by Стивен Кинг
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 monstermovie 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 Bill Williams . . . 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 Manster? 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 severed human head.
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 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. This film has its genuine moments of unease and horror: it smoothly engulfs the arm of a farmer who has been unwise enough to touch it and the blob turns a sinister red as the farmer screams in agony; later, after McQueen and his girl friend discover the farmer and take him to the local doctor, there is a scary moment when McQueen can't locate the blob in the darkened examining room. When he sees it at last, he throws a bottle of acid over the thing, which flashes briefly yellow and then returns to its former ominous red.
Also, the CofF 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 bad 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 Saucer-Men, a 1957 American-International picture, CofF 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 Saucer-Men 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-rod headlights to "light" the monsters to death. The movie is also notable for the fact that Elisha Cook, Jr., is 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.
CofF had this to say about I Married a Monster from Outer Space, a 1958 Paramount release which formed the lower half of "summer shocker" double bills along with either The Blob or the hilarious Pat Boone film Journey to the Center of the Earth: Kiddy-oriented sf programmer. Gloria Talbot marries a monster from outer space which is disguised to look like Tom Tryon. Good argument against hasty marriages, but not much of a movie.
Still, this one was a lot of fun, if only for the once-in-a-lifetime chance it offered to see Tom Tryon with a snout. And before leaving this one and proceeding on to what (sadly) may be the worst of the Grade-Z movies, I'd like to say something a little more serious about the peculiar relationship which obtains between terrible horror movies (of which there are a dozen for each good one, as this chapter testifies) and the genuine fan of the genre.
The relationship is not entirely masochistic, as the foregoing may make it seem. A film like Alien or Jaws is, for either the true fan or simply the ordinary moviegoer who has a sometime interest in the macabre, like a wide, deep vein of gold that doesn't even have to be mined; it can simply be dug out of the hillside. But that isn't mining, remember; it's just digging. The true horror film aficionado is more like a prospector with his panning equipment or his wash-wheel, spending long periods going patiently through common dirt, looking for the bright blink of gold dust or possibly even a small nugget or two. Such a working miner is not looking for the big strike, which may come tomorrow or the day after or never; he has put those illusions behind him. He's only looking for a livin' wage, something to keep him going yet awhile longer.
As a result, horror-movie fans communicate their likes to each other by a kind of grapevine which is part word of mouth, part fanzine reviews, part convention-hall chatter at such meetings as the World Fantasy Convention, the Kubla Khan Ate, or the IguanaCon. Word gets around. Long before David Cronenberg made something of a splash with They Came from Within, fans were muttering that he was someone to watch on the basis of an earlier film-an extremely low-budget flick called Rabid, starring X-rated queen Marilyn (Behind the Green Door) Chambers-and Cronenberg got a bravura performance out of her, by the way. My agent, Kirby McCauley, raves about a small picture called Ritual, filmed in Canada and starring Hal Holbrook. These films don't get wide American release, but if you watch the papers faithfully, you may see one of them playing at the drive-in as a pick-up second feature below some overrated major studio flick. Similarly, I heard about a little-known early John Carpenter film called Assault on Precinct 13 from Peter Straub, the author of Ghost Story and If You Could See Me Now. Done on a shoestring (and Carpenter's first feature, Dark Star, is reputed to have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000 a sum that makes even George Romero look like Dino DeLaurentiis), Carpenter's talent as a director onetheless shines through, and Carpenter went on to do Halloween and The Fog.
These are the nuggets, the horror-film fan's reward for sifting through films like Planet of the Vampires and The Monster from Green Hell. My own "discovery" (if you don't object to the word) is a little film called Tourist Trap, starring Chuck Connors. Connors himself isn't very good in the film-he tries gamely, but he's simply miscast. Yet the film wields an eerie, spooky power. Wax figures begin to move and come to life in a ruined, out-of-the-way tourist resort; there are a number of effective, atmospheric shots of the dummies' blank eyes and reaching hands, and the special effects are effective. As a film that deals with the queer power that inanimate dummies, mannequins, and human replicas can sometimes cast over us, it is a more effective film than the expensive and ill-advised film made from William Goldman's bestseller, Magic.*
But to get back to I Married a Monster from Outer Space: bad as it is, there is one absolutely chilling moment in the movie. I won't say that it's worth the price of admission, but it works . . . boy, does it work! Tryon has married his girl friend (Gloria Talbot) and they are on their honeymoon. While she stretches out on the bed, dressed in the obligatory filmy white nightgown and waiting for the consummation of all those steamy clinches on the beach, Tryon, who is still a good-looking man and who was even better looking twenty years ago, goes out on the balcony of their hotel room for a cigarette. A thunderstorm is brewing, and a sharp stroke of lightning abruptly renders that handsome face transparent for a moment. We see the horrible alien face beneath-runnelled and knotted and warty. It is a "seat-jumper" for sure, and during the fade-out we perhaps have time to think about the consummation to follow . . . and gulp.
If movies such as Tourist Trap and Rituals are the nuggets fans sometimes find by sticking around for the B picture (and no one is so optimistic as the dyed-in-the-wool fan), a moment such as this one is the equivalent of the gold dust that can sometimes be panned out by the faithful toiler. Or to put it another way, there is that marvelous Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," where the Christmas goose, when slit open, yields up the beautiful and priceless stone that has been lodged in its gullet. You sit through a lot of shlock, and maybe-just maybe-there is that frisson that makes it at least partially worthwhile.
*Home Box Office, in its endless quest for prime-time filler, is now making many of these "little" films available in a way that such spotty distributors as New World Pictures have never been able to do. Of course, there's no shortage of dreck on HBO either, as any subscriber will tell you; still, there is an occasional prize in the pay-TV box, which is usually full of such mouldy cinematic Cracker jacks as Guyana: Cult of the Damned and Moment by Moment. In the last year or so HBO has offered Croenenberg's The Brood and an interesting AIP picture called The Evictors (starring Vic Morrow and Michael Parks), which got no American theatrical distribution . . . and Tourist Trap.
There is no such frisson in Plan 9 from Outer Space, unfortunately, to which I reluctantly award the booby-prize as the worst horror film ever made. Yet there is nothing funny about this one, no matter how many times it has been laughed at in those mostly witless compendiums which celebrate the worst of everything. There's nothing funny about watching a Bela Lugosi (who may actually have been a stand-in) wracked with pain, a morphine monkey on his back, creeping around a southern California development with his Dracula cape pulled up over his nose.
Lugosi died shortly after this abysmal, exploitative, misbegotten piece of trash was released, and I've always wondered in my heart if maybe poor old Bela didn't die as much of shame as of the many illnesses that were overwhelming him. It was a sad and squalid coda to a great career. Lugosi was buried (at his own request) in his Dracula cape, and one like to think-or hope-that it served him better in death than it did in the miserable waste of celluloid that marked his last screen appearance.
3
Before we move on to horror on TV, where failures in the genre have been every bit as common (but somehow less spectacular), it seems appropriate to finish here by asking a question: Why have there been so many bad horror movies?
Before trying to answer that, let's be honest and say that a great many movies are very bad-not all the turkeys are gobbling in the horror pen, if you take my meaning. Consider Myra Breckinridge. Valley of the Dolls, The Adventurers, and Bloodline . . . to mention just a few.
Even Alfred Hitchcock produced one of those Thanksgiving birds, and unfortunately, it was his last picture: Family Plot, with Bruce Dern and Karen Black. And these pictures only scratch the surface of a list that could continue on for a hundred pages or more. Probably more.
There's an impulse to say something's wrong here. There may well be. If another business-United Airlines, let us say, or IBM-ran their affairs the way 20th Century-Fox ran the making of Cleopatra, their boards of directors would soon be down at the local 7-11 store, buying pizza mix with foodstamps-or maybe the stockholders would just break down the door and wheel in the guillotine. It seems almost incredible to believe that any major studio could even approach the brink of bankruptcy in a country that loves the m
ovies as much as this one does; one might as well try to imagine, you might think, Caesar's Palace or the Dunes wiped out by a single crapshooter. But in fact there is not one major American film studio which has not at least once during the thirty-year period under discussion here tottered on the brink.
MGM is perhaps the most infamous case, and for a period of seven years the MGM lion ceased to roar almost entirely. Perhaps significantly, during this period when MGM was leaving the unreal world of the movies and pinning its hopes for corporate survival upon the unreal gambling world (the MGM Grand in Vegas, surely one of the world's more vulgar pleasure domes), their one major success was a horror movieMichael Crichton's Westworld, in which a disintegrating Yul Brynner, dressed in black and looking like a nightmare revenant from The Magnificent Seven, intones again and again: "Draw. Draw. Draw." They draw . . . and lose. Yul is pretty fast, even with his circuits showing.
Is this, you ask me, any way to run a railroad?
My own answer is no . . . but the failure of so many films released by "the majors" seems more explicable to me than the failure of so many of the horror films released by what Variety calls "the indies." At this writing, three of my novels have been released as films: Carrie (United Artists/theatrical/1976) 'Salem's Lot (Warners/television/ 1979), and The Shining (Warners/theatrical/1980), and in all three cases I feel that I have been fairly treated . . . and yet the clearest emotion in my mind is not pleasure but a mental sigh of relief. When dealing with the American cinema, you feel like you won if you just broke even.
