Galaxy of Terror (1981)

The spaceship Remus, belonging to a planetary culture ruled by someone going by the fortunately not copyrightable moniker of The Master, crashes down on a rather dangerous and mysterious planet.

The Master sends a second ship, the Quest, after it. The Quest is predominantly populated by character actors like Edward Albert, Erin Moran, Robert Englund, Grace Zabriskie, Ray Walston and Sid Haig who are perfectly built to turn the sparse hints the script offers about the characters and the world they inhabit into something that feels plausible and alive. Arriving at the planet, the Quest also crashes, and will need some repairs to fly out again.

At least the Remus is comparatively close by, so it doesn’t take long for our protagonists to stumble upon what’s left of its crew – dead bodies, killed under mysterious and obviously violent circumstances. There are some crew members missing, however, so there still may be survivors, somewhere. Perhaps they have made their way to the gigantic, creepy black pyramid looming on the horizon?

Before anyone from the Quest can start making their way there, as well, the newcomers begin suffering from the same troubles that must have killed the Remus’s crew – tempers begin to flare, moods darken, and whenever somebody is alone, they are killed – or worse – by a different monstrosity with the curious ability to disappear before anyone else can see it.

Bruce D. Clark’s Galaxy of Terror – produced by Corman’s New World Pictures - is typically considered as being on of the Alien rip-offs. Some of that sweet sweet, Corman money has certainly flown into the film because of that, but the Alien influence is mostly visible in the grubbiness of the tech, the very non-Star Trek (or Wars) characters, and the spirit of some of the production design (among others by James Cameron, who’d put that particular experience to good use a couple of years later when he made an actual Alien sequel). Much larger in feel and form loom Bava’s Planet of the Vampires – one of the core texts in science fiction horror on screen – and of course Forbidden Planet.

In fact, much of the film plays out like a less polite, more brutal and sexed/sleazed up version of the latter film, with added elements of a post-hippie interpretation of A.E. Van Vogt-style SF weirdness. Which works out very nicely indeed for the film thanks to its spirited, imaginative space gothic meets working class production design and practical monster effects that mix puppets, a bit of stop motion and whatever else was to hand in ways to make any monster kid happy.

Obviously, going by contemporary tastes, I could rather have done without the rape by giant worm scene (that makes a thing explicit many another horror movie prefers to keep implicit or plain metaphorical for a reason) – particularly since Clark films it very much as a scene we (as in the imagined all-male heterosexual audience) are supposed to be turned on by instead of squicked out. Which isn’t just unpleasant but based on very weird assumptions about male sexuality.

Fortunately, the rest of the monster business is much too good to let that one piece of unpleasantness destroy it, and Galaxy of Terror would be absolutely worthwhile for its effects and production design alone. The latter does also add a fine layer of cosmic dread to proceedings, uniting the promise of science fiction cinema to show us things we’ve never seen before with the (cosmic) horror dictum of showing us things we probably shouldn’t be seeing.

Beyond Atlantis (1973)

The Philippines. A fisher with the excellent name of Manuel the Barracuda (Vic Diaz) sells some extremely valuable pearls to pimp and all-around tough guy East Eddie (Sid Haig). Eddie isn't stupid, and soon mounts an expedition to find out where exactly Manuel gets his pearls from and then grab them for himself.

Apart from bringing some well-armed goons, Eddie partners up with the shady gambler Logan (John Ashley) and the expert diver Vic Mathias (Patrick Wayne, lesser known brother of Bruce), the latter our supposed hero of the evening. "Scientist" Katherine Vernon (Lenore Stevens) overhears some of the negotiations between Logan and Vic and talks her way onto the expedition to find out what she can about a mysterious tribe spurious ideas lead her to conclude is connected with the pearls.

After smacking poor Manuel around, our "heroes" learn that he acquires his pearls from a mysterious woman - later named Syrene - (Leigh Christian) as payment for using his boat as a taxi between the hidden island she's living on and the nearest supermarket.

So off to her island the expedition goes. There, they soon meet up with the very Caucasian looking Syrene and her mysterious tribe. Except for her and her pompous father Nereus (George Nader), every member of the tribe suffers from a bad case of Ping Pong Ball Eye Syndrome (and is decidedly non-Caucasian, but there will be an implied explanation for that difference later on). To make up for their eye problems, they can breathe underwater.

Katherine theorizes that these are descendents of the inhabitants of Atlantis, but this part of the story never goes anywhere. Instead, there's a lot of diving and two mysterious accidents to witness. Oh, and Nereus wants his daughter to "mate" with Vic to improve the island's gene pool. That poor girl!

This is one of the billion of movies Eddie Romero produced in his native Philippines mostly for the US market, and like a lot of them, Beyond Atlantis is first and foremost intensely boring. It's an adventure movie without all that much adventure (unless Sid Haig falling into a pit full of crabs counts as "adventure") and many long and tiresome diving sequences that don't make up for that lack.

It's too bad, really, because the movie starts out promising enough, with quite a bit of sharp yet silly dialogue, some choice scenery chewing by a very enthusiastic Sid Haig and a character set-up that hints at a Treasure of the Sierra Madre-like plot full of cynical people betraying each other.

Alas, that promised film never manages to materialize. Worse, once the expedition has reached the island of the Atlantides, the plot more or less stops dead in its tracks, and the film develops into a sleep-inducing series of diving sequences, followed by Lenore Stevens walking around with a frowny-face (I suppose that means she's thinking?) until someone tells her she's not allowed to be where she's going, followed by more diving sequences.

I'd be perfectly fine with a film about people wandering around an island (though not so much with the endless diving) if the island were filled with anything of interest, or if someone had a character arc, or if something would happen from time to time, but Beyond Atlantis only traipses and dives from filler to filler.

It doesn't help that the film it is utterly unlike other Filipino movies for the US market made in that era in that it is nearly completely lacking in exploitational values like violence or sex and so gives off the very unpleasant whiff of a film made in 1953, not 1973. Internet rumours tell me that having nothing that could offend anyone in the film was the only way for Romero to get Patrick Wayne to play the lead; as if his role couldn't have been filled by a tree someone painted in skin-tones.

Even the underwater seduction scene between Syrene and Vic is played out fully clothed! It leaves one to wonder how a girl "mates" with a man while he's wearing a wetsuit. I suspect just swimming around him won't get anyone pregnant, but what do I know about the way strange creatures like Patrick Wayne reproduce?

It might sound cruel, but I just don't think that showing me some people with ball-bug-eyes, Sid Haig, wetsuited non-sex and one mildly exciting shoot-out in the end is enough exciting content for a ninety minute film like this. As a short film, it would probably work out, but in this form, even I can't stand the content to diving ratio.

 

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Spider Baby (1968)

A terrifyingly square-jawed (and dumb as the piece of rock his chin resembles) man called Peter (Quinn Redeker) tells us a little story about that strange little illness known as Merrye's Disease.

It's quite a fittingly named disease, seeing that only members of the Merrye family seem to suffer from it. At some point in their teenage years, all Merryes start to regress mentally and also develop some unpleasant signs of murderous insanity. In the end, a Merrye even falls back into a pre-human state of existence (that is, starts to resemble Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy).

The last presentable members of the family (I suppose procreation by something other than accident can get a little problematic when you are never mentally adult), Virginia (Jill Banner), Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn) and Ralph (Sid Haig) live in the rather musty old family home, protected and fed by their trusty old family chauffeur Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.).

The old man is also taking care of the less human family members, a small assortment of aunts and uncles hidden away in the cellar.

Alas, Bruno is but a single man - not a very sane man himself, at that -, and when he returns from an excursion into the city, he finds himself confronted with the dead body of the postman (played by our old nemesis Mantan Moreland), who did not survive the charming little game of "spider" that Virginia likes to play so very much.

Even worse than the corpse though is the letter the postman was delivering - some greedy relatives are planning on taking the "children" under their wings and steal all their money. Oh joy, they're coming to visit today.

And what charming people they are. There's Emily (Carol Ohmart), whose love for dancing in front of mirrors while dressed in her undies will prove quite problematic for her future survival, our narrator (and therefore hero of the piece, so hurray for him) Peter - as I said, dumb as a rock, the hitler-mustachioed lawyer Schlocker (Karl Schanzer) and his secretary Ann (Mary Mitchel), the future love of Peter's life, who is of equally dubious intelligence.

Bruno and his charges are bravely trying to put on a sane face, but Emily's insistence on first having dinner at the house and then staying the night combined with Schlocker's unhealthy curiosity lead them down a path, or rather a corridor, that ends like all corridors in old dark houses end - in a room where someone is very enthusiastic about playing "spider".

Spider Baby's director and writer Jack Hill is one of my heroes of low budget filmmaking in the 60s and 70s. The way in which he was always on the look-out for new methods of making his films as sleazy as possible, while at the same time instilling them with a sense of outrageous fun as well as a very healthy dose of satire alone would be enough to make most of his films (The Big Doll House! Coffy! Foxy Brown! Switchblade Sisters! etc.) mandatory watching in my book. But Hill was also a more than competent director, not of the sort that has much use for obvious signs of flashiness, yet exceedingly effective at making well-paced and clever b-films that for once tend to keep the promises their one-sheets make.

Underneath the wonderful and sometimes delirious strangeness of Hill's movies, there was always something else going on, be it that Hill made a quite cynical commentary on the genre of the revenge flick inside of a revenge flick or that he used a cheerleader exploitationer as a declaration of love and hate for women's lib at once.

Spider Baby isn't any different. Here, Hill drags the corpse of the old dark house mystery/horror movies from the 30s and 40s from its grave and takes a good look at what can be done with it in the late 60s. While he's doing that, he might just as well add the sexuality to it the older films were never able (or allowed to) talk about.

And, while he's at it, he makes parts of the sexuality quite uncomfortable by ascribing it to young women with the minds of children, basically poking around in the closet with the sign "Children and sexuality! Don't open!" without running the risk of not being able to sell his film to an audience.

Brilliantly, Hill does this trick while still making a sleazy, well-paced, well filmed, competently acted and very weird black comedy.

 

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