Die, Monster, Die! (1965): adapted by Jerry Sohl from the H.P. Lovecraft novella "The Colour Out Of Space"; directed by Daniel Haller; starring Nick Adams (Steve Reinhart), Boris Karloff (Nahum Whitley), Suzan Farmer (Susan Witley), and Freda Jackson (Letitia Witley):
H.P. Lovecraft's 1927 story "The Colour Out Of Space" is one of a handful of the greatest horror stories ever told, eerily prescient in how it anticipates some of the effects of fallout and nuclear radiation exposure, horrifyingly vivid in its relentless description of the physical and mental disintegration of a family infected by Something From Outside.
I noted the excellent, recent German adaptation here. This 1960's adaptation takes certain liberties with the text and takes a little too long to really get rolling. But roll it eventually does, and quite effectively.
This was from AIP when it was still trying to imitate the British horror of Hammer Studios. The action of the movie has been relocated from the 1880's to the 1960's and from Massachusetts to England. A love interest has been added.
Well, really all the characters have been added -- screenwriter Jerry Sohl has modeled the doomed family in this movie on a sort of amalgam of various doomed families in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, none of those stories actually being "The Colour Out Of Space," in which a hapless family of farmers have to deal with the titular colour.
Boris Karloff is his usual magisterial self as the patriarch of the Whitley family. He's hiding a secret, one that seems to have infected his wife and his manservant. Brash, no-nonsense American Nick Adams (again, not in the original story) arrives at the behest of Karloff's wife to get Adams' fiancee Susan away from the cursed Whitley homestead. Poor old Nick can't even get a cab to the Whitley property, as the nearby town shuns the Whitleys and that whole area. This may be because the Whitley property is home to a "blasted heath" upon which nothing grows. Among other things...
Patience rewards the viewer with a gripping second half, complete with some fine, disturbing model work when it comes to monsters and disturbing make-up when it comes to infected humans. Adams is fine as a brash but occasionally bumbling hero, while Suzan Farmer has a somewhat thankless role leavened by allowing her some agency in facing the curse on her family. Also, a bracingly short 80 minutes and change! Recommended.
In Cold Blood (1965) by Truman Capote: Truman Capote's crowning achievement. If you're as old as me, you remember Truman Capote as an effete, sneering presence on game shows and talk shows of the 1970's. But he was a great writer, once, and In Cold Blood really is an essential piece of American writing.
It's also a landmark in novelistic reportage. It's been adapted twice, once as a movie and once as a TV miniseries; the events surrounding Capote's research into the facts have also spawned two movies, Capote and Infamous. Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Oscar for Best Actor for playing Capote in Capote.
In 1959 near Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family (the father, mother, teen-aged son, and teen-aged daughter) were murdered by person or persons unknown. Capote was in the area within a couple of weeks to cover the investigation. The murders were brutal enough and mysterious enough to briefly spark national outrage.
The killers would turn out to be Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, two petty criminals who'd come up from Texas to the Clutter home because Hickock had been told stories by his cellmate during a recent prison stay that the Clutters kept all of their money at home in a safe. The Clutters did not actually do this. The small amount of money the two murderers got from the Clutter home was soon used up, though a couple of items taken by Smith would help clinch the case against them once they were apprehended.
The brutality of the murders and the subsequent revelation that they were essentially meaningless fascinated America for a time, especially once Smith and Hickock were caught several months after the Clutter massacre.
The stories and questions that swirl around the writing of In Cold Blood -- and specifically how involved Capote became with Smith and Hickock -- have come to obscure what a triumph the book is. Capote's vivid descriptions of place, character, and happenstance are marvelous and heart-breaking and occasionally sinister. He concisely presents the Clutters and their killers, the investigators and the neighbours, and a wide variety of other 'characters' both central and peripheral to the case.
If Capote had too much sympathy for Perry Smith in real life, it doesn't particularly show in the book: Smith is a fascinating charmer, but also a man capable of complete indifference to lives other than his own. It was Hickock who fantasized before the fact about slaughtering the Clutters, but it was Smith who actually did the killings: perversely, he did so after making three of the victims more comfortable and, in a paradoxical bit of humanity, preventing Hickock from raping the daughter before killing her.
Hindsight allows for certain new observations to make about Smith and Hickock. They both may have suffered from traumatic brain injuries as adults as a result of auto accidents. Hickock's obsession with killing the Clutters often presents itself as murderous envy spawned by a life of poverty and privation. Both Smith and Hickock seem to possess the uncanny charm often attributed to certain types of psychopaths. And so on, and so forth.
In Cold Blood does a lot of things very, very well. It's also a fine 'real-life' police procedural, and a fine 'real-life' court procedural. It's a testament to fine writing and reporting. Highly recommended.
The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch (1965): It's 1980. Earth has been under siege for nearly eight years by giant, fast-growing plants. The cities have fallen. The environment is collapsing as the plants destroy all other plant species and the animals that rely upon them as a result. Basically, humanity has become a rat hiding in fields of 600-foot-tall corn. And now whoever or whatever sent the plants has sent out the exterminators.
To say that Thomas Disch's first novel is an astonishingly bleak end-of-the-world novel is an understatement. We begin in terrible shape. Things don't get better. The plot focuses on a small Minnesota farming community on the shores of Lake Superior. Well, not so much shores. The plants have been relentlessly draining the Great Lakes for years.
So the town of Tassel, much of its original location overrun, has moved to the newly draining bottom of Lake Superior. There, Anderson, the Christian fundamentalist patriarch of the town, attempts to push back the plants and feed his town by growing corn. Just keeping the corn going requires a maximum effort by the village. Anderson believes they are being tested by God. But if they are, then God has gone silent. Or his answer is simply 'No.'
Disch invests this short, terse novel with effectively chosen moments of Biblical imagery and language and the occasional quote. But The Genocides is about the failure of all of humanity's institutions in the face of a sublime and indifferent menace, not a world in which a Christian God actually exists. Or any other gods.
The occasional scene of terror gives way to scenes of fumbling, racing panic. Our protagonists can only flee or die. Or flee and die. It's a rich, full life. Their numbers dwindle. Winter comes. Internal tensions begin to destroy Tassel almost as effectively as the invasion. Will whatever is behind all this ever show its face? Good question.
Even at this young age, Disch was a skilled stylist and an occasionally sardonic chronicler of human frailties. Some of Anderson's choices as a leader are understandable yet almost unspeakably grotesque, none moreso than a sort of Uber-Calvinist imitation of communion. We may become invested in whether or not some of the other characters survive, but it's an investment kept at a remove: it's doom alone that ultimately counts.
Disch was never known as a technically inclined science fiction writer, but the science of The Genocides still seems ruthlessly pragmatic and sound. The plants, devoid of personality and agency, nonetheless become an extraordinarily effective foil for humanity's own inhumanity, and for humanity's world-reshaping mistakes. The Earth is at the mercy of the ultimate invasive species. The crops must grow. The weeds and the vermin must go. Highly recommended.
