William Sylvester, Heywood Floyd in 2001, made a few Horror Movies in his day. I had a notion he was a radio man. But he was a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Devils of Darkness was directed by Lance Comfort, a B-Movie maestro of prolific propensities.
Which came first? Science fiction or UFOlogy? Ponder this as you watch KILLERS FROM SPACE!
These days repressed memories are yanked from brains of "abductees" by means of hypnosis. Dr. Martin here was given truth serum. This film was seven years before the purported "alien abduction" of Betty and Barney Hill.
The spooky part is the implication that beneath the realm of consciousness we are being whisked away by aliens, some with evil intent, like these aliens.
The only way you can tell is if somebody else says you've been abducted.
Although we know these "aliens" are a popular political weapon of last resort in some circles. Disaster philosophers and chaos theory evolutionists believe that only under constant, agonizing, continuous threat, on a grand scale, can humanity evolve. If you are a disasterist and make your way to military might, you might conclude, as Outer Limits indeed did at one point, that it might benefit the Planet Earth to face an alien invasion. Said interplanetary crisis might cause the world to unite against a common enemy.
Well, say, the way it did against. . . Saddam Hussein, Islamofascists, the VietCong, the Sandinistas, and the evil porcinistas of James Finn Garner.
The World is presently petrified by the prospect of maniacal blue chickens from space establishing a new pecking order as reported to us by former secret agent men who have apparently received truth serum, like Peter Graves. Marshall Dillon's kid brother interestingly, post-KILLERS, became a secret agent man.
My how fact and fiction bleed into one. Literally.
So expect at some point to see Press Secretaries across the planet pulling their hair out trying to warn us of Killers From Space.
Tucker Carlson comes on air. "I'm sorry to have to say this, but millions of you people are going to die."
UFOS Fact or Fiction?
They'll decide for you.
I hate to monkey around but . . . I asked my wife what movie reminded her most of me and this one was the one she chose:
It is nice to know she thinks of me as a laboratory animal abused by Boris Karloff. At least she had me spayed and neutered.
Redundant but okay. Guess she wanted to cover both x and y.
Karloff did his own stunts. This is the origin of the phrase Pratt Falls. He later starred in the serial comedy The Veil.
An early incarnation of The Ape, according to Wikipedia, is The House of Mystery. William Nigh concocted both monkey shines.
Sources
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.
