Текст книги "Monsters in the Movies "

Автор книги: Джон Лэндис

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Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

Invaders From Mars  [William Cameron Menzies, 1953]

A tightly constructed, nightmarish scenario, in which all the authority figures—teachers, policemen, even your parents—are working for the Martians! The ending completely freaked me out when I was a child.

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

The Green Slime  [aka Gamma 3: Operation Outer Space, Kinji Fukasaku, 1968]

Shot at Tokyo’s Toei Studios with an entirely Caucasian cast. Luciana Paluzzi is pictured here being harassed by one of the Green Slime. With a great title song!

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

Mars Attacks!  [Tim Burton, 1996]

Based on the infamous and gruesome Topps bubblegum trading cards by Mad Magazineartist Wallace Wood. The Martians kill indiscriminately and speak in a language that consists entirely of the word “Ack.” Burton fills the film with homages to 50s and 60s sci-fi movies, specifically Ray Harryhausen’s Earth vs. the Flying Saucers[Fred F. Sears, 1956].

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

The Thing From Another World  [Christian Nyby, 1951]

The indelible ad art for The Thing. George A. Romero once described this film as “a movie about doors,” because you are never sure what is lurking behind each one.

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

The Thing  [aka John Carpenter’s The Thing, 1982]

Bill Lancaster’s screenplay and Rob Bottin’s astonishing make-up effects, coupled with Carpenter’s dynamite direction, make this picture a modern classic.

“You gotta be fucking kidding me!”

Palmer (David Clennon), The Thing[1982]

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

Starman  [John Carpenter, 1984]

Carpenter’s nicealien movie (almost like an apology for his malevolent The Thing). This baby is Jeff Bridges’ Starman! Karen Allen falls in love with him when he gets a little more mature.

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

Le Voyage dans la lune  [aka A Trip to the Moon, Georges Méliès, 1902]

One of the first, if not thefirst, sci-fi movies, this image of the rocket ship stuck in the Moon’s eye is unforgettable.

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

20 Million Miles to Earth  [Nathan H. Juran, 1957]

A spaceship returning from Venus crashes into the sea off the coast of Sicily bringing with it the Ymir, one of Ray Harryhausen’s most unique creations.

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

Forbidden Planet  [Fred M. Wilcox, 1956]

Ad art showing Walter Pidgeon as Dr. Edward Morbius, Leslie Nielsen as Commander John J. Adams, Robby the Robot, and Anne Francis as Altaira, Morbius’ beautiful daughter.

“My evil self is outside that door, and I have no power to stop it!”

Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), Forbidden Planet

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

The Blob  [Chuck Russell, 1988]

A remake of the 1958 classic, with the addition of villainous government operatives and better special effects.

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

Alien  [Ridley Scott, 1979]

The Alien about to be blown out of the open hatch of the escape pod by the intrepid Ripley (Sigourney Weaver).

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

Poster for Alienwith the fantastic tagline, “In space no one can hear you scream.”

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

The Alien as it bursts from the chest of Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt), in a truly shocking sequence.

“This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.”

Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), before putting herself and the cat into a hibernation pod, Alien

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

Planet of the Vampires  [Mario Bava, 1965]

Alienscreenwriter Dan O’Bannon and director Scott say they have never seen it, but it is hard to avoid this film’s influence on Alien. With little budget and, literally, smoke and mirrors, Bava created a marvelous, other-worldly quality to the planet’s exteriors. When the astronauts explore the ruins of another ship containing the skeletal remains of its giant alien pilot, it’s hard to accept Dan and Ridley’s denials. Regardless, Alienand Planet of the Vampiresare seminal sci-fi films.

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

It! The Terror From Beyond Space  [Edward L. Cahn, 1958]

Ray “Crash” Corrigan as It, a stowaway on the first spaceship to land on Mars. An obvious influence on Alien, down to the opening of a hatch to blow It from the ship.

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

Predator  [John McTiernan, 1987]

Another variation of The Most Dangerous Game[aka The Hounds of Zaroff, 1924] a short story by Richard Connell in which a big-game hunter hunts human prey. This time, it’s an alien who travels the universe hunting the local species for sport. An elite unit of soldiers finds itself being hunted by the Predator in the jungles of Central America. Kevin Peter Hall plays the Predator in a creature suit by Stan Winston. An entertaining action picture that ends with Arnold Schwarzenegger surviving an atomic blast! Eventually, the Predator ended up fighting the Alien [ Alien vs. Predator, Paul W. S. Anderson, 2004] just like King Kong vs. Godzilla.

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

Predators[Nimrod Antal, 2010] is the latest sequel.

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

Independence Day  [Roland Emmerich, 1996]

One of Emmerich’s movies of mass destruction, this time an all-out alien attack on Earth that is eventually thwarted by Will Smith’s heroic jet pilot and Jeff Goldblum, using a laptop computer (in one of the all-time inane plot devices). A ridiculous, but very entertaining film. Emmerich destroyed the White House again in his 2012[2009], this time with a tidal wave tossing an aircraft carrier onto it!

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

Paul  [Greg Mottola, 2011]

Two English sci-fi geeks (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) embark on a road trip across the US and have a close encounter of the third kind with an alien slacker (voiced by Seth Rogan) who is being pursued by mysterious government agents.

Space Monsters[ Book Contents]

The Thing From Another World  [aka The Thing, Christian Nyby, 1951]

Generally assumed to have been directed by producer Howard Hawks, this taut suspense thriller about a group of soldiers and scientists in the Arctic who find something in the ice is a bona fide classic.

Target Earth[Sherman A. Rose, 1954] Richard Denning and Kathleen Crowley are threatened by an invasion of alien robots from Venus!

MONSTROUS MACHINES

Apart from the obvious advantages in manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, and communication it has given us, the Industrial Revolution has a lot to answer for: The clear and increasing damage that man-made pollution is doing to our planet, and all of the robots, automobiles, and computers that run amuck in the cinema! In the movies, machines turn on us with remarkable regularity. From malicious cars [ Christine, John Carpenter, 1983] to malicious television sets [ The Twonky, Arch Oboler, 1953], the movies have no doubts that our machines are untrustworthy.

Silent film’s most famous robot would have to be the Machine Man disguised as the character Maria in Fritz Lang’s iconic Metropolis[1927]. Another fabulous mechanical man, Robby the Robot, was introduced to us in Forbidden Planet[Fred M. Wilcox, 1956]. Robby was the first movie robot to speak with the robotic voice we now associate with all computers. His 1950s “space-age” design, with its revolving antennae, plastic dome, and many moving parts was such a hit that MGM immediately starred Robby in his own feature, The Invisible Boy[Herman Hoffman, 1957].

Another particularly memorable movie robot is Gort, which accompanies the alien Klaatu (Michael Rennie) on his mission to Earth in The Day the Earth Stood Still[Robert Wise, 1951]. In this elegant Cold War film, the populations of other worlds, concerned about the brutality of mankind, send Klaatu to warn Earthlings of the dangers of atomic power. If Earthlings attempt to expand their propensity for violence into outer space, Gort and his fellow robot enforcers will destroy us. So never forget the words, “Klaatu barada nikto.” A good reason to see The Day the Earth Stood Stillis to learn just what those words mean, so you will be prepared the next time a flying saucer from another world lands on the Mall in Washingon, D.C.

Cold War paranoia also fuels Gog[Herbert L. Strock, 1954], where two robots, Gog and Magog, are being controlled by secret radio signals to sabotage an American space station. In The Colossus of New York[Eugène Lourié, 1958], a brilliant young scientist is killed in a car crash on the eve of winning the Nobel Peace Prize. His brain-surgeon father transplants the young scientist’s brain into the skull of a large robot—a bad idea for all concerned.

Far eclipsing the brain power of a human mind, computers’ processing capabilities have always made us nervous. This concern is reflected in a whole series of movies where computers attempt to take over the world. In Joseph Sargent’s suspenseful Colossus: The Forbin Project[1970] and in Stanley Kubrick’s seminal science-fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey[1968], computers come to the logical conclusion that humans are incapable of making correct decisions and take steps to relieve them of that responsibility. In The Forbin Project, the supercomputers respectively placed in control of the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals join forces “for the betterment of mankind” with terrifying results. In 2001, HAL, the onboard computer of the spacecraft Discovery One (given a calm but creepy monotone voice by actor Douglas Rain), comes to believe that the human crew will jeopardize the Jupiter Mission (to find the source of a mysterious black monolith discovered on the Moon), and begins to murder them one by one. In a chilling sequence, HAL kills the astronauts who are in suspended animation, their deaths displayed in the flatlining of their life-support systems. HAL then tricks the two remaining astronauts (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood in brilliant, underrated performances) into going outside into space. HAL murders one of them and refuses entry to the other. The astronaut repeatedly orders: “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” HAL finally responds, “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.” The astronaut literally blows his way back into the ship and gives HAL a lobotomy in an unsettling, starkly beautiful scene.

Another movie featuring machines running out of control is Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton [1973]. Westworldwas inspired when Crichton took his kids to Disneyland. He wondered what would happen if the audio-animatronic pirates on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride began to kill the passengers. Notable for the perfect casting of Yul Brynner as a Western gun-slinging robot relentlessly pursuing hapless tourist Richard Benjamin, Westworldis the obvious model for James Cameron’s low-budget classic The Terminator[1984], in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a relentless robot from the future. A smart and well-made action sci-fi movie, Cameron topped it with the dazzling Terminator 2: Judgment Day[aka T2, 1991]. With a bigger budget, terrific stunt work, revolutionary computer generated images, and Stan Winston’s superb make-ups and puppetry, Cameron delivered a truly spectacular movie. This film not only made the bad guy Terminator from the first film into a good guy, it also introduced the awesome T-1000 robot, played by Robert Patrick with the help of some extraordinary special effects.

Isaac Asimov’s classic and influential collection of short stories I, Robotwas published in 1950. Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” (1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey any orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law) set the standards for practical artificial intelligence. I, Robotwas made into an underwhelming, CG-laden, Will Smith vehicle in 2004 by Alex Proyas.

One robot that disregarded all of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics was the Proteus IV in Demon Seed[Donald Cammell, 1977], in which an “artificially intelligent computer” ends up impregnating Julie Christie by force when it fails to charm her.

In The Matrix[Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999], it is revealed that what most people experience is actually a simulation of reality created by intelligent machines to pacify the humans, whose bodies supply heat and energy to The Matrix. Neo (Keanu Reeves) becomes involved in a rebellion against the machines in a wonderful movie. I won’t talk about the increasingly stupid sequels as I enjoyed the first one so much.

Be they robots, clones, androids, cyborgs, or replicants: when does enough artificial intelligence make a non-human human? This question is addressed in movies like A.I. Artificial Intelligence[Steven Spielberg, 2001] and Ridley Scott’s visionary Blade Runner[1982]. The brilliantly realized and prophetic future of Blade Runnerwas done with traditional miniatures and an optical printer, before the existence of digital effects.

So what exactly does make us human? In the MGM classic, The Wizard of Oz[Victor Fleming, 1939], our four heroes are on a quest. The Cowardly Lion wants some courage. The Scarecrow wants something organic in his head, something other than straw; he (like many others in this guide) wants brains. And Dorothy just wants to go home. But it is the Tin Man who understands exactly what he needs to be a human. The Tin Man wants a heart.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

Christine  [John Carpenter, 1983]

Another evil car movie, this one based on a Stephen King book. A witty opening sequence follows the manufacturing of the shiny red 1958 Plymouth Fury on its Detroit assembly line, as the song “Bad To The Bone” by George Thorogood & The Destroyers blares on the soundtrack.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

Metropolis  [Fritz Lang, 1927]

Brigitte Helm as the “Maschinenmensch,” the robotic version of her character Maria.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

Forbidden Planet  [Fred M. Wilcox, 1956]

A crew member of United Planets’ Cruiser C-57D keeps his ray gun trained on Robby the Robot. Robby’s vehicle is behind him, on the right.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

The Invisible Boy  [Herman Hoffman, 1957]

MGM recycled the Robby the Robot suit from the previous year’s Forbidden Planetin this “boy and his robot” movie.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

Also given here is the very eye-catching Theatrical Poster to The Invisible Boy [1958]

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

The Day the Earth Stood Still  [Robert Wise, 1951]

Klaatu (Michael Rennie) and robot Gort (Lock Martin) emerge from their ship. A rare color still from this black and white classic.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

Gog  [Herbert L. Strock, 1954]

“…and then, without warning, the machine became a Frankenstein of steel!!” So ran the tagline on the poster of this neat, low-budget sci-fi thriller.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

The Colossus of New York  [Eugène Lourié, 1958]

Another brain transplant movie! A Nobel Prize-winning young scientist is killed in a car accident and his surgeon father puts his brain into a giant robot, with predictably dire results. Here he is carrying off his widow, Marla Powers.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

2001: A Space Odyssey  [Stanley Kubrick, 1968]

Astronauts Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood suspect HAL, the spaceship’s onboard computer, and lock themselves into a pod where HAL is unable to hear them. They are in for an unpleasant surprise. HAL, the red spot outside the window, can read lips!

“I can’t put my finger on it, but I sense something strange about him.”

Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), about the onboard computer HAL, 2001: A Space Odyssey

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

Westworld  [Michael Crichton, 1973]

Yul Brynner’s robot gunslinger having a check-up.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

Terminator 2: Judgment Day  [aka T2, James Cameron, 1991]

Robert Patrick’s incredible T-1000 model Terminator in mid-morph. Cameron raised the bar on special effects with this exciting movie.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines  [aka T3, Jonathan Mostow, 2003]

Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, a little worse for wear.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

Demon Seed  [Donald Cammell, 1977]

Based on a novel by Dean Koontz, a computer with artificial intelligence named Proteus asks its inventor: “When will you let me out of this box?”. Proteus eventually rapes Julie Christie who gives birth to the silliest-looking human/machine hybrid in the movies.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

A.I. Artificial Intelligence  [Steven Spielberg, 2001]

Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law star as androids in a film developed by Stanley Kubrick and with a screenplay credited to Steven Spielberg.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

Blade Runner  [Ridley Scott, 1982]

Rutger Hauer as a Replicant in the film based on the science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?by Philip K. Dick.

Monstrous Machines[ Book Contents]

The Wizard of Oz  [Victor Fleming, 1939]

The Tin Man (Jack Haley) with Dorothy (Judy Garland) and the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger).

Peter Lorre as the child murderer in M[Fritz Lang, 1931].

HUMAN MONSTERS

The movies are populated with serial killers, psychopaths, sadists, perverts, men, women, and children who are a long way from what anyone could call “normal.”

The most obvious human monsters are characters that are physically malformed, either by birth or accident. After the huge box office numbers of Universal’s Frankensteinand Dracula[both 1931], MGM wanted a horror film of their own. But when they released Tod Browning’s Freaksin 1932, critics and the public were MONMOV279HUMMON_020so repulsed that the studio quickly withdrew it from theaters and sold it off to a grindhouse distributor. Freaksis a powerful, disturbing film, in which real sideshow freaks play themselves in a tragic love story. Although mostly presented in a sympathetic light, Browning betrays his sideshow stars by exploiting their handicaps in the grisly revenge sequence in the final reel. A more uplifting story is The Elephant Man[David Lynch, 1980], the true story of Joseph Merrick, a cruelly deformed man in 19th-century London and the kindly surgeon who befriends and protects him.

Lon Chaney, Sr. “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” often portrayed physically grotesque characters in still-unmatched make-ups of his own design and execution. Chaney’s touching portrayal of Quasimodo, the tragic Hunchback of Notre Dame[Wallace Worsley, 1923] clearly conveys the passion and sensitivity hidden inside of Quasimodo’s ugly and misshapen exterior. Charles Laughton also gives an extraordinary performance as the Hunchback in William Dieterle’s excellent 1939 remake.

Lon Chaney’s most celebrated role is that of Erik, The Phantom of the Opera[Rupert Julian, 1925]. The Phantom, who wears a mask to cover his gruesome face, terrorizes the Paris Opera House from his hideout in the sewers. Chaney’s unmasking by Mary Philbin remains one of the great moments of the horror film. Universal remade The Phantom of the Operain 1943 [Arthur Lubin] with Claude Rains as the disfigured composer; and Hammer Films produced their own version [Terence Fisher, 1962] in which Herbert Lom was the Phantom. The lavish film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera[Joel Schumacher, 2004] is best avoided, but Brian De Palma’s rock’n’roll parody The Phantom of the Paradise[1974] is a lot of fun.

The Mystery of the Wax Museum[Michael Curtiz, 1933] shot in early two-color Technicolor, is the story of Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill) a sculptor who makes life-like figures for a wax museum in London. When the museum’s profits diminish, his partner burns it down for the insurance money. Trying to save his beloved wax figures from the flames, Ivan Igor is knocked out and left to die in the inferno. A dozen years later, Igor, now in a wheelchair, opens a new Wax Museum in New York. The beautiful wax exhibits are actually real people that the now-insane sculptor has murdered and dipped in wax! Half wisecracking newspaper story and half horror film, Mystery of the Wax Museumhas another ghastly unmasking scene when Fay Wray hits Atwill’s face and his wax mask cracks and breaks, revealing his hideously scarred countenance.

The movie was remade by André de Toth in 1953 as House of Wax, starring Vincent Price, in full Technicolor, and in 3D. Disfigured characters seeking revenge is a plot used over and over again in movies, from the silent version of Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs[Paul Leni, 1928], to Sam Raimi’s delirious Darkman[1990].

Cannibalism is frowned upon in polite society, but it is the focal point of a lot of movies. The fictional, penny-dreadful character of the murderous barber Sweeney Todd, whose victims became ingredients in Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies, was portrayed by the marvelous Tod Slaughter in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street[George King, 1936], and again by Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd[2007]. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre[Tobe Hooper, 1974], the story of a group of friends who stumble across a deranged family of cannibals in the Texas badlands, is a truly nightmarish movie. It introduced us to one of modern cinema’s most iconic human monsters in Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), who wears a crude mask of somebody else’s skin, a bloodstained leather butcher’s apron, and carries a very loud chainsaw.

The graphic and gory Italian movie Cannibal Holocaust[Ruggero Deodato, 1980] is a fauxdocumentary about a lost American expedition to the Amazon. The movie then shows us the “found footage” left by the missing film crew. This extremely unpleasant picture is one of the first “first-person camera” narrative movies. The movies’ most popular cannibal is brilliant serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter, from the crime novels of Thomas Harris. The first film to feature this repellent but fascinating character was Michael Mann’s Manhunter[1986], where he was played by Brian Cox. Lecter next appeared in The Silence of the Lambs[Jonathan Demme, 1991], the only horror movie to win five Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins’ performance as Hannibal.

A person’s lack of sanity is not necessarily obvious at first meeting. The Old Dark House[James Whale, 1932] opens on a dark and stormy night, in which stranded travelers take shelter in the old dark house of the title. This is the home of the eccentric Femm family and their brutish, alcoholic butler, Morgan (Boris Karloff). Rather than tell you the plot, I strongly suggest you watch this deliciously camp black comedy from James Whale. But be careful of Saul, and do not let Morgan anywhere near liquor!

James Cagney plays a gangster who not only has mother issues, but was genuinely psychotic in White Heat[Raoul Walsh, 1949], and Richard Widmark is unforgettable as Tommy Udo, the giggling killer who pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs in Kiss of Death[Henry Hathaway, 1947]. But nothing prepared the public for two films from 1960 that brought a new level of terror to the movies. Psycho[Alfred Hitchcock, 1960] and Peeping Tom[Michael Powell, 1960] are two films from master filmmakers; the first, an international sensation, the other ended the director’s career. Peeping Tomis about a killer who murders women with a camera tripod that has a knife mounted on the end so that he can film his victims’ last moments of fear and death. Psychobegins as the story of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and an illicit love affair, but becomes the story of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) an insane, murdering transvestite who, at the end of the film, has literally become his own mother! One shot in lurid color, the other in black and white, both movies are unsettling classics.

From Jack the Ripper to Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh to that suspicious-looking guy sitting next to you, there are more than enough human monsters around to inspire filmmakers for generations to come.