Текст книги "Monsters in the Movies "

Автор книги: Джон Лэндис

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Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

Gorille enlevant une Femme (Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman)  [Emmanuel Frémiet, 1887]

A bronze sculpture by Emmanuel Frémiet. (From the Author’s collection.)

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

Konga  [John Lemont, 1961]

Mad scientist Michael Gough is helpless in Konga’s giant grasp in this publicity paste-up photo.

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

Robot Monster  [Phil Tucker, 1953]

I’m not entirely sure what George Nader is trying to do to Ro-Man in this publicity shot for one of the all-time, strangely fascinating, terrible movies. I admire the sheer balls of putting a space helmet on a gorilla suit and thinking that would be okay as an alien monster. With music by a young, “gray-listed” Elmer Bernstein!

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

The White Gorilla  [Harry L. Fraser, 1945]

Ray “Crash” Corrigan in his now white gorilla suit. Corrigan also plays Steve Collins and the Narrator. A triple threat.

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

Captive Wild Woman  [Edward Dmytryk, 1943]

A publicity shot of Cheela the gorilla (Ray “Crash” Corrigan) holding Paula Dupree (Acquanetta). In the film, sexy Acquanetta becomes a gorilla (also Corrigan) and then sultry but deadly Paula Dupree. It is all very impractical.

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters  [Edward Bernds, 1954]

The monsters the Bowery Boys meet are a vampire, a robot, and a gorilla.

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

Bride of the Gorilla  [Curt Siodmak, 1951]

A steamy melodrama, in which South American plantation manager Raymond Burr murders his boss to get to his wife, Barbara Payton, and is cursed by a witch doctor to turn into a murderous gorilla at night. Directed by the screenwriter of The Wolf Man[1941]. This time, Lon Chaney, Jr. is the cop on the case.

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

The Monster and the Girl  [Stuart Heisler, 1941]

His brain now inside this massive gorilla’s head, Scott Webster regards his sleeping sister, Susan (Ellen Drew). Charlie Gemora’s best gorilla-suit performance.

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

Murders in the Rue Morgue  [Robert Florey, 1932]

Charles Gemora as Erik, the orangutan about to kidnap another woman for his master Dr. Mirakle (Béla Lugosi). Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue[1841], which many believe to be the first true detective story.

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

At the Circus  [Edward Buzzell, 1939]

Harpo, Groucho, and Chico crooning with Charlie Gemora in this publicity photo.

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

Blonde Venus  [Josef von Sternberg, 1932]

During the “Hot Voodoo” dance number, as the drums pound and the trumpet wails, a gorilla menacingly comes onstage. The gorilla removes its head to reveal the beautiful face of Marlene Dietrich (inset)!

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

The Ape Man  [William Beaudine, 1943]

Experiments by mad doctor James Brewster (Béla Lugosi) turn him into an ape man! He and his gorilla must obtain human spinal fluid to reverse this situation before it’s too late. A Monogram Picture, so you know it’s cheap.

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break  [Edward F. Cline, 1941]

W. C. Fields, writing under the pseudonym Otis Criblecoblis, created this surrealistic and very funny film, about Fields pitching a film to producer Franklin Pangborn. Fields is pictured with a gorilla, played by Emil Van Horn.

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes  [Hugh Hudson, 1984]

The infant Tarzan, safe in the arms of apes that adopt and raise him in the jungle. The first part of the film, dealing with Tarzan in Africa, is great. Rick Baker made the magnificent apes.

IN CONVERSATION

Rick Baker

“There is something scary about 45° angles.”

Rick Baker at home (photo by the Author).

Monstrous Apes[ Book Contents]

JL: Rick, what’s your definition of a monster?

RB: I think I have a different concept of a monster than most people. I’ve always been fascinated by them, but I don’t see them as bad. The kinds of monsters that I like are Frankenstein’s Monster, Quasimodo, and guys like that. The ones I like are sympathetic.

JL: OK, but what aremonsters?

RB: Monsters are creatures that don’t exist in the real universe.

JL: Mythological monsters, like dragons and Cyclops…

RB: I like all those. I’ve always been attracted to things that aren’t in the real world. Fantastic things, grotesque things. I don’t like gory stuff…

JL: But you do a lot of gore effects! Didn’t you tell me that when you were a teenager, you used to do make-up wounds on yourself, just to freak people out?

RB: Yeah I did, but that was just to get a reaction, an easy reaction. That’s why I don’t have that much respect for those kinds of make-ups because I know how easy it is to fool somebody with just the sight of blood. It’s not as hard as doing a character, or to turn a young person, through make-up, into an old person.

JL: Your own interest in monsters seems to be aesthetic.

RB: It’s a visual thing. I’ve always been fascinated by the way they look and how people designed and changed a human into something else.

JL: If I said to you, “I want to be made-up to look like me, but I want it to be scary,” are there things, shortcuts, you can do...?

RB: There is kind of a formula to that.

JL: Like what?

RB: Angularity. Look at the werewolf in An American Werewolf in London[John Landis, 1981], your four-legged hound from hell. It had big scary teeth that are going to tear you up, but it’s also sculpted in a very angular way. The brows are very angular and there are 45° angles all through it. There is something scary about 45° angles.

Baker working wolf head in Piccadilly Circus for American Werewolf in London[1981].

JL: Well, Dracula has got that going on.

RB: Yeah, with the widow’s peak and the eyebrows shaved—I use 45° angles all the time.

JL: They always show the devil that way, and Mephistopheles has brows like that.

RB: Yeah, the devil’s horns go up at 45°, as well as the ears. I don’t know why 45° angles are scary, but they are! I think some of the scariest make-ups, and the guy who was the best at making scary faces, was Lon Chaney, Sr. So many designs that I’ve done, and I know other make-up artists would say the same, were influenced by Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera[Rupert Julian, 1925]. Some of the faces he makes in that are great.

JL: And Chaney was using old stage make-up, with big limitations in what he could do because of the primitive materials he had to work with.

RB: A lot of the old make-up guys didn’t have a lot of the tools that we have now, and that’s part of the reason their efforts worked so well. They worked within specific limitations. They couldn’t make 10,000 werewolves crawl on the ceiling, you know? There was a certain reality to their work. It was closer to what you could really believe.

JL: Do you have a favorite movie monster?

RB: Frankenstein is my favorite and the Boris Karloff version is by far the best. It was one of those movies where the mix of people involved—James Whale, Jack Pierce, and Boris Karloff—created magic.

JL: Karloff had an amazing face.

RB: He’s got a great face, and the make-up Pierce designed for his face never looked as good on anyone else. And I don’t think that anyone else was as good as Karloff either.

JL: OK, so you’ve done a lot of aliens.

RB: Aliens and werewolves. I did your movie [ An American Werewolf in London], and I did The Wolfman[Joe Johnston, 2010], and I did Wolf[Mike Nichols, 1994]…

Baker making-up Griffin Dunne as “Dead Jack” for An American Werewolf in London[1981].

JL: Of course! What is it about werewolves that people are so interested in.

RB: Well, I think everybody seems to feel like there’s a beast inside them somewhere.

JL: Like Jekyll and Hyde?

RB: It’s that whole evil side coming out. But what I like about werewolf movies is the change in the appearance of the person. I’m interested in the transformation, more than the story itself. That animal and man combination has always fascinated me, going back to [French artist Charles] Le Brun. I always thought the combination of humans and animals was such a fun thing. That’s why I liked Island of Lost Souls[Erle C. Kenton, 1932].

JL: The first film version of (H. G. Wells’ novel) The Island of Dr. Moreau? I love that movie! The make-ups in that picture are great.

RB: Better than in any of the remakes.

JL: Why is that?

RB: Because my favorite make-ups are the ones where the guys didn’t have the tools that we have today! For Island of Lost Souls, they didn’t have foam rubber or silicone so they couldn’t make really crazy things, and I think they benefited from that. The Beast Men are these hairy, man-like creatures, but there’s a reality to it.

JL: You flew to London to join me for Ray Harryhausen’s 90th birthday event at the National Film Theater. [Steven] Spielberg, [James] Cameron, [George] Lucas, Tim Burton, Guillermo [Del Toro] all talked about how he inspired them. What is so special about Ray’s work?

RB: He really does give those metal and foam rubber puppets life! He makes them characters… but also, I think a lot of this is that we’re the generation which grew up with his films and saw them fresh and new. I would watch a Harryhausen movie and suffer through 20 minutes of bad acting just to see his effects. Since then, I’ve seen so many huge effects movies, with thousands of things doing all sorts of crazy action, to the point where it just has no impact and I don’t care. But I can watch one of Ray’s puppet animations with complete pleasure.

JL: Do you remember the big battle in the second Lord of the Ringsmovie [ The Two Towers, Peter Jackson, 2002]? That was the first time I saw a CG movie with so much CG that wasn’t in outer space. I thought: “This is great!” It was a way of realizing these enormous monsters on a vast scale. But now I’ve become so bored with CG effects. Things have gotten so elaborate, I just don’t care.

RB: I know, just because you can have a thousand werewolves climbing upside-down on the ceiling, it doesn’t mean that you should!

JL: You know what you showed me once that totally freaked me out? You were very gleeful. You had gotten a medical encyclopedia full of horrible photographs of medical anomalies, and one of them was of teeth growing out of a guy’s leg. Do you remember that? It really freaked me out.

RB: When I first went to junior college, I found books on plastic surgery. Just talking about those kinds of things scares me. Seeing what can happen to you and that you can still be alive… There was one guy in particular that was in an airplane crash, who basically had no face, and no skin on the top of his head. They had drilled holes in his skull to let the pressure out, but the guy was alert and alive. I find that horrifying. What scares me is that it could actually happen to me. How would I deal with that when I looked in the mirror and that’s what looked back at me?

I think that’s something that always fascinated me about make-up: that I could look through my eyes, and see a completely different person looking back at me in the mirror. I was painfully shy as a kid, but in make-up you can do things you can’t do as yourself.

JL: I think that’s true of Eddie Murphy.

RB: I think it’s true of any actor. Everybody hates the process of being made-up—hours in the morning—but you’re sitting there looking at yourself, and you can see that other face, the character’s face, looking back.

JL: What clearly demonstrates that is costume. I’ve seen it millions of times. Once the actors get into their clothes, they know who the character is.

RB: Actors need that. When you walk onto a cool set and you’re in this environment, and you’re in make-up and costume, it’s got to help! With all this movement to motion-capture and blue screen, I really think it affects the performance and reality of the moment.

JL: I am always impressed by the fact that actors, especially in fantasy films, so often have to react and respond to something that is not there. Some gigantic creature or cataclysmic event that will be put in later in post production.

RB: So many people say “If we don’t do it today, it’s not going to work.” Then I’ll say, “Did you see Star Wars? You know the band that’s in the cantina was shot six months later in a whole different country, by a whole different group of people, and you would swear that they’re there in that cantina.”

JL: But that used to be standard! That’s filmmaking!

RB: Yeah, that’s what’s missing now though, isn’t it? (Laughs.)

The Fabulous World of Jules Verne[aka A Deadly Invention, Karel Zeman, 1958] Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman’s unique blend of live action, stop motion, and drawn animation reproduces the look of 19th-century etchings, which works wonderfully well in this fusion of two Jules Verne novels.

NATURE’S REVENGE

Whether it is rats, spiders, snakes, bees, sharks, or just big old mean dogs, we are all afraid of some animal out there. Movie makers, constantly searching for something to scare us with, have shamelessly taken advantage of our reasonable fears of bee stings, spider bites, and being devoured by sharks, by featuring these and other beasties in horror films.

Producers and directors can take a real creature and make it gigantic, like the crab in Mysterious Island[Cy Endfield, 1961] or the spider—“Crawling Terror, 100 Feet High”—in Tarantula![Jack Arnold, 1955], or they can just unleash vast numbers of the critters we dread: bees in The Swarm[Irwin Allen, 1978]; or snakes in Snakes on a Plane[David R. Ellis, 2006]. If a vast, unstoppable army of ants in The Naked Jungle[Byron Haskin, 1954] isn’t enough to scare you, then how about the REALLY HUGE ants of Them![Gordon Douglas, 1954] or Empire of the Ants[Bert I. Gordon, 1977]? If the rats made you uneasy in Willard[Daniel Mann, 1971], schlock producer’s logic says that the giant rats in The Food of the Gods[Bert I. Gordon, 1976] should reallymake you jump out of your seat.

I can imagine the writer’s pitch now: “The great white shark that terrorized the beaches in Jaws[Steven Spielberg, 1975] was puny! He just wasn’t really that big! How about a Mega Shark?” “Yes! Yes!” shouts the producer. “And he could battle a Giant Octopus!” And that is how Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus[Jack Perez as Ace Hannah, 2009] was born. In that film, the absurdly big Mega Shark destroys San Francisco’s famed Golden Gate Bridge, which had obviously been repaired since 1955 when it was heavily damaged by the giant octopus in Ray Harryhausen’s It Came From Beneath the Sea[Robert Gordon, 1955].

If worms give you the creeps, then the millions of flesh-eating bloodworms in Squirm[Jeff Lieberman, 1976] will make you do just what the title says. In The African Queen[John Huston, 1951] the audience shared Humphrey Bogart’s character’s revulsion when he came out of the water covered in leeches. If a few normal-size leeches generated such disgust, then an Attack of the Giant Leeches[Bernard L. Kowalski, 1959] is the only way to go.

It isn’t always necessary to make something we naturally avoid, like a scorpion, into a colossal version of itself to frighten us. ( The Black Scorpion[Edward Ludwig, 1957] did that with stop-motion animation by the great Willis O’Brien.) Sometimes a rabid dog [ Cujo, Lewis Teague, 1983] or just an angry grizzly bear [ Grizzly, William Girdler, 1976] is enough to terrify us without the use of special effects.

Usually, the giant animal monster is explained by some pseudo-scientific theory: it’s a prehistoric beast frozen in ice, or a mutant, created by atomic radiation. The monster is sometimes created by toxic waste or by some covert corporate or government experiment gone terribly wrong. The man-eating piranha in Joe Dante’s Piranha[1978] are the results of a misguided military experiment, while in the 2010 remake, Piranha 3D[Alexandre Aja], the vicious piranha are prehistoric fish freed from an underwater cavern by an earthquake. The change reflects the politics of the era in which each film was made.

Sometimes the reason for nature turning on us is unexplained. When Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds[1963] attack and kill, no reason is given for their behavior. The characters speculate on what could be making the birds turn suddenly homicidal, but the movie deliberately offers no solution to the mystery and ends on an uneasy, unresolved note.

Creature From the Black Lagoon[Jack Arnold, 1954] is a classic story of an ancient species destroyed by contact with modern civilization, essentially the plot of the first half of King Kong[1933]. The Gill-Man was designed by Millicent Patrick and is considered to be one of the greatest monsters in film history. The celebrated sequence where Julie Adams is swimming on the surface of the lagoon, unaware of the Creature as it swims beneath her, remains one of the most poetic in the genre. A B movie made almost entirely on the back lot of Universal Studios (except for the underwater sequences, shot in the crystal-clear waters of Wakulla Springs, Florida) Creature From the Black Lagoonwas a great success and is still one of the best 3D movies ever made. Two sequels followed, in which the Gill-Man continued to be abused by the human leads.

Other humanoid, water-based creatures include The Monster of Piedras Blancas[Irvin Berwick, 1959], the very silly fish-men of Horror of Party Beach[Del Tenney, 1964], and the infamous Humanoids From the Deep[Barbara Peeters, 1980]. Infamous because the producer, Roger Corman, had additional scenes shot in which the monsters were shown actually raping the nubile young girls hired to be topless and scream as the slimy fish-men, created by make-up maestro Rob Bottin, had their way with them. And to increase the sleaze factor, the movie ends with one of the rape victims giving birth to a baby fish monster by having it burst through her stomach in a geyser of blood, in blatant imitation of the “chest burster” scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien[1979].

Underwater is not the only place we will find humanoid monsters—they also come from underground. The scary, carnivorous cave dwellers a group of women encounter in Neil Marshall’s The Descent[2005] are very nasty indeed. Be warned, this is definitely not a movie for the claustrophobic. Deep in the bowels of the Earth can also be found The Mole People[Virgil W. Vogel, 1956], who are used as slave labor by a race of “Sumerian Albinos!”

Another movie that features an insatiable underground threat is Ron Underwood’s Tremors[1990]. Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward play two contemporary cowboys trying to deal with the huge subterranean monsters they discover in a small town in the Nevada desert. Tremorsis a textbook example of a well made and entertaining monster movie.

Nature’s Revenge[ Book Contents]

Mysterious Island  [Cy Endfield, 1961]

The castaways fight a giant crab on Captain Nemo’s island. Ray Harryhausen animated an actual crab shell purchased at Harrods Food Hall in London.

Nature’s Revenge[ Book Contents]

Tarantula!  [Jack Arnold, 1955]

The tremendous tarantula in the movie never holds a woman as illustrated here in the ad art. It was not unusual for exploitation picture promotional art to exaggerate.

Nature’s Revenge[ Book Contents]

The Swarm  [Irwin Allen, 1978]

Olivia de Havilland wonders how her career ever came to this. Henry Fonda and Michael Caine are also in this ridiculous Irwin Allen movie.

“This is more than a movie. It’s a prediction!”

Publicity tagline for The Swarm

Nature’s Revenge[ Book Contents]

Snakes on a Plane  [David R. Ellis, 2006]

The passengers and crew are not happy about snakes on the plane.

Nature’s Revenge[ Book Contents]

The Naked Jungle  [Byron Haskin, 1954]

Charlton Heston struggles to save a Peruvian cocoa plantation from the “Marabunta”—millions of voracious army ants.

Nature’s Revenge[ Book Contents]

Empire of the Ants  [Bert I. Gordon, 1977]

A toxic spill turns ordinary ants into intelligent, rampaging monsters, bent on conquering mankind. Another Bert I. Gordon trashing of an H. G. Wells story.