The Mole People

The Mole Men

Director ~ Virgil W. Vogel

1956, b/w, USA

Writer ~ László Görög

Stars ~ John Agar, Cynthia Patrick, Hugh Beaumont

 

Starts with about five minutes of screen time of filler, a Professor of English Frank C. Baxter  (real) running through the history of hollow Earth in mythology. So it starts as it means to go on, and it is amazing how much feels else like padding. They spend an awful long time climbing down a hole in pursuit someone who is obviously already dead.

 

So, some archaeologists (who make anthropological deductions too) go the top of a mountain to investigate some ruins and then descend through the mountain to discover an ancient Sumerian civilisation that worship Ishtar (which apparently wasn’t a thing they did). (So if they go right at top and then go down, I’m not sure they descended enough to be below the Earth’s crust… more “hollow mountain” theory than “hollow Earth”?). The Sumerian are albino and vulnerable to intense light – making the archaeologists’ torch a religious weapon – but luckily for these stock American men, there is a Caucasian woman considered lower caste for one to fall in love with. The archaeologists masquerade as divine and use their torch as a threat to survive the Sumerians’ religious murderous inclinations whilst sitting around being all masculine. It’s up to Alan Napier as Elinu, the High priest, to add some life to proceedings with his dissent and conniving, and merely by not phoning in his part.

 

 

The Mole People, who we’ve come for, have the highlight of dragging people under into the dirt. They have agreeable clunky men-in-suit designs with memorable enough masks, and although they are apparently harvesting gigantic subterranean mushrooms (?) for food, they seem to be mostly for milling around for regular whipping. But it’s not a film to monopolise on the potential of that particular analogy.

 

Some impressive avalanche stock footage, a little commentary about hierarchies, slavery, racism and population control; but although this is loaded context and colouring, it doesn’t ultimately feel like proving much. The appeal now is in its datedness and silliness, its ambition far exceeding its budget.  

 

 

But there are reports of a possible remake with Robert Kirkman involved, and I will consider that promising as I am big devotee of ‘The Walking Dead’ comics.

Lifeforce - and my negligible personal experience with it

Tobe Hooper,

1985, UK

Screenplay: Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby

+ uncredited: Michael Armstrong and Olaf Pooley

 

-1- “concerning my negligible personal connection to the film”

Throughout my youth, I lived in a maisonette with my room three storeys up overlooking fields. Across the fields, I had a clear view of the peak of the clocktower of what had been a Masonic Boys’ School but was now “The American University”, and that’s how one night I saw a glimpse of the filming of Tobe Hooper’s ‘Lifeforce’. There’s the scene where the characters helicopter in to a sanatorium grounds in pursuit of the killer alien, and that’s what I saw: the helicopter buzzing around the clocktower one night. In the “making of”, there’s the tale that Hooper was instructing the pilot to go nearer to the clocktower, dangerously, and certainly the proximity of the shot in the film does feel a little too close for comfort. And I am sure I saw some of the lightshow at the end being filmed too.

 And over a decade later, I found myself working at that location: it had not been a university for a long time and it was now just a “campus”, hosting summer schools and film crews. Ostensibly I was a general cleaner/custodian (my boss was American) so I was making up rooms for summer schools and picking up after film crews. It wasn’t unusual for me to turn a corner and bump into ‘Eastenders’ (Dot Cotton once joked that I had stolen her make-up), or a kids show being filmed, or to walk out into the quad to see a Bollywood dance routine underway. Before it closed and was turned into luxury apartments, I lived on campus for a few months on the set of ‘Children of Men’, but that’s another story. All to say that the moment in ‘Lifeforce’ where they arrive in the helicopter and you see people wandering along the walkway cloisters in the background, I used to sweep those walkways daily. It was an incredible location and I still have the fondest memories of wandering and working around it.

 When the ‘Lifeforce’ characters go to visit the woman in her apartment, that’s what was called The Headmaster’s House, and a Shiek lived there for a time when I first worked there. I walked up those stairs many times. When the character’s go inside the asylum, that mustard colour on the walls is one I knew so well: this was the colour inside every dormitory tower. There was a time when my boss had the chance to repaint, but he forked out extra money for the very same mustard colour to be specially mixed, which we staff could never understand. Anyway, for this alone, ‘Lifeforce’ will always have a particular place in my affection, for tiggering memories of a building that I loved and spent a decade in.

-2- “concerning the film itself”

 The last time I saw ‘Lifeforce’ was probably in the Eighties on VHS, so when I saw it again, streamed a couple of years ago, my first thought was that it had never looked so good. And it certainly looks great, the opening space sequence with John Dykstra’s effects being both state-of-the-art glorious and just the right side of old-school cumbersome. And that’s true of the whole film. It captures that feel of enjoyably bad-it’s-good 50s b-movies perfectly without ever quite falling over the edge… well, not if you’re a genre fan, surely.

According to the “making of”, the production of ‘Lifeforce’ was quite drug-fuelled and shambolic. An adaptation of Colin Wilson’s book ‘The Space Vampires’ (I mean, with a title like that…) by Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby – and with O’Bannon, you know you’re in assured b-movie hands – the plotting is crazed, going from sci-fi to zombie apocalypse and carried along by the threat of a nude woman in the most gleeful pulpy, exploitation manner. It’s a fun merger of sci-fi and gothic tropes. There are several memorable set pieces: the astronaut’s exploration of the spaceship – looking like a birth canal as well as space castle – and the wonderful/hilarious zombie puppets; a zombie dashing itself into dust against the bars of its cell a particular highlight. In this era, this kind of thing rarely got such a big budget. It’s a curio.

It’s a film for the boys. CH Newell says, “At its core, Lifeforce is the dark heart of all humankind’s anxieties about extraterrestrials” and locates the films basis in fears about aliens; but it’s even closer to home, surely, being about man’s fears of womanhood. Women are alien and in control of men’s libido, which men are helpless to, etc. There are a couple of token women at the start, but otherwise it’s mostly Mathilda May with the stunning body walking around in the nude, with other women as mostly interchangeable. There is a moment when a woman needs to be slapped around to reveal her duplicitous nature; and even in a man’s form, she’s treated aggressively into revealing herself. The naked female vampire’s sex drive is linked to death and causes an apocalypse: whole planets can be decimated by her seduction and the giant phallus in orbit. In the end, a bewildered male besotted with her must sacrifice himself heroically to her sexuality. It won’t win anything for any insight or interesting viewpoints on gender.

Henry Mancini’s score is turned right up to bombastic, featuring that militaristic undertow that b-movies of yore often had. The acting is properly earnest /wooden with only Steve Railsback overacting (perhaps appropriately) and Peter Firth enjoying playing it as superciliously as he can (“I’m a natural voyeur.”). And you have Railsback shouting at Patrick Stewart, “Listen to me, you bitch!” There’s camp value too.

I will throw ‘Lifeforce’ in with films such as ‘Killer Klowns from Outer Space’ or ‘Shrunken Heads’ or ‘The Monster Club’, or even things like ‘The Man from Planet X’: thoroughly enjoyable cheesy fun that I find myself repeatedly coming back to, although they’re no one’s idea of prime cinema.

Matinee - monster kids special appreciation club

1993, USA

Screenplay: Charles S Haas

This era of Joe Dante is golden. Its mixture of coming-of-age, easy humour and genre motifs and spoofery hits my sweet spot, achieved in a balance that only Dante was doing. It’s a miracle and a joy that we got that gleeful oddity ‘Eerie, Indiana’, for example.

Ten minutes in to ‘Matinee’ and you could almost miss that it’s stuffed with so much due to its deceptively light and bright manner. It has affectionate and funny homage to Fifties Atomic monster films and huckesterism, and clearly aligns this to a kaleidoscope of fear: real, imagined, personal and political. Right down to a TV prank about female fears (the joke’s on you). This gives way to announcements on the Cuban Missile Crisis – it’s 1962 – and the close-up on the mother’s dread moves to incorporate her eldest son. Gene (a charming Simon Fenton) is an army brat, resigned to a friendliness because of that which surely contributes to his maturity and his closeness to his younger brother (“Yeah: disgusting,” says young Dennis, taking his older brother’s cue). And the opening is rounded off with The Tokens’ ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ on the radio as a storm thunders outside. This whole world is defined by latent, real and projected, natural and manufactured. It’s a personal favourite opening.

It's true that the song use is a little too on-the-nose (The Angels’ ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ plays briefly with the appearance of Starkweather, just in case you didn’t guess) and John William’s score keeps out must subtlety (I wish The Tokens were allowed to linger longer so the mood of the song really set in; and something akin to Thomas Newman scoring would have been more to my taste). But Dante happily shoves subtext forward. There’s no doubting the themes here, long before Woolsey’s caveman-and-mammoth explanation is animated on a wall. It’s Charles Haas’ script but the tonal balance is distinctively Dante.

There’s a comic book gloss, the kind that sold the USA as the empire of dreams and plenty; the adults maybe a little on the hysterical side, but it’s grounded with the casually warm interplay between the youths. That’s a consistent jibe throughout Dante’s work. This grounding is in details like the jaded indifference of Woolsey’s (John Goodman – Stogie-chomping his way through a William Castle character) actress-partner Ruth (a wonderfully dry Cathy Moriarty) and the barely suppressed worry of Gene’s mother. It’s in Stan’s (the instantaneously likeable Omri Katz, who will always be immortal as ‘Eerie, Indiana’s’ Marshall Teller) male bravado being easily punctured by a far more confident girl, or Gene resigned to loneliness because he’s always moving. It’s heightened reality rather than just movie-reality (for comparison: John Hughes’ youth films don’t have such warmth or realism). It’s a film made on memorable detail: for example, there’s a nice little skit on the UN saying “Hell”, and plenty of mileage out of a former delinquent boyfriend called Starkweather and his hilariously bad poetry (“No skin off my ass-phalt,” has always been a favourite). There’s even a gag-homage to Cronenberg’s ‘The Fly’.

Dante doesn’t really take sides on the matter of real, manufactured or imagined fears, although his nostalgia for this era of cinema-going is palpable. Rather, ‘Matinee’ posits that all forms of fear will thrive and exist in one hotbed of anxiety, in peaks and troughs. There is the moment where Gene’s mother nurtures and tempers her worry and possible pending grief by watching old family films of her husband, and Gene leaves her to this private moment of balming her feelings with film. We could criticise him for not going forward and consoling her, or maybe he just innately understands that uniquely private and emotional relationship between viewer and film. And then later in the film, as the kids are upstairs happily throwing popcorn and taken in by the fireworks accompanying ‘Mant’, the cinema owner is in the bunker in the basement, eating popcorn and watching the news. The medium consoles and it inflames, depended upon your preference.

And the movie-within-a-movie, ‘Mant’, is hilarious. These are the patches in the film where satire gives way to gleeful, unapologetic spoof. And it’s always been evident that Dante knows this stuff inside-out: the terrible ‘Mant’ dialogue is belly-laugh funny, it’s so spot-on. Dante’s particularly artistry is in satirising genre while never forfeiting its power. The film ends on hope… the “coming attractions”… but its final image is of war toys in close-up, obscuring the Happy Movie Ending. There’s always grit in the candyfloss with Dante. (And it does short-change The Tokens twice.)

It may have been misunderstood and sunk at the time, but the film has a loyal cult following because ‘Matinee’ is a true Monster Kid happy place. Like Dante’s ‘Explorers’, it leaves me with a goofy-happiness with its Sun-drenched mixture of fear, friendship and film. It’s a hugely entertaining, earnest in its silliness, admirably straightest as a bildungsroman, concluding that, most of all, fear needs an audience.

The Flesh Eaters

Jack Curtis

1964, USA,

Written by: Arnold Drake

All the bad-it’s-good laughable drive-in elements are here if you want them: dated gender archetypes, kitsch dialogue, blunt acting, some what-the-hell? logic, etc. There’s a Nazi flesh-eating parasite in the water, trapping a bunch of genre types on a secluded island. At first, Prof. Bartell seems agreeable enough, but he can’t be trusted. Like any scientist working alone in Sixties horror, he’s got secrets. Written by Arnold Drake, who went onto write ‘Doom Patrol’ and credited in a lot of other DC comics franchises right up until his death in 2007 (he even created the original Guardians of the Galaxy with Gene Colan).

But on the plus side: Martin Koslick as the professor goes for a more sinister, lowkey register rather than gregarious (indeed, so controlled was his acting that at first I thought he might not be the bad guy, despite the foreign accent) and Rita Morley as a lush actress is seemingly trying to do more, as the movie goes on, than just drunken acting for annoying comic-relief – indeed, they give their characters more than just one dimension. Everyone else sticks to archetype. Byron Sanders is the barking manly hero; Barbara Wilkin is soon hanging off his bicep. Ray Tudar really goes for it as Omar, the tediously annoying beatnik that has “expendable” written all over him - and just what was he doing on that raft out there…? (Maybe he was so tedious, others just set him adrift.)

It does no good to wonder on details: do the flesh eaters have the whole island surrounded? The characters certainly act as though that’s a fact. And when the professor is drawing the tide-line in the sand, is he going to go all around the island? And of course, they’re daft for trying to fly in the storm in the first place. And the tastelessness of a parade of pretty girls for Nazi experiments is somewhat undermined by the question: Do they only experiment on women with pony-tales?

But more pluses: there is superior framing and camerawork from Jack Curtis. It’s a true gore movie, for its time and budget, preceding Herschell Gordon’s Lewis. By which I mean that the moments of gruesomeness are full-blooded – a knife scraping off flesh-eaters from a shin, for a start – where the black and white photography helps mask some of the effects deficiencies (black paint for blood). Even the corpse on the raft overcomes any shakiness in execution to be truly memorable and out there for the era, surely? It reminds me of the Horror Top Trumps that disturbed me so as a kid. Oh, it won’t meet modern gore standards, but it’s genuinely icky. And then it brings on a ludicrously stupid and enjoyable super-monster that often resembles a rampaging bubble-bath (a flesh-eater whose weakness is blood??).

You’ll come for the unintentional humour, and you’ll get that too, but ‘The Flesh Eaters’ is fun, never boring, a cut above average and surprisingly nasty.

The Wraith

Mike Marvin (writer & Director) 

1986, US-Canada

The power of Eighties genre is strong in this one. Certainly, when I first saw it back then I am sure it made more sense.

Nick Cassavetes is Packard, the kind of bad guy that Steve Martin parodied so well in ‘Little Shop of Horrors’. Packard heads the kind of gang that’s wandered off of a Troma film but wants to be in ‘Mad Max’. Oh, there is some ripe acting and David Sherrill and Jamie Bozian as Skank and Gutterboy are often embarrassing… but they aren’t out-of-place and they do inject WTF? energy to the somewhat lightly sketched proceedings. My favourite moment is when police officer seems to interrupt two of the gang apparently having a finger pointing contest. And speaking of squirm-inducing: the soundtrack is quite a weak selection of Eighties pop-rock. Except for Robert Palmer and Billy Idol, because I have a soft spot for them.

Anyway, you see, this gang has killed the boyfriend of the girl that Packard has designs on which sets off a vengeful spirit light show.

It doesn’t make much sense – vengeful ghost comes back in flashes of Eighties sci-fi light effects to race his murders … to the death! In a hot black car! The spirit rides a motorbike in his civilian guise, perhaps to throw off the suspicious that he actually has a regenerating killer car. He often comes with his own back-lighting, going a bit ‘Guyver’ at one moment and straddles the line between supernatural and science-fiction for no reason at all.

And his girlfriend (Sherilyn Fenn) – who really seems clueless and quite unaffected by his murder – falls for him all over again, despite him coming back as Charlie Sheen. He eventually mentions it, having completed his vengeance, as if he’s revealing he can actually stay the night after all, but she’s unphased. Didn’t she wonder about the notable scars all over him? In the end, he does what the bad guy wanted to do and just whisks her off apparently for an eternal roadtrip of love.

There's nice blue lighting, a freewheeling youth vibe by the water, the general goofiness doesn't quite gel with the murder backstory, no one seems to think too much - in fact, Packard's conflict that he can only only get Keri by bullying makes him the most coloured-in character in this jambooree of Eightiesness. It's enjoyably of its time and ripe stuff for those that want to chortle at the aesthetics of a different era. Requirements to be “good” are not expected.