SUMMER OF BLOOD: B-HORROR IN THE 1960s - THE BOLT-IN-THE-NECK GANG

On 10 April, 1966, Embassy Pictures released one of the most amazingly ludicrous double features in the history of crappy movies: not one but two horror/Western hybrids directed by William Beaudine, among the most prolific directors in the history of the medium. Alphabetically (I don't know which was the A-picture and which the B-picture - but spiritually they are both, of course, B-pictures of the first water), the first of these was Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, which was so bad that it was the one film out of his legendarily slipshod career that John Carradine declared to be his most embarrassing. We are not, sadly, here to talk about that movie; "sadly", because its sibling is pretty much a dog too, and lacks the reliable hammy charm of Carradine in a movie he knew was going to hell all around him. I give you - and Lord knows you don't need to give it back - Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. And as much as that makes it sound like the kind of movie that you could already have three-quarters written in your head, they didn't even get that right: Dr. Maria Frankenstein (Narda Onyx) is in point of fact the famous mad scientist's granddaughter.

Maria and her simpering assistant/brother Rudolph (Stephen Geray) have left Europe altogether when we meet them: American Southwest, it seems, have much better weather conditions to follow granddad's experiments in re-animating corpses through lightning storms. Or whatever exactly Maria is up to in an old mission; it's never exactly specified and it's also not really consistent. But it involves murdering locals and placing the artificial brains the siblings retrieved from the family collection, in the hopes of making a superman, or a slave, or God knows what. Terrified of his sister's insane schemes, Rudolph has been surreptitiously poisoning the creations before they have a chance to revive, as he does with the latest victim; and it so happens that following this victim's disappearance, his family, including the beautiful Juanita (Estelita Rodriguez), are preparing to get the hell away from the town and whatever secret nastiness the Frankensteins are perpetrating under the guise of trying to heal the sick young men of the town. Consulting her grandfather's journals, Maria decides that the issue has been with her test subjects: she needs a strong, muscular hunk of man meat to experiment with.

Sensibly realising that this was all going nowhere, JJMFD now restarts. Legendary outlaw Jesse James (John Lupton), thought to be dead, has actually escaped his stomping grounds in the Midwest to try his hand as a gunslinger and thief here in the Southwestern desert. Along with his friend Hank Tracy (Cal Bolder), Jesse has been hustling and conning his way through small towns, or so it would seem from the pair's introduction, with Jesse taking bets on whether the strong, muscular Hank can win fights. That's enough to bring them to the attention of Butch Curry (Roger Creed), the leader of a local gang who recruits Jesse and Hank to help hold up a stagecoach. Butch's hotheaded brother, Lonny (Rayford Barnes) bristles at the thought, and goes to Marshal MacPhee (Jim Davis) to turn Jesse in. A shootout ensues, in which Hank is badly wounded, and the two men barely escape; as it is, Hank is practically dead when Jesse finally crosses paths with the other movie: Juanita and her family, who take the outlaws in. It's Juanita's grand idea to take Hank to the Frankensteins for the only treatment that can possibly save his life, and Maria only needs to take one look at him to know that she's found her perfect subject.

That gets us a decent chunk into the movie: the remainder is a power struggle between Maria and Jesse over Hank, and a slow-burning romance between Jesse and Juanita, and it is paced like the slow bloating of a dead rat on the highway. For a movie that's rather busy with story details, JJMFD is appallingly light on anything that resembles narrative momentum: whole scenes go by without the characters doing much of anything but milling around and batting a single plot point around limply. It is the kind of movie where after about an hour, one checks the time to find that it's 28 minutes in; an hour later, it's only gotten up to 44 minutes. The thing is, most of the storytelling is already long done by that point; even having watched the movie, I can't actually tell you what's going on in the back half, only that there's precious fucking little of it and it's doled out jealously by Carl K. Hittleman's incrementalist screenplay.

Something called Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter should, at the very least, be batshit crazy and outlandishly stupid and therefore enjoyable campy, but it's too boring for any of that to hold. This is the worst kind of bad movie, slackly directed from a shambling and aimless script, with actors who stiffly plow through their scenes, leaving nothing that's silly enough to be funny. There is one solitary exception: Narda Onyx, about whose name I was prepared to say something snarky, but why pick on her? She's the closest thing this movie has to a saving grace, and she deserved better than to have this turn out to be her final credit in a decade-long, TV-dominated career. It's not good acting she's up to, Lord knows: she's channeling a bit of that John Carradine energy herself, attempting to inoculate herself against the problems of the script by going as big as she can, and there's not a fragment of reflection or inner life to her Maria Frankenstein, the kind of mustache-twirling villain who can literally get away with talking about how proud she is to be evil. It's a stupid part that gets to the film's best solely because the bad guy is always the best part of awful low-grade horror; but Onyx goes all-in and makes it her own. The way she massacres "R"s is pure camp divinity; her big, hungry expressions of power and lust give her more personality than any other human onscreen, which takes barely any effort, understand. But Onyx is the only one putting in even that much effort: not a single one of her castmates who isn't playing a big loud Mexican stereotype makes any sort of impression, with Lupton's Jesse James the flattest of them all, a bland smile and shitty mustache where there needs to be a charismatic firebrand who could win the hearts and minds of half a nation.

The complete blank riding in the slot marked for the protagonist merely serves to compound the rest of JJMFD's crippling flaws: this is a movie where nothing goes right, and it comes to saying things like, "given the non-existent budget and schedule, Beaudine sure did a great job of preventing any sets from falling over or actors from staring into the camera". Which is to say, the film isn't inept, and that's not a little thing to say about these desperately impoverished B-movies. At the same time, ineptitude would possibly give the film some pizzazz, some trashy energy, anything besides Onyx's shameless, sensational hamming that doesn't result in your eyes gliding right off the screen. There is probably no greater sin a movie can commit than to be boring, and this is, with all due restraint, as boring as any other 88 consecutive minutes of cinema I have ever encountered.

Body Count: 6 or 7? My attention wandered.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SCI-FI HORROR - THE JUNGLE! IS MY HOME!

When horror came back to American cinema in a big way in the 1950s, it was after receiving a face-lift: gone were creaky Mitteleuropean castles and villages, banished were old dark houses, and even the outright lifts of Expressionist aesthetic techniques were mostly snuffed out (though a genre that gets so much mileage from a well-placed patch of inky shadows as horror will never, ever be entirely free of Expressionism's influence). This was the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the era of the post-war explosion in scientific advances that everybody could see and touch in their own homes, thanks to the concurrent post-war economic boom. And so the refreshed horror films of the period were, by and large, oriented more toward science fiction than myth and fantasy. By the end of the decade, Britain's Hammer Films would prove that there was still a market for classic Gothic forms of horror, but Hollywood and the American independent scene wouldn't start to move back in that direction until the 1960s.

But I shouldn't skip ahead. Let us stay in the early years American horror's Atomic Age with a film that was very nearly titled Bride of the Atom, with hellaciously clumsy line of dialogue supporting that title left in the finished film. It was changed at executive producer Donald McCoy's insistence to Bride of the Monster for its 1956 release, but the hints of nuclear paranoia still make themselves perfectly clear. At the same time, the movie is a huge, enthusiastic throwback: it's a science fiction parable that secretly wants to be a '30s mad scientist picture, and its status as a love letter to the horror of a previous generation is all the clearer given the admiring position given to the long-since washed-up former horror icon Bela Lugosi as the wannabe Frankenstein. It is a modern (or, was modern, in the '50s) film made by a passionately nostalgic film buff, weirdly combining two eras. I mean, it has to be weird, given that the cinephilic writer and director was Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Let's make one thing clear right off: yes, it's an Ed Wood film, and that shows, but if ever the most notoriously incompetent filmmaker in the history of world cinema made a movie that's not all that bad, it was this one. Forget what Tim Burton's giddy Ed Wood told you: Bride of the Monster might be embarrassingly cheap, and it might have a script full of one impossible howler of a line after another, and it might clank through its arbitrarily stitched-together scenes like a rusted-out Chevette dragging its muffler... Remember everything that Ed Wood told you, but also temper it a little bit. Much of the film is absolute crap. Some of the film is perfectly ordinary mid-'50s programmer boilerplate. And Lugosi's performance is genuinely enjoyable and one of his "best", allowing that "best Bela Lugosi performance" isn't entirely unlike "best Ed Wood movie" in terms of compliments that really don't mean diddly shit.

But for now, let me return to my initial point about the film's Janus-like straddling of horror epochs. Like most Wood films, the film's plot is remarkably convoluted and busy for something so utterly short (a mere 69 minutes), and that's even more impressive given that he was working from somebody else's first draft in this case, that of a certain Alex Gordon. But if we carve out the deadwood, there's an old mansion called Willows House on the shores of Marsh Lake, in the woods by the swamp, which everybody thinks is abandoned, but it's actually where Dr. Eric Vornoff (Lugosi) is busy with his human experiments. On one particular dark and stormy night, two hunters, Mac (Bud Osborne) and Jake (John Warren) run afoul of Vornoff and his hulking henchman Lobo (Tor Johnson). They become the 11th and 12th missing person cases in that region lately, and the persistent unflattering news articles penned by dauntless investigative reporter Janet Lawton (Loretta King), blaming a lake monster for the disappearances have finally shamed the local police department, headed by Captain Robbins (Harvey B. Dunn) into doing something about it. So he reluctantly assigns detectives Dick Craig (Tony McCoy) - who just so happens to be Janet's fiancé - and a fella just called Martin (Don Nagel) to the case. They in turn receive help, briefly, from a Professor Vladimir Strowski (George Becwar), a European cryptozoologist. None of these people move fast enough for Janet, who heads to Willows House on her own and ends up a hypnotised prisoner of Vornoff's, her sexual magnetism captivating Lobo. Prof. Strowski, meanwhile, also heads to Willows House, were we discover that he's in fact been hunting Vornoff across the world, ever since the mad scientist was banished from their home country for desiring to create a race of atomic supermen. For attempting to stop Vornoff's nuclear experiments, Strowski comes face to face with the Marsh Lake Monster: an enormous mutant octopus, the biggest success so far of Vornoff's super-strength ray.

That was a bad job of carving, I'm sorry. But I also did mention that Wood's scripts have a tendency to get far knottier than they should be, and I managed to avoid talking about the great many blind alleys the film pokes its head into, including the introduction of the inexhaustibly annoying Officer Kelton (Paul Marco), the whiny and enormously ineffectual cop who'd show up for larger roles in Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space and Night of the Ghouls, the autobiographical touch of Lobo's angora fetish, or the absolute fascination the early scenes have with exploring the minutiae of people asking other people to help them find information. Or the nominally tense stand-off between a man caught in quicksand and a stock-footage alligator.

The point, anyway, is that Bride of the Monster represents a most special mash-up of ingredients ranging from its old dark house to a conversation about the legitimate, real-world terror that nuclear testing might be affecting the world's atmosphere in unknown ways. And it is, I think, legitimately interesting for doing so, even though the film's interest has to compete with a lot of baffling and bad distractions. Besides the ones I've mentioned, there's the hypnotic, inexplicable business between Captain Robbins and a parakeet, which he's gently stroking in one scene, and allowing to sit on his shoulder in another, like a pirate with a parrot, without the script even slightly acknowledging it. This isn't even typical Woodian bad filmmaking; it's so at odds with anything else that happens in the movie, it's almost Dadaist.

But the outrageously awful touches are mostly in little random chunks, while the main body of the film is, dare I say it, simply average for a penny-pinching B-movie of the time. The sets are preposterously artificial, but Wood's cinematographers, Ted Allan and William C. Thompson, take care to shoot Willows House with enough darkness that it disguises the limits of the production without looking like a mistake (the rest of the movie, especially the scenes in the police station - now those look like hell).

And even when it's no damn good at all, Bride of the Monster has a couple of cards up its sleeve: Lugosi and Johnson. The latter has a big loutish screen presence like a doughier Lon Chaney, Jr, and when he's not talking - the mistake that Wood made when giving him a showcase role in Plan 9 - he's legitimately good at bringing in a sense of sad-sack pathos. His mooning over Janet is, in an undeniably weird and misconceived way, actually touching. As for Lugosi, he's just fun. It was the actor's last speaking part, and not meaningfully better than the dopey villain rules he'd been able to scrape up for most of the decade preceding this release, but some combination of a director who openly adored him, and a role full of thick and chewy monologues heavy with tragedy and rage, led to Lugosi being in a visibly better mood than he was at virtually any other point in his career. Moaning about his painful past, tinkering with smoking carafes of what are undoubtedly bright-colored chemicals like an especially nerdy child on Christmas, even gamely putting on a look of terror in close-up shots to be intercut with that notorious non-functioning octopus - through it all, Lugosi can hardly keep his glee tamped down. While it's not "good acting" - at no point does the actor disappear into the character - it's honestly the most enjoyable experience I've ever had watching him. And that goes a long way towards making Bride of the Monster an honestly rewarding bit of dumb movie fun, no irony necessary. Of course, irony helps, as does a taste for the corny, played-out crap Wood was so lovingly referencing. But any rumors you've heard about this being an all-time disaster fit only to be gawked at are entirely overstated.

Body Count: 5, on top of the ten previous victims of Vornoff's experiments.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE 1930s - I'VE GOT TO HAND IT TO YOU

The most reductive version of the Entire History of American Horror Filmmaking is that it all began as Hollywood's narrative and stylistic response to German Expressionism, which was, with the odd exception here or there, the only place you could go between about 1910 and 1930 to find anything paranormal in the movies. And this response came in a very direct way, for the most part: several of the leading lights of the Expressionist movement were imported, with the most important for our present purposes being Karl Freund, a top-shelf German cinematographer brought to Universal by Carl Laemmle (himself a German immigrant, though from decades earlier), where his second feature was the genre-defining Dracula. Rumor has held (though with what proof, it's tough to say) that Freund even largely took over directorial duties on that film from the perpetually drunk Tod Browning, which means, in theory, and if we want to stretch a point way too far, that Freund was the individual most responsible for show America what horror cinema should look like.

Even backing away from the most strident claims of German authorship of American genre films, it's certainly the case that Universal intentionally took its cues from Expressionism, while the other studios took their cues from Universal. It was probably inevitable that there'd be a Hollywood remake of a German classic, then - indeed, it's more surprising that the first generation of American sound horror only produced one such remake (ignoring that Nosferatu and Dracula derive from the same novel; the latter film is anyways more indebted to Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston's stage adaptation than to Bram Stoker). Admittedly, the 1935 production Mad Love only sees fit to credit itself as an adaptation of Maurice Renard's 1920 novel Les mains d'Orlac, but the more direct influence was surely the 1924 German film The Hands of Orlac, with Robert Wiene directing Conrad Veidt in the title role, the same team-up behind the quintessential Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Not only was Mad Love inspired by a German movie, the two individuals most prominently responsible for its success were recent transplants from the German film industry. One was none other than Karl Freund, directing a feature for the eighth and last time, three years after officially debuting with The Mummy. The other was star Peter Lorre, a Jewish native of Austria-Hungary who'd become a fixture in the German film industry following Fritz Lang's iconic M. Germany in the 1930s being a chilly place for Jews, he quickly fled to France, then Great Britain, where he made his English-language debut as the villain in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934. Mad Love was his next film, the first step in a Hollywood career that would take a long time to find its footing, and never quite steadied itself. This cannot be blamed on his talents: despite the obvious labor it took him to recite his lines in English, his insane surgeon in Mad Love is a stellar piece of physical acting and uncanny screen presence, and reviews at the time were enthusiastic bordering on rapturous.

In Mad Love, Lorre plays Dr. Gogol, a genius surgeon living in Paris, who has formed a pronounced erotic fixation on Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), the star of a Grand Guignol-style horror theater. He's attended every one of her performances, and finally presents himself to her on the night of her last performance, where he's horrified to learn that she's retiring to spend more time with her husband, the up-and-coming genius pianist and composer from England, Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive, in the role Veidt played in the German film). In a fit of demented despair, Gogol purchases a wax replica of Yvonne that has served as an advertisement for her act, which he stages in his home as his very own Galatea (a comparison Gogol makes some dozen or so times, drifting from a smart reference to an irritating distrust on the part of the writers as the film goes on). Fate doesn't have much better in store for the Orlacs; on his way to Paris, Stephen's train derails, and he barely survives, with his hands badly mangled in the process. To save his life, they must be amputated, which will end his career at its most promising moment, but Yvonne swallows her pride and begs Gogol to see if he can possibly help rescue Stephen's precious hands. He can't, but he can do something almost as good: that same day, he attended the execution of an American murderer, Rollo (Edward Brophy - his affable whimsy at the prospect of dying, especially his delight in hearing that the Hoover Dam was completed, is one of the most off-kilter and memorable elements of the whole movie), and the dead man's perfect hands - he was a circus knife thrower in life - are the perfect candidate for a limb transplant. The mad doctor tells no-one of this particular development, but when Stephen finds himself, after weeks of costly therapy, able to fling sharp objects with deadly precision, while coming no closer to being able to play the piano at his former level, he starts to wonder whether the miracle of his rescued hands has an unimagined dark side. Gogol, for his part, is delighted to have a lever to nudge Stephen into a madness all his own, and hopefully freeing up Yvonne for himself.

Mad Love has all the necessary components to be one of the great horror films of a generation, though I can't convince myself it quite gets there. A major reason for this is simply because the broadly similar story told in The Hands of Orlac (where the surgeon is a far less important character, while Orlac himself is the protagonist) is handled better there. The reconstructed version of the 1924 film runs something like 40 minutes longer than the neat and tidy American picture, at 68 minutes, and that time gives it more room to linger on Orlac's descent into mental chaos as he grows convinced that his hands have been possessed by the spirit of a murderer. Mad Love has an impeccable opening two-thirds, at which point it realises that has a hell of a lot of plot to resolve, and starts sprinting. And where the original pivots from paranormal thriller to psychological study in a way that's largely elegant and convincing, the remake delays the revelation that this is, in fact, all in Orlac's head to a moment where it rather undercuts what has gone before it.

Those are, however, mostly quibbles, and without directly comparing Mad Love to The Hands of Orlac, its shortcomings are almost invisible compared to what it does well. Sure, there are elements that don't work much at all: May Beatty, as Gogol's soused housekeeper, is on the bottom rung of dreadful comic relief characters in '30s horror, while the plucky American reporter Reagan (Ted Healy) is better mostly because he has such a low bar to clear. And Clive is a wet sponge: nothing in his brief film career is close to the level of his great insane genius in Frankenstein and its sequel, and there are worse performances on his CV than Stephen Orlac, but there's still very little depth or tension in his acting. Not many actors could have favorably compared to Veidt, of course, and Mad Love de-emphasises the character to a point that the role is neither as challenging nor as vital; still, a bit more real self-doubting terror would have been nice, and it's hard to believe that Stephen is really all that horrified by the possibility that his body is betraying his mind.

This is, for the most part, utterly terrific filmmaking, though. Lorre is so incredible as Gogol that he forgives all the other human-sized sins the film could possibly come up with. The makeup artists doubled down on the actor's already weirdly doughy baby features by shaving every bit of hair from his face and head; adding that to his great skill at bugging out his features and winding his voice up to a piercing squeak, and Lorre's Gogol turns out to be an utterly captivating and endlessly creepy figure, lumpy command of English and all, and far more difficult to get a grasp on than the usual mad scientist; he is, clearly, a gifted and passionate surgeon, which makes his descent into psychotic behavior even more disturbing.

And Lorre isn't the only great visual on hand: Freund's direction happily emphasises imagery, and he had the good fortune of an utter genius as one-half of his cinematography team: Gregg Toland shot the film alongside Chester Lyons, and it's possible to see all of the bold, geometric shadows in this film that would later become Toland's signature in things like The Grapes of Wrath and Citizen Kane. And this hard lighting makes Cedric Gibbons's big, menacing sets seem all the more imposing and Gothic.

The number of striking shots in this film is most impressive, for an unabashed B-picture: a guillotine bleakly standing against the clouds, a little mirror reflecting the wax statue in a tiny frame as Gogol dreamily plays the organ to his Galatea. In one scene, Stephen receives a visitor who claims to know the full extent of Gogol's experiments, and the revelation of that visitor's appearance is, in all honesty, maybe the scariest individual image in '30s cinema, though the thready laugh accompanying that image helps a lot. There are two montages that fill entirely different ends - one is a nightmare representing Stephen's memory of the crash, one is a time-lapse showing the Orlacs' bills piling up - but in both cases the mountain of Expressionistic imagery sliced together by editor Hugh Wynn with crazy speed and excellent relationships between frames results in terrifically purposeful style as an evocation of psychology.

That's the secret magic of Mad Love, in fact: it's both a hugely successful example of '30s horror style at its most unhinged and portentously Germanic, and also a nasty, insightful chunk of pulpy psychological study. Gogol is a clear-cut Mad Genius of the most generic sort, but he's also uncomfortably and always recognisably human beneath the madness: the sexual frustration and obsessiveness that drive him are monstrously unpleasant, but they're not unrecognisable as perversions of the way actual people feel. As a result, he's more threatening and more sympathetic simultaneously, and the movie containing him hits harder than the usual mid-'30s horror show. The film was produced, unexpectedly, at MGM - which explains Gibbons, but not really anything else about it - but it's a proud exemplar of the Universal horror mentality at its most effective, right at the moment that the horror fad was just about to start burning itself out. Indeed, Mad Love was itself a box office bomb, a most unfair fate for what should otherwise have become a iconic piece of American horror.

Body Count: 3, plus the undoubtedly large number of victims of the train crash, plus at least two flies fed ominously to a pitcher plant.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SILENT HORROR - IT'S ALIVE

To begin with, define "horror" in a way that makes everybody happy; then solve the intractable mysteries of cinema history prior to 1920. And once you have done these two things, you can authoritatively state, "this is the first American horror film". But until we reach that point of pure intellectual fulfillment, the best we can do is to make our best approximation. So it's more a matter of convenience than rock-solid history that leads me to anoint as that first American horror film a certain adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's frequently strip-mined Frankenstein, produced in 1910 by the Edison Company. And here's what we do know: we do know that this was the very first American Frankenstein. So close enough for government work, is what I'm saying.

It holds another distinction, too: it was the first screen Frankenstein that adapted Shelley to the screen primarily by means of ignoring her completely. Part of that is the inevitability of condensing even a novel as moderate in its size as Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus to the duration of a one-reel motion picture - that duration being a bit difficult to pin down. Online sources all land on 16 minutes, but the version I have seen (which does not seem to be projected at too high a framerate) is less than 13. Either way, that leaves time for only a very harried version of Shelley's story, or a rebuild of the whole thing using only the basic ingredient common to all movie Frankensteins: a medical student named Frankenstein (Augustus Phillips) decides to take it on himself to create live, and the thing he gives life to (Charles Ogle) proves to be a ghastly perversion. Though even in the most reduced form, writer-director J. Searle Dawley's adaptation plays loose with the material: while Shelley famously kept the details fuzzy, the basic notion of all versions of the story is that Frankenstein desired to bring dead flesh to life; this Frankenstein of 1910 is actually creating life out of nothing, more explicitly in the fashion of God even than usual.

In fact, this film's embrace of the "Frankenstein wants to be God" metaphor is so extreme that the monster turns out to be, literally, an extension of the creator's thought. The basic description of events - which you can easily follow for yourself, the public domain film is easily found on the internet (though on YouTube, at least, you can have either good resolution or properly tinted colors, but not both) - finds Frankenstein leaving for school, becoming consumed with thoughts of life and death, forming his creature, realising too late that his evil, unholy impulses had imprinted upon the being, turning it into a wrathful monster. It follows him as he returns home and to the arms of his fiancée (Mary Fuller), harassing them both, and causing Frankenstein to admit to the wickedness of his deeds. And this is where things get openly metaphysical, as the monster apparently ceases to exist except as an incorporeal projection of Frankenstein's mind, which even then dissolves into nothingness as he redeems himself from his impure ways.

It sure as hell ain't Shelley, though most of the film is derived from the book (Frankenstein in school, Frankenstein making the monster, and the monster assaulting Frankenstein's wife on her wedding night, all the significant plot points in the movie, are all Shelley's). But even if it deviates from the source material, it's still an enormously gratifying adaptation, intelligently grappling with its basic themes in a form that better suits the scale and palette available to a filmmaker of 1910, when scenes were still all but universally communicated in theatrical wide shots with limited cutting, and what we'd now call feature-length films only barely existed. Dawley, who liked to (overweeningly) call himself the first motion picture director, was more concerned than anyone else working at that time with dramatic cohesion, character reality, and the function of acting in films, so it fits that his Frankenstein would be a primarily psychological one; and his treatment of the monster as closer to an Edward Hyde-esque manifestation of Frankenstein's broken soul than a rampaging corpse is impressively achieved, all the more for being in such an unfamiliar idiom, both in terms of the stagey framing and the extravagantly broad acting.

But I brought us all together for a very specific reason, and I haven't even touched on it: how is Frankenstein '10 as horror, anyway? Astonishingly great, in fact, especially since horror as a codified genre in American cinema was still 20 years away from finally coalescing (thanks, in part, to that other and better-known Frankenstein). Like most adaptations of the novel, its most striking scene is the creation of the monster, and I will frankly declare that, adjusting for the steep technological curve of the years following, this particular movie has one of the very best versions of that scene ever. It's more of an alchemical process than the biological one favored by most later movies: Frankenstein tosses some stuff into a vat locked into a metal chamber, and the monster forms, almost of its own will. The technique is obvious and simple: Dawley set a model on fire, and burned it into ashes, while waggling one of its arms, and then he ran the footage backwards. It's as primitive as any trick in the cinematic toolkit, but it works enormously well here: watching a humanoid form extrude from the very air is uncanny as hell even without the distressing floppiness of that dead arm, no matter how much the smoke moving downward gives away the game. It's a terrific scene in every detail: the cuts back to an increasingly nervous Frankenstein, the refusal to show the fully-realised monster at first, even the skeleton hanging out in the corner of one frame, implying a chamber of horrrors just off camera that we can only imagine.

As for the monster itself, it's a freaky bit of make-up, designed by Ogle himself, and looking more like a wild man-ape than a grotesque animated corpse. Ogle certainly gives the most interesting performance, too, slinking around erratically and using his big grand gestures as ways of stressing his alien nature, while Phillips and Fuller make those same gestures simply because that's how you do, in 1910. Watching him lope and shuffle around the sets is horror of the most genuine sort: an intrusion of something incomprehensible and wrong into a sedate, even boringly normal space. It's too much to ask that a 105-year-old movie should still be even marginally "scary", but with this monster creeping around these places, Frankenstein is still impressively able to be unsettling and creepy. The film is a relic of an almost unrecognisably earlier period in the medium's development, but it's as broadly accessible as anything from the same filmmaking style that I can name. It's kind of the perfect "my first early narrative cinema" experience, with the comforting familiarity of genre helping to bridge the archaic presentation with the far more immediate emotions it evokes. American horror couldn't ask for a sturdier, more confident opening act than this.

Body Count: 0 or 1, depending on exactly how metaphysical you want the monster to end up being.

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THE LAZARUS PITS

There's little more frustrating, in terms of filmed entertainment, than watching a movie waste the talents of a gifted actor, and The Lazarus Effect burns through no fewer than three people who absolutely shouldn't have gotten themselves stuck in such a ropey low-budget horror film: Olivia Wilde, Mark Duplass, and Donald Glover. And we might as well throw Ray Wise onto that list, since even though he's in dodgy little crap-pile movies like this all the time, most of them at least give him more than one scene with a grand total of zero meaningful lines of dialogue to occupy his time. And even as this is a grave irritation, it would barely even enter the conversation about just what it is that's most vexing and wrong-headed about the first truly awful horror film of 2015.

The film is about a scientist tampering in God's domain, and his name is Frank (Duplass), so at least the script, by Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater, knows itself. Specifically, materialist Frank and his Catholic fiancée Zoe (Wilde), who is a Catholic, and that causes struggles with Frank, who is atheistic, and so he can't understand her belief in the soul and the afterlife, which is due to her Catholicism - do you understand that yet? Because the movie is willing to make it clearer if need be. Three years ago, Frank and Zoe put their wedding on hold to focus all their attention on the serum they've been developing: a serum whose initial use was to sustain the brain activity of coma patients, but has turned out to have the rather unexpected side effect of bringing the recently deceased back to life. Their work on pigs and dogs has been unpromising so far, but a breakthrough is right around the corner when they, and their assistants Niko (Glover) and Clay (Evan Peters), welcome an undergraduate from the university where they do their work, Eva (Sarah Bolger), to film their experiments (and no, this doesn't mean that the film is one of those first-person jobs, saints be praised)

Unsurprisingly, Eva's first trip to the lab results in a shocking success when the team brings a dog back to life. Over the next few days, Frank and Zoe keep an eye on him - Rocky, in honor of that movie where Sylvester Stallone played a boxer who was killed and brought back to life - and the results are weird as hell: apparently, Rocky is getting better way too fast, way too much. All this thinking jams to a halt when the university tries to shut them down, and a biochem corporation swoops in to steal their research, and all looks grim, until the rogue scientists decide to break into the lab one night and re-create all their work to have a document that this miracle really was their work. What, exactly, they hope to do with this, given that the biochem company owns their work, that they did, fair and square and legally, is not clear. Just for the bragging rights, presumably. Anyway, they start working awfully hastily, to stay ahead of the guard and the mysterious hacker who has been spying on them, and they work so fast that they forget to take every last safety precaution. And that's how Zoe ends up electrocuting herself to death. I just bet you can imagine where it goes from there.

So, what do we have here, with this The Lazarus Effect? Equal parts Frankenstein, the Friday the 13ths where Jason was a zombie, and, I was surprised to find, Lucy (the dialogue smugly points out that we use all 100% of our brain, just 10% at a time - but RevivedZoe uses all of her brain all at once. And much the same happens to her as happened to Scarlett Johansson, only done as an '80s horror film instead of a '90s action film). And a whole lot of unbearably shitty writing married to trite directing and cinematography and a lot of cheap jump scares. Bland, generic horror I can handle, and director David Gelb is good at providing it: the lab is spookily underlit, it has lots of things that clang, and there are oh-so-many close-ups to facilitate people sneaking up when we're not looking. What torpedoes The Lazarus Effect is she sheer mindlessness of a screenplay that keeps starting plot threads which it has absolutely no intentions whatsoever of pursuing to completion: the dog basically evaporates out of the movie around the three-quarter mark, right after dialogue that's more or less literally stating "hold on, the dog is important! We have to remember that there was a dog in this movie!" The film keeps trying to build a sense of external stakes - the university wants to kick us out; wait, somebody here must be a spy; wait, this big multinational firm is being all sinister and wants our serum; wait, someone has hacked into our encrypted files - and just as doggedly keeps forgetting all of them the instant that the scene introducing them ends. None of the characters are consistent or make any kind of sense, though the central relationship between Frank and Zoe is clearly the worst part: they've been craftily written to seem totally unsuitable for each other and barely even able to tolerate each other's presence, except when they're a warm, stable, romantic pairing.

The ghastliest part is certainly that central religion/science debate, as conceived by people who apparently hate both faith and reason. So much energy is put into creating ambiguity about whether Zoe went to Hell, or if she just had a hallucination driven by her Deep Dark Traumatic past and kicked into overdrive by the moment of dying; such playful teasing goes on as to whether she's been possessed by a demon or is just having her brain overheat from too much magical science juice. And yet, in the clinch, the film gleefully announces that it doesn't give a shit about any of that; it just wants to have a corny twist ending and a rampaging Frankenstein monster who behaves with unnecessary personal cruelty while she terrorises the lab.

I want to admire The Lazarus Effect. Its economy and efficiency are both laudable (basically just five people on one set for 83 minutes), as is its desire to remix old-fashioned tropes with a certain rough-hewn DIY indie mentality. But the result is so lazy, and at times openly incoherent at the level of storytelling, while being shot like a series of beginner's lessons from the Every Horror Cliché Ever playbook, that I can't credit the film for its conceptual strengths. Only one aspect of the film is good on any level: Olivia Wilde is absolutely splendid, creating a woman who believably shifts between evil and confused terror, after having done all of the heavy lifting of the more character-driven first half entirely by herself. There's humanity and terrifyingly plausible inhumanity alike in her performance, and she makes the whole film seem a little more effective and stable just by virtue of standing there, insisting on what we should think and feel no matter what bullshit is going on the script. But she is one person, and it is a goddamn tidal wave of bullshit.

2/10

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - I HAVE A FEELING THAT YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND SCIENCE VERY WELL

The important part first: BioGoji, the Godzilla suit featured in Godzilla vs. Biollante, is my all-time favorite design of the iconic creature. It's not flawless - like all of the VS Series Godzillas, it has chunky thighs that suggest that too much devouring nuclear sites and not enough time jogging is taking its toll (but hey, he was in his 40s at this point, cut him some slack). Though the flipside of that is that it's far less thigh-heavy than any of its successors in the 1990s. Anyway, the thighs aren't the point: what makes this the Godzilla of Godzillas for me is the face, an exquisite piece of monster design that stretches out the snub snout of the last two suits, thickens his brow to make him look truly mean, gives him dark brown eyes that turn to jet black spots in the night scenes, sharp little horn-like ears, and best of all, gives him a beautifully-detailed double row of fangs. It's not the most lizard-like Godzilla; it is, though, the most demonic, the one that feels most like some nightmare creature out of Japanese mythology. Which Godzilla is, after all. And I have gotten that far without even mentioning the dorsal spines, which are just about the perfect proportion and weight, though they do have a bad tendency to flop about.

I will further point out that my adoration of the vs. Biollante suit has not, to this point, been contingent upon ever having seen the movie in which he resides; in the interest of disclosure, I'll admit now rather than later that while I came to this Godzillathon having seen a commanding majority of the first run of Godzilla movies, I hadn't even seen half of the VS series. So a lot of this will be new, confusing territory for me to mine.

For example: I had no expectation that vs. Biollante would be so firmly in continuity with the previous film, The Return of Godzilla, links between films only being a tertiary concern in the '60s and '70s films. But there you have it. The film opens in 1984, days or even hours after the events of that series re-start, with a team of scientists hunting through the rubble of Godzilla's rampage to find any physical remains of the monster for studying purposes. They do indeed find some skin fragments, and this kicks off all the plotlines in a movie whose contribution to the franchise's generally eco-friendly moral tales, also catching me off guard, is of a vigorously anti-genetic testing nature. Contesting for a sample of Godzilla cells, wee have, at a minimum, the evil American corporation Bio-Major, the good Japanese government, and the morally ambiguous Republic of Saradia, a Middle-Eastern oil kingdom with a science program led by Japanese scientist Dr. Shiragami Genshiro (Takahashi Koji), attempting to create a new super-wheat using Godzilla DNA, to create a crop that can grow in the harsh Saradian desert. The film's prologue finds Bio-Major attacking the Saradian lab and, in the process, killing Shiragami's daughter Erika (Sawaguchi Yasuko), leaving the good doctor so distraught that he might do anything. And boy, does he ever.

The plot than skips ahead to 1989 - the year of the film's release - to find Shiragami having sworn off all Godzilla-related research, with the Japanese government having instituted multiple anti-Godzilla defense contingencies, including the construction of a new Super X2, the successor to the fighter jet that did such a good job of subduing Godzilla last time (the new vessel, which looks kind of like a flying electric shaver, doesn't fare nearly as well when it finally sees action), a psychic research center with a program funded by a certain Okochi Seikun (Kaneda Ryunosuke), hoping to use psychically gifted young people as an early warning system and possibly an anti-Godzilla weapon. And last, research is being done with the Godzilla cells, in the hope of creating a working Anti-Nuclear Energy Bacteria, organisms that devour and render inert radioactive material (the implication, I believe, is that this was conceived as an nuclear waste disposal project, and only retrofitted into a defense weapon when Godzilla's return becomes imminent).

There's a fourth line of defense left, though nobody realises it yet. The team working on the ANEB needs the help of Dr. Shiragami if they're going to go any farther, and he has a single request: some of Godzilla's genetic material for his own experiments. The mad, grieving doctor wants the introduce the monster's cells into the Biollante project he's been working on, which turns out to be a super-hardy rose which has been hybridised with Erika's DNA. This means, of course, that we now have a plant-human-Godzilla chimera on our hands, and in hardly any time at all, it has turned into a gigantic, towering rose bush with mouth-like growths at the end of its stems. This abomination is called out as such by Kirishima Kazuhito (Mitamura Kunihiko), a geneticist going through a moral crisis, the boyfriend of Okochi's daughter Asuka (Tanaka Yoshiko), and the closest thing we have to a protagonist, but it ends up being a good Frankensteinian perversion, not a wicked one.

That's an unbelievable amount of plot to not even get us to the point where Godzilla is freed from its volcanic tomb by Bio-Major, whereupon the film settles into a much more comfortable, straightforward daikaiju eiga on the classic model. Godzilla destroys Biollante, rampages through Osaka, and is in turn smacked around by a mutated, revived version of Biollante. There's some convoluted business involving all of the human attempts to stop the monster throughout, but you don't need a roadmap to follow it, as in the first half of the movie. I am uncertain if this messy, discursive way of telling the story benefits Godzilla vs. Biollante or is a strike against it: there's something charming in how the script recalls one of Fukuda Jun's "Godzilla-as-Bond-movie" exercises, only played entirely serious and straight. At the same time, it's really not worth the mental work it takes to keep track of it; the numerous characters littered throughout (and I haven't even mentioned all of the important ones) are all pretty bland and anonymous, reduced to one or two easy-to-remember character traits. And the mish-mash of scientific terms and concepts puked out of the course of the movie is as idiotic as anything you'd hope to find in a cheapie mad scientist film from the '50s. The story was the result of a contest Toho held to invite fans to pitch the new Godzilla picture; it was won by dentist Kobayashi Shinichiro, whose ideas were changed into a very different form by writer-director Ohmori Kazuki, who for his pains would be rewarded with writing duties on no fewer than three more Godzilla films in the subsequent decade. Whoever came up with every individual idea, it's a complicated swamp of narrative, and the payoff just isn't there.

And yet, while watching it, that doesn't really seem to be a problem. Partially this is because Ohmori the director is much more gifted than Ohmori the writer; Godzilla vs. Biollante is an astonshingly striking movie, visually, with some truly beautiful shots and moments. There is a particular sequence in which all of the children at the Okochi research institute excitedly share the drawings they made, based on their dreams; the shot of them all holding up crude crayon pictures of Godzilla breathing down fiery destruction, accompanied by the chorus of enthusiastic kids cheering for their handiwork, is maybe the most terrifying single image in any Godzilla film since the very first one. There's dramatic tension to the camera angles and beauty in the lighting found in not one instant of The Return of Godzilla; Ohmori might have been a bit clumsy at telling a story, but he and cinematographer Kato Yudai sure knew how to communicate thoughts and feelings visually.

The film also boasts one of the most intriguing, though not thus one of the best, scores in the Godzilla franchise. Composed by Sugiyama Koichi, the music includes frequent quotations from the great themes and motifs composed by Ifukube Akira in the series' heyday, and that adds a real sense of grandeur and weight to the proceedings; the '80s rock orchestrations of those same themes are peculiar as all hell, but Sugiyama finds a way to make it work. His new material , though by no means as effective as what he purloins, builds on Ifukube in generally successful and compelling ways. I'd never listen to it alone - it's far too dated in far too many ways - but the music creates a very particular mood that isn't replicated anywhere else in the franchise.

But, above all else, what makes the movie work is the monster action. Godzilla vs. Biollante has some of the all-time best effects work in the annals of daikaiju eiga: if I have one complaint, it's that the models of Osaka aren't nearly as interesting as the Tokyo seen in The Return of Godzilla, or the highest-budget work from the 1960s. This was the first film with effects directed by Kawakita Koichi, who served as Nakano Teruyoshi's assistant in the previous film and had worked under Tsuburaya Eiji in the '60s; a strong background that shows up onscreen. Not only is the new Godzilla suit a masterpiece, both versions of Biollante are absolutely terrific, with the second and more mobile and monstrous standing out as one of the best of all Toho kaiju. The fight itself is a gorgeous piece of action filmmaking, with dark lighting to add to the drama and some really impressive, shockingly violent choreography (the shot of a spike vine plunging through Godzilla's hand, which then gushes green blood, is truly horrifying in the best way). It's a damn shame that the film's relative failure at the box office was blamed on the monster, who then never re-appeared; Biollante's particular characteristics inspired the filmmaker like few people were ever inspired in this genre, and for all the film's curiously plodding story, it's impossible not to forgive all sins during those glorious moments when it appears, a nightmare of teeth and leaves that is imaginative and unique like few movie monsters ever have been.

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FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTERS FROM HELL

There's nothing quite as wholly wretched as a tremendously dumb movie that fails to be such a violation of basic filmmaking competence for its stupidity to blossom into something fun to mock. Thus: I, Frankenstein, a movie that exactly lives up to the pedigree "from the producers" - and co-scenarist Kevin Grevioux, a fact not mentioned in the ads - of Underworld. That is to say, we have here yet another modern urban adaptation of one of the classic horror monsters, drenched in sparkling black and tech-white production design and cinematography, anchored by actors who seem hellbent on having the least fun possible with inherently ludicrous concepts. And Bill Nighy lording over everything as a scenery-chomping bad guy that you'd be inclined to call "campy" if there was even a little bit of flavor to his performance.

The hook (the "plot", we might call it, but I think that's being awfully generous) is that the stitched-together undead monster (Aaron Eckhart) created in the 1790s by Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Aden Young) did not merely enjoy superhuman strength and stamina, but was immortal to boot. And thus it is that it still lives all this time later - the film uses "200 years" a lot, and I get the convention of using round figures, but that's not quite the phrasing you'd use if you were talking about the gap between 1795 and 2014, so I'm not really sure when "now" is - having spent most of that time in the wilderness hiding from the demons that want to study it to use Frankenstein's reanimation technique for their own ends. Opposing the hellspawn are the soldiers of the Order of the Gargoyle, an army of apparently low-tier angels that live inside the stone statues on cathedrals. The gargoyle queen, Leonore (Miranda Otto), was the first to recognise the monster's right to live, giving it the name Adam and treating it with something vaguely like kindness; but even she would rather use him as a pawn in her fight against the demon prince Naberius (Nighy) than really deal with the consequences of his potential humanity.

That, in practice: Aaron Eckhart, with scars on his face and chiseled abdomen that represents a grotesque inhuman abomination according to no standards ever held in any culture on Earth, attacks people with big metal sticks, they blow up in lousy CGI plumes of flame. Sometimes there are many of them all at once, and he kills them quickly, in combos. Sometimes there is a level boss, and it takes him longer, with more elaborate but not really any more interesting choreography. Sometimes he snarls at and/or protects the exorbitantly wan biologist - the world's greatest electro-chemist, or something like that - Terra (Yvonne Strahovski), who is incongruously chipper and quick to adapt after being plunged into a draggletail fantasy world by a glowering stranger who is, we are assured, meant to be gross and hideous and not at all smoldering and sexy. Not that any of the four adjectives I just used actually apply to Eckhart's hilarious gruff performance, though since it's really just a waiting game until the film tries to force a romantic attachment between the two, director Stuart Beattie certainly seems to be aiming more for "smoldering", regardless of where he ends up landing.

Everything about I, Frankenstein is overdetermined and ridiculous in a manner that's more annoying than funny, beginning with its clumsy title (with the emphasis on glossy, sterile surfaces, I'd have preferred iFrankenstein), moving on to Eckhart's performance, and culminating in the overwhelmingly grim, grandly chintzy texture of both Ross Emery's drably shadowy cinematography and Michelle McGahey's production design, dominated as it is by the Order of the Gargoyle's command center, located in a stunningly massive Gothic cathedral that looks like Notre Dame de Paris went through a punk phase and came out with spikes jutting out of every possible surface. In these elements and others - the demons, looking awkwardly like Buffy the Vampire Slayer baddies, the villains' industrial-chic lair, the scar tissue that tends to augment Eckhart's abs rather than make him look like a perversion in God's eyes - the film indulges in a wide-ranging tackiness that actually makes it look cheaper than it is: from all the visual evidence, you'd guess it was one of those on-the-fly shot-in-Romania jobs, and not a largely Australia-based production. Certainly, nothing in the rinky-dink nondescript European settings nor the bargain-bin CGI implies any kind of level of care or investment in the production.

In comparison, the lousy screenplay is merely a distraction, not a significant flaw. Oh, there are plenty of problems that a first-year screenwriting student would be able to pick out - Leonore's wildly inconsistent motivation, the film's generally confused sense of how the gargoyles work in the first place, the blockheaded dialogue that involves Adam reciting essentially the same litany of thoughts in at least every other scene - but it's just bad. And bad horror/fantasy action films are easy to swallow, once you've seen enough of them. Beattie's screenplay, from Grevioux's comic book, is dysfunctional but only because it is lazy and hugely content to rework Underworld but with Frankenstein's monster this time. Underworld having been a bit of a slog to begin with, it's of course the case that I, Frankenstein ends up being a dull-minded, low-energy waste, but the screenplay still manages to be the best thing.

Between the design, the acting, and the pacing, the whole thing is a lugubrious bore, not daft enough to be fun, not wretched enough to be the kind of vigorously painful that bad movie masochists can still get a kick out of. It's ugly and miserable in the most generic way possible, amusing only in flashes, usually because of Eckhart's "kids roleplaying in the backyard" performance style. But mostly, it's just tedium, a routine January release without even enough creativity to be disgusting.

And in case you were wondering, the "Frankenstein must be destroyed" moment from the trailer? Re-edited dialogue, probably by a marketing consultant with a better sense of taste than the rest of the production combined. So there's not even dubious fan-service to make it worthwhile!

4/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

The Canadian indie horror film American Mary is good enough that I wish it were better. That's a weird way of phrasing what's meant to be a statement of praise; but American Mary is a weird movie. It's the second feature by filmmaking twins Jen and Sylvia Soska, following the 2009 Dead Hooker in a Trunk, which I have not seen, though I have a sneaking suspicion I can guess what it's about; their production company is named Twisted Twins, which sounds about right. On the evidence of this sophomore effort, I'd describe them as having pretty terrific instincts, and a great sense for how to make the viewer twist and squirm though unnerving concepts carried through unfussy, brutalising images. And I'd also describe them as suffering from that common screenwriter's ailment, Can't Write a Third Act syndrome.

What they can write, though, is a hell of a character. That character being, of course, Mary: Mary Mason, to be precise, a medical student training to be a surgeon, vividly played by Katharine Isabelle as a sardonic idealist who is a little bit shocked to discover about herself that she has virtually no ethical scruples when the possibility of making money raises its head. Though even putting it that way begs the question: defining "ethical scruples" in the context of American Mary would require making assumptions that the film never asks you to make, and in some cases specifically proscribes.

Which is both the extremely refreshing and boldest part of the movie, and also the most weirdly misfiring and self-defeating. I guess I need to talk about the content of the film if I want to go any further: Mary is broke as all hell, you see, and the job where she scrambles to make enough to keep the lights on and the bill collectors angry and impatient but at arm's length winks out of existence soon into the movie. Depressed and at the end of her tether, Mary heads to look for work at the local strip club, but gets a different job offer than the one she expected: the club owner, Billy Barker (Antonio Cupo) has a badly beaten human body in the back, and he's looking to spend $5000 to have somebody with surgical training and a willingness to ask absolutely no questions whatsoever patch that body up, presumably for more beatings. This Mary does, with surprisingly little moral handwringing - some, of course, but $5000 is a titanic sum of money given her current situation.

The real fun begins when one of the strippers comes calling a little while later: this is a certain Beatress Johnson (Tristan Risk), who has invested quite a gigantic sum of money into body modification surgery to make herself look and sound as much as a physically functioning human being can to the grossly dysmorphic '30s cartoon character Betty Boop. She doesn't want Mary to help her along that path any more; she's actually look for help for a friend of hers, Ruby Realgirl (Paula Lindberg), a body modification enthusiast with less resources than Beatress herself, who wants more than anything to resemble a human Barbie doll. For the kingly sum of $10,000, all Mary has to do is remove Ruby's nipples and sew up her vagina. Reasoning that her patient is an adult capable of making decisions on her own, Mary acquiesces even more quickly than she did with the victim in the strip club's back room.

This is enough to make Mary a celebrity surgeon in the body modification underground, and American Mary spends the great majority of its running time playing around with the ramifications of that, considering the sort of weird things that such a person might be asked to do. The really remarkable thing is that the Soskas (who cameo as twins and probably lovers who ask for a few things that don't include being conjoined, which caught me off guard) don't offer up even an iota of judgment for the world they're depicting, and only a very little bit for Mary's gross violations of professional ethics in contributing to that world. So while we might be tempted to file this away under the "body horror" label, it's not really horrifying.

And this actually causes the film some issues, because it dearly wants to figure out a way to make Mary a mad scientist, drunk with her newfound power and money, and build a downfall for her. This is achieved in part by splicing in a subplot that mostly works and then ceases to as it goes on: in one of her classes, Mary is taught by a supercilious, condescending ass named Dr. Grant (David Lovgren). It's worth noting that everything he says is true, and Mary knows it; it's the vicious, sarcastic, leering way he says it that tips us off from the first scene that this guy is a huge problem. And lo and behold, he eventually invites Mary to a party with the single intention of drugging and raping her. Mary's revenge is blunt and immediate: she kidnaps Grant and makes him the canvas for her most extreme modification experiments. And this is horrifying, and the delayed reveal of just what shape Grant has come to is maybe the single most viscerally upsetting image I've seen in a horror movie in the 2010s. But that doesn't change how artificial the rape revenge subplot feels at all turns, like the Soskas were somehow aware that they hadn't built in a mechanism to demonstrate Mary's inability to distinguish right from wrong and needed to have her do something that was thus awful.

After all, the title makes it clear that this is an assault on something. Greed? The amorality of money? It's hard to say, but you don't put "American" in a title if that's not your intent, even if you're Canadian. Thankfully, it's not belabored at all; though this is in no small part because the film simply can't round the corner on Mary's downfall character arc. We have this very broad-minded depiction of a subculture; we have a revenge horror flick; we have a twist ending that makes sense logically but not dramatically and seems to exist only to depict Mary getting her comeuppance for sins that the movie didn't demonstrate as being all that sinful in the first place. And somewhere in all of that, the protagonist goes from being a charmingly innocent young woman to a callous femme fatale whose acidic wit makes her seem aloof and merciless even when she's being nice. Isabelle does her absolute damnedest to sell this, and her performance is committed enough to make it work on a scene-by-scene basis (it's a seriously great performance, not only by genre standards but by normal, everyday film standards), but it still feels like two or three scenes in the middle have to be missing, where we actually see Mary's morals start to slip.

For all the dramatic slip-ups, the film is still intensely memorable and effective, for the Soskas know how to come up with an unforgettable image. It is admittedly the case that the images are more mind-blowing for their content than because of they way they've been filmed; in fact, the film relies to an irritating degree on a certain industrial-grey lighting scheme that feels like it dates from the 1990s, and the overreliance on stock medium shots robs some moments of their impact (the reveal of Ruby's body, which actually comes quite late in the film, is a particularly unexceptional moment that feels like it shouldn't have been). But the imagination of the body modification, and the filmmakers' directness in depicting it, is intoxicatingly vivid. At the risk of gendering things, there's a distinctively feminine sensibility to how the film emphasies sexuality and body identity without being terrified of it, and for a genre as repelled by strong female sexual impulses as horror, that's quite an achievement already. The inherent conservatism of the form still shows itself in that oddly misguided finale, with its punishment of kinksters and "deviants", but the horror world could use more voices like these even so. Enough of American Mary is truly impressive that I'm pretty confident the Soskas have something outright great in them, if they can refine their talents and instincts just a bit more.

6/10

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THE WORDS GET STUCK IN MY THROAT

See enough movies - and more to the point, discuss enough movies - and you start to come up with shortcuts, boxes that you can file things in to help make it easier to come to grips with what they are and how to approach them. But every now and then something comes along and blindsides you by refusing to fit into any of those boxes at all, and these are the most special and rewarding of all films.

Thus it is with 1966's The War of the Gargantuas, a film that I was not prepared for at all before I saw it. You'd think it was just one of many daikaiju eiga from the mid-'60s, attempting to marry scenes of giant monsters with the styles and genres most popular internationally at that time, and while this is basically true, it doesn't even scratch the surface of a movie which absolutely beggars my ability to distinguish between something that's fun to watch because of how bad it is, and something that's fun to watch because of how legitimately great it is. Because it is, clearly, a bad movie. But it's also a movie that is terrifically entertaining and involving in a way that completely sidesteps irony.

At least, the Japanese version does: and in fairness, The War of the Gargantuas is a title better reserved for the slightly longer English dub prepared at the behest of distributor Henry G. Saperstein (the Japanese cut we might more fairly call Frankenstein's Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira). And this version has much less ambiguity to it: it is a bad movie and then some, though a joyously bad one. I'm inclined to think that the Japanese original isn't necessarily any better, given how similar they are in plotting and even in several points of dialogue; I'm inclined to credit the tendency one has to give the benefit of the doubt to subtitled movies, there always being some level of abstraction between the viewer and the film as a result of having to read the dialogue which makes some very howlingly bad utterances seem far less ridiculous.

In fact, the two versions of the film are rather similar overall (the English dub re-edited mostly to give added prominence to the film's requisite American actor, Russ Tamblyn), but the one difference introduced in the new dialogue is a doozy, and that too sets the Japanese film far out ahead of its American brother: in Japan, The War of the Gargantuas was an outright, explicit sequel to the previous year's Frankenstein Conquers the World. In America, save for one orphaned line, replacement story writer Reuben Bercovitch did everything he could to hide that fact. I assume this had something to do with the very different set of expectations the word "Frankenstein" evokes in the Anglosphere, but whatever motivated it, it left the American film almost desperately anxious to make no real sense and feel like a morass of half-formed plotting.

Happily, that's the last I have to bother with the American movie from here on out, and now we can focus our attention solely on what I shall not continue calling Frankenstein's Monsters, because no English speaker in 47 years has ever referred to the movie that way. It still doesn't make a great deal of sense, unless you make some assumptions that the film doesn't even encourage all that strongly, but at least it's not so hysterically vague.

We show up some time after the first movie to find a ship at sea (that most reliable of daikaiju eiga staples) under attack by a barely-seen giant octopus (a revival of an idea meant to factor into the climax of Frankenstein Conquers the World). It vanishes mysteriously, but this is merely the harbinger of something even bigger and badder, a giant man-shaped green thing that destroys the boat in the flicker of an eye. The one surviving sailor (Yamamoto Ren) is delirious when he's recovered, claiming that the ship was attacked by a Frankenstein (the Japanese version prefers this term, but sometimes uses "gargantua" for no readily apparent reason), who ate the rest of the crew.

This comes to the attention of three biologists who worked the Frankenstein before, Dr. Paul Stewart (Tamblyn), Dr. Majida Yuzo (Sahara Kenji), and Akemi (Mizuno Kumi), who gets neither a title nor a family name despite being the most apparently competent of the trio, but that's what being a woman in the sciences will get you. We're clearly meant to think of these people as overlapping with the same group dynamic at the heart of Frankenstein Conquers the World, though the names are different and Mizuno is the only actor to repeat; and we're perhaps meant to assume that the juvenile Frankenstein they're seen tending to in flashbacks is the monster from the first movie, though there is no way to square that with the first film's plot, and it's also elliptically suggested that the baby monster - named Sanda - was lab-grown out of the tissues form the earlier Frankenstein. Look for airtight story logic, and you look in vain.

The plot goes a whole lot of nowhere as the scientists refuse to believe that Sanda could be capable of the evils that this other monster - Gaira he's named, out of the clear blue sky - has perpetrated, and spend a lot of time wondering what on earth could be going on. The audience, having seen from the title that there are two monsters, gets to merely wait patiently while the characters catch up, though unlike a great many daikaiju eiga that leave us with nothing but a human story for a full hour, War of the Gargantuas showcases plenty of scenes of Gaira raising hell throughout, even before he and Sanda finally meet and have their day of reckoning.

This film goes all over the map, including some of the absolute finest scenes in any Toho daikaiju eiga right next to some of the worst: Gaira's first urban rampage includes a cleverly-cut scene of him eating a woman that's legitimately disturbing for a film that wasn't intended to be taken very seriously, and then hardly any time later, he waits for an unaccountably awful American lounge singer (Kipp Hamilton) performing an uncommonly awful song (including a line about switching on a microphone in her heart) to wrap up her act, so that he can attack her. Generally speaking, the scenes with the scientists are the worst parts (worst non-musical parts, anyway), primarily because of Tamblyn: 32 years old or not, his baby face made him look ridiculous in the part of a seasoned scientist, and his ability to fake being able to understand his Japanese co-stars was nowhere near Nick Adams's (still, Tamblyn comes off better in the Japanese language version: his English dubtrack sounds like it was recorded when he was both fast asleep and stoned). But the balance of the film favors everything else, and everything else is great.

For such a daft, frivolous premise, director Honda Ishiro and cinematographer Koizumi Hajime threw themselves bodily into making it as rich-looking as I can imagine. It is easily the best-shot of the Tohoscope widescreen daikaiju eiga that I have seen, with heavy, atmospheric lighting and a huge number of impressive compositions; Stewart and Akemi's walk through a foggy forest, the cadre of teenagers they meet there, and Gaira's subsequent rampaging are all particularly well-mounted. The silliness starting to eagerly creep into the Godzilla films at this time can't be detected even a little bit in any of the staging of War of the Gargantuas: Honda's dislike of frivolous movies was more in force here than it had been in years at that point, and the business of tracking two giant potentially cannibalistic nuclear mutants is treated with immense urgency, to its absolute credit. We can thank, as always, Ifukube Akira for his pulsing march that gives so much audible shape to this urgency; I'm not going to fling around phrases like "one of his best scores", because he had a lot of great ones, but this one especially so.

We can also thank Tsuburaya Eiji for yet more great effects: the monster action in War of the Gargantuas is as good as anywhere else in the genre, with some of the best models of Tsuburaya's career and what honestly might be the single best-choreographed monster fight, as Nakajima Haruo (in the Gaira suit) and Sekida Yu (as Senda) scramble over each other furiously, brutal like most daikaiju eiga aren't because of the obviously humanoid participants, and graced with a truly brilliant climax set in a harbor, with boats being used as clubs, that self-evidently influenced Guillermo del Toro's more polished, but no more rousing Pacific Rim (del Toro has made no effort to deny this influence).

So which is it? One of the most awesome daikaiju eiga, or one of the messiest, most shabbily-written and acted daikaiju eiga? No reason at all it can't be both, and the main takeaway is this: whether it is great or greatly terrible, The War of the Gargantuas is one of the completely essential entries in its subgenre, maybe the most worthy of viewing after the irreplaceable Godzilla itself.

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