Two-Fisted Tales: The Star Witches by John Lymington (Macfadden, 1970)

I was recently hipped to the work of John Lymington via a great piece written by Jacob Charles Wilson in the estimable Books Review of Books (issue # 3, June 2021), wherein Wilson basically makes the case for Lymington as a kind of forgotten idiot savant of British pulp SF, citing his 1965 giant spider opus ‘The Green Drift’ as “..a terrible book and an amazing book. It’s a miracle it was ever published.”

Suitably intrigued, and noting that I already have several Lymington joints stashed unread on my shelves, I chose to begin my investigation with ‘The Star Witches’, because… well, how could I not? It sounds bloody brilliant.

Well, what can I tell you readers - a sense of morbid fascination saw me through to the final pages, but I’m not much inclined to repeat the experience. First published in the same year as ‘The Green Drift’ (though this U.S. edition dates from 1970), ‘The Star Witches’ is, unquestionably, a terrible book. An amazing one though…? I fear not.

Although nothing in the exciting back cover copy Macfadden’s editorial staff managed to wring out of this damned thing is technically incorrect, the arrangement of these events within Lymington’s text is… not quite as compelling as we might hope, to put it mildly.

The Reverend David James, for instance, only discovers that “..a coven of witches was using his church for worshiping Satan..” via a few throwaway dialogue exchanges towards the end of the novel, and he scarcely has much time to be perturbed by the issue amidst the thunderous rumblings, “cold smells”, petty bickering and great globules of misbegotten, barely coherent, shapeless prose through which Lymington attempts to convey the descent of his (far too numerous) cast of characters into a state of supernatural hysteria as they are buffeted by the assault of some kind of incorporeal alien intelligence.

The Reverend James, by the way, is in no sense the novel’s hero or protagonist - instead he is merely one member of an ever-expanding ensemble of pointless and dislikeable individuals Lymington conjures into existence to stretch out his word count, each chiefly defined by their assorted weaknesses and grotesquery. (The Reverend, for instance, is a venal, self-serving type, possessed of prodigious girth, multiple chins, and invariably described as either picking remnants of fish from his teeth or tripping over his impractical ecclesiastical vestments.)

Mirroring both Wilson’s description of ‘The Green Drift’ and the staggeringly uneventful 1967 film adaptation of Lymington’s ‘Night of the Big Heat’, the “action” of ‘The Star Witches’ is largely confined to the interior of one cold, strange, smelly house (the squire’s abode in a fictional Cotswolds village), wherein upward of a dozen characters gradually accumulate and spend the entire first two thirds of the novel fretting about the absence of one Harry Royce, owner of the gaff in question. An amateur scientist, Royce seems to have disappeared, ‘Marie Celeste’-style, mid-way through his dinner, whilst carrying out some vague researches into matter transference and inter-planetary telepathy, or, y’know - something along those lines.

Harry’s dinner, incidentally, was paprika stew, “with the cheese on the steak,” which his housekeeper (a gargantuan, simple-minded West Country stereotype, like all of the book’s working class characters) repeatedly insists he would never have voluntarily left unfinished. And, if you feel it would be beneficial to receive frequent updates on how long this dinner has been left sitting in his study, and what happens to it as it gradually congeals, and to read several discussions on the subject of whether or not it would be a good idea to clear it away, then, friends - John Lymington is the author you’ve been looking for!

A similar dialectic is invoked on a slightly grander scale during the final third of the book, when, after discovering the body of the absent Mr Royce in a trance-like state within a wall cavity, the characters spend most of the remaining pages arguing about whether they should kill him - in order to destroy the ‘bridge’ his consciousness has formed with the evil alien intelligences which are trying to take over everyone’s minds - or alternatively, just, y’know, not kill him, even though they probably should, just due to general milquetoast queasiness and procrastination on the part of the middle class contingent.

Meanwhile, in the grounds of the house, pound-shop Nigel Kneale vibes are soon the order of the day, as reality warps and frays around Royce’s ‘pepper pot’ private observatory, wherein he has trained his high-tech telescope on the distant planet from which the book’s malign, shapeless entities originate. Eventually, the local residents, tiring of both subterranean rumblings ‘spoiling’ the beer at the pub and their assorted husbands and wives failing to return from the indecisive palaver going down at the manor house, do the decent thing and assemble a pitchfork-wielding mob to take care of business.

Spoiler alert: they do not really succeed, and the book ends, hilariously, with a field report composed by one of the extra-terrestrial invaders, who apparently intend to continue sending signed and dated letters to each other and compiling paper records whilst they conquer the globe, despite being shapeless, nameless telepathic beings from a wholly unknown realm of distant space.

John Lymington is credited with having written over 150 books between 1935 and 1989 - not quite matching the output maintained by his fellow British ‘mushroom pulp’ godhead Lionel Fanthorpe during his peak years, but regardless, Lymington also pumps out his prose like a fog of inarticulate, stream-of-consciousness blather, showing little regard for whether the ends of his sentences bear any relationship to their openings. It reads as if he (like Fanthorpe) was simply dictating the novel into a tape recorder, ‘first thought = best thought’ style, as the clock ticked down to his deadline, before sending it straight off to some poor, underpaid typist to be transcribed.

Fanthorpe however was a worldly and charismatic individual, meaning that the random digressions into his day-to-day which inevitably filtered through into his writing often proved interesting or amusing. (I mean, who wouldn’t want to read 200 bad science fiction novels written by this guy?) 

The incessant irrelevancies which accumulate within Lymington’s prose by contrast feel mean, narrow-minded and crushingly banal. It’s all suggestive - though I may be projecting unfairly here - of a kind of culturally blinkered, unhappy existence, the experience of which feels more unhealthy than the writhing, inter-dimensional tendrils of the alien mind-stealers the author rather half-heartedly seeks to invoke in ‘The Star Witches’.

In the first chapter here for instance, we learn that ‘bovine’ housekeeper Clara suffers from wind in the mornings, because her husband Bill puts far too much sugar in the mug of tea he brings her at six o’clock, and which she needs to drink quickly because she needs to get up before seven. We learn that lecherous gardener Bert Gaskin (“known throughout Keynes as a big, blundering, blustering, beggaring knowall”) wears ‘yachting shoes’, because his feet “suffer in hot weather” and “linen shoes can be good for that”. We learn that the doorbell in Harry Royce’s residence is “an original installation from 1850,” and that he “likes original installations”. “Sometimes he had them put in even if they weren’t there when he came,” Lymington would have us know.

Perhaps you think I’m being a bit unfair here. I mean, isn’t it through this kind of detail that all authors develop character, and create a sense of place for their stories? Maybe, but after suffering through a few dozen pages of Lymington, I’d defy you make a case for this excruciating drivel adding up to anything except his daily word count.

It certainly succeeds in torpedoing any promise of the kind of cosmic grandeur which the SF and horror genres are conventionally supposed to deliver, that's for sure, but beyond that, Lymington’s hum-drum eccentricities fail to even register as perversely fascinating or unintentionally funny. Carelessly tossed off, and full of minor lapses of logic so painfully mundane it’s barely worth even registering them, instead it’s all just really annoying. 

Indeed, the main feelings generated by spending 140 pages enveloped in the sweaty, feeble mess of ‘The Star Witches’ are those of futility, tedium, mild revulsion… and a creeping realisation that, even for us most dedicated excavators of forgotten 20th century popular culture, there are some stones which are perhaps better left unturned. 

 

Horror Express: The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes (David Kramarsky / Roger Corman, 1955)

Over the past few years, I’ve got into the habit of tuning in to ‘50s American sci-fi/monster movies for a dose of comforting, mid-week escapism. Perhaps it’s just me, but somehow, that distinctive combination of remote desert town settings, flat, TV-style staging, woozy theremin music, reassuring techno-babble, clean-cut squaresville vibes and that distant patina of eerie, cold war paranoia… all of this just goes down perfectly with a whisky & soda after a hard day in the office (and the short run-times help, too).

Imagine my consternation then when 1955 ‘The Beast with a Million Eyes’ brutally overturned my expectations. Despite boasting Roger Corman as an executive producer (and uncredited director), the opening half hour of this extremely low budget, Palm Springs-shot outing feels a world away from the cheery hi-jinks of Not of This Earth or It Conquered the World. Instead, it presents us with a vignette of bleak, psychologically harrowing b-movie existentialism which Corman’s later collaborator Richard Matheson would have been proud of.

Our setting is an isolated, family-run ranch which has been steadily losing money for three years, or so husband/father Allan (Paul Birch) tells us in voiceover. He feels like a failure, having lost his family’s affections as a result of this financial turmoil, but is unable to find a way to reverse their sorry fate.

Allan’s shrewish wife Carol (Lorna Thayer) is meanwhile introduced to us as a seething vortex of negativity. Trapped in a kitchen she clearly hates with every ounce of her being, she spends her days labouring away at the Sisyphean task of trying to bake cakes, repeatedly burning them, and flying into a rage as a result.

So bitter is Carol that she won’t even allow the couple’s teenage daughter Sandy (Dona Cole) to leave to go to college. “Why should she get the chances I never got?”, she demands to know. Sandy in turn bitterly resents her mother for condemning her to a life of drudgery on the isolated ranch, all culminating in an atmosphere which at times feels as suffocating and inescapable as the pit in which the characters toil in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s existentialist classic ‘Woman of the Dunes’ (1964).

As if all this wasn’t bad enough meanwhile, the family’s problems are silently observed by a lumbering, mute simpleton (Leonard Tarver) who - for reasons that are not really made sufficiently clear until the film’s conclusion - lives in a shack adjoining their house.

Charmingly, this fellow is known to the family simply as “Him” (“he can’t tell us his name, assuming he ever had one,” Sandy sneers), and he seems to spend much of his time shivering on an unkempt mattress next to wall covered in girly pictures - when he’s not spying on the family members or lurking about with a wood axe, that is. Allan insists that “He” is harmless, but the women aren’t so sure, treating him with a mixture of fear and outright contempt.

At the heart of this tsunami of bad vibes, Allan himself remains an inert, helpless figure. Staring out into the desert, he meditates on the threat posed by the dry, lifeless expanse which stretches beyond the limits of his unhappy homestead. “Maybe the hate started out THERE…,” he muses, gazing at gleaming animal bones in the sand.

Already living in vision of the American Dream transfigured into a hermetically-sealed, loveless hellscape, it’s safe to say the last thing any of these folks need is the arrival of a Beast with a Million Eyes. Thoughtfully though, when the film’s allotted visitor from another world does eventually make an appearance, it does so in a manner which initially feels more annoying than actively apocalyptic.

The Beast’s ship (or meteorite, or whatever it is - the nature of the vessel is never really made clear) overshoots the ranch house, breaking all the windows, and shattering Carol’s beloved glassware. Her sense of futile, outraged frustration in the face of this inexplicable domestic calamity feels horribly palpable; as she gazes forlornly at the shards of a water jug, it honestly feels for a moment or two that she might be about to slash her wrists.

Long before it deigns to make any kind of physical appearance however, it becomes clear that The Beast’s modus operandi involves taking psychic control whatever ‘inferior’ intelligences happen to be hanging about in its general vicinity of its landing zone, dispatching them on malign and destructive missions on its behalf. (Herein lies the rationale for the creature’s purported “million eyes”, or so I’m assuming, as it sees through the optics of all the local insects and animals, etc etc.).

So, first a flock of suicidal birds attacks Allan’s station wagon, before the film reaches what is surely it’s nadir (in both emotional and cinematic terms) during a sequence in which the family’s beloved sheepdog Duke allegedly ‘turns bad’ under the influence of the alien entity and attempts to attack Carol whilst she is alone in the house.

I should clarify that, up to this point, ‘The Beast with a Million Eyes’ has been reasonably well made on its own low budget terms, but the problem here is that the production obviously had no means of creating the illusion that poor old Duke had gone crazy / become rabid. True, they manage to rustle up a few close-up insert shots of him growling and bearing his teeth, but in the long shots which comprise the majority of the scene, he just looks like a normal, happy doggie, making Carol’s decision to run screaming in fear and subsequently blast him with a shotgun seem entirely inexplicable in visual terms - as well as making us hate her even more in the process - even as we grudgingly acknowledge the idea the script is trying to convey.

Strangely, the catharsis caused by Duke’s death (along with the impact of the other low level disasters the family have suffered) somehow succeeds in bringing them back together, allowing them to escape the depressive fug in which they were previously trapped and reminding them of the familial bond they all share -- and it is here that the essential point of Tom Filer’s screenplay finally becomes clear.

It is soon noted, y’see, that the alien’s hypnotic powers only have an effect on people when they are alone. When we’re together, when we have LOVE, we’re safe! (Like all malign invaders/super-computers/killer robots etc, the Beast is flummoxed by by the concept of love, although its clumsy voiceover here at least acknowledges a distant, historical memory of such a thing once existing on its long-dead home planet.)

Corny as it may seem in retrospect, this grand theme is actually quite effectively unpacked by Filer’s script, aided by a set of characterisations which are more multi-faceted and psychologically realistic than those generally encountered in ‘50s monster movies. Crucially, the core idea that, beneath all the dysfunctions and resentments inherent in family life, we still share an unbreakable bond with our relatives and life partners, is allowed to develop naturally here, rather than just being preached in our general direction, as was more standard in this genre/era.

Unfortunately however, nobody thought to include poor old “Him” in the group hugs, so… you can probably guess how that whole plotline plays out, although there is at least quite an interesting, socio-political twist thrown in vis-à-vis the revelation of who the hell “He” actually is, which I won’t spoil for you here.

Thematically speaking, I found this story’s emphasis on the virtues of togetherness - and its implied rejection of individual agency - quite interesting, in view of the anti-communist / pro-‘freedom’ ideology which (in allegorical terms at least) was pretty much obligatory in American SF films of this era.

But then, if you look at it another way, I suppose the alien entity’s attempt to create a kind of invasive hive mind provides just as good a stand-in for the Reds as anything else, so ok - fair enough. Nothing to see here folks, just a bit of unusually thoughtful ambiguity on the part of the scriptwriter - let’s move on.

Of course, the philosophical resonance and character drama in ‘Beast with a Million Eyes’ could have soared to Shakespearean heights of achievement, and it still wouldn’t have saved the film from living in reviled infamy in the minds of the millions of ‘50s monster kids who presumably sat bored out their minds in matinee screenings, demanding to know: where in the fucking hell is the Beast with a Million Eyes?!

Legend has it that this was also the reaction of producer James H. Nicholson, whose American Releasing Corporation financed and distributed the film shortly before morphing into the legendary American International Pictures. True to form, they already had the movie pre-booked with title and poster artwork ready to go, so…. WTF are you trying to do to us here, Roger?

Having committed the cardinal sin of turning in a monster movie without a monster, ‘executive producer’ Corman was thus allegedly dispatched to make right on his mistake with a mere $200 in hand, hooking up with master monster sculptor Paul Blaisdell to produce… well, for the most part, they seem to have resorted to just using a kettle with some flashing lights on the top, to be honest.

Seen in insert shots earlier in the film, this object seems very small (like some kind of sensor or radio receiver or something?), so when we see the surviving characters approach it during the film’s final minutes and discovering that it is actually supposed to be big - like, a spaceship, with a monster in it - the effect is disorientating.

When the door on the side of thing finally opens, we belatedly get a 30 second glimpse of some kind of scary, brain-headed monster thing (with TWO eyes, for the record), somewhat reminiscent of the creatures from the same year’s ‘This Island Earth’. In an attempt to boost the impact of this revelation, these shots are super-imposed with the image of a big, throbbing eyeball, lending them a rather wild, proto-psychedelic quality which could, at a stretch, perhaps be seen as a very early indicator of the direction Corman’s directorial work would take during the 1960s.

All this is actually quite cool, and psychotronic as heck, but it’s likely audiences at the time merely saw it as a load of cheapjack crap - a pathetic, last minute attempt to try to justify the movie’s title and poster artwork, delivering far too little, far too late -forever condemning ‘Beast..’ to the lowest rungs of the monster movies canon.

Viewed with nearly 70 years-worth(!) of hindsight however, ‘Beast with a Million Eyes’ feels like a more-than-respectable addition to the Corman/AIP catalogue. Sure, it suffers more than usual from budgetary constraints, and the lack of a tight directorial hand on the reins allows some extremely clumsy elements (eg, the dog scene and the monster’s ridiculous voiceover) to make it into the final cut, but at the same time, the film’s strong writing and well-rounded characters nonetheless keep us engaged throughout.

As such, it to some extent helped establish a formula which Corman would re-visit again and again over the next few years, with increasing confidence and success each time around. In marking the start of this cycle, it deserves to be viewed sympathetically as a minor landmark in American genre cinema, as well as for its own not insignificant points of interest.

October Horrors # 10: A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018)

Welcome to the High Concept Zone, where we find a very 21st century iteration of the ideal American nuclear family living in a state of total silence, in an eerily depopulated version of rural upstate New York.

They are isolated survivors, adjusting as best as they can to circumstances in which the slightest sound brings instant death, courtesy of the huge, apparently unstoppable, alien predators with over-sized hearing apparatus covering most of their heads who lurk just out of sight, waiting to pounce on any outburst of noise with lightning speed.

The extent and immediacy of this threat is made clear to us in no uncertain terms during the film’s opening sequence, when, as the family tip-toe back to their bucolic farmstead following a scavenging expedition to the nearest town (they wear no shoes, and have tramped down their route with sand), the youngest of their three children covertly inserts some batteries into a toy space shuttle he has acquired without his parents’ knowledge. The results are not pretty.

Jumping forward a year or so from this tragedy, the other members of our family remain alive and well, and we learn that they have in fact been granted a significant boon in the survival stakes via the fact that their eldest daughter is deaf. This means that they were already fluent in communicating via sign language (which is helpfully sub-titled for us) before the alien invasion hit, and were to some extent already used to sharing her soundless world.

As the might well imagine, this is a film clearly designed with theatrical exhibition in mind. It was definitely not intended for viewing at home, particularly when your next door neighbours are having a house party, or your pets are making a fuss, or whatever else. The first ten minutes or so of the film play out in total silence, and the sounds we hear thereafter are strictly limited to those the characters hear – each one a potential harbinger of death. IMDB trivia informs me that the first line of spoken dialogue (whispered, naturally) occurs 38 minutes in.

It’s a bold move for a commercial feature, but, after briefly wondering whether I could really make it through ninety plus minutes of this whilst sitting, subject to distractions, in a friend’s living room, I was surprised by how easily I adjusted to the film’s world of silence. (The fact that traditional, non-diegetic music gradually begins to creep in as action intensifies later in the film probably helps in this respect.)

One thing we should make clear straight away is that, to get anything out of ‘A Quiet Place’, one must Indulge The Concept. Spend a few minutes testing its real-world foundations, and it clearly don’t hold up too good. How long can a human being really go without coughing or sneezing or snoring..? How do the family intend to silently harvest and process the golden fields of corn they’ve apparently raised on their farmstead..? The father (played by director Krasinski and his fulsomely moisturised beard) may be a DIY homesteader/inventor par excellence, but surely even he must have trouble sawing wood and hammering nails in silence..? And so on.

We could continue in that vein for quite a while, but what would be the point? Far better just to accept Krasinski (and co-writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck)’s idea as an ingenious, Twilight Zone-style thought-provoker – exactly the kind of thing that Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont might have come up with back in the day, invested with a wistful American specificity worthy of Ray Bradbury - and to see where they want to go with it, basically.

Thematically speaking, I fear their eventual destination is nowhere too remarkable. Aside from a strong emphasis on the virtues of familial love and cooperation (the fact that Krasinski stars opposite his real life partner Emily Blunt probably helped in this regard), and an earnest survival-above-all-else message common to most high-minded disaster/post-apocalypse tales, I suspect there is little that can be pulled out of ‘A Quiet Place’ to beef up anyone’s thesis on the socio-political aesthetics of the contemporary U.S. horror film.

As a straight-forward narrative entertainment however, it is at least extremely well-realised. Assembled with a spirit of hand-crafted professionalism that oddly mirrors the practical achievements of its male protagonist, ‘A Quiet Place’ makes effective use of its reasonably glossy production values (the dread name of Michael Bay appears alongside a bus-load of other credited producers, and there are more people listed in the credits than in probably every pre-2000 film I’ve reviewed this October put together).

Editing rhythms and real-world cause-and-effect remain as tight as the premise demands, and, throughout the film, suspense is tightened, released and re-tightened with confident ease. The keep-quiet-or-die conceit gives the filmmakers the opportunity to explore some novel variations on the well-worn methodology of nail-biting tension, including, as you’d imagine, many hands thrust across mouths at the last second, and a whole bit of business with a loose nail sticking out of the basement staircase that is just delightful.

Spectacle and peril are both kept on a tight leash through a long and convincing slow-burn, only to be let loose in the final act, when certain incidents-which-we-shall-not-spoil-here have made clear that all bets are off. As is only right and proper, the film’s big-eared monsters are initially kept at a distance – gigantic, toothy blurs that crash across the screen, leaving destruction in their wake. When we do get to see a little more of them however (and eventually, we see quite a lot of them), they are very cool and impressive creations.

Next gen descendants of the questionable critters who once galumphed across our screens in Verhoeven’s ‘Starship Troopers’ and clear ‘Quiet Place’-precursor ‘Pitch Black’ (2000, with Vin Diesel - remember that one?), they seem to reflect a positive development I’ve noted in a number of films in recent years, vis-à-vis the creation of CGI monsters that convey convincing weight and physical presence, and, as a result, do not look laughably ridiculous when placed within ‘real’ filmed environments.

The design of theses beasties’ heads in particular – with multiple, overlapping jaws opening like the petals of a flower to reveal some kind of vast, fleshy hearing apparatus – is memorably horrific, hitting some of the same ‘uncanny’ buttons as the original, similarly eyeless, ‘Alien’ blue-print.

One of the most interesting twists in the film’s storyline comes via the fact that Blunt’s character is pregnant. Just think about that for a moment. I mean, you can teach your older children to keep quiet, but how are you going to tell the new arrival..? The thought that holding a new born baby is essentially the equivalent of lighting a stick of dynamite is an unpleasant fact that the human race within this film is basically going to have to find a way around, should they wish to survive.

I’m not sure I find Mr Can Do Dad’s solution – which involves a padded, sound-proofed wooden box with pumped in oxygen – entirely convincing (and the notion of an infant who spends his or her early years confined to a series of increasingly large boxes sounds like material for an entirely different kind of horror film), but… I certainly couldn’t come up with any better ideas, and imagining how the forthcoming birth was going to play out proved a fascinating and rather terrifying prospect.

Unfortunately, it is at this point that I felt ‘A Quiet Place’ dropped the ball somewhat. Somewhere along the line, the more familiar mechanics of modern, commercial horror movies start to come into play, precipitating a gruelling stalk-and-hide sequence which culminates in a landmark “you’ve got to be f-ing kidding me” moment that feels so ludicrous that I hope readers who have seen the film will know what I mean when I say that it comes very close to torpedoing our ability to take the remainder of the movie seriously.

Furthermore, to jump on what seems to have become a personal hobby-horse of mine, I do wish that modern filmmakers could ditch their habit of using child birth and new born infants merely to ‘up the ante’ on horror and suspense set-pieces. Of course, issues of parenthood and reproduction are always ripe for exploration, and of course the ‘child/mother in peril’ trope is as old as time itself, but, now that the unspoken taboo re: placing maternity ward business in close proximity to grisly violence and imminent death seems to have been broken, the way in which this freedom is increasingly exploited (in this film, The Void, and The Witch, to name but three films I’ve reviewed here) often strikes me as merely crass and manipulative. (Admittedly, this could just be because it succeeds in manipulating me so well, but…)

And, whilst I’m getting my licks in, I also need to pre-warn viewers of the regrettable (and unexplained) deus ex machina which occurs toward the end of ‘A Quiet Place’. Just think the movie version of ‘Day of The Triffids’, and we’ll say no more about it. Not that I have any better ideas on how to end the thing I hasten to add, but, as with the pregnancy thing, the suspicion that the scriptwriters have written themselves into a corner is hard to shake

So, in conclusion… well I don’t really have a conclusion. This is a well made, compelling movie. As an example of some well-intentioned Hollywood types making an original, imaginative and highly watchable genre film, it should probably be celebrated, and should certainly be given preference over the thousandth pointless derivation of ‘Amityville’ or ‘The Exorcist’, or whatever else is being advertised in shades of black, grey and red on the side of buses this month.

I didn’t really feel particularly strongly about it however, and a few significant blunders and an overriding feeling of low level, aspirational smugness prevent me from really wanting to pin a ‘Quiet Place’ badge on my lapel and start enthusiastically talking it up to friends, etc. Make of it what you will, but you could certainly dial up far worse from your preferred streaming service, that’s for sure. (Just remember to wait until all potential noise-makers in your immediate vicinity have gone to sleep before pressing ‘play’.)

October Horrors # 4: Not Of This Earth (Roger Corman, 1957)

My attempts to gradually familiarise myself with Roger Corman’s pre-‘House of Usher’ filmography may have hit choppy waters last year with The Undead and Creature from Haunted Sea, but we finally make landfall here, with what must be one of the absolute best of his late ‘50s pictures.

‘Not Of This Earth’ first hit screens in February ‘57 as half of a ready-made double bill with ‘Attack Of The Crab Monsters’ and, in view of its title and poster, you may well wonder what it’s doing in the middle of a marathon of horror reviews. Well, like many of the best low budget ‘50s Sci Fi films (cf: The Man From Planet X), this one draws just as much from horror traditions as it does SF, melding the two rather nicely and inadvertently kick-starting the loose cycle of “space vampire” movies that went on to include Bava’s ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965), Curtis Harrington’s ‘Queen of Blood’ (1966), and, eventually, Tobe Hooper’s ‘Lifeforce’ (1985) in the process.

Admittedly, the opening scene may not bode terribly well, as a carefree bobby-soxer bids a chaste goodbye to her eager boyfriend (HIM: “don’t be a drag, you know how you flip me”, HER: “I’m hip, but if my father dug the scene, he’d put small round holes in your head”) and subsequently falls victim to the less than convincingly monstrous figure of a burly middle-aged man in a black hat and shades (Paul Birch), who proceeds to extract her blood using some kind of machinery concealed inside a suitcase.

As a characteristically modernist animated opening sequence unfolds (created by Paul Julian, this one features skulls, paint-dripping alien landscape and a roving pair of shining eyes), we would seem to be en route to yet another paranoiac “the aliens are among us” type yarn (hey, at least the special effects are cheap), but thankfully this initial premise is taken in a very different direction by Charles Griffith & Mark Hanna’s witty and relentlessly imaginative screenplay.

Next up for instance, we see the black-clad killer barging into a quiet suburban doctor’s surgery, where, using slow but precisely enunciated English that leads Beverley Garland’s nurse to assume he is some kind of visiting foreign aristocrat, he declares that he is critically ill and demands an immediate blood transfusion.

Understandably, William Roerick’s doctor is reluctant to acquiesce to “Mr Johnson”s demands, particularly given that he refuses to submit to a blood test, but the application of some voiceover psychic powers soon resolves their disagreement, with the doctor in thrall to “Johnson”, and sworn to secrecy regarding his dealings with this new patient. (1)

In fact, the doc even ends up consenting to Johnson’s wish to recruit his nurse on a full time, private basis, in order to prepare his daily transfusions and – as he puts it - “to see that I do not expire”. When Nadine (for that is Ms Garland’s character name) hears how much this weirdo is willing to pay her, she is happy to go along with this arrangement, and ends up accompanying Mr Johnson to his home, despite the reservations of her cop boyfriend (Morgan Jones), who is outside slapping a ticket on the fiend’s illegally parked sedan.

Mr Johnson’s welcoming of Nadine into his household closely mirrors the old ‘Dracula’ tradition, right down to the alien’s attempt to lock the nurse’s door without her permission, and his offering her comforts (food, access to the swimming pool) that he himself refuses to enjoy.

In fact, whilst he may be largely ignorant of human customs and behaviour, Mr Johnson nonetheless seems to know exactly how a vampire should live, and as such he has acquired an impressive mock-Tudor mansion, and has even employed a local small-time hoodlum (Jeremy, played by Corman regular Jonathan Haze) as his all-purpose cringing crony.

As well as driver, porter, cook and cleaner, Jeremy also serves duty as Johnson’s all-purpose guide to human conduct (“I told you not to drive a car before ya learn how,” he snaps at his employer in first scene). Despite happily admitting that “this guy is six kinds of a freak”, Jeremy is happy to put his suspicions on deep freeze and do Johnson’s bidding. After all, as long as his boss keeps on handing him piles of gold ingots to convert into U.S. currency, who has time for questions?

So, that’s our basic set up, and, with admirable brevity, the remainder of the film gives us something extraordinary to chew on about every five or ten minutes, regular as clockwork.

Johnson’s communication with his home planet of Davanna for instance is accomplished via a hologram-based radio transmitter and matter transfer device that he keeps in his closet, and that will turn any connoisseur of vintage space-age clobber green with envy. Describing the earth’s inhabitants to his controller as “second state, sub-human, weak and full of fright,” he subsequently recites a list of his instructions from on-high, none of the potential results of which sound very promising for the people of Earth, whose fate is either to be harnessed as blood cattle should Johnson be able to subsist on their blood, or flat-out destruction if he does not.

Next up, Johnson opens the door to Dick Miller, appearing here in the role of a dishevelled door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman whose fast-talking patter briefly confuses the stern alien. Though he is barely on screen for two minutes before being unceremoniously stuffed in the incinerator, Miller is great here, with his unruly hair, his weary distaste for his own sales routine and his sardonic use of the word “crazy” as an all-purpose acknowledgement all suggesting that he is actually some down-on-his-luck beatnik reluctantly forced into regular employment. A joy.

Towards the end of the film meanwhile, Johnson is surprised to encounter a female of his species on the street; wearing similar wrap-around shades, she looks like a classic film noir vamp. The two aliens speak telepathically whilst browsing at a magazine stand (I wish the print was good enough for me to see what they’re reading), and the woman explains that she is fugitive who has escaped from Davanna, using the ‘dimension warp’ installed in Johnson’s closet without permission.

Johnson declares that the woman will face severe punishment for this transgression, but she responds by informing him that things have gone south pretty sharp-ish back home on their dying planet. She provides a harrowing account of Davanna collapsing into anarchy, as ‘enemy prisoners’ are drained of blood en masse to quell the hunger of the mob, prompting her to make the jump to Earth to escape the violence. Now, she too desperately needs blood, and begs Johnson to help her, prompting him to break into the doctor’s surgery where, in a horrible mix up, he selects the wrong bottle and doses her with rabid dog’s blood.

Then, just when you think you’ve already got your moneys-worth from this picture, Johnson – who is presumably beginning to feel rather desperate once the woman’s body is discovered – unveils a bizarre, flying jellyfish creature that he keeps rolled up in a glass tube(!), and sends it to attack the doctor. A wonderfully hideous, Lovecraftian creature design, this thing drops from the sky like a demonic lampshade and engulfs the poor guy’s head, Flying Guillotine style, until he ceases to struggle and thick gloops of blood trickle out from beneath it. Yowza!

Though blighted by a few minutes of unnecessary and tension-free running around in the final reel, ‘Not Of This Earth’ is otherwise a more or less perfect sci-fi/horror concoction. Clocking in at a brisk sixty-seven minutes, Griffiths and Hanna’s screenplay is superb, full of way-out ideas, razor sharp (or at least, extremely strange) dialogue and a wide variety of diverting shenanigans.

Like Corman’s more celebrated horror comedies of the era (‘A Bucket of Blood’, ‘Little Shoppe of Horrors’), the strength of the writing here makes for a film that is both eerily unnerving and genuinely funny, but with the pendulum perhaps swinging more strongly toward the former aspect on this particular occasion.

Performances too are great across the board. The odd, unnatural phrasing and impossible-to-place accent Birch employs as Mr Johnson also strike a perfect balance between humour and menace, whilst Garland makes for an absolutely swell heroine, obviously taking great pleasure in portraying a smart, capable and hard-headed woman who could easy run rings around any of the male characters.

Haze meanwhile is a gum-chewin’, street corner stupid-smart delight as Jeremy, and hell, even the cop boyfriend is kind of likeable. (You’ve got to love the moment when, after discovering that Johnson is a malevolent alien, he tells Garland “If I didn’t have to go on duty in half an hour, I’d go over there and get you out myself”.)

What I love above all most about the films that emerged from Roger Corman’s orbit across the decades (even the bad ones) is that they never play their audience for suckers. Cheap, simplistic and crassly commercial though they may be, you never get the feeling that Corman and his collaborators set out to make a movie they wouldn’t want to watch themselves.

Rarely allowing levels of enthusiasm or ingenuity to flag, Corman never talked down to his viewers the way that so many low budget operators did, only resigning himself to a “fuck it, this'll do” approach on rare occasions when the extreme haste and poverty under which his productions were undertaken made it impossible to save a picture from ignominy.

In this sense, Corman’s films strike me as a cinematic equivalent of the Marvel comic books overseen by Stan Lee during the ‘60s. Though working at crippling speed in areas of culture widely regarded as disposable, juvenile trash, these men saw no reason to let his own artistic standards slip, ruthlessly applying a credo that I’ve always taken to be one of the key rules of any creative endeavour; namely: if you set out to make something really good, with a bit of luck you’ll make something ok. If you set out to make something “ok”, you might as well give up and go home, because what you make is going to be worthless.

Though he may not have put it in quite those terms, it is this attitude that led Corman and the creatives he corralled around him to create films like ‘Not of this Earth’ – one week wonders that fell so far beneath the radar they didn’t even attract critical contempt upon their initial release, but that remain thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking over sixty years later, keeping them alive in an era when I’ll bet 90% of the movies that gained an Oscar nomination in 1957 have been long forgotten.

---
(1) As an aside, I liked the decision here to name the alien “Johnson” – though clearly not a deliberate reference on the part of the scriptwriters, it puts me in mind of the “Johnsons” celebrated by William Burroughs in his novels, referring to the invisible, subterranean brotherhood of quiet, seemingly law-abiding citizens who are nonetheless always ready to help out a junkie, to harbour a criminal without ratting to the law, and to generally act in opposition to ‘straight’ society.

October Horrors #11: The Man From Planet X (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1951)

Long on atmosphere but short on story, this weirdly compelling poverty row oddity from B-movie auteur Edgar G. Ulmer remains historically noteworthy as one of the very earliest entries in what would soon become a veritable avalanche of horror-inclined science fiction movies throughout the 1950s.

Though the writing here is sketchy in the extreme – never really bothering to take its ideas beyond the kiddie matinee level – ‘The Man From Planet X’ can nonetheless make a good case for itself as the very first ‘alien visitor to earth’ movie to emerge from Hollywood, quietly prefiguring [or at least, produced in parallel with] the familiar defining classics of the genre – which must have made it’s tale of a lone representative of a dying alien race pitching up on a remote Scottish island and using the mind-controlled locals to help it prepare for a full scale colonisation project feel at least somewhat sensational to its initial audiences.*

Of course, these kind of stories had been knocking around in literary SF for decades by this point, but such subject matter was still a novelty when it came to the movies, to the extent that Ulmer and writer/producer Jack Pollexfen (how could he not make SF movies with a name like that?) seem unsure how to handle it.

Essentially, they seem to have decided to tackle the material in the style of a 1940s horror movie, imbuing their extra-terrestrial visitor with a genuine sense of uncanniness and mystery that would swiftly vanish from the more scientifically-minded movies that followed later in the decade, and it is this approach, rather than any claims of alleged historical importance, that continue to make ‘The Man From Planet X’ worth seeking out all these years down the line.

Filmed at least partially on sets left over from the Ingrid Bergman version of ‘Joan of Arc’ (1948), and enhanced by some absolutely beautiful miniatures and matte paintings (reportedly created by Ulmer himself), the film’s fictional Scottish island – upon which a crumbling medieval ‘broc’ (repurposed as an observatory) stands out starkly on a craggy outcrop surrounded by boulder-strewn wilderness - is a baleful, fog-shrouded studio creation that rivals anything Mario Bava achieved on similarly low budgets in later decades.

Though some atrociously shoddy theatrical backdrops used here and there, and you’ll sure get sick of looking at those same few rocks used in close-ups by the end of the picture, the sheer isolation of the island setting is nonetheless powerfully conveyed (in this regard, ‘The Man From Planet X’ reminded me strongly of far later UK-based monster movies such as ‘Island of Terror’ (’66) and ‘Night of the Big Heat’ (’67), and the overall atmosphere created here is rich, consistent and deliciously weird – a fine, classic draught for connoisseurs of studio-bound cinematic gothic.

This is just as well, as the film’s writing, as mentioned above, is less than top drawer. The human drama – as represented by the potential love triangle between square-jawed hero Robert Clarke, demure scientist’s daughter Margaret Field and cowardly creep William Schallert (he has a little black beard, so watch out) - is pure boilerplate stuff, just treading water until the scary stuff shows up, in a formula already familiar to poverty row horror films that would unfortunately go on to be replicated in hundreds of monster movies over the next few decades.

Much time meanwhile is similarly ill-spent on expounding reams of ‘science stuff’ that is unlikely to have convinced even the most credulous 1950s school boy, concerning as it does the path of the alien’s blighted home planet, which his race have seemingly sent careering through space, putting it on course to pass extremely close to the earth in, ooh, a couple o’ days.

The island on which the film takes place has been picked – both for the observatory and the alien scout’s initial landing – on the basis that it will be the point on the earth’s surface that will come closest to the passing Planet X, thus making it the perfect spot for the alien invasion force to do a quick hop from one globe to the other. So I mean, we’re not quite working on an Arthur C. Clarke level here, y’know?

Even the film’s great, flash-forward opening – in which we see Clarke alone in the darkened observatory, scribbling his story by candle-light before he steps out to face the alien menace that has overcome his companions - turns out to be a cheat, as, when we eventually reach that point in the main narrative, it turns out that he has a whole regiment of police and soldiers from the mainland waiting outside to back him up, whilst his friends are merely temporarily indisposed by the alien’s mind control beam.

If you’ll allow me a quick -- SPOILER ALERT – moment, I should also outline the nature of our hero’s plan for overcoming the alien threat in the nick of time before Planet X reaches the Earth. Basically, Clarke advocates approaching the mind-controlled humans who are serving the alien and, just, y’know, talking to them and shaking them about a bit until they snap out of it. Then, he’ll lead them all to safety, the soldiers will blow up the alien’s ship with a fizzy sparkler rocket launcher, and bob’s yr uncle – invasion averted! Yes ladies and gentlemen, he apparently brooded all night trying to come up with that plan. I ask you.

But anyway, leaving these script deficiencies aside, we should probably also spend some time discussing the alien itself. Though the sight of a diminutive spaceman waddling about in a big domed helmet with grabby extendable arms and a ray gun would soon became the very essence of cheesy sci-fi cliché, the creature here – apparently played by a performer whose specialty was a “slow motion vaudeville act” - is really quite striking.

There is something genuinely odd, and, well… alien… about this alien, and the complete failure of the human characters’ attempts to communicate with it feels like a far more believable portrayal of the frustrations of two entirely different life forms trying to suss out each other’s intentions than the convenient “we learned your language from your TV broadcasts, earthling” kind of shtick that would become common currency in subsequent SF films.

Although he is ostensibly an aggressor, the travails of this poor little fella, traipsing around a distinctly unwelcoming landscape, with big, maniacal apes forever threatening to shut off his all-important breathing apparatus if he doesn’t co-operate with their incomprehensible desires, are actually quite affecting in a weird sort of way.

When he resorts to the mind control beam to recruit some local help and shuts himself up tight in his landing craft, we have to ask ourselves if a human astronaut would have done any different in equivalent circumstances. As such, ‘The Man From Planet X’ achieves a sense of parity between the two race’s respective encounters with the ‘alien’ that, again, would rarely be matched by the more polarised, Cold War-inclined sci-fi that followed.

As with all of the Ulmer movies I’m familiar with, ‘The Man From Planet X’ has a certain aura of darkness about it that prevents it from ever being written off as campy or unintentionally humourous, despite its clumsy scripting and rudimentary special effects. As in the director’s other films, there is a sense of dislocation and confusion that predominates here above all else, as the characters find themselves lost in a situation beyond their understanding or control, their free will seeping away as inexplicable events shift the terrain around them, and as even their own individual motivations become increasingly unclear.

In this sense, ‘The Man From Planet X’ seems more reflective of the war-haunted fears of the 1930s and 40s than of the heavy-handed Cold War sub-texts that would soon come to dominate the SF genre as it developed, and it remains all the more memorable and mysterious as a result - a small, cheap and knowingly silly movie that nonetheless orbits a core of the genuinely uncanny, and the genuinely fearful, keeping full understanding and resolution forever just out of reach.

---

* To clarify, ‘The Man From Planet X’ actually premiered in March 1951, one month before Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby’s ‘The Thing From Another World’, with which it shares a number of story elements. The more immediately influential ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’ followed in December, and after that, ‘50s sci-fi was officially off to the races.