Blood Of The Vampire

Blood of the Vampire (1958)

Dir. Henry Cass

Written by Jimmy Sangster

Starring Vincent Ball, Donald Wolfit, Barbara Shelley, Victor Maddern

            In “Transylvania, 1874,” as the opening credits dubiously explain, “The most loathsome scourge ever to afflict the earth was that of the vampire. Nourishing itself on warm living blood, the only known method of ending a vampire’s reign of terror was to drive a wooden stake through its heart.” This little bit of trivia seems extremely pertinent almost immediately, as the movie opens with a stake driven through a shroud-wrapped body by a burly masked man, while a priest or authority figure or something looks on approvingly. And later, when some wall-eyed hunchbacked weirdo (Victor Maddern, CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG) sneaks up to murder the gravediggers and steal the corpse, you would be forgiven for assuming that this movie called BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE, which is set in Transylvania and begins with a bunch of text about vampires, was about vampires.

            Alas, you’d be wrong. While the most loathsome scourge to ever afflict the earth may well be the vampire, this movie will be dealing with, at most, the second most loathsome scourge ever to afflict the Earth, and to be perfectly honest, considering the small scale and relative local impact, if the source we’re dealing with here is even in the top ten most loathsome ever to afflict the earth, we’ve actually had a pretty easy go of it. I even have my doubts about if it’s the most loathsome scourge to ever afflict Transylvania in 1874, given that all the characters have a weird mix of German, British, and Latin names. Maybe there’s a lesser-known Transylvania in Germany?

Anyway, wherever the scourge may fall in the all-time rankings of loathsomeness, it’s certainly loathsome enough that I’m against it. And the person who’s going to discover it the hard way is one Dr. John Pierre (Vincent Ball, small roles in WHERE EAGLES DARE, A TOWN LIKE ALICE, MURIEL’S WEDDING, along with a lot of TV), a forward-thinking doctor who’s just been tried in “Carlstadt” * for murder, following a failed last-ditch attempt at a blood transfusion on a dying patient. The ignorant locals consider this basically one step down from witchcraft, and when his last-minute attempt to get a respected colleague to corroborate the medical necessity of his actions is strangely answered with condemnation, he’s packed off to the Penal Institute on Comboat (?) Island. This institution, as it turns out, is run by a sinister warden/mad scientist named Callistratus (Donald Wolfit, BECKETT[!], LAWRENCE OF ARABIA [!!]) who happens to have great need of a man with exactly Pierre’s skillset. Pressed into work in Callistratus’ secret basement laboratory, he quickly begins to suspect something sinister is afoot, especially when his fellow prisoners start to mysteriously disappear. OK, not so mysteriously; everyone knows Callistratus is killing them in his diabolical experiments. But can Pierre foil the dastardly villain and clear his name before he, or his devoted fiancé (Barbara Shelley, the original VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and various Hammer productions) become the next victims of the madman?

1958 was still the very, very dawn of British horror cinema; CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, which touched off the movement, was only a year old, and its follow-up, THE HORROR OF DRACULA, was barely even out of theaters by the time BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE came calling. But producers and longtime low-budget hustlers Monty Berman and Robert Baker of the also-also-also** ran Brit grindhouse studios Eros Films and Tempean Films (THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS, THE TROLLENBERG TERROR aka THE CRAWLING EYE) already saw something of a formula brewing, and hired FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA scribe Jimmy Sangster pretty much immediately after DRACULA proved that its predecessor’s success was no fluke.

Sangster had only two produced screenplays when DRACULA premiered, but was already in hot demand: he had six produced screenplays in 1958 alone, which might explain why he was running a little low on ideas when he wrote BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE. I mean, I guess there’s a certain smirking cleverness to the idea that the “vampire” of the title here is not a supernatural bloodsucker, but rather a mad scientist who steals blood for medical transfusions to combat his rare blood disease. That is, however, more a matter of title semantics than a plot point the movie makes much of --or, in fact, comments on at all-- and alas, the movie is otherwise strictly standard mad science fare, with a castle, laboratory, hunchback, etc. In fact, despite the “Vampire” in the title, it differs in no particular from the Hammer FRANKENSTEIN movies that Sangster also wrote (there’s even a hunchback named “Carl”!), with the exception that even the lowest-rent FRANKENSTEIN film had at least some aspirations towards a high concept premise. BLOOD is more of a prison movie, where it matters less exactly that the doctor is up to (just trying to develop a treatment for his own blood disease) than that our hero escapes from him.

And to that end, it’s actually a pretty good story, as far as it goes! The fiendish  Doctor’s machinations are mostly unimaginative, but respectably diabolical (one might even say loathsome!), and our hero’s situation looks suitably hopeless. The script does a perfectly proficient job of methodically establishing the specific obstacles he must overcome to clear his name and defeat the villain, and consistently rolls out new complications to keep things from getting too repetitive. The hero himself is dull as dishwater, but at least the circumstances of the story lend themselves well to a nicely-build prison-escape-thriller. And the cast is proficient enough; Ball isn’t exactly explosively charismatic, but he imparts a prickly sense of contemptuous umbrage upon the character, which at least gives him more definition than the litany of bland pretty boys Hammer insisted on shoehorning into their movies for the next few decades. Wolfit is basically doing a low-level Bela Lugosi impression without the accent, which is fine enough, because after all, he’s quite right, this movie would be better if Bela Lugosi was playing the villain. Interestingly, the two least important characters are the ones who are actively good here: Hammer scream queen Shelley brings vastly more intelligence and agency to her role than is strictly required (Sangster, who does not exactly have a great history of writing meaty female roles, at least gets her directly involved in the action here, and Shelley runs with it every inch as far as the boilerplate damsel-in-distress trope will possibly allow her), and Maddern, through his one real eye, does a surprising and impressive amount of work to instill his non-speaking hunchback sidekick stereotype with some inner life. It’s hard to know what he’s thinking, exactly, and the screenplay offers very little that would help one guess, but it’s definitely clear from his performance that he is thinking, that he’s taking all this in and pondering it.

Indeed, while over the next decade or so Sangster’s scripts and plotting would sometimes get a bit loose (even the next years’ THE MUMMY and BRIDES OF DRACULA struggle with some basic narrative structure), BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE sports a perfectly sturdy construction. It’s a perfectly fine yarn, told perfectly adequately. And yet, for all that, it packs very little punch compared to its British horror contemporaries. Despite its gothic horror trappings (the “prison” might as well be a castle, it even has a drawbridge, towers, and posh living quarters), it feels much more akin to the mad science films of the 1950s than the burgeoning horror films which would define the 60s and 70s. Partly this comes from the somewhat anachronistic story itself, which is set up in every imaginable way to resemble something like THE DEVIL COMMANDS (1941) or, hell, even ISLAND OF LOST SOULS from 20+ years prior. But a bigger part is the production, led by director Henry Cass (THE GLASS MOUNTAIN), which is every bit as stagy and stodgy as the early Hammer films were vital and audacious. With its lengthy medium shots, drowsy editing, hammy theatricality, and corny under-dressed castle sets, it resembles the low-budget movies of twenty years prior more than their descendants just a few years later. Cass demonstrates not a whit of understanding about why the Hammer films were such a monumental leap forward in modern British filmmaking, and seems perfectly content recycling the same style as the films at the beginning of his career in the late 30’s. Even the addition of color film --Hammer was notorious for using the medium for bright red blood splatter-- makes no difference to a films whose primary palette consists of dirty grays and faded browns.

With a more forward-thinking production and a little more ambition, I think the film could have mustered more bite and been a little better. But ultimately not much better. Bottom line is, although it’s a competently assembled little tale, its most damning flaw is that it utterly lacks in anything remotely exotic or exciting. It’s about as standard as they come, hitting virtually every cliché in the book without building off a single element in any kind of new or imaginative way. Even its mild nods to actual science (the protagonists study blood types and discuss transfusions) were a half-century old by the time the movie came out (though, in fairness, they would have brand new in the movie’s 1880 setting***). Other than the need to crank out a sixth horror script in a single year and to prominently feature the word "vampire" in the title, I can't think of much reason why anyone would have thought this was a tale especially worth telling. It’s fine as far as it goes, but without a little more imagination, “fine” was all it was ever going to be.

*Presumably they mean Karlstadt, Germany, a town about an hour East of Frankfurt, not Carlstadt, New Jersey. There’s also a Carlstadt which is a borough of Dusseldorf, though if that’s what they mean it seems unnecessarily specific. The only other potential contender is the Croatian city of Karlovac, which, apparently, is rendered in German as “Carlstadt.” Either way, none of these are anywhere close to Romania. It’s over 1,500 miles from Karlstadt to Transylvania, which is a 16 hour journey any way you slice it today, by car.

** Standard wisdom is that Hammer > Amicus > Tigon > Tempean > Harry Alan Towers, although there is certainly some variability movie to movie.

*** The opening takes place in 1874, everything else takes place “six years later.” I looked it up to be sure Sangster wasn’t incorporating new medical knowledge ripped from the headlines, but blood types were first discovered in 1900. That made me wonder if this was actually vaguely based on a true story, but if Nobel-prize winning biologist and physician Karl Landsteiner got the idea while being unjustly imprisoned by a imperious madman, they don’t mention it in his wikipedia page. Landsteiner made his discovery in 1900 and 1901 and got his Nobel for it in 1930, so even that was almost three decades old when Sangster wrote this script.

You can really see why they thought this image would bring in the kids.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

           

TAGLINE	NO WOMAN IS SAFE from the MOST FRIGHTENING FIEND IN THE HISTORY OF HORROR! Which is blatantly a lie on a whole cornucopia of levels, most notably in that almost every woman is safe, since the FRIGHTENING FIEND runs an all-male prison and the inmates are his primary victims. He does kill his maid, though, and threatens Dr. Pierre’s girlfriend, so those particular two women are not safe from THE MOST FRIGHTENING FIEND IN THE HISTORY OF HORROR. And yeah, about that last part...
TITLE ACCURACY	Technically vaguely true if you’re willing to accept that a guy who steals blood to transfuse it for medical purposes can reasonably be called a “vampire.” But blood definitely does play a key role here.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	England
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Mad Science, arguably vampire
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Jimmy Sangster
NUDITY?	None, though Berman and Baker would become notorious for inserting random scenes of nudity into their later movies, as we discuss in THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes, poor Barbara Shelley gets assaulted by this one asshole, though she’s saved before things get too out of hand. And, thankfully, the movie agrees that the guy who did it is scum who deserved to get strangled by a Hunchback.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Yes, there is a pack of vicious dobermans who are trained to kill anyone who displeases Dr. Callistratus or his sadistic guards.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Just mad science
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None.
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Never practice cutting-edge medicine in Carlstadt.

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+

The Fly (1958)

The Fly (1958)

Dir. Kurt Neumann

Written by James Clavell based on the short story by George Langelaan

Starring Al Hedison, Patricia Owens, Vincent Price

THE FLY is one of those 1950s mad science / giant insect (spoiler?) films which we think about primarily in conjunction with Mystery Science Theater 3000. Which is to say, we think of them as comically antiquated, silly camp, if we even think about them at all. We have some hazy vision of stilted dialogue and clumsy rubber monster suits and cartoonishly square honkie scientists, and that’s about it. But THE FLY isn’t just a 1950s mad science / giant insect film. It’s also the 1950s mad science / giant insect film; the one which has emerged from the pack over the years to not simply be remembered, but to embody the very concept of this type of film. Writer Chuck Klosterman gained some attention recently for his theory which states, “As the timeline moves forward, tangential artists in any field fade from the collective radar, until only one person [or, in this case, work of art] remains; the significance of that individual is then exaggerated, until the genre and the person become interchangeable.” He used this to imagine a future where the musical genre “rock and roll” has faded completely from popular culture and is only remembered as a historical movement through the lens of one individual performer who consequently must represent the totality of the artform (he debated between Elvis, The Beatles and Bob Dylan, before ultimately settling on the correct choice, Chuck Berry). If John Philip Sousa is the embodiment of marching band music, Beethoven is the embodiment of Classical Music, and Berry will someday embody rock and roll, THE FLY is the embodiment of that particular breed of horror which in itself defines, to some extent, the genre cinema of the 1950s. Only perhaps THEM! offers it any serious competition for that honor.

THE FLY, then, is a movie that you encounter, and feel like you know, long before you ever actually watch it. Like the “twist” ending to PLANET OF THE APES --which is probably the one thing which is most known about that movie, even (and perhaps especially) by people who have never seen it-- you probably already know, at least in broad strokes, the big shock moments of THE FLY. I’ve seen most of the iconic scenes parodied or referenced in everything from The Simpsons (in their classic “Treehouse of Horror” segment Fly vs Fly) to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which features a minor character who actually has an origin story very similar to the one seen in the movie) to BEETLEJUICE (Michael Keaton quotes the title character’s final moments) to Phineas and Ferb (a teleportation accident involving mixed-up fly parts). And then of course, there’s David Cronenberg’s 1986 loose remake of the same title, which is possibly even more famous than the original, at least in the circles in which I run. Howard Shore wrote a fucking opera version of the story in 2008. That’s about peak cultural saturation.

And yet, somehow THE FLY still wasn’t quite what I expected. Not entirely, anyway. I mean, on one hand, it is entirely, almost quintessentially a 1950’s mad science film. You’d be hard pressed to find a single 30 second sequence which could not be immediately identified as a 1950’s mad science film even completely isolated from any other context. The cinematography is of the stagey, candy-coated technicolor school, full of lush, warm lighting and pristine theatrical sets which seem to owe their genesis more to the imagination of Norman Rockwell than anything which ever existed in the real world. The acting is of that theatrical, pre-method-acting variety, with broad, uncomplicated performances which could play to the back rows of a stage theater quite comfortably. The dialogue is no more naturalistic, full of turgid, purple philosophical monologues and earnest declarative proclamations (“It would be funny, if life weren’t so sacred,” emphasizes a forlorn scientist after mistakenly sending a kitten to another dimension). And the movie has that unmistakably 1950s desire to ensure that the characters are all morally upright to the point of being positively saccharine. No moral ambiguity here, no complicated motivations.

But on the other hand, just like THEM!, THE FLY turns out to be rather darker and more affecting than you’d have any reason to expect going in. I love 1950’s horror cinema, but I can’t imagine even the most sensitive soul feeling particularly horrified by THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS or IT… THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE. I doubt even their creators imagined they would disturb and unnerve. They were matinee drive-in fluff for kiddies, full of rubbery special effects, precocious child and silly featherweight melodrama. But THE FLY turns out to be a little more twisted than its brethren. In fact, David Cronenberg's “reimagining” of the film as a body-horror nightmare isn’t as radical a departure from the original as I had assumed. While not as fascinated as Cronenberg was by the messily dysmorphic transmutation of flesh, it’s definitely interested in shocking and disturbing its audience, and in doing so, successfully manages to find an unexpected vein of the grotesque running through the corny 1950’s suburban modernist milieu.

It is the story, of course, of Dr. Andre Delambre (David “Al” Hedison*, most recognizable for playing Felix Leiter in LIVE AND LET DIE and LICENSE TO KILL), a Montreal scientist who is discovered in the film’s opening with his head and arm crushed beyond recognition in a hydraulic press. We don’t see the messy results, but hot damn, that’s a pretty hardcore death to start a movie with in 1958. His wife, Helene (SAYONARA, a multiple-Oscar-winning Marlon Brando-starring 1957 anti-racism movie that I’ve literally never heard of before today***), denies any involvement in his death, but begins behaving extremely strangely, becoming obsessed with flies and unable to discuss what happened. Eventually, Delambre’s kindly brother Francois (Vincent Price, 1975’s “conceptual TV special” Alice Cooper: The Nightmare) shows up and tricks her into telling the sordid tale that lead to Delambre’s untimely (and squishy) demise.

Seems that once upon a time, Delambre was an apparently non-mad scientist laboring to build a matter transporter in his basement (admittedly, that description makes him sound quite mad indeed, but he seems pretty well adjusted. Also arguably  this would actually make him a non-mad engineer, since he’s actually trying to build a device, not test a hypothesis, but let us not muddle the case with needless semantics). He’s a loving husband, but he’s really, really into his work and misses some meals and stuff, which mildly irritates his wife and lets us know that his tragic flaw is that he cares more about making a history-altering scientific discovery than his wife’s home cooking, which in the movie’s opinion means that it’s tragic but inevitable that he’ll eventually have his head crushed by a hydraulic press. I don’t need to tell you what goes wrong, because you already know. One day Helene ventures into the basement to find her husband unexpectedly silent, and hiding his head under a cloth of mystery while scrawling frantic messages to her with the hand he’s not suspiciously holding behind his back. Uh oh.

In one sense, this is a movie conceit which is ludicrous in the extreme -- he ends up with a giant fly head (but his own brain?) and must try and locate the pesky insect which has stolen his own human noggin. I mean, that’s downright kooky, it barely even supports parody it’s so outrageous (the Simpsons episode which references the movie actually doesn’t do anything more ridiculous with the concept than its source material does). If you start asking questions about how, exactly, this works, it quickly becomes clear that it’s utter nonsense. So hard sci-fi it ain’t, but somehow the movie doesn’t come off as comical as it really ought to, by all reasonable standards.

Part of this, I think, is the gruesome opening -- we know this is going to end really, really badly, so there’s an element of inevitability and tragedy here, combined with the engrossing mystery of how our nice scientist ended up at such a desperate point. Part is also the simple but effective imagery, from Delambre’s disconcerting silent, masked form to the elaborate animatronic fly mask and arm, which are utterly absurd, of course, but also detailed and realistic enough to be appreciably repellent. Still, for my money, the biggest reason THE FLY manages to pull off the impossible and become a genuinely unnerving 1950’s sci-fi schlock pic has to do with the existential randomness of it all. Delambre really is a pretty nice guy with a lovely, supportive wife and a genuinely inspired scientific breakthrough. He isn’t some callus Dr. Frankenstein who let his hubris overcome his humanity, he doesn’t even make some crucial misjudgment. There’s just one tiny, random complication he didn’t consider or plan for. In every other parallel universe, this experiment probably went off without a hitch and the guy went on to become the most famous and important human of the century. And yet, in this universe, he’s going to be transformed into a disfigured monster and eventually smashed to death by heavy machinery, which will be, by that point, a blessing. It’s such a terribly cruel and blatantly unfair turn of events that you can’t help but be a little affected by it. In fact, it’s perhaps even more salient today than it would have been in its own time, because of our (completely unwarranted) sense of nostalgia for this “simpler time,” which is presented with exactly the corny, sentimental treacle we expect of it, until it’s suddenly shattered by this bizarre and grotesque intrusion of random fate.

It’s traditional when discussing 1950s horror movies to blather on and on about the sense of fatalism brought on by the apparently imminent nuclear holocaust, which hovered over everything throughout the cold war but was perhaps especially anxiety-ridden in the decade immediately following the Second World War. You could, if you were so inclined, make that case for this movie -- the film’s teleportation experiment, though not explicitly related to the atomic age,*** could be seen as a metaphor for the new era of science powerful enough that a single mistake could have catastrophic and unforeseen consequences. You could even argue, perhaps --just perhaps, and especially since this was based on a French short story-- that maybe poor Dr. Andre Delambre might be a symbol for the post-war modernist ideals, forging forward with good intentions but an irresponsible naivete for how those ideals and their resulting knowledge might unexpectedly transform them into dangerous monsters. There might even be a little autobiographical allusion, strangely enough; short story author George Langelaan actually underwent plastic surgery to alter his appearance and make him a more effective spy for the Allies during WWII. Did he, like the protagonist here, find his own face suddenly transformed into something alien and unnerving?

Mostly, though, I don’t think a movie like THE FLY is meant to be read symbolically. It’s a film which is meant to shock and fascinate, and that’s what it does. From its startling, mysterious opening to its big special-effects reveal to its surreal, grotesque ending, it’s a movie which magnificently threads the line between campy delights and grim body horror. The cast is solid: Owens is absolutely radiant as the doomed scientist’s wife, and has the acting chops to be convincing as both a stereotypical homemaker and a mentally shattered trauma survivor, effectively holding the entire movie together. Hedison is sympathetic as the title character (even though we don’t see much of him after his big transformation, that's him under the mask, not a double) and what the heck, we might as well enjoy Vincent Price in a rare nice guy role.**** It’s not the best use of the big fella, but his overpowering screen charisma is as intoxicating as ever, and he's effortlessly endearing. Director Kurt Neumann (a stalwart B-movie workhorse who had directed nearly 30 movies since 1933, and tragically died a few days after THE FLY’s premier, reportedly weakened by his exhausting work on it) lets the plot flag a little as the backstory begins, and needlessly lets it drag on for ten minutes after the obvious finale, but no matter. It’s a strange and affecting experience not quite like anything else.

Which leaves me with only one complaint, and one which will be rather predictable to those of you who know my usual stance on these mad science pics: Why the fuck does Delambrefly have to go and smash up his lab and burn his notes?! I think the prospect of instant teleportation would be valuable enough to endure a few setbacks. I know he doesn’t want anyone else to get mutated, but all you have to do is keep the flies out of the transportation tube! Hell, install an air curtain and you've fucking changed the course of history! The concept was sound, I say, SOUND!

Anyway, other than that, THE FLY is great. If the 1950’s mad science / monster craze has to be defined by just one film, you could hardly pick a better one -- it brings everything you’d expect from the era and genre, but also a little more. I don’t know if it is, as Vincent Price describes in the trailer, “far beyond anything your mind could conceive,” but it’s also not quite what you probably assume.

************

*Fun fact: his daughter, Alexandra Hedison, is married to Jody Foster. Incidentally, I can’t exactly recall the pronunciation of the Doctor’s name, but writing out “Andre Delambre” makes it look like it rhymes, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. It’s French in the original short story (Canadian here) so it’s anyone’s guess what it should actually sound like.

**Not-so-fun fact: Ricardo Montalban plays a Japanese character.

***Although one of the posters claims the film is about “The Monster Created By Atoms Gone Wild!” they must mean that it’s literally composed of carbon atoms, because unless I missed it there’s no talk of atomic energy here.

****Ironically, the huge success of THE FLY --one of the few famous roles where Price plays a completely nice guy-- seems to have been the deciding factor into making him a fixture of the horror genre, and one of the screen’s most legendary villains. He’d done HOUSE OF WAX in 1953, and THE MAD MAGICIAN in 1954, but was only a sporadic genre actor until THE FLY, from which point he began appearing almost exclusively in horror films. Or at least, that’s the way writer Richard Harlan Smith tells the story.

Woah now, let's not overreact.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	Horror Of The Winged Menace ! She had to kill the thing her husband had become -- But could she? Once it was human... even as you and I! The monster created by atoms gone wild The fly with the head of a man...! And the man with the head of a fly! It's the terror-topper first introduced to the public in "Playboy" Magazine! 100$ if you prove it can't happen! For your own good we urge you not to see it alone!
TITLE ACCURACY	Totally accurate
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from George Langelaan’s short story. Which, incidentally, was first published in Playboy magazine, if you were confused by that 6th tagline.
SEQUEL?	Two sequels, RETURN OF THE FLY in 1959, and CURSE OF THE FLY in 1965
REMAKE?	Yes, Cronenberg’s 1986 remake starring Jeff Goldbum, which also had its own sequel (THE FLY II) in 1989.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Filmed in Canada, but made by an American studio
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Mad Science / Killer Bugs! / Transmutation
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Well, Patricia Owens had been in an oscar-winning prestige pic with Marlon Brando the previous year.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Vincent Price
NUDITY?	None, unless you count flys.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Yes, in the final’s equal parts hilarious / disturbing last twist
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	Yes, of a sort
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Yes, Mrs. Delambre seems to crack up a bit after the horror
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Abso-Lutely
VOYEURISM?	Nah
MORAL OF THE STORY	Look, just fucking stop trying to make scientific breakthroughs, OK? It can only end in tears.