase, remote control box, teleportation machine, an alien “embryo,” and the “flying umbrella monster.” As always, there was barely enough time to design one decent effect, let alone several, but Blaisdell managed to do the impossible once again. Everything Corman asked for was delivered on time and within budget.
The blood suitcase was an easy prop to make. Blaisdell customized an aluminum Hallibuton suitcase, adding glass containers and plastic tubing to the interior and securing everything in place with metal bands. The “teleportation portal” took a bit more time to prepare. Beginning with a balsa wood framework, Blaisdell set up horizontal rows of flashing lights across the bottom panel and wired everything from the back. A double lever made from plastic globes attached to a wooden frame was added to the right side of the device to represent a master “on-switch.” Lastly, a combination of rods and orbs was hung directly overhead. Altogether, the finished device stood nearly seven feet tall and about two and a half feet wide.
A simple “remote control” was carved out of pine and outfitted with several black knobs, six tear-drop stationary lights, a telescoping antennae made from plastic tubing, and a glowing dial that was illuminated with AC power using a cord that ran up Paul Birch’s coat sleeve, down his back, and off the set to a wall socket. There was also a two-inch plastic figure inside the box that was supposed to be an image of the Controller of Davanna. In reality it was a “Marskman,” a commercially sold tie-in figure from the old “Space Patrol” television series.
The embryonic version of the jellyfish creature measured about seven inches long and was made from liquid latex poured over a positive clay mold. The embryo was wrapped in colored tissue paper and placed in a plastic cylinder inside the blood suitcase. This version of the creature was on-screen for less than 15 seconds. A simple photographic dissolve suggested the embryo’s growth into the full-size adult alien.
Paul Blaisdell not only designed movie monsters, he also built props like this “interplanetary teleportation controller,” a favorite device of the uncanny Mr. Johnson (Paul Birch), a man who was most definitely Not of This Earth (courtesy of Bob Burns).
Working from a single preapproved pencil sketch, Blaisdell created the jellyfish monster with latex, foam rubber, and wire coat hangers. The hangers served as a framework for the monster’s umbrella-shaped body. Blocks of foam rubber were used to pad out the central portion of the body. Liquid latex was painted over the assembled wire frame and foam rubber in successive layers. After it had dried, the latex was given a purplish sheen and highlights were added with an airbrush.
Hooks or nails carved out of pine and coated with latex were cemented to the creature’s bell-shaped posterior, and a face of sorts was added to the top. The face was actually a rubber prop that was obtained from a magician’s supply shop and customized with pieces of block foam and latex. Paul also bought a handful of the famous rubber lizards that had served the Beast with a Million Eyes so well, cut off their tails, and used them to further augment the appearance of the monster’s head. The finished alien prop was attached to the fishpole flying rig Blaisdell used on It Conquered the World. He didn’t have much time to practice flying the umbrella monster, so in the finished film it merely glides through the air as if it were levitating.
Paul Blaisdell (left, in “Major Mars” getup) and Bob Burns examine the umbrella creature from Roger Corman’s Not of This Earth. There is no truth to the rumor that Paul based the monster’s design on Hedda Hopper’s outrageous frippery (courtesy of Bob Burns).
The monster’s only purpose in Not of This Earth is to kill the good Dr. Rochelle (William Roerick). After Paul had flown his creature into the doctor’s office, he carefully maneuvered it across the room, letting it hover slightly before eventually lowering it so that the creature appeared to land directly on top of Roerick’s head. The actor then took over, grabbing the alien by its rubber-coated wire frame and struggling on camera while slowly pulling the wire frame closed around his neck to simulate a horrendously slow strangulation. Spirits were running high as Roerick agreed to “bleed” on camera for Corman, who wanted to punch up the scene with a little 1950s-style grue. In a black-and-white film, just about any liquid can be used to simulate blood if it’s dark enough and opaque. In Not of This Earth, Roerick bled pure grape juice. By letting it slowly leak out of his mouth onto the desktop after the alien has squeezed his head like a ripe boil, Roerick gave the film that extra touch of the grisly which was probably responsible for generating quite a few Technicolor nightmares.
Blaisdell not only made the necessary props, he was always on hand to see that they worked properly, as he later explained:
Back in the days when we made these pictures, the unions were not as strict as they later became, so I would hang around the set almost all the time just to make sure all the effects worked properly and that there were no slip-ups. Nowadays that wouldn’t be possible. I doubt I’d be on the set at all. But back then, you had to be there if you wanted things to work out right. Building something like the jellyfish monster for Not of This Earth and then handing it over to some prop man to try and make it fly … uh-uh, no way. I was there to make sure Roger Corman got what he was paying for. He might not have been paying much, you understand, but he was paying, and he was entitled to the best effect he could get at the price we had agreed on.
Although Corman had no problems with the props Paul made for the film, he did encounter some difficulties with his star, Paul Birch. In fact, Corman managed to so upset Birch that the actor ended up walking off the picture. It all had to do with a special set of oversized contact lenses Birch was required to wear for scenes in which his eyes were to appear totally white. The lenses proved quite uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time. (Christopher Lee would experience similar problems with the contact lenses Hammer asked him to wear for its series of Dracula films.) Naturally, Birch wanted to keep the lenses in as little as possible. Corman, on the other hand, wanted Birch to wear them around the clock, even when he was not on camera. Not that the director was being purposefully sadistic; he merely wanted Birch to be “ready to go
” whenever Corman decided to shoot more alien footage. Birch thought that was ridiculous and told Corman so. Roger simply replied, “Wear the lenses, Paul.”
Birch finally got so upset he challenged Corman, and the two nearly got into a fistfight. According to Chuck Griffith, “They pushed and shoved each other, but it was really just a farce that came to nothing.” Nevertheless, Birch was angry enough to walk off the set, disrupting the film schedule. Fortunately for Corman, most of the actor’s scenes were already in the can. Since Birch wore dark glasses and a hat slouched over his brow for most of the film, it was relatively easy to substitute a stand-in for the few scenes that remained to be filmed.
The substitution was successful: neither reviewers nor audiences of the time detected the subterfuge.
7
Here Comes Mr. Gordon
Although I was a member of the Screen Actors Guild, I was stepping over the line every once in a while as far as intruding on other union territories. When AIP was just getting started, the unions tended to be more lenient. I was kind of stepping over the line by doing the creature costumes and the props while acting the parts of the monsters as well. Then again sometimes I would appear basically as myself in a nonspeaking “bit” role, like when I played one of Peggie Castle’s heavies in Oklahoma Woman, so I guess I was intruding on all the union territories at one time or another. There were so many—the Screen Actors Guild, the Screen Extras Guild, the Directors Guild, the Prop Builder and Model Makers Union, the scenery makers union, the makeup artists union. But back in those days the whole team of us—the actors, grips, the prop masters, the director, the cameraman—we all kind of tried to help each other out whenever the need arose. “Hey, I want to go get a cup of coffee, how about taking over for me for a minute, Paul?” Sure, pal. But as time went on, the union rules got stricter and stricter. You really had to toe the line after a while, because they seemed to have spies everywhere—maybe even more than Moscow headquarters. That’s one of the reasons why AIP and some of the other film producers started making pictures in Europe and doing coproductions with Japan.
—Paul Blaisdell
An eventful year for celluloid sci-fi and horror came in 1957. Month after month, from January through December, one new genre production after another bowed at theaters and drive-ins across the country. Voodoo Woman, Not of This Earth, The Deadly Mantis, and Attack of the Crab Monsters all opened within the first quarter of 1957, and the summer season was to prove even more bountiful with bad ol’ boogies like Kronos, The Monster that Challenged the World, The Cyclops, X the Unknown, The Unknown Terror, The Black Scorpion, and The Monolith Monsters all battling one another for the almighty consumer dollar. Then there was The 27th Day, Twenty Million Miles to Earth, The Land Unknown, Beginning of the End, The Unearthly, and Enemy From Space, as well as producer-director Bert I. Gordon’s budget-minded inversion of Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man that he called The Amazing Colossal Man.
The Incredible Shrinking Man sounded like one of Jim Nicholson’s titular namesakes for an American-International product, but it actually originated with Universal. Universal had purchased the rights to Richard Matheson’s best-selling novel The Shrinking Man and wedged the “incredible” adjective into the title in a misguided effort to reach AIP’s drive-in clientele. (The picture deserved better.) Jack Arnold, who seemed to be directing as many sci-fi and horror films for Universal as Roger Corman and Eddie Cahn were for AIP and Allied Artists, was working from Matheson’s own screenplay, which telescoped the action of the novel into an 87-minute, A-class production boasting state-of-the-art special effects. In Matheson’s novel, Scott Carey (Grant Williams) is exposed to a double dose of pesticide and radiation, the combined effect of which is to make him shrink, inch by inch, day by day, until he virtually disappears from the face of the earth. The Incredible Shrinking Man was previewed by Universal on January 23, 1957, and released shortly thereafter. By September of the same year, AIP would have its own outrageous answer to Matheson’s minuscule marvel unspooling at drive-ins across the nation.
Bert I. Gordon, who was destined to become another low-budget monster movie monarch during the 1950s, had migrated to the Los Angeles area from Kenosha, Wisconsin. Shortly after arriving in L.A., he got involved in early television series like Cowboy G-Men and Rocket Squad, on which he served as production assistant. Before long he began challenging AIP’s turf by producing and directing a number of low-budget science-fiction movies.
Gordon must have been fascinated by the concept of gigantism. Virtually every one of his pictures explores the theme, from King Dinosaur (1955) to Village of the Giants (a 1965 adaptation of H. G. Wells’s Food of the Gods), Food of the Gods (a 1979 attempt at adapting the same tale), and Food of the Gods 2 (1989). Unfortunately, Gordon—like Roger Corman, Edward L. Cahn, Bernard Kowalski, and other directors of low-budget movies of the 1950s—never had the kind of funds at his disposal to do justice to the pictures he wanted to make. While Corman et al. produced films which required a minimum of photographic effects and specialized props to tell their story, Gordon’s complicated properties, with their gargantuan gargoyles and attendant logistical headaches, necessitated the use of expensive and problematic optical effects. It would obviously have been easier and cheaper to make a series of less grandiose fantasy films, but that was not Gordon’s vision.
Optical effects didn’t come cheap, so Gordon tried creating his own. Unfortunately, his poverty-induced ineptitude resulted in pictures marred by blatant matte shadows (as in The Amazing Colossal Man) or bizarrely mismatched matte lines (as in Earth Versus the Spider, when the tarantula’s legs repeatedly disappear into the ground). Even relatively simple superimpositions suffered from his undernourished film budgets; in The Cyclops (1957), for example, background elements could plainly be seen through the foreground image of the title monster.
Apparently the desire to make the kind of movie that interested him most overrode any considerations Gordon might have had about what types of effects he could reasonably expect to achieve on a limited budget. Having heard that monster specialist Paul Blaisdell seemed to be able to consistently pull rabbits out of hats on low-budget projects, Gordon put out feelers to see if Paul and Jackie would be interested in working on his picture The Amazing Nth Man. The title originated with Jim Nicholson, who recalled a short story he had read some years earlier called “The Nth Man,” about a man who grows two miles tall. Frequent Roger Corman conspirator Chuck Griffith began a treatment based on Nicholson’s retelling of the tale, but the finished version (written with actor Dick Miller in mind as the title character) was way out in left field. Griffith agreed to rework the scenario, but walked out of the project after spending a single day with Gordon, who was closely supervising everything he did. “He could never stop looking over my shoulder,” Griffith complained. “I just couldn’t work like that.”
The script, newly retitled The Amazing Colossal Man to avoid any possible legal conflicts with the author of “The Nth Man,” was rewritten by Gordon with Mark Hanna, who had worked on Not of This Earth and The Undead for Roger Corman. Blaisdell thought the story line was pretty hackneyed, but agreed to join the payroll because the film seemed to offer “interesting possibilities” as far as prop-making went. Since there were no foam rubber monsters to be devised (the film’s “title monster” would be rendered via photographic effects during postproduction), Blaisdell thought the assignment would be an interesting change of pace.
The Amazing Colossal Man begins with an effectively orchestrated low-key sequence that generates a surprising amount of suspense. The U.S. Army is conducting an experimental bomb test in the Nevada desert. The first-ever plutonium bomb is about to be exploded, and no one is sure just how big the blast might be—least of all Col. Glenn Manning (Glen Langan), one of the army’s team of hand-picked observers. Tensions mount during the countdown to detonation, but when the timer reaches zero nothing happens; there is no explosion, just a foreboding silence punctuated by a me
tronomic beeping as the activated bomb ticks away the seconds.
In the distance the moan of a low-flying airplane can be heard. Through his field glasses, Manning can see that the pilot is in trouble. The small craft makes an emergency landing, but crashes right in the center of the test site. Manning instinctively rushes to the pilot’s aid, despite orders from his superiors to return to the safety of the observation trench. Suddenly the incessant beeping of the unexploded plutonium bomb stops. A heavy silence fills the air.
This promotional still from the British release of The Amazing Colossal Man ably illustrates the style of AIP’s campaign writers.
And then the bomb explodes.
Manning’s body is suffused with radiation from the explosion. His protective clothing is blasted away, every particle of hair is evaporated in an instant, every inch of skin is blackened and blistered by the bombardment of irradiated atomic nuclei. But somehow, by some cruel twist of fate, Manning survives. He is transported to an army hospital where he remains in a coma; the doctors are amazed to find him still alive. Treatment is initiated for the third-degree burns that cover 98% of his body, but the outlook is not good.
The next day, however, the surgical team is astonished to discover that Manning’s body has begun its own accelerated regenerative process. Dr. Paul Lindstrom (William Hudson) meets with army spokesperson Richard Kingman (Russ Bender) to discuss the recondite phenomenon. Kingman believes the newly developed plutonium bomb to be merely one more in a long line of wartime destructive devices, but Dr. Lindstrom suggests the possibility that plutonium inherently possesses some sort of restorative properties—how else can one explain Manning’s miraculous recovery?
