Creature Feature Week: Foul-Mouthed Biddies

Good, old Stan Winston.  Comin' through with the monster madness.  Bringin' us Betty White and crocodiles... in Maine... because he doesn't understand how reptiles work...  yeah...

We open on serene Black Lake where a local Fish and Game officer is brutally attacked by an almost unseen whatever-the-fuck a la Jaws in front of the town sheriff Hank Keough (Brendon Gleeson, best known as Mad-Eye Moody in the Harry Potter films unless you're a fan of British cinema).

Enter paleontologist Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda) who dislikes Maine and was probably sent because her ex-boyfriend doesn't want her around for a while.  The "ex-boyfriend" thing isn't important.

Once in Maine, Kelly meets up with the sheriff and Jack Wells, another Fish and Game officer, both of whom apparently dislike New Yorkers and try to dissuade Kelly from taking part in the expedition to get rid of the lake monster.  Kelly threatens to sue and gets her way because she's Bridget Fonda.

Yep... Maine law enforcement...

Once at the lake, they check in with the resident little old lady, Dolores Bickerman (Betty White in all of her longshoreman glory).  She claims to have mercy-murdered her husband with a skillet.  Why she isn't arrested at that point is completely beyond me.

And then we get Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt) a "rich kook mythology professor" who likes to swim with crocodiles.  Because he's fuckin' crazy.  And rich.  And a sexist bastard.  Arrives in his own helicopter.  This is important.  He informs us that as long as a crocodile's nostrils don't freeze, a salt-water crocodile will survive a Maine winter and I don't believe that for one damn minute.  And then they get flipped into the water by something but none of them get eaten.  Boo.

So, yeah, it turns out that cranky old lady has been feeding a crocodile that followed her husband home.  Her husband was an idiot that got too close and then had his name changed to "Lunch".  The thing, now, has graduated to whole cows.  Instead of actually taking her in, like any sane police force, they placed her under house arrest.  Because law enforcement in rural Maine is lax.

Beef:  It's What's For Dinner.

So, anyway, Hector finds the cove where the croc lives and takes a dive when it pops up right behind him (conveniently next to his helicopter).  To avoid getting eaten, he uses an inflatable raft as a diversion but the croc manages to catch hold of the whirlybird.

Realism is our friend.

And the rest of the movie is all about hunting the damn thing down with an aim to kill it.  They DON'T kill it, because Bridget Fonda always wins, but that was initially the goal.

This movie got a LOT of negative reviews when it came out but frankly, I love it.  It's another of those movies that has that perfect blend of horror and humor.  I think that's WHY it got as many bad reviews as it did.  Even Roger Ebert hated this movie. And I can kind of understand because this situation really is entirely unrealistic.  A 30-foot salt water crocodile in a lake in Maine?  Come on.  A little old lady that has no problem feeding the thing?  OK, given the amount of news stories about crazy cat-ladies, I can kinda believe it.

Seriously, though, there ARE enough scares in this to make it a great "intro to horror" without freaking people out entirely.  It's still got an R-rating so Lake Placid did take its horror seriously and the movie is worth it just to watch Betty White call Keough "Officer Fuck-meat".  The dysfunction among the group of hunters is fun to watch, too.  Personally, I view this movie as a parody of movies like Jaws or Grizzly and that's what makes it enjoyable to me.

Give it another go, I say.

Creature Feature Week: Oh, Fuck That.

God damn you, 70s!  I fucking hate you, I seriously do. I really need the 70s to die in a fucking fire.

I say this because 1977 brought us the "nature strikes back" cult classic Kingdom of the Spiders.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUU!!

John "Bud" Cardos, who needs to be beaten with a fucking oar, takes us to a small Arizona town (which, really, is no big loss, ultimately... because Arizona SUCKS) that's having a little bit of a problem.

It starts with a prize-winning cow at the Colby farm.  Perfectly healthy in every way until something attacks it.  This brings in the town vet,  Robert "Rack" Hanson (William Shatner in one of his better roles... you know... without all the... pregnantpauses).  We get introduced to Rack with him chasing down a bull to give it its antibiotics.  There's a little bit of confusion because the girl that's helping him is actually his sister-in-law and you get the feeling that something gets nipped in the bud when she referes to him by his brother's name.  The brother died in the Vietnam War but that's kind of peripheral to the plot.  The Shat can't figure out directly what happened to the dead cow but sends a sample off to be analyzed.

Enter Diane Ashley, an arachnologist that has Rack's test results.  The cow died from a massive dose of spider venom.  Rack obviously doesn't believe her because she's a girrrrrrl.  Ashley is adamant that the issue is serious and gets Rack to show her the carcass and its pen.  And then the dog dies.  Ashley runs a quick chemical test (because she couldn't have done that a few days ago and just made a fuckin' phone call) and discovers that the dog died from spider bites, too.  The owners of the dog and cow reveal that they found a massive "spider hill" in the back forty.

My but that's a fashionable 70s pantsuit.

Ashley theorizes that because of the rampant use of pesticides like DDT, the tarantulas, which are hunting spiders, anyway, are colonizing to attack larger animals for food.  This pretty much gets proven when a bull stampedes out of the barn covered in tarantulas.

And this, folks is why I try to eat organic whenever I can.  This does not, however, eradicate my love of Funyuns.

ANYWAY!  Ashley is pretty damn sure that the tarantulas won't hesitate to attack people and, seriously, where would this movie be without that mental tidbit.  And, for real, the rest of the movie is The Shat and Blondie finding web-strewn corpses everywhere.  Ashley, much like in Jaws, tells the mayor that instead of pesticides, they should be using birds and rats to maintain pest populations but the mayor pooh-poohs the idea saying that rats and birds would freak out the attendees of the upcoming County Fair.  That being said, he sends up a crop duster who promptly screams like a little girl when he finds himself covered with tarantulas and crashes.

We shall call him Princess.

Seriously, from here on out, it's just a matter of time before everybody in town is attacked by tarantulas in some form or another.  Up to and including ACTUAL little girls.

Oh, look.  Future therapy visits in their larval stage.

So, this is one of those cult films that become kind of ubiquitous.  It certainly added a lot of new arachnophobic individuals to society, myself included (although that has less to do with the movie than it has to to with my allergies).  Much like Jaws, tarantulas got a whole lot of myths attributed to them after this came out.  

Just so you know, a tarantula bite is generally no worse than a bee-sting.  This does not mean that I want the hairy motherfuckers anywhere near me.  With their beady eyes and their eight creepy fuckin' legs and eeeeeeeeeew...  It didn't help that when I saw this the first time my asshole brother kept making crawly hands on my shoulder.  Ass.

*shudder*

But, I digress.  

This movie, much like a lot of the Creature Features in the 70s, was pretty damn anvilicious in terms of environmental messages.  The trend at that point suggested that the supernatural was not our worst enemy.  The environment was.  Because we were abusing it.  And in the wake of global warming, they were probably right.  PLEASE DON'T DIE BEES!  I heart you.  Except when you sting me.  The we gonna have words.

A couple of trivia notes.

First, there were 5000 tarantulas used in this movie.  The studio paid $10 each for every live tarantula caught locally which was 10% of the movie's budget.  Tarantulas, though, are cannibalistic, which meant that they had to be kept in individual containers, and shy, which meant they wouldn't actually move toward people without a little encouragement by way of air hoses.

Second, they could never remake this movie today with as many spiders they killed during production.   At least not the same way.  You'd have to expect a lot of CGI and a PETA representative on set.

Third, the director, during auditions and meetings to cast the actors, kept two tarantulas on his desk to weed out the ones that would freak out.  Those that freaked included Barbara Hale and Donna Mills, both of which appeared in killer spider movies later on.

And lastly, there was a SERIOUS problem with itching on set because tarantula hair is used to make joke itching powder and with thousands of spiders around... well... you know...

All in all, I do like this movie.  The acting, for the time and considering William Shatner's record, was really very good.  The plot, although a little simplistic, was well thought out and it's one of the first movies I remember having a downer ending.  Nobody gets out of this alive.

And that, just by itself, makes this movie awesome.

Creature Feature Week: IT'S HYOOOOOOOGE!!

YAY!  It's TropeFest Time!!!

Today we're looking at BIG things.  Things that risk property damage with every fucking movement.  Things that might just be misunderstood but, for realsies, are usually just giant dicks.  Or boobs.  That's actually a thing.  We'll discuss that in a bit.

In movies like King Kong to Attack of the 50ft Woman to The Amazing Colossal Man to modern-day kid movies like Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, Hollywood has been obsessed with giants since, well, almost the beginning of film.  Because why have a normal sized monster when you can have a GIGANTIC one?

The trend started in 1925 with an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and it featured stop-motion work by Willis O'Brien who became a household name (in those households who cared) for his work on King Kong.  Kong was such an astounding success that even today if a giant monster is included in the plot (particularly if the monster is humanoid), it will usually climb a building carrying a human hostage and bat at airplanes.  (Usually, though, the movie will leave out the part where the monster plummets to its death.  That's just depressing.)

NO!  BAD TOUCH!  MY BODY!

From the early days of stop-motion monsters to the Atomic Age, King Kong was really the only giant monster around.  And then came Ray Harryhausen.  The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms is the first of the "nuclear monsters".  Those monsters that reflected a fear of atomic energy and the damage it can cause.  In this case, a Rhedosaurus decimates New York City.  Just in case anyone is wondering, there was no such thing as a Rhedosaurus.  It was made up.  Like Santa Claus.

The Japanese were kind of known for borrowing American monsters and making them out of rubber suits so both King Kong AND the Rhedosaurus both got Japanese representation.  Kong was left pretty much as is but The Beast got an upgrade in Godzilla (Gojira - ゴジラ).  Godzilla, the first of the Kaiju (strange beast - 怪獣) monsters, was Japan's resentment of Hiroshima writ large and he is STILL popular to this day with new sequels and new monsters.  In fact, there's a new Godzilla reboot coming out in the next year or so.  (We don't count that Matthew Broderick abortion.  It's fun to watch but it's not Godzilla.  I prefer to call it Chinny McEgg-Layin'-Princess-Pants.)

Through the 40s and 50s, though, a specific sub-trope was appearing.  The giant animal movie.  Movies like Them! and Tarantula reflected the damage nuclear energy could wreak on the environment at large.

HEEHEE!  I made a funny.  "At large"... I slay me.

There is not enough therapy in the world...

ANYWAY!!  These movies generally involve mad science and the development of radioactive weaponry.  Tarantula is a notable exception since the monster was created by peaceful research.  The cool thing about these movies, though, is the advances they made in special effects.  Specifically in Tarantula, they used matte paintings, miniatures, composite filming and real animals, carefully splicing them into backgrounds where Them! (the first Big Bug film) used puppets and mechanical ants.

All the while, Ray Harryhausen and Dynamation were still working their own magic in science fiction and (primarily) fantasy films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad which features a two-headed Roc (a giant bird from middle eastern mythology) and H.G. Wells' Mysterious Island.

That is one HELL of a case of crabs.

Other than Uncle Ray, Bert I. Gordon was the mastermind of a lot of these films.  It was really rather fitting that the man behind Earth vs. The Spider and The Amazing Colossal Man was referred to as Mr. B.I.G..  He kept the giant monster gig going at least up until the 70s when he directed Empire of the Ants and Food of the Gods.

Something tells me an oar just ain't gonna cut it... 

Now, from a scientific perspective, these movies, every last one of them, violate the square/cube law.  Basically this is where if you double the size (by edge length) its surface area is quadrupled and its volume is eight times the original.  A creature's agility would be halved, not to mention the increase in food and oxygen intake.  What this boils down to in terms of a monster is we don't care.  It's a fuckin' monster.  Science has nothing to do with movie magic.

In cases where we're talking about a human giant, the magic pants rule will be in effect 99% of the time.  Frankly, I'm OK with a giant wang but my kinks have nothing to do with the ratings system.

Speaking of giant wang, there are a FEW movies that deal with giant body parts and they USUALLY end up being satirical and sexually oriented.  Right off the top of my head, Chillerama gives us a segment named "Wadzilla" (giant sperm), Soul Vengeance has a man develop the ability to grow a giant prehensile penis that he uses to exact revenge and Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) features a giant boob.

Let's take a look at the origins of this particular trope, because, really?  It's older than dirt.  Our caveman ancestors routinely hunted for Mammoths.  Wanna take a guess as to WHY the Mammoth was named so?  Because it was a fucking land barge.  We dislike giant things because they can step on us and mythology has maintained the existence of giants since mythology began.  The Bible has that whole David and Goliath thing goin' on.  Fairy tales often speak of giants and even some of our own American folk tales, such as Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan, specifically deal with them.  Our modern day fiction writers often give us both heroes AND villains that are much larger than a human being ought to be.

All of that being said, nowadays, we don't see a lot of this in live action films or TV just because of cost which is odd because B-movies latch on to this thing like a lamprey that misses his mother.  We DO see it a lot in comics and cartoons just because it's easy to DRAW big things.  Apache Chief, a politically correct, affirmative action add-on to the Super Friends comes directly to mind.

These movies are some of my favorites, though.  The little guy taking down the big bully.  The crazed monster with aspirations to godhood.  The abject fear of radiation.  The property damage.  All of them give us something to think about.

Mostly, I think about how I want to be big.

Being average sucks.

Creature Feature Week: Is That a Cobra In Your Pocket?

About a month after I was born, Universal released one of its last double features.  This double feature contained The Boy Who Cried Werewolf and Sssssss!, a coming-of-age screwball com... wait, no.  I got that wrong.

Sssssss! delves deep into the world of a mad... well, really more "drunk" than "mad", herpetologist, his daughter and his unsuspecting intern/lab assistant.

Yeah, I couldn't even type that with a straight face.

So, yeah, anyway.  The movie starts with Dr. Stoner selling a large, moaning, presumed snake to the carnival.  Then Stoner hires David Blake (Pre-A-Team Dirk Benedict), a bullied young man, to be his unsuspecitng intern/lab assistant.  David probably should have known that something was odd when Stoner fed his snake, Billy, a bowlful of whiskey.

Stoner, by the way, believes that the human race is doomed and the only way to survive the upcoming apocalypse is to turn humans into reptiles.  Ummmm... yeah.  So... There's a way to prove a hypothesis.  Stoner is not demonstrating it.  Because he's crazy-cuckoo-pants.

Stoner has David help him feed a poisonous snake with no anti-venom, injects him with an "inoculation" meant to make him immune to cobra venom and salmonella and all that crap.  (Trivia note: Benedict was actually stuck with a real syringe for the scene.  Because he's a method actor or some such bullshit.)

Side effects may include dizziness, nausea, death and gross skin peelies...

He then introduces David to his daughter, Kristina.  They get to liking each other in a "horizontal mambo" sort of way.

Precious Moments.

Daddy does not approve and specifically tells her "No intercourse".  Of course, it had already happened by the time he said it but, hey, it's the thought that counts.  In the meantime, a dude that hit on Kristina kills Billy and Stoner sets a Black Mamba on him in the shower.

Reb Brown does have a nice butt.  That freaky toe weirds me out, though.

All the while, David is slowly turning into a cobra.  Because of the "inoculation".  And I SAY "slowly" but it kind of hits him all at once and he changes in a matter of minutes once it finally hits.  While it's happening, his college professor sees him and is knocked out and handcuffed to a pipe in the basement where he is then promptly eaten by a large python.

Another fuckin' shot?  Seriously?

 

David's transformation concludes, Stoner is killed by an ACTUAL cobra, Kristina found the "snake" from the beginning at the carnival and brings the police back with her.  They kill the real snake and then they all find David-snake fighting for his life against a mongoose... because that's not sterotypical at ALL.  Kristina screams and the movie ends, leaving everybody's fate about as clear as mud.

OK, so, really?  I like this movie, and it was another one that I caught on Creature Double Feature as a kid, but it's a little... tame and boring.  I'm really not sure how this film got the cult following that it has.  It's kind of unintentionally hilarious but not really enough to make a big deal out of it.  I mean, they covered up butts with cartoon tree-branches to get a PG rating.  The concept, though, is kind of awesome.  It's kind of a cross between a werewolf story, Frankenstein and "nature strikes back". 

The film, really, and much like most mad scientist movies, is all about hubris, that karmic retribution that a person gets for challenging the gods and the demise of Dr. Stoner certainly fits the bill.  And to make that come through perfectly clear, ALL of the snakes in this movie are real.  Five King Cobras were imported from Thailand to make the movie and the cobra milking scene was authentic except for the bit where Stoner takes the snake by the head where a puppet was used. All 5 snakes were used to film that scene because most of that day was spent keeping them from escaping the enclosure since the snakes wanted to do THAT instead of their fucking job which was rearing up and looking menacing.

The only thing that bugs me about Sssssss!  is the shift between protagonist and victim.  You spend the movie really thinking that David is going to save the day and the twist at the end throws you for a loop. And the undecided ending?  Looks like they were angling for a sequel.

All in all?  Another OK way to spend a couple of hours but nothing to write home about. 

Creature Feature: I Wanna See You Squirm

Before we get into today's review, let's talk about why this week is going on, shall we?

First off, it's happening because my friends and I at The Incredibly Strange Horror Bloggers Network were wracking our brains over what themes we should cover for smaller cross-blog events and this one just popped right into my head.  I mean it's so obvious.

But, really, we're doing this to celebrate the unsung hero of the horror genre.  The ubiquitous Everyman of fright films that everybody knows but no one talks about.  Well... we talk about them because they're awesome (or awesomely bad) but I feel they don't get enough recognition otherwise.

Creature Features exploit our fears, whether it's of the creatures themselves or the societal issues that the creatures represent, in a unique fashion.  They specifically put a face to our fears and phobias and above that, COLLECTIVE fears and phobias.  But they're simple.  With simple plots and simple characters.  They are not great movies by any stretch of the imagination.

Most of all, though, Creature Features represent a lot of childhoods.  I remember waiting for Saturday morning cartoons to end and the afternoon Creature Double Feature to start on Channel 56 in Boston (that UHF station had a really long range because I watched it in Maine, too).  It was where I watched movies like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Food of the Gods.  It was the one thing in my house, as a kid, that my siblings and I wouldn't fight over.

That's why, this week, we're looking at B-grade schlock, for good or ill, and, well, featuring the creature.

Just to be clear, though, we're not, generally, looking at humanoid monsters, here.  We're talking about the mindless beasts.  The mutated monsters.  The "nature gone wild" movies.  We may touch on the humanoid but we're not really looking at the traditional monsters like vampires or werewolves.  While they count, I almost consider them a separate genre.  I call THAT genre "traditional horror".

ANYWAY!  Today we're going to look at one of my favorites! 

Squirm starts with the backstory.   In text.  On a black background.  Presumably because they couldn't find stock footage of a thunderstorm.  Suffice it to say, there was a thunderstorm.  Oh, wait... they DO show us the thunderstorm.  FINALLY!  Someone with a camera and a lick of sense.  Plus?  Screaming worms.  With legs.

Deep in the backwoods of Georgia, in a town called Fly Creek, where nothing good ever happens, a young woman is mooning over her pre-internet-internet-boyfriend who's on his way to visit.  This is where the thunderstorm happened.  We know this because the old lady keeps bemoaning, in a horrific accent, mind you, that the storm was just fucking awful and that the roads are flooded and that the fridge went out.  Mom is also upset about pre-internet-internet-boyfriend.  Geri, the young girl in question, borrows the local worm-farmin' feeb's truck to pick up Mick, the pre-internet-internet-boyfriend.

Mick gets dropped off and Geri takes him to the local store where she has to pick up ice to keep Momma from bitching about the fridge.  Plus, you know, salmonella bad.

And then things get weird.  I say weird because apparently no one in the South has heard of an egg cream.

An egg cream, by the way, is just vanilla or chocolate syrup, soda water and a little milk.  I don't know WHY they call it an egg cream because there's no egg OR cream in it.  Mick finds a worm in his and in doing so pisses off the local sherriff who, like all law enforcement in horror movies, is a useless pain in the ass.

Eeeeeeeeeew.

Roger, the aforementioned feeb and legitimate hayseed... who actually spends a bit of time WITH A HAYSEED BETWEEN HIS TEETH, gets all angry because Geri lost his worms and his father makes him go and replace them.  Because his dad picked on him, he eventually ends up like this:

Worst.  Diet.  Ever.

So, anyway, the rest of the movie is all people finding worms that like to burrow under skin because lightning apparently gives ANYTHING super-powers. 

Somebody needs a shave...

I really don't know why I love this movie.  There's really nothing redeemable about it.  This is just deliciously awful, b-grade, "nature strikes back" madness.  There's definitely no social message in here.  I'm pretty certain that this was made just to give Rick Baker a chance to cut his teeth and make people say "icky".

The acting in here, except for Mick, is just fucking atrocious.  The pregnant pauses and syrup-y sweet Gone With The Wind accents just make me want to strangle someone but, much like 2000 Maniacs, the chicken-fried horror works.  The acting makes this movie HILARIOUSLY awful.

Plus there's enough Pabst Blue Ribbon in this movie to drown about 50 hipsters.

If you're in the mood for brainless 1970s backwoods creepy-crawlie-ness, this is an awesomely horrible way to spend a couple of hours.  Just fry you up some chicken and get you some collard greens and corn bread and it's a mo'fuckin' PARTY!

Creature Feature Week!!!

Creature Feature Week is here!!!

This week we're covering monsters, natural or otherwise.  Whether it's dinosaurs or genetically modified  ants or blobs of space goo, we're talking about the non-humanoid creepy.

I'll be posting all week, as usual and I'll be linking to articles, as they become available, from:

MK Horror
Kweeny Todd
Movies at Dog Farm
and
Deep Red Rum
The Big, Gay Horror Show

And maybe a surprise or two.  

In fact, Kweeny has already kicked us off with her Top 10 Modern-Day Creature Features!

Lunchy-munchie!

Show the Demon Blogger some love!