...on YouTube. I've been poking around on YouTube in my odd
moments, looking for tutorials, music videos, cartoons, and
anything else that popped into my head that might be sound and/or
video. The other day, I went looking for monsters. And not just
any monsters. What I searched for were the monsters I saw
on TV when I was quite young. Some of them scared the hell out of
me when I was 8 or 9. Some of them were so cheesy that I laughed at
them even then. The really scary thing about this YouTube adventure
is that I found every last one of them. (Or at least their
trailers.) On YouTube. Most were free to watch in their
entirety--not that I did.
First on my list was The Creeping Unknown, (1955) which
in the UK was called The Quatermass Experiment. This got a
lot of play when I was in grade school, and my father, having seen
it on the family-room TV a few too many times, dubbed it The
Creeping Kilowatt Crud. You can see the whole thing on YouTube. I wasn't
expecting it to be remastered to film resolution, which makes it
look way better than it did on any of our TVs. I didn't
watch all of it. I mostly ran the slider across until I found "the
good parts;" i.e., where they actually show the monster or at least
the cool Heinleinian spaceship it rode in on. I vividly recall my
annoyance at seeing most monster movies having a lot of talking and
running around and (occasionally) some kissing (yukkh!) but...not
much monster. The Creeping Unknown was better than most in
that regard, though the monster was a not-quite-a-blob creature who
was originally an astronaut who brought back an alien infection
from...somewhere...and gradually turned into the monster. It
crawled around and was eventually electrocuited on a repair
scaffold somewhere inside Westminster Abbey, hence my father's
nickname for it.
I remembered the monster badly; I thought it was a true blob
monster, but hey--at late 1950s TV resolution, it might as well
have been. If you like period pieces, watch the whole thing. For
the monster genre, it was surprisingly well done.
Not all were. For a true blob monster (which were a sort of
Hollywood cottage industry in that era) I had to dredge up X
the Unknown (1956.) It was an obvious ripoff of The
Creeping Unknown, done on the cheap. The monster was a big
black tarry glob that bubbles up out of a hole in the Scottish
highlands and starts eating people. The monster didn't get much
screen time, but I remember one very well-executed shot of the
monster rolling toward a town. I recognized the technique
immediately: They had mixed up something viscous but cohesive,
colored it black, and photographed it rolling down a sloping
miniature set, with the camera in the plane of the set. On screen,
it was a house-sized blob monster rolling down a country road on
its merry way. Well-done, and scary in spots, even if the seams
were often visible.
Much scarier in a body-horror way is a blob movie called
Caltiki, The Immortal Monster (1959.) (Italian
titles; dubbed in English.) A sort of spaghetti monster movie, it
came from Italy and scared the crap out of a lot of young
Americans, myself included. A researcher in Mexico discovers that
the Mayans didn't just disappear; a blob monster ate them. And
sunuvugun if the monster isn't still there, and still hungry. The
monster gets a reasonable amount of screen time, especially toward
the end. And yes, it looks like a livingroom's worth of bad '70s
carpeting dyed black with a couple of extras underneath it, pushing
it around in bloblike ways. The scary parts are seeing what it does
to the unfortunates it latches onto. Even when I was ten, I could
tell the dialog did not match the lip movements of the actors. I
didn't care. Monsters are a language in and of themselves.
Sure, I watched it (back in the Sixties) but the less said about
The Unknown Terror (1957) the better. I'll give
you a rank spoiler here and say that the monster looks a lot
like...man-eating soapsuds.
Oddly, I never saw The Blob (1958) when I was a kid.
Maybe the local TV stations thought it was too scary. Dunno. If it
had been on Chicago's Channel 7 (as most monster flicks were) well,
I would have seen it. You can watch the whole thing (this time in
color) at the link above. Lots of footage of the pinkish-purple
Blob eating people, though as blobs go it was kind of featureless
and, given the color they made it, did not carry much sense of
menace.
So much for blobs. There are doubtless other blob movies that I
haven't heard of. (Got any?) Blobs, are, well, cheap,
compared to dinosaurs or aliens. Now for a much better
monster; indeed, one of my all-time favorites: 20
Million Miles to Earth (1957; the link is to a
monster-rich excerpt) has a Ray Harryhausen animated monster. And,
weirdly, the scriptwriter was the older sister of the nice lady who
lived next door to where I grew up. Charlott
Knight (1894-1977) used to come visiting from Hollywood circa
1960, and she would sit on the front porch of her sister's house
and tell stories to the neighborhood kids, including me. She told
us she wrote 20 Million Miles to Earth, (which we had seen
on TV more than once) and I admit I didn't believe her at the time.
It wasn't until IMDB appeared that I could look her up, and...yes.
That was her. She also played bit parts on Pettitcoat
Junction. The monster in the movie (which Charlott called a
"Ymir," though the word is not used in the film itself) was the
first I'd seen with a sympathetic edge. Astrononauts took an egg
from Venus, brought it to Earth, and hatched the poor thing into a
world its kind had never known. It grew quickly, though as best I
recall the only thing it ate was sulfur. (The full movie, being a
Harryhausen, is still being marketed and is not available on
YouTube.) It gets loose in Rome, fights a hapless elephant, and is
harrassed by the Italian military as it climbs around on the
Colosseum, making a mess. By the end I felt sorry for it.
Sympathetic monsters have since become a thing, but this is the
oldest example I can think of. And I knew the person who thought it
up, wow.
Now, I recall a childhood fear of robots. I dreamed once that a
gigantic metal robot foot stomped on the Weinbergers' house across
the street. Where that came from is a bit of a mystery. Scary
robots were less common than other monsters, and the ones I
remember seeing weren't all that scary. Gog (1954) starred two mini-tank robots
built to ride a rocket into outer space. The robots were cool,
though we don't actually see them until half the film is over. In
truth, they got very little screen time at all, and were not in
fact the actual villains in the story. In Tobor the Great
(1954) the robot was the good guy, as was Robbie in Forbidden
Planet (1956).
For a real robot bad guy from my childhood, I have to cite
Kronos (1957). The premise is
stone-dumb: Aliens somewhere are running short on something, so
they send a sort of gigantic robot battery to Earth to suck up all
our electricity and take it home--so that the aliens can convert
that energy into matter. (They must have run out of asteroids.) The
robot itself, however, was unlike anything else in monster cinema:
It consisted of two huge cubes connected by a neck, with a dome and
a pair of antennae on top. It was several hundred feet tall. It had
four cylindrical legs that went up and down, and some kind of
rotating force cushion beneath it, or something. It lands on the
Mexican coast, and marches north toward LA, stepping on Mexicans
and sucking up energy from any powerplant it encounters. It even
inhales the energy of a nuclear bomb, dropped on it by an actual
B-36. Eventually they decide to short it out, and like any battery
with a sufficiently low internal resistance would, it melts. Dumb
as the premise was, Kronos the robot had considerable novelty
value: It was not just some guy in a robot suit. The models and the
opticals were pretty decent for 1957. It's good enough to waste an
hour and a half on the next time you catch a bad cold, though with
a warning: There's...kissing.
So, apart from Kronos, I'm not sure what gave me robotophobia as
a five-year-old. Mutant dinosaurs like The
Giant Behemoth (1959; nice 1080p rip) and
Godzilla (1954) didn't do much for me. Ditto
Rodan (1956) and Gorgo (1961), though Rodan had his
moments. Dinosaurs were already scary; making them even bigger did
not make them any scarier. Mothra? (1962) A
giant...moth? ummm...no. For real chills and grade-school
nightmares, nothing in that era could compare to... The Crawling Eye (1958).
The film was made in England, and called The Trollenberg
Terror over there. Mountain climbers in the Trollenberg (a
German mountain range) start getting their heads torn off up at the
summit. Cold-climate aliens are holed up in the crags somewhere,
trying to get ahead. (Sorry.) When the supply of mountain climber
heads thins out, they start edging down the mountain, looking for
more.
I had literally not seen the film in fifty-odd years, and
remembered the monsters badly. They were huge fat octopus-like
things, with lots of squirmy tentacles and one great big bloodshot
eye in the middle of it all. In 1965 or so, I thought the special
effects people had cheaped out and painted a pupil on a beachball
for the eye. It was better than that. You don't have to take my
word for it. And you don't even have to watch the whole damned
movie. Somebody with a serious monster fetish has copied out all
the scenes that actually show the monster, and you
can see it here. Got three and a half minutes to waste? That's
all it takes. Way back in the Sixties, we watched the whole thing
for three minutes of monster. My research tells me that that's not
an aberration. That's how the monster genre worked.
There were a lot of other monster flicks in that era. The ones I
cite here are the ones I remember most vividly. The ones more
easily forgotten had cheesy monsters or almost no monsters at all.
Curse of the Demon was originally filmed without
a visible monster. They put one in because everybody wanted to see
the Demon. It was cheesy as...hell, heh. It was onscreen for maybe
a minute and a half. I saw it once and that was plenty. I saw
The She Creature, but it was a cheap ripoff of
The Creature from the Black Lagoon and I confess I don't
recall anything but the fact that the monster was visibly female.
The Monolith Monsters were gigantic crystals that
grew and spread before the good guys do...something. (I forgot
what.) My only clear impression is that the crystals would be
relatively easy to outrun.
Oh, there were lots more. The Amazing Collosal Man
(1957) and its way dumber sequel, War of the Collosal
Beast (1958.) Reptilicus (1961) which I saw at an
outdoor theater in Green Bay, with my cousins. The monster was a
puppet; kind of like Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, with fangs.
The Giant Claw (1957.) It looked like an enormous turkey
buzzard. I already knew what turkey buzzards looked like. Making
one huge only made it look silly.
And on and on and on. We have better monsters these days,
including some really scary robots, like AMEE from Red
Planet (2000). (AMEE may be the scariest robot in any movie,
ever.) And, of course, Alien/Aliens (1979/86),
Predator (1987), Cloverfield (2008) and numerous
others. The big difference is that I wasn't ten years old when I
saw Alien. (I was 27.) As I wrote here some years ago,
monster movies are how young boys learn bravery. It
was certainly true for me. Now, I can look back at the whole
silly-ass genre...and laugh.
That was a lot harder in 1962, trust me.