Night of the Demon (aka Curse of the Demon) (1957): adapted by Charles Bennett, Hal E. Chester, and Cy Endfield, from the short story "Casting the Runes" by M.R. James; directed by Jacques Tourneur; starring Dana Andrews (Dr. John Holden), Peggy Cummins (Joanna Harrington) and Niall MacGinnis (Dr. Julian Karswell):
It's too bad there's no way to see the pure Charles Bennett version of this movie: producer Hal E. Chester added some unfortunate bits (including the mostly infamous demon close-up) and probably subtracted others. An opening Dana Andrews voice-over is especially unnecessary.
What's left is still a fine horror movie with outstanding performances throughout. It isn't patricularly faithful to the M.R. James short story it adapts, though most of the logic of the supernatural is kept intact. Niall MacGinnis is a stand-out as the mostly malevolent magician, who nonetheless dotes on his mother and seems to be charmingly harmless unless you disagree with him.
Dana Andrews is solid as the lead, skeptical American psychologist John Holden, who gradually loses that skepticism as evidence of the supernatural mounts. Peggy Cummins is also good as Holden's partner in demon-busting, and the supporting characters are pretty much all memorable as well.
The long-shots of the demon are relatively effective, though its more sinister manifestations remain, in master horror-director Tourneur's hands, shadows and fog and whirling, discordant noises.
One of the oddities of Chester's decision-making with the fire demon lies in the fact that it's smaller than a man in James' story but a looming, King-Kong-sized giant here. Sometimes less is more, especially when it comes to horror. Highly recommended.
From Hell It Came (1957): written by Richard Bernstein and Jack Milner; directed by Dan Milner; starring Tod Andrews (Dr. Arnold). Tina Carver (Dr. Mason), Linda Watkins (Mrs. Kilgore), John McNamara (Professor Clark), and Gregg Palmer (Kimo): Some combination of atomic-test fallout and native magic results in a murdered island prince returning as a walking, vengeful tree.
Startlingly wordy and inept, From Hell It Came would be a lot more fun if it were a lot less wordy. An eternity (well, about 40 minutes) drags by until the walking tree we've all been waiting for finally starts killing people. However, either because of censorship issues or the overall clumsiness of the tree outfit, our hero kills people by throwing them into quicksand or down hills.
An early scene impresses because the medium shots of the prince talking and talking and talking while staked to the ground for execution include a chicken in the left-top portion of the frame. The chicken provides quite the distraction, and then another chicken wanders into the frame.
I do like the design of the tree monster, which is pretty much all face. It's not as scary-looking as the two male leads, however. Jesus, From Hell It Came has the ugliest male leads I've seen in a long time. Well, since The Night of the Lepus, anyway. Apparently, ugliness was no impediment to playing the male lead in a cheap Hollywood horror movie in the 1950's.
The island on which the action takes place is populated by nebulously conceived natives played (mostly) by white people and American scientists sent to investigate the effects of atomic fallout on the island and to treat natives who have 'The Black Plague.' A cultural clash ensues between Western medicine and native medicine. A male and female doctor bicker over her desire to be employed rather than married and pregnant. The usual. I think there's a parrot involved as well. Or maybe not.
Linda Watkins as Mrs. Kilgore has the thankless role of a comic-relief shop-keeper on the island. Why there's a white shop-keeper on the island is beyond me, as the native population seems to be about 12 people and the only reason the scientists came to the island was to investigate fallout. The film-makers saddle Ms. Watkins with an Australian accent, an accent that is clearly and hilariously way, way beyond her acting range.
It doesn't help that the screenwriters seem to confuse Australian with Cockney, or that their primary word indicators of an Australian are endless repetitions of the word "blooming" (OK) and "ducky" (one of the WTF bits of Hollywood Cockney). Not recommended, though intermittently funny.
Unexplored Worlds: The Steve Ditko Archives Volume 2: edited and with an introduction by Blake Bell (1956-57; collected 2010): This second volume of the Fantagraphics Steve Ditko Archives takes us through a year in which Ditko recovered from tuberculosis and drew like a fiend, racking up over 400 pages of work, mostly for bargain-basement Charlton Comics. The co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange strove to develop a personal style very early on, as this volume shows. The art is distinctly Ditko from the get-go.
But it's also a Ditko experimenting with what works in terms of storytelling. He plays with detailed rendition and exquisite linework, especially on covers and in opening splash panels. And the broad nature of what Charlton was publishing -- very short stories in a variety of genres, all of them terribly written -- gave Ditko pretty much free rein to work on everything from how to draw a horse's legs (he still doesn't have it at this point, though I'm not sure he ever did; Kirby didn't either) to how to draw fantastic vistas of space and time and other dimensions.
A story about a painting that's a gateway to another dimension shows us the Ditko who will be, less than ten years later, on Marvel's Doctor Strange. On that great character's adventures, Ditko would become one of a handful of the greatest depictors of the weird and uncanny in comic-book history. It's a bit of a paradox.
Ditko was (and is) perhaps the most humanistic and normative of superhero illustrators, his characters not puffed up like steroid-addled beachballs, their faces and clothes lived in and life-like. But he also had a penchant for action conveyed through body language and positioning, and an eye for the weird and unusual conveyed in a few simple lines. He was the comic-book world's version of Magritte with his surreal juxtapositions and commonplace elements arranged in impossible ways.
The writing on almost all of these stories is pretty terrible, as noted -- Charlton was the Yugo assembly line of American comic books of the 1950's and 1960's. But the sheer volume of pages required by Charlton (and the sheer volume required by Ditko to survive at Charlton's miniscule page rates) did give Ditko a chance to develop, experiment, and become the artist he soon would be. Highly recommended.
The Brain from Planet Arous, written by Ray Buffum, directed by Nathan H. Juran, starring John Agar, Joyce Meadows and Robert Fuller (1957): Hilariously bad, blessedly short (70 minutes) D-Movie science fiction from the swingin' 50's. John Agar, the patron saint of bad actors, gives a command performance as Steve March, a nuclear scientist possessed by Gor, an intermittently incorporeal brain from, well, planet Arous.
Gor is an escaped criminal who intends to rule the Earth because he can blow stuff up by thinking about it. Also, he seems to be a sex addict. Maybe he should just run for Congress!
Steve and his friend Dan discover Gor inside one of those caves that are in every cheap movie and TV show made in California, in the heart of Mystery Mountain, which looks like a rocky hill in that valley that appears in every movie and TV show that needs a rocky valley (it's in the Gorn episode of Star Trek, I'm pretty sure). Gor kills Dan and possesses Steve. Steve tries to date-rape his fiancee, who is saved by her plucky dog and is surprisingly forgiving about the whole date rape thing. Steve emotes like a crazy man, with John Agar's superb acting being supplemented by wacky contact lenses and a surprisingly inspired shot of Steve's face taken through a water cooler.
Gor blows up a couple of model planes and demands that the rulers of the world bow down before him to so he can use humanity as a cheap labour force to build a space battlefleet and conquer the universe. Vol, apparently planet Arous's least competent police officer, shows up to stop Gor and, after telling the fiancee and her father that he has powers greater than Gor's, spends the rest of the movie hiding inside the body of the fiancee's dog.
But wait! Vol does tell us that Gor has to leave Steve's body every 24 hours to breathe. And when he does so he becomes solid, and can be killed with a blow to the part of the brain called the Fissure of Rolando. Huzzah! Is that a handy axe I see lying around Steve's living room?
Aside from wretched dialogue, terrible visual and special effects, and lousy acting, The Brain from Planet Arous also has hilariously off-beat voice acting for the character of Gor, world conqueror. And a plucky dog! And, so far as I could count, maybe two different sets, along with a lot of outdoor work, some stock footage of atomic explosions, and an inexplicably abrupt exit by Vol at the conclusion of the film. It's like the good brain suddenly remembers he left his car running. Recommended for sheer awfulness.
Extra points if you notice that the film seems to have loaned its plot to the 1980's sci-fi actioner The Hidden, starring Kyle MacLachlan and Claudia Christian's breasts.
