Tuesday, November 05, 2024

The Season is Upon Us, it Seems

It's like a switch has been thrown as we enter November and the Christmas TV commercials start in earnest.  Sure, there have been Christmassy ads running since, well, probably September, but this week the 'Big Boys' have been launching their full on seasonal TV campaigns.  Just today, I've seen the opening salvo of commercials from M&S, Aldi and Lidl.  It can only be a matter of hours before Sainsburys, Tesco, Asda and Morrisons join in, (I'm pretty sure that I saw a Waitrose Christmas ad the other day, so they've already fired their first shots of the season).  Oh, and the number of TV spots for those designer perfumes have ramped up - always a good indicator that the festive season is upon us. Obviously, the one that seasoned Christmas commercial watchers are waiting for is the John Lewis TV ad, although I've never understood just why people get so obsessed about these.  It isn't as if they're particularly memorable - I vaguely recall that one about the old peado who loves on the moon, but beyond that, I can't say that I clearly remember any of them.  Getting back to the point, it's hard to remember exactly when these Christmas commercials started this year - were they showing over the weekend?  Did it kick off last Friday, the first day of November?  (I didn't watch a lot of terrestrial TV over the weekend, instead focusing on various Roku streaming channels, which, more often than not, play US ads, usually about  dodgy sounding pharmaceuticals, Medicare claims and tax avoidance). 

Which leads me to ponder as to whether there's some complex formula used by advertisers as to when the Christmas TV ad campaign starts.  Steeped in mystery, like the way the church formulates when Easter is going to fall every year.  Something, perhaps, to do with which weekend the clocks go back on - is there a rule that says we have to have left British Summer Time before Christmas ads can show?  Maybe that is it - it has to be the first weekend following the one where we go back to GMT and the nights start drawing in, making us feel Christmassy.  Of course, these days it is all complicated by the fact that early November is when we also get ads banging on about 'Black Friday' sales.  A concept which, as I never tire of saying, is completely meaningless in the UK, as we don't have Thanksgiving on the Thursday before, (which conveniently marks the start of the US holiday season).  Having answered the question of how they calculate the date for the commencement of the UK Christmas TV commercial season, the other burning seasonal question which needs answering is that of when is it time to put up the external Christmas decorations?  Clearly it doesn't coincide with the TV ads, as I haven't so far seen any displayed around Crapchester.  (Although there are still some lingering Halloween external decorations, which seem to be becoming more popular - there was an inflatable witch popping up and down in the front garden of one house I walked past last week, for instance).  When they arrive, we'll really know that Christmas is here. 

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Monday, November 04, 2024

Hand of Death (1962)

Lately, I've been catching up with a number of B-movies that piqued my interest when I first became interested in horror films - more years ago now than I care to remember - but which I was never able to see due to their lack of availability on UK TV back then.  We're talking about the pre-internet era here, when we had only three TV channels and home video was in its infancy.  So, if a film didn't turn up on one of those three channels, then you weren't going to be able to see it, it was that simple.  To research my new found interest, I had to rely on books (often borrowed from my local library), which usually included all too brief write ups of the films and tantalising stills from them.  So it was that I first became aware of Hand of Death (1962), from a single still in a book about movie monsters.  It showed a guy with grotesquely swollen face and hands steadying himself on, rather bizarrely, a parking meter.  The caption on the picture simply named the film and there was no other reference to  it in the main text.  In the years that followed I found out a bit more about the movie from other books - cast, director, basic plot outline - but was never able to catch up with the film itself, which remained an obscurity, not even to be found anywhere on the net.  Until now, that is, when I found a number of copies have turned up online.  

So, having finally ended my decades long wait to see Hand of Death, was it worth it?  The most immediately striking thing about the film is that it is very traditional science fiction/horror B-movie, yet was made as late as 1962.  The plot could easily have come from thirties or forties Universal or Monogram B-movie starring Karloff or Lugosi: scientist working on revolutionary new gas that can pacify those who inhale it, gets a whiff of his own invention and finds that his very touch deals death.  Even his motivations for developing the gas - for use on the battlefield to incapacitate enemy armies without harming them - could have come from one of those thirties films an over-reaching scientist's good intentions turn out to pave the road to Hell.  While mad scientist type films were still being made in the fifties and into the sixties, they tended to have moved with the times, with experiments involving then fashionable radiation to grow insects to giant proportions and the like becoming the norm.  Moreover, they were also increasingly tailored to the youth market, as drive in audiences became ever more important to the box office fates of low budget films.  AIP, in particular, targeted this demographic with the likes of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Blood is My Heritage, to name but a few.  Hand of Death, by contrast, makes no concessions to this market, with its middle aged cast and lack of hot rods and surfers, (although a beach does feature prominently at the climax - but there are no parties going on there).

What we get instead is a pretty standard science-gone-wrong plot, as the protagonist finds not just his body, but also his mind warped by his encounter with the gas he has developed, (reminiscent, to some degree, of Universal's The Mad Ghoul (1943)).  The performances, from a cast of B-movie veterans, including John Agar as the unfortunate scientist, are pretty standard for this sort of film.  What is outstanding is the make-up worn by Agar as he starts changing into a monster, with both hands and face hugely swollen, with blackened, cracked skin.  Indeed, the scenes where he wanders around the streets in this state, wearing a trench coat and trilby hat are more than a little surreal and give the film a genuinely bizarre feel.  (It is from this sequence that the still with the parking meter, which sparked my interest in the film, was taken).  The film tries hard to make Agar's character a tragic hero: not only were his original intentions peaceful, but he never intentionally kills anyone in the film, it's just that people keep touching him or forcing him to fend them off, resulting in his fatal touch killing them.  (The make-up effects for his victims are also above average, with his initial touch leaving a black mark on them, before their skin swells, blackens and cracks like his).  The problem is that his character is too stereotypically written and performed for the audience ever to care much about him.  

In terms of production values, Hand of Death looks pretty decent for a low budget movie, making good use of its locations and featuring some memorably shot sequences. These include the aforementioned street scene as well as the long tracking shots of Agar stumbling along the beach toward the end, while a child plays on a terrace in the foreground, the set-up constantly teasing a collision between the two.  The low budget shows, though, in the generic-sounding electronic jazz-style score, which never really seems to match the onscreen action.  Still, at around an hour, Hand of Death is a reasonably brisk experience, with an interesting set-up and a great-looking monster in a pretty standard plot.  Was it worth the wait?  Probably not, but I still found it a reasonably entertaining diversion for and hour or so.

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Friday, November 01, 2024

The Cyclops (1957)

Bert I Gordon's second film as director, The Cyclops (1957) feels like a dry run for his The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), released later the same year.  Both concern ordinary guys who are enlarged to gigantic proportions after receiving huge doses of radiation.  The key difference is that the later film presents its protagonist as initially sympathetic, only later turning into a rampaging monster as the radiation causes his mental faculties to deteriorate, whereas in The Cyclops, we only meet the title character after he has become a monster.  The creature in The Cyclops is, however, allowed to show us a glimpse of his human side as, toward the end of the film, he starts to remember his former identity and life.  Not that it lasts - he's soon back to menacing the heroes before succumbing to a spear in his single eye.  What's clear watching The Cyclops is that it was clearly made on a tight budget, featuring only a handful of characters for most of its running time and confining its action to a single outdoors location, with a very simple plot structure and a typical B-movie cast, (Lon Chaney Jr and Gloria Talbott being the most recognisable faces).  The effects work, even by Bert I Gordon standards, is noticeably cheap, with his trademark giant animals being inserted into the action via some quite shoddy process work.  The title monster itself fares best, with better quality back projection and matte work inserting it into the action, although the make-up - with a mass of mutated tissue obscuring one eye, to effectively make it a cyclops - is somewhat rudimentary.  It is striking, but not particularly convincing.

But the cheapness shouldn't be surprising, as Gordon made the film for Allied Artists, formerly Monogram - the king of poverty row studios, which, at this time, was trying to move upmarket with bigger budgeted, more respected films, but still couldn't resist turning out low budget B-movies like The Cyclops.  Even AIP mustered larger budgets for its B-movies, as witnessed by Gordon's second attempt at the subject, made for AIP, The Amazing Colossal Man.  The AIP-produced film had better production values, a more expansive plot, varied locations and featured far better special effects, with not only more competent process work, but also a far more extensive use of miniatures.  While the two films are undoubtedly similar, it is the sequel to Colossal Man, War of the Colossal Beast (1958) which most closely resembles The Cyclops.  While The Cyclops involves a woman searching for her missing fiance, whose plane had crashed in the wilderness in Mexico (which, as it turned out, was full of radioactive ore-bearing rock), Colossal Beast opens with the sister of the, presumed dead, giant of the first film, searching form him in Mexico.  In both films, the titular giant is found living in a rocky wilderness (probably the same location was used in both) and has suffered facial disfigurement.  Colossal Beast's first half really does feel like a slightly bigger budgeted version of The Cyclops.  

The Cyclops might not be a great film, but some of the performances are OK, particularly that of Lon Chaney as the blow hard uranium prospector who co-finances the expedition and does manage some poignancy in the scenes where the monster starts to recall its true identity.  It doesn't dwell on this part of the plot, however, quickly moving back to being a regulation monster movie, with its title beast chasing the rest of the cast around.  It's pretty much a typical Bert I Gordon movie: briskly moving, utterly ludicrous and rough around the edges.  The cinematic equivalent to a short story from a down market pulp magazine, in fact.  But it clearly worked as a stepping stone, allowing Gordon to step up to AIP and slightly bigger resources -his films for AIP are noticeably slicker and more solidly made than his earlier output.  Gordon would eventually fall out with AIP, though, and return to Allied Artists in the sixties.

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