The Babadook

Rating: NR 

Run Time: 93 mins

Director: Jennifer Kent

Starring: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall

I was prepared to love this movie…for a number of good reasons: I have been reading the enthusiastic hype for months; the story idea is a great springboard for a horror movie; I’m an Essie Davis fan (I encourage anyone who will listen to watch the Phryne Fisher murder mysteries); the concept art for the monster looked cool.  But you know what?

 

Ba-Ba-Ba…big fucking deal.  That’s what.

My working theory for explaining the critical adulation this film has engendered is this:  the director Jennifer Kent went all around God’s green earth talking up how clever and important and smart and deeeep and significant this movie is.  The movie is just not that good.  I have read several of these interviews and it strikes me that she has little natural affinity with the horror field.  I think Kent wanted to make an art house horror flick.  She wasn’t successful…because art house horror movies aren’t scary.     But she still has reviewers, not to miss out on that hype or be seen as unsophisticated rubes, getting absolutely orgasmic in their descriptive language of how swell and how awfully frightening the picture is.

    

Yet, with all it had in its favor and for all the complimentary reviews, The Babadook is still one of the most overrated films in years.  Go back five years at least, when the posers were creaming all over themselves about how great Black Swan was.  That overrated…

The movie tells the story of Amelia and her son, who are essentially each other’s world.  She has wrapped him in a cocoon of sorts that he actively chafes against.  Yet it is clear they love each other; their affection is very real.  Amelia was being driven to the hospital by her husband the night Jacob, her son, was born.  During the trip, they were in a vehicular accident that left the husband, Oskar, dead.  Amelia’s manner of handling her grief is to bury it.  She doesn’t allow Jacob to celebrate his birthday on his birthday, for instance.  Otherwise, they share their lives together: meals, story time, the ritual of looking in closets and under beds for the monsters. 

One evening, at Jacob’s bedtime, he discovers a children’s book that neither even knew he owned.  It’s called Mr. Babadook, and boy is it a mind fuck.  This Babadook character is not at all a nice fellow.  In fact, he’s out to fuck you up and is not coy about announcing his intentions.  When they reach the point in the illustrated book where it becomes clear that the Babadook is a sinister sort of bloke, Amelia insists they stop reading.  Good idea…except the damned thing keeps showing up again and again.  She tears it apart and trashes it; it reappears.  She burns the motherfucker; this seems to do the trick, until he starts prank-calling (it’s hard to charge a monster with terroristic threat if you can’t convince the police he’s real, after all).  What is more, Amelia starts to catch glimpses of Mr. Babadook in the shadows or around corners.  It seems the book isn't necessary to invoke him anymore; Jacob believes the fucker’s already in the house and he’s starting to suspect he might be in Mom!   

If the movie goer is to make a stab at understanding the significance of the Babadook as a symbol, he must make some assumptions about the presumed state of mind of Amelia at the film’s beginning.  The early scenes are supposed to suggest how entrenched she is in her continued grief and how exhausting the task of being the single parent of an out-of- control child; that same child is also the constant reminder of her husband’s death such as to contribute to her unconscious resentment of the son.  It is certainly true that Essie Davis looks washed out and tired beyond belief.  But I’ll tell you what: if I were a single mother trying to raise an active child while holding down a shit job, I’d look like Amelia, too.  Further, if the shit job entailed caring for senile old bitties who keep changing their tea orders, I would hate to go to work as well.  In fact, I often do hate to go to work, and I look about the same when I come home…emotionally drained.  So the film doesn't convince us that her everlasting grief or unwillingness to manage or confront it are the reasons she constantly looks like she’s about two seconds away from cutting her own throat.  I have often ended up with a few hesitation marks on my neck when I shave for work in the morning.

The same is true of Jacob.  We are apparently meant to see him as a behaviorally maladjusted child who acts out in inappropriate ways.  Clearly, Jennifer Kent doesn't have a son.  That is what every six year-old boy I have ever seen acts like…hyperactive and occasionally barely controllable.  In fact, I thought of him as being a very imaginative and precocious child in the best sense of the word; he was tremendously clever.  Further, I rather admired his ingenuity with weapons systems.  They damn well serve a practical function later in the movie.  And another thing, I would have pushed that bitch cousin out of the goddamned tree-house, too.  Save for the intermittent high-pitched, wail-like scream he would emit every once in a while, I thought he was quite normal. 

In one of her seemingly never-ending press interviews, Jennifer Kent suggested she could not find any research on the difficult (task) faced by mothers raising children.  Are you fucking kidding me?  There have been years of study on the terrible guilt working mothers experience.  There has been research on the spurious idea that women possess some mythically innate “maternal instinct.” Moreover, those studies have demonstrated that the quality is not quite so universal as our patriarchal society likes to believe.  Women can and often do resent the ever-loving shit out of their children.  And they are not the only ones.   In fact, there is an entire litany of offenses for which I, the father, have told my children I will most certainly kill them, dismember their bodies, and bury the parts in our back yard.   

So that I don’t come off entirely as a conservatively literal curmudgeon, I would like to mention the things I really did like.  The acting on the principles’ part is great.  Essie Davis does exactly what she must do to sell the part; she’s a damned good actor.  What I didn’t buy was her potential for hypersensitivity to unexplained phenomena.  Fair enough, though, because, in my understanding, psychosis with paranoid features isn’t uncommon.  It is because of her ever-increasingly suspicious frame of mind that she begins to hallucinate. 

Noah Wiseman, too, was incredible.  He was hilariously energetic, playing Jacob with a boundless energy that would suggest, too, that his imagination was so vivid that the job of differentiating between fantasy and reality might be terribly difficult for his character.  Jennifer Kent must be responsible for coaxing this performance from the boy.  She has spoken of how she coached Noah Wiseman such that she got the performance she needed without at the same time scaring the holy shit out of him, and I bet that was an incredibly difficult thing to do.  The choice to keep other characters peripheral to the story was, if not just a lazy way of shunting underwritten parts to the side, also the right one.  It effectively (highlights) the incredible isolation the mother and son feel (she subjects him to this in the mistaken belief that he is the dangerous one).  Both are alienated from any substantive companionship outside of their own circle of two. 

And, finally, the conception and rendering of the Babadook itself is great, as is the central story idea that introduces him to the film.  Kent has noted the influence of German Expressionist Horror on the character (I don’t doubt she is a cinephile, mind you) and he looks like a great cross between Lon Chaney’s vampire in the lost London After Midnight and Graf Orlock from Nosferatu.  The children’s book illustrations heighten the nightmare quality of the design.  Even here, though, I must protest.  If there was one thing that could have improved the film, I believe showing the monster lurking around in the shadows more than he is seen would have succeeded in convincing us better that we needed to pay careful/closer attention to any clues that would elucidate for us the actuality beyond our immediate senses; after all, I think that is part of the fun of watching psychological horror: you get to argue in good nature with your friends about whether the monster or ghost or demon really existed at all. 

I know this is a counterintuitive concept in horror cinema; generally, it is certainly true that the less the monster is seen, the more frightening it is.  I just don’t think it worked here.  His appearances were so infrequent that it was too easy to believe he was just not real, that he was merely an auditory and visual illusion for Amelia.  Psychological horror, as I understand it, cannot survive that absence of ambiguity.  And that is absolutely what we have here.  I’m usually not a fan of this sub-genre because it’s just not scary.  Sure, the pseudo-intellectuals like to talk about it and go on about how “frightening” such stuff is, but they’re talking out of their collective ass.  Blood and tits are too low-brow for this set. 

But if it’s done well, it can be scary as well as thought-provoking.  And it doesn’t need gore or nudity to ingratiate itself with an audience.  Psychological horror always seems firmly rooted in the fertile soil of psychoanalysis theory.  A repressed something wells up from the dark recesses of the unconscious and manifests itself in corporeal form, or at least seems to.  The trick about viewing a “psychological horror film” is determining whether the “thing” is real or imaginary.  In the world of David Cronenberg, we are blessed because his protagonists’ demons more often than not actually and absolutely do take physical form, certainly during his aptly-called body horror years.  His characters develop tumorous growths or parasitical creatures with a specifically sexual nexus, or they grow phallic appendages or vaginal orifices, or they birth “children of rage.”  Or they become something else entirely, something terrible and foreign.

In other movies, we are not so fortunate.  We must do the work ourselves…in a sense.  Surely the undisputed master of this horror sub-set was Val Lewton and his greatest director, Jacques Tourneur.  There is really no sure way to determine if voodoo magic is real or not (I Walked with a Zombie) or whether Irena is a were-panther or not (Cat People).  Tourneur would perform the same trick again in Night of the Demon in the late fifties; one could even make the argument that the demon which eventually appears is a figment of the overwrought imagination of its victims.  Consider The Haunting or The Innocents…  In fact, these two films are particularly good as exemplars to compare The Babadook to, at least and if only superficially, because they deal with women (highly suggestible women) with very sensitive and very vivid imaginations.

Of course, the central theme of what is real and what is not was baked into the movies in their adherence to their source material, but they are still marvelously constructed films that deal with women confronted with traumatic events that occur within seemingly haunted houses.  Further, Eleanor and the governess deal with their experiences in such a way that it is almost (if not) impossible to determine if what they are enduring is real or not.  That seems to be the crux of psychological horror.  The ambiguity that balances the dichotomy of the real and the purely imaginary is so tricky to parse out.  But in The Babadook, it’s just not.  And further, the way it unfolds made it difficult for me to give two shits, anyway.  Until the end.  Stick around for that, because it is good.  It cannot redeem the film for me, but it is poignant and clever.   

Some who read my thoughts on this movie may consider me a literalist philistine who lacks the subtlety of mind to “get” this picture, but do not be fooled by them; there is nothing to “get.”  In fact, and this pisses me off, really, I have yet to see or read a review whose writer has had the fortitude to call the movie out.  It’s fucking boring!  There… 

It’s this sort of hypocritical pseudo-intellectual pandering that makes the film industry the world’s largest mutual admiration, where its critics are just so many sycophants who must not miss their seat on the boat when a few respected critics start lauding a film.  Everyone must instantly write his own unthinking piece on how great the goddamned movie in question is for fear of being left out of the vomitus of hyperbole that accompanies a few favorable reviews.  I do not excuse myself, for I have been equally guilty of the very same.

Quite simply, the movie does not do a good job of rendering the central dilemma sufficiently equivocal.  First it’s one thing (the monster is real!) and then it’s the other thing (it’s all in her head!), without never there being a proper balance maintained (or even attained at all) between the two possibilities.  Sure, the idea is a really good one, as far as movies that deal with female neurosis or psychosis go (and we ought to as well add Repulsion to the list).  She is certainly repressing something…but what?  She is sleep-deprived (very often linked to psychosis as an exacerbating factor).  Check.  She is isolated.  Check.  Her constant companion is a six year-old (an unlikely source of intellectual stimulation).  Check.  Her job sucks and she’s got no love life.  Check.

But I never felt threatened.  I wasn’t scared for the mother or the kid.  I didn’t think they were ever really threatened.  So there’s no sense of danger, no stakes.  And who cares anyway, because the two of them are so fucking isolated that no one is likely to miss their stupid asses in any event.

I suppose we have Freud to blame for this…  

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 4/10

          

Horror Express

Rating: R

Run Time: 88 minutes

Director: Eugenio Martin

Starring: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Telly Savalas

 

Horror Express – ah yes, another horror movie I remember from my childhood.  Not until recently did I see the entire thing, but snippets of visual imagery I certainly remember: the red, glowing eyes of the monster; the blank, white eyes of its victims; the red fingernail polish under the eyes, nose, and mouth of each victim (this is what passes for blood, but it sure as hell looks like polish applied with a fingernail brush). 

Two English scientists, a Russian count and countess, a crazy-ass Eastern Orthodox priest, a mentally deranged Cossack, and a monster that looks like a piece of shit.  No, I’m not talking about the design or construction of the monster costume.  I mean the monster looks like it was literally made out of shit…a shit monster, if you will.  Now I didn’t start to envision it that way until after I saw the movie, so I guess I spoiled it for you.  But don’t let this dissuade you from seeing Horror Express, because it’s a pretty good and even suspenseful B-movie.  And, despite the fact that the monster looks like absolutely the world’s largest bowel movement fully formed in the shape of a man, it is otherwise a genuinely frightening creature.  But then again, who wants to die at the hands of a biped composed of animate fecal matter?; in that sense, a shit monster might legitimately be considered a genuinely frightening creature – it might even scare the living shit out of you...sorry.  Still, while I stand by my assessment that the creature is scary, the scariest piece of shit you are ever likely to see, there is no denying that is most resembles a giant turd.    

When we first see the Turd Who Walks, he is frozen solid in a block of ice in a cave in Manchuria, where he is discovered by Professor Alexander Saxton (the great Christopher Lee).  Saxton believes he may have found the missing link in this two million year-old creature, which looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before (well, again, that’s not entirely true,  but I want to try to move away from that image).  Lee, in voiceover narration, dictates a letter to the Royal Geological Society, where he explains that the expedition in Manchuria ended in tragedy.  And then we never hear another fucking word about it.

Or are we supposed to assume the expedition includes the transport across Siberia from China to Moscow, which occurs during the train ride that consumes the rest of the movie’s running time?  The expedition in Manchuria doesn’t end in tragedy as far as we can see.  The shit that could be described as tragic doesn’t start to hit the fan until just before the train ride.  Which is a fucking train ride, not an expedition.  He should have said, the Trans-Siberian Express train ride ended in tragedy.  Whatever…

But before we even hear Lee or see the scene in the ice in Siberia, we hear the theme song over the opening credits.  The theme song sounds like an eerier version of something Ennio Morricone might have written for one of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns.  The interesting thing about this theme is the fact that you will hear more than one person either play or whistle the theme during the movie.  That doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to me.  Not only that, they whistle or play it as if it had some sort of intrinsic significance to the plot of the movie itself.  That also doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.  Is this the monster’s mantra?  Maybe… 

Well, no sooner is the thing all crated upon and ready for shipment via train, than it kills a thief right there in the train terminal.  He gets the white eye-fingernail polish treatment, too.  Everybody makes a fuss and then a wildly overacting Alberto de Mendoza, playing Father Pujardov, the Eastern Orthodox priest (and the personal family priest of the Russian couple), starts spouting off about evil and Satan and how the thing in the crate is evil and satanic.  Man, he is sooo adamant, I think we’re talking Eeeviiil with a capital E here. He makes a cross on the ground with a piece of chalk and then tries to do the same on the crate, but it doesn’t adhere.  Later, this will be pointed out to Prof. Saxton (I mean the fact that the chalk could not write on the box) as evidence of its evil nature.  He poo-poos this and says there could be a reasonable explanation for the chalk not appearing.  Hell, yeah, there is, and it’s called, “Maybe the priest was faking it and didn’t really touch the chalk to the crate!”

Anyway before all this, Saxton meets up with a Dr. Wells (played by the incomparable Peter Cushing), for whom it is clear he feels a bit of antipathy initially.  Well, everybody gets loaded up and off we go on the Trans-Siberian Express!  The crate with the shit monster in it gets loaded up and Dr. Wells bribes one of the attendants to sneak a peak in there because Professor Saxton is being quite coy about its contents.  Uh-oh…as we all know, that spells doom for the poor attendant, who also gets the “white eye, blood from the orifices hoo-doo” from the monster’s glowing red eyes.

The next thing we know, the attendant is missing and the detective aboard orders Prof. Saxton to open the crate.  So, what does he do?  By God, he throws the key out the window.  Well, there’s only a fucking padlock and a chain on the damned thing to begin with, so the detective, in grand, “Oh yeah, asshole, I’ll show you!” fashion, simply orders one of the other attendants to take an axe to the lock.  Except inside the crate is the missing attendant, but no shit monster. 

It is right around this time that someone, I don’t remember who, asks Prof. Saxton if he thinks it’s his shit monster running around killing everyone.  He says yes.  What?  Let’s think about this a minute.  At this early a juncture, wouldn’t it be much more likely that someone else killed the attendant and stole the shit monster because he thought it might be valuable than to believe that a two million year-old stool sample has suddenly come to life and is walking the earth again?  Oh, well.          

Next up, the monster kills a mysterious woman with a past (the folks aboard are caricatures out of Murder on the Orient Express; in fact, we could call this movie by that title).  You will remember her as the woman who petitioned for help from Dr. Wells earlier in the movie.  The monster sneaks up and puts a bear hug on her and gives her the stare of deathly horror, whereupon she, too, dies of the white-eyed heeby-jeebies.  When he catches her, she is trying to steal something from a safe in the hold where the goodies are stored. 

Someone later tells the train detective (I don’t remember his name) that the victim was a spy.  And he knows this, how?  Anyway, the detective answers, “Yes, I know.”  Well, Mr. fucking Train Detective, if you knew that, why didn’t you do something about it earlier?  Exasperating, man.

Right after the spy’s murder, Dr. Wells is snooping around (he’s a nosy old bastard) in the hold and gets his arm grabbed by the monster.  Thankfully the detective is there in time to shoot the shit (sorry)…shoot the monster, that is.  Now, you wouldn’t really think bullets could harm organic waste matter, but thank God it does.  No more shit monster. 

Wells and Saxton team up at this point to try to figure out what the hell is going on.  They put some of the viscous fluid from the monster’s eye under a microscope and see some incredible images of dinosaurs and other exotic objects, including a view of the earth from space.  It turns out we’re dealing with an ancient alien here, whose eyes are the windows not of its soul, I think, but which are the seat of its intellect.  I don’t think it necessary to divulge any more of the plot, for to do so will only ruin the rest of the movie.  But, let me say this: you will miss the shit monster. 

I’ve made fun of the film, but it’s really a lot of fun and it’s well-made, given what I’m sure was a limited budget.  The monster is actually really creepy scary…he’s bigger than shit, too…I can’t help myself.  It’s well-acted by everyone, even de Mendoza and Telly Savalas, whose overacting is so bombastic as to add more than it detracts from the action.  The alien idea and the theme involving eyes is very interesting, too.  It’s similar in some key respects to Carpenter’s The Thing, (closer to the source novella, “Who Goes There?” than the Nyby/Hawks original from 1951).  I wonder if the screenwriters and the man responsible for the original idea were familiar with James Campbell’s work.

I will admit that nostalgia strengthens my affection for movies I might otherwise not be too fond of.  I love all of the Hammer Dracula films equally, largely because they all have Chris Lee in them.  I can’t bring myself to find much fault with the Universal creature features of the 30s & 40s, even when they changed from prestige pics to B-movie fare.  So my memories of those glaring eyes, red as coal, informs my opinion of its value after all these years.  As I age and begin to feel more insistently the pull of the way I remember the events of my past, I cling even more to these cheesy old horror movies that formed a part of it.  I cannot help myself.     

RANDOM THOUGHTS

I have read a story concerning how Christopher Lee encouraged Cushing to commit to the film that, if true, is a poignant one.  Filming began as Cushing was still grieving the loss of his wife to cancer, a shattering blow to the actor.  I’ve read elsewhere about the astonishingly visible transformation his appearance underwent in the time between the last two Hammer Dracula pictures; I had honestly not noticed.  Always an extremely thin man, he became emaciated.  I guess I had noticed without knowing what to attribute it to; I’m sorry that it was grief.

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 6/10   

                        

Gojira aka Godzilla (1954)

Rating: NR

Run Time: 96 minutes

Director: Ishiro Honda

Starring: Takashi Shimura, Akihiko Hirata, Akira Takarada

I do not fear the explosive power of the atomic bomb. What I fear is the explosive power of evil in the human heart.                                                                                               ~Albert Einstein

Godzilla/Gojira is an acknowledged classic of fantasy cinema.  Perhaps it is not flawless, but it's damned close.  Its pace is largely unflagging, even in the human interest sections (which contribute to the considerable contextual depth within the film).  Those sections that punctuate the monster action elucidate the themes (Japanese fatalism, fear of the destructive power of science and technology, the psychic scars that afflict the survivors of a terrible national tragedy), symbolism (the monster itself), and origins (what are they exactly?  We don’t really know) surrounding Godzilla; they are what makes the beast (as we all know from viewing the movie or reading example upon example of critiques or reviews that dissect this film)  a very particularly Japanese metaphor for nuclear annihilation. 

The opening of the movie, even after all these years, is stunning.  The experience is first an aural one.  The opening sound we hear is like that of a telephone post striking a solid metal wall.  There is a consistent rhythm to its beat.  Over this is tracked another very loud noise, as yet unidentified, that can only be described as some amalgam of metallic moorings ripping asunder and the hybrid of an elephant’s and lion’s roar.  This immediately precedes the score and main theme.  It has been described elsewhere in these terms, but I find the word to be so apt that I cannot and do not want to avoid using it.  The theme is, in a word, martial.  The sharp staccato pulses of the strings increases the urgency and tension inherent in the music.  The root note or key rises an octave.  The dynamism of the theme establishes an expectation for what we see later in the movie; it is foreboding and apprehensive all the while.  The score is the work of Akira Ifukube, and it must rank among the greatest pieces of theme music in any fantastic film within the history of the genre. 

We open on the Eiko Maru, a large fishing boat in the Japanese Sea.  Crew members are gathered on deck relaxing, when they observe a large and powerful light just beneath the plane of the water’s surface.  The light is pulsating as if from some power source that waxes and wanes.  This ominous occurrence is proceeded by a shot of the ship engulfed in flames.  Actually it is a shot of a miniature ship set afire with lighter fluid and a match, floating in a large swimming pool beyond which is a matte drawing.  While we’re on the subject, the pulsating light itself is probably a large, high wattage light bulb insulated by a waterproofed electrical line, just beneath the surface of the water (I’m not certain how the strobe effect is achieved, although that would be easy enough to jerry-rig).  ANNOYING ASIDE THAT ADDS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO THIS REVIEW: you know the sort of light I’m talking about: people with lake front property sometimes put them in the water just beyond the shoreline to attract bug; then the bugs attract the fish.  Anyway, and this is the salient aspect of this whole digression, it would seem that whatever is the origin from which the light emanates is an incredibly powerful source of energy.          

A cascade of events ensues upon the inexplicable loss at sea of the Eiko.  A sister ship, the Bingo Maru, is sent by the owner, South Sea Shipping (highly original, n’est-ce pas?) to search for the first vessel.  It suffers the same fate. Three lone survivors of the Bingo alight on the shore of Ohto Island, a fishing village, where they then tell a strange story.  Then a third ship disappears (now at this point, I was beginning to think, “fuck, people, it might be time to revisit your rescue process; send a damn helicopter next time” – then again, choppers never fare well in these nature run amok movies either; think Jaws or Grizzly).  A reporter is sent to investigate the claims of the three survivors of the Bingo and a local village fisherman from Ohto who raves of seeing a monster while on the sea.  During this journalist's stay, a violent storm rages on the island.  Simultaneously occurring with that storm are those same eerie flashing lights and the destruction of several village structures…and the helicopter used to transport the reporter (see what I mean?).  What is more, we hear a terrible roar that sounds suspiciously like the one accompanying the opening theme music (the sound a metallic elephant would make).   

Back in town, and by that I mean Tokyo, it would appear that the same guy who works for South Sea Shipping and was sent to salvage one of the lost ships, Hideto Ogato (Akira Takarada),  is the secret boyfriend of Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kōchi), whose father just coincidentally happens to be the famed paleontologist and marine biologist, Kyohai Yamane (the great Akira Kurosawa lent one of his very favorite actors, Takashi Shimura, to his good friend, Ishiro Honda).  Now, I’m not a scientist, but that strikes me as rather implausible academic cross-training in disparate disciplines, doesn’t it?  in any event, it is he who is tasked with forming an expedition to Ohto Island to investigate claims of some sort of enormous sea serpent, an idea that has gained media time because of the confluence of different witnesses talking essentially the same shit. 

Why do they send a paleontologist slash marine biologist at this juncture, you might ask?  Well, it’s not just the three Bingo survivors and the Ohto Island fisherman who are raving about this gigantic beast.  The crazed village idiot (and every village has one; although, as I recall, the village of my birth seemed to have a disproportionately larger number than most) starts in about a monster he calls “Godzilla,” a legendary carnivorous dinosaur-like creature who lives in the sea.  This creature has been known to destabilize the fishing economy of the island from time to time and has occasionally come ashore to devour its human inhabitants (as this villager is the sole adherent to the legend, it would seem that Godzilla hasn't made an appearance in quite a few years; one suspects that the mythic tale has been passed to only a select few such as he).  Also, a child whose home was one of the huts destroyed in the storm claims to have seen some giant monster leaving the scene of the mayhem which claims the lives of his brother and mother, leaving him orphaned and homeless (which, I suppose, will make him a good candidate to fill the role of the next generation’s prophetic village dunce).  Hmmm…maybe the crazy old bastard isn’t so crazy as he seems. 

Perhaps the Japanese authorities are willing to entertain the idea of a giant prehistoric sea monster, but the introduction of Kyohai always seems to me at least a little premature.  Even the island’s inhabitants at least initially dismiss the claims of the old villager (again, whose tale’s beast must be a legend he himself has never personally seen; either there would be, in the current age within which he is living, direct evidence of the existence of Godzilla and other villagers who had seen the monster, or Ohto Island’s secret is as well kept as the location of Skull Island).  The young boy’s statement regarding what he saw, although we know it to be true, could as easily be dismissed as the result of shock, grief, and susceptibility to the story of the old man.

Meanwhile, the send-off to the expedition is witnessed by a mysterious man, thin, wearing an eyepatch with an enigmatic expression on his face; this is Dr. Daisuke Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata).  He used to be Emiko’s squeeze, or at least they are betrothed or were engaged or something along those lines (Emiko eventually breaks up with the slightly sinister doctor some time later, clearing the path for Hideto).  The injury that necessitates the eyepatch is never explained, but he’s got that thousand yard stare (which must be taxing for a guy with only one eye) and we are perhaps encouraged to wonder if he has terrible personal knowledge of the destruction at Nagasaki or Hiroshima (in which event, really, he ought to be glad he’s not a gelatinous stain somewhere or that he doesn’t have three or four eyes to cover up).  

Daisuke is the last of the four lead actors, and his character, motivation, and scientific acumen is of extreme importance to the outcome of the movie.  I’ve already at least alluded to this, but the triumph of Godzilla over just about any other daikaju eiga (giant monster movie), including its many sequels and save for the great 1933 King Kong, is that the story itself is rich with both text and sub-text in equal measure.  Godzilla himself is both a monster and a metaphor.  The central human players are sympathetic and their characterization is reasonably well-developed for a monster movie.  In Dr. Yamani, Brody, Hooper, and Quint are one.  Within the aspirations of the young lovers, Emiko and Hideto, lies the phoenix-like resolve of a broken nation to heal itself…if only they and the Japanese people can withstand Godzilla’s assault.  And, most significantly, in Dr. Serizawa, a morally complex character who further elucidates the complex thematic material that illustrates the predicament of a modern nation-state that nearly precipitated its own destruction trying to fulfill chauvinistic imperial ambitions; the character epitomizes self-loathing, survivor guilt, shame, arrogance.

Anyway, the expedition ships out to Ohto Island and, upon arrival, begins its investigation.  The scientists find areas on the island contaminated by massive amounts of radiation and a gigantic footprint in the eddies of which is a living trilobite, an oceanic arthropod long since believed extinct.  While all this is being discovered and pondered upon, the village alarm bell is sounded and its people clamor to more fortified areas.  Dr. Kyohai is just climbing the incline of a large hill when the sound of that awful roar is heard and over the hill appears…a ferocious…wait, what is it?...ohmigod it’s a…it’s a fucking hand-puppet, that’s what it is.

    

That’s right, the first time we see this most iconic of all fictional Japanese daikaiju eiga, its monstrous visage horrendous and awesome, Godzilla’s a damned hand-puppet.  And not a particularly good one, either.  Points off.  The admittedly bad taste left in the modern viewer's mouth is redeemed almost immediately by a spectator POV shot of those atop the hill who stare down at the beach from above, where there is visible of the monster’s temporary return to the sea..   This is a great shot.   

Kyohai returns to testify in a government hearing convened on the subject, where he unveils evidence of Godzilla’s existence.  Extraordinarily, he shows them a photo of the hand puppet.  Instead of saying, “Hey, that’s a fucking shitty hand-puppet, Kyohai,” the politicians are aghast at what they see (for the wrong damn reason).  He is asked what can be done, and after speculating about its likely origins and coupling that with the indication that it has been immeasurably strengthened by the atomic energy it has ingested, he pretty much concludes by saying there’s really not a damned thing that can kill Godzilla.  Now you may ask yourself, “What the fuck does a paleo-marine biologist know about killing a 200ft, therapod-like reptilian creature that breathes fire?”  And right you would be, I think.  Kyohai is a scientist. 

Serizawa, on the other hand, is both a scientist and a researcher/inventor.  One of his most recent inventions is a thing called a Motherfucking Oxygen Destroyer (sans the motherfucking), and the bad bitch does as its name suggests.  In fact, he has shown the technology to Emiko, who was justly horrified, as is Serizawa himself.  It’s been a while since last I saw Godzilla, so I don’t remember if he was threatening when he did so, like, “Bitch, this is what I’ll do to you if you break up with me!  If I can’t have you, no one can…moo-hahahahaha!”  I’m pretty sure he doesn’t.  but does swear her to secrecy, one she feels compelled to break when she realizes it may be the one thing that can save  Japanese and the world from the monster’s destructive wrath.

I don't want to say much more about the movie, other than to concur with those who believe Godzilla is one of the greatest giant monster movies ever made, second only to King Kong.  In 1952, the first time since the dawn of the atomic age, King Kong was re-released and made more money than ever (apparently more than any previous re-issue of the classic; more even than the movie made in its original run in 1933).  A canny producer thought there might be a market for a new giant monster movie.  Ray Harryhausen convinced him that such a monster could be achieved realistically and fairly inexpensively, just as Kong had been.  That movie was The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and it, too, made a fair sum of money.  It also introduced the concept that atomic bomb testing might unleash or even create monstrosities we as a society were ill-equipped to face on any number of levels, logistically, politically, culturally. 

  

Across the ocean, a rising star of Japan’s Toho Studios, the producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, was similarly canny and conceived of a very Japanese incarnation of much the same concept.  I am going to say very little on the next subject, because it has been said elsewhere with more eloquence and thoughtfulness than I might bring to bear, but very simply, for those of you who, like me, are not the most adept at recognizing symbol or allegory: Godzilla is a metaphor for the atomic bomb.  It is, for the Japanese people, a very distinct and unique symbol, and a horrifying one.  The point is explicitly made more than once in the film.  It permeates the mood of the movie entirely.  The annihilation of Tokyo is merely the denouement; the climax of the movie a reiteration of the same.

Random Thoughts/Interesting Tidbits

Unlike the giant ants of THEM!, yet similar to the Rhedosaurus of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Gojira was not created (or, more accurately, genetically altered/mutated) by nuclear radiation, but initially awakened after many years and then strengthened by it.  He consumes the radiation somehow and, instead of being destroyed by it, is further empowered.  He breathes flame and his stegosaurus-like dorsal fins simultaneously glow.     

While I joke about the hand-puppet and other somewhat mildly unconvincing aspects of the f/x work, it doesn’t sully the film for me at all.  I have always been a fool for miniature models of cities, planes, helicopters, tanks and such (countrysides, too, such as in War of the Gargantuas).  When I see the burning boats, I know they are models in a swimming pool set afire by a match and lighter fluid.  Yet, while artificial, the effects do not look cheap or shoddy, and I for one can believe there are men burning alive in those flames (itty-bitty men, maybe, but men nonetheless).  If I am not mistaken, the f/x guru responsible for this work, including Godzilla's rubber suit, was Eiji Tsuburaya.  The man who wore than suit and imbued the monster with motion and menace, for quite a long time, was Haruo Nakashima.  These early creators are important people.  If contemporary SFX artisans are great, it is only because these men and women stand on the shoulders of the legendary giants who preceded them and were arguably greater than they (because all they had to work with were rubber bands, sticks, and glue).  

Anyway, on what was clearly a limited budget that was probably largely expended between director Ishiro Honda, a contemporary and friend of Akira Kurosawa;  Takashi Shimura, also one of Kurosawa’s most favored actors;  and the massive miniature set of Tokyo, there was likely not much remaining for even the Gojira suit itself.  Given the limitations, it is impressive what the creativity and ingenuity of the SFX crew was able to accomplish.

Lastly, for those of you who would like to read what I consider to be the best review and critique of Godzilla that I have yet read (passionate, profound, and well-articulated), see Lyz Kingsley's critique at “And You Call Yourself a Scientist.”  Truly, if it has been argued similarly but better elsewhere, a reviewer should defer to that source; if I had anything original to say beyond what she has already said, which I doubt, it is through pure serendipity.  Her reviews are informed, comprehensive, and often, laugh-out-loud hilarious.  And she does it without profanity, a feat I find extremely difficult.   

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 10/10

Cabin in the Woods

Rating: R

Run Time: 95 minutes

Director: Drew Goddard

Starring: Kristen Connelly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchinson

SPOILER ALERT:  if you have not seen this movie yet, do not read this review, which is really more of a commentary anyway...

Cabin in the Woods/CITW is probably one of the most written-about horror movies in recent memory.  I'm not so much of an egotist as to believe I’m going to add a whole hell of a lot to what’s already been said.  Then again, what the hell.  Since I'm merely going to add my two cents to what's already been said by perhaps more eloquent voices, there's no real need to rehash the plot in anything other than the broadest of outlines; you probably already know it anyway.  So, here we go: the cast of college students, all of whom cut against type in one significant way or another, travel to a cabin in the woods and, in short order, start dying.  That, in a nutshell, is our point of departure.

I have come here to praise CITW, not bury it.  But I’m going to address the things I didn’t care for first.  My criticisms are nothing new either, but they diminish, just a smidgeon, the overall accomplishment of the film, although I'm torn as to whether it compromises the experience of watching it.  Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon made a decision to riff on a pretty specific sub-category of horror cinema but seem to imply that their commentary has universal application to the horror movie genre, which I’m not so sure of.  As has been said, the whole cabin in the woods scenario (specifically, the locale) would seems to specifically apply to The Evil Dead, its sequel, maybe the F13 franchise and its various first cousin campgrounds slasher flicks (movies like The Burning, Sleepaway Camp, The Final Terror, and these specifically in terms of locale and the slasher rules of the game: character types, Final Girls, sex=death, etc.).  I don’t think they care to reference Wrong Turn and its sequels or Cabin Fever and its sequels.

Yet the motif we have here, despite the multiplicity of options available to the players (all of which end in death, of course), adheres much more closely to the slasher film than any other recognizable form I am aware of.  The archetypes of slut, athlete, intellectual, fool, and virgin more properly belong to that playing field than anything else today, and that whole genre is beginning to run out of steam…yet again (save for the recent unnecessary remakes of so many of them; will the slasher never die?).  The director Goddard’s explanation is that the guises of the game have changed over the years, or even centuries, but the stakes have always been the same and the formula must stay fresh and current, consistent with any particular society's (Western, Asian, racial/ethnic) prevailing cultural fears and apprehensions.  If that is true, then maybe the filmmakers’ explanation for why we are presented with some strange combination of the demon possession slash-zombie gut-muncher-slash redneck/hillbilly horror-slash-lonely woods slasher killer sub-genres is a valid one.  I can live with that.  Particularly when that distinctly Western image is juxtaposed against the J-horror trope in another environment.

Still, I don’t know if it is true that the most enduring horror tropes of the current cultural landscape still involve a manipulation of clichés developed in movies from the ‘80s.  That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case in the other countries we are shown who participate in the ritual, whose horror motifs seem more current that our U. S. variety (although, admittedly, the Asians have been making horror movies about ghosts for years; we have only recently taken notice).  Still, I must admit that a perusal of new horror releases at Netflix or Vudu seems to confirm the Whedon/Goddard argument.

Whatever the case, the experience of watching the movie is still dizzying and thought-provoking.  Not perhaps as thought-provoking at the intellectual level as a classical philosopher's dialectical discussion of, say, Virtue or Justice; but still, one demanding the viewer pay close attention to the film to get the absolute most out of it.  CITW is one worth repeat viewing to tease everything out (unless I'm just obtuse).

I don’t often read much after the fact to learn what the creators of most forms of art or entertainment were trying to say with their creations; it is, I think, a fault of mine.  Still, a benefit to this approach is that, if or when I do go back to look for explanations, it can be personally gratifying to see how closely my understanding of a movie matches the creators’ intentions, and that can’t be a bad thing; unless, of course, my thoughts don’t match the creators’ own, in which case I feel rather like a fool.  I find that I feel like a fool frequently.

In any event, if it is true that Whedon and Goddard were trying to revitalize certain older forms and parody torture porn equally (as has also been suggested), I say the result is a failure.  If, on the other hand, they are commenting on how humanity’s appreciation of scary stories is rooted in a much deeper, darker, more sinister precedent, then the result is nothing less than brilliant…or at least pretty damned smart.  I’m going with the latter, because that is much more interesting an idea anyway and seems to be an explicit theme in the screenplay.  That the rules of the game are merely symbols of fetishistic elements in a ritual designed to save us by appeasing something terrible; that, for me, adds a depth of meaning to our viewing experience that makes us simultaneously voyeurs and co-conspirators. 

If that is so, are we experiencing some crazy movie within a movie?  Is art imitating life?  That is, are the creators suggesting that the tropes of horror films developed from genuine rituals?  Not literally, of course, but in the Jungian archetypal sense?  Race memory, even.  Does horror fulfil a need similar to the Aristotelian theory regarding tragedy, to trigger some cathartic event that allows us to vicariously relieve ourselves of the weight on our souls?  It cannot be as simple as pure escapism, because we could say all movies fulfil that role; all are fantasy, after all.  Horror satisfies the need in us to be horrified, which is distinct from terror.  If a simple definition of horror describes the intrusion of the unnatural or abnormal into the natural/normal, perhaps horror operates to allow us to view our otherwise shitty, dissatisfied lives through a different prism. 

Yes, it is true that my life sucks, but I’m not:

1. The parent of a child who is possessed by a demon
2. Being stalked through the woods by an indestructible, zombie serial killer
3. In thrall to a vampire who is slowly draining my life away
4. Haunted by a malevolent ghost who won’t quit fucking with me

This view is a little like Alvie Singer's philosophy concerning the horrible and the miserable, which I paraphrase: the horrible are people who have three eyes, are horribly disfigured, or who are double amputees; the miserable is everyone else.

Or, more cynically, is the movie just an example of the tail wagging the dog?  Is it all a big joke?  Like, “Hey, let’s make a movie where, come to find out, the horror in horror movies is really orchestrated by a cynical cabal of corporate types to appease the angry nether gods?”  Because, you know what?  There is a sense in which it is!  The corporate types are Hollywood executives, who are the cynical arbiters of what kind of horror we want to see (unless they decide we don’t want to see any kind of horror during a certain period; in which case they’ll nix any plans and bury anything in production or even some stuff already in the can, like, oh say, The Cabin in the Woods- It’s ultimately all about the money, after all, isn’t it?); anyway, that would make us the angry crowd that needs to be fed Christians.  Is that my original idea?  No.  Is that necessarily even valid?  Who knows?  

And please let’s not use the prefix “meta” to define all of this, shall we?  We hear meta this and meta that being tossed about far too liberally and often these days; its misuse has diminished the term’s value considerably.  I say, meta-fuck it…let’s meta-move on.  Oh, and while we’re at it, down with “post-modern,” too.

The movie doesn’t work without Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford as Sitterson and Hadley.  They walk the fine, perfect line between irreverent disregard for the victims they are condemning to ritualistic death and a solemn appreciation for what compels them to do so.  It is often difficult to tell whether or not their inappropriate jokey banter is a defense mechanism against the greater realization of the awful truth of what forces them to sacrifice these victims (who are, by the way, unlike so many characters who populate shitty movies of this ilk, likeable people; I don’t think that was accidental on the filmmakers’ part) or whether they’re just dickheads. 

The screenplay presents them as cocky assholes, but we have not scratched too far beneath the veneer before we reinterpret what we’ve seen to conclude that they are, if nothing else, highly competent professionals whose skill in orchestrating and directing each aspect of the ritual is vital to its success.  And they are two very frightened men.  Really, imagine the incredible pressure inherent in the job.  In terms of CEO pay, if these guys are executive level, they fucking earn that 200 times the amount of the least highly paid employee at the Facility.  They’re still assholes, though.

The last show to attempt anything quite as tricky as CITW (one or two false moves and the edifice crumbles) was, I suppose, Wes Craven's Scream, itself viewed by most as a post-modern twist on the slasher.  I love Wes Craven.  His ability to reinvent himself through consistently developing good ideas that resonate with the prevailing culture in at least three different decades is as uncanny as it is ultimately profitable to the studios that trust him.  I think we could even say CITW is something of an elaboration upon the ideas elucidated within his New Nightmare in the sense that he posits a real and frightening actuality behind what we horror fans look upon as just plain fun.  

Much has been said regarding how the movie works as a loving homage to and a subversive critique of the horror genre.  How exactly the film works as this nifty hybrid is another story, and I still have a host of unanswered questions that bugged me, mostly in a good way, about the movie:

• Are the monsters real or facsimiles, cloned, robotic, what?
• How are potential employees of the Facility introduced to its purpose and the horrible truth it conceals from the rest of us?  What if they decline the job after it's offered?  
• How exactly did the sacrificial system develop over time and what might have been earlier
• scenarios and victim archetypes?
• Just how does the movie within a movie work?  Are horror tropes (literary or otherwise)  
• borrowed from the reality of the sacrificial system, or is the converse true?
• What exactly do they do the other 364 days out of the year?     

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 7/10
    

THEM! (1954)

Rated: NR

Run Time: 94 minutes

Director: Gordon Douglas

Starring: James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon

THEM!’s entertainment value as a horror film is intrinsically noteworthy in itself without any examination of its significance in post-WWII American culture as a metaphor for its citizens’ fear of atomic power in an ever more dangerous geopolitical world.  Yet it was also just that: a very contextually relevant movie relative to the era within which it was made.  I have never been shy in voicing my admiration for Stephen King, both regarding his work as an author and his critical commentary on the genre within which he works: bottom line, Stephen King is a passionate horror aficionado who has what I consider to be a keen understanding of how horror works, in either film or print.  That we must explore the impact of horror film and literature through the prism of its sociological import is perhaps not wholly original, but King’s articulation of the theory in Danse Macabre is a comprehensive refinement of the notion.   At its very core, horror is a genre replete with cautionary tales; its monsters and ghosts are metaphors and symbols used to explore our fears across a largely allegorical landscape (except for exploitation fare like the slasher subgenre; that’s just all about tits and gore).  There is no greater validation of this theory to be found than in the horror/sci-fi of the 1950s, in America and elsewhere.

Released three years after the Hawks/Nyby, The Thing, and within the same year as Gojira/Godzilla (itself, we must remember, Tojo Studios’ answer to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms), THEM! was one of the first (not the first) movies to address the potentially disastrous consequences facing humanity in the very new nuclear world if we did not treat “Oppenheimer’s deadly toy” with care.  Pandora’s Box had been breached.  While the consequences of those fateful discoveries are still being played out in the post-modern world, that’s not what we’re concerned with today.

I do believe THEM! has the distinction of being the first giant insect movie, although I suppose Wells in part got there first in literature, as he so often did, with Food of the Gods.

THEM!’s opening immediately immerses us in the action that propels the story (there’s not a lot of fat on the movie’s bones):  A New Mexico State Police cruiser and airplane are liaisoning ground to air to confirm the report of a civilian aircraft pilot who said he saw a little girl walking, apparently aimlessly, through the desert.  Just before they turn in for the day, the pilot spots the girl.  He wheels around and turns back to where he saw movement and at this point, the plane is very much the focal point of the camera.  Then the camera draws back and downward, showing us the desert-scape.  A little girl with pigtails who is holding a doll walks right into the frame and the camera begins to follow her advance.  This is a neat idea; I’m not sure why, but I’ve never seen anything quite like it.  

The girl appears catatonic and is displaying one serious-ass thousand yard stare.

The sergeant of the cruiser, Ben Peterson (a young James Whitmore), brings the girl back to the car.  The pilot announces he’s found a trailer/mobile home.  When Ben and his partner respond to this scene, they observe several bizarre things:  an unusual impression in the ground (a sort of print), a ransacked interior whose metal façade has been ripped or shredded outward, the presence of sugar cubes within and without the mobile home, bloody clothing, other torn fabric, money intact (not a robbery) and a small revolver.  Ben does the old (and much-maligned among forensic scientists) “pick up the gun by sticking a fucking pen in the barrel, thus possibly altering the interior of the barrel such that a later identification cannot be made using unique rifling characteristics .” 

Forensic firearms analysis in 1954 was almost certainly not as advanced at that point, but, even if the sub-discipline were technologically capable of such examinations, because, as it turn out, it doesn’t really matter anyway because our suspects are (***SPOILER ALERT***) giant-ass ants who couldn’t hold a tiny gun like that in their little claw hands anyway.  Ben also finds a piece of the little girl’s missing doll (a portion of the pre-fabricated head).  This is explained without a word of dialogue as Ben silently demonstrates to his partner how both the small swatch of fabric and the piece of the doll’s head fit together like pieces of a puzzle; a wordless and intelligent example of “show, don’t tell” cinematic technique.  Now we know where the little girl came from.

Ben’s partner tells us that we have ourselves a 914 (exactly what I was thinking).  The police request the assistance of crime scene investigators and an ambulance for the girl.  When she is safely loaded, we hear for the first time a creepy and exceedingly high-pitched screeching noise.  The girl bolts upright and wide-eyed in her stretcher, until the noise stops.  I appreciate the interesting ways the film builds tension by showing us step by step that we need to be afraid of something, because the little girl sure as hell is, even before we know what it is we should be afraid of.

Ben and his partner next visit the local gas station/feed supply/convenience store called “Johnson’s” owned and run by Gramps (I thought they called him Cramps, at first), where they find present many of the same phenomena as at the trailer site: wooden siding ripped outward, the place ransacked but nothing missing from the cash register, a shotgun with its barrel bent crooked, and sugar spilled from a barrel that is crawling with hundreds of tiny ants (Ben casually runs his fingers through the sugar and ants; it’s a smart visual and a bit of clever foreshadowing simultaneously).  Gramps is there, too, but he’s deader than the proverbial door nail, lying there in the cellar wide-eyed and bespattered with blood.  Ladies and gentlemen, it looks like another damned 914.

Ben and partner split up as darkness descends and we hear that awful, eerie, high-pitched screeching sound.  The deputy (whose name I don’t remember, but let’s call him Barnie for convenience’s sake because he’s about to die anyway), revolver drawn, goes to investigate.  This, as it turns out, is a rather regrettable decision. 

The next day, the New Mexico police authorities (which is pretty much just Ben at this point, what with Barnie being dead and all) learn the little girl is the only survivor of a family whose dad was an F.B.I. agent.  The family was apparently vacationing in, that’s right, the fucking desert.  Why the G-man would bring his whole family out into nowhere is beyond me; literally, the trailer’s in the middle of the goddamned New Mexico desert.  Anyway, because of the newly-discovered federal nexus, the F.B.I. sends out one of their own, another special agent, to assist in the investigation.  The agent’s name is Robert Graham and he’s played with a sort of breezy authority by James Arness, who really was one tall motherfucker.  He was, of course, the original “The Thing” itself, and it was his towering stature that lent that film whatever frightening aura it possesses (I happen to think it possesses quite a lot).

The group gathered learn from the pathologist who performed the autopsy that Gramps could have died of several different injuries or afflictions: neck and back broken, chest crushed, skull fractured, and enough formic acid in him to kill twenty men.  How exactly he would know what a lethal dose of formic acid was is a mystery?  Perhaps Mengele experimented with it at Auschwitz (those Germans and their meticulous documentation).  Ladies and gentlemen, we’re closing in on WTF time.  Then the New Mexico captain goes off and says this asinine thing, like they have “…lots of evidence loaded with clues.”  What?  It reminded me of Churchill’s famous statement about the inscrutability of the Soviet Union, except when Churchill said it, it made sense.

So now it’s time to call in the experts, and who do they choose?  Entomologists, that’s who.  Why?  Well, that‘s a damned good question.  Sure, we know from the poster that giant ants are at the bottom of this crisis, but they certainly have no reason to believe so at this juncture.  The entomologists are the Drs. Medford, father and daughter.  The two quickly (and rather cryptically) make a connection between the White Sands, New Mexico, site of the explosion of the first atomic bomb, and the strange phenomena they are made privy to and which they presently witness.  Do they share any of this with the authorities?  No, no they don’t.  They just keep on with the cryptic innuendo without really saying much of anything we or the authorities can make sense of.  Perhaps, we should not be too surprised.  Medford the Elder is, after all, the world’s foremost myrmecologist (which I figured was an expert on mythical aquatic half-women, half-fish creatures).  Father and daughter toss out words like “Formicidae.”  Cryptically…  

Anyway, taking the presence of formic acid into consideration, the senior Dr. Medford waves a small jar of the stuff under the silent little girl’s nose as an experiment of sorts.  Of course, we all know where this is going: she flips her shit.  Her heretofore frozen, unblinking eyes begin to rapidly rise and fall and she screams.  She jumps out of her chair and runs to the closest thing to a corner, shouting, “Them! Them!”  Interestingly, this won’t be the last time they (the ants, that is) are referred to as such.  There next step, as night falls, is to take another trip to the desert.  Before they do so, Graham tells the older man, “It’s getting late out there, doctor,” to which Medford Senior replies, “Later than you think.”  Cryptically…

In the desert, the doctors, still maintaining silence about their working theory, discuss the possibility that whatever is responsible for the recent disappearances has turned carnivorous because its natural diet has become sparse.  I’m no scientist, but I don’t think it works that way.  Besides, aren’t ants carnivorous anyway?  No matter…  The junior doctor, Pat, separates from the men to investigate something just below a crest or ridge of sand when that screeching noise returns.  Pat obliviously looks downward when the head of a gigantic ant with enormous mandibles ascends the crest and provides us our first look at the film’s villains.  We’re off… 

The remainder of the film is a thrilling and suspenseful race against the clock to destroy the ants before THEY overrun and destroy us.  As Mr. Dr. Medford says, they are a “A fantastic mutation probably caused by lingering radiation from the first atomic bomb.”  Directed by Gordon Douglas, THEM! is a tautly paced thriller as the authorities and scientists, on the same page in this one in terms of knowing the ants must be destroyed, first eradicate a nest only to find two breeders who can fly have escaped.  Speaking of that, hell, it’s even got Fess Parker in a bit part right before the launch of “Davy Crocket.”  The effort to both locate the ants and find a way to destroy them assumes the remainder of the movie’s running time, leading to the justly famous climax within the storm drains of the City of Angels.     

So, here we have our first Man vs. Nature, sub-category: Giant Insect Movie, with the horrible causative factor being radioactive nuclear fallout; this, together with alien invaders (those fucking communists), would be the well from which 50s fantastic cinema would draw again and again, but perhaps never so successfully or as intelligently as here.  (Save for Godzilla, of course, which uses its monster-as-metaphor for nuclear annihilation with a different twist).  “THEM!” is a deserved classic, a well-crafted movie with sympathetic characters and believable special effects.  The resolution in the L. A. storm drains is creepy and a lastingly iconic image of fantastic cinema & horror/sci-fi (often copied and later parodied lovingly by Larry Cohen’s “It’s Alive!”).  If the film were made today, the denouement after Dr. Medford’s final cautious remarks about what the future might hold would almost certainly contain a final scene showing a nest of giant ant eggs beginning to hatch in some remote and unknown location.

DISPARATE THOUGHTS

Wonderful imagery:

The aerial and then ground view of the ant at the apex of the desert nest with a human rib cage in its mandibles; the ant drops the detritus and it rolls down the hill past skulls and other bleached human bones (and the missing officer’s Sam Brown belt).

The first glimpse of the very heart of the first colony’s nest:  You can see motion within the yet hatched eggs, all mist and glistening sacs; I would be surprised if Ridley Scott did not copy this image as a jumping point for the visuals of the facehugger/queen’s eggs in Alien.

The last view from above (camera vantage, that is) of the latest winged queens, heads swaying and mandibles clenching and unclenching…justly famous.

Beautiful New Mexico desert setting, all large cacti and sagebrush, winds and sands…and big fucking ants.

First of the oversized animal that otherwise appears naturally in the world and wreaks terrible destruction movies (Jaws,  Grizzly, Claws, The Swarm, Squirm, Snowbeast (hey, I believe in Yetis), etc.) – the first age feared nuclear fallout, the next alienation and distrust of government in the wake of Vietnam (Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes) the next age toxic waste (Toxic Avenger, C.H.U.D, Return of the Living Dead, Prophesy,)…what next, I wonder?    

About that earlier comment that slasher flicks are just for horny teenage boys: It would seem that even slasher horror has sociological merit (however dubious).  Carol J. Glover, whom I would identify, rightly or wrongly, as a Freudian feminist (in just that order), has quite a bit to say about the subtext of these otherwise disposable films.  I’m looking for a copy of her Men, Women, & Chainsaws, but if you, like me, have a difficult time finding that one, check out her essay in Screening Violence, itself a tremendously informative look at the historical, aesthetic, and social aspects of violence in cinema.

The Horror Inkwell Rating: 8/10