HubrisWeen 2015, Day 9: I Am Legend (2007)

On June 23, 2013 the world lost Richard Matheson, but like many a genre legend he will never truly die. Matheson was a hugely prolific writer, so even if you don't know his name you've definitely seen something he wrote if you watched more than ten films or TV show between about 1950 and, hell, today. If he didn't write it directly, then it was based on one of his many novels or short stories. From TV shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek: to movies as varied as The Comedy of Terrors, Duel, What Dreams May Come, and Real Steel have had Matheson's mark on them.

Matheson made one of his biggest marks, however, with his 1954 vampire novel, I Am Legend. The novel tells the story of a man named Robert Neville who just might be the only human left alive after a plague he is strangely immune to turns the rest of the world into vampires. Vampires that he hunts out and stakes during the day, while fortifying himself inside his house during the night as the vampires call for him to come out. But is he really the last true human left alive?

The effects of the novel can be seen in a variety of ways, not the least of which is the attempt to explain vampirism in scientific terms. The novel was first adapted to film as The Last Man on Earth in 1964 with Vincent Price as Robert Morgan, which Matheson actually wrote the original screnplay for. However, while it is the most faithful adaptation of the story, Matheson was not fond of the later rewrites and requested to credited under the pseudonym "Logan Swanson." I'm sure I'll review this version in due time, but one of its biggest departures was making the vampires into slow-moving, shambling corpses. It's little surprise, then, that it's often cited as one of George A. Romero's inspirations for Night of The Living Dead.

The film was adapted a second time as The Omega Man in 1971 with Charlton Heston in the Robert Neville role. This one, however, diverges wildly from the novel. The menace that Neville faces are no longer vampires, but a cult of albino mutant Luddites that blame modern technology for the downfall of the world--and see Neville as one of the chief architects. The twist of the original novel is virtually cut out all together, so the tragic yet hopeful ending is robbed of a lot of its power. It is notable for having one of the earliest onscreen interracial romances between Heston and Rosalind Cash, but overall it's not very good.

In the 1990s, rumors swirled of a third adaptation with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but that attempt was cast into development hell until around 2002, when the project was revived as a vehicle for Will Smith. It took several rewrites and mutations before the film finally made it to the screen at the end of 2007, and yours truly went to see it with expectations firmly lowered.

What I saw was almost a pleasant surprise.

The film opens in 2009, with a television interview with Dr. Alice Krippin (an uncredited Emma Thompson!). Dr. Krippin has engineered a version of the measels virus that is designed to combat cancer. She happily announces that in the 10,009 human trials she has conducted, all 10,009 patients have become cancer free. The amazed announcer asks if this means she has cured cancer and Krippin replies, rather modestly, that she has.

A "Three Years Later" title card finds us in an empty, ruined Manhattan. (A rather clever nod to the 2012 apocalypse hysteria of the Aughts) Wild plants everywhere and not a sound can be heard anywhere--until we see a car zooming down an otherwise abandoned street. In the passenger seat is a German shepherd named Sam, but the driver is Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith!), a former US Army doctor and current last man on earth. Sam has caught wind of something, and Neville nearly runs right into an entire herd of deer. (Which oddly vocalize like elk) He and Sam pursue the deer, ultimately having to get out on foot and chase after one buck.

Together, they fight crime.

Unfortunately, a feral lioness kills the deer. Neville briefly ponders killing the lion, but then sees her mate and cub. Something about their dynamic gives him pause, reminds him of something he's lost. And then his watch beeps, and he realizes the sun is dipping dangerously low in the sky. Calmly, he and Sam leave the lions to their kill and hurry back home. Neville covers their tracks into his brownstone with some kind of chemical (vinegar, looks like). They eat their supper while Neville watches a recording of a morning show on his TV, he bathes Sam, and then closes down the heavy shutters on all the windows as the sun sets and bars the door.

Sam and Neville sleep in the bathtub that night, listening to the sound of creatures that might once have been human howling and screaming outside. In this version, the vampires (or "hemocytes" if you go by the subtitles and "Darkseekers" by the dialogue, but fuck that--they're Goddamn vampires so just freaking call them that) don't know where Neville lives and are too feral to call him out even if they did.

Neville's days are pretty loaded. He starts off each morning by experimenting on vampire rats in his basement lab, trying to find a vaccine or antidote. It seems that KV (the "Krippin Virus") turns you into a bald, albino rage zombie version of your former self. And I have to say, the vampire rats are truly cartoonish CGI, despite the fact that at least one of them could have been played by an actual hairless rat. Most of his subjects are unaffected or killed, but he does see one rat that looks like it's returning to normal. The rest of the morning consists of searching every apartment in the city, both for supplies and to ensure no vampires are hiding inside. (There's some nice worldbuilding in these scenes, particularly when we see a newspaper front page warning that infected dogs can come out at dusk) Then he swings by a video store populated by mannequins he's set up, including a mysterious woman near the adult section he promises Sam that he'll talk to one of these days.

So, in this film the apocalypse spared us Batman v. Superman. Clearly, those of us in the real world are in the darkest timeline.

His afternoons consist of broadcasting a radio signal to any possible survivors and waiting at the docks every noon for other survivors who never come. Here we notice that every bridge out of the city has been destroyed. Sam sees another deer and the two pursue it, only for the cornered creature to duck into a ruined bank building. To Neville's horror, Sam follows. Neville reluctantly goes in to recover his dog, and finds the deer has aleady been killed by the vampires inside. He nearly runs into a huge group of the vampires, standing in a bank vault in a cluster and panting heavily--which is about the only truly effective shot of the vampires.

As we soon see when Neville finds an unharmed Sam, only to be attacked by a vampire, someone decided that the bald, hairless humans that repesent this version's vampires needed to be entirely CGI. I have no idea why, since the only thing they do that needs CGI to accomplish is opening their mouths really wide like Arnold Vosloo in The Mummy movies. It renders them incredibly non-threatening because they never look real. This is a far cry from Gollum, let me tell you.

"Whoa. Wrong book."

Neville gets Sam out of there, and ends up jumping out a window with two vampires gnawing on him. The sun kills them pretty effectively, but it's certainly an unpleasant process. Neville chides Sam for running into the dark and forgetting that she can still be turned if she's bitten, then makes her stay in the car while he uses some of his blood as bait for a trap that captures a female vampire (Lauren Haley, but mainly bad CGI). This raises the ire of a male vampire (Dash Mihok, also mainly bad CGI, though), who almost charges partly into the sunlight, stares Neville down, and vanishes.

In his log later, Neville attributes this behavior to the vampires becoming desperate for food and forgetting self-preservation. He also discovers that the female vampire has a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder before he tests his vaccine on her. It appears to work at first--only to then apparently kill her. Neville revives her and keeps her locked up under sedation in his lab.

That night, like most nights, Neville is tormented by his memory of the night New York City was locked down by the military. We don't see it all in one piece, but Neville loaded his wife Zoe (Salli Richardson, voice of Elisa Maza on Disney's Gargoyles) and young daughter Marley (Willow Smith, yep, his real-life daughter) into a military transport, along with Marley's puppy Sam. They barely made it past the infection scanners and through the crowd desperate to escape the island. Neville had to stay in order to continue his work, but he loaded his wife and daughter into the helicopter--keeping Sam at his daughter's insistence. Unfortunately, the helicopter took off just after the missiles had destroyed the bridges, and another helicopter lost control after being swarmed by desperate people and spun into the helicopter containing Neville's family...

Now, Sam is all he has left in the world. Too bad fate isn't done screwing him over. During a regular run, Neville notices one of his mannequins in a place it should not be. Isolation has made Neille, understandably, a bit disconnected from reality. So he angrily approavhes the mannequin demanding to know if it's real, and ends up gunning it down--and firing wildly at the windows of the buildings around him. Unfortunately, he makes the mistake of stepping into the puddle by the mannequin to investigate it--and finds himself caught in the exact kind of trap he used to catch the female vampire earlier.

Blood rushing to his head knocks Neville out for hours. When he comes to the sun is going down and cutting himself down results in landing on the knife, wounding his thigh. He crawls back towards his car, only for the male vampire to appear in the building behind the trap--holding onto three vampire dogs. A thin strip of sunight that's rapidly fading keeps the dogs at bay, but Neville has only just made it to his car (and his other gun), when the sun dips below the buildings enough to allow the dogs to charge. Neville ultimately kills the vampire dogs, but Sam has been bitten several times.

"Bad vampire dog! Bad!"

Revealing her name is Samantha, Neville loads the dog into the car and speeds home. Unfortunately, the vaccine doesn't work on dogs any better than humans and as Neville cradles Sam in his arms, her fur falls out and she lunges at his throat--and he is forced to strangle her to death. He buries her in the field where he grows corn, and goes to the video store to make good on his promise to speak to the mysterious mannequin in the adult section. Through tears he begs the mannequin to speak to him. And that sounds like it should be ridiculous, but it's amazingly heart-wrenching.

Unfortunately, from here on the film takes a slight dive from the great one-man show it's been up until now. Neville attempts to ambush the vampires that night on the dock, running several over with his car. However, there's too many and they finally overturn his car. The male vampire leans in toward Neville, teeth bared--only for a bright UV light to drive the vampires away. A dazed Neville hears a female voice desperately asking him where he lives and he tells her address, but warns not to let the vampires follow.

And then he comes to on his couch. His leg has been stitched up, Shrek is playing on the TV, and there are two normal humans in his kitchen. The adult woman is Anna Montez (Alice Braga!) and the young boy is Ethan (Charlie Tahan), though Ethan appears to be mute (at least for most of his screentime). Anna is making eggs and bacon from Neville's reserves, and advises she set some antibiotics by his plate for his leg.

Anna and Ethan were aboard a Red Cross ship harbored in Philadelphia, but unfortunately it was overrun. Apparently, only they survived the assault and have been on the move ever since--and they heard Neville's broadcasts. Unfortunately, he wasn't at the docks that day so luckily they had waited nearby and were able to save him from the vampires. Anna then mentions that their real destination is Vermont, since there's a colony of other immune survivors there. Neville gets furious at this, since he is sure that is a myth and he smashes his plate against the wall and storms away until he can calm back down.

When Neville comes back down, he obsessively quotes Shrek for a bit before getting down to business with Anna. She explains that on board her ship there were five immune people, but the vampires (no, stop saying "Darkseekers" just fucking call them vampires) got the others. She talks again about going to Vermont but Neville refuses. He has to stay and fix things, finally stop the plague once and for all.

Anna asks what happened to his leg, so he shows her the trap. He's mystified because he is sure the infected could not have laid the trap for him because they have no higher brain function, but Anna is not so sure. While they sit beside a koi pond, she asks Neville if the vampires could be evolving. Ethan then splashes into the pond, so Neville throws some food in to send the fish into a feeding frenzy. When Ethan observes that the water is cold, Neville realizes that temperature is the key.

Putting the female vampire on a bed of ice, he tries again. Anna brings him coffee, and then notices that one wall of Neville's lab is devoted to the human subjects he has experimented on--all of them dead. Anna begins to see Neville in a different light, but doesn't say much. After taking Ethan up to bed as the sun sets, Anna notices Marley's picture. Neville explains that they named his daughter after Bob Marley--whom Neville has been listening to off and on for the whole film--and discovers, to his horror, that Anna doesn't know who Bob Marely is,

Neville endeavors to educate her. Afterwards, they close up the shutters as Anna begs him to come with to the colony in Vermont. Neville insists there is no colony, and her admission that she knows the colony is there because God told her doesn't exactly sway him. He counters her "God's plan" bullshit with pointing out that KV killed 90% of the world's population, leaving only the immune and the vampires. And then the vampires killed those who were immune. As far as Neville is concerned there is no God.

And then, perhaps to prove Neville's point, there comes a keening scream from nearby. It seems that, concerned about Neville's chances, Anna didn't wait for full dawn to bring him home. Well, now there are dozens of vampires charging across the park toward Chez Neville. The UV floodlights in the park only slow them down, but the car bombs he sets off on the street seem to the job. Except, going upstairs to find Anna and Ethan gets him ambushed by the male vampire. Bitten on the neck and tossed around like a rag doll, Neville only escapes by stabbing his foe in the leg with a screwdriver. Well, more like this causes his foe to throw him down the stairs in a way that would kill an ordinary human.

Neville shoots at the male vampire with a hidden assault rifle,sets off another explosion, and then chases after the fiend when he scrambles up the stairs. He chases the male vampire out of a window, and then finds Ethan and Anna hiding under a dresser as another vampire tears a hole in the ceiling. Neville dispatches that vampire with another gun--but the male vampire is outside, calling down another wave of vampires. Their only option now is to flee down to the safety of the lab...

And here's where the movie completely falls to shit if, like me, you went to see it in the theater. I'll elaborate on that momentarily, but I will tell you right now that if you watch it on Blu-ray or DVD you want to be sure you have the "Alternate Cut" selected if you want the film to not completely piss all over the floor in the last few minutes.

We'll start, therefore with the alternate cut's ending, a.k.a. the ending that isn't infuriating. Locking themselves behind the plexiglass, Anna discovers that the vaccine is working, turning the female vampire into something more like her former human self. Unfortunately, then the vampires smash through the lab doors. Neville desperate, tries to reason with the vampires as they slam against the glass, telling them he can save them. However, the male vampire tosses the others aside and smashes against the glass, cracking it.

Then, to Neville's shock the vampire uses its bloody hand-print to paint the image of a butterfly on the glass. And suddenly, Neville understands, as he looks at the butterfly tattoo on the shoulder of his test subject. This whole time, the male just wanted the female back. To Anna's confusion, Neville unhooks the creature from her IV, which causes her to revert back to her vampire complexion. Neville has Anna open the door and he rolls the female vampire out to the others.

Calmly, as the male vampire keeps the others at bay, Neville gets a syringe and uses it to bring the female vampire back to consciousness. The mated pair are happily reunited, and the male gives one last baleful look to Neville--who apologizes aloud, with a sideways glance at the wall of photos of the vampires he's killed. The vampires depart, leaving Neville to realize that he is the boogeyman. You might even say, he is legend.

And then Neville, Anna, and Ethan drive across the one bridge that apparently wasn't destroyed. (Yeah, okay, that part is dumb) They broadcast to others that there is hope, that they are not alone. The End.

"Well, your tonsils look fine from here, but that wisdom tooth has got to go."

Unless you saw it in the theater, of course. Apparently test audiences--the same bastards who deprived us of Audrey II going on a Godzilla-style rampage in Little Shop of Horrors until the director's cut finally hit Blu-ray--couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that Neville was the real monster all along. This, of course, is the entire point of the damn novel and The Last Man On Earth got it right, too. Though, the oddest part is that this means the audience rejected a happy ending!

Sure, Neville driving happily into the countryside after realizing he has been callously torturing and murdering intelligent beings is a bit of an odd decision, but I can accept it. Meanwhile, the theatrical ending opts to have the vampires just have been mindless monsters all along--despite keeping all the obvious cues that they are more than that--and Neville becomes "legend" instead by giving his cure to Anna and then suicide bombing the vampires. It keeps the tragic ending the story has always had, while removing everything that actually made it mean something.

Oh, and the film's already heavy-handed butterfly motif in the theatrical ending takes a turn for the "Swing away" reveal of Signs, in a way it already borders dangerously on in the original ending.

Now, even with the fixed ending this movie is still heavily flawed. As I said earlier, the film takes a distinct dive in quality once Neville is no longer alone and making Anna (and Ethan) just other immune humans instead of vampires who gradually became human robs the reveal of a lot of its power, as well. And the vampires, my God, the vampires are just awful. There is no reason that the vampires had to be such awful CGI for most of their screen time, but somebody decided that was a good idea and they were wrong.

These vampires might be creepy in a Resident Evil game, but they never feel like anything but cartoons that have entered the real world. The ending still works in spite of the fact we're being asked to sympathize with game sprites, but the only way they could look sillier would be if they were all dressed in rubbery bat monster costumes. And calling them Darkseekers just makes it that much worse. At least "Hemocytes" almost sounds cool, but why is it so hard to just call them vampires? People in the real world certainly would.

Even with an ending that doesn't make you wonder why they bothered with the rights in the first place, the film is barely more than okay. But, damn it, I really want to like it more. For one thing, Will Smith gets to really stretch his chops as an actor for the first 2/3rds of the film. This film has to rely on him alone for that stretch of it, and he is more than up to the task. His performance is easily on par with the one Vincent Price delivered in The Last Man On Earth, which is high praise indeed. I mean, the aftermath of Sam's death is made even more heartbreaking by his performance.

It makes me really wish the rest of the film was deserving of that. It's not just that I feel the writing suffers a bit, but Smith's performance does as well. Unfortunately, when Anna and Ethan show up, Will Smith the actor becomes overpowered by Will Smith the Persona. You know exactly what I mean, I'm sure--the scenes of him teaching Anna about Bob Marley and quoting Shrek could just as easily have come right out of something like Hitch.

In the end, my favorite adaptation of Matheson's novel will always star Vincent Price. However, this film comes frustratingly close so many times it really makes me wish it could have actually pulled it off. In the end, I'm afraid it comes up just too short. It's definitely worth seeing, as long as you watch the alternate cut, but it will never be the horror classic it should have been.

Sad to say, it's no legend.

Today's review brought to you by the letter I! Hit the banner above to see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for I!

HubrisWeen 2015, Day 8: Harbinger Down (2015)

There's a rather misguided belief that I've been guilty of buying into, which is that practical effects in movies are dying. Movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and even Furious 7 prove that there are actually some filmmakers who understand that you need to squeeze some real destruction in amongst the computer graphics, and even smaller films like WolfCop and Late Phases show that even low-budget productions are trending back towards practical effects instead of SyFy-level CGI.

However, it's certainly easy to believe that Hollywood is killing off practical effects when you look at a movie like Jurassic World, which is the latest entry a series that has always set the bar for understanding when you need CGI and when you need a practical effect--and totally failed to learn that lesson. Despite the director's insistence that he was using practical effects, we got 99% CGI and one dying Brontosaurus puppet. (No, fuck you, I'm not calling it Apatosaurus and you can't make me) It really makes you miss Stan Winston even more.

Then Rick Baker quit doing special effects because he was tired of competing with CGI, and I can only imagine that the way the studio decided to replace his efforts in The Wolfman with the worst CGI werewolf transformation effects since An American Werewolf In Paris had a lot to do with motivating that decision. Peter Jacksomn suddenly decided that orcs needed to be CGI in The Hobbit, despite having previously delivered an entire trilogy full of badass orcs that were stuntmen in make-up.

The worst offender by far, however, was 2011's The Thing. It was bad enough that somebody decided that they needed to do a prequel about what happened in that Norwegian base in John Carpenter's 1982 remake, but refused to believe audiences could care about a group composed entirely of non-Americans. The true insult came about, though, when the promo materials all claimed the film would be delivering practical gore effects like Rob Bottin had created, courtesy of a genre legend in his own right, Alec Gillis--and then the finished film replaced all but a few tentacles with passable CGI that didn't have anywhere near the impact of the gore effects from Carpenter's film.

If you've seen the behind-the-scenes footage of the effects that were replaced, you know this was a horrific injustice. Still, no one was more understandaly offended than Alec Gillis. Turning to Kickstarter, Gillis set up a fund to create his own take on a shape-shifting alien monster story. I missed the Kickstarter when it came out, so I have not a penny to my name in the film's creation. However, you can bet that I'm contributing whatever I can spare to the Shallow Water Kickstarter, since I love practical effects and I can't possibly resist a good fish-lizard-turtle-man creature.

So I was definitely excited for this film, even if I knew it was likely that it would not actually be good just because it was doing practical effects. I mean, hey, Leviathan has Stan Winston doing a version ob The Thing that turns people into fish monsters and it's "meh" at best. Hell, for all I knew it would be the worst kind of crushing disappointment. Still, I knew I had to pick it up when it hit DVD (forget Blu-ray, unless you were a donor) and at least give it a chance.

The film opens in 1982, in the Arctic Circle as a Soviet lunar lander crashes back down to Earth. Two things present themselves in this sequence: one, the effects are a charming mix of mediocre CGI and obvious miniatures for things like the clouds. Two, when I say "lunar lander" I literally mean that. Landing struts and all. The cosmonaut (Jason Speer) inside is clearly boned, of course. Not only is his craft burning up as it plunges into the atmosphere, but a container on the panel behind him is leaking some kind of space goo.

That's never a good sign.

Cut to the modern day, in Alaska. The film briefly decides to introduce our characters via horrible camcorder footage as college professor, Steven (Matt Winston, a real "that guy" actor) is loading stuff into a rental car while grad student, Sadie (Camille Balsamo) scrapes the ice off. Filming all this is Stephen's other grad student, Ronelle (Giovonnie Samuels), but we won't be introduced to her face-to-face for a little while yet. The trio's destination is the crab fishing vessel, Harbinger.

Why are they going on this vessel, exactly? To study the effects of global warming on beluga whales, of course. The trio get an introduction to the crew, a real rag-tag bunch: Russian ex-pat Svet (Milla Bjorn), righteously bearded Inuit Atka (Edwin H. Bravo), the aptly named Big G (Winston James Francis), obvious love interest Bowman (Reid Collums), and token black guy Dock (Michael Estime).

[There's also Roland (Kraig W. Sturtz), who seems to stay in the drive shaft area of the ship, but both the movie and the characters seem to forget he exists for much of the running time]

Dock gets a load of Ronelle and, as you would expect of a thinly sketched character, has to remark on his surprise at a "sistah" being on board. And I quickly realize I would like this movie so much better if Ronelle was the heroine. Not only is she gorgeous and cute, but it'd be a nice change of pace to have a woman of color be the survivor of a sci-fi horror movie. That the only recent example of that I can think of is Alien vs. Predator is severely disheartening.

Team Ronelle.

Nope, as you probably guessed, our heroine is Sadie, as cemented by the fact that the boat's skipper is her grandfather, Graff (Lance Henriksen!). The two have not seen each other in quite a while, and it's also apparently been a while since Sadie has been on a boat. Oh, she's got her sea legs just fine--unlike Stephen, who is turning green already--but she gets nervous when Graff invites her up to the wheelhouse. It seems her parents died in a boating accident and she's been way of boats ever since. Graff offers her a platitude about not letting fear get the better of her, but doesn't force the issue.

Sadie and Ronelle set up their gear, meanwhile. In addition to what appears to be a woefully inadequate whale tracker (the boat shows up as flashing boat,on a grid, the belugas they're tracking as flashing circles--with no frame of reference), they also have a genetic analyzer. Bowman, standing in for the audience, wonders what the heck they need one of those for if they're tracking whales. Ronelle explains it may be useful if they get a sample (?) from one of the whales.

Or you know, encounter an alien life form that they need to analyze.

That night, as the fishers are drawing up huge bundles of crabs, Sadie sees the pod of beluga on the screen right next to the ship. She is unable to wake her fellow scientists, so she goes topside and sticks the underwater camera over the side. She sees the beluga (which appear to be some barely adequate puppets), but more importantly sees that they are crowding around something lodged in the ice floe. Whatever it is has a blinking light on it, and it's in blue ice so it's been there a while.

After a brief discussion with Graff and Svet, during which the possibility of it being a Navy buoy is dismissed, the decision is made to extract the object from the ice and bring it aboard. Stephen and Ronelle finally wake up and come topside to see what all the fuss is abut, Stephen being briefly irritated that Sadie didn't wake him when she sighted the belugas. However, he quickly decides that the thing in the ice is way cooler. While Ronelle films, Atka, Svet, Dock, Bowman, and Big G chip away at the ice. One of them wonders if it might be a sea mine, but Svet points out that putting a big blinking light on a sea mine kind of defeats the purpose.

Upon uncovering more of the metal of the object, Graff realizes it's Soviet so whatever it is has been in the ice for over twenty years. And then they find the dead cosmonaut inside, whom they assume burned to death on re-entry. Graff votes they bring it back to port and report it to the Russian authorities. Stephen objects that it belonged to the Soviet Union, so since they no longer exist salvage law applies and it belongs to the university. Sadie backs up the salvage law part, but when Stephen tries to strong arm her into going along with his plan for it, Graff points out Sadie found it and they're on his boat so it's going back to port and they can decide who gets to claim in then.

The partially uncovered space capsule is lowered into the hold, next to the container of crabs they've caught. Graff tries to radio in that they've found wreckage with human remains, but the storm blowing in is garbling the radio so all he can successfully get through is "negative mayday." Dock, Atka, and Bowman go down into the hold to freeze the crabs with liquid nitrogen. Seeing that Dock is sticking his head into the capsule nervously, the other two blast the liquid nitrogen to scare him.

Sadie and Stephen, meanwhile, are at odds. Stephen doesn't want the capsule touched, but Sadie wants to examine it. Finally, she turns to Bowman for help. Bowman gets Big G to distract Stephen by...asking the marine biology professor for psychiatric advice. This somehow works (and the dialogue is fairly clever, so it may have been improvised) and Sadie sneaks down to the hold with Svet, so the Russian can translate the writing on the capsule. They discover that it is, in fact, a lunar lander (this being a movie like Apollo 18, in that it suggests the launch of a rocket for a moon landing could be kept secret).

"And this one here says 'Comrade Kilroy was here.'"

For some reason, Sadie decides to take off the cosmonaut's helmet and realizes he didn't die from burning. His body is riddled with what appear to be parasites beneath the skin. She carefuly extracts one and puts it in a sample tube. Satisfied, she turns to go and analyze the sample--but Svet stops her briefly to note that oozing sample canister from before, now empty. She can't figure out the exact English word on the label, but the closest she can figure is "water bear."

After Big G gives up the ruse, Stephen sees Sadie talking with Svet and Bowman and figures out she was behind it. He goes to investigate the capsule and sees it was disturbed, picking up the discarded helmet in his bare hands. Ronelle and Sadie analyze the sample while Bowman looks on. Sure enough, the sample indicates the parasites are mutated tardigrades ("water bears"). Naturally, they don't look like tardigrades, but just you never mind that. Based on the analysis from Ronelle's little machine, the tardigrades DNA matches a wide array of creatures--somehow, in the decades that they've been in the ice, the tardigrades have been absorbing the DNA that just floats freely in the ocean from virtually every creature in it. They've used this DNA cocktail to evolve into something completely new.

Unfortunately, they've also started to thaw. While Svet and Big G are flirtatiously trying to drink each other under the table, the film remembers that Roland exists. While lounging on his cot by the drive shaft, Roland hears something squeaking around and decides to look under his cot. He sees a mass of blue, pulsating flesh--and then the mass shoots out tentacles that bust his skull open. Svet and Big G are now inexplicably trying to beat the shit out of each other (!), but Svet ultimately wins and walks away. So, I guess that wasn't foreplay?

Svet then goes to see Ronelle, who comments that Big G obviously likes her--and then gives her make-up tips because Ronelle was previously studying to be a make-up artist before she settled on marine biology. She then notices a scar on the side of Svet's face. Svet dismisses it as a bad break up and a horrified Ronelle says she hopes they found the guy. "Most of him," Svet replies.

About this time, it's discovered that the body of the cosmonaut is missing. Stephen blames Sadie for this, claiming she threw the body overboard. When it's pointed out it'd be hard for Sadie to carry a body by herself, Stephen claims Bowman helped her. Graff throws Stephen against a column, having had just about enough of his crap. As everyone is arguing about what to do, Sadie notices Stephen is acting funny. She follows him as he suddenly runs out on deck and strips to the waist. He's screaming about being hot and inded his very skin seems to be steaming in the cold air. The crew helps Sadie get him back inside--but then, as he bends over a desk, his back breaks into a strange pattern of what look like keloid scars. (This is plainly a CGI effect, incidentally) And then several tentacles burst out of his back and spray an off-white liquid at the ceiling.

Some of the liquid splashes into Dock's mouth, and then they observe the liquid (via reverse filming) oozing into a drain under its own power. Another puddle on the desk forms into a wriggling mass of tentacles that leaps into the air and then dives into the drain as well. Sadie traps another bit of the liquid as it turns into a rolling polymer with a glass and a lid. They take it down to the hold so it can be frozen with liquid nitrogen. Sadie cuts off a piece to examine. Sure enough, it's more tardigrades and she discovers that, when thawed, she can cut them apart and not only will they reform but they can change from solid to liquid and back again at will.

The crew all meet and discuss what needs to happen. The simple fact of the matter is that they've all been exposed to a parasite ("Some more than others," Svet says with a glance at Dock) that can take over and destroy its host completely. It can also change from liquid to solid and is nigh impossible to kill. The only weapon they have on board is liquid nitrogen, but at least they already know that cold can stop the creatures...temporarily. They set up some portal spray tanks and pour some of the liquid nitrogen into buckets.

Graff and Atka go down to find Roland, having finally remembered the poor bastard. Well, they don't find him--aside from some blood--but they do find that the drive shaft has been bent out of shape. And then they find the cosmonaut, dangling from some translucent tentacles.The tentacles drop his body and they see that they belong to a creature that has attached itself to the wall with tentacles, but looks like a large blue insect. It lashes out with tentacles, but luckily for Graff they can't reach him. Unluckily for Atka, it's because he was in the way. Before Graff can do much of anything, Atka's arm has been torn off and he's being dragged to his death.

When Graff meets the others in a hallway and sees Bowman holding a small bucket of liquid nitrogen, he dryly quips, "We're gonna need a bigger bucket." This is legitimately the best line in the film, which is rather unfortunate.

Big G, Bowman, and Graff go back down to find that the creature has transformed into a dead ringer for the monster from Forbidden World and is currently chomping Atka's body in half. It begins spraying liquid from various pores as they approach--which has the amusing effect of making it look like the creature is doing that thing in cartoons where tears or sweat are rendered as huge spouts of water--but they thoroughly hose it down with liquid nitrogen. This really only allows them a moment's peace before they hear screams from the upper decks. On the deck of the boat, Svet has Dock trapped in a crab net with a Very pistol pointed at him. She is insisting he is infected because he is sweating, and a high temperaure has aleady been established as symptom.

The others try to reason with Svet, but then Dock slumps forward and translucent blue tentacles burst out of his back. Svet fires the flare gun and sets him ablaze. Something about this doesn't sit well with Sadie, though, and she confronts Svet inside the cabin by throwing Svet's duffel on the ground. Graff opens it and discovers it's filled with sophisticated radio equipment. Why does she have this? She's a Russian spy, of course.

"Come on, guys, I'm fine: this is a birthmark!"

You see, the Russians have been installing spies on fishing boats all over the Arctic in hopes of finding this capsule. Now that it's been found and the threat of the organism inside it has been discovered, she sets the countdown for the various explosives she's set all over the boat to go off in an hour. She'll be fine, however, because she's been inoculated (against what, water bears?!) and there's a Russian sub coming to get her. She then pulls a gun on the others. Graff decides to go for the old "you can't shoot all of us" gambit, and the group prepares to rush her--just as the goop that's been pouring out of the pipe behind her, in full view of the crew (and earshot of Svet) finally decides to strike at her after taking the form of a very familiar-looking webbed tentacle. And for the life of me, I have no idea if the lack of reaction was supposed to be intentional or poor blocking.

At any rate, Svet drops the gun and--in the stupidest death I've seen in a good while--Ronelle picks it up, but stands in place holding it out in her palm to the others, asking someone to take it from her until the tentacle grabs her by the head and yanks her into the pipe. Now, not only is this death stupid because Ronelle gets herself killed in the dumbest possible way, but this is not one of the gore set pieces. We do not see a single drop of blood as a grown human woman is forcibly yanked into a pipe she could not possibly fit into and vanishes, which implies she somehow fit perfectly. While the abilities of the monster are maddeningly inconsistent, it definitely could not have liquefied her that fast.

I knew that the token black woman wouldn't survive, but couldn't she at least have had a somewhat dignified death?

Svet tries to escape, but Big G grabs her by the arm and demands to know where the bombs are. She starts to tell him--and then sees a lower torso (I'm guessing Atka) standing down the hall. The intestines are tentacles now and before she can say anything more useful, the torso tackles her and she is dragged into a vent. Apparently being inoculated just means the creature has to take its time digesting her, as we'll see her occasionally being devoured for a little while.

Well, the remaining survivors decide it's time to find the explosives before they all die, and they figure out how many were in her bag. Big G, examining the busted drive shaft, figures out that he may be able to bend it back and then they can get back to port and go into quarantine--but there's not time for fixing the shaft until they find the bombs. Graff finds a few of the explosives, which are magnetized, and collect them. However, then Sadie figures out that Svet must have hidden the rest of the bombs in the bilge pump and she's the only one who can fit into the bilge to get them--and sure enough, she's right. As she's sticking all the bombs onto a crowbar, Big G and Bowman realize that the container full of a ton of crabs is now empty. All that mass had to go somewhere...

...like the bilge pump. And indeed, as Sadie drops the last bomb into the bilge water, she suddenly realizes that the water she's standing in is not water. The monster begins to solidify around her and the others pull her up just in time so she only loses her hip-waders instead of everything below her hips. The monster then bursts up out of the bilge pump and Sadie just leaves the crowbar covered with explosives by the the tanks of liquid nitrogen because apparently if you concentrate all the explosives in one area it will be fine.

Unfortunately, Graff gets splattered with tardigrade goo so he charges Bowman with keeping Sadie away from him while he dumps his wife's ashes as a last human act--oh, yeah, Sadie's grandmother has been dead for years and he just didn't bother to tell her. Big G goes to work bending the drive shaft back, but he gets ambushed by the film's one truly memorable monster: the re-purposed corpse of Svet that has mantis-like blade hands and a huge, toothy mouth coming out of the back of her head.

"Greetings, fellow hew-mon. I am also hew-mon woman, how are you?"

Big G just punches the Svet-Mantis out after stabbing it a few times, and goes back to to straightening the drive shaft. As you might expect, the creature waits until he has it fixed and then gets back up and impales him with its claw. Now that the movie has disposed of its last person of color, we cut back to the other three survivors. The bombs go off and...the explosion just blows a hole in the deck and temporarily freezes the big monster in the hold. Sadie has to face her fear and take control of the helm in the wheelhouse, while Graff begs for Bowman to freeze him.

Unfortunately, the monster has just re-awakened and has other plans. Its tentacles impale Bowman and then drag him out onto deck. Sadie gets to watch her love interest die, helpless to do anything about it. Graff then spots a huge iceberg ahead and tells Sadie to crash the boat into the ice as he tosses himself to the giant monster whose tentacles are now completely cocooning the boat. (And really this part just reminds me of the boss in Resident Evil 5: the attractive woman in a low-cut dress with exaggerated breast jiggle who suddenly turns into a giant tentacle monster on a barge) Sadie sets the course for the iceberg, jams the throttle and grabs a radio before diving out the window and onto the ice floe.

She watches as the giant, glowing creature rises from the boat, roaring to the heavens--and then slams into the iceberg. This is somehow considered final, even though we already know this creature is made up of nigh-inestructible tardigrades that can also turn into liquid so it is not even remotely dead. Her radio suddenly working now, Sadie radios in, "Harbinger Down," and collapses onto the ice as we hear the sound of a helicopter closing in on her. The End.

Yep, I still think she should have been the final girl,

The trouble with Harbinger Down, ultimately, is that it's a film whose very reason for existing is to be "different" from other films. Its use of practical effects was supposed to distinguish it, but in reality it did nothing of the sort.

There's several reasons for this. First of all, while everyone is used to the awful CGI in SyFy Channel Originals and Sharknado sequels flooding the bargain bin market, there's actually been a bit of a trend away from that in low budget fare. I already mentioned WolfCop and Late Phases, but they aren't the only examples. Hell, even the Asylum's Age of Dinosaurs featured some hand puppets in among the cheap CGI.

So just having practical effects is not enough to distinguish a movie, despite the seeming trend toward 100% CGI in Hollywood. Therefore, you need to deliver really good practical effects. This movie, sadly, does not. The effects (aside from some dubious miniatures and the beluga puppets) are certainly not bad, but there's nothing about them that stands out. Rather than trying to be their own thing, most of them are based on the principal of, "Hey, remember how cool the effects in John Carpenter's The Thing were?" Unfortunately, while that film gave us a mulitude of memorable creatures, this film gives us...tentacles, more tentacles, and tentacles that sometimes glow! When the monster does take on a form more recognizable than "mass of writing tentacles," it usually looks very generic. I've already mentioned the Svet-Monster, which is the only one really worth mentioning.

Oh, and that attitude I mentioned extends to the movie itself. It makes constant reference to The Thing: just off the top of my head, Dock calls something "voodoo bullshit" for no reason and in Roland's bunk there's a Chess Wizard computer lying on its side. Even the structure of the climax is basically the same as MacReady rapidly losing all his allies and barely fleeing a gigantic version of is shapeshifting nemesis prior to destroying it, only to probably freeze to death. Of course, this film just shows how necessary Childs showing up again was to the success of that film's ending.

Failing to be its own thing is really just a symptom of the film as a whole. The characters are thinly sketched stock roles, you can almost guess every one of the plot's beats, and the direction is rather like Anaconda in that it's largely stolid and lifeless, but then will attempt some form of stylish approach that doesn't eally fit. I can't help but snicker a bit at this quote from the film's Kickstarter page:

Visual Effects limitations back in the 80's meant that those sci-fi/horror filmmakers had to tell more psychologically engaging stories. They didn't have CGI to show expansive worlds, so they told stories that relied on well-developed characters in intense situations. It was those very limitations that made their films better.

Hilariously, this film shows that that statement is completely inaccurate. Movies in the 1980s didn't need CGI to have paper-thin characters and terrible writing. This film shows that that has not changed. As a screenwriter and director, Alec Gllis makes a fantastic special effects artist.

Ultimately, watching this film reminded me of nothing so much as a direct-to-video film from 1995 called Proteus. Like this film, Proteus is an "homage" to John Carpenter's film that takes place on the ocean: the story involves characters on an oil rig-based research station fighting for their lives against a shapeshifting mutant. The ending involves the mutant turning into an enormous sharktopus, and it is delightful. However, I missed Proteus on video. The reviews for it were terrible, and I probably would have disliked it back then, too.

Seeing Proteus on Netflix Instant, though, was a breath of fresh air. It was a largely crummy film, but it was mostly practical effects and charming ones at that (again, giant sharktopus) and that made it seem unique...in 2011. Harbinger Down was specifically produced to be unique, and it feels less unique than a direct-to-video rip-off (ostensibly based on the novel Slimer by Harry Adam Knight, of Carnosaur fame) that had no grander ambitions than stocking video store shelves.

I really wanted to like Harbinger Down, and I don't regret supporting the film by buying it on DVD, but sadly it just isn't very good. It's a passable time waster of the sort you might watch at the gym when it inevitably makes it to cable. If it ends up on Netflix Instant, I'd say it's worth a spin, but I just can't recommend actively seeking it out.

It's far from the worst movie I've watched for HubrisWeen, but that's damning it with the faintest of praise as you'll soon see.

Today's review, brought to you be the letter H! Hit the banner for the other Celluloid Zeroes' reviews for H!

HubrisWeen 2015, Day 7: Ghoulies II (1988)

Even if you're only passingly familiar with producer Charles Band, you probably know of his reputation for loving stories about small monsters killing people. This obsession is usually associated with the Puppet Master films, but it started several years before that. The actual basic idea for the film was actually being tossed around by Band as early as 1983, but it's pretty obvious that the first Ghoulies really came to life after Band saw Gremlins. After all, the original title was "Beasties" and that wouldn't fool somebody into accidentally renting it, thinking it was related. I also would be willing to bet the wacky hijinks that the "Ghoulies" get into in the first film wouldn't have existed without Joe Dante's film.

It's strange, then, that the first Ghoulies should miss the central lesson of the film it was trying to cash in on: the titular monsters are not even close to the focus of the movie. They're merely tools of the various sorcerers facing off, and they aren't even the major antagonists of the film. It feels rather like a wasted opportunity.

Luckily, somebody was taking notes when Empire Pictures decided to continue the franchise four years later. (Intriguingly, this would be two years before Gremlins 2: The New Batch came around) When Ghoulies II was written, they wisely decided that the main focus should be on the titular creatures.

The film opens as a semi-truck emblazoned with "Satan's Den" on the side makes its way toward Greenville, the current site of the carnival it belongs to. Driving the truck is Larry (Damon Martin), while his uncle Ned (Royal Dano) sits beside him, polishing off a bottle of whiskey. Ned keeps commenting about how the moon is the fullest he's ever seen, which leads me to believe he's never seen the moon before since the moon we see is slightly more than three quarters full. Ned chides his nephew for not paying more attention to the moon if he wants to be a great magician like his uncle used to be. Larry is a bit more concerned with paying attention to the truck, because the radiator is overheating. They'll have to hope there's a garage on the way.

(Incidentally, I can't help but find all the talk of a "full moon" entertaining because Charles Band would form Full Moon Entertainment the next year, after Empire Pictures went belly up)

Meanwhile, a priest (Anthony Dawson, a prolific character actor) is fleeing through some misty woods with a wriggling and snarling sack slung over his shoulder. He's being pursued by three guys in red hoods, presumably devil worshipers of some kind. He manages to escape from them by hiding in a closed garage that had left a back door unlocked, which he then bolts behind him. However, he doesn't bother to wait long before turning on the lights inside the garage. I guess the devil worshipers didn't want their bag back all that badly, since they don't immediately bust their way in. To his delight, the priest finds a huge barrel of something labelled "solvent" in the garage--whatever it is is bubbling and giving off a mist, and is just sitting there without a lid. Boy, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

The priest offers up a prayer to God to stop the devil worshipers and demon spawn before tossing the bag into the barrel of acid. Unfortunately, he missed one of the demon spawn, because just then the Bat Ghoulie smashes through the window on the door. It makes sure he sees it before swooping down and knocking the priest into the acid.

More like a flying squirrel than a bat, but close enough.

Larry and Uncle Ned arrive at the gas station, and Larry walks inside to ensure that nobody is around. He almost sees the skeleton inside the barrel before Ned calls to him for assistance. Once he walks out, the priest's skeleton floats to the surface--and then the Ghoulies surface as well, completely unharmed. The Ghoulies don't have official names that I know of, so I'll just go by the names given online for them: the Fish Ghoulie looks like a toothy baby doll got merged with a gill man; the Cat Ghoulie looks a bipedal cat with cloven hooves on its hind feet; the Rat Ghoulie looks like a bipedal rat without the tail; and the Toad Ghoulie looks like a lizard got merged with, well, a toad.

All of them, as with the first film, are John Carl Buechler creations. Though this time around they look a hell of a lot better. You'll also notice there's no way all four of them could've fit into the bag the priest was carrying.

"Hello, hello, hello, hello!"

While Ned and Larry are making sure the radiator is cooled down, the Ghoulies spy the "Satan's Den" logo and take it as an invitation. They walk over to the truck--via some really good stop-motion animation, courtesy of David Allen--where the Rat Ghoulie unlocks the back of the truck and they all climb in. The Bat Ghoulie swoops in at the last moment before they close the doors behind them. Of course, they don't lock the doors behind themselves, so you'd think that either Ned or Larry would notice that, but they don't.

Then again, Ned is both drunk and preoccupied with their oncoming doom when the "money man" arrives at the carnival. He's referring, of course, to P. Hardin (J. Downing), whom we see pulling in to the carnival grounds the next morning in a fancy car. He's the son of the carnival's owner, and given he looks like every coprorate douchebag character Kyle MacLachlan and James Spader ever played got spliced together, it's not hard to guess he's the human villain.

Hardin introduces himself to Sir Nigel Penneyweight (Phil Fondacaro!), who used to be a Shakespearean actor--and, indeed, won't ever stop quoting Shakespeare--but now works with the Satan's Den crew as the resident hobgoblin. Hardin wants all the carnies to meet with him in twenty minutes so he can law down the law. Nigel goes to inform Larry and Ned, bearing coffee, but Ned is passed out drunk again on the haunted house's electric chair. When he awakens to hear the news, Ned makes a quip about flipping the electric chair on--while Nigel complains about how hard it is to scare kids these days.

Incidentally, the haunted house is basically all set up, so I'm not sure where the Ghoulies found to hide during the set up process, but they managed. At any rate, at the carnival meeting Hardin announces that this weekend's show will be a trial run. Any acts that are not showing a profit will be out on their asses after the weekend's over. It's probably not a good thing that Ned was so eager to heckle Hardin during the man's speech, since Hardin advises that Satan's Den has been losing money for some time. So Hardin's got an especially serious hate-on for them.

Unfortunately for Larry, Hardin definitely does not hate Larry's crush, Nicole Le Fevre (Kerry Remsen, who can be seen getting a cross carved into her forehead by the titular Pumpkinhead in the same year), who is one of the dancers in the bellydancing show. Speaking of which, the manager of the show, Ray (Mickey Knox), is having a bit of a dispute with one of the other dancers, Patty (Ames Morton). Seems she's found a guy in town and she always finds a guy in town and then disappears for the whole weekend. Well, Ray wants her to actually work the show this time, but his demands are interrupted when her cat runs off.

Following the cat, she ends up in Satan's Den. Unfortunately, the meowing she hears as she goes further in is not her cat. She finds out just a bit too late when she reaches into a sarcophagus and the Cat Ghoulie bites her and slashes at her with a straight razor. The Toad Ghoulie knocks her down and holds her feet, and then the Rat and Fish Ghoulies hold her arms down. The Cat Ghoulie advances on her with the straight razor drawn...

"So! You thought you would have me fixed, no? I FIX YOU!"

That evening, Hardin goes to see Nicole in the dressing room of her show. He wants to see her after the show, but she defers him a bit because she has several shows that night. So he convinces her to meet him after the last show. Meanwhile, a drunk Ned decides to start fiddling with a small grimoire he keeps in his trunk. He flips to a page about summoning demons and imps to do your biddig and half-heartedly reads it, whereupon the Ghoulies crawl forth from various hiding places to meet him. Incorrectly assuming he summoned the little demons*, Ned excitedly runs to fetch Nigel to show him. Of course, the Ghoulies deliberately hide from Nigel and Larry, and Larry--already short on his temper from Hardin's ultimatums--blows up at his drunk uncle for forcing them to make up for his slack. Nigel calms Larry down, and they lead Ned off to a back room to sleep it off.

[* I'm honestly not entirely sure why the filmmakers don't just have Ned summon the Ghoulies. It's not like there's any clear continuity between this film and the first, and the spells in that grimoire will turn out to be real deal later on]

Well, the business is slow for Satan's Den, of course. Two bratty kids, the elder just shy of adolescence, buy tickets despite the elder asserting that it's going to be lame. They're shortly followed by a group of five...teenagers? College kids? The leader of the group carries a red boombox and after Larry tells him he needs to turn the music, the guy gives him the finger--but actually listens and turns it off.

Hardin, meanwhile, is watching Ray advertise for the bellydancing show as Nicole and the other dancers gyrate out front in skimpy outfits. (Which sort of begs the question: if that's how they're dressed outisde the tent, what do they do for the show? Surely at a carnival they don't have a nude stripshow) Ray, bizarrely, advertises that the girls "slither on their bellies like..." before tapping his cane on the stage for the two groups of dancers on either side of him to finish in turn with, "Reptiles!"

Oh no, did he hire Strother Martin to supply his dancers?

Inside Satan's Den, the two kids are wandering around while the elder is being a twerp--kicking displays and stuff. Well, until they encounter the Rat Ghoulie gnawing on a severed doll head in the guillotine set-up. It spits some kind of goo on the older kid's shirt and he retaliates by producing a shuriken (!) and throws it at the fiend. It just catches it in its teeth and eats it. The kids decide that this makes the place awesome and they have to tell their friends about it.

The group of college kids have managed to lose their fifth wheel, and the couples decide they should ditch him. Which seems harsh until you see the guy wandering around trying to find them and you realize he's wearing the trademark late 80s/early 90s inexplicable vest but with dangling leather fringe. Surely even then he looked like a dumbass. Well the couples try to party in a side room, only for the Ghoulies to smash the leader's boombox. He pulls a switchblade on them, but the Bat Ghoulie swoops in and bites his hand so he drops it. He and his girlfriend decide to leave, but the other couple decide to stay and make out--whereupon the Rat ghoulie spits his goo on them, which apparently hardens quickly into a form of adhesive.

Unfortunately for the fifth wheel, when he finds the room his friends have already gone. The Cat Ghoulie has traded his straight razor for a switchblade and stabs him in the leg. When he collapses on a nearby table, it turns out to be the one beneath a pendulum. And before you know it, he's being stretched and the actually sharp (!) pendulum is swinging down towards his gut...

Larry is pleasantly surprised by the huge crowd that forms now, excited to see the "rats." seeing the two couples exit, the group leader clutching his hand and threatening to sue and the other couple all glued together, just works the crowd into a frenzy. Poor Nigel in his stifling hobgoblin suit (basically a gorilla suit with horns on the mask) is utterly ignored, because the crowd only wants to see the "rats." They get to see them, all right, as the Ghoulies are busy wrapping their latest victim's body in gauze to disguise him as a mummy. The crowd just thinks the Ghoulies are putting a prop mummy into its sarcophagus and cheer them on. They especially love it when the Cat and Rat Ghoulie high-five each other.

Well, okay, then.

Hardin notices the business that Satan's Den is doing and demands Larry show him the receipts immediately after closing. He then goes to see Nicole, whom he takes to Nigel's trailer. Nigel graciously allowed him to use it, you see. Nicole smirks and happily goes with him, at least partially to see his reaction to the fact that the trailer was designed with someone only 3'6" in mind. I'm--I'm not really sure what he expected. He did see Nigel, right?

Well, we won't know the details yet but Hardin had a reason beyond the amorous for inviting Nicole over, which is the only reason she went with him. But Larry doesn't know that when he sees them outside Nigel's trailer after closing. While he and Hardin are discussing the anomoly of how successful satan's Den has been that weekend, Ned wakes up inside the haunted house--and remembers seeing the imps earlier. The lights are off in the haunted house, so he picks up a magic lightbulb (the kind that light up when you hold them in your hand) and goes searching through the place--eventually finding that the pendulum has blood on it, and discovering that one of the mummy "props" has real blood on its belly.

He angrily yells at the Ghoulies that he didn't want this, and he is attacked by the Bat Ghoulie, dropping his light bulb. Outside, Hardin and Larry are interrupted by a police car pulling up with the boombox jerk and his girlfriend in the back. (Unlike any police car ever, the back doors open from the inside) They've come to find their missing friend and the broken boombox they left behind. Well, Hardin greases the palm of the head officer so they're ready to declare everything above board when Ned flips the switch to turn on the lights.

Ned has pulled his grimoire out and found a spell for "explusion of demons by demonic intercession," and this gets the Ghoulies good and agitated. The Fish Ghoulie bites him on the neck, but he just uses the blood to paint a rather subpar pentagram (the lines don't connect) and begin reciting the spell. The Cat Ghoulie stabs him in the chest with the switchblade, but it turns out his deck of playing cards protected him. "You can't kill me, I'm a Goddamn magician," he challenges, oblivious to the Rat Ghoulie gnawing through the electrical cord to the electric chair. He's interrupted in his second attempt at finishing the incantation when the Rat Ghoulie pokes him with the chewed-off cord and he is cartoonishly electrocuted to death.

Walking through the now dark exhibit, the cops, Larry, Hardin, and Nigel find Ned's body. The officer points out they'll have to investigate the death, but Hardin objects that everyone in the carnival would tell you that Ned as a drunk. He probably just tripped over something in the dark and electrocuted himself. The officers oddly accept this, even though it would still require some investigation even if it was an accident--and the dead man has an obvious wound on his neck. Then a grieving Larry pulls the neverending handkerchiefs out of his uncle's sleeve in order to cover his face.

I honestly have no idea if that was supposed to be funny or not.

Larry throws himself into his work the next day, trying to fix the Satan's Den's rig. Nigel tries to tell him not to throw his life away, wasting it away in the carnival. Larry snaps at Nigel, then later snaps at Nicole because she couldn't possibly understand what's going through. Well, for your information, douchecanoe, she could: Hardin wanted to talk to her because he found out she used to be part of a high wire act with her family, The Amazing Le Fevres, as part of the circus that Hardin's family bought out--until her brother fell off the wire in front of her, and missed the net. She's been afraid of heights ever since, which is why she refised Hardin's offer to start in a new high wire act. Larry apologizes for being a jerk and the two kiss. So, I guess they're a couple now?

Well, an angry Nigel goes to work fixing some of the Den's flying bats, only to drop his pliers. When he fnds them, they're lying next to a bloodied bracelet he recognizes as Penny's. And then the Ghoulies show themselves to him, which he reacts to by fleeing in terror. Well, Larry comes to man the ticket booth for Satan's Den for the night, only to find that somehow Hardin has legally seized the attraction (?) and has an armed guard to keep Larry out. He's fired Larry and Nigel, and also put a lien on Nigel's car just to be an extra dick about it.

The armed guard is oddly willing to let Larry barge into the place to claim some personal artifacts. While rifling through a trunk, Larry hears an odd noise and opens a different trunk to find Nigel cowering inside. Larry laughs off Nigel's talk of demons--until Nigel points out the Fish Ghoulie nearby. Nigel points out that creature's teeth match the bite on Ned's neck, and then the Fish Ghoulie helpfully confirms by launching itself across the room and sinking its teeth into Larry's chest. The other three pile onto Larry, while Nigel runs to get help.

The new ticket taker, the security guard, and the male halves of the couples from earlier (who have come back once again to find their friend) just laugh at Nigel's insistence that Larry is being attacked, before the two doofuses barge into the joint. Larry, meanwhile, is somehow holding his own against four little monsters made of teeth. He shakes them off by grabbing a bare wire for one of the displays (!) which somehow does not harm him beyond a minor burn on his hand, but shakes them loose. He rushes out, finding Nigel on the way, and they go to get guns from several of the carnies, and to enlist the aid of Ray, a strong man, and a fire eater.

They rush back to Satan's Den, but Hardin orders his guard to shoot them if they try to go in. The guard turns out to be less bloodthirsty than Hardin and just lets them go in. Hardin grabs the guard's shotgun, fires him, and follows the group in. They're just in time as the Ghoulies have gotten the head jerk into the guillotine and the other guy is under the pendulum, while the cackling patrons watch since they think it's part of the show. Nigel rushes the patrons out, while the others rescue the two morons. Hardin stares dumbly at the Ghoulies while the others try to kill the Ghoulies. Guns don't work, fire doesn't work, and even the strong man's attempt to choke the Rat Ghoulie just gets him a faceful of goop. And then Patty's corpse falls out of the iron maiden prop.

Hardin accuses Larry of bringing these creatures to the carnival, and they end up struggling over the shotgun, which blows a hole in the wall--letting the Ghoulies out into the carnival. Of course, they could have just walked out into the carnival at any time, but never mind that. Larry says they have to close the carival, but Hardin refuses and offers a reward to whomever catches one of the Ghoulies alive, so Larry punches him.

"Let's paint this town red! ..you know, like blood?"
"We got it, Jeff!"

The Toad Ghoulie stops and ogles Nicole doing her act, causing her to scream when she sees it. Larry hears her and enlists her help, so they rush away for her to get dressed in actual clothes. And now it's time for the rampage sequence! At a strength test, involving a punching bag, the Cat Ghoulie sees some guy win a stuffed animal and responds by jumping into a huge boxing glove (?) and leaping at the guy, suckerpunching him the back of the head. At the bumper cars, the Toad Ghoulie and Rat Ghoulie work together: the Rat Ghoulie scares a woman out of her car and when she falls, the Toad Ghoulie runs her over.

Man, Fast & Furious 8 looks amazing.



 Meanwhile, a clown (no, I mean an actual clown) in a dunk tank finally annoys someone into hitting the mark. Unfortunately for the clown, the Fish Ghoulie is waiting in the tank and chews his arm off just above the elbow. (Which begs the question of why its teeth only did superficial damage to Ned and Larry) And then the Fish Ghoulie makes it to a rocket ship ride and unhooks the pod of a middle-aged couple, sending it flying into another tent and causing an explosion. Um, sure. This triggers a mass exodus from the carnival, during which Hardin hears a father tell his daughter that he's going to sue the owner into the next lifetime.

Larry, Nicole, and Nigel regroup and figure that they need a plan--they've seen that conventional weapons don't hurt the creatures, so Larry suggests they use a supernatural solution. After all, didn't Ned have the grimoire in his hand when he was killed?

Hardin meanwhile, is having a breakdown in the men's room. He doesn't see the Fish Ghouie starting to crawl out of the toilet behind him--as one did in the first film, briefly, as well as on its infamous poster. It hides in the toilet before Hardin apparently decides he needs to heed the call of nature and sits down on the toilet. And, finally, the film makes good on the original's tagline of, "They'll get you in the end," as we hear crunching, tearing sounds and Hardin screams in agony.

"Oh, God, no! I should've used Preparation H!"

Larry, Nicle, and Nigel find the grimoire and the blood-stained page that Ned looked at last. Rushing outside, they make a pentagram in the sand, and Nigel begins to read the incantation since he can actually pronounce Latin. Unfortunately, the Bat Gremin swoops down and yanks the grimoire out of Nigel's hands and drops it in a car at the top of a ferrish wheel. Rather than trying to get the ferris wheel turned back on, they decide someone has to climb up--and Nicole asserts she's the only one who can do it. She climbs up to the top, dodges a token attempt by the Bat Ghoulie to knock her down, and tosses the book down to the others. They fall to the ground to avoid the Bat Ghoulie and finish the incantation.

Well, the incantation makes the ground shake, and then a crack opens up and a huge, clawed hand reaches out of the ground--and snatches the Bat Ghoulie out of the air. Then the creature the hands belong to rises from the ground, revealing itself to be a Fish Ghoulie, if that Ghoulie were about seven feet tall. It sniffs out the other Ghoulies and begins tracking them down. The Cat Ghoulie is easy prey, since it's focused on a shooting game. Down the gullet it goes, whole.

This is a very high brow site, so I won't make a joke here about eating pus--damn it!

The Toad Ghoulie has buried itself in a popcorn machine, but that's not enough to save it. Bye bye, Toad Ghoulie! You were always my favorite. The Rat Ghoulie makes a stand on the platform of the hammer-style strength test, which results in it getting flattened before being devoured. Unfortunately, the Giant Ghoulie doesn't just disappear--though we in the audience know that the Fish Ghoulie is still alive--and it assumes that Nigel is a ghoulie. No time for searching the grimoire for another spell, the others grab Nigel and head to his trailer to barricade themselves in.

When the beast shakes the trailer, Nigel's hobgoblin suit falls out of the closet and it suddenly occurs to Larry that maybe the beasts are tough on the outside but not the inside. He quickly fashions a Molotov cocktail and, with Nigel's aid, stuffs the suit full of clothes and shoves the Molotov into it with the wick sticking out of one eye. They offer it to the Giant Ghoulie, who immediately swallows it whole, somehow without dousing the wick. Sure enough, it goes boom, and the resulting fireball then returns to the Hell that spawned it.

The next day, Larry and Nicole load up her car and Larry leaves Satan's Den in Nigel's hands before driving off. The camera pans over to the men's room trailer, and we hear the Fish Ghoulie flusing something and cackling. The End.

And people worry about snakes in their toilets. Bah!

I had seen the cover for Ghoulies in the video store, of course, but my actual first experience with it was at one of the first sleepovers I ever went to when I was maybe nine. It was a pretty perfect movie for that, but even then I recall A) having no clue what the hell was going on and B) not thinking it was any good. Years later, I would pick Ghoulies II up from the video store and immediately wished I had seen it at the party instead.

Back then I usually watched most movies I rented several times before returning them, and I definitely enjoyed this one each time--even if I wished the Toad Ghoulie had been the survivor instead of the Fish Ghoulie. However, like many things I never bothered revisiting it for years and didn't bother with the third or fourth films at all. (Still haven't, but maybe some day) Then I saw the double feature DVD of this film and the original Ghoulies in Half Price Books and had to grab it.

Sure enpough, Ghoulies was still not very good, but Ghoulies II was just as fun as I had remembered--even if it was slightly more profane than I remembered. See, the original theatrical release was rated R but once it hit video, it was reduced to PG-13, like the first film. The DVD uses the theatrical cut, but near as I can figure, the only difference is that a few uses of the word "fuck" were trimmed, because the film isn't any gorier than I recall. And it certainly doesn't have any nudity. Really, I have to wonder why the film wasn't cut down to PG-13 to begin with, since a lot of its dark sense of humor seems to be tailored to the tastes of the older kids and teenagers an R-rating would exclude from seeing it.

Simply put, this film is a delight. It wastes only the barest amount of time with character development, and unlike the first film it actually understands that the Ghoulies are the entire reason we are watching it in the first place. So the film delivers them in spades, and makes stopping them the focus of the film instead of whatever bullshit wizard battle formed the central conflict of the first film. Sure, the budget clearly didn't extend far enough to really give us a Ghoulie rampage in the climax, but they did he best they could and the Ghoulie puppets definitely look as good as can really be expected--and the stop-motion sequences are geninely excellent.

While Ghoulies II is hardly as good as, say, Critters 2: The Main Course--and certainly not so good that I fear spoiling its plot beats--there's no denying that it's a damn fun entry in the "pint-sized killer beasties" genre. If that's your thing, check it out. You'll definitely have a blast.

And don't forget to check your toilet for Ghoulies.

Today's review brought to you by the letter G! Hit the banner above to see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for G!

HubrisWeen 2015, Day 6: Fiend Without A Face (1958)

C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!

You may have noticed that my first five films this HubrisWeen were about killer aquatic reptiles. Well, it's kind of hard to keep that trend going forever, so now it's time to depart in a big damn way. Instead of killer reptiles, now we're looking at killer hopping brains!

Really, I shouldn't have to say more than that to get your attention, right? I mean, brains that can survive outside the body are a horror movie staple. Usually, however, the only killing they do is psychic. Not so with these brains! These are predatory, highly ambulatory brains!

They're also oddly adorable.

So where exactly do adorable, hopping brain monsters come from? I'm glad you asked. Canada, of course.

Specifically, Winthrop, Manitoba. In Winthrop, the US Air Force has stationed a brand new interceptor base designed to have an unprecedented radar range thanks to a nuclear reactor powering it. And when we join the movie, a base guard is having a smoke just outside the fence on his late night duty. He then hears an odd noise, like something slurping and hopping around in the woods. He goes to investigate it, and we see another man standing in the forest and also listening to the odd sound. The solider hears a scream and then comes upon the dead body of the man we saw before.

Well, that dead body right outside the base is just the last thing that Major Jeff Cummings* (Marshall Thompson) wants. Tensions between the Air Force and the locals in the area have been tense enough as it is without a dead man in the mix. Captain Al Chester (Terry Kilburn) tries to tell him to forget about it, since for all they know it was natural causes. Cummings is a bit shocked to hear that attitude from a base security chief, since they're supposed to be suspicious of everything. He'll rest easier when the base doctor's autopsy comes in, though.

[* I first saw this film at B-Fest, and discovering the lead character's name was "Cummings" resulted in exactly the kind of constant jokes you're thinking of already. My favorite was definitely, "Major Cummings is all over it."]

However, when they go to see the base's doctor, Captain Warren (Gil Winfield)--passing by the desk of one officer who "comically" hides the sandwich he's eating in his desk drawer until they're out of sight again--they discover he hasn't done the autopsy. Why? Because he doesn't have the body to examine. The town's mayor and the man's sister claimed the body and are refusing an autopsy, and the colonel already signed off on it. Cummings is not too happy to hear that, but he might get a chance to plead his case because they're still on the base meeting with the colonel.

When Cummings arrives, Colonel G. Butler (Stanley Maxted) is pleading with Mayor Hawkins (James Dyrenforth) and Barbara Griselle (Kim Parker), the dead man's sister, to let them do the autopsy. They still refuse, so Butler shows them, and Cummings, the notebook that Barbara's brother was suspiciously writing in at 3AM outside an Air Force base. The pad is a list of flight times for the base's aircraft--how do you explain that, commie? Well, if Butler had read the next page he'd have discovered that it was a list of various women's names and descriptions of their product. Said women are actually the Griselles' cows, who have had very low milk yields of late and Barbara's brother was convinced that it was the constant sound of planes that so disturbed them. Unable to pin espionage on the dead man, Butler relents to them claiming the body.

Cummings, for his part, drives Barbara home. He tries to offer condolences, but she wants no part of it until he objects that Americans aren't so different from Canadians. it's not like they're aliens, right? That gets her laughing, at least. However, she's got a funeral to prepare while Cummings has a radar test to supervise. The test, for some reason, involves stock footage of a plane that Cummings is communicating with and lots of footage of spinning radar dishes, including one where the director decided to jazz things up by mounting the camera on one of the spinning dishes at whatever base he was allowed to film that footage at! After boosting the nuclear power way past safety limits, apparently forgetting that the locals already dislike having a nuclear reactor in their backyards without it melting down on them, the big radar screen in the base allows them such a thorough range that they can see Russia from their house,

Though I'm not sure how a radar station located in Manitoba is able to display a radar signal that appears to be centered directly at the North Pole.

Unfortunately, the celebration is short-lived because the signal fails. Apparently, this keeps happening whenever they test the radar array. Cummings and crew still can't figure out why, since it doesn't seem to be a power drain--it seems to be some kind of interference. Speaking of interference, the plane from the test returning to base (or, at least, I assume it's that plane since the stock footage here is an entirely different plane) passes over the funeral of Barbara's brother and, hilariously, completely drowns out the preacher speaking over the grave.

It also annoys two old, oddly Irish farmers. The old woman says she's at least glad the cows are getting used to it and goes into the barn to feed the chickens. Unfortunately, the strange sound from the beginning of the film finds her now. Something clearly invisible makes its way through the straw on the barn floor and then leaps up and attacks her. Her screams draw her husband, but he's too late. Hearing the creature moving and seeing the straw rustling, he tries to attack it with a pitchfork, but it's no use. Whatever it is kills him by apparently wrapping around his neck and making loud slurping sounds.

Barbara is leaving the funeral with Professor R.E. Walgate (Kynaston Reeves), when a young man rushes up to inform the mayor about the old couple being found dead in the same manner as Barbara's brother, on their farm at the edge of the air base. Walgate gets a significant look on his face, but Hawkins goes for the blaming the Americans. Butler gets the call and makes a futile effort to explain that there is no evidence of any radioactive contamination that would cause these deaths. After the phone is hung up, Cummings suggests maybe they ought to try and tell the townspeople a bit more about what they're actually doing there, show them why it's important. Butler is just reminding Marshall why that's not true when Chester arrives. His men had gone to investigate the farm, but the local constable chased them off the scene.

So it falls to Cummings to track down relatives of the old couple and get them to consent to an autopsy. He apparently succeeds because we next see Warren explaining his autopsy results to the local doctor Bradley (Peter Madden), Butler, Cummings, and Chester. He's discovered that the victims both had two tiny puncture wounds at the base of their skulls and when he cut open their skulls to investigate, he found that the brain and spinal cord were gone--sucked out through those two tiny holes. Marshall describes it as a "mental vampire" and Warren can only offer that as his explanation because he's never seen anything like it. Chester makes an odd comment about, "Maybe that Gibbons guy was right. Maybe it is supernatural," but if he's referencing an earlier scene it must have been cut because I don't recall that ever coming up.

Butler gets the Bradley to agree to keep this a secret from even the mayor, while Warren contacts a variety of specialists to find out what could have caused this. Cummings is tasked with keeping an eye on the townsfolk and reporting anything unusual. So naturally, Cummings heads right over to Barbara's house--where he manages to walk in on Barbara, who has just gotten out of the shower and is wearing nothing but a towel. (This is pretty damn racy for 1958, I hasten to add--Ms. Parker almost comes out of the top of the towel when wrapping it around herself, for instance) Of course, being Canadian she politely tells him to make himself at home while she gets dressed instead of violently throwing him out.

"Dear Penthouse: I am a Major in the USAF stationed in Canada, and I never thought this would happen to me..."

Cummings pokes around and finds a manuscript titled "The Principles of Thought Control by R.E. Walgate" on a desk with a with a tape recorder. He starts leafing through it when Barbara returns, now wearing a robe with the towel wrapped around her hair. She wasn't even getting her hair wet when we saw her in the shower earlier, so I don't know why she needs the towel, but okay. She explains that Walgate dictates into the tape recorder and she edits the tapes and prepares the manuscripts. Cummings observes it's odd to find a man like Walgate in Winthrop, which Barbara jokingly means he is implying they're too back woods for that.

Walgate had a stroke a few years ago, so Winthrop was the perfect quiet location for him to settle while continuing his work. Cummings asks if Walgate is still doing research into psychic phenomena, but abandons that thought thread to try and move in for a kiss--and then Constable Howard Gibbons (Robert Mackenzie) walks in. Gibbons is outwardly hostile to Cummings, implying he's letting the "G.I. killer" run loose so he can focus on putting the moves on local women. And here I note that Gibbons is also vaguely Irish, so either Winthrop is a town of Irish expats or the filmmakers wanted to try and make the locals sound extra Canadian but had no idea what Canadians sound like.

(Given that this film was made in England, I'm guessing the latter)

Gibbons eventually provokes Cummings into a fist fight, and Barbara understandably asks Cummings to leave. Following up a hunch, Cummings then gets Chester's help in tracking down every book and article Walgate has ever written and binge reads it. Meanwhile, Gibbons leaves the mayor's residence, just in time to miss the arrival of the invisible menace. Much like Forbidden Planet, the camera tracks the invisible monster's movements as it knocks over things it passes by on the porch and tears a hole in the screen door. Hawkins goes to investigate the sound of the thing--and thus gets his brain good and sucked out.

Gibbons faces an angry mob the next day, but he assures them that it was no radioactive fallout that killed the mayor. He believes there's a psycho soldier on the loose, and he so immediately convinces the crowd that they immediately all grab their rifles and head into the woods to hunt for the killer. Cummings, meanwhile, goes to visit Walgate. Barbara is not happy to see him, but she shows him to Walgate nonetheless. Walgate surprises Cummings by having already figured out what they're doing at the base with atomic power and radar, because he read an article about Cummings' work a few years ago. He assures Cummings that he doesn't spread his assumptions around, though neither one acknowledges that Barbara is within earshot when they're discussing this.

Barbara goes to transcribe the latest notes, so Walagate asks what her brother's face looked like after death. He claims to have a reason for that. When Cummings brings the topic around to a possible supernatural explanation, Walgate scoffs, but when Cummings brings up the professor's psychic research, the man gets irrationally upset. Barbara all but kicks Cummings out for nearly killing the old man, but Walgate assures them both that he's fine. Cummings takes his leave, anyway.

Meanwhile, the posse in the woods is getting tired now that it's either mid-afternoon or pitch dark depending on the shot. They split up into pairs to hurry the seaarch, and Gibbons is walking with another man when they hear a strange sound--and then Gibbons vanishes. A council meeting, led by deputy mayor Melville (Launce Maraschal), is called. Cummings is invited along to offer any defense and assistance from the USAF perspective. Barbara ultimately comes to his defense, pointing out that it was clear that no radiation was responsible for the strange behavior of the cows.

And then Gibbons wanders into the meeting, moaning with a far away look in his eye. Apparently he has been mentally disabled by whatever attacked him--having his brain only partially devoured. Later, Cummings tells Barbara that he believes Walgate is somehow involved in what's going on--and acting on a hunch, he goes to the local cemetery. He sees someone slip out of a mausoleum, and entering the door he finds Hawkins' coffin has been opened and Walgate's pipe was left beside it. And then Cummings is locked in when the door shuts.

Luckily, Chester realizes Cummings is missing and he and Barbara go to the cemetery. They discover Cummings just in time, before he can suffocate. He rushes to confront Walgate, who has just started to notice the absence of his pipe--and he swears he didn't mean to nearly kill Cummings. But Cummings has moved beyond that, as he explains to Walgate that he read about Walgate's ideas about materialization of thought. Walgate objects that he declared it impossible, but Cummings counters that with atomic power it could be possible. Upon hearing the sound of the invisible monster nearby, Walgate admits that Cummings is right and it is a terrible story and pleads with Cummings to shut down the nuclear plant--just before he has another minor stroke.

Butler is reluctant to shut down based on such a cockamamie theory when Cummings explains it, but he does relent. Unfortunately, when Cummings gets to the power station the technicians discover the control rods are all smashed. Without them there's no way to control or shut down the reaction, and it will take four to six hours to get replacements. After Walgate recovers from his attack, he has Barbara summon Cummings, Chester, Butler, Bradley, and Melville to hear his explanation. He had been experimenting with the materialization of thought in his lab--which Barbara didn't even know he had--and somehow discovered that electric shocks to his brain could boost his telekinetic ability. The effects made him ill, so Bradley introduced him to Barbara for use as a secretary.

With Barbara helping him complete his actual work, he could focus on shocking his brain to flip a book's pages. But he was utterly unsuccessfully until lighting struck his house. He realized then that he needed much more power, and gradually he got the hang of moving small objects but it was not enough. So, somehow, he tapped into the power from the radar tests and used it to create a being from his thoughts that could be used to channel these psychic energies further. But, being created from thought, it was invisible--and smart enough to figure out that Walgate intended to control it. So it smashed his equipment, destroyed his notes, and escaped the lab. Walgate couldn't tell anyone because who would believe him?

Well, he now knows he created a "mental vampire" (and Cummings hilariously gives Butler an "I told you so" look here) that draws power from the nuclear reactor and needs to feed on human nervous systems, but even worse than that--he's pretty sure he created more than one. Butler dismisses this as lunacy just as Chester arrives with Bradley, Melville, and the Sandwich Guy from earlier. Sandwich Guy notices something moving in the bushes outside the glass doors to the veranda, and when Butler goes to use the phone he discovers the line has been cut. And then the glass shatters and Sandwich Guy is dragged to his death by the invisible attacker. Realizing they're under siege, the others work together to try and board up the windows--except for Melville, who becomes the simpering, panicked ninny who won't even help Barbara move a desk in front of the door.

Cummings asks if there's any way to make the creatures visible, and Walgate suggests that the only way might be to give them more radiation to absorb. Sure enough, after eating the head technician at the lab so he can't stop the radiation dial from going into the "Danger" zone (which oddly is after the "Overload" section), the fiend at the base becomes visible. And what a beautiful sight it is: a stop-motion brain with nerve tentacle legs, spinal column tail, and little eye stalks on top of its cerebellum.

"This is your brain on a nuclear engineering degree."

Back at the house, Melville goes all Irish and panicky--and then the others realize they can see the fiends gathering outside now. Walgate explains that the power must have increased at the nuclear plant and the only option is to shut the plant down: without its energy, these creatures will perish. Luckily, they'll also perish from gunshots, as Chester discovers by putting a bullet in one. And boy, do they go out in an amazing gory fashion for 1958.

Unfortunately for Melville, nobody thought to close the chimney  The others are too late in pulling it off and killing it with an axe. Cummings suggests their best plan of action is to to get to a dynamite shed between the house and the plant and to blow up the control room. Wait, what?! So Cummings decides to make a run for it, after getting a good luck kiss, of course. Walgate suggests maybe he control the fiends long enough to buy Cummings some time, so he rushes outside as well.

Well, he does buy some time for Cummings--by being immediately set upon and devoured by three of the fiends.

"You ever notice that brains just taste better when they belong to the guy who created you?"
"Oh, totally."
"I concur."

Cummings makes it to the dynamite shed, easily killing the one fiend waiting outside for him. He makes it back to the base, where a really obvious stand-in for Marshall Thompson runs by a bunch of drained bodies. Here's a tip for filmmakers: don't shoot your stand-in face on in medium shot and assume your day for night tinting will disguise it in post.

Back at the house, some idiot left the hammer right by the window they boarded up. It turns out, though, that the fiends just needed their tentacles and tails to break through. Butler and Chester use up their dwindling ammunition, but it's clear it will soon be no use. Luckily, Cummings has his dynamite all set in the control room--even though I'm still not sure how blowing it up will do anything but accelerate the reactor into overload, which would be very bad--and easily lights the fuse, kills a fiend, and runs for cover. It's just in time, too, for a fiend has latched onto Barbara's head just as the dynamite explodes.

The fiends all fall to the ground, dead, and then melt into goo--in a scene I'm positive Sam Raimi used as inspiration for the end of The Evil Dead. Cummings returns and Butler puts him and charge before everyone else vacates the premises to let Cummings and Barbara get their celebratory make-out session on. This is all framed in happy terms, seemingly ignoring the fact that the only base personnel still alive at this point are three people and they just destroyed the reactor that powers their operation. Oh well, hero's gotta bang the hot Canadian lady. The End.

"What do you think of my new fiend stole? Too garish?"

Fiend Without A Face runs a relatively brief 74 minutes, but it's hard to call it lean. As you may have guessed by my synopsis, a large amount of the running time is eaten up with characters that have little to do with the main plot and are then abruptly discarded when the mental vampires finally come into the main focus. Hell, Cummings being locked in the mausoleum adds nothing to the plot but a few more minutes of screen time. Tightly plotted, this film is not.

However, while a lot of films with similar story issues would end up being dull, this film really can't be accused of that. Even the normally deadly dull scenes of radar arrays are handled deftly--they're kept to a minimum and feature quirky touches like the camera on the radar dish.

And then there's the fiends. Oh, they are a delight. There's almost no way that crawling, hopping brain monsters could be anything but fun. Still, while the stop-motion effects that bring them to life are a bit dodgy, there's no denting how impressive they are. Not only that, but there's the simple fact that the climax of them swarming the house can't help but feel incredibly familiar. Rather like Matango, this film is not mentioned as one of the influences on George A. Romero's Night of The Living Dead, but you can't help but think it did contribute to that film's existence.

Not only do you have characters boarding up windows to protect themselves from a relentless horde of foes, but those foes can only be put down by shots to the brain and there's an awful lot of black and white gore spraying around when that happens.

Speaking of which, I didn't have to look it up to know that this was a bit of a transgressive film in its day. I'd imagine the towel bit alone was rather controversial, though I cannot confirm that, but I can confirm that this film did raise quite a stir in its native Britain for the gore effects. Fairly understandable, honestly. After all, the film seems fairly restrained and bloodless for most of its running time, before suddenly turning into a bloodbath.

It can be very easy to write off Fiend Without A Face as just another B-movie. Like a lot of 1950s science fiction, the mad science that creates the monsters doesn't actually make any sense and the plan to stop them makes even less. The characters are also pretty thinly sketched archetypes, and the story certainly is not deep or meaningful in any way.

However, I have to agree with the Criterion collection that this is a movie people should see. It's a fun movie, pure and simple, And sometimes, that's more than enough.

Today's review brought to you by the letter F! Hit the banner above to see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for F!