Not of This Earth (1957)

A rather peculiar fellow going by the - totally not the pseudonym of an alien invader - name of Paul Johnson (Paul Birch) ambles through Southern California. He has a very particular form of blood disease that calls for rather intense blood transfusions, but also the ability to hypnotically convince his doctor to be rather helpful about his medical troubles and his preferred solution to them.

Mr Johnson moves into a nice suburban house, hires himself a former ne'er-do-well as a caretaker and a private nurse (Beverley Garland). Occasionally, he communicates with his alien superiors about experiments meant to save his radioactively irradiated race, and ambles along to kidnap people for some rather radical experimentation which leaves them rather dead.

As a director, I particularly love Roger Corman for his Poe cycle made some years later, but even when he made short and very cheap variations on alien invasion and monster movie models, his films typically had something to recommend them.

In the case of Not of This Earth that something is the very specific type of contemporary Southern California hipness used to fill in the holes in budget and script, like Dick Miller’s short turn as a salesman taking a bad end not unfitting to his profession, the absurd teen patois used in another scene, the general late 50s grooviness of what’s going on, and the immensely quotable dialogue (“If I do not receive blood within four chronoctons of time, I will have no need of emotion”), that feels like the sort of thing Ed Wood was trying to achieve but lacked the sense of humour to reach.

Because of the general scrappiness of the production, this has an often very improvisational feel through scenes that just seem to have popped into the crew’s mind and then directly to camera. Only a couple of years later, this would culminate in little masterpieces of skewed wit like Bucket Full of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors, but even in its embryonic form, Corman the pseudo-beat is a fine thing to remember the man for, among many other achievements.

In short: Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956)

Warning: spoilers for a movie older than most people who will read this!

Colonialist stud Rock Dean (John Bromfield), a guy so 50s macho, he’s having a smoke while he gets vaccinated, runs a plantation in Brazil. After a series of killings the locals believe to have been committed by a monster known as the Curucu, his workers flee the plantation deeper into the jungle. Our porn-star named hero doesn’t believe in monsters, but he still mounts an expedition to its supposed hunting grounds to regain the trust of his (former) wage slaves.

Apart from the colonial stand-by of the native carriers, he is accompanied by chieftain’s son turned “civilised” Tupanico (Tom Payne) and Dr Andrea Romar (Beverly Garland), looking for a head-shrinking drug that just might help shrink cancer as well (seriously). The good doctor is one of them thar independent wimmen, but this being a 50s adventure movie, you know how that’ll turn out.

I call Curt Siodmak's Curucu an adventure movie and not a monster movie for a reason, for while there are a couple of scenes concerning the titular monster, the film spends most of its time not on the tropes of bad monster movies but rather those of bad adventure movies. The monster will turn out to actually be a man in costume, anyway, which at least excuses how bad that thing looks, but even if it didn’t, this would still be much more of a film about actors reacting to archive footage of animals than one about monsters. And certainly more than about actual adventure, as well, for even though this was actually shot in Brazil, Siodmak seems to go out of his way to not use this opportunity for anything but two or three scenes that really make use of the landscape. Otherwise, this might as well have been shot on a soundstage in California; in fact, Siodmak (who really could do much better) shoots the whole affair as if it were.

On the narrative level, this is a talky mess in which very little of interest happens, and the best bits – like an actual dramatic climax – seem to happen off-screen. The film’s racial and social politics are dubious, though not interesting enough to go into them in detail, its plot plods along slowly, and there’s only a sense of adventure if you’re deeply into scenes of actors being threatened by small animals that are never on screen with them at the same time.

So there’s very little at all to recommend Curucu to anyone but the colonialist adventure movie or Beverly Garland completists among us.

The Alligator People (1959)

Warning: I'm pretty sure various alligators were hurt for our entertainment during the making of this movie, so if you're sensitive about these things, this might be a film to avoid. It was a borderline case for me

Under hypnosis, nurse Jane Marvin (Beverly Garland), tells her psychiatrist boss a peculiar tale about a time when she was the freshly married Joyce Webster.
The honeymoon trip with her new husband Paul (Richard Crane) was rudely interrupted by a telegraph whose content convinced Paul to jump the train and disappear out of his wife's sight. Before the wedding night. Her husband's sudden and inexplicable flight wasn't something Joyce was willing to tolerate, but her attempts at finding out where her wayward husband got to were less than successful. It's not as if Joyce had much to go on anyway. Paul never did talk about his life before he met her except for mentioning a plane crash he shouldn't have survived and his belongings are strangely devoid of any hints towards his past.

Some off-screen sleuthing eventually led Joyce to Paul's former college fraternity and from there to the place he gave as his home address - a creepy mansion deep down in the swamps of Louisiana. Of course, Joyce made her way there as soon as she was able, finding a certain Mrs Hawthorne (Frieda Inescort) living there with two black servants and hook-handed, gator-hating, alcoholic handyman Manon (Lon Chaney Jr.) in the swamps nearby. Mrs Hawthorne purported not to know anything about Paul, but Joyce easily enough understood the old lady was lying for some reason, and would not be moved until she found out what truly was going on.
One suspects our heroine didn't exactly expect the truth had something to do with a friendly mad scientist (George Macready), the pituitary glands of alligators, and a husband with a very bad case of psoriasis.

Despite pretending to be a horror movie in its marketing material, The Alligator People is a SF melodrama with a slight influence of Southern Gothic for all but the final five minutes of its running time. As expected, it's also patently ridiculous in its set-up - so Paul is absenting himself from his new wife because he might start to look ugly, despite the way his face looks anyhow? -, silly in its science - did you know the best hope against curing the unpleasant aftereffects of alligator pituitary gland serum is radioactivity, or that cobalt 60 is transported in simple wooden crates you leave standing around at a rural train station until a mad alcoholic can get them? -, and not as clever as one would like it to be - after all, the only way the film's writer Orville H. Hampton can think of to produce a meeting between scaly-faced Paul and Joyce is to have the up to that point perfectly capable and sane woman suddenly run hysterically through a swamp full of very laid-back alligators by night, during a storm, and nearly getting raped by Lon Chaney Jr. whose leering she seems completely oblivious towards.

Despite these problems, the film has its moments. Director Roy Del Ruth (a man with a long and varied filmography starting in the early 1920s and nearly ending here) manages from time to time to conquer his workmanlike tendencies and shoot an atmospheric scene or two before it all breaks down in a very badly done bit of last minute monster rampage that only seems to happen because the producers suddenly realized they were selling this as a monster movie and not the science fictionally enabled melodrama they actually had. Plus, when she's not going into uncharacteristic hysterics, The Alligator People unexpectedly gives always theoretically capable (which is to say, as much as the movies she was in allowed her) b-movie actress Beverly Garland much opportunity to shine as the sort of heroine that even comes to her melodramatic moments with honesty. When the script isn't betraying her, Garland is very convincing as the driven, capable (for a 50s genre movie) woman out to understand why the hell her jerk of a husband suddenly disappeared. She gives the character just the right amount of frailty and desperation at the edges of her strength, making her much more believable than anyone or anything else in the movie.

Unfortunately, nobody else in the cast got the memo about Garland's kind of naturalistic acting, and so Inescort, Macready, and Chaney are mugging their roles up with fierce abandon. Chaney clearly has fun with his role (and who wouldn't have - he has a hook hand and rants about the evil of alligators, after all), while Macready speaks every single one of his lines (even "good morning", if he'd ever say something quite as prosaic) with a pathos and overemphasis I can only explain with him assuming every single member of any giving movie audience to be dumb and deaf. Even though I do approve of a good bit of overacting, I don't think these performances do the film any favours at all. They sure as hell don't do Garland's performance the justice it deserves.

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