MegaMonsterMonth! #7 - Earth Vs The Spider (1958). Trapped in a Web of Spoliers.

It's Bert I. Gordon again. For someone who wasn't that good a filmmaker, I seem to like watching his stuff. Today I'm checking out Earth vs the Spider.

Synopsis

Jack Flynn (Merritt Stone) is driving home to a small town in the southwest after purchasing a birthday gift (a bracelet) for his daughter, Carol (June Kenney). He hits something and his truck crashes. The next day Carol and boyfriend Mike (Eugene Persson) go looking for him. They find the truck, but no body. Spying a nearby cave and thinking he may have crawled in there for shelter they venture inside and find...a giant spider! The local sheriff (Gene Roth) and high school science teacher, Kingman (Ed Kemmer) are eventually convinced that the spider is real. They venture into the cave and gas the spider with DDT. It collapses, apparently dead. But not so fast! While being stored in the high school gym, the spider is revived by rock and roll and gyrating teens (none of whom seem to be under 30). It breaks out and goes on a rampage through the town.

The most inattentive posse ever.

It eventually grows bored of eating people and heads back to the cave, where the sheriff traps it with dynamite; but not before Mike and Carol head inside to look for her birthday gift! The teens manage to survive long enough for the locals to get to the kids, where Kingman arms Mike with an electrode. The two of them catch the spider in an electrical arc which stuns it. The multi-limbed menace falls onto a stalagmite and the film ends with the monster impaled and dead.

Analysis

This is probably the most competent of Gordon's movies. The effects are okay with the matte shots avoiding the transparent look of some of his other movies. There are some pretty gruesome corpses, drained of fluid by the spider. The acting is amateurish, but adequate. Gordon keeps the movie moving along, he throws in enough spider action to balance some dull character interactions and, at 73 minutes, the film does not overstay its welcome. The opening - with Jack screaming into the camera as something slashes across his face, is an arresting way to start he film.

Of course, there are a lot of things wrong with the movie. The effects, although adequate for a film of this type (low-budget) and era(the late-Fifties), look pretty sad when compared to other films of the time (like the superior Tarantula (1955)). The acting is wooden and the "teen" cast is far too old. Although this is often the case in films (with actors in their twenties playing teens) in Earth, some of the high-school students look like they're pushing forty. The script is pretty bad, having characters doing some amazingly dumb things, even by horror movie standards. Would you really want to stage an impromptu sock hop in a room with a huge spider, even if you think it is dead? Would you really go back into the cave of death to get a bracelet? And the dialogue, which tries - clumsily, painfully - to channel the teen slang of the day - laughable.

Notes

One thing I like about this movie is that there is no explanation for the spider. It's not radioactive. Toxic waste hasn't seeped into the ground water. It didn't drop into a tank of bovine growth hormones. It's just a big spider living in a cave. Why? Are there more? Is this just an outlet for a vast, underground world of giants? Who cares?!? Not Bert I. Gordon.

Verdict

This is a bad movie I love. HThe dialogue is goofy, the acting is sub-local theater, the effects are barely competent, but something about the movie makes it fun to watch and doesn't get boring. Because of the this, the many flaws and failings are acceptable, since the movie itself is entertaining and endearingly silly. Check it out.

Here's the trailer:

MegaMonsterMonth! #7 - Poster Of the Day - The Amazing Colossal Man

Can you make a bald guy in a nappy look menacing? The poster for The Amazing Colossal Man shows that you can.

Telling the story of Colonel Glenn Manning (Glenn Langan), a man caught in the blast of a nuclear bomb, the film is entertaining. It lacks the thrills of contemporary giant monster movies, like Them (1954) and Godzilla (1954, released in the US in 1956) and suffers from a low-budget, short production time (reportedly, it was made in 10 days) and inept special effects. In particular, instead of following the Godzilla route and building large model cities, much of the Colossal Man's colossal action is accomplished by mattes, with Manning superimposed over static shots of buildings. The cheapness and lack of care in this process causes him to often appear transparent. However, having a talking menace, one that has a story arc and can communicate the fear and despair he is feeling as his body grows and his sanity slips, is effective. The film also benefits from decent acting on the part of Langan, Cathy Downs as his fiance Carol Forrest and William Hudson as Dr. Paul Linstrom.

Obviously, the poster was not trying to sell My Dinner with Andre the Giant. The film doesn't deliver anything as exciting as the image here; but, that was something common to Bert I. Gordon's films, where the posters depicted thrills that his low-budget productions could not deliver. It is playing up the action aspects of the movie and does so well. It is a dynamic poster, one that does the best job possible of making a man wearing a diaper look like a real threat. His look is one of concern at the assembled firepower, something that captures a salient point of the film; that Manning is a person, not a mindless beast. Although he is acting like movie monsters for decades - menacing fleeing mobs, carrying a helpless blonde - he is also a person and reacting as a person would if people were pointing guns at him. Manning's pose is awkward; it looks like he is about to fall over (maybe because of his lack of feet?); or, is he just shying away from the tanks and soldiers? If so, this reflects a theme that runs through the film; Manning is a sympathetic figure. A close look at the poster shows a man who is terrified that he is becoming "A Monster!"

Check out the trailer.

MegaMonsterMonth! #4 - War of the Colossal Beast (1958) - Now With 60-Foot Tall Spoilers!

Bert I. Gordon. The name is a legend among B-movie afficiandos. Active mostly in the late-Fifites and early-Sixites, Gordon produced and directed a string of low-budget horror and sci-fi movies.

Here are a few that any genre fan will recognize:

• The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) - The first part of the Glenn Manning Saga!
• Beginning of the End (1957) - Peter Graves versus giant grasshoppers!
• Valley of the Giants (1965) - Super-sized teenagers, a scourge of the 60s!
• The Food of the Gods (1976) - HG Wells comes back as a giant rat!
• Empire of the Ants (1977) - I want to pollinate Joan Collins! With sex!

Anyway, his films are generally low budget, have terrible special effects, laughable scripts, c-list actors...basically, everything you'd associate with drive-in fodder. They are also pretty entertaining, as long as you have the right mindset.

Synopsis

Picking up where The Amazing Colossal Man left off, Beast finds the 60-foot tall, diaper-clad Colonel Manning (Dean Parkin) horribly scared and driven insane from a bazooka blast he received at the end of the last film. He is living in the hinterlands of Northern Mexico, menacing the locals. He is eventually captured and brought to Los Angeles. While being held in an aircraft hangar, his sister Joyce (Sally Fraser) tries to reason with him, unsuccessfully. While chained to the floor, Manning has a lengthy flashback, retelling the story of The Amazing Colossal Man. All of the highlights of that film are shown. Manning eventually escapes. He makes it to the Griffith Observatory where he is surrounded by police and Army personnel. Joyce talks him out of destroying a convenient bus load of school kids. He has a brief moment of sanity, grabs hold of some high tension wires and evaporates. The End.

Analysis

By any reasonable standard, War of the Colossal Beast is a bad film. The acting is wooden. The effects are bad, even for the time, with Manning often transparent, a sign of poor mattes. While the make-up is effective in a few shots (and in stills) whenever he moves his mouth it looks like a latex appliance glued onto the skin. Which, of course, it is. The decision to go briefly to color stock for the finale when Manning electrocutes himself is pretty neat, even if it is only there for a ballyhoo effect; but it adds nothing to the movie. The music seems to be the same stock the Gordon uses in all of his films. And the direction is comprised mostly of static shots.

There are a few good scenes. The opening, where a Mexican teen (Robert Hernandez) is being chased by some unseen menace is well shot and tense. The initial appearance of the horribly scarred Manning delivers a jolt, as he emerges from behind a hill top, while our heroes stand among the wreckage of cargo trucks Manning has been raiding for food.

While a low-budget can be used to explain some deficiencies (like threadbare special effects work or the caliber of a cast) it cannot be used to justify a poorly written story. The film lacks drama. The characters who should get most of the screen-time, Joyce, is often pushed into the background. There are scenes that are in the film just to pad it out, like a 3 minute segment showing different agencies in DC passing the buck about who is responsible for the giant. It's a weird sequence that stops whatever forward momentum the film has and one that adds nothing to the story. The long, unneeded flashback (well, unneeded except to pad the movie run-time with recycled footage) is another scene that has nothing to do with the story and has no apparent impact on the character of Manning. It is there solely so Gordon could reuse footage. There are a number of scenes like this that exist to extend the film to feature length.

Not all of Gordon's work was like this. The Amazing Colossal Man is pretty good with Glenn Langan displaying some real pathos as the man slowly becoming an alien in his own body. Earth vs the Spider is a likeable enough romp, some decent effects and some fun moments of giant spider action. Even Beginning of the End (showcased in one of the best MST3K episodes) had decent acting by the Beginning was literally achieved by having grasshoppers crawl on photographs). While Gordon never made a really great movie, he did make films that tried to be entertaining. Unfortunately, War of the Colossal Beast is just lazy.

Notes

Even though it continues the story of The Amazing Colossal Man, Beast has a different cast and wasn't marketed as sequel.

Verdict

Beast straddles the line between so bad it's bad and so bad it's good. It is not one of Gordon's better films, mostly because of how, even at only 69 minutes long, it feels padded. It has some amusing moments and isn't a horrible way to spend an hour. However, if you want to check out a decent Gordon movie, check out The Amazing Colossal Man or Earth vs The Spider.

Check out the trailer.