Universal Cult Horror (TCM DVD Set) Analysis: The Mad Ghoul, Murders in the Zoo, House of Horrors, Strange Case of Dr. Rx, The Mad Doctor of Market Street

THE MAD GHOUL
1943 - **1/2
"With me it's ghoul trouble baby," laments Carl Denham, i.e. Robert Armstrong, to a little honey of a fellow reporter who appears and exeunts with little fuss in one of the few horror movies made in 1943, THE MAD GHOUL. Excuse its impoverished gloss as half the studio workforce was busy fighting in WW2, back when we weren't entirely sure we'd win.

But despite the horror overseas, here at Universal the censors won't allow us to learn what the ghoul (David Bruce) does with the body that makes him so evil.  Presumably he eats the heart; they mention the heart is removed and graves are dug up, but then they change the subject. Meanwhile Evelyn Ankers lip syncs light opera on a tour of the midwest, lovesick ghoul trailing after (he got that way cuz of romantic rival and thesis advisor George Zucco's ancient zombie gas formula) like a semi-dead groupie, unearthing stale hearts to keep himself from becoming too decomposed to pitch woo. Zucco and the ghoul have yet another rival: Turhan Bey as the urbane composer-pianist who sweeps Evelyn away while the ghoul is off eating other people's heart out.  "He always chooses a new corpse" the critics say. Catching the culprit "may be the means of saving the deceased from a horrible mutilation!"

That's what you call a low stakes game, certainly not worth risking your life for.  It's not like he's killing people, just grazing. Relative to what the Nazis were doing to Poland, and the Japanese to China, corpse eating is hardly even a ticketable offense.

Zucco has fun but the plot is the same as all the Universal pics of the time: a killer and his handler taking out their critics while a snappy reporter (Armstrong) goes undercover as a funeral home cadaver. "Whatever you do, don't mar this coffin!" exclaims the undertaker. It's all good, brozo; the make-up is interesting, the shambling effective, the suspense music fine; the heart-eating thing is uncanny chiefly for its glaring elephant in the room mums the wordedness. The lighting is competent but needs more shadows and darkness. Hasn't anyone ever heard of expressionism? A dark set could save on electricity! I guess the censors wanted to make sure no phantoms were having sex in the corners.

I''ll say it again: THE MAD GHOUL is the best PRC horror movie that Universal ever made. It's every bit as strange and oddly engaging as any Poverty Row monster movie of the 1940s that you can name, but it's got all the brand-name (B-unit) trappings of Universal Studios to give it that little bit extra and deliver a lasting, satisfying, and fun film. Although it was probably pretty forgettable as the second-banana feature in the cinemas in 1943 to SON OF DRACULA --- Shock Cinema

Rose Hobart is in it, somewhere. I didn't see her though. There's not even eight people in the whole cast, aside from some disheartened gravediggers.

MURDERS IN THE ZOO

1933 - ***1/2

Somehow this Paramount film wound up in the Universal Cult Horror collection, to all our benefit. The beautiful Kathleen Burke (the Panther Woman from Paramount's same year ISLAND OF LOST SOULS) is something to kill over in the familiar cycle of betrayal, love, revenge, and maniacal jealousy. But this is pre-code so the lurid come-ons of Eric (Lionel Atwill) are truly perverse, like few lechers ever got to be after 1934. "Yes, Eric, I know, now you're going to make love to me," Burke says, voice trilling with panic, after he kills her latest lover with a mamba bite. Lots of cutaways to pent-up animals in cages the better to symbolize a panorama of human emotions with, dearie. Atwill sits with a chimp in his lap and looks quite comfortable.

Unfortunately there's some comic relief in Charlie Ruggles as the zoo's dipsomaniac PR agent who hems and cowardly haws for whole stretches at the thought of l-l-lions and t-t-t-igers! and there's boring straight man stuff from Randolph Scott, but hey Burke is so lovely and haunted it leaves a queasy taste; her misery with Eric has put her in a state of somnambulistic terror so irresistible you too will want to risk having your mouth sewn shut and being left to die in the jungles of Malaysia or wherever just to save her. Too bad for you, then! 

HOUSE OF HORRORS
1944 - ***
Two disparate artists - one of murder, one of sculpture -- are brought together by fate to rage against the bile of snooty art critics determined to rob them of revenue. As the acromelagy-ridden Creeper, Rondo Hatton (a real-life victim of Japanese nerve gas) was in a string of Creeper Bs (including the Sherlock Holmes film PEARL OF DEATH), then died, but his name lives on in the Rondo awards. I was once nominated for one! It all fits together.

There's a great dissolve between the hero's hot vacant bikini model and Kolseck's Rondo.  Beautiful Rondo vs. bland blonde!  Kolseck rants "now I have a feeling of power! Limitless power..."

As someone who labors greatly for this little site, I'm always having mental dialogues where grandiosity is soon tempered with rage at a lack of public recognition, followed by dejection, humility, redemption, artistic inspiration fueled by grace, which quickly becomes overstuffed with grandiosity once again, and the cycle clicks a spoke anew. Sometimes I take this journey in a single breath. So I appreciate the Napoleanic frustrations of Martin Kolseck, an actor used to playing Nazis relishing a chance to add some depth to his villain, making him as sympathetic up to a point as, say, Condrad Veidt in A WOMAN'S FACE (my 2008 Bright Lights appreciation here)

The Rondo award prototype is complete!

I like this from Memphis gadabout John Beifuss: "Those who do not appreciate true art will probably call it ugly," rationalizes the film's mad sculptor about his work -- a useful comment that could function as an inadvertent slogan for all the undervalued directors laboring in the sometimes disreputable horror genre." I like that Burns and Allen's regular third wheel and announcer, Bill Goodwin, is a cop. And there's a great existential sadness that hangs over it all, which Beifuss again nails:

"House of Horrors" is little more than efficient in terms of its staging and camerawork. But it's utterly absorbing in its alternately dismissive and sympathetic attitudes toward art and abnormality; as the story volleys between the healthy Steven and the weird Marcel, between the vibrant Joan and the grotesque Creeper, it functions almost as a dialogue. On the surface, Yarbrough seems to encourage the conflicted viewer to embrace the film's rote 1940s endorsement of wholesomeness; yet it's the almost Steinbeckian duo of Marcel and the Creeper that engages our identification.

The DVD image is super clear, exposing the relative poverty of the bland-half sets, but the crazy sculpture studio has some good lighting, and Rondo's reputation as the Creeper is well established by his supernatural ability to slip silently in and out of shadows and sneak up right behind people before strangling them and breaking their spines with only his tall twisted shadow to give him away. The film is a sort-of sequel to THE BRUTE MAN, which ends, presumably (I can't remember) with the Creeper being shot and disappearing into the river, which is where our sculptor fishes him out. Word to the wise: if you want to kill a bunch of enemies, rescue a monster!

STRANGE CASE OF DR. Rx
1942 - *

This is the one where the guy kills all the people who were exonerated for crimes with which they were clearly guilty. I say, good work, Dr. Rx! Mantan Moreland is 'great' as a sassy butler, jiving with delivery folks and generally deserving to be fired. He does have one good moment when he's supposed to pick up the blandsome hero from the airport in the morning, but then he wakes in the afternoon to said hero strangling him. "Why didn't we meet me at the airport?" the hero snaps. "Boss, I'm on my way right now!" Mantan says.

Similarly there's only one tiny little dark patch of horror in the film (pictured above) when we see Dr. Rx pulling a mindfuck freak-out gaslight routine, a heavy metal oasis in a desert of tedious post-code banality. It gets worse with the arrival of a feminism-sabotaging first amendment-violating hack reporter who tries to rope her detective husband out of the crime solving racket and into a straitjacket of domestic suffocation. Yeesh, you'll want to suffocate the lot of them. 

MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET
1942 - *
I started watching this in good faith but its tale of a mad scientist working on early forms of cyrogenics--and leaving a trail of bodies wherever he goes--is so dull and flat it makes one long for the comparatively ingenious touch of PRC or Monogram. El Mad Doctore (Lionel Atwill) is marooned with some dislikeable specimens on a tropical island where he saves the chief's wife with an adrenalin shot (not into the heart, I guess to not shock those heart-phobic censors). So from then on he's got the tribe in his hand, which means experimenting on the natives and then, when he wants to work on 'higher' forms of life (censors don't mind racism), the white castaways. Now he's gone too far! 

The Mad Doctor of Market Street presents us with such lousy specimens of the human animal, I am tempted to think that Martin's script was trying to sneak in an existentialist subtext. Certainly, life couldn't seem more absurd or meaningless than it does at the end of The Mad Doctor of Market Street. Only Martin's colossal incompetence at every other facet of screenwriting keep me from taking such an idea seriously. - Horror Inc.

I actually stopped watching about halfway through in disgust. I paid real money for this set, after eyeing it now for a few years on TCM's site, thinking the price would go down or I could get them to send me a review copy. For $44 or whatever the list is they should endeavor to give us at least four decent films instead of only three. The last two 'doctor' films are appallingly bad. We all know 1942 was a grim period for the horror film but jeeeze.

Maybe it was the war. Nothing could compare with the Nazis and Japanese as far as horrors. (By 1944 it was okay since we realized we would win). At any rate it does make one wonder if anyone at TCM even saw these last two films, or just figured that since they had doctor with the words strange or mad they must fit in the box. A pox on them, but not too bad a one, don't want to spook the censor. In closing, if you're wondering whether this set is worth the money, here's my breakdown:


Mad Doctor of Market Street - value - $0.00
Strange Case of Dr. Rx - value $0.50
The Mad Ghoul - value: $3.00
House of Horrors - value: $10.00
Murders at the Zoo - value: $30.59

It's worth it, just barely...

In the future, TCM, here's my recommendation for a great five film horror set, PRE-CODE JUNGLE HORRORS:

KONGO - 1931
EAST OF BORNEO - 1933
WHITE WOMAN - 1933
BLACK MOON - 1934
THE INTRUDER - 1933

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Old Dark Capsules 2: Phantom of Crestwood, The Black Cat (1941), Horror Island, The Rogue's Tavern, One Frightened Night

THE BLACK CAT
1941 - Universal **1/2
 It's confusingly titled since the Ulmer 1934 is the Black Cat as far as every horror fan in the world is concerned, but this name-only version has charms of its own, hampered (unless you've a benign tolerance for idiots) by insurance salesman Broderick Crawford's spazz and bluster and the endless tut-tutting of Hugh Herbert. The climax exemplifies Griffith's dictum re: you don't crosscut from the heroine about to be grilled in a cat crematorium, Perils of Pauline-style, to old Hugh Herbert fiddling around with old lamps and screwdrivers laughing to himself like a simpleton, since it creates a feeling of rage rather than suspense in the viewer (his exact words, I swear!) Another rule: never turn your back on someone after you've accused them of murder, especially when you're alone with them inside a secret, soundproof chamber. Luckily there's Basil Rathbone (as a greedy heir) and the dialogue's so rattattat one gets the whiff of amphetamines in the air. However, unlike Howard Hawk's ingenious use of overlapping dialogue, here they have to wait for the other person to finish their lines, if you'll forgive the expression, so there's a weird disconnect, as it takes longer to go a shorter distance even while moving  twice as fast. More stuff happens in the first half hour of this CAT than in six ordinary old dark house films, yet it never really goes very far in any one direction.

In addition to Basil Rathbone ("who does he think he is, Sherlock Holmes?" quips Brod), the package of greedy heirs include a young and very surly Alan Ladd! Would that Veronica Lake was around to chill Crawford's kinetic spazzing, although even the spazzing has some worth, like when he jumps off a second floor balcony and lands in the mud in a single wacky take, precluding (I presume) use of a stunt double. After flying through the air and tackling an empty suit of armor or the wrong guy five times in a row, though, you'd think he might hesitate the smallest bit with his wild accusations the next time a single whiff of red herring catches his dopey blue collar nose. But not unlike the Ritz Brothers' Gorilla movie, if you're mood is undiscriminating there are worse things out there: this Cat has even more secret passages and panels than usual for this sort of thing, the cat sculpture and its surrounding marble mausoleum are gorgeous, and there's two hangings! Interesting since one couldn't show anyone hanging in 1941, and they weave around that issue by showing her dangling legs reflected in the mirror... for a surprisingly long take.

As far as red herrings (or are they?) Gale Sondergaard is good as always as the sinister catkeeper (the old lady wants to keep her house a cat sanctuary after she dies), but poor Bela is literally stuck out in the cold as the shaggy groundskeeper. Clearly they wanted his name in the credits but didn't want to deal with him except through a second unit. Was it the morphine or just his infamous temperament that regaled him to these wasted parts at Universal all through the 40s?  I would like to see one movie, just one, where Bela has a girlfriend. Why couldn't he be married to Sondergaard or something? Actually there is one film where a girl likes Bela, Monogram's otherwise unwatchable BLACK DRAGONS... Bela, you shall be... avenged! (Rattle metal thunder sheet and flicker the lights)

HORROR ISLAND
1941 - Universal - *1/2
There are a lot of things wrong from the start with Horror Island: squeaky clean Dick Foran in a Popeye-style sailor man suit struggling to pay for his boat; As Dick's dimwit first mate, Fuzzy Knight makes Andy Devine seem like like Errol Flynn, but even worse is Leo Carrillo's shameless overplaying as a Spanish pirate. The three are bound to seek some gold on a remote island, but need money for the expedition so they market it as an adventure expedition  ("twenty million in Spanish gold!"). Signing up is wiseacre heiress Peggy Moran, her drowsy playboy companion, and some other tourists. After some on-deck skullduggery they land on a rocky coasted island and an old mansion and then 'yawn' finally murder, ghostly howls, and the dusty suits of armor that m-m-ma-move by themselves. Simmer for 30 more minutes of tepid candle-lit corridor creeping and, Mister, you got yourself a bland comedy-mystery cliche stew. Worse even, a lot of the spook happenings turn out to be fake, and we never really know which are the real scares until the sound guy gets killed and the scares keep coming. Needless to say, all concerned seek the hidden treasure, and a sinister shadow in a slouch hat add to the studio enforced and censor-scrubbed 'fun.'

Some like this film though, probably because they saw it as very young kids... it has a chapter in the Guilty Pleasures (Vol. 1 - Midnight Marquee)which I think is out of print. It should be enough to know that it's there, in the book, and that some writer likes it. I say if you just relax into the film and take it as a bunch of vaguely connected shots of young men and women in dreary wartime fashions and homogenized pirate costumes skeedaddling in and out of secret panels and conking each other on the back of the head, maybe you can muddle through.

There is one bright spot: Moran's effete rich pal, Thurston Coldwater (Lewis Howard), who lounges around and makes droll wry comments like an anesthetized Waldo Lydecker. He can do wonders with a line like "Listen, my impetuous young friend," and he has the last joke. Why didn't he star?!?!

PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD
1932 - RKO  ***1/2
Where has this gem been all my life? Now it's on WB's Archive Collection where the image seems ever-so slightly squeezed so everyone looks super thin but who cares? So glad to have it around. Karen Morley (the moll from another 1932 gem, Scarface) shows why she deserves to be on the cover of the best film criticism book ever written (Manny at the Movies) with her scene-swipingly slithery performance as no-bones gold digger Jenny Wren, who's decided to retire and intends blackmailing all her rich ex and present lovers in one fell swoop, gathering them at a remote mansion at midnight, along with their wives, if any, her own shrewd maid, a colorful drunk, and bearable comic relief. Jenny's retirement is prompted, we learn, via groundbreaking whirlwind flashbacks, to some naive rich kid college boy leaping from a cliff after she dumped him (she learned he'd been cut off financially because of her). Then his ghostly face appears unto her on the balcony, and then she's dead.

On hand is Ricardo Cortez as a slickster hired by an unseen party to retrieve some incriminating love letters from her suitcase. He knows the coppers will pin her murder on him so he sets out to solve the mystery before the law can fix the ubiquitous washed-out bridge. The ending, on a foggy cliff with a single engine police plane coming in overhead, and the two guys walking off into the fog, foreshadows the similar end of Casablanca!! Was Curtiz a Karen Morley fan?  I sure am, after this movie. The pre-code era is full of B-list actresses who almost all pattern their gold diggers after Jean Harlow or Peggy Hopkins Joyce, but Morley is herself, with that uniquely flat, nasal, slightly sing-song voice that immortalized such lines as "you work fast, don't you Tony?" and "I don't like cigar smoke in my room-duya-mind?" in Scarface.

The photography should also be noted for being supremely shadowy, nearly to Von Sternbergian levels, but with (in this case, Spanish-style) old dark house acoutrements -- secret passage, clues, complex motive crosswork -- instead of masochism and feathers. We learn in the beginning that the ending was chosen via a contest over the radio (after a serial of six chapters), but that hardly seems relevant today, or even likely in reality. Either way it's my new favorite. And I didn't even mention Hilda Vaughn as Morely's awesome, slightly Sapphic maid. She may be the coolest maid in all pre-code, almost a Leporello-level co-conspirator rather than a mere servant.

THE ROGUE'S TAVERN
1936 - Puritan Pictures - **
Detective Wallace Ford wants to marry Babara Pepper quickly so they head to a remote lodge the next state over (where its presumably easier) to meet a preacher. A gaggle of suspicious types mill in the lobby of this remote lodge, and then a dog bares his fangs on cue at certain windows and soon, sans preacher, they're all locked in by a mysterious killer. Suspects include a cabal of diamond smugglers, an old coot in a wheelchair and, I forget who elsezzz but there are worse ways to doze off than in front of an old dark house mystery, as long as you wake up in time to marvel at the sustained crazy killer monologue finale. 

Please note also the big fireplace in the lobby / lounge / tavern, which apparently is a mainstay of RKO-Pathe, the soundstage chosen 2-1 by fly-by-nite indie outfits like our film's releasing company, 'Puritan Pictures.' When at RKO-Pathe, make sure to build your set around the big fireplace, if it's available. You won't regret it.

Unfortunately when the fireplace is the film's best asset, you're headed nowhere fast; Pepper's character has that post-code nag problem where instead of just telling Ford what she's seen out the window, i.e. fangs, murders, she hems and haws and stammers like Lou Costello while Ford's busy cross-examining the rogues, and he's reluctant to listen to her, thinking she's just making some excuse to monopolize his time. Why doesn't she just tell him right off instead of saying "c-c-c-can you come here a m-m-minute?" Of course he brushes her off and since it's post-code she lingers and whines and schemes to get his mind back on the preacher and the marriage. The DVD is on Alpha and is pretty blurred. But I don't think clarity would help. The fog of booze on the other hand, just might. 

ONE FRIGHTENED NIGHT
1935 - Mascot Pictures - **1/2
A dark and stormy night, a crotchety old man (Charley Grapewin) gathering his greedy heirs to read the will, secret passages, a spooky mask, and a long lost blonde granddaughter who shows up last minute to inherit everything, down to the last measly million. What a dumb clause if you want your granddaughter to survive the night!! Luckily an imposter dies first, not unlike what happens in THE MONSTER WALKS (1932 - see Old Dark Capsules 1). 

But ONE DARK NIGHT is a little more lively and ape-free than MONSTER WALKS, better even without Mischa Auer but saddled instead with the inescapable Wallace Ford. He plays a Vaudeville magician named 'the Great Lavalle,' whose car conveniently breaks down near the old mansion during the storm. His assistant (Mary Carlisle) just so happens to be the real granddaughter heiress. The old man believes her because she refuses to have anything to do with him or his filthy money. Meanwhile there are poison darts, Hindi sculptures, and a line-up of suspects who all must sooner or later tangle with the usual carload of clueless, gun-jumping cops. Rafaela Ottiano (the human trafficker in SHE DONE HIM WRONG) is the maid; Arthur Hohl and Hedda Hopper (you heard me) are suspects. Ford has no interest in Carlisle except as a pal and assistant, which is unusual, so she upgrades to Regis Toomey, despite the fact he may be the killer.

FRIGHTENED has been a fall-asleep C-level favorite of mine for years in a more truncated version than the somewhat blurry Alpha DVD (I had taped it in the early 80s off the old PBS show Matinee at the Bijou).  I even used footage from it in my cynically unclaimed 2009 smashed hit, CURSE OF THE MALE GAZE (Carlisle stands in for Laura Mulvey). What better way, perhaps, to close this capsule collection than to present it now? 




See Old Dark Capsules 1 here (with OLD DARK HOUSE, CAT AND THE CANARY, THE GHOUL, THE MONSTER WALKS, THE GHOUL)

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The Evolver Virus: PROMETHEUS, THE DEAD FILES

One of the weirdest, most psychedelically spooky and Halloween-triguing shows on TV right now is the Travel Channel's THE DEAD FILES: psychic Amy Allan and retired NYC homicide detective Steve De Schavi investigate haunted houses with a twin pincer approach: he dredges up the the building's history and talks to witnesses; she sees dead people, she speaks to dead people, and they speak to her. But there's only one way to know if her findings are real... and that's Steve's corroborating unearthed facts. She uses a sketch artist to capture the image of the main dead person she encounters which is later compared with Steve's recovered photo of the historical troublemaker. They match always and the key moment of the whole show happens: Steve's eyes widen, his head involuntarily shakes back and forth in stunned disbelief, and we realize with queasy delight that we're watching a very grounded man's horizon expand, the 'super' part stripped away from the supernatural. Slowly the soul and body, so long ago separated by church, science, and state, grow re-merged.

PROMETHEUS (recently released on DVD) provides an eerie ancestry with Steve and Amy's investigations. A retro-futuristic pre-emptive gravestone, Ridley Scott's big sci fi comeback film marks his first return to the mythos of his 1979 franchise-launcher ALIEN in the same year, 2012, that's marked the death of his brother and fellow director Tony (see "I'm not Afraid to Die") and the end of the Mayan calendar. A muddled but fascinating career capstone, PROMETHEUS serves as a summation of all Scott's pet themes, cheapening them in the process through bloating their budget-inflated product. As usual, a crew of humans and one robot travel light years, this time to the end of the universe to find our godly makers.  In the process we learn, kind of, we're the result of a black oil virus, a DNA contaminant leakage. And we are offensive to our maker's eye. We are the gods (the DNA match is the same) but they don't want to recognize us as their children --we are the vile aliens --we came from the same black oil gunk the H.R. Giger beasties did.

This rejection by the elder titans is similar perhaps to the way science doesn't want to recognize the power of mediums like Amy Allan. Science wants to live completely and deludedly in the realm of materialism --there is a problem science has with anything already believed without prior scientific confirmation: astrologers, psychic, alien abductees, and exorcists, regardless of the evidence that it's all real to those who experience it --and not real to scientists who can't quite grasp it, yet. There is a slowly growing realization that the movement of planets even far away ones, in our own galaxy, affecting every last emotion or event here on earth via quantum entanglement, but it will be awhile before science comes to terms with astrology. It's a problem parents have when kids come out as gay, and it's not just a problem the 'engineers' (lead scientist Elizabeth Shaw's term for the big alien creators) have with us, it's a problem Ridley Scott has with his own material.

Like more than a few prequels shot decades after the original, PROMETHEUS has lost its connection to the mystery that blew minds in the original's heyday. With the help of reality-bending CGI and a massive budget, the film has lost sight of itself. Too big to fail, it lurches into the dark void in search of a light switch, so that it might clear yet another shadowed room and fill yet another darkened forest with shopping malls. The Alien series is now caught in a Moebius strip where the future is farther in the past than the present and ten times the budget means ten times slower momentum. The CGI lets nerdy crippled-by-second-guessing directors like Ridley over-tinker until a film is all FX details and the actors just gray blotches embarassing the technical perfection around them with their unforgivable human-animal irregularity.

A great aspect of the 1979 original, never recovered in any sequel, was the naturalistic dialogue. Remember the breakfast scene, after everyone wakes up on the Nostromo and starts smoking and grumbling and socializing in an overlapping naturalistic Altmanesque rhythm? These were people in the same room, at the same time, talking in their low, natural voices. Call me crazy but cigarettes had a lot to do with that. Has quitting smoking had the unforeseen side effect of dissolving our sense of 'adult' group dynamics? The chest-bursting scene was so shocking in the original because everyone was talking and joking and eating at the table in a believable manner, happy to see John Hurt's face again and to be heading home ("back to the old freezarinos!"), so when the little alien comes bursting out we're completely shocked. In this modern era we're always waiting for that chest-burster, but that's the problem. We've seen it too often to get traumatized --we expect it. We get pissed if it doesn't come. Meanwhile, without cigarettes there is no adulthood to deviate from.

So instead of characterization and naturalistic acting, the characters in PROMETHEUS are defined through Screenwriting 101 blather: a mohawked soccer hooligan geologist thinks he's in ALIEN 3 and so his overacting Brit thesp license extends to dismissing alien life as a load of bollocks; the nerdy hipster biologist meanwhile thinks he's in a mumblecore rom-com; the disillusioned hunk drinks and mopes because the engineers seem 'all gone'; leader Charlize is of course cold bitch who needs sexual healing from a black guy who sings "love the one you're with" and carries a bandillon, etc. -- and there's douche chill-invoking dialogue, which mimics Scott's BLADE RUNNER (1982)  in the way the actors disown lines even as they say them.

Many of you readers are perhaps lucky to have not heard Harrison Ford's original voiceover on that film, which the studio heads wanted added to clarify the confusing plot. As a fan of the film even before it came out, I used to fantasize that I could somehow edit out that cornball voiceover, which ruined Roy's big moment ("I don't know why he saved my life...") and stank everything up with hackneyed cliche like "The charmer's name was Gaffe. I'd seen him around" Or "he's the kind of guy who used to call black folks n*******." And of course "Rachel was special, no expiration date."

 Such ick dialogue oozing from its actor's mouths in PROMETHEUS includes "it's Christmas, Captain. And I want to open my presents" and the old man Weyland talking about his shiny replicant David: "the closest thing I have to a son, but he will never grow old and never die." Oh thanks gramps. If you were in Kubrick's 2001 you'd have probably had to say that "Hal was the most human of us, yet a computer!" and the continual associations of this voyage with an imagineered Disney ride, a beleaguered entitlement that's a bit like little Richard Benjamin disembarking for WESTWORLD, or or that airplane feeling of impatient infant entitlement one might feel as the stewardess's beverage cart comes slowly down the aisle toward your row, but never fast enough. It doesn't bode well for a film unless that film goes way off the deep end, and PROMETHEUS has the ALIEN legacy and the rich field of crypto-anthropology to spelunk, but never so deigns since there's all this stuff to do that's stale three times over since the 90s.

The worst of the lot is Noomi Rapace, who joylessly cries and screams and yells and and rappels up to the moral high ground like otherwise no one would take her pint-sized powerhouse trip seriously. In the 1970 original, even when Ripley was racing around trying to rescue that damned cat Jones she knew there was no point in overacting, in making the pain and anguish she was going through unbearable to us as well. Truth be told this was my problem with Noomi in GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, too. There's a certain line no actor should cross when expressing agony. When they cross it, the film ceases to be entertaining and becomes merely traumatic.

Would have loved to see her smile like this just once, in the movie

One of the aspects of the original ALIEN that made it so mind-blowing was that the giant alien 'space jockey' in the ship Nostromo investigates in the beginning is so uniquely other (thanks to H.R. Giger) with its vaginal entrances and fallopian shape, and the 'space jockey' was so  big and odd, and most of all very old, apparently calcified or petrified by the leaked-in non-oxygen atmosphere. It looked to be some kind of high-tech elephant man, with its stomach burst recorded in the petrification. For PROMETHEUS that mystery, that complete 'other' aspect is lifted up into the broad daylight, the fallopian / vaginal aspect is sublimated; the jockey is just wearing a helmet and suit, and is really a a big, hairless (literally) white guy. It's like if the Loch Ness monster being heaved up on dry land and someone explaining it's just a big catfish. Give us our mysteries back, Mr. Ichthyologist Scott. Your 'engineers' are just a bunch of pre-op Pinheads fixing to slug a Dr. Carrington in old age make-up (if you compare the bottom two image, clearly this was intentional, right down the collar on the human and camera angle).

from top: Hellraiser 4, Prometheus, The Thing (from Another World)

There's a reason of course that we (or I, at any rate) recoil from this figurative interpretation of our makers. We don't like ourselves, so why should our 'engineers'? We want to see an 'other' in science fiction, something we haven't seen before, something truly new, the way Giger's designs were in 1979. That's the problem here - such radical beauty would be too 'alien' for a movie with this size budget --they can't take the chance, just like mainstream science can't risk supporting alternate theories of human evolution. Bent on suppressing the intuitive. shamanic, and daemonic through its bulldozer mentality, the deadening effect has science has on our souls, or PROMETHEUS has on our love of the original ALIEN, is a mythic counterpart in Heracles bum-rushing the Underworld, hacking at shadows. As Patrick Harpur writes:

"Too much of our recent history has been soul-slaughter, imagining the past as merely primitive and, musclebound with technology, bulldozing the sacred spaces, hunting the daimonic animals with high velocity rifles, dispatching the jets to shoot down the UFOs, violating the moon-goddess with phallic rockets, and so on. Having severed all connection with the gods and daimons, we reckon we are getting away with it. But we aren't. The victory over the daimons is hollow; we simply make a hell of our world. And, as we drive the daimons out before us, they simply creep back in from behind, from within. We compel them to seize and possess and madden us. If we want to know our fate we would do well to look at Heracles. He neglected his wife, his soul, who, in order to rekindle his attention, sent him a shirt soaked in what she was told was a love potion. But the potion was a poison that poured over his body, corroding his too-solid flesh. The more he tore at the shirt the more he tore himself to pieces. He was glad to find death on a burning pyre..."  (1)

The problems with PROMETHEUS stem from this too-literalness. Instead of a daimonic soul force not bound by physical laws as we understand them, which would have been a fine use of the CGI Kubrick lacked in his "Beyond Jupiter and the Infinite" portion of 2001, or of gods whose thoughts are crystallized into the 3-D space time, like the Krell, or who breathe life into man, like Zeus, the engineers are jacked-up leatherboy baldheads carrying ink black tubes of super soil around the 3-D linear space-time universe, 'seeding' and/or 'poisoning' the worlds they find.

We have to take David's word for it that they're bound to come destroy the Earth but aren't they just seeing us the way we see the squid monsters, with abject horror, like the father beholding the creature that returns from college with long hair and a pierced septum? It's fitting that our engineers turn out to be so Heraclean, so anti-spirit, even still using screens and projections instead of telepathy and astral projection (as the real aliens do, and are doing right now, telling you not to believe me).

With all this uncanny familiarity breeding so much revulsive contempt, the fantastic H.R. Geiger production designs of the original (above) become in fact anachronistic to the spirit of Scott's 'new' vision. The original marriage of alien and Nostromo was about a clash of surfaces -- the alien was the return of the gothic architecture, of biology and machine fused together in spinal column-style fractal patterning vs. the maternal warmth of the ship and its dragonfly-like arrangements (above). We realize the original shape of the alien came from his previous surroundings, that he's continually shedding skins and becoming more and more like his surroundings and his prey for camouflage purposes if nothing else. Because the freshness of Giger's work is now long gone, Scott gives up on any notion of either gothic 'other' or chameleon in favor of a bland universal language which is then made inscrutable. Like how grandparents and grandchildren sometimes share a special bond that leaves parents out of the loop, David the robot understands the big black engineers so we don't have to.

Lawrence prays to Prometheus

Quoting from his favorite film LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, and wearing his hair like Peter O'Toole, David's the only character we can safely identify with in PROMETHEUS, the only character who at least has the wherewithal to subtly conceal his agenda rather than trumpet it like the denouement of an amateur stage production. Awash in Michael Fassbender's iceberg joviality, David seems to be acting only for himself, for a kind of twisted self-satisfied prank-pulling, imagining himself Lawrence, and the crew he serves no more admirable than the treacherous British military he 'works' for, and the aliens as his true tribe. He even talks to the ship's computer as if a human (rather than interfacing through his internal modem), while all alone, like he's feigning the need for 'human' companionship. The computer calls him "David" in a voice no-doubt intentionally similar to HAL's in 2001. And like that film was associated with birthdays, PROMETHEUS references Xmas continually, and the idea of ersatz immortality wrought through progeny, all of whom are disappointed by whatever they get for Xmas, no matter how expensive, just as we are disappointed by who they turn into. It's our nature to be underwhelmed, and PROMETHEUS doesn't disappoint. 

And who can blame David for thinking ill of his fellow Prometheus crew members? Sometimes the 'banter' of the crew even seems to careen towards a kind of FIREFLY jocularity, "a hundred credits?" wagers the Asian stereotype, "put it towards a lap dance with Miss Vickers!" Really bro? PORKY's-like sniggering and lap dances are going to survive into 2089? That's sad. And those overconfident orchestral scores with those minor key English horn parts that make everything sound like a Spielberg military funeral? And the way neither Ridley Scott nor Elizabeth seem to remember there's a difference between being a leader and a whiny martyr? "I shall need more time here," says Elizabeth Shaw when its announced they need to split back to the ship to avoid a coming storm, as if her lady martyr bossiness can hold back nature. Even when dealing with her husband's bitter disillusionment she spins it around to get attention by reminding him she cawn't have children, and so it becomes some big sob moment,  recalling the words of Camille Paglia:

Feminism . . . sees every hierarchy as repressive, a social fiction; every negative about women is a male lie designed to keep her in her place. Feminism has exceeded its proper mission . . . and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate" (2)

Thus even her husband's bitterness must be reinterpreted as a sleight against her being a woman. Still he's at least human. When he says 'here's mud in your eye, pal' to David, shortly before drinking the magic droplet of black hole mud dosed therein, he sounds like M. Emmett Walsh in BLADE RUNNER. And like Deckard, Shaw eats with chopsticks and talks to computers while watching the same material of someone or something over and over.

Of course Scott is a fan of classic sci fi so naturally he'd age into a fan of his own work. He's edited and re-edited BLADE RUNNER so many times that it's become about its multiple edits, as I discuss so repetitively in my 2008 article for Bright Lights, What's your Edition Number? The Replicanting of Bladerunner: Final Cut.  The only thing that the over-eager team behind the digital refurbishing seem to leave alone is the faces of the "mortal human" actors: M. Emmet Walsh and Edward James Olmos as the cops, J. F. Sebastian and Tyrell. To see their blue veins and gray, pockmarked, sweaty skin in amidst all that shiny CGI-enhanced finery... We want to apologize to the CGI computer for being so hard to duplicate, not just vis-à-vis the "uncanny valley" but with our decomposing faces.

Thus the Peter Weyland is played by Guy Pearce in elderly make-up rather than a real old man who might seem less streamlined and more genuinely crotchety, and his hand closes like a polyp recoiling from his scheming daughter Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), who, in classic Freudian form, has made herself as sleek and anime-replicant-like as possible in order to compete with David the favorite (artificial) son. But of course the favorite child never appreciates it. "Doesn't everyone want their parents dead?" he later asks. And while it's clear Charlize does want Peter dead, so she can take over Weyland Corp, she also desperately wants his love, which is a huge turn-off. Her attempts to become more like a replicant to win his attention are a sad, under-explored echo of modern eating disorders and surgery addictions as girls make themselves more and more like anime robots every day, crossing the uncanny valley in an unconscious drive to please Disney's NWO agenda. 

  Clockwise from top left: Charlize (Prometheus); Kristanna Loken (Terminator 3); 

Charlize again (Aeon Flux); Milla Jovovich (Ultraviolet); Sean Young (Blade Runner)

Speaking of wanting to make yourself as rigid as possible, let us return to THE DEAD FILES... 

As a preface, for those skeptics in the audience let me just say this: microbes existed long before there were microscopes to see them, so if someone had vision so acute they could see microbes before the rest of us could via the invention of microscopes, would they be hallucinating, or lying? Would you be committed to an asylum if your hearing was so acute you could pick up noises no one else could here until the invention of the condenser microphone? 'Genuine' skepticism keeps an open mind and neither believes nor disbelieves anything 100% and that's why the presence of Steve De Schavi is so reassuring. His heavy lidded eyes betray a long history of dealing with lying murderers, scared witnesses, concealed information, and blood, and he's a genuine skeptic as any good detective must be (ala Sherlock Holmes --"I neither believe nor disbelieve anything") yet he is continually astounded by Amy's spot-on information. Compare him, then, to the smug skeptics aboard Prometheus, who even though it's 2089 and they're deep in space, sneer at Shaw's decree about our 'engineers' like they're sophomore year science majors and you see how it is. The cop trusts his instincts, his information, the facts. Science just snickers at anything outside its parameter of the consensually agreed-on 'known.' It doesn't matter what evidence presents itself to the senses, or through witnesses, records --they snicker.

But there are such things as ghosts.

In PROMETHEUS there are ghosts that appear via some alien expression of the 'stone tape' theory, which is that certain mineral deposits under or in the walls of old castles can record moments of extreme psychic trauma that replay infinitely and be seen by psychics, children, shamans, and schizophrenics in the right series of electromagnetic circumstances. And just like the stone tapes within and without the world of film, certain emotions and moments in time endure.

And what will make Scott's film endure despite the cliches is its very real look at the intergalactic origin of humanity. Again, skeptics may scoff but there's plenty of evidence to make us question the doop-de-doo logic of Darwin, which explains very little about why were are so different than our ape brothers, why chimps haven't developed speech by now, and who made the tape splices and alien signatures and serial codes on our junk DNA ("ever buy snakes from the Egyptian, pally?")

Scientists trying to understand the paranormal through their systems and measurements is like a dog chewing on a math book to understand algebra.  We have to, as dogs, admit there might be a other ways to perceive the information in the book other than through eating it. If we could read our reality the way it was written, with all nine of our senses aligned to all nine levels of reality, if we could read that which was written deep in the rocks of ages and in our DNA, then we would know who wrote it, who wrote and breathed us into creation and then split, promising to return in a few thousand years, in time for Christmas, then forgot about us, didn't even call on our birthday, or buy us a bushbaby, just threw us away like a message in a bottle thrown by a shipwrecked sailor. And now, if we see them on the street, they just look the other way, ashamed they ever created us to begin with.

 The catch in PROMETHEUS is that our makers may have used us as a biological weapon to wipe out some other species. The 'sacrificial engineer' in the pre-credits sequence dissolves into broken ashes that slowly, presumably over billions of years, reconstitute into ourselves, but why? Were we meant to color the canvas or gesso it back to blankness?

Planet of the Vampires (1967)

What a disappointing answer this is to the mysteries of our own existence and of the 'space jockey' in the first film, who in turn was hatched double from a similar crashed spaceship in Mario Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (see my proposed Netflix streaming 'Roots of Alien trilogy' post on Bright Lights After Dark), and before that elsewhere (see Alien Explorations illustrious trail of same) as if to say there really is only one race in the galaxy, and the aliens who burst from our chests are really created by our own Miracle Gro-spiked internal parasitic microorganisms rather than a true 'other' - which was what made the original ALIEN so compelling. Coming up with answers doesn't always mean improving the question. In this case the logic is quite reductive. Wherever we go, all we ever find is ourselves, in one form or another, according to stupid-ass PROMETHEUS. Why bother going anywhere? Is Ridley tired of traveling?

From top: Parasaurolophus Prometheus, The Tree of Life

Of course, much as its reductive, there's even some bizarre 'near-evidence' suggesting an actual artifact giant ship on the dark side of the moon--with a Mayan mummy girl inside, keeping the ship alive through, presumably, an ancient system of brainwave power (see my post on Divinorum, Prometheus and the Moon Maiden) which is fascinating to contemplate, if not quite believe.

Science will always admit it doesn't know everything and there are still countless uncatalogued life forms in the oceans; still quantum physics-derived revelations about the elastic nature of time, space and 'true hallucinations' left to come. But we will know it and feel it ourselves long before they admit it's real. That's why it will always be the job of the artists and TV producers to figure out how to present this uncertainty to the public in intriguing ways that never quite become fact or fiction, because unless science can taste it in the math book, it can't actually exist, and thus on these levels they are useless. We may not know how to read the math book ourselves, yet, but we're smart enough not to eat it. The text unmauled, we can stare at the cryptic markings and let our natural learning process slowly acclimate ourselves to the high strangeness. After a few more generations of ancient astronaut enthusiasts have come and gone, and their knowledge of alien theory seeped down into the collective 'given,' then alien engineering will organically become a scientific reality. Or we can go on with the plan to panic and deny, belittle and destroy, mask our fear under the guise of a skeptic or mainstream scientist, deriding all we cannot explain and never getting the paradoxical irony when they in turn admit they don't know either. In other words, I don't know the answer either, therefore your hypothetical answer is stupid, and not even worth investigating.

To bring the eating the math book metaphor back, science believes in all the ingredients--wood pulp, ink-- just not what the book says. It knows there are billions of galaxies and we have the potential to one day discover life on another planet and we know only a fraction of what life was like in our distant past and we are different in our brain power than all the rest of the animals and the earth has been here a long long time, and yet --if you even propose to connect all these dots, and consider one of the other billions of galaxies around far longer than us may have long ago been to our planet and even 'seeded' us into existence, they snicker. Why? Because they can never admit there might be a world going on outside of their own limited perspective. They can only imagine the universe as a school patiently waiting for science to allow it to open.  We've only even had a space program for less than a century! In all the billions of years the universe has existed, surely someone had time to evolve enough to come here, and leave again once they got a look at how we turned out, a Dr. Frankenstein blasting off to escape his mess of Karloffian monsters!

 In BLADE RUNNER this horror occurs between Roy Batty and Tyrell ("I want more life, father") but 1931's FRANKENSTEIN was really the first time we learned that the gods don't want to see us at their doorstep. They wanted us to become lawyers instead of poets, clean-cut surgeons instead of hairbag rock stars. But we're artists, and depressed, so we in turn want a legitimate answer as to why our dad disturbed our timeless sleep and dragged us into the cold clinical light of day from out the cozy womb of stars.

Michael Fassbender's robot is however no ugly genetic swamp of rejection issue hang-ups and accidental girl drownings but an electronic Apollo, the gifted Adonis lawyer our god dad wanted us to be. He escapes the chthonic morass of nature, the primordial soup from which we were slowly built together via the knitting DNA mandibles of the insectoid uber-intellect, with all the phony differences, illusions of time, and abject rejection of one thing (sewage) and love of another (flowers), all being knit into focus from the black ooze. You could call those canisters of black ooze a biological weapon but you'd miss part of the point: this is the stuff that created us, that will create us again, wherever it lands. It's humans in a bottle: just release and wait six billion years for the ooze to work its way through its long gestation, through trilobites and past dinosaurs and mammoths and into monkeys and BOOM, there's that man again.

Into darkness: T-B: Dead Files, Prometheus, Planet of the Vampires

Or you could feed it to man himself and get the feedback squall of H.R. Geiger-inspired uber-chthonic slime monsters. In THE DEAD FILES it's De Schavi that mirrors the human astronauts, examining the records and remains of the ancient race that is somehow, in some form, still alive, and Amy is Michel Fassbender's robot, seeing that which still exists beyond mere 'living' --the things western civilization has tried to eradicate, to demonize, trivialize and ridicule --the layers beyond our notions of life, the limited spectra of what we consider possible with our current common denominator sensory spectra. And the spooked hooligan geologist is the ultimate example of mainstream science, going along for the ride if there's a tenure position involved but freaking out if his narrow parameter of the known is stretched even a hair, like going scuba diving and getting freaked out if he sees a fish. He's the Heracles who finally gets soaked by the shirt, forced to tear himself to pieces. As the ugly link between the elder gods who made us and little machines we've sired, humanity has become merely the unwanted middle child, like the middle generation shut out in the grandparent-grandchild bond. Both our gods and machines want to kill us so badly we may have to beat them to it, just to prove we deserved to be here.

NOTES:
1. Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality (p. 261) Prime Winds, 2003
2. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae,  (p. 13) Vintage Books, 1991

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