Aww...they're so cute when they're passed out.

I hate 3D on general principal and consider it a classless, money-grubbing gimmick, trotted out whenever panic grips the hearts of backward-looking Hollywood beancounters. I reached this conclusion early in life after coming to grips with just how awful Freddy’s Dead, Jaws 3D, and Friday the 13th Part 3D really were. But every critic has that one 3D skeleton in the closet. One black mark on their critical scorecard. One film they like in spite – or perhaps because of -  the occasional distracting bit of visual cheese.

Creature from the Black Lagoon is mine. Despite coming out twenty-three years after the other monster movies that celebrated their sixtieth anniversaries in 1991, it made its way onto VHS and into my eight-year-old-self’s collection. I can’t think of a better time to give yourself a classical monster education. And what could be more classical than ripping-off King Kong‘s “beauty and the beast” angle?

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

"Is that...Orson Wells career? My God, look at that calcification."

Unfortunately for my conscience, this movie wouldn’t exist without 3D. It’s producer William Alland (who played Our Reporter in Citizen Kane) originally heard the legend of an Amazonian fish-man in 1941, from cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa…who’d go onto film, among other things, John Ford’s The Fugitive and Two Mules for Sister Sara. For whatever reason, Alland sat on the legend for ten years, eventually turning it over to Universal housewriters Harry Essex (who’d go on to write What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) Maurice Zimm (who’d go on to write…at least eight episodes Perry Mason) and Arthur Ross (who’d go onto write Satan’s School for Girls. Funny where some people’s career paths take them, isn’t it?)

By the time Creature had an actual script the Vincent Price-headlined House of Wax was raking in loads of cash for Warner Brothers. Universal couldn’t help but answer a month later with It Came from Outer Space. It‘s director, Jack Arnold, was the natural choice to helm what I’m sure Universal considered, at the time, to be the next logical step: an underwater 3D movie. That’ll pack the theaters, right?

Right. And it’ll make an eight-year-old shut up and pay attention, because the movie opens with the formation of Earth itself! Fantasia made us wait 40 minutes for stuff like that, but Creature from the Black Lagoon‘s all like, “Boom! There you go. That’s how you begin: at the beginning! Of everything! Suck those nuts.” Eight-year-old me admired the audacity of this, the same way he admired films that started off with a nuclear war. (With Damnation Alley being the winner of those particular Olympics.) Significantly-older me can’t help wondering if that’s Criswell providing our opening narration. It isn’t, but it’s fun to dream.

The Gillman's always been an ankle man.

Also, I gotta smile at Our Humble Narrator’s tortured attempts to reconcile geological history with the opening lines of Genesis. “In the beginning,” he intones, “God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form and void.” Cut to “the planet Earth, newly formed and cooling rapidly for millions of years.” Our Humble Narrator guides us through the formation of continents, oceans, and finally, life itself. “The record of life is written on the land. Where, fifteen million years later, Man is still trying to read it.”

I can just see some asshole Fundamentalist in the audience going, “You mean four thousand years, right? Aww…fuck this movie. Secularist propaganda’s what this is. Probably Communist. That’s it! 3D is a Communist plot!” We’ll forgive our three writer’s complete refusal to do any research into the actual time-scale of evolution…or anything that might’ve let accurate information come within miles of their script. However, I reserve the right to mock them for it, as even eight-year-old me could call “bullshit” on some of bullshit we’ll hear later on.

Anyway. One person “still trying to read” the record of life is Dr. Caral Maia (Antonio Moreno), a paleontologist exploring the Amazon jungle’s finer (California-looking) rocky hillsides. He and his Indian Companions (Rodd Redwing and Perry Lopez) spend the opening scene going gaga over the fossilized hand of what appears to be a fishman, jutting ominously from the stones (and right into Arnold’s camera). Maia carts the find home, leaving his Indian Companions to the tender mercies of that un-fossilized fishman who’s been observing them All This Time.

"...and it was THIS big!"

The Creature – or Gillman, whatever you want to call him – is backed throughout his trilogy by another iconic score, composed by the once-again-uncredited Henry Mancini and Herman Stein, with a little help from Hans J. Salter. You might not know his name, but you’ll certainly know his work, as Slater either composed or directed the music for pretty much every Universal horror film after Son of Frankenstein. That’s part of why Creature feels like such a worthy successor to those films. Its score’s filled with enough big brass to make Cab Calloway dance because and an undertheme that may have inspired John William’s score for Jaws. It’s as classical as the structure of this film’s story because everyone knows brass = prehistoric monsters. Just like theremins = alien invasions and/or space travel.

Meanwhile, Maia arrives at the Instituto de Biologia Maritima, temporary home of Maia’s former students, Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams) and Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson). Impressed with Maia’s find, Dr. Reed convinces el Instituto’s head, Mark Williams (Richard Denning) to fund a little field trip for all involved, since it looks like the Instituto’s entire staff of…what, like, five people?…follows Maia back to the rock wall.

Dr. Reed used to be a personal hero of mine, mostly because his name was David and he got to scuba dive for a living. (That’s all you need to do to be a marine biologist, right?) Now I see David Reed for the sexist, speechifying douche he really is, and wonder what the holy fucking hell his girlfriend sees in him. I’ll admit, sometimes you need someone to make a Stirring Speech and get the plot moving, but there’s a wide gap between the stirring speeches here and the ones Bradbury wrote for that last Arnold/Carlson collaboration:

David: More and more we’re learning the meaning and the value of marine research. Look, look over here  – this lung fish. The bridge between fish and the land animal. There are many thousands of ways nature tried to get life out of the sea and onto the  land. This one failed. He hasn’t changed in millions of years. But here – here we have a clue to and answer. Someday spaceships will be traveling from Earth to other planets. How are human beings going to survive on those planets? The atmosphere will be different; the pressures will be different. By studying these, and other species, we add to our knowledge of how live evolved, how it adapted itself to this world. With that knowledge, perhaps we can teach man to adapt themselves to some new world of the Future.

"I haven't seen you this nervous since we fell into that nest of gundarks."

I’m with Mark: it’s a “nice speech, David,” but it’s written out so clumsily typing into this review (and reading it back…over and over and over) gave me one king hell of a headache. This is the first of many times our Heroic Scientist will link his own job to space exploration. Easy to see why he’d do that: space was the sexy topic of the moment, as demonstrated by the glut of Alien Invasion and/or Space Exploration films from this period. The parallel’s not even all that forced since both environments are inherently hostile to human life. There’d be no way for us to explore either without a whole mess of modern technology…meaning, in a stand-up fight with the average lifeform born into and bred for that environment, human beings are pretty much screwed from the start.

In order to get screwed Our Humans must first rent a boat from my favorite character, Lucas (Nestor Paiva), skipper of the fishing barge Rita and the closest thing to a Working Class Hero in this movie. Paiva’s one of those character actors with the power to disappear into his roles, which is probably why his career stalled out in (Mostly Ethnic) Character Actor Land. At least Paiva’s actually of Portuguese descent, the tenth child of two immigrant grocery store owners, so his is one of the few accents that fits the film’s Amazonian setting.

So we’ve got a group of characters stuck on a boat, going upriver on a journey of discovery they’ll soon regret. This is Monster Movie 101, folks. If I had to pick a literary antecedent, I’d pick Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness because Heart of Darkness is both awesome and awesomely influential.

"...up there, there is so much room, where babies burp and flowers bloom..."

But back to Creature and our doomed crew as they trudge upriver, to a place Lucas knows as “the Black Lagoon; a paradise.” Starring off into the stock footage with his best girl on his arm, Dr. Reed can’t resist the chance to fuck up another scientific fact:

David: This is exactly like it was a hundred and fifty million years ago, when it was part of the Devonian Era.

Yeah, you’re off by about two hundred and ten million years there, Doc. Thank Christ numerical dyslexia has no effect on fossil-finding instincts or this movie would never pick up. But it does, mightily, once they get to the Black Lagoon and make their presence known to its sole inhabitant. James C Havens directed all the underwater sequences that make this film memorable, meaning this is as much his picture as Jack Arnold’s. A lot of his choices might baffle – he lets a lot of shit float into the foreground, way past the point of blurriness – until you remember this movie was originally shot and shown in 3D. All those fish and plants were supposed to jump out at you, along with the Gillman himself. Both directors employ a lot of framing and perspective tricks to heighten the illusion, my favorite being a shot of the Creature’s arm as it reaching through a porthole.

So Mark and David go swimming, the Creature observing them all the while. But then Julie Adams decides to take a dip, triggering the obligatory inter-species lust that’s killed more monsters than Super Science and American Pioneer Spirit combined. Mark immediately gets the hot idea to kill the Creature and cart it back home. (“We must have proof!”) David (initially…and unfortunately) takes the “we can learn more from it if it’s alive,” track. We’re supposed to side with him because he’s Richard Carlson, Savior of Mankind, while Mark’s a money-grubbing asshole who pulls rank like he’s working it to climax:

David: You don’t sound like a Scientist, you sound like some big game hunter out for the kill.

Mark: We may not be back home, David, but you still work for me.

Lucas is a badass. That is all.

And that gives you permission to antagonizing the fish monster who can tear up nets like they’re made of butter and do the same to human flesh? Fuck you, buddy. And keep your hands off my Julie Adams! Then again, Dr. Reed’s no great shakes either. He obviously never caught a revival showing of King Kong, or he’d know exactly what the Gillman was after and exactly how to trap it.

Lacking any genre savvy, the movie proceeds a bit like this: Our Humans try to capture the Creature, it escapes, and one of the incidental characters I haven’t mentioned yet dies. There are plenty of them, because the monster has to kill someone, and we have to save our main character deaths until the end. Again, this is Monster Movie 101, and watching this flick you’ll see the modern iteration of that formula run through its first successful field test. This is the foundation of every Slasher film you’ve ever seen and most of our modern monster movies, from Alien on down. That’s why this film’s important, and why it deserves attention still today. But here comes the punchline

Because the movie’s not that good. The characters are one-note and bland, while their development’s stymied by the fact we never really get to know them until we get to the Black Lagoon. Go back to Heart of Darkness, which wouldn’t be nearly as awesome if it cut right from the mouth of the river to Kurtz’s camp. Or jump forward from Heart to Howard Hawks’ Thing from Another World. In both cases, we get extended build-ups full of lively interactions from enthusiastic actors, allowing us time to get to know these characters before the stresses of survival expose their inner foibles.

Here, thanks to the fact Harry Essex is such a bad dialogue writer (getting easier to believe he just stuck his name on Ray Bradbury’s It Came from Outer Space script all the time), everyone’s foibles are on display from the word go. Marks and asshole. David’s a patronizing fool. Dr. Maia’s the Elder Scientist with no speeches to give, since David’s monopolized that role. Julie Adams is…Julie Adams. And Lucas is Brazilian. None grow over the course of their jungle adventure, so my contempt for them gets to grow unchecked, like a good tumor.

Yep. Idol of American youth, this guy.

All of which allows me to unabashedly root for the monster, another through-line connecting this to previous Universal outings. Played on land by Ben Chapman and underwater by Ricou Browning, the Gillman’s easily the best-looking monsters of his age. Designed by ex-Disney animator Millicent Patrick, the Creature’s a marvel of clashing textures. The contrast of rough and smooth scales, the glint of water on wet skin, and all the thousand and one subtle touches – like the way his gills move as he breathes – give the Gillman a verisimilitude other monsters of his period lacked. Not bad for a pair of $15,000 suits with creepy, dead-looking eyes. Even those fit into the Creature’s overall aesthetic. And they only become obvious once Jack Arnold insists on having the Creature walk directly into the camera. As if he were walking right toward (gasp) the audience!

Yes, it’s exactly the kind of gimmicky, throw-shit-in-our-faces 3D that Arnold’s last film avoided. Shows what I get for praising people. Watching this back-to-back with It Came from Outer Space really underlines what good dialogue (even Bradburyian soliloquies) can bring to the table, and how it can invigorate tales as old as time. Here, everything said is functional, in service of exposition. “We’ve got to do that thing!” “Okay, let’s do that thing, then.” “Oh shit! We can’t do that thing now! Here comes the monster!”

So Creature from the Black Lagoon, for all its fans and all its historical import, winds up being an average monster movie, even for its own time. On the other hand, Creature‘s real star, the Gillman, proved an above-average monster can raise your average monster movie up, and ensure it grabs an above-average slice of box office pie. Hence the increased focus on monsters as the 50s really ramped up, which -  among many, many other things – gave the creature his opportunity…for revenge.

If I had to sum up the 50s SF movie in one image...it'd probably be that trifocal eye from War of the Worlds. But this would be a close second.

3D is bullshit. You know it, I know it. But movie studios and the technology companies allied with them are, as of this writing, wasting billions of dollars on an international propaganda campaign to convince us otherwise. (I know – “Duh!” right? Well, since I currently can’t spit without hitting a trailer for the 3D Phantom Menace, you get to watch me vent about it.) This has happened before, but those who forget the past are condemned to…do something. I forget what just now. Strain their eyes, get headaches and have seizures if this Cal State study from last August is any indication.

Most of us are old enough to remember the 3D craze of the mid-80s. Even if we aren’t, a casual viewing of Friday the 13th Part 3-D or Jaws 3-D will tell us everything we need to know. But tonight I want to go back – way back – and talk about the wave that struck Hollywood in 1952.

A little-remembered man-eating lions epic called Bwana Devil formed the leading edge of that one. One day, I hope to read someone with a bit more clout than I correctly label Bwana Devil “the James Cameron’s Avatar of its era.” Then as now, the novelty of a “new” viewing format (which is as old as film itself, but never mind that now – 3D is the future!) allowed slack-jawed idiots to pretend the crappy, derivative film they just watched somehow “immersed” them in a “new” and/or “visionary” “experience.”

Then as now, talented filmmakers were conscripted to talk 3D up under implicit threat of never working in Hollywood again. Then as now, they made the best movies they could with the cumbersome, half-tested technology of the time and the constant oversight of bosses looking to make a quick buck. Thus was born the movie 3D partisans always trot out when trying to justify the form’s existence: House of Wax.

This though...Barbara Rush officially wins "Best WTF? Face In the History of Cinema."

Actually, I’m lying. Most hacks trot out Dial M for Murder because it’s a Hitchcock movie, and therefore unassailable (in their minds). But that lay over a year down the road from House of Wax, which deserves to be considered in its own time. I bring it up here only to set the context for tonight’s feature, which came out the month after House of Wax and stands as an absurdly important piece of Alien Invasion movie history. It’s not marketed as such, and few have the patience to discover its real importance. Which means I get to tell all of you about it. Hopefully you’ll watch it and  pass it on to your grade-school aged child, permanently wrapping his expectations of what counts as a “good” Alien Invasion movie.

Kinda hard to talk a movie up when its title sequence sends the audience into uncontrollable giggle-fits. Then again, that opening shot of a spherical alien ship crash-landing into the camera  is pretty giggle-worthy. (A) It looks like a giant golf ball that’s (B) obviously hollow and (C) stuffed with magnesium flares. Plus, if you hit Pause in the right place, you can just barely see the mirror they hung to the left of frame. And the support keeping this flaming golfball wired to the ceiling. Then the movie explodes in our face.

Turns out that mess actually had some baring on the plot, because it’s 1953 and Hollywood writers can still define the word “plot” if you asked them. Especially since this film comes to us from SF grand master Ray Bradbury, who (like a lot of writers at the time) spend the early 50s slinging scripts at any producer who’d use them for something other than fishwrapping…including It‘s producer, William Alland. I’ve heard two stories about what followed: either Alland bought a bare bones treatment (or two) from Bradbury and turned it over to one of Universal’s in-house writers, Harry Essex, to finish up…or Alland bought a full script from Bradbury, with Essex going on to claim full credit only after he (or Alland, or the both of them) changed a few bits of dialogue around.

Okay, so maybe it's not the middle of Illinois, but hang on...

Either way, this movie feels like a Bradbury joint. If you ever stayed up all night finishing October Country or Something Wicked This Way Comes you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t…well, do. You’re missing out on some great stuff and you’ll thank me later. I’ll identify the Bradburyian elements that stick out to me, but actual Bradbury scholars (I’m just a casual fan, honestly) are sure to notice tons more.

Time to meet John Putnam (Richard Carlson) a writer and lucky bastard, enjoying a cozy Arizona night at home with local hot schoolteacher Ellen Fields (Barbara Rush). “This is Sand Rock Arizona,” he monologues for us over some opening helicopter shots, pulling double duty as main character and Humble Narrator,

“on a late evening in early spring. It’s a nice town, knowing its past and sure of its future as it makes ready for the night and the predictable morning. The desert blankets the Earth, cooling, resting for the fight with tomorrows son. And in my house, near the town, we are also sure of the future. So very sure.”

You see what I mean? That’s pure Bardbury right there, waxing poetically about the most mundane things, like the world’s own Stage Manager. The man could turn any community into Grover’s Corners, and – hey – here’s a young couple all decked out and ready to experience some tragedy or another. Before that, though, Johnny and Ellen observe the starship from John’s backyard, its crash stymieing their plans to have sex under the stars. Even though its nighttime, the two manage to secure an overflight from Pete Davis’ Crop Dusting Service. As dates go, at least a giant “meteor” strike has the benefit of novelty. You don’t see thousand-yard craters everyday. Unless you’re from Mars.

I liked these two immediately, both as performers and as characters. They seem so comfortable with each other I was honestly sad to see the plot interrupt their four minutes of introductory flirting. When they’re together, time moves faster than that meteor. Ellen immediately struck me as the Sand Rock’s Designated Smart Person, once condemned (or so she thought) to a life of intellectual dehydration in a one-horse town. Then along comes this writer. From Chicago, no less. Of course she snatched him right up! For fuck’s sake, she’s a Scorpio! Scorpios are hot. They take what they want…and then paralyze it with neurotoxin so they can casually devour it later.

She just wants him for his enormous...telescope...

Meanwhile, Johnny – being a Sagittarius and a writer – is too bowled over by his own absurd good luck to do much more than banter. He’ll even listen to her talk about astrology. (Hell, I’d listen to Barbara Rush talk about the eurozone crisis with rapt attention, but some people treat astrology like they treat eugenics.) Not that she’s Nancy Regan or anything; she loves Science as much as the next girl, even pronouncing the crater “beautiful” as they observe it from the air. She also declines to correct her boyfriend when he pronounces it “the biggest thing that’s ever happened in our time!”

This is supposed to take place in Arizona, after all…home of the Barringer Crater and the Grand Canyon, two of North America’s biggest holes in the ground…but maybe John’s just excited. Yeah, that’s gotta be it. He was all jazzed up, about to get laid and doing that thing where you stretch the flirting out and build up the excitement…then this thing flies right over his house and crashes into the back-forty. His judgement’s bound to be a bit clouded. That might explain why he decides to climb into the crater all by himself.

Otherwise the only explanation I have is “it’s in the script.” The script needs John to see the ship before its closing hatchway triggers a convenient rock slide. If anyone else saw the ship (besides the audience, of course) John might actually succeed at convincing them of the alien menace in their midst.

Pete Davis (Dave Willock), Sheriff Matt Warren (Charles Drake) and the one reporter who managed to see the crash try to write John off as a loon, inspired by a one too many blows to the head. Even Ellen needs a close encounter before she’s really convinced. (Astrology’s one thing, but alien invasions? Fuck off. Level-headed school teachers don’t have time for such nonsense.) Good thing an alien floats right across their path on the drive back.

How many floating eyeball monsters has this thing gone on to influence over the years? Honestly, my conservative estimate's somewhere in the thousands.

Would an alien crossing your path count as bad luck? Depends on the alien, I suppose. Like if ET crosses your path things are probably all good…but if a xenomorph crosses your path, you’re probably fucked. In this case, Our Happy Couple’s smart enough to leave it until the sun comes up. Good thing, since the alien POV camera’s been watching them this whole time.

Cue excellent musical sting, courtesy Henry Mancini, Irving Gertz, and Herman Stein, who scored more of these 50s monster movies than I have space to list. Sufficient to say, we’ll be hearing about them again, but I’d like to call special attention to the theremin work here, which is excellent. It’s creepy in a distinctive sort of way, not easily reducible to the usual whooo-ooooh-oooohhhh. It’s hard to get more “50s” than an alien invasion movie scored by a theremin.

Incidentally, my research indicates these aliens were actually called xenomophs on set. They live up to the name (“xeno” = “foreign”; “morph” = “change”), despite the fact no one ever uses it on screen. In their native form they resemble giant floating jelly fish, with one cyclops eye providing director Jack Arnold with a great excuse to shoot in (originally 3D – even though that’d make no sense given their monocular vision and all) alien-POV shots. But as Johnny and Ellen discover the next day, on top of being smart enough to “conquer space” (though not smart enough to avoid crash-landing) these aliens are shape-shifters.

Before that, though, everyone John knows has to question his sanity. Dr. Snell (George Eldredge) from “the university”? Hell, all the signs he can see point straight to “meteor.” The whopping four on-sight reporters? They’re too busy trying to snap a picture of Ellen. Sheriff Matt happens to be Ellen’s ex (“I also knew her father: I was his deputy.”) so there’ll be no help there. “Putnam,” Sheriff Matt says, underlining the movie’s theme, “you frighten ‘em. And what frightens ‘em they’re against, one way or the other.” John and Ellen are on their own…and if I were John, I’d be happy enough about that. Hell, I’d face down twenty alien invasions for a chance with twenty-eight year-old Barbara Rush.

Ellen: “I just wish we had found one of ‘em, that’s all. One little monster to toss into the principal’s bedroom.”

Mmm…Scorpio….Frustrated, Our Happy Couple stops by the side of the road and have another moment of Bradburyian rhapsody…

John: “It’s alive! Alive and waiting for you. Ready to kill you if you go too far. The sun will get you, the cold at night. There’s a thousand ways the desert can kill.”

Hey...everybody's got their fetish...but I can think of smoother trees to cuddle up to...

…before censorship codes of the time force them to abandon the idea of fucking by a Joshua tree. Instead, Our Happy Couple drives a’ ways down the road and stumbles across a couple of linemen, Frank (Joe Sawyer, or “Sgt. Biff O’Hara from Rin Tin Tin” if you prefer) and George (Russell Johnson, or “the Professor from Gilligan’s Island“). Frank complains of strange sounds traveling along the wires, as if someone down the line were tapping them. He then uses this as his excuse to soliloquize:

Frank: “After you’ve been working out in the desert fifteen years like I have you see a lot of things…hear a lot of things too. The sun in the sky and the heat. All that sand out there with the rivers and lakes that aren’t real at all. And sometimes you think that the wind gets in the wires and hums and listens and talks, just like what we’re hearing now.”

We aren’t hearing it of course but “that’s the way it is; it comes and it goes.” Our foursome parts…and the intrepid linemen (as Bradburyian a pair of Working Class Heroes as you’re likely to see out of Hollywood) are set upon by the Alien POV cam and mist it uses to enshroud its victims. This trips John’s spider-sense…or maybe he just saw something in the rear view…either way, the being they find where Frank and George used to be may look like George…but it isn’t. We see the alien POV cam sneak up on Ellen and the mist coalesce into “George’s” hand.

Spotting Frank’s arm sticking out from a nearby rock, and noticing “George’s” new ability to stare directly into the sun without blinking, Our Happy Couple retreats to Sheriff Matt…who doesn’t believe them. Of course. See, this movie’s the mid-point between 1951′s The Thing and 1956′s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. “Don’t be afraid,” Alien-George monologues at Real-George and Real-Frank. “It is within our power to transform ourselves to look like you. Or anyone. For a time it will be necessary. We cannot – we would not – take your souls, or minds, or bodies.” Though they’re not above a little hostage taking to fortify their position.

"You might want to put some Windex on that fishbowl...I'm just sayin'..."

Too bad everyone’s got someone in their lives who knows them well enough to suspect they’ve replaced by an alien doppelganger. (I’ve got at least four.) In this case, George and Frank’s spouses show up to crack the case wide-open. Like the Thing, these aliens could care less about the planet Earth and only crashed here thanks to  mechanical problems. But unlike the Thing, or the Martians who’d invade a few months later, these Its are not inherently hostile to humanity. They just want to go home. And if you can’t sympathize with that you’re obviously a coldhearted bastard. You’ll notice Steven Spielberg used the same trick thirty years later. Ever wonder why?

Apparently Bradbury submitted two scripts, one with beneficent aliens, one with malevolent. The studio, bless it’s heart, picked the beneficent script, and the movie’s far stronger for it. Right away it stands out from the pack of films it would obviously inspire. The whole “aliens in a cave” motif (mineshaft in this case – but same difference) shows up again in It Conquered the World and Zontar: The Thing From Venus, just to pull two off the top of my head. The whole “body snatcher” thing is a rant unto itself that I’ll save up for a review of those films. For now, let’s all wonder why this movie isn’t the “classic” cinematic metaphor for the dangers of rampant Communist infiltration/McCarthyist paranoia?

Could be because parts of just plain silly. For one thing, this is the first time I’ve seen a movie use a Joshua tree for a jump-scare. Literally, John shines a light on one and Ellen screams, meaning we’re all supposed to scream too. Must’ve been a 3-D thing. Also, the aliens can’t shoot for shit. Alien-Ellen (yeah, Ellen gets abducted and duplicated about a third of the way through – spoiler alert) could’ve easily cut Johnny in half with her laser pistol while he stood captivated by her sleeveless black dress and eevil scarf. But no. Our Hero has to wind the obligatory gunfight. And for once I actually want that.

Now *this* I would've liked to see in 3D.

It’s all Richard Carlson’s fault. I’ve liked the guy since I first saw Creature from the Black Lagoon years and years ago, but here he’s playing a much better character than Dr. David Reed. Johnny Putnam’s a strange fusion of the Bradburyian author avatar and the Hollywood Action Writer far more common to SF movies of that time and ours. In other words he’s exactly the kind of guy you’d want to talk his way  through First Contact: an unyielding negotiator who’s naturally suspicious without being too big a dick about it. Add to that his and Rush’s  chemistry and Johnny Putnam has enough contradictions in him to almost pass for human. His Stirring Speeches are certainly better written than Dr. Reed’s.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Matt’s supposed to stand for the Everyman, another Working Class Hero, even though we’re supposed to view him as a rival for Ellen. He’s all like, “Kill the aliens!” and only Ellen’s kidnapping prevents him from calling a torch-wielding mob down on them. Eventually even that concern’s overridden by the stress of watching “people” he knows aren’t people walk around town right outside his window.

Matt: “Did you know, Putnam, that more murders are committed at 92 degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature? I read an article once. Lower temperatures, people are easygoing. Over ninety-two and it’s too hot to move. But just ninety-two people get irritable!”

Charles Drake is wonderful throughout, gradually loosing his cool as responsibility piles up on his shoulders. The fact that I can root for both protagonists makes their eventual (but inevitable) fist-fight that much sweeter. Sure, Sheriff Matt’s even more of a patronizing asshole than most men in 50s SF films, but his concerns are genuine and his lawman instincts are right on track. If this were any other Alien Invasion film, he’d be completely in the right and John Putnam would be a Damn Dirty Collaborator, on par with It Conquered the World‘s Lee Van Cleef. And while the usual boring love triangle is set up it remains blissfully unexplored because Ellen’s quite obviously made her choice before the movie opens…and then she gets kidnapped.

Just think! Entire sub-genres could trace their genesis to THIS VERY SHOT! Probably not, though. That ET thing was probably the last real "insight" I can offer.

It’s neither the most famous nor the most infamous movie of its era. Because of that I’ve grown to appreciate It Came From Outer Space more than most of its cinematic siblings as time’s gone on. Bradburyian monologues may not sound natural to ears long-since starved by the poverty of modern expression, but their inclusion gives the whole movie that same dreamy character Bradbury lent to all his best work. Even the “normal” dialogue sounds crisper – less stagey and more pulp novel-y. Which means the characters are more likeable. Which meaning there’s some actual tension to their story because we the audience – gasp – care. Arnold’s direction on this (his first genuine SF picture) alternates between Awestruck (at Our Happy Couple, the desert landscape, or his own special effects) and Creepy in a classic horror/German Expressionism kinda way, making great use of shadows, light, and the seemingly-lifeless landscape that is – like all deserts – actually teaming with life.

And while later 3D fads would obsess over throwing shit in the audience’s face, this movie restrains itself to one spaceship crash, one rockslide, and one alien eyeball. Sure, we see the spaceship crash twice…but, then again, nobody’s perfect. I applaud It nonetheless. See It for its historical import or your own personal nostalgia. See It on a fourteen inch computer monitor or a forty-foot theater screen. But do yourself a favor and see It for Klaatu’s sake. Then I won’t have to explain why I like It so much more than Arnold and Carlson’s next – much more famous -  3D SF flick, Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Which I’m going to do anyway, regardless. Still, the point stands.

"It's the Ray Bradyburyest 50s SF movie you've ever seen. It's incredible! Like...something out of another world."

by Chad Denton

Stylin' and profilin'...

This time the TARDIS lands near the city of Jaffa, right in the middle of the Third Crusade. While looking around the group is ambushed by Saracen soldiers, who abduct Barbara. The soldiers also capture William des Preux, a Crusader who lets himself be captured while pretending to be King Richard I of England in order to distract the enemy, while the rest of the TARDIS crew manage to rescue William de Tornebu, a nobleman also serving under Richard. The Doctor hopes that by helping de Tornebu recover from his wounds and by returning him to Richard’s court they can get the king to help them save Barbara. At Saladin’s camp, des Preux interrogates Barbara, curious about her “strange clothes.” Barbara ducks his questions and finds out about des Preux’s charade. Concerned for Barbara’s safety, des Preux tells Saladin’s ministers that she is Richard’s sister, Joanna. Meanwhile the Doctor steals clothes for himself, Vicki, and Ian, from a merchant in Jaffa, so they can fit in.

A Saracen emir, el-Akir, presents Barbara and “Richard” to Saladin and his brother Sephadin, but Saladin sees through the ruse. An enraged el-Akir threatens to have Barbara tortured, but Saladin angrily rebukes him and dismisses him. Barbara actually tries to tell Saladin the truth of who she is and where she’s been, but he just assumes that she’s telling him in a roundabout way that she and her companions are traveling entertainers. As such Saladin considers keeping Barbara on as his entertainer. At Richard’s court, the Doctor and the others find an extremely ill-tempered Richard, who is glowering under recent setbacks in the Crusade and the news that his brother John is trying to usurp the English throne. Regardless Ian insists on begging Richard to send him with an escort to Saladin to arrange for Barbara and des Preux’s release. Richard declares he’d let Barbara rot in a cell before he would negotiate with Saladin. The Doctor and Vicki join in and convince Richard to reconsider by pointing out des Preux’s ruse and the potential embarrassment Saladin will feel when it turns out that des Preux is not the king. Amused by his way of thinking, Richard invites the Doctor to join his court as an adviser.

Click here to read full article…

Nice outfits.

Confession time, everyone. Time to let you all know that, despite barely mentioned it, I’ve spent the last seven years of my life dreading the release of Red Tails. This dramatization of the Tuskegee Airman story – the story of an all-black unit of fighter pilots trained to fly and fight for their country at the eponymous air field in central Alabama –  is one of the many, many, many passion projects George Lucas shelved back in the 90s so he could focus on making…well…you know…those movies.

But unlike every other reformed Lucasfilm fan in existence, my dread came with its own personal baggage. You see, this

(Left to right) William A. Campbell, Willie Ashley, Langston Caldwell, Herbert Clark, George Boiling, Charles B. Hall, Graham Mitchell, Herbert Carter, Louis Purnell, Graham Smith, Allen G. Lane, Spann Watson, Faythe McGinnis, James T. Wiley, and Irwin Lawrence. (Courtesy Herbert E. Carter)

is a picture of my grandfather, Herbert E. Carter (eighth from the left, front and center), with his graduating class at Tuskegee Army Air Field in July, 1942. Thanks to racist foot-dragging within the War Department, it took ten months for his squadron to reach French Morocco. As the commanding officer of the Army Air Forces, General Hap Arnold, explained at the time, “Negro pilots cannot be used in our present Air Corps units since this would result in Negro officers serving over white enlisted men creating an impossible social situation.”

Eventually, after months of training at air fields throughout the American South, the Ninety-Ninth Flying Pursuit Squadron joined the North Africa campaign as part of the 33rd Fighter Group under Colonel William W. Momyer. That racist foot-dragging still prompts a font of righteous indignation in my gut, even though a part of me realizes all that retraining was instrumental to the Airmen’s future success. As with so much else, a fighter pilot’s chance of survival increases in proportion to the amount of training they have prior to combat. There’s a maneuver in this movie that one of the main characters supposedly learns from watching German pilots, but that’s some ol’ bullshit right there. They learned that trick before they even got out of Basic and spent the majority of 1942 practicing it, and a whole lot else besides, in the skies over Florida.

Once they finally made it Over There, the Ninety-Ninth scoured the Mediterranean for Axis craft, clearing the way for the the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy. Two planes were shot out from under my grandfather during the invasion of Anzio, but he had no trouble securing others. On top of being a pilot, he was also the squadron maintenance officer, personally flight testing whatever his crew fixed so he would know the job was done. The Tuskegee Airmen would go on to support the Allied invasions of France and Germany, but my grandfather returned to the U.S. in July, 1944, having survived seventy-seven missions. Here’s a picture of him astride the German motorcycle he captured in Sicily and fixed-up for getting around:

This is what you'd call "awesome."

The point being, he’s a real person. So real he just helped me fact-check these last few  paragraphs over the phone. This article from the Alabama Heritage website, or this article from CNN.com, will tell you more about the Tuskegee Airmen in a handful of minutes than this entire two hour movie.

And I’d much rather talk about all that than talk about the movie anyway. Even its  positive reviewers can barely work up any enthusiasm for it. As far as I can tell, this movie’s only real defenders come from an increasingly vocal segment of people who actually like…those films…and who wants to get in bed with that crowd? Not I, said the cat.

At best, Red Tails is a perfectly serviceable War Movie from the 1950s that just so happens to be premiering in 2012. By which I mean it has all the problems of classical War Movies: too many characters, not enough time, and an overwhelming emphasis on building up to the mandatory minimum three action sequences.

If I had to pick a John Wayne movie this film most closely resembles (because when it comes to War Movies from the 50s everyone goes for John Wayne movies), I’d pick Flying Leathernecks…which I see Red Tails’ executive producer and re-shoots director, George Lucas “studied in preparation for this film.” I swear I didn’t look that up on the IMDb beforehand: my brain made that connection as I walked out of the theater. So either my brain surfs the internet while I’m asleep or the resemblance is just that obvious.

Playin'...playin' with the boys...

First of all, Red Tails starts the story in the wrong place: Ramitelli Airfield, Italy, 1944. When the “hard” part (convincing the US Army that African-Americas were, in fact, smart and coordinated enough to serve their country) is already over. Actually, the movie begins with a disparaging, racist quote from a 1925 Army War College Study of “Negroes in combat,” which pronounced us unqualified for a whole lot of things, flying planes being the least of them. You’d think this film would open in the Jim Crow South whose culture produced such a “study”…but no. If it did, we’d have to wait even longer before we got to our dogfights.

In case you haven’t noticed, George Lucas loves him a good dogfight. He loves machinery in motion. He loves old cars, old planes, new types of camera equipment, and making movies from the comfort of his chair like some beached walrus…no! Bad critic! Strike paragraph, begin anew…

I’ve got a lot of respect for George. (No, really, stop laughing. I’m being serious.) He’s been one hundred percent upfront about his reasons for making this film. He loves him a good dogfight and he loves telling stories about small groups of people changing the history of their world…or their galaxy. The only real differences are differences of scale. As long as they ride sweet machines while they do it, George Lucas will be there. And he’ll find a way to stick a camera into that machine’s fiery remains.

Hold on to your butts, my lovelies: I'm about to agree with George Lucas on something.

On this we agree: the P-51 Mustang is one of the sweetest fighter aircraft to ever roll off an assembly line. Can’t go wrong with a Rolls-Royce engine, can you? Add the distinctive coloration, which does exactly what it was designed to do – be distinctive – and you have all the ingredients for some extremely attractive pictures. George recognized this and so we have this film, because at some point George stopped being a director and started being a human Xerox machine.

And it’s…not bad. Let me repeat that with conviction:the movie isn’t that bad. But you should check it out for yourself because in the end it’s just…okay. And that almost makes me even more angry. There’s a part of me going, How dare anyone make a movie about my grandfather that is anything less than awesome? and I’m not the kind of critic who suppress feelings like that. Nor do I suppress the part of myself that loves the sight of a fiery explosion in a clear blue sky. It’s like a hole punched in the universe with flying metal. It’s awesome in the old sense of the word that lives a few doors down from awful. Not awful like those…other movies…but in the sense that War is Hell. And with movie making technology being what it is these days, the right director can find a way to plop you in the  center of a flying hellscape.

Like this.

So I get it, George. And I thank you and  your hand-picked director, Anthony Hemingway, for having the discipline to compose your shots well (I always knew what was going on no matter the ambient level of chaos) and for including as much carnage as a PG-13 rating allowed. It’s not nearly enough (I’ve seen worse third-degree burns on CNN) but that’s how I’d sum up this film as a whole. Where’s the rest of it, guys? I felt like I wandered into the middle of a story that didn’t end so much as stop…an experience I haven’t had with a George Lucas-aligned movie since Episode IV – A New Hope.

You know how almost everyone in a George Lucas movie is a cardboard standie with lines, save the three or four core characters who retain the camera’s focus? Such is the case here, where our cast extends to Marty ‘Easy’ Julian (Nate Parker), Joe ‘Lightning’ Little (David Oyelowo), Ray “Junior” Gannon (Tristan Wilds) and Colonel A.J. Bullard (Terrence Howard). There are other people in the film, some of whom you might even recognize, but they’re not really in the movie in the same way half the characters in your average X-Men movie aren’t really there, save to stand around and be counted. Yes, that’s Andre Royo as Squadron Maintenance Officer Antwan “Coffee” Coleman, who is not playing my grandfather any more than any of the others. None of these people are real, obviously. This story (as it says right in the opening) is “inspired by true events.” Which means “we took real events and replaced all the real people who actually participated in them with instantly recognizable War Movie stock characters.”

The first two I mentioned above are old friends, with Easy being the Serious Squadron Leader and Lightning his Hotshot, Upstart wingman who is (of course) “the Best Damn Pilot We’ve Got.” Despite being saddled with stock characters, Parker and Oyelowo turn in wonderful performances, doing a great job playing off each other as Lightning’s hotheadedness and Easy’s on-duty drinking strain their friendship. They deserve a movie all to themselves, but they have to share this one with at least three other plots. Colonel Bullard and Major Emanuelle Stance (Cuba Gooding Jr.) have to fight the good fight back in Washington and keep the racist top brass from shutting everyone down before we get to our first dogfight. Junior (who secretly longs to be called “Ray-Gun” and carries a Buck Rogers Special for just that reason…and as a personal good luck charm) has to go down behind enemy lines and participate in a ten minute remake of The Great Escape. And Oyelowo has to fall in love and marry a beautiful Italian woman named Sofia (the beautiful Bostonian Daniela Ruah).

They got the "hurry up and wait" part down to a science, I'll give 'em that.

All these plots would be fine if it didn’t have to fight each other for running time. The amount of material here could fill a six hour HBO miniseries and still have enough story left over to keep the thing on air for years. Call up Steven Spielberg sometime, George, and ask him for a few pointers. Better yet, get him to direct the next movie. I know you say you’re making a sequel (and a prequel) but everybody says that once their movie hits theaters. I know nothing’s set in stone yet.

Spielberg’s no great shakes at the multi-character War Drama either. But (before you send me angry mail for that comment) he compensates for this by focusing in on one character and using that character to guide the audience through his brightly-light, hyper-real, high-pro-gloss nostalgia worlds made from pure Love of Cinema…and its power to arrest audiences with images.

Sometimes we call these characters “protagonists” and Red Tails gives us four for the price of one…five if you count Cuba, though he only shows up about halfway through. And it’s fairly obvious his and Terrance Howard’s characters were last-minute insertions into the picture. They have meetings, they make speeches, and just when you think you’re about spend some time with them – jump cut back to Italy, where we rejoin our four main plots already in progress.

Now that's a War Face!

Because there are so many characters here, and because their stories take such divergent paths through the chaotic clusterfuck of war, all of them come off flat and far too bland to be anything other than human collages. One dimension’s supplied by the actors and their naturalistic interactions, the other’s supplied by those few bits of non-operational dialogue the script, courtesy John Ridley and Aaron (“I am the stone that the builder refused”) McGruder, supplies whenever our boys get down time. The non-speechy parts of this film are perfectly fine. We’re watching young dudes give each other shit, which is always funny. There are moments of actual brilliance scattered throughout, like pieces of an exploding train you find stuck in your plane’s belly.

Like this scene: Our Core Group is in town for the night, just moseying along to the dance hall, when some white officers approach them and ask if they’re the Red Tails. Our Core Group instantly quits their clowning, quiets down, and draws close to each other. Mutual protection and all that. The White Officer assures them that he’s a member of the heavy bomber group the Red Tails have just successfully escorted, and he just wants to thank them the Army way: “First round’s on me.” Our Core Group hesitates and someone (maybe Hemingway, maybe Lucas) does a very slow, very subtile push-in on them and the silent glaces they throw each other. If you know anything about how American racism worked at the time, you can see each man’s eyes ask “Is this a trap?” The punch-line being it isn’t. The white officers really do just want to buy Our Heroes a drink and say thanks. This should be a dramatic high point for everyone. If the story started out in America it would’ve been. But then we’d have to follow one story, centered on an actual character, for the entire film. Instead we follow four, which forces our directors to slice off each scene just as things are about to get interesting.

And I think you can all guess who’s going to die by the end anyway, so there’s two stories right there. Go back to the War Movie formula. You have to kill someone early on so we can show the audience War is Serious Hell. And you have to kill someone in the end to give the proceedings that proper, tragic note. What better excuse to cut to a mournfully billowing American flag? And hey – if one of your characters (the one who kept disappearing for twenty minute stretches) just so happens to make it back from that POW camp right then, at the group’s most perfect moment together…so much the better, then. More convenient that way, don’t'cha know?

Oh well...here we go again.,,

On the one hand, dogfights are awesome. On the other hand, the characters participating in them are not. Except for our two leads, who are busy having a falling out whenever Oyelowo can tear himself away from Daniela Ruah. Not that I blame him. Those two deserved their own movie too. Nobody in Italy had even heard of Jim Crow and they genuinely did view the Americans – whatever their skin tone -  as liberators. These two would’ve risked life and limb walking down the streets of any major American city in 1944. But in Italy, they can get married…in public…with her mom’s blessing. Though the fact neither one knows a lick of the other’s language probably helps their relationship mightily.

But then again, dogfights are awesome. There are three major engagements in the film and each arrives right on schedule, punctual as the scar-faced German fighter pilot who pops up every once in awhile to sneer. (I couldn’t help but hum John Williams’ Imperial March whenever he and his plane appeared.) If you’re allergic to greenscreen this movie will swell your tongue right up. I’m not particularly, so I loved the special effects reel just as much as I expected. However, as with previous Lucas movies, I walked out wishing the movie part of the movie had been just a little bit stronger.

Nice try, guys. I actually do salute you.

Well, this is embarrassing. I purposefully avoided X-Men: First Class for a variety of reasons I hope I’ve explained in past X-reviews. Come to find out, not only is it better than it has any right to be, not only is it easily the best X-Men movie of the series…for me, it’s also the best superhero movie of Summer 2011.

But after eleven years and four increasingly crappy movies, can you blame me for being skittish? No. Of course you can’t. Even the so-called “good” X-movies are lousy with basic plot and story problems everyone ignored at the time because we were too busy being happy they existed in the first place. Along comes First Class, a film that feels like its makers kept one eye on a gargantuan check-list of those problems…and the other on the clock. It still has the multitudinous problems of a Superhero Team Movie, and especially a superhero Team Movie made by Fox, but unlike every other superhero movie of Summer 2011, First Class feels like an actual film.

Let me explain. Thor and Captain America were transparent feature-length commercials for The Avengers. Green Lantern was a crappy remake of a much-better animated film that was only two years old at the time anyway. Contrast First Class, which tells a coherent story with a beginning, middle and end that all manage to exceed expectations. I know: isn’t that what every good movie’s supposed to do? Yes…but if it were easy, everyone would do it.

I still say this is the best possible way to open an X-Men movie.

First Class begins with the same forty second trip to the concentration camps Bryan Singer used to open his X-Men movie. Afterward, we cut to stately Xavier Manor in upstate New York. There, the Xavier family’s young scion, Charles, discovers a shape-shifting homeless girl rooting through his ‘fridge in the middle of the night. Being psychic, he sees through her disguise (as his mom – rather obvious choice…but she’s young; she’ll learn) and into the persecuted-but-otherwise good person underneath, named Raven. He basically adopts Raven in a Victor Frankenstein/Elizabeth Lavenza type deal that (given what we learn later in the film) Charles probably backed up with a few implanted mental suggestions. “Oh, her? Why yes, mother, we adopted her. Don’t you remember…? No? Well, how about now?”

Back to the camps. Where, unlike Singer, who had twenty-eight scripts worth of material to squeeze into one film, director Matthew Vaughn actually sticks around long enough for us to meet the young Erik Lenscher in earnest. Erik’s ability to manipulate magnetic fields peaks the interest of Nazi science adviser Klaus Schmidt (Kevin Bacon), who provides Erik’s with a Defining Element of Tragedy by killing Erik’s mom right in front of him. This proves Erik’s powers are tied to anger and other socially-inappropriate emotions. Schmidt’s overjoyed at this discovery in his own, Kevin Bacon-y way…never suspecting he’s just created his own Frankenstein monster.

Twenty years and one jump-cut later, it’s 1962. Charles Xavier is a young, hotshot Oxford professor (now played by the downright prepubescent-looking James McAvoy) with wide-eyed, naive dreams about using his job title to pick up chicks in bars…oh, and peacefully integrating mutants into human society. Erik Lehnsherr (now played by Michael Fassbender) is a one-man Mossad hit-squad with a trail of dead ex-Nazi’s in his wake and an eternal quest for his old war-time “mentor,” Herr Schmidt.

"It protects my very important brain, January."

Schmidt’s rechristened himself “Sebastian Shaw” since escaping Europe and gotten a new gig as the Las Vegas-based owner of The Hellfire Club. But there’s more than standard-issue Hugh Hefner envy going on here, as CIA Agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) soon learns. On top of his own mutant ability to absorb kinetic energy (and project it back), Shaw’s gathered a small band of powerful mutants to his cause, including reduced-to-one-note-henchmen versions of the teleporter Azazel (Jason Flemying, under a ton of make-up) and the diamond-skinned psychic Emma Frost (January Jones).

What cause? Why…World Domination, of course. All Shaw has to do is trick the U.S. and Soviet Union into full-scale thermonuclear war. This, as any student of history will tell you, was an absurdly easy proposition which almost came true several times over during the actual Cold War…accidentally. No supervillains required. Yeah. Let that thought wake you up screaming sometime. The “MAD” in that TV show Mad Men (starring apparently-hot actress January Jones) should stand for Mutually Assured Destruction. And if it doesn’t then I’m even happier I don’t watch TV anymore.

So, on top of being your typical superhero movie – by which I mean, “the softest kind of ‘soft’ science fiction” – First Class is also an Alternate History tale. The Cuban Missile crisis of this universe had nothing to do with the incipient, imperialist paranoia or a pigheaded, nuclear dick-waving contest. No. It was all Kevin Bacon’s fault! We should’ve suspected it from the start!

"Really...? We're gonna go with that, then...? Well...okay..."

With her bosses at the CIA unwilling to accept reports of teleporting devil men and underwear models who can cut glass with their fingers, Agent Moira seeks out the one academic young and idiotic enough to publicly spout off about human mutation’s superpower-granting potential: Charles Xavier. Ol’ Chuck’s first meeting at Spook Central doesn’t go so well…but Xavier doesn’t exactly make it easy on himself. You don’t start rattling off the contents of a spook’s head, especially not when you’re inside their fortress. And Raven…damnit, Chuck, I know you two are BFFs and all that…but if anything’s going to scare the American spook community more than a psychic, it’ll be a shapeshifter.

Our Heroes are saved from spending the rest of their lives in a dank hole by the so-criminally-underused-his-character-isn’t-even-named Oliver Platt, who sets them up at a derelict facility out in the Virginia (?) countryside. Xavier’s first mission (an attempt to break-up the Hellfire Club on their yacht) fails. But that failure allows Charles and Moira to encounter and recruit a young Holocaust survivor with the power to manipulate magnetism and a major hate-on for Herr Shaw.

Thus is born a bromance for the ages, the movie’s dramatic pivot point. Others are introduced as Charles and Erik’s recruiting efforts ramp up, but they’re little more than distractions. My one complaint with First Class is the same complaint I have about any Team-based superhero movie that tries to do a World in Peril story and four major character arcs in ninety minutes or less: all but one of them (the Charles and Erik Show) feel rushed and half-heartedly realized.

And I ain't talking about the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union.

You could throw that critique at any of the X-movies…something I’ll continue to do until someone starts listening. The X-Cast is too unwieldy for anything other than serialized narrative forms…like monthly comics. Or weekly TV shows. Good movies (no matter how Epic), if they even want to try being “good,” focus on a central relationship, subordinated others to The Main Conflict. In the best of all possible worlds, these subordinate conflicts others becoming thematic reflections of the Main.

Some of that goes on here, because Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman are great people, with a Good Nerd’s understanding of the material they’re working with and the goals they’re working toward. Vaughn was one of the many, many people supposed to direct X-Men: The Last Stand after Brett Ratner’s untimely departure…only bowing out after Fox refused to compromise their unreasonable scheduling demands. Apparently X-Men movies have to come out by Memorial Day no matter how shitty the end results might be.

This time, post-Kick-Ass, Vaughn accepted the inherent challenge, probably saving this film from completely sucking in the process. See, Fox is contractually obligated to make an X-Men movie every couple of years or the rights to make further X-Men movies will automatically revert back to Marvel. This is an incredibly stupid deal, negotiated during the comic book company’s Famine Years of the late-1990s. Since then, Marvel’s reconsidered its previous “sell the movie rights to our characters off piecemeal to coke-addled idiots who can’t see past than the next fiscal quarter” policy. Not that there aren’t plenty of those inside The House That Stan and Jack Built…but as of 2011, all of their major characters exist under the same movie studio’s umbrella.

GQ magazine's mutant issue always trots out the pretty boys.

Except for the X-Men (and Spider-Man, but we’ll discuss Mr. Parker another time)…one of Marvel’s largest and most-marketable sets of characters. Aware of this, Fox planned to mine an entire series’ of prequels back in the mid-2000s. Hence the cumbersome title of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which I’ll continue to acronymize as X-MO:W. I can remember the rumors flying hot and heavy throughout Spring ’09. We were told, if Wolverine hit it big, to look for a Mutant Pride parade’s worth of Origin films, detailed the backstories of everyone from Rogue (X-MO:R) to Storm (X-MO:S) to, of course, Magneto (X-MO:M).

You can still see pieces of X-MO:M floating around in First Class. That’s why The Charles and Erik Show takes center stage. That’s why everyone else gets shafted…especially Mystique. She – strong reoccurring antagonist though she may be – gets reduced to Charlie’s friend-who-happens-to-be-a-girl. And her arc’s reduced to a Quest for One Good Lay. She ends up turning evil because Erik’s the only one man enough to admit scaly blue chicks might be hot…especially with the contrast of that red hair…and those creepy, yellow cat-eyes.

Then again, I’m down here in the 2012, with an Internet’s worth of sexy cosplayer photos to back up that contention. The characters of First Class are trapped in the early-60s, when shacking up with someone of a different skin color still counted as a felony offense in several states. Jennifer (Winter’s Bone) Lawrence acts the hell out of her role, easily matching McVoy and Fassbender when it comes to creating a nuanced character out of thin air and a thinner script. And despite her disappearing for most of the middle act (when the movie’s busy introducing all the other proto-X-Men) Lawrence has a leg up on her fellow second stringers: her character is actually in this movie.

Separated at birth?

Not so with Dr. Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult, who looks so much like Cillian Murphy I kept waiting for him to ask someone “Would you like to see my mask?”) Sean Cassidy (Caleb Landry Jones, whose been in absolutely nothing of note), Armando Munoz (Edi Gathegi, last seen around here playing the Token Black Vampire in the first two Twilight movies), Alex Summers (Hannah Montana: The Movie survivor Lucas Till) and Angel Salvadore (Zoë Kravitz). Their characters are patently not in this movie. They appear and serve plot-specific functions, sure, but their arcs can’t hope to compete with The Charles and Erik Show.

Two characters (Banshee and Havok – the two characters most so-called “normal” people probably know the least about) make due with glorified training montages. Dr. McCoy’s transformation into his more familiar, bluer, hairier alter ego becomes our C-Story, rushed through (like most C stories) so the film can end with Beast somewhat resembling his Kelsey Grammer-self from X3. (Wouldn’t want to confuse the poor “normals” now, would we?) Angel turns evil so the airborne Banshee can have a dogfight with someone during the Climactic Battle. And the black guy dies.

Goddamnit, X-Men…out of all the cliches in Hollywood, you had to adhere to that one? Whoever made that decision, let them step forth so that I might serve them an extra-tall, piping hot mug of Fuck You. You couldn’t think up another Defining Element of Tragedy for this team? Some other way to let them all know Kevin Bacon and his Club are super-serial?

Yeah, fuck you, Thor. Now *that's* some heroic drinking, right there!

The answer’s “No” because there are still too many characters in this movie. If we didn’t kill some of them off the Climactic Battle might get even more crowded, the A and B Stories would certainly be more diluted, and then we’d be right back where we started, watching a haphazard, overstuffed, mediocre X-Men movie. Like Bryan Singer’s.

Still, I feel I should emphasize this is the best X-Men movie of the series. For all its missteps, it gets so much right that I can’t do anything other than recommend it. Michael Fassbender is excellent as the young Magneto, a vengeance-driven anti-hero on a path to becoming what he hates. McAvoy is exactly the kind of naive idealist who would coach a team of super-teenagers and try to lead an anti-hero off the path of destruction. And this is just a personal thing but…after four films, it’s nice to see Professor X lead from the front for a change. No disrespect to Patrick Stewart: it’s not his fault his character got shafted four times over. As emotional cores go, these two are white dwarf star matter. They have too many good scenes together (and separately) to list individually. You’ll have to watch the movie.

Because you should. It’s a slightly above-average movie that manages to blow the X-Men curve right off the grid. It’s early-60s setting allows it to have more style and verve than any superhero movie this side of…Kick-Ass, really. The symbolism is appropriate, the dialogue is lively, and the special effects are finished…except for Emma’s diamond skin, which could’ve used a few more textures.

Overall, its positives outweigh its negative so heavily the total package left me wanting more. The Climactic Battle’s the best we’ve seen since X2, and its lack of Wolverine makes me automatically place it above its predecessor. Encourage people to make more of these, however you can. If we don’t, you know they’ll just get lazy and go back to making crap again. Should this franchise follow previous reboot trends, we can regard this as X-Men Begins. Here’s hoping Vaughn and Co. use this as their springboard to create the X-Men‘s own Dark Knight.

Anonymity will be their first line of defense...hence the bright yellow.

In honor of a great man and his birthday we present the speech they should’ve told you about in school. Oh yes, I say it plain: this is “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.” “And we are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”

Originally delivered at the Riverside Church, New York, New York, on April 4, 1967.

The family that slays together, stays together

You’ll have to get over a few hurtles to enjoy Son of Godzilla, the first being its title. Japanese audiences knew this as Kaiju-shima no Kessen Gojira no Musuko. Obviously its American distributor changed the title to force a parallel with King Kong’s 1933 shameless cash-in sequel (which I like sooo much I rarely even speak its name). Nowadays, after decades of watching this film on television, there’s no way John Q. Public would ever pick up a copy of Monster Island’s Decisive Battle: Godzilla’s Son. What the fuck is that, when you can just call it “Son of Godzilla?” So Son of Godzilla it will forever be, with all the baggage that implies.

I’ve been alive long enough to see the stock of all twenty-nine Godzilla movies rise, fall and rise again…except Son of Godzilla. The fan view of this film remains as firmly divided as the two sides of the Grand Canyon. Half the fanbase loves this film and consider it a childhood classic they would gladly pass down to their own children. As I type this, my skin’s aching to peel itself off and crawl away from the computer in terror…but Son of Godzilla really is one of the first “family friendly” monster movies in the daikaiju cannon. There’s some…iffy stuff in their, sure…but nothing too hard for the little rugrats. No longer an avatar of nuclear horror, Godzilla’s story here is the story of a reluctant foster parent, trying to be the dad he never had. It’s Toho’s Disney movie, and its fans argue that makes perfect mulch for any budding G-fan. They’d recommend it to everyone, kids from one to ninety-two, with no reservation whatsoever.

I’m not one of those people.

"Damnit, boy! I done told you! Never mess with them humans! Can't trust 'em. They'll shoot ya! With lightning guns!"

The other half of the fanbase hates “family friendly” anything, because we’re all secretly (and not so secretly) misanthropic bastards. We watch monster movies to see cities set afire and the military-industrial complexes of Great Nations laid waste. I’d argue your entire family would benefit from seeing that early and often. It’s certainly done wonders for me.

Sure, we need Accidental Parent stories, but who else is arguing for stories of fiery carnage? Like the Biblical conflagration that ends Godzilla: 1985. Or the trip through packed field hospitals in the original Godzilla, backed by a haunting children’s choir. I can’t watch Son of Godzilla without flashing back to those images, which ground the whole daikaiju genre in a very horrible place. No matter how commercial it gets or how far afield it wanders, this genre exists as a monument. A marker, placed so that we’ll never forget what could happen…and what’s already happened.

So here’s the poop on Son of Godzilla. Since Ishiro Honda had to go make King Kong Escapes, Jun Fukuda, who proved he could handle the organized chaos involved in making a Godzilla movie with the previous year’s Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, once again won the big chair. Like vs. The Sea Monster, Toho sold this movie off quick and cheaply to an American television distribution company named the Walter Reade Organization. They provide the second thing you’ll have to get over if you want to enjoy this film: it’s atrocious original dubbing by our “good friends” at Titra Studios…dubbers of, among other things, the original Speed Racer cartoon.

"Never trust a Gollum either. Little bastard led me right into those Hobbits and their damn Elf-light."

Oh yeah: it’s that bad. And now that I can watch Sony’s DVD, I lay a full twenty-five percent of my long-standing annoyance with this movie at the feet of Titra’s bad dubbing. That may not sound like much but every little bit helps in this business. (Which is why you should all email this website to twenty of your gabbiest friends. Don’t wait: do it now.) So, since I’m watching the original version of this film in its original language like a good snob, those problems are moot and I’ve eliminated film’s two major excuses. This is it, Son of Godzilla: it’s go-time. Should you leave my island you will be an instrument of Death, praying for war.

This film’s fans (including the one that hosts this website) praise it for breaking with what had become the Godzilla series formula: monster shows up, Godzilla shows up, big fight, the end. I still see where they’re coming from, even though all those things still happen. They’re just embedded in a glossy block of classic Jungle Adventure tropes, garnished with mid-century Super Science.

And of which I dearly like. But even with all that, we still end up following the familiar stock character triad of Scientist, Reporter and Chick. Maroon it on a deserted island and the Godzilla franchise will still cling to its Stock Character Tarot Deck. Hell, in terms of character creation, Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster is more of a wild departure than this. If anything, for his sixth Godzilla movie in a row, screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa went back to The Formula. Wouldn’t do to follow characters who aren’t bland. If they were otherwise, they might not be so internationally “relatable.”

"Hey, kid? You jump ship or somethin'...? Well, what's with the life-preserver?"

Structurally, Son of Godzilla reminds me of an American mid-50s monster film – one of the many, many rip-offs of The Thing from Another World. Maybe it’s the location: a UN scientific outpost fully of Manly Men on the deserted, south sea island of Sollgell. Maybe it’s the sausage fest of an initial cast, most of whom the film ignores. Our Reporter – who parachutes into the movie from an overflying cargo plane in a move that would make Batman proud – is just too damn cool to give the rest of these suckers any face-time…unless and until they go crazy.

This is Goro Maki (Akira Kubo), the first Reporter in the series with a self-proclaimed super power: his nose for news. “The smell of a story” led him to Sollgell Island, and he’ll be damned if he leaves before he finds out what this brain trust’s up to. Unwilling to kill him themselves, the scientists agree and draft Goro as their new chief cook and bottle-washer. So much for that conflict. Goro’s integrated into the team within the space of a montage. Only the surly Furukawa (Yoshio Tsuchiya) holds onto his antipathy…and everybody in camp understands Furukawa’s just getting sick of living the cast away life.

This motley bunch’s engaged in some ol’ fashioned weather control experiments. Specifically, a weird species of cloud seeding that, like Godzilla himself, uses nuclear explosions as a power source. This patently-insane idea’s accepted as casually as the head scientist, Professor Kusumi’s (Tadao Takashima, in his second Godzilla movie), pronouncement that “World population is reaching its limit…The African deserts, Siberian tundras, the South American jungles: they’re useless to us now.” Along with everyone still dumb enough to live there…right doc?

Kamacaras by-God work for their supper!

The initial test goes well…until mysterious radio interference royally screws with Our Heroes timing. Their bomb detonates too early, drenching Sollgell in a radioactive deluge. All our humans make it through with lymph nodes intact and tongues miraculously un-swelled. Sollgell’s population of giant insects come out even further ahead, swelling to  cruise-ship size thanks to all the ambient radioactivity…that dissipates at warp speed and is never mentioned again. Sure hope these guys have all the kids they want back home. From this day forth, the survivors of Sollgell will be shooting more blanks than an action movie stunt crew.

Seemingly realizing this, Furukawa goes mad – mad, I tell you, mad, mwuahhahahaha – with homesickness and tears-ass through the remains of their camp with a gun. With the whole team ducking, Furukawa charges the beach, swearing to the Professor’s Number 2, Fujisaki (Akihiko Hirata, in his fifth role as a Scientist in as many Godzilla movies) that he’ll swim home if that’s what it takes. Foolish mortal. Little does he realize his world is ruled by a mad god named Jun Fukuda. Who proceeds to drop Godzilla on this poor working stiff who just wants a a night in his own bed.

Lured by the radio interference (which everyone just figures for a psychic baby’s cry Godzilla picked up on…somehow), Godzilla trudges through the camp. The interference leads him to an egg the giant mantises have dug up. The egg hatches…bringing forth the most horrifying special effect ever conceived by the hand of man: a bouncing baby Godzilla that everyone will eventually call “Minya”…for whatever reason.

"Don't hate me because I look like a bleached frog! Hate me because I'm a shameless marketing ploy!"

Minya (played by a rod puppet in his opening scene and by niche-famous, travel-sized Japanese actor “Little Man” Machan once he gains some height) is the last and largest hurtle between you and un-ironic enjoyment of this silly little monster movie. Whenever you hear fans of long-running series talk about certain reoccurring characters you’ll occasionally hear somebody, “You either love ‘em or hate ‘em. There’s no in-between.” I used to think that was true of Minya, so I was surprised as anyone to discover I don’t really hate the Minya we’re presented with here. As with so much else in Godzilla’s original series of films, Minya started off with promise that Toho squandered quickly and crassly.

Sure, between his glassy, too-wide, Muppet eyes and rotund, Stay Puft Marshmellow Man belly, Minya’s one ugly little fucker. Worse yet, Tsuburaya Studios designed a Godzilla suit just as ugly, attempt to sell the idea that Minya and Godzilla are members of the same species. The last suit, from vs. The Sea Monster, makes a brief appearance for Godzilla’s brief water scenes, but once the Big G strikes land, his entire morphology changes. His eyes get bigger and move to the top of his head, which becomes blocker than it’s ever been before, even in the old hand-puppet days of the mid-50s.

On the other hand, the addition of Minya and the story points that flow from him give Godzilla something to do now that he’s no longer wading through Japan’s major cities. Let’s be honest – up to this point, Godzilla wasn’t a character: he was a special effect who in eight films exchanged exactly one scene of dialogue with the other inhabitants in his universe…and that had to be translated for us by Mothra’s twin priestess.

Here, the absence of Mothra combines with some wonderful suit acting from Machen and the two actors who portray Godzilla on land (Yu “Ebirah/MechaniKong” Sekida and Seiji Onaka) to produce one of the most underrated pantomime routines in history. Once willing suspension of disbelief kicks in and you stop making fun of the costumes, believing in these monsters becomes absurdly easy.

Better than what crocodiles have going on, I'll say that much...

Part of that’s due to excellent sound design, which has the tough job of communicating Godzilla and Minya’s emotional range to a human audience that may not give two shits otherwise. (And might even be horrifically put-off by the idea of monsters having emotional range in the first place.) As horrific as rod puppet-Minya might be, and even with all the times I’ve watched this film, Minya’s birth scene (where Godzilla saves him from being eaten by a three-mantis tag team) is still harrowing because of the squealing sounds of pain and confusion put into Minya’s far-too-immobile mouth. This holds true up ’til and including my favorite scene, which I hope to reference without spoiling by calling it “that scene in the snow.” G-fans know what I’m talking about and the rest of you should find out. It may be the key scene that finally, after thirteen years and eight films, moved Godzilla from the role of Avatar of Nuclear Annihilation to Reluctant Adoptive Father and Defender of The “Natural” Order of Things. Godzilla, too, gets a major upgrade in his vocabulary, befitting the fact that, for the first time in the series, he’s interacting with another monster in a way that doesn’t involve active violence…only the passive violence that every human culture sanctions in the name of raising children.

Godzilla’s parenting regimen is a universally familiar because someone on this movie still felt the need to make a socially relevant point, even out here in the south pacific. Goro has a line in the original version that spells this out for denser members of the audience. Observing the films one-and-only really famous scene (Godzilla’s fatherly advise to Minya on how to roar like a champion and breath radioactive fire without someone stepping on your tail) Our Reporter comments, “Just like the education fanatics back home…they don’t let their children play.”

By the late-60s, Japanese education professionals were well on their way to cementing the their school system’s international reputation for steep competition, forced hierarchies and mind-shattering entrance exams. All in the name of creating a nation of hard workers specialized in technical marvels that rest of the world can’t do without. They saw themselves as we’re meant to see Godzilla here: tough but firm guardians of naive new life, doing what they have to to prepare the next generation for a harsh, uncaring world filled with dangerous creatures.

"And this one's for all the bad homages you're going to inspire down through the years!"

Humanizing Godzilla this much is also way easier than conceiving parental habits for giant radioactive lizards from scratch. This isn’t science fiction – Ishiro Honda took all the series’ remaining pretensions to SF with him when he left – this is Adventure Fantasy at its most idyllic. Symbolized by the movie’s Chick, Saeko (or “Reiko” if you’re watching the English dub) Matsumiya (Bibari “Beverly” Maeda), the only daughter of legendary (in-universe) archeologist Dr. Matsumiya, who chose to remain on Sollgell after the Imperial Army abandoned it during World War II’s waning days.

Having grown up there with only her father and the native fauna for company, Saeko spends the first half of the movie playing a skittish cat-and-mouse game with Goro, who in his capacity as camp cook gets the shit-duty of foraging. The two eventually bond over a Hawaiian shirt Saeko stole off the camp clothes line, which Goro basically gifts to her after she proclaims it (in so many words) too girly. This is the beginning and end of her character arc, which isn’t an arc so much as a point – the kind of hypothetical point with no length and no width that only exists in the minds of math teachers. After this she’s as passive as any native guide in any given Tarzan film…though Beverly looks much better in a pair of khaki pants than any previous Jane.

Aww yeah...

Oh…I’m sorry. Am I ruining this family friendly Godzilla film with my dirty mind? Well, I hope so, because that’s about all I could do to keep myself awake during Goro and Saeko’s Bogus Journey around Monster Island. Goro even calls it that at one point (though his line’s altered to omit the phrase from the English dub), meaning this is the film that provided 57% of modern daikaiju fan websites with their name, or some derivation thereof. I’m forced to grant it Plus One for Historical Importance.

But goddamn is its human cast ever supurfluious…moreso once Godzilla and Minya start interacting. That‘s the interesting story. Who cares about these science jerks? All they’ve ever done is fuck up the local weather. It’s all they can do, as revealed by the fact their weather control experiment serves as a Third Act trump card. Freeze the fucking monsters! Or drown ‘em in radioactive flashfloods! Flush them back out to sea! It’s an incredibly obvious idea that Our Heroes take an hour and a half to think up.

"...we're just living on it!"

So the movie kills a lot of time while everyone waits around for Akihiko Hirata to repair the radio. Oh sure, Goro and Saeko have adventures…the Professor even sends them on an ol’ fashioned Fetch Quest to find a Native Cure to a Mysterious Tropical Disease the men contract two-thirds of the way through. Our leads find it, observe Godzilla instructed his new son, Goro makes that crack about education reformers back home, and they make it back to camp safely. The men are cured and the whole episode has zero lasting effect…apart from giving Furukawa another chance to wig out with a gun.

Furukawa stands out as the only character proactively working towards fulfilling his goals, making him my favorite of all the Science Jerks. Sure, Number 2′s fixing the squawk box, but there’s no passion in Hirata’s character. Everyone but Furukawa’s such a dry, one-dimensional Member of the Team they all bleed into each other.

Seriously, there’s I couldn’t tell you anybody’s name. (Hell, I had to look up Number 2′s…I just called him “Serizawa” the whole time.) Who cares? None of them do anything. Even the characters who do venture forth escape the film without a scratch. The Professor gets nicked by one of Furukawa’s errant shots, but that’s the only blood we see in a film with giant spiders, fire-breathing dinosaurs and loving shots of giant mantis mandibles cracking in anticipation of a morning meal. What’s the point of packing your cast with Red Shirts if you’re not going to kill them off? Inexcusable.

What’s the point of placing characters in jeopardy we know they’re going to escape from, because this film doesn’t have the balls to kill them? If it were lulling us into a false sense of security with its human story (the way Godzilla and Minya’s arc lulls us into a false sense of lighthearted comedy before – BANG – giant spiders and that scene in the snow) that would be fine. Somebody could sacrifice themselves to allow the rest of the group to evacuate…like Dr. Serezawa did, way back in the original Godzilla. And…hey, there’s Akihiko Hirata right over there. Hey, man! What are you waiting for, another Oxygen Destroyer?

And in the end, all your left with is some heart burn and a stupid look on your face...

In the end I still have serious reservations about this film, just not for the reasons everyone usually ticks off. If you can get past the shitty Godzilla and Minya designs, this has some of the best monster action in the Godzilla series. I’d be a dick if I didn’t give due props to the army of puppeteers to brought all these giant insects, and one giant arachnid, to life. I’ve heard it took anywhere from a ten to fifteen-man team to pull of the Climactic Battle between Godzilla and Kumongora, the spider (known as Spiga in the West). I’d rate it as one of the Big G’s Ten Best Fights if I wanted to have no life and do something time consuming, like a Top Ten list.

So while the monster stuff is awesome, it’s bogged down by a whole lot of Disney-esque Adventure antics with Our Reporter and his Chick. Still, it’s visually and aurally dynamic, competently shot, and strangely…in the end…kinda poignant. It certainly has one of the best endings in the franchise. Considering that, and its historical import as the first Godzilla movie to actually be about Godzilla in thirteen years, I have to call it required viewing. But just barely. It squeaks by on the skin of its egg-teeth. And as we move through the rest of Godzilla’s series I expect we’ll reach that conclusion more often than not.

No, I’m not dead, I’m just on vacation, thousands of miles from my equipment and the numerous films on my To Review list. That’ll continue for (at least) the next eleven days.

In the meantime, enjoy this episode of the After Movie Diner podcast, in which host Jon Cross and I discuss three DIY superhero films you might’ve seen around here recently: Defendor, Super and my perennial favorite, Kick-Ass. And happy holidays.