Gorgo

Eight years before directing 'Gorgo' in 1961, Eugène Lourié made 'The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms' and arguably launched the whole giant atomic monster, kaiju subgenre. After 'Gorgo', and with two other giant creature movies under his belt that left him feeling himself typecast, he retrired from directing forging a successful career in other off camera roles including an Academy Award nomination for the visual effects on 'Krakatoa, East of Java'. Of those four movies that led to him relinquishing the director's chair though the first and last remain central to the genre.

Following a volcanic eruption off the coast of an Irish island the crew of a salvage vessel capture a giant monster with bright red eyes and wiggly ears.  Ignoring the claims of the Irish scientists they take the creature, 'Gorgo', to London and put on display for the gawking masses until it's 200 foot tall mother, 'Ogra', turns up and rampages across the city.

Beyond the obvious stompy bloke in a rubber suit limitations of the movie and an over-reliance on stock footage there's some striking effects work here as 'Ogra' eats everything in her path in her desperate search for Chewits her lost baby. With barely a female in sight - beyond the 200ft tall one - this is a remarkably male-centred movie even for the time and in their absence Lourié puts the emotional heart of the movie in the hands of the young orphan, Sean (Vincent Winter), and the two kaijus and, through their greed and their voyeurism, firmly establishing the humans as the actual monsters.

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Village of the Damned

Adapted, as I'm sure you already know, from the John Wyndham classic, 'The Midwich Cuckoos', 'Village of the Damned' is the story of an invasion of sorts that begins when the entire village of Midwich is sealed off from the outside world by a cone of sleep. For four hours everything - human and animal, villager and visitor - inside the village boundaries immediately falls asleep.  Waking with no memories of what has transpired it's not until 2 months later, when every woman of child bearing age is discovered to be pregnant, that the scale of the enigma begins to be revealed.  The pregnancies develop inhumanly quickly and the babies are born simultaneously with each displaying strikingly similar characteristics.  This accelerated development continues as the children mature at four times the speed of an entirely human child and display notable telepathic abilties.

Narrowing the focus from the novel, the film concentrates on one family, Professor Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders - 'Psychomania'), Anthea Zellaby (Barbara Shelley - 'Quatermass and the Pit') and their 'son' David (Martin Stephens - 'The Innocents') who ostensibly acts as the leader of the children, who are, despite not appearing for the the first 30 odd minutes, the undisputed stars - as well as the focus - of the film.  The children, who operate a hive mind, are neatly conformist, joyless, quick to anger and utterly ruthless in it's expression and an obvious metaphor for the Nazi and Communist regimes that had so preoccupied minds over the previous decades and a reflection of the fear of the newly maturing baby-boomers and the societal changes they were inspiring - "Couldn’t you learn to live with us, and help us live with you?".

Anglo-German director Wolf Rilla in his only foray into science fiction plays a subtle hand avoiding those cliches that potentially would have littered the film if the originally planned US productions hadn't floundered.  His version (and vision as one of the scriptwriters) emphasises the mundane reality of the village made weird by the actions of the cuckoos in the nest, the cosiness that Wyndham was famously accused of shown to be only a thin veneer covering the turmoil raging below - the accusations, the abuse, the fear, the violence - and the focus is kept deliberately narrow only hinting at the wider picture. There are no answers provided, Gordon Zellaby's solution is one of coldly pragmatic necessity that is a reflection of the children's nature - "if you didn’t suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are" - and the who and the how of the children is never revealed and both they and the movie are all the more chilling for it. 

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The People That Time Forgot

Amicus' 1977 direct sequel to 1974s 'The Land That Time Forgot' returned us to Edgar Rice Burroughs' dinosaur riddled antarctic island, 'Caprona' where Doug McClure's 'Bowen Tyler' had been stranded at the end of the previous movie.  Last seen trudging over snowy mountain peaks in the company of Susan Penhaligon's 'Lisa Clayton' to throw the message in a bottle into the sea that has spurred his chldhood friend 'Ben McBride' (Patrick - son of John - Wayne) to mount a rescue mission.  Accompaying him into the unknown are photographer 'Lady Charlotte 'Charly' Cunningham' (Sarah Douglas - 'Ursa' in the first 2 'Superman' movies), paleontologist 'Norfolk' (Thorley Walters), his mechanic 'Hogan' (Shane Rimmer) and, along the way, a cave-woman named 'Ajor' played by singer Dana Gillespie.

Directed, as was 'The Land..', by Kevin Connor - who also sent McClure to both Atlantis and 'The Earth's Core' - this one is every bit as flawed and fun as it's predecessor.  The story is flaccid, the dinosaur effects are risible and the cast are poor (except McClure - I won't have a word said against McClure) with Wayne being boorish and bullying and an unlikeable lead, Douglas overplaying her role, Walters and Rimmer acting as comic relief and Gillespie providing the cleavage. 

Written by future 'Amtrak Wars' author Patrick Tilley it's a pretty by the numbers adaptation that was the last gasp of the Amicus studio but when I was a kid Doug McClure was my absolute favourite and to this day his three Amicus monster movies rank amongst my favourites although I'll admit this one is solidly in third place.

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The Projected Man

Made and released in conjunction with the Peter Cushing movie 'Island of Terror', 'The Projected Man' has scientist Dr Paul Steiner (Bryant Haliday - 'Devil Doll' 'Tower of Evil') over-reacting to his funding being pulled by testing his teleportation device on himself and getting all burned and murdery with his new electric hand of electro death.

Taking it's queues from such sci-fi classics classics as 'The Fly' and 'The Quatermass Xperiment' this is a fantastic flop of a film.  Haliday's gruesome make up and some entertainingly cringy dialogue aside there's little to recommend here with its cliche riven script, it's wooden cast and dreadful climax it's a bad movie but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

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At the Earth's Core

"This cannot be the Rhondda Valley.  I've never seen anythng like it."

As a result of the disasterous first test of their Iron Mole drilling machine Dr Abner Perry (Peter Cushing) and David Innes (Doug McClure) find themselves lost in the subterranean world of Pellucidar. A land of rubbery dinosaurs ruled over by the lady eating, telepathic pterodactyl-like Mahars.  Luckily though the nicer locals - including Princess Dia (Caroline Munro), Ghak the Hairy One (Godfrey James) and Ra (Cy Grant) - speak English and so David sets about uniting the tribes to defeat the Mahars.

"They're so excitable. Like all foreigners."

Based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, scripwriter Milton Subotsky and director Kevin Connor go all out for silly fun with this technicolour adventure romp.  The cast spend much of the film running around a fiery set made entirely out of health and safety nightmares while battling beaky dinosaurs and their piggy henchmen to a soundtrack from ex-Manfred Mann woodwind player Mike Vickers.  Cushing - a year away from playing a Moff in his slippers and scolding the Green Cross Code Man - looks especially frail here but is channelling his Dr and playing his part entirely for laughs, gets all the best lines and has great chemistry with McClure who seems to be thoroughly enjoying Cushing's performance.

“You cannot mesmerize me. I’m British!"  

Even on it's original release 'At the Earth's Core' was ridiculed for it's effects (and pretty much everything else) and it must be admitted it is spectacularly cheap looking and primitive even for the time it was made but personally I'll take wobbly sets, rubber monsters and a bow-legged Peter Cushing over slick effect every time and I bloody love this film.

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Hardware

I can't really remember when I first saw 'Hardware' but it was fairly soon after it's 1990 release but what I do remember was sitting there in amazement wondering how I could have missed the news that 2000AD had made a movie of one of my favourite stories, 'Shok!' from a treasured Judge Dredd annual (1981) and then scouring the credits wondering why there was no mention of writer Steve MacManus or artist Kevin O'Neill or even of 2000AD who subsequently sued for plagiarism and won.

Hardware is a post-apocalyptic tale of mechanical mayhem triggered by the discovery of the dismembered remains of a prototype murder robot out in the desert wastelands by Nomad, played by Fields of the Nephilim singer Carl McCoy,  the first of three rock star cameos in the opening 20 minutes and who is presumably just wearing his own clothes.  The second cameo soon comes in the form of Iggy Pop's radio DJ Angry Bob, who gives us some background info on the world we're in before Lemmy ferries two of our stars across the river to the sounds of 'Ace of Spades'.

Thanks to Shades (John Lynch) and Moses (Dylan McDermott - perhaps the most recognisable non musician here thanks to roles in various series of American Horror Story) the robot's head soon finds itself part of an industrial sculpture made by Stacey Travis' Jill before it starts drawing the power needed to start itself up and murder everyone in sight except for Jill because in the grand tradition of the slasher there needs to be a last woman standing.

Working on a small budget director Richard Stanley has made a real go of it and parts of it look pretty nice but the limitations do shine through.  Most filming took place inside the then disused Roundhouse so everything has a nicely grimy, derelict feel but poor soundproofing meant all dialogue needed to be re-recorded giving the film the look of a poorly dubbed foreign language film. 'Based' as it was on a 7 page 2000AD short what little story there is can only be stretched so far and patience is stretched thin as the robot repeatedly revives itself for yet another bout of murderdeathkill.  In amongst this the cast deal competently with a hammy script with Stacey holding the centre stage well and earning her scream queen stripes and William Hootkins as creepy, peepy neighbour Lincoln Wineberg Jr making a memorable cameo.

Truthfully you can't fault Stanley's ambition (you can definitely fault his ethics) and he made a gritty, hissing clanging post-industrial slasher with it's toes in the same fetish club aesthetic that spawned Clive Barker's Hellraiser but like it's tin man antagonist it's lacking heart and is essentially a mish mash of Terminator, Blade Runner and Soylent Green, occasional spaghetti western tropes and a thousand no-budget Italian grindhouse post-apocalypse schlockers all wrapped around a plagiarised core.

 

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Quatermass 2

Released by Hammer in 1957, 2 years after both the release of their first Quatermass movie and the showing of the original 6 episode TV series, Quatermass 2 (or II if you're feeling slightly Roman) is perhaps the least regarded of the three Hammer Q movies which I think is a real shame even if I do mostly share that opinion.

Treading similar ground to 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers', which was released in the intervening year, we find the Professor and the members of The British Experimental Rocket Group investigating a meteor shower that falls on the isolated location of Winnerden Flats where he finds an industrial complex eerily similar to his own proposed moon base staffed, it soon transpires, by people under the control of little alien blob things that had arrived in cute little rocket shaped meteors and which planned to transform themselves into very large alien blob things.

Compared to the first there's a notably bigger budget on display here and director Val Guest (who had also directed Xperiment) keeps the pace high but allows Kneale space to explore some of his favourite themes of totalitarianism, of indifference and incompetence amongst the British classes and the rejection of rational science characterised by the downtrodden but dogged Professor.

Returning to the role of Quatermass (the only actor to do so) Brian Donlevy plays him as a notably less abrasive character here than he was in Xperiment cowed perhaps by his failure with Victor Carroon but certainly by his dealings with British governmental bureaucracy.  As with his first appearance in the role Donlevy's performance is often clumsy and his delivery less than perfect a result no doubt of his alcoholism but he's supported by a very capable cast of recognisable character actors including Bryan Forbes, William Franklyn and Sid James who was also appearing at that time in his breakthrough TV role in Hancock's Half Hour whose presence lighten the load.

The film concludes with a finale that while undoubtedly spectacular with it's 200ft tall blob monsters is somewhat of a let down after the intrigues of the film and leaves something of a bitter aftertaste that it was just another monster movie but that aside it is a movie with a solid premise, reasonably well executed and with an intriguing message at it's core that perhaps deserves to be better regarded than it is.

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The Quatermass Xperiment

It was only a matter of time before we got to the film that launched - well, revived - a studio and created countless cinematic legends and so here we are in the company of the venerable Professor Bernard Quatermass.

When Hammer released 'The Quatermass Xperiment' in 1955 it was a familiar commodity to the British public with Nigel Kneale's creation having been made as a six part serial by and shown to great success on the BBC just two years earlier.

The story follows the return of the sole survivor of the rocket ship launched by Quatermass' 'The British Experimental Rocket Group' and of the alien parasite that takes over his body leading to one of the most iconic endings in movie history.

Director Val Guest tweaking a screenplay by Richard Landau from the original script by Kneale does a masterful job of building the suspense ably assisted by a sympathetic performance from Richard Wordsworth (great-great-grandson of William) as the doomed astronaut Victor Carroon, a gently comedic performance from Jack Warner as Inspector Lomax and a slightly lumpen but enjoyably brusque performance in the title role from Brian Donlevy, an American brought in to help sell the movie to the US.

The end result is a movie whose impact, beyond the rejuvenating of Hammer studios and the myriad films and careers that flowed from it, still resonates today.

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The Trollenberg Terror (The Crawling Eye)

"Didn't you see? His head! It was torn off!"

Written by legendary Hammer Films screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and released in 1958 'The Trollenberg Terror' (or 'The Crawling Eye' in the US) is the story of an investigation into the deaths linked to an inexplicable, unmoving, radioactive mist on the side of Mount Trollenberg (not actually) in Switzerland.  Doing the investigating is intrepid US troubleshooter Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker), intrepid journalist Philip Truscott (Laurence Payne) and intrepid mind reading sisters Anne (Janet Munro - The Day the Earth Caught Fire) and Sarah Pilgrim (Jennifer Jayne - beloved of us here at Wyrd Britain for being the pseudonymous screenwriter (as Jay Fairbank) of Tales That Witness Madness and Son of Dracula).

What we get here is a good old fashioned alien invasion movie with shades of 'X the Unknown', 'Island of Terror' and 'Night of the Big Heat' and like all good creature features it's a load of B movie tosh littered with cliches, rubbish monsters - in this case a giant eyeball with tentacles - and a heroic, fiery last stand which, of course, is everything one could want in a monster movie.

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City Under the Sea

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave, there is a movement there!
As if their tops given death
His undivided time.

Known in the US as 'War-Gods of the Deep', 'City Under the Sea' is a Vincent Price helmed movie from American International Pictures home of Price's Phibes movies as well as Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe movies to which this owes much of it's genesis, parts of it's title and flashes of it's script including that opening quote above which paraphrases Poe's poem, 'The City in the Sea' and was one of a number of movies produced by the studio that was lumbered with a Poe related title - see also 'The Conqueror Worm' the entirely irrelevant US title of 'The Witchfinder General'.

Tab Hunter plays mining engineer Ben Harris who along with (Mary Poppins' David Tomlinson) Harold Tufnell-Jones FRA (Fellow of the Rooster Association) is plunged into the submerged city of Lyonesse in pursuit of landlord's daughter Jill Tregillis (Susan Hart).  There they meet Sir Hugh (Vincent Price) and his band of  smugglers who along with their subservient 'gill men'  have been hiding in the sunken city kept alive by the rejuvenating gases of the increasingly active volcano upon which the city is built.

It's an engaging enough romp and there's a decidedly low budget feel to the movie that rarely ventures beyond the confines of the studio. Price is uncharacteristically subdued here leaving much of the scenery unchewed whilst John Le Mesurier cuts a delicately sympathetic figure as the Rev Jonathan Ives. Hunter in his first starring role makes for a clumsy lead as does Hart but Tomlinson is well within his comfort zone as the buffoonish Tufnell-Jones.  The movie makes a valiant attempt at replicating the appeal of Jules Verne stories such as '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' but ultimately falls far short thanks to a lacklustre script and some uninspired direction from Jacques Tournier, here making his last film after a career that included such highlights as 'Cat People' and 'Night of the Demon'.

 

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The Day The Earth Caught Fire

After an early career making light comedies director Val Guest took an unexpected sidestep in 1955 when he was tasked by Hammer with directing the movie version of the first Quatermass story, 'The Quatermass Xperiment'.  Following it's success he developed a successful sideline in science fiction with the second Quatermass movie and 'The Abominable Snowman' (both 1957) and, in 1961, thanks in part to his profits from Cliff Richard's 'Expresso Bongo', he got the go ahead from British Lions too make the apocalyptic 'The Day The Earth Caught Fire'.

Simultaneous American and Russian nuclear tests knocks the Earth off it's axis and out of it's orbit sending it moving towards the sun.  Daily Express journalists Peter Stemming (Edward Judd - 'Island of Terror' & 'Vault of Horror') and Bill Maguire (Leo McKern - The Prisoner's two time No.2) along with government typist and whistleblower Jeannie Craig (Janet Munro - 'The Trollenberg Terror') break the story and cover the aftermath as society crumbles and the world waits for salvation or death.

It's a gloriously mature science fiction film, there are no dashing square jawed heroes - Judd's Stemming is a bitter and broken man careering towards alcoholism - just people struggling and adapting to tumultuous times both before - the dawn of the 1960s - and after the Earth is made to go walkabout.  Guest has made primarily a newspaper movie along with many of the tropes that entails but placed it in the context of an encroaching global apocalypse. He's coloured his movie with some wonderfully hard-bitten and barbed dialogue and made good use of stock footage of fires and storms that roots the film firmly in the real.

The version presented below is the US version with bells added to the end which does spoil the deadpan ambiguity of Guest's original edit a little.

Buy it here - UK / US.

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The Sorcerers

Starring Boris Karloff, Catherine Lacey, Elizabeth Ercy and Ian Ogilvy 'The Sorcerers' is the story of disgraced hypnotist Dr Marcus Monserrat (Karloff) who, over a characteristically sad looking Wimpy hamburger, somehow convinces bored hipster Mike Roscoe (Ogilvy) to allow himself to be strapped into the machine he's invented. Said machine looks to be straight out of 'The Prisoner' (UK / US) and after some suitably psychedelic lighting effects and an electronic squall worthy of the Radiophonic greats it allows Monserrat and his wife Estelle (Lacey) to control Roscoe's mind and perceive everything he does.  It's not long though before the flood of emotions and experiences overwhelm Estelle and her darker nature comes to the fore.

Karloff is always a powerful presence and Ogilvy a reliable leading man but the movie belongs to Catherine Lacey's powerful performance as her addict's craving for new experiences degenerates into murderous madness.

Of the three movies director Michael Reeves made in his short career the third, 'The Witchfinder General' (UK / US), is undoubtedly his most widely celebrated but for me, as good as that movie is, it's this his second movie made the previous year, 1967, that's his best and shows just how good he was and would've been.

Buy it here - UK / US.



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They Came From Beyond Space

'They Came From Beyond Space' is a cobbled together sci fi movie from Amicus studios. With a set apparently left over from the Doctor Who movie 'Dalek's Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.' (UK / US) and a Milton Subotsky script made up of vague memories of various 1950s alien invasion movies like 'Quatermass 2' (UK / US), 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' and 'It Came From Outer Space'.

Mind controlling moon rocks come to Earth to recruit slaves to help them rebuild their crashed rocket.  Up against them is action scientist Dr.Curtis Temple (Robert Hutton) who as well as being a rocket scientist is an expert at hand to hand combat, a crack marksman and a metallurgist who can make fashionable anti alien headgear at the drop of a, well, a hat. In charge of the now corporeal moonies is 'Master of the Moon' Michael Gough in a very fetching pink cape.

It really is a load of old tosh. The story is dull, bitty and anticlimactic, the direction from the usually reliable Freddie Francis is pedestrian at best but I suppose he could only do so much with what he had and thanks to his cinematographers eye in parts it does look quite nice.  Truthfully there's nothing here to recommend to you other than if, like me, you have a liking for really bad sci fi movies then all of the above because this is a really bad sci fi movie.

Oh and just to add to the experience the video embedded below isn't a particularly great copy.

 

Buy it here - UK / US - or watch it below.

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The Medusa Touch

Inspector Brunel (Lino Ventura), a French detective on a job swap in London, is called in to investigate the attempted murder of novelist John Morlar (Richard Burton) a man who, according to psychiatrist Dr Zonfeld (Lee Remick), had described himself as having "A gift for disaster."

Morlar, it transpires, is a powerful psychokinetic with a pathological hatred of humanity, a great line in wonderfully misanthropic and nihilistic dialogue, 

"And Mother was much like the hotels; a decade past her prime, a lot of paint covering the worst cracks, a pathetic pretence of being better than she was." 

and a building desire to destroy the society he hates, 

"I’ve found a way to do God’s dirty work for him. The Royal Chieftain, the parasites, and the whole gang of international rabble rousers, are going to bleat to the Almighty Nothing in his great Temple, to give praise for three million pounds. I promise you, the moment they kneel to pray, I will bring the whole edifice down on their unworthy heads."

Over time 'The Medusa Touch' has been derided for some patchy effects particularly during the climactic set piece but such things are mostly irrelevant to me especially when they are surrounded by a tightly plotted and solid story and strong performances which director Jack Gold (The Naked Civil Servant (UK / US)) teases out of a uniformly excellent cast.

Burton, whose star was in terminal decline by 1977, is almost a peripheral figure in a movie that has his name at the top of the billing and revolves around his character but he still dominates the screen whenever he appears.  Ventura has a lovely light touch and a shabby Columbo-like air in what is essentially the starring role, Remick is as rock solid and reliable a presence as ever and the rest of the cast is littered with familiar faces like Gordon Jackson, Harry Andrews, Jeremy Brett, Derek Jacobi, Michael Hordern and James Hazeldine. 

I first saw 'The Medusa Touch' as a young lad and the ending was one of the few things that ever freaked me out and as such it has remained in my head ever since, but it wasn't a film I ever had the opportunity to return to so it was a wonderful surprise when writing this to discover that my memory hadn't rose tinted it and I enjoyed it just as much some 40 years later.

Buy it here - UK / US.



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The Asphyx

Sir Hugo Cunningham (Robert Stephens - 'The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes') is a parapsychologist who, whilst photographing people on the brink of death, discovers a smudge on the film that he comes to see as evidence of the existence of an 'asphyx', a spirit attracted to those about to die.  After the deaths of his son Clive (Ralph Arliss - 'Kickalong' in Quatermass (UK / US)) and his fiancée Anna (Fiona Walker) he determines, with the help of adopted son Giles (Robert Powell), to learn how to trap these spirits and achieve immortality for himself and his family.

With it's Victorian setting, anachronistic machinery and blurred line between science and the occult 'The Asphyx' occupies the same sort of proto-steampunk area as William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories (UK / US).  Its an improbable and fairly plodding affair that is somewhat lacking in wit and takes itself far too seriously by which I'm not asking for jokes or pratfalls I just wished it would have enjoyed it's absurdities and fully invested in them.  As it is it's a stilted mixture of the outrageous and the staid which makes it a fun and watchable curio but, for me at least, not much more than that.

Buy it here - UK / US - or watch it below.



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Island of Terror

In their short lifespan Planet Film Production made five films; two crime movies, a horror - 'Devils of Darkness' - and two science fiction movies - 'Night of the Big Heat' (UK / US) and 'Island of Terror'.

In many ways both 'Night of the Big Heat' and 'Island of Terror' can be seen as a bit of a job lot as they share very similar concepts - strange creatures terrorising a remote island - a director - Hammer legend Terence Fisher ('Dracula' (UK / US), 'The Curse of Frankenstein' (UK / US)) - a composer - Malcolm Lockyer - a cinematographer - Reginald Wyer (a regular Terence Fisher collaborator as well as working on 'Night of the Eagle' (UK / US)) - and principal cast - Peter Cushing.

In this instance the strange creatures - named 'Silicates' - are created in a lab on the island where they are trying to cure cancer.  The Silicates are greenish blob things with Triffids like stingers that feed on the the bones of their victims.  Impervious to axes, petrol bombs and dynamite it's up to the trio of doctors - Cushing, Edward Judd ('First Men in the Moon' (UK / US), 'The Day the Earth Caught Fire' (UK / US)) & Eddie Byrne - along with scream queen Carole Gray ('Devils of Darkness') to find a way to end their threat and save the islanders.

It's a fun movie that I've always thought has the feel of early 70s Doctor Who about it and with it's perils of science storyline it's certainly coming from the same place that would later give us Doomwatch.  There are some pacing issues but Fisher takes us on a real tour of the island with numerous outdoor locations and a plethora of studio sets.  His slow reveal of the monsters is as effective as the creatures aren't and the finale as the panicked villagers are held seige in the village hall is very well done.

Buy it here - UK / US - or watch it below.

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