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.

La Nuit La Plus Longe / ‘Sexus’ (José Bénazéraf, 1965)

Of all the eccentric directors who roamed the hinterlands between art and exploitation in European cinema through the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Moroccan-born, Paris-based José Bénazéraf (1922 – 2012) remains one of the more elusive. Lacking either the poetic earnestness of Rollin or the grindhouse ubiquity of Franco, denied the arthouse cred of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and without ever achieving a breakthrough hit like Larraz’s ‘Vampyres’, Bénazéraf is very much an outsider even within this crew of outsiders, and if Tombs & Tohill hadn’t seen fit to allot him space alongside his aforementioned peers in their definitive Immoral Tales, it seems likely that his work would have been entirely forgotten in the English-speaking world - instead of ALMOST entirely forgotten, as is currently the case.

Naturally, this very obscurity along piques my interest, and, having recently found a source for a few of Bénazéraf’s early movies, now seems a good point at which to jump in and see how this cat stacks up against the aforementioned pantheon. First up, 1965’s ‘La Nuit La Plus Longe’, also known as ‘L'enfer Dans La Peau’, which hit American shores the same year, distributed by Radley Metzger’s Audubon Films under the name ‘Sexus’ (a title perhaps pilfered from the Henry Miller book of the same name?)

‘La Nuit..’ was actually Bénazéraf’s fifth feature film as producer/writer/director – a fact that greatly surprised me, given that what transpires on screen often seems more like the work of some nineteen year old firebrand who just saw a Godard movie and grabbed the nearest camera, rather than that of an experienced independent filmmaker in his forties.

Thus the opening minutes here give us sharply angled, quasi-verité street footage, with a foxy dame (Virginie Solenn) wandering around Paris as bongo fury erupts on the soundtrack. For a while we’re completely in the dark re: context and genre, but when two guys eventually appear and poke a gun in her ribs, it becomes clear we’re looking at a CRIME STORY.

Bénazéraf’s potential inclusion in the nouvelle vague may be questionable beyond his appearance as “man in white car” in ‘À Bout de Souffle’ (thanks IMDB!), but hey, check out what we’ve got here so far: a girl and a gun. Like it or not, the sort of brutal, chauvinist minimalism that can be found peeping through the corners of Godard and Chabrol’s early work is delivered here in spades, as if José had taken Jean Luc’s famously misquoted maxim and run with it… even if the question of whether he was pursuing it for the sake of artistic expression or easy dough remains open for debate.

Soon, we’re settled into a familiar kidnap scenario at a criminal gang’s rural hideaway, and there is a certain audacity to the way that Bénazéraf, before even establishing his credentials with a glimpse of excitement or drama, already has us literally clock-watching along with his blank, cipher-like characters, as they sit around smoking, cracking open beer cans with a screwdriver and staring at the oversized cuckoo clock whose tick-tocking dominates much of the film’s soundtrack, awaiting the arrival of their boss.

In its early stages, the film seems at pains to evoke the contrived, poker-face pose of a street corner tough guy, as characters speak in muttered non-sequiturs, ignore each other’s questions, and generally fail to give us an inch. Except when they do, breaking the spell to clearly explain for our benefit that so-and-so will here in an hour and that the ransom must be paid by 4am and so forth – which is all a bit disappointing, given the gimlet-eyed audience stare-down that has proceeded it.

Gratuitous boobs and mildly eroticized violence proceed to push things firmly into the sexploitation/roughie bracket – Bénazéraf really spreading his net wide in terms of saleable genre elements - and basically at this point the whole thing becomes a cynical, psychosexual free-for-all; a kind of suspense-free ramble through the kind of “killers & victims in a confined location” set-up that would later be perfected in films like Polanski’s ‘Cul de Sac’ and Frederick Freidel’s ‘Axe’/’Lisa Lisa’. Thus, a series of menacing gestures, slow stripteases, theatrical knife fights and stammered confessional monologues ensue, with any thread of emotional/dramatic coherence rendered largely incidental.

Throughout the film, Bénazéraf taps straight into the core of base gangster movie instincts. The women dance and get naked, the men take care of business and get violent. Delighting in that peculiarly ‘off’ sense of fake-ness that seems to characterise action scenes in many low budget French films (though it looks like they put a lot of effort into the choreography of the big knife fight, bless ‘em), the intent seems to be to make clear that everything here is *performance* - vaguely pushing toward the very same kind of hipster-gangster metaphysical revelation that led former Paris resident Donald Cammell to cook up such extraordinary results just a few years later.

But anyway; that sad-eyed, sympathetic-yet-creepy looking fellow playing the gang boss - he looks familiar, doesn’t he? Why, yes, it’s Jean Rollin regular Willy Braque in an early role! What a lovely surprise. It’s always nice to see him. And the younger, handsomer dude swinging a touch of Delon-like charisma, he’s a pretty strong presence too. He actually looks a lot like an older version of John Moulder-Brown from ‘Deep End’, but he isn’t, obviously. (He is Alain Tissier, for the record, and he didn’t appear in any other films I’ve seen.)

Despite a music credit for Chet Baker being prominently displayed on posters, the soundtrack here seems like a pretty rum business too. In between stretches of silence and that infernal tick-tocking, we get snatches of mambo, jazz and African drumming that sound like they’ve probably been pulled straight from LPs in the director’s record collection, and copyright be damned. Baker’s own music only appears in the film’s more, uh, ‘sensuous’ moments, adding a touch of arty mystique to Solenn’s gamboling naked in the woods, and so forth.*

A particularly freaked out passage of exotica-esque tribal percussion and dissonant piano-bashing can be heard when the film takes a sudden, unscheduled leap away from the isolated kidnap scenario into a Franco-esque risque lesbian bondage act, observed by a bunch of people we’ve never seen before in the middle of one the most cramped looking faux-nightclub sets you ever saw. This thing really comes out of nowhere - no reason, no convincing context - but I’m kinda glad it did, because the psycho-sexual kidnap drama thing had just about run its course by this point, and, as with Franco, such kinky material really seems to kick-start Bénazéraf’s engines, leading to some wild low angle shots, snappy editing and coldly classy Helmut Berger-esque b & w photography, as a pair of dancers play out their act in the middle of the bar-room floor, with the louche patrons carefully stepping around them.

Whilst the faux-new wave pillow-talk sometimes gets a bit much, the film’s final twenty minutes, in which the kidnapped girl and the more handsome gangster evolve a kind of oblique relationship as they await their inevitable demise, works very well, achieving a kind of simple, utilitarian poignancy that almost manages to salvage the film’s more high-brow aspirations, in spite of its numerous instances of boredom, sleaze and silliness. As if realising he’s suddenly hit the right note, Bénazéraf then sadly proceeds to overplay his hand almost immediately, ploughing straight into cliché, as the sound of Baker’s lonesome horn accompanies Tissier’s existential, head-bowed walk toward across bare fields to greet his machine gun-delivered doom, at which point we freeze-frame, ‘Platoon’ poster style, as the credits roll. A little on the nose, you might say.

Overall, ‘La Nuit la Plus Longe’, gives the impression of José Bénazéraf being a bit of a chancer, but not necessarily in a bad way. More than any of the other loosely defined ‘art / exploitation’ directors, he really is poised on the knife edge between the two impulses, never really allowing viewers to settle safely into one mindset or the other. Those with a pre-existing belief that the director is a neglected visionary may take this as an uncomplimentary review, but that’s really not the case. Cynical though I may be about Bénazéraf’s true intentions, I enjoyed this film a great deal, and, though the results may be nowhere near as powerful or challenging, the general thrust of Bénazéraf’s approach strikes me as being as close to a madman like Koji Wakamatsu as it is to someone like, say, José Ramón Larraz.

Like Wakamatsu, Bénazéraf’s films (in this time period at least) have a free-wheeling, “anything could happen next” sort of vibe to them that I really appreciate. They seem like films made entirely out of sight of industry or authority, brazenly biting the hand that feeds them as they plough whatever miniscule amount of dog-eared cash was invested in their production into a kind of “we’ve got nothing to prove, we’ll film what the hell we like” anti-methodology that feels bracing and fun compared to the more tightly structured and critically picked over work of the era’s better known filmmakers.

That’s not to say that Bénazéraf is anything less than a canny technical operator – he has a great sense of filmic rhythm and a good eye for framing and photography – but there is nonetheless a kind of steely absurdity and uncertain, amateur hour thuggery to ‘La Nuit la Plus Longe’ that verges into an almost accidental kind of ramshackle movie poetry. Though difficult to really defend in terms of its artistic merit (however much it may strive for such recognition), this is strung out, marginal b-cinema at its finest – a warped postcard from the unmapped badlands of ‘60s Paris, where Cashiers de Cinema feared to tread - and I look forward to catching up with more of this peculiar filmmaker’s oeuvre post-haste.

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* Chet Baker’s music here, I should add, is certainly an exquisitely ragged example of the trumpeter’s particular art, even if the clichéd visual accompaniment here perhaps does not showcase his talents to their best advantage. Music by Baker actually turned up in several early Bénazéraf films, presumably recorded whilst he was living in Paris, but I’m not really sure of the nature of their collaboration. Maybe they were best buddies and close collaborators, or maybe José just turned up at Chet’s hotel room one day with a tape recorder and a wad of smack money? Who knows. Answers in the comments please if you can enlighten us further.