Humanoids from the Deep (1980)

A small New England fishing town has rather a lot of trouble: the fishing yield of the local salmon has been decreasing for years now, so much so that most of the population greets the plans of a corporation to build a cannery and start on a highly industrialized fishing operation with happiness. Only a couple of people, really mostly native American Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena), are set against it. Johnny even might have a chance to stop the project in court, so the New England fishing rednecks under the leadership of Hank Slattery (Vic Morrow) are getting antsy enough, they start acting like the Klan. Despite being for the cannery, local boat owner Jim Hill (Doug McClure) doesn’t hold truck with these assholes, and might even become a voice of reason for the saner of the local fishermen, if he and the rest of the cast didn’t get distracted by a bunch of fish men going around killing men and raping women.

These gill men are of course the result of genetic experimentation by Evilcorp meant to increase salmon yield, a side-effect their own chief scientist Dr Drake (Ann Turkel) had warned them about (but they wouldn’t listen, and she apparently wouldn’t whistleblow). And yes, the local Salmon Festival is right around the corner, and the Mayor of AmityEvilcorp would absolutely prefer if things like a bit of murder, rape and kidnapping were kept on the down low. So it’s left to the fists (and guns) of Doug McClure and Anthony Pena to fight the fish folk eating the fisher folk.

It is rather astonishing how many Nature Strikes Back, Jaws-alike and classic monster movie clichés can be squeezed into eighty minutes of runtime, but that’s how producer Roger Corman liked it in this phase, and that’s certainly what director Barbara Peeters (with additional sleaze shot by Jimmy T. Murakami and/or James Sbardellati) delivered.

Because the film is stuffed to the gills with clichés and tropes that need little explanation, it zips along at an often incredible pace. Peeters somehow manages to keep things surprisingly coherent, with character motivations that make sense as far as they go, and a plot that may be a mix of the greatest hits of all monster movies, but also holds together through kill scenes, unpleasantness and weirdness.

Obviously, I have no problem at all with the film’s nature as a bit of a best of album with added sleaze, particularly not when it is executed with such vigour, as well as a true commitment to being a bit gory and unpleasant in the traditional exploitation style. The effects, particularly in the great, climactic attack on the Salmon Festival and the fantastic Alien rip-off moment that gets us out of the door do get rather Italian from time to time and become so imaginative, they stop being just unpleasant and instead turn surreal.

An added ace in the hole in this regard are the monster suits designed by Rob Bottin. While they were clearly realized on the cheap, there’s a sense for the strange detail on display that makes them work very well indeed. These things – all of them recognizable individuals too – look wrong in the just the right way. Mouths that are too broad, or arms that are too long suggest these creatures are something not coming out of nature as we know it, but mutants that don’t have a place in an ordered universe. Which is quite the effect to achieve with a batch of rubber suits.

Three Films Make A Post: It Never Forgives Or Forgets

The House Where Evil Dwells (1982): A couple played by Edward Albert and Susan George (and their kid) move into a traditional little house in Tokyo. It was surprisingly cheap, but then, it is haunted by a trio of ghosts who have nothing better to do than to entice the couple and their best friend (played by Doug McClure) into a repeat performance of their own deadly love triangle from some hundred years ago. All of which does sound rather nice as an example of US/Japanese horror, particularly once you realize the film does actually utilize quite a few Japanese actors and locations. Unfortunately, whereas the film’s basic idea is sound, the script by Robert Suhosky and James Hardiman is tediously obvious, and lacks any even second or third hand clue about how Japanese ghosts and curses might work.

And Kevin Connor – usually great when staging scenes of Doug McClure punching rubber monsters and pirates – is a terrible director choice for a ghost story. There’s simply no sense of subtlety, nor any ability to build up the proper ghostly mood in the man’s toolkit, so all we get is goofiness and very little of substance or interest beyond the basic idea of the film.

The Black Tower (1987): This British short film by the somewhat anonymously named John Smith about a man being haunted by a building, the titular black tower that somehow follows him wherever he goes, on the other hand, is a brilliant example of how the techniques of experimental filmmaking can achieve a feeling of true, creepy weirdness. On paper, there’s very little to a film that consists of an off-screen monologue and shots that mostly show that black tower from various angles and in various surroundings, and some dislocating editing tricks, but in practice, this is one of the most effective treatments of the encroachment of true strangeness into daily live I’ve seen. That it also from time to time manages to be very, very funny indeed just adds to Smith’s achievement.

Im Schloß der blutigen Begierde (1967): But let us end our first post in this new October on a bummer, as is traditional in horror. This was initially supposed to have been directed by the great Jess Franco, and thereby acquired some members of Uncle Jess’s ensemble like Janine Reynaud, Howard Vernon and Michel Lemoine. Fate in form of the siren song of a Fu Manchu movie put Adrian Hoven on the director’s chair instead. As treated by Hoven, the film mostly consists of a series of scenes of characters babbling horrifying double entendres, having flashbacks, getting their kits off and from time to time committing acts of violence, all badly held together by your typical Gothic horror guff and flashbacks to former lives; also included are some real life operation shots, which the film treats as a big selling point.

Hoven is very good at aping the tedious side of Franco (or he can be tedious all by himself, I don’t want to be unfair to the guy), but brings little of the visual inventiveness, the obsessive energy, or the plain coolness of Franco’s filmmaking into play. For a film full of Gothic tropes, nudity and a bit of blood, this feels surprisingly boring and anaemic. The theoretically good stuff is there, but it is treated perfunctorily, without any drive or actual interest in it.

The Death of Me Yet (1971)

The Cold War. A man at that point going by the name of Edward Young (Doug McClure) is trained full-immersion style in a fake US small town to become something of a perfect infiltrator for the Soviets. He seems to be rather good at this sort of roleplay; at least, he’s the favourite of the father of the program that trains him, one Barnes (Richard Basehart).

When we meet him again, he is living in – you’ve guessed it – a US small town under the name of Paul Towers. He has become a bit of a pillar of the community in his role as newspaper owner and writer of anti-war commentaries, and is married – apparently happily - to Sibby (Rosemary Forsyth). As we will learn soon enough, Paul – let’s keep that name – has defected from the Soviet cause, using a fortunate (for him) plane accident to make his handlers believe he is dead. His love for Sibby is clearly real, though Paul hasn’t told her anything about her past, putting some strain on the marriage. Otherwise, his life seems pretty perfect.

That is, until his old masters find out he is still alive and try to murder him, repeatedly. Further complicating matters is some proper espionage that has been going on at the company of Paul’s brother in law. This puts Joe Chalk (Darren McGavin), the most fed looking fed this side of Edgar J. Hoover, rather closer to Paul than he’d like.

This John Llewellyn Moxey TV film is, despite an open ending that suggests ambitions for a sequel (or for a follow-up TV show) that never came, a nice example of the form. Casting the all-American Doug McClure as our Soviet deep cover spy on the run is certainly a nice touch, particularly since McClure (mostly known for his magic fists around here) is pretty good at projecting the character’s underlying ruthlessness without making his actual humanity unbelievable.

The plot – based on a Whit Masterson novel, apparently – is not terribly original and rather too straightforward in its clarity about Paul’s true, decent and upstanding character, but does still build a nice net of differing emotional loyalties for him to get caught in. Moxey, as was his wont, manages to pack a lot of incident and character work into a seventy minute running time, even finding time for a bit of 70s kitchen sink psychology in between the espionage shenanigans without things ever feeling too superficial or the plot too cramped.

As a McGavin fan, I got a bit of a kick of the specific kind of asshole he’s playing here, with his haircut fifteen years out of style, his unempathetic character, all squinty little eyes suggesting a man of limited intelligence who mostly gets through life by rote, a badge, ruthlessness and a total lack of belief in his fellow man. Which is a weird and interesting way to portray the US intelligence community in a film about a highly capable Soviet spy who retired himself for moral reasons.

The Land That Time Forgot (1975)

1916. A German submarine commanded by a Captain Von Schoenvorts (John McEnery, about as German as his character name) sinks a British passenger ship. While it's surfacing to recharge the batteries, the submarine meets a force it can't resist - a lifeboat full of the British ship's crew, biologist Lisa Clayton (Susan Penhaligon) and two-fisted American Bowen Tyler (Doug McClure). As we all know, nobody can resist the fist of Doug McClure, and so it takes only a short fight until the submarine's new commander is named Tyler. The American promptly decides that the best direction to point his shiny new submarine in is New England. Or so Tyler thinks, for the German first officer and professional jerk Dietz (Anthony Ainley) is clever enough to sabotage the boat's compass.

When Tyler and his British friends realize this small problem days later, they get so distracted the Germans have no particular trouble taking their submarine back. At least for a time, because the Fist of the McClure punches its way back into command again after a time.

Now truly lost somewhere in Antarctic waters, and lacking in supplies and oil, the submarine eventually travels through an underwater cave into the lost continent/island/place on a volcano crater Caprona, where it is warm and cosy, and food will surely be plentiful.

As it is with places like this, Caprona is full of dinosaurs, cavemen and everything nice. These dangers convince the rather gentlemanly Von Schoenvorts, Tyler and the British that it would be best to just forget about the war at home and work together to find a way to first survive and then escape the continent. The longer the men and woman stay, the clearer it becomes that Caprona isn't your typical lost world - for some reason, the further north the group travels, the more highly developed the cavemen and creatures they meet become (which mostly means the cavemen getting better at guerrilla tactics and getting the knowledge to build shields). There must be a mystery behind it, but - quite disappointingly - the film never explores it pretty well.

Of course, expecting an Amicus adventure movie with Doug McClure that's based on the first Caprona novel of Edgar Rice Burroughs to thoroughly explore the pretty interesting SF-nal concept at its core would be asking too much, even though it credits great yet curmudgeonly SF and fantasy writer and editor Michael Moorcock as its co-writer in Moorcock's only screenwriting credit. After all, Amicus's The Land That Time Forgot isn't really a film out to explore ideas, but one out to show Doug McClure punching out cavemen and shooting dinosaurs while Susan Penhaligon makes slight screeching noises.

Once the film actually arrives at that point of natural awesomeness, it becomes not exactly overwhelming - it's not mad enough for that - but at least pretty damn entertaining, entertaining enough to let me just ignore the film's wasted potential for becoming a fantasy adventure movie with a brain. The Land's problem is how much time it takes to get its characters to Caprona. The film's first forty minutes feature more than just a moment of feet-dragging to get to the appointed running time without having to put much money on screen. Director Kevin Connor (who started a short phase of being Amicus's go-to guy for this kind of adventure movie with the film) really isn't too great at letting his filler look like anything else, and is never able to hide there's no need at all for some of the script's early long-windedness. For example, instead of putting McClure, Penhaligon and the British sailors into one lifeboat from the start, the civilians and the sailors are in different boats only so that the film can spend five minutes it could have used for showing us something interesting on their meet-up. And let's not even start with the weird back and forth in submarine ownership, which is - again - neither interesting nor necessary.

Fortunately, once our heroes have arrived on Caprona, things get quite a bit more interesting, the pace increases and the script stops letting its characters do everything three times.

Connor has, after all, dinosaurs of highly variable quality to put on screen. Worst in show here is certainly the wire-driven pterodactyl McClure encounters late in the movie: it's stiff, it's badly detailed, and its appearance is marred by the fact that Connor doesn't even seem to try disguising the wires it's hanging from; Tsuburaya, dinosaur effect guy Roger Dicken definitely isn't. Some of Dicken's other dinosaurs are a bit more effective, but really, I'm pretty much satisfied with any kind of prehistoric monster as long as it is fighting Doug McClure doing his patented two-fisted kinda-sorta everyman American bit. In that regard, The Land That Time Forgot's only disappointment is that McClure doesn't punch a dinosaur, but only a lot of cavemen of various stages in their development.

 

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At the Earth's Core (1976)

Eccentric British scientist Dr. Perry (Peter Cushing) has invented a fabulous drilling device, the Iron Mole. Before going on some more interesting travels deep within the Earth's core in it, he and his former student and current financier, two-fisted American David Innes (Doug McClure) are making a test run through some Welsh hills. But the Mole works better than anyone could have expected and transports our heroes right to the centre of the Earth, where they find a whole new world - called Pellucidar - to explore.

Only armed with an umbrella and Doug McClure's fists, the men have to fight off ridiculous suitmation dinosaurs, are captured by the swine-faced servants of a race of hypnotic, telepathic, man-eating dinosaur-birds, romance a princess (Caroline Munro) - alright, only McClure romances, but what can you do - and incite a human revolt against the evil dino-bird people.

Poor Amicus studios, always playing the second fiddle behind the Hammer juggernaut, having to somehow make movies on budgets even lower than those of their more successful rivals. In the second half of the 70s, Hammer was of course already racing towards financial doom itself, and it's not difficult to imagine that times for Amicus must have been even harder.

So, while Hammer was trying to turn Dracula into a James Bond villain without a James Bond to fight, Amicus turned its misshapen but loveable head towards the non-Tarzan works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, of course biting off much more than their budgets could have been able to chew even at the best of times, as At the Earth's Core amply demonstrates.

Seldom have the 70s (this is shortly before the first Star Wars movie, mind you) seen a more rickety looking conglomeration of cardboard sets. The often nearly immobile and always terrible looking giant monster suits are usually crosses between dinosaurs and other animals. My personal favourite here is the toad-o-saurus who seems barely able to move its head but is at least able to breathe fire (as toad-o-saurusses do) and explodes when punctured by arrows shot by famous action hero, elderly (and terribly ill looking) Peter Cushing. The toad-o-saurus is exemplary for the special feeling of ambitious ridiculousness the cramped but colourful sets and the monsters exude, the charm of the inept but beautifully sillily imagined that one can find in certain Taiwanese fantasy films, and that one wouldn't expect to find in a film from the UK. On a technical level, the special effects are of course utterly embarrassing, but I haven't got what it takes to complain that a fire-breathing toad-o-saurus, a boar-o-saurus or the awesome cave octopus doesn't look "realistic" enough.

Where the special effects either embarrass or charm the pants off of one, the script turns Burroughs' rather sprawling (at least as far as I can remember) novel into exactly the theoretically tight, yet easily distractible, simple adventure yarn one usually finds Doug McClure starring in. It's all very silly (and takes place in surprisingly few sets) and somewhat dumb, but it hangs together well enough while providing the basic thrills it promised to deliver.

I also dig (sorry) the trio of B-movie stalwarts at the film's core (sorry, I can't help myself), or rather the professional enthusiasm they bring into a film with such a thin script and dubious production values.

Beloved B-movie icon Peter Cushing looks rather terrible, and has to play an often annoying "idiot scientist" role, but does this with his own peculiar sort of dignity that makes my inner child cheer whenever he does things like trying to fight a chicken-o-saurus with an umbrella, explodes the turtle-o-saurus, or states the obvious with one of the better lines of his career, "You cannot mesmerize me, I am British!" (of course echoing something very similar from Horror Express).

Doug McClure gives exactly the same easy-going, two-fisted manly man performance he does in all of his films (to be honest, I never understood why his films even bothered to give him a character name other than "Doug McClure"), but fortuitously this is exactly what the film wants of him, no more, no less. Caroline Munro is, as was so often the case in her career, relegated to the role of the stunning girl that doesn't wear much clothes and needs to be rescued repeatedly. On paper, it's a waste and a shame, but in practice, she's at least so good at the stunning bit that I'm glad it's her and not blonde bimbo number three playing that role.

So, although probably nobody would want to call At the Earth's Core a good movie, I find it quite irresistibly charming. It's a little weird, a little cheap, a little stupid, and sometimes, that's exactly what a film is supposed to be.

 

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