Whether it was the ongoing saga of Walter Paisley or getting 86'd by Arnold in The Terminator, you could count on an interesting performance from Dick Miller.
Dick Miller was arguably the greatest character actor who ever lived. To me, there was Strother Martin, Slim Pickens, Agnes Moorehead. Just a ton. But Dick was on everyone's mind for their projects.
Dick Miller of blessed memory. Peace forever.
Innumerable females of optimized attractiveness find themselves hotly pursued by bubble headed monsters in sci-fi/horror cinema. These monsters are symbolic of the human male's doggedly reptilian-brained quest for mates.
I see the Id as the subcortical autonomic nervous system brain cloud that everybody tries to, but cannot, suppress. The Ego is body image. The Pain Body. The Horror Body. The Superego is the pathetic attempt to control the buck wild Id. Culture is the failed attempt at Full Spectrum Dominance.
Truly, human males are monsters from the human id. Procreation. Fighting. Flighting. Freezing. The four horsepeople of the apocalypse.
That great Psychoanalyst David Icke has perfectly externalized the Id with his great work of art, The Reptilians.
It is so insane one wonders with the egregore scholars whether some unearthly force propels the human male on his self-destructive course to sexual ruin. The human male being a puppet. The kind of puppet Rod Serling was terrified of. The kind of terror that burps forth from the heart of the man dreading his coming transformation into a mutAnt. Space is cold but space has the hottest blood of all.
Desire so out of fashion so unquenchable it morphs into a deformity--a Mr. Hyde, a Jack the Ripper, a MutAnt, a Creature from the Black Lagoon. The cloak of sexual shame is a monster suit. One thinks of the repressed Japan of the Fifties and Sixties where Ultraman, a giant superego from another planet, intervenes against the rubber suited miscreants posing as monsters out to gobble gorgeous females. As gobble they inevitably must.
What a clean cut guy Ultraman was, the classical OK Superego. Over the years, you could see Ultraman's struggle with rubber suited refugees from Japanese civilization and its discontents transforming into the S&M paradise popular on the island. Some sort of accomodation between the guilt tripping superego and the id. What was Japan feeling guilty aboutf? The Empire? Bringing the atomic bomb upon itself?
There was nothing Japan did in 1945 or in all of human history that justified the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on their personages. That was an American War Crime. Period. The American President Obama apologized for it. You can't apologize for it. That asserts you can make up for it.
You can't. You ruined two cities burning their people alive. You take that karma into eternity. How's that for horror?
The MutAnt has to settle for Exeter being his Ultraman. The two engage in a battle within the male mind between the Sadistic Superego and the salacious male chauvinist Id. Inescapable guilt. Erectile dysfunction. Castration. The MuTant fails utterly to get the girl. But so does Exeter. They are hopelessly impotent before the Goddess Ruth Adams.
Ruth Adams is the girl of the MutAnt's dreams. But Cal Meacham, 1950's All-American Scientist, already has her heart.
Cal has a radio baritone voice, flies jets, blows things up in his lab and has a sidekick named Joe who appears in every science fiction film and Gunsmoke Episode known to man.
Cal triumphs because he's a virile God-fearing Neocon who condescends to do science while skinny-dipping with Ruth Adams, a walking pulp cover model, in some frozen pond.
Cal uber allis. Everybody else, as Alfred Adler might say, suffers from "organ inferiority".
Cast
Jeff Morrow starred with Cal in a creature movie.
Rex Reason, Cal, was in a creature movie (see above) and his brother was in Star Trek the Original Series.
Faith Domergue was a film noir and scream queen sultress with an intriguing personal history that included a stint as Howard Hughes' sweetie. Rotten Tomatoes Filmography.
Lance Fuller Brak, the Metalunan who had it in for Neutron, was a veteran sci-fi/horror thespian.
Russell Johnson. The Professor is not with Mary Ann on this one.
Douglas Spencer, who also appears as Scotty the Reporter in The Thing.
Robert Nichols, also a cast member of The Thing.
Directors Joseph M. Newman and Jack Arnold.
Had a chance to get my paws on a Vivarium DVD. Played it on receipt. I was very satisfied with it. Put it back in the jacket. Put it in the NETFLIX envelope and put it in the mailbox.
It is on its way to NETFLIX. Or . . . it'll come right back to me.
It seems a race of human-prairie chicken hybrids is on our planet building generic McMansion neighborhoods to study human development. That much you may glean from the title of this motion picture alone.
The idea that aliens are in control is a tried and true tradition. It is a useful device if you wish to analyze the alienating social conditions that really wreck human life on this planet. This is as naked a slap in the face of the prevailing social forces as you are going to find. It puts me in mind of Paralax View with its brisk middle finger to the "powers that be" who seem hellbent, pun intended, on crushing the daylights out of us.
That is what Vivarium is. It is a crushing movie. It is a perfect representation of . . . the World Economic Forum. It is a thoroughbred horror movie and the filmmakers are people to watch. I'm interested in what they'll do next.
If you don't like to question the "authorities", you may want to avoid this little gem. But avoid it and you miss some wonderful performances especially by the two leads. They are perfect choices for this type of material.
You may wish to treat yourself to a viewing of Foxes. It lives on the filmmaker's YouTube Channel. It is said to be a prologue of sorts to Vivarium. It deals with some of the same issues in a Little Red Riding Hood sort of way.
I mean it is not as if the "aliens" aren't human. They're perfect representations of human evil. They are deformed humans. At the center of the deformity is the total commitment to control. We're mice caught in their maze. They're cats. They torture us before they eat us. That's the World Economic Forum in a nutshell.
Imogen Poots finds herself in interesting movies. So does Jesse Eisenberg. They're good binge candidates if you run out of ideas.
In the old days they used to have something called "Equal Time".
Having looked at I Was a Teenage Werewolf, which was much, much better than I thought it would be, it may be useful to look at its double feature touring buddy, Invasion of the Saucer Men.
The Werewolf was a guy dealing with civilization and its discontents who was getting help from a Wilhelm Reichian back to nature Freudian; a reptilian brained hack in favor of lobotomizing our more cerebral capacities and organizing ourselves around pure social savagery.
Invasion is kind of about the dangers of teen alcoholism seen through the metaphoric lens of an alien invasion. It could have been called Invasion of the Space Pimps.
The movie also features a scene which predates the 1970s cattle mutilation mass hysteria. An alien dices up a cow person. The film was made in 1957, twenty-three years ahead of Linda Moulton Howe's Strange Harvest.
That scene featuring the bovine murder constitutes about all the horror you are going to get from Saucer Men. I suppose you could follow the cattle mutilation thread to Donald Wandrei, whose book Strange Harvest contains a story entitled "The Fire Vampires," a rendering of which lives at HorrorBabble. As a means to mining horror from this harmless motion picture.
This flick is a make the spaghetti screen saver. Also good for Halloween Party background noise.
This flick lives over at Sci-Fi Central in its totality.
Count Gore de Vol, a creative dynamo of paranormal proportions and Washington D.C. Horror Icon of Nixonian immensity, is celebrating his 50th Anniversary February 4th 6:30 p.m. with a screening of The Shining (Kubrickian version) at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Here's the Count making the announcement.
The Count once played Bozo on the Bozo the Clown program on WDCA. It's interesting because Doctor Madblood, another great Horror Host, did a stint as Bozo in Richmond, Virginia, WTVR.
Is that a coincidence or am I just creepy-clowning around?
Here's an old ad on E-bay if you are a memorabilia collector:
Doctor Madblood's Past Life
I had a friend who won some sort of contest and he actually appeared on the Bozo and Sooper Dog show. They used to have an audience of kids. Everybody in the neighborhood watched that day. There was Rob. Top row.
I suspect local legend Jess Duboy of being Sooper Dog. Locating proof has been difficult. Anybody out there who knows for sure, comment below.
Here's Sooper Dog singing, interestingly, Puppy Love.
This movie is over at Team Be Good.
I had the damndest time trying to find this movie. It was almost as bad as The Enchanted Cottage. Apparently, a batch of legal crap keeps people from repackaging Enchanted Cottage and Ghost and Mrs. Muir, both of which are ripe for musical transfiguration.
The Werewolf is a human ruled by his Reptilian Brain. He/She is the quintessential incarnation of the conflict between the ego and the id. A human battling his animal nature. Instinctual urges, violence, barking out threats, overwhelms the human ego and turns humans into wolves.
This type of wolf is not the balance of nature predator but the rabid wolf. The delirium associated with rabies has been identified as the real world antecedent to the Werewolf myth. But on a psychological level, the werewolf is not a myth anymore than mood swings or bipolar disorders are myths.
The Werewolf's cousins are Mr. Hyde, the Incredible Hulk, Darkman, and a host of others. A sentient werewolf, a la Hugh Jackman, is a dog that won't hunt (his girlfriend at any rate). Meaning, he has tamed his id. He has a modicum of self-control. He can save his romantic partner.
Perhaps it is fitting Michael Landon has a go at werewolfism given rumors about his dark side.
But we all have a dark side.
Does that mean we'll all have a go at werewolfism?
At one point or another.
The first Halloween movie is the best Halloween movie. If you don't want to spoil the experience, don't watch any of the others.
Except maybe Halloween III. That one was interesting.
For a movie that was made for the express purpose of making easy money, Halloween had a lot of dimension to it. No pun intended.
The cinematography was spot on. There was an ink blot feel to the darkness in the movie. It got all over you. And Carpenter the Composer was off the charts jamming what with his alarm bell stabbings and scratchings setting off premature panic that wanes until the monster pops up and you realize you were right to start running in the first place.
Good stuff.
But . . . tucked in the movie is the horror movie marathon hosted by Doctor Dementia. It features The Thing and Forbidden Planet. The Thing in The Thing is a kind of walking carrot who kills a couple malamuts. It was remade by Carpenter. Some think that remake is his best film.
Forbidden Planet features an invisible monster which turns out to be the one-man egregore created from Dr. Morbius's primal Id. Carpenter mixes the two movies in his version of The Thing and the inner monster manifests itself in the bodies of Carpenter's characters. But this isn't about that.
If you notice, the movies appear in Halloween out of sequence. The Thing kills dogs before his flying saucer is even discovered. They hadn't blown him out of the ice yet. In Forbidden Planet, Robbie the Robot zooms in toward the space ship before it has landed. In Halloween poop hits the fan before poop hits the fan.
Doctor Loomis and the Sheriff find a dead dog at the Meyers' house before Michael chokes the German Shepherd outside the house Annie is babysitting at. Exactly when the masks and rope are stolen from the Hardware Store is not clear. You can chalk it up to bad editing but . . . is it really?
If you are confused, it is probably the way Carpenter wanted it. At the subliminal level, we are experiencing a mental disorder, a regression if you will, and time, like a mental disorder, is out of joint. The future happens before the present. Foreshadowing is foreboding. A process of confusion and disorder depriving the audience of any means of making sense of what is happening.
The present is as blank as Michael's mask. Even in Carpenter's soul ripping music, the horror happens before the horror happens. That music has been called a "music box" or "musical set construction." You don't have to build a haunted castle. You can make one out of sound.
Music is used that way in Phantasm and Jaws. When a Stranger Calls. I went to see When a Stranger Calls in the theater. People were literally screaming before anything happened. That is musical genius.
What is Michael? He's a cash cow now. The various attempts to define what he is have not been sufficient. I don't really want to know what he is. Then there is no mystique. His ability to haunt us is done away with.
As a cure I suggest getting back to nature. Get back to the original Carpenter. Open the music box. Watch the teenage girls walking down the street.
See the spectral figure behind the bushes.
