Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Read online

  On a similar level, the desire to create virtual characters for the screen that appear real to the viewer seems to me, ultimately, to be both flawed and pointless. Essentially, it is on one level an effort to ‘trick’ the mind, to fool the eye into accepting the existence of that which does not exist. But even the best such attempts – and Avatar gets closer than most – fail, and I would venture to suggest that it is not simply due to shortcomings in technology. The way that we process information from the physical world is ineffably complex, and even at the purely observational level we are fine-tuned to pick up on countless signals from those whom we encounter in our day-to-day lives. Creating a virtual person is not simply a matter of sticking sensors over a human face in order to ‘map’ the features, nor of enabling a pupil to dilate at appropriate moments. The essence of one’s humanity is essentially intangible, and can only be replicated on the screen by another human. All else is merely a means of disguising emptiness, and I believe that we will always pick up on that emptiness. Some support for this position may be found in the pioneering work of the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, who, in 1970, coined the term ‘uncanny valley’ to describe his hypothesis that when facsimiles of humans, whether robotic or otherwise, act in a human manner, it causes the human observer to react with revulsion. Mori equated such facsimiles to animated corpses, and relegated them to the same level as zombies.

  Lest I be tarred a Luddite, though, let me reiterate my love of spaceships exploding, and battling armies of Orcs, and the creation of new worlds through which I may wander for a time, but let me temper it with the proviso that I will save from fire the wonderful model effects in John Carpenter’s The Thing before any scenes in George Lucas’s cold, mechanised Star Wars prequel trilogy; that I will take Wes Anderson’s flawed Fantastic Mr Fox (Roald Dahl by way of The New Yorker) over Up, even as I acknowledge the wit, humanity and genius of Pixar’s best work; that Nick Park deserves a statue to himself for Wallace and Gromit alone, and every time I see a fingerprint upon his creations my eyes grow hot, but that Flushed Away is an abomination for pretending to be similarly crafted when it is not; that, in all things, I will prefer the sticky, imperfect human touch over the inhuman perfection of that which is generated by computers or, far worse, any effort by a computer artificially to replicate flaws in a misguided effort to suggest humanity.

  So it is that my affection for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is, in the end, tied up with its imperfections, for its imperfections are what make it the product of people, not machines: with the jerkiness of its stop motion; with the occasional remnant of a fingernail mark, or a maker’s flaw, upon its models; with the notion of craft as being linked to the physicality of an object; and with its trust for its audience, its faith in that audience’s willingness, its desire, to suspend disbelief, without being forced to surrender itself entirely to the virtual. It is an affection for ingenuity, for a time when not everything that could be imagined was capable of being presented on the screen and the viewer was required to reach out to the filmmaker, just as the filmmaker reached out to the viewer, each acknowledging the gap between the dream and the reality, while at the same time respecting the effort made to bridge it, thus forging a bond between the cinemagoer and the creator of the image.

  But I acknowledge, too, that my love for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is entwined with my love for my father, now many years dead, and for those moments spent sharing with him the experience of the fantastic. If I sound like I want to turn back the clock, it is as much out of my desire to be reunited with him for a time, father and son once again, as it is out of my love and admiration for the work of Harryhausen, and those who continue to follow in his footsteps.

  I shook the hand that made the Cyclops.

  I shook the hand that made the Gorgon.

  I touched genius.

  THE WASP WOMAN

  (Director: Roger Corman; starring: Susan Cabot, Anthony Eisley, Barboura Morris, William Roerick - 1959)

  Paul Magrs

  When I watched late night monster movies on my black and white portable as a kid I’d be phasing in and out of sleep. They were always double or even triple features and I would fight tiredness to keep watching. My dreams would steal into the experience of watching the film. There would be nonsensical patches of story with no connection to the plot and afterwards I’d never know for certain what I’d seen and what I’d dreamed. It’s a feature of those late night films – the tacky ones, the cheapo ones – that they obey a kind of logic that exists only in their world.

  The Wasp Woman has a long prologue dealing with the crazy scientist, Dr Zinthrop, and his hives of deadly wasps. It was added in order to pad the film to a length suitable for TV broadcast, but it adds a little bit of pathos and backstory to the Frankenstein figure in this film. The prosaic logic of running lengths seems less convincing and enticing than the thought of the dream logic that takes hold of us when we watch a B-movie such as this. I think The Wasp Woman is the B-movie nonpareil.

  These films happen in a different universe altogether: one in which searing daylight can be shot in such a way that it suggests blackest night. One in which the noodlings of a glockenspiel can become the creepiest sound in the world. This is a universe in which we’re always looking around corners and anticipating the worst and the weirdest that can happen. Here, in the B-movie universe, anyone can change out of all recognition. Just anyone can have curious powers bestowed upon them, or be transformed ineluctably into a monster.

  Okay: plot. The curious Dr Zinthrop is filching royal jelly from the queen wasp of his hives. He’s on the verge of a stupendous discovery and looking very shifty about it. The corporation funding his work has just sacked him and so he has to find new backers. And so he pitches up at the offices of Janice Starlin Enterprises, high above the streets of NYC. The film takes Gothic horror tropes and images from the 1940s Universal movies and redeploys them in the then present day metropolis, steeping them in the full glare of the sun and all that brilliant glass of midtown Manhattan. It’s a bold move for a cheapie monster pic: to convince us that all this gleaming modernity still has darkness at its heart. That, inside this skyscraper, there are still black labyrinths and laboratories brewing up evil. And scientists with strange accents still defying nature.

  Here we meet the owner and figurehead of the cosmetics company, Janice Starlin herself. She used to be the model for the skin creams they pedalled. After eighteen years she’s feeling her age – and even looking it. Sales are down by over fourteen per cent because she’d taken her face off the advertising. The company’s losing consumer confidence and the board looks worried as Janice stands in front of a large downward-trending graph.

  Susan Cabot is arch and waspy-waisted as the film’s focus: ‘Not even Janice Starlin can remain a glamour girl forever!’ she declares regretfully, stooping ever so slightly beside the flow-charts.

  I like Cabot’s slowness and weariness. The way she pinches the bridge of her nose in consternation and thinks hard before pinning her hopes on weird Dr Zinthrop and his mad ideas. The presentation of Janice is a strange one. It’s feminist, at least at first glance. She’s the boss and holds court at the board meeting. It’s Janice who dismisses people and hires them on a whim and who secretly funds dodgy research. But her business is all based around the vital importance of women looking young and attractive for men. When she feels that her looks and her profits are slipping her desperation is palpable.

  Like the many femme fatales she faintly resembles – Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest or Joan Collins as Alexis Carrington-Colby in Dynasty – Janice smokes a lot. Maybe she’d look less wrinkly and washed out if she cut down a little? But to film audiences of the time, fags in women’s mouths and hands signaled allure, independence – and danger.

  As it is, she’s fearless when it comes to chancing her life and safety for the sake of glamour. She’s going to be Dr Zinthrop’s next guinea pig. Cue montage of the scientist messing about with actual guinea pigs an
d close-ups of board members and secretaries smoking and looking worried – completely oblivious all the while to Janice’s experiments.

  We see her shed five years after her first three weeks injecting ‘wasp enzymes.’ She looks chuffed as muck, caressing her smoother complexion. I’m irresistibly reminded of those adverts for skin creams and hair conditioners of recent years, in which fifty-odd year old actresses loll about on settees and tell us that they treat themselves to exorbitant Product X, ‘Because I’m worth it.’

  Again, that sensation of having dropped off to sleep and morphing the ad-breaks into the main narrative of the movie… B-movies are like lucid dreaming, when your half-awake mind tries to make sense out of the strangeness…

  The Wasp Woman seems to me to be anticipating the rise of the multi-zillion dollar beauty industries. All of them based around the same kind of pseudo-science that Dr Zinthrop peddles. All of them dedicated to getting people to apply restorative gunk to their withering flesh.

  Now, in the last third of the film, we experience Janice’s impatience and rapacious greed for results. Next thing we know, she’s strutting about in the darkened corridors of her office building at night. Sneaking into the secret lab – the xylophone bonging away worriedly on the soundtrack – and then shooting up with the miraculous goo, unsupervised by her dodgy guru.

  All downhill from here. Even though Janice comes to work looking eighteen years younger – and even smiling! – astonishing the laconic broads she employs as secretaries and making them spit with envy. We also see things starting to go wrong. Dr Zinthrop is attacked by a cat he’s been rejuvenating (in a very poorly choreographed feline fight scene). And now the clock is ticking in a different way. We know a little about the inevitable adverse effects. We’re desperate to see what becomes of the hubristic Janice.

  This is my favourite bit coming up. The first wasp woman attack. Even when she mutates, this woman’s wearing kitten heels, angora sweater and a fetching medallion. But her head has become a furry helmet with antennae and vicious fangs. Her eyes are boggling and huge. She murders the security guard – and seems rather sanguine about the whole transformation and killing business, even when she’s turned back to relative normal. Not much remorse from Janice.

  As the wasp woman she is amazingly agile, scooting about and creating mayhem. This film is often described as a knock-off of the The Fly starring Vincent Price, though I think it’s more than that. The Wasp Woman is that rare thing: a female monster who is allowed to stand in her own right as the macabre star of the show.

  It is never clear whether she transforms in times of stress (a la The Incredible Hulk) or whether she changes at will. At times it’s as if she deliberately uses her altered state to her own advantage – when she needs to get some snoop out of the way, for example. Janice Starlin seems less at the mercy of her blighted nature than she is in thrall to her own ambitions and greed.

  In the final reel it seems as if she’s even going to bump off her valued friend, kindly Mary. When Mary’s co-worker and love interest Bill asks Dr Zinthrop about the danger Mary’s in, the venerable scientist doesn’t mince his words: ‘She’ll kill her and tear her body to shreds and then devour the remains!’

  We get a classic Monster Movie moment, with Mary being borne down upon by the remorseless wasp woman. It’s terrible, but it’s classy as well, all at the same time. And it’s tense because we believe in these people by now, flimsy as they may be. We care about whether the wasp woman jumps on them and sucks out all their blood to a throbbing, buzzing jazz soundtrack.

  Luckily Bill bursts in to save the day and it’s comeuppances all round. Janice gets a phial of smoking acid tipped on her furry head and then she’s chucked out of the window. Her Frankenstein Zinthrop suffers a fatal heart attack, no doubt realising the horror he has unleashed. Serves him right, of course. But we do feel for Janice. She’s the victim of patriarchy and glands.

  The young lovers Mary and Bill survive and embrace, of course. And that’s it! Like many of these wonderful late-night pics, it’s over in a flash. Again, leaving you wondering if you’ve missed something. And leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps.

  You never get an epilogue in a true monster flick. The credits roll over the monster’s dead body. It’s as if, in this weird B-universe, ordinary life after the events of the movie is unimaginable… or unimaginably mundane. Mary and Bill will marry – but, in the years to come, will they ever talk about the queer events of 1959? When they both worked for Janice Starlin Enterprises? That was the year they learned a great lesson indeed about the search for eternal youth. They both learned how, in the end, it really isn’t worth it after all.

  VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED

  (Director: Wolf Rilla; starring: George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Martin Stephens, Michael Gwynn - 1960)

  Bill Hussey

  A vivid memory: I am seven years old, huddled against my grandfather on the narrow, threadbare sofa. Overhead, the brittle fingers of a tree scrape the caravan roof.

  ‘Keep watching, son,’ granddad whispers. ‘Watch the eyes.’

  My own eyes are rooted on the ancient Bakelite TV set. Onscreen, the little boy has snatched the Chinese puzzle box away from his unearthly ‘brother’. Suddenly, the brother’s eyes begin to shimmer, to gleam, to glow. I shudder, and my grandfather’s laughter echoes around the tin box that is his home. As a showman who remembers the freak shows of his youth, the old man appreciates a good scare.

  Up to this point my exposure to science fiction had been confined to benign entities cannibalising Speak and Spell machines to ‘phone home’ and Arthurian legends rerun in a galaxy far, far away. Now, by way of this minor masterpiece, executed with skilful simplicity, I had glimpsed the dark side of the genre. Despite the shivers, I was hooked…

  The wonderfully monikered Sterling Silliphant’s screenplay for Village of the Damned is largely faithful to its source material. The poetic title of The Midwich Cuckoos may have been ditched in favour of cruder, more drive-in friendly fare, but the setting of John Wyndham’s tale remains the same pastoral idyll. This, to my mind, is crucial to the success of both film and book. As the movie opens, a few establishing shots of a shepherd driving his flock across the grounds of a manor house provide an immediately identifiable setting. Midwich is a perfect example of what crime writer Colin Watson called ‘Mayhem Parva’: an archetypical, somewhat romanticized English village that can be shaken only by the discovery of a body in the library or, in this case perhaps, aliens in the cricket pavilion. Like the Golden Age detective story writers, Wyndham knew that strange events work best if located in a prosaic setting, their terror made all the more implacable by the humdrum backdrop of the village pub and the scout hut. So when, a minute into the film, George Sanders’ Professor Zellaby keels over while on the telephone to his brother-in-law, the ordinariness of his surroundings have already provided a stark contrast to the phenomenon.

  This contrast continues as director Wolf Rilla takes a tour of the village and its comatose inhabitants. From this point until the opening credits, there is no music. As the camera ghosts over sleeping bodies, background noises take on an ominous quality and provide a temporary soundtrack: the distant voice of an operator calling down the wire; the lonesome trill of a telephone; the whir of a tractor motor; the gush of a tap; the heavy skip of a stuck record. Then the camera pans up to the church clock – 11 am – and we are left to wonder what is moving in the streets of Midwich. As with much of the ‘action’ in Village of the Damned, whatever is going on is rendered infinitely more unnerving by it happening out of shot.

  In Whitehall, Zellaby’s brother-in-law Major Bernard (played with quiet conviction by Hammer veteran Michael Gwynn) cannot shake his sense of unease. Unable to contact Zellaby he motors down to Midwich. At the village border, he witnesses the local bobby (Peter Vaughan, memorable from his role as the doomed archaeologist in A Warning to the Curious) pass out while investigating a crashed bus, and promptly calls in the Civic Def
ence Corps. They find that the edges of the invisible, sleep-inducing barrier are sharp and unmoving. Even men in gasmasks prove susceptible to the ‘spell’ and so a plane is sent up to survey the area. It is fairly obvious what will happen next, but by using a series of well-edited reaction shots, underscored by the plane’s droning engine, Rilla creates a scene of toe-curling tension.

  In the novel, the surveillance results in photographs of a craft, shaped like ‘the inverted bowl of a spoon’, lying at the mathematical centre of the village. The notion of a physical alien presence implied that the women of Midwich were actually assaulted in their sleep, an idea abhorrent to the executives at MGM. This may be one of the few cases of censorial studio interference resulting in a positive result, for the lack of a craft gives the miracle births later on an inexplicable, haunting quality that would not have existed had the possibility of alien rapists been in the frame.

  Midwich begins to wake up. One can imagine the modern cinematic approach being chaos in the streets, but again the quiet horror is maintained by scenes played out in silence, nary a word being exchanged between the confused villagers. Soon after, the military arrive (a second alien intrusion into Midwich) and Professor Zellaby begins his investigations. Another trump card was the casting of George Sanders. Snobbish and always slightly sinister, Sanders had excelled in roles such as the oily villain Jack Favell in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), but he had also won plaudits for his suave portrayal of Simon Templar in a series of adaptations of Leslie Charteris’ The Saint. Here Sanders’ differing styles come together as he plays a sympathetic hero with a calculating edge (highlighted when Bernard complains of Zellaby’s ‘cold scientific detachment’), a combination that makes him an admirable foe for the ‘children’.