Chapter 17
In 1993, Steven Spielberg’s computer-generated Tyrannosaurus Rex crashed through a compound barrier in Jurassic Park; even dyed-in-the-wool monster junkies like myself, who had been subjected to every conceivable movie monster imaginable over a 40-year time span, were forced to sit up and take notice. From that day onward, the computer took a firm hold on the field of monster effects and hasn’t let up since. But CGI hasn’t worn well over the years. Which CGI monster has made any sort of impact on audiences since Spielberg’s trumped-up “the dinosaurs are coming” opus was foisted upon us in a blaze of hype? Answer — none. Take Godzilla, for example. The Japanese original is etched into the minds of past generations of fans and has been the subject of 20-odd movies, cartoons and comic strips. Toho’s creation is right up there with the gill-man, the Frankenstein Monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man and King Kong, forever enshrined as one of fantasy’s key figures. But what about the 1998 incarnation? Nobody can remember it; Roland Emmerich’s giant, computerized lizard is just that — a giant, computerized lizard, lacking personality and depth. And as with most modern-day CGI beasties, it’s there one minute, gone the next. The camera refuses to linger on these “cooked up in a computer” creatures; a lack of faith in the end product, maybe? Legions of fans, if called upon, can roughly sketch Harryhausen’s Ymir or the mollusk in The Monster that Challenged the World because these monsters were allowed an abundance of screen time. They were the stars of the show. Nowadays, they’re not. Blandness, sterility and lack of fright appeal have set in. Where once monster movies were “X” or “A” rated, nowadays, they’re classified as child-friendly. More mature members of the cinema-going public have become increasingly blasé over the whole computer deal. Take CGI dinosaurs. They might well be aesthetically accurate in detail according to the geological age they inhabited, but frequently they look flat and pixilated. Compared to a solid stop-motion model, they’re almost two-dimensional. CGI wizardry also lacks the one essential ingredient guaranteed to grab an audience — wonder. Wonder has virtually disappeared from monster effects. Everyone now knows, thanks to documentaries and magazines, exactly how these things are conceived, straight from the drawing board into the intestines of a computer. In this respect, computer monsters don’t actually exist. That hairy spider on strings in Missile to the Moon existed, cheap looking or not; it was constructed by hand. A computerized creature is simply an ephemeral image composed of millions of pixels that, after usage, vanishes into the ether, unlike, say, a Harryhausen model that (if you had access to one) could be picked up, touched and moved into various positions. It’s the difference, dear fan, between one holding this book and an e-book. School kids can now drum up a reasonable-looking monster on their laptops; what is the point in creating large replicates or manipulating intricate models inch by inch, photographed at a single frame at a time, when a computer can perform the task without too much fuss and bother.
CGI didn’t exist in the 1950s; optical and mechanical effects ruled the roost, so it’s somewhat ironic that during this decade, audiences were assailed by an arresting onslaught of mind-boggling monsters that lodged in the memory for a very long time afterward. Film companies had a capacity for making a thousand dollars spent on effects seem like a million bucks. And it didn’t require an army of technicians to bring them to the silver screen — two to three at the most or, in Harryhausen’s case, one. Nobody needed countless magazines telling them how such-and-such was made; the technician could quite easily work it out. We all knew that Bert I. Gordon placed his performers in front of back-projected magnified insects and lizards; that Jack Arnold’s Tarantula was a real tarantula matted into the action; that the spider in World Without End was a furry dummy worked by wires; that the giant ants in Them! were specially constructed imitations worked by animatronics; that Godzilla was a man in a rubber suit and that a filmmaker by the name of Ray Harryhausen somehow managed to combine his marvelous creations with live footage to stunning effect. Admittedly, on rare occasions, the not-so-special effects raised the eyebrows and provoked the odd titter. But remember — all were devised without the aid of computers; their imaginative conception wasn’t impaired through lack of computer knowledge. Humans were responsible for their transference to the big screen, not machines. Spectacular results could be, and were, achieved pre-CGI: Godzilla’s destruction of Tokyo and, skipping forward to the ’60s, Gorgo’s demolition job on London are classic sequences made in the days when computers had nothing whatsoever to do with the film industry. Both movies could never be bettered by digital tampering.
And that brings us to a very important question: Which particular monster, out of the veritable zoo that we were exposed to in those far-off days, tops the list of all-time greats? After a great deal of head-scratching, here is my top 10 list, in order of preference, of what I reckon are the 1950s pivotal monsters, the crème de la crème of monsterdom, if you like.
20 Million Miles to Earth — The Ymir, a giant Venusian reptile on the rampage in Italy. Judging by the number of years it ran in England, Columbia’s feature has to be the most popular monster movie of the 1950s. From the monster’s birth, crawling unsteadily out of a gelatinous egg-sac, to the escape from the cage, its capture and finally the final stand atop Rome’s Coliseum, Ray Harryhausen manipulates his anatomical marvel with faultless expertise, imbuing his alien creature with emotional depth, savagery and pathos; he successfully created, in this modest production, a dynamic being to which mass audiences could identify. It wasn’t family fare, either — in England, 20 Million Miles to Earth received an “X” rating. One of the maestro’s favorite movies — and colorized, it takes on a whole new perspective in big-screen entertainment.
Godzilla — Inoshiro Honda’s titanic radioactive dinosaur was a stomping nuclear holocaust, trashing all before it, including the plot, which didn’t really matter; the monster’s prolonged wrecking of Tokyo is one of fantasy cinema’s greatest segments of unadulterated monster-mayhem. Like a black behemoth, Godzilla roars, breathes fire, glows with radiation, crushes humans underfoot, demolishes buildings, tears up power lines, swats planes out of the air as though they were flies and gobbles up trains; no wonder the British censor slapped an “X” classification on the movie. Dark, violent scenes such as this will never again feature in today’s watered-down monster fare.
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad — The Cyclops. Yep, Harryhausen again, but no one else could come close to what the man achieved in the 1950s; every fantasy filmgoer from eight to 80 can remember the impact that his cloven-hoofed, one-eyed horned giant, processed in Dynamation, had on them at the time when it strode from the mouth of a cave on the Isle of Colossa, bellowing its head off. It left an indelible impression on this writer as a 12 year old, and even my young son, seeing the uncut 1975 reissue, was mesmerized enough by the thing to suffer the odd nightmare. An extraordinary, exotic monster straight out of the pages of the Arabian Nights and a personal best for Harryhausen which, given his exceptional creative output, is really saying something.
Tarantula — Universal’s effects ace Clifford Stine used two tarantulas for different setups in this superior monster show; never has a spider appeared so monstrous than in Jack Arnold’s riveting giant insect thriller, shot mainly at night to convey an atmosphere of scientific experimentation gone horribly wrong. The scene when the townsfolk, laying down dynamite on a road, spot the gigantic spider crawling over a distant hillside straight toward them, goes to show what can be pulled off by using hard-won resources rather than cash to get one’s ideas across — a fabulous platter of monster action, one of the company’s defining moments.
The Monster that Challenged the World — Augie Lohman’s mechanically operated giant mollusks-cum-caterpillars really leapt out of the screen, their big hypnotic headlamp eyes and drooling mandibles a favorite image with horror film poster collectors. The lengthy end sequence, when one of the articulated creatures attacks Audrey Dalton and her daughter in a laboratory, depicts Lohman’s 20-foot model in all its glory, a one-off in a way, endearingly ’50s in conception, although not so cute as to avoid a British “X” certificate when first released.
Rodan — True, in some scenes audiences can spot the wires hoisting Rodan and his mate over the city they are about to destroy, but so what? Toho’s first monster outing in color was a huge success for the company, running, like 20 Million Miles to Earth, for an unbroken 12 years in England. Rodan, in young fans’ eyes, was as terrifying as Godzilla, his dynamic battle with the military at Sasebo almost recreating the same level of urban destruction evoked in Godzilla’s wrecking of Tokyo. And the mechanically operated caterpillar-like Meganurons were just as splendiferous. Without doubt, this becomes the second finest Japanese monster film of the ’50s.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms — Ray Harryhausen’s first solo effort proved to be, against all expectations, a big success for Warner Bros., perfectly displaying the man’s unique talents for producing knockout effects on low finances. His animation of the Rhedosaurus, along with the Ymir and Cyclops, counts as one of the top three best pieces of stop-motion of the decade. Whether demolishing a lighthouse, capsizing a boat or stalking the New York streets, this striking, pebble-skinned dinosaur, tongue flicking, eyes blinking in the sunlight, is a creature of which audiences can relate. Which is why Harryhausen has acquired godlike status over the years; no other craftsman of his type (with the exception of Willis O’Brien) has invested so much blood, sweat and tears into bringing his eyecatching models to life. We fans are eternally grateful that he did.
The Black Scorpion — Which brings us to Willis O’Brien himself, Harryhausen’s old mentor. Working in tandem with Pete Peterson, O’Brien fabricated, out of a standard monster-on-the-loose scenario, a vigorous horror flick of some note. Not only did we get a pack of oversized scorpions but a gripping sequence inside the depths of a volcano. This mid-section interlude probably arose from some of O’Brien’s aborted storyboards dating back to the previous decades; it has a distinct ’30s look about it and was a tremendous, unexpected bonus for fantasy fans, featuring not only the scorpions but a worm-like creepy-crawler and a super-bug. The final confrontation in a Mexico City stadium, the military versus an extra large scorpion, is a climax ranking as one of the ’50s most exciting. Underrated in some quarters, The Black Scorpion, 50 years on, comes across as one hell of an animated monster spectacle.
The Deadly Mantis — Another winner from Universal-International, Clifford Stine’s marvelous effects as eye-opening as ever; a colossal, extremely ferocious, praying mantis thaws from an Arctic iceberg and causes problems all round for Craig Stevens and his men before flying down the Gulf Stream toward Washington and New York. The attack on the airbase and the final showdown in Manhattan’s Holland Tunnel are just two acts of monster pandemonium that ensured a full house in British cinemas right up to 1969. Stine’s large-scale model mantis is a beaut, a super creation very popular with buffs at the time.
Varan the Unbelievable — Try to obtain a copy of the original, uncut Japanese edit to fully appreciate what Inoshiro Honda and his team were trying to attain. Varan is a monster to be reckoned with, not given its due, in the heavily altered, and shortened, American print. The plot involves a gargantuan prehistoric scaly lizard that is forced out of its saltwater lake home; enraged at the disturbance, the monster heads toward Tokyo, trashing native villages and fighting off battleships en route. The picture has bags of monster action, filmed by Honda in the classic darker tones that highlighted Godzilla, and Varan is a formidable adversary in the grand Toho tradition. This picture is so good in its original form, and so rarely seen, that it has edged out of my top 10 the giant ants in Them! The fiery medieval devil in Night of the Demon and the towering crystals in The Monolith Monsters also came in for consideration. Apologies for this, but you can’t list ’em all!