The Black Scorpion

The Black Scorpion (1957)

Dir. Edward Ludwig

Written by Robert “Not the Blees, NOT THE BLEES!!!” Blees, David Duncan

Starring Richard Denning, Mara Corday, Carlos Rivas, Mario Navarro

THE BLACK SCORPION offers two things, and only two things. One is those is endless scenes of generically handsome square scientists (Richard Denning, THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, and Carlos Rivas, THE KING AND I, TRUE GRIT) having meaningless longwinded exposition dialogue or aggressively putting the moves on an irrelevant hot local lady (1950s pinup cult figure Mara Corday, THE GIANT CLAW*). The other is stop-motion scenes of giant scorpions wrecking shit up intercut with footage of an adorable googly-eyed scorpion puppet face.

One of those two things is a lot of fun to watch. The other is is capable of incapacitating a grown man in a matter of seconds. Guess what the ratio of one to the other is.

Nah, I kid, BLACK SCORPION is ultimately pretty fun. But it definitely suffers from a catastrophic excess of corny 1950s dorkiness. During some of the flirting scenes, the actors are mugging so shamelessly that it seems imminently possible it might degenerate into a singing cowboy movie and squander all the goodwill you earn by showing me giant stop-motion scorpions wrecking shit up. And of course, there’s also this infuriating little kid (Mario Navarro, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN) like they had back then, who is always stowing away with the military and putting himself and everyone else in mortal danger because aren’t kids just the darndest lil things. It would be unfair and unreasonable not to expect some cheesy, stiff drama in a movie like this --it’s par for the course, and even the very best movies of THE BLACK SCORPION’s ilk are suffused with it-- but even with that expectations, the non-scorpion parts here are pretty dire.

This seems like a good time for a long hypothetical conversation about science.

Another minor annoyance is that --like THEM!, the great grandaddy progenitor of all giant bug pictures-- it has an odd structure where it seems like the problem is resolved but then there’s an entire act still remaining which basically just repeats the first climax. Here --just like THEM!-- the film begins with partners (Denning and Rivas) who stumble onto an unexpected gigantic arthropod menace and must join forces with the military to do battle, and eventually dynamite the offending arachnids’ lair, and then just assume everything is fine without actually looking, like a Bond Villain leaving our hero alone in an easily escapable death trap. But of course, it’s only 60 minutes in, so that’s not gonna solve the problem; you gotta have a big final battle in an abandoned soccer (“futbol”) stadium with tanks and explosions and so forth.

The result is an abrupt narrative full halt followed by a reset which has to completely rebuild its lost momentum, and there isn’t quite time to manage it. That seems like a trifling complaint in a film this silly, but there’s also no reason on Earth that a giant bug flick of 88 minutes ought to suffer such a lack of narrative momentum. Writers Robert Blees (FROGS, WHO SLEW AUNTIE ROO?) and David Duncan (THE TIME MACHINE, FANTASTIC VOYAGE) seem more intent on faithfully aping the structure of THEM! than considering if it’s actual good storytelling,** and it kind of reminds me of some of the early American slashers (HE KNOWS YOU’RE ALONE, TERROR TRAIN) which intuitively understood that a template for an entire genre had been established by one landmark film (THEM! for giant bugs, HALLOWEEN for slashers) but didn’t quite have the necessary perspective to recognize what parts of the template were intrinsically necessary to the formula and what parts were just distinctive details. The result is a movie with some obvious vestigial limbs showing, not entirely without charm but certainly without much grace.

But who can stay mad at this face?

But, when there’s giant scorpions on-screen, you’re willing to forgive a whole lot. In a giant scorpion picture, only a fool would trade even a frame of enthusiastic stop-motion mayhem for the most elegantly plotted narrative in history. Priorities are what separates a good-bad movie from a bad-bad movie, and THE BLACK SCORPION wisely prioritizes putting forth as much of the title character as possible. The animation (Ostensibly by KING KONG’s Willis O’Brien, but reportedly mostly by his protege, the improbably named Pete Petersen) is lively and full of the kind of eccentric detail and personality and I look for in this sort of hogwash, and they’re smart enough to throw in a variety of scenarios. And also giant bugs. There’s plenty of giant scorpions, of course, but they also get a 30 foot carnivorous worm in there, and a cameo by a giant spider. If he had a good enough agent he could probably have gotten a little box around his name on the poster. Or at least an “and” credit. He makes a real impression in his brief appearance.

Tantalizingly, there’s also reason to believe these non-scorpion creepy-crawlies may actually be veteran players humiliatingly forced to play second fiddle to these young upstart flash-in-the-pan BLACK SCORPIONS: it seems there is quite a bit of online speculation that these models were, in fact, the very ones which were infamously cut from the fabled KING KONG “spider pit” sequence. Amazing as that sounds, it actually seems fairly plausible (there’s not really any reason for such a menagerie of creatures to appear in this lazy b-movie, and O’Brien reportedly borrowed heavily from old models and effects in this film) but alas, I can find no specific source which confirms the speculation, and a few other sources are willing to spoil our fun by pointing out that Ray Harryhausen claimed that many KING KONG models were still stored at RKO in the 1950’s, where many had met with a slow death by decay by this time. Still, since the Spider-pit models didn’t make it into the final print of KONG, it’s not hard to imagine that they were of less interest to RKO and could have ended up in this unassuming little movie without much notice.

Anyway, whether or not BLACK SCORPION is as close as any human is ever likely to get to the holiest grail of all lost cinema, it’s a hoot to watch a bunch of giant stop-motion bugs menace tiny humans, and it boasts an embarrassment of riches in that regard. If they really made all these models and did all this animation just for this dorky B-picture, color me impressed and pass my compliments to the chef, because they could easily have done half as much work and still comfortably fit into the herd of giant bug flicks from the 50’s. Recycled or not, though, the end result offers a lot more whammy than your average giant [noun] formula matinee flick. They even try something a little different by vaguely superimposing real footage of a skittering living scorpion over footage of large crowds running in fear. It doesn't work even slightly, but the effect is kind of weird and nightmarish, and I've never seen anything quite like it. That’s hustle, and I respect it.

I mean, for a horror movie this is ludicrous, but for an art movie it would rock.

Another group really hustling here? Scientists. (In this case, Volcanologists, who have enough to worry about what with earthquakes and exploding mountains of liquid rock and should not, by god, feel any professional obligation to deal with giant arachnids of any kind). You gotta love that earnest 1950’s reverence for science, which is pretty easy to mock, but considering where we’ve gone since then feels positively heartwarming in retrospect. There’s not a speck of doubt in THE BLACK SCORPION’s mind that all our problems can be solved by rational, modernist scientists backed up by a robust military, and so that’s the fantasy we get. Our heroic Volcanologists here are every bit as manly and virile as a Jean-Claude Van Damme flick (they just tend to express it by thoughtfully puffing a pipe and hypothesizing, rather than spin-kicks), and their work is viewed as unambiguously vital and honorable. One perfect encapsulation of the movie’s starry-eyed respect for the profession: Our intrepid men of book-learning actually take a camera with them when they go into the lost world of giant insects on a mission of destruction. The camera has no bearing on the plot, but the movie just naturally figures if we’ve gotta blow this up for the sake of mankind, at least it would be good to try and document some of it. That always bothers me in movies like this, where they have to blow up the ancient temple or the alien spaceship or whatever and no one acts like that’s a great loss for humanity. Way to respect the pursuit of knowledge, BLACK SCORPION.

Another pleasant surprise? Note that the movie features two equal partners, one Mexican and one American. They’re both geologists, both men of science, and there’s never any sense that the Americans consider Mexico or its inhabitants in any way inferior, or even that their respective nationalities divide them in any meaningful way. Granted, the Mexican guy doesn’t get the girl or have any notable dialogue in the entire second half of the movie, but he’s always there dammit, and the two banter about how beautiful Mexico is and discuss the brilliance of its scientists. That would sadly be hailed as progressive today, even in an non-giant-scorpion type movie scenario. Its gender politics are slightly less defensible, but hey, baby steps.

So yeah, in conclusion, if you like movies with giant stop-motion insects intercut with film footage of a big slow-moving googly-eyed scorpion puppet head, which are also less racist than you probably feared, I would recommend THE BLACK SCORPION.

*She also appeared in small roles in a number of films by her friend and TARANTULA co-star Clint Eastwood, including THE GAUNTLET, SUDDEN IMPACT, and PINK CADILLAC.

**Of course, the real tension in the movie is if these two will ever finish their geological volcano survey (which if I learned anything from my buddy Rob, means basically camping out in the most beautiful places on earth, growing a beard, smoking weed, and eventually marrying a beautiful French co-ed.) It’s almost a DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOIS with giant bugs, because they’re constantly about to start this damn thing and just keep getting interrupted by this and that, mainly scorpion-related.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	Don’t Be Afraid To Scream… It Helps To Relieve The Tension. This message of hope brought to you by the makers of THE BLACK SCORPION.
TITLE ACCURACY	There’s definitely a scorpion, though his unusually large size seems more relevant than his color
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	no
SEQUEL?	no
REMAKE?	none
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	US production, though according to IMDB at least some scenes were filmed in Mexico.
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Giant bugs!
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Willis O’Brien
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Pretty much the whole movie
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	No
MORAL OF THE STORY	Geologists must be well-rounded enough to statistically analyze mountains of tedious seismic data and be the last line of defense in the unlikely event of a giant insect attack.

Call it an affectionate C+