The Crazies

Sometimes, I think the biggest mistake of my life was my refusal to go to Pittsburgh.

As a film student at Ohio University, I knew a pack of guys who all were from the Pittsburgh area and who spent their summers working on the crew for George A. Romero. They all insisted that it was fun, even if you had to help sort through the spare parts brought fresh every morning by a local butcher (the zombies in Dawn of the Dead were not just playing around with rubber). Actually, a couple of these guys viewed that as part of the fun.

It wouldn't be until a few years later (when I finally got to see most of Romero's movies) that I realized that I should have gone. Romero is, quite simply, one of the major artists of the contemporary American cinema. An extremely individualistic filmmaker, Romero has followed his own vision with much of the same lonely sense of dedication as was pursued by Ed Harris' character in Romero's production of Knightriders (a movie that is Romero's key statement on his own work).

Unfortunately, Romero's artistic gift has been far greater than his ability to find a good distributor. The vast majority of his movies have either gone barely released or basically unreleased thanks to a long string of really bad distribution companies. Even when his production of Martin garnered a surprisingly strong amount of critical reviews during a brief run in New York, the distributor merely deep-sixed the movie into some Southern drive-ins where it vanished from view.

Which may explain why Romero is now making his living by selling the rights to his movie for modern re-makes. The original Dawn of the Dead may be infinitely superior in every way to the recent re-do, but the second version is the one that got widely distributed. The same will undoubtedly be true of the new version of his 1973 masterpiece The Crazies. But if you really want a strong gory taste of total paranoia, I strongly recommend locating a copy of Romero's movie.

In some ways, The Crazies can be viewed as a re-working of The Night of the Living Dead with the zombies replaced by the crazed victims of a military biological warfare weapon that has been accidentally discharged into their water supply. Add in a hefty dose of Nixon-era political paranoia (in which the president would just as soon nuke the town as admit to doing anything wrong) and seasoned with a strong critique of the military (largely taking place within the military's own rank and file as they try to deal with the situation), simmered with a nicely raw presentation of small-town USA values and you get a potent witch's brew of a movie.

So see it before you see the new version.

Fiend Without a Face

There is a long standing debate within the horror genre between the effect of what is shown and what is simply implied. The old RKO producer Val Lewton was the master of suggestion, while the more modern maestro George Romero is an expert of forcing viewers to confront the unbearable.

But the 1958 production of Fiend Without a Face achieves the odd distinction of doing both. If the greatest terror is conceived in one's own head, then why not have brain-sucking critters who are just that, brains (well, brains with the spinal cord still attached).

The movie gets tremendous effect out of a few simple sound-effects, basic stop-motion animation, and a story line just whacked out enough to be a weirdly chilling pipeline into urban folk lore. But the most inspired idea in Fiend Without a Face is the basic realization that you can really freak people out by attacking them with the most critical core component to human anatomy.

Set near a secret U.S. Air base in Canada (though everything was actually filmed in England), Fiend Without a Face starts with a pretty routine military investigation into a series of odd murders among the rural population. The air force major in charge of the investigation (Marshall Thompson) divides his time between re-assuring the locals (a task that he sucks at), noticing strange details at the crime scene (a job that he is half-baked at) and trying to score with the one available woman in the whole town (a job he is successful at for no obvious reasons).

Meanwhile, the farmers are worried that all of the jets flying in and out are having a bad effect on the cows. Also, the possibility of radiation from the base's hush-hush experiment is becoming noticeable. Then there is the slight problem of people turning up dead with their brains sucked out. Fortunately for the U.S. Military, most of the farmers are more concerned about the cows.

What really works in Fiend Without a Face is pure primal fear. That and a hefty dose of Cold War paranoia which under lies most of the movie. The brain-suckers of the story presents a near perfect pulp summation of 1950s' anxieties. Once they become visible, the nasty creepy-crawlies also tap deep into a well-served sense of the gross. These are just some of the reasons why Fiend Without a Face remains a cockamamie classic.

Invasion of the Saucer Men

A good archaeologist often learns more about a lost civilization from its trash than from its art. That is why the typical B-movie from the 1950s tell us more about the Golden Age of Eisenhower than any twenty epic productions of that period.

Which is also why Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) is a trash treasure-trove of the period. Cheaply produced and incredibly dumb, Invasion of the Saucer Men is also effectively spooky and indescribably fun. The movie is both god-awful and divinely inspired as it reveals the frayed threads behind the button-down minds of the period.

The plot is pretty straight forward. Invading aliens with large bubble heads attack teenagers at a lovers' lane in their attempt to conquer the earth. Pretty simple, very short, and extremely nonsensical. While the fate of the planet hangs in the balance, two teens (Steven Terrill and Gloria Castillo) are able to stop necking long enough to save the world. Meanwhile, a secret task force from the U.S. Army (two officers in search of the clue bus) ponders the defense implications of the whole incident.

Added to the mix is a pre-Batman Frank Gorshin as a booze-hound of a traveling salesman whose liquor consumption defies the alien menace (the short bulb-heads kill by using needles in their fingers to inject victims with massive amounts of pure alcohol). The more they inject him, the more he needs a chaser.

The movie offers a predictable mix of randy kids and fumbling adults. But it also offers a low-key but surprisingly more seamy view of small-town USA. The setting is largely a vast wasteland of sleazy bars and rambling corn fields, barely enlivened by the local drive-in. It weirdly prefigures The Last Picture Show in its latent sense of impending decay.

Invasion of the Saucer Men was directed by Edward L. Cahn, a man whose career never left the bottom of the barrel. Ironically, he would also directed the 1958 horror film It! The Terror From Beyond Space which ultimately served as the direct inspiration for the movie Alien. Cahn remains a curious but notable footnote in Sci Fi history.

With a running time of 69 minutes, Invasion of the Saucer Men manages to not wear out its welcome. Instead, it remains a genuinely scary delight.

Last Man on Earth

There are movies and there are films, each separated by rifts in elitist attitudes and adolescent obsessions. Then there is the cinema of the damned, a vast skid-row of Jungian shadows and Freudian dreams. Like a flee market held at an abandoned drive-in, this is a place stocked with life's most tawdry and potent fragments from the collective sub-conscious. Here, and here alone, we find the poetry of the lost and doomed.

If there is a barker stationed at this particular gate of Hell, he will look like Vincent Price. In a career that see-sawed from second string respectability to senior citizen camp parody, Price rose and fell and rose again. He went from being a simple servant within the back lots of RKO and Universal Studios to his late career as master of the Edgar Allan Poe genre in the dingy back alleys of American International Pictures. Though his career turned into a lemon, Price successfully took over the entire lemonade stand. He became the unchallenged King of Horror.

When reporters would ask him how he would rate his films, Price simply quipped “It's all art.” He was actually a well-heeled connoisseur who collected a wide range of Pre-Columbian and Asian artifacts and, as I discovered from first-hand experience, had his own limits where his films were concerned. When programming a retrospective of his career, I had wanted to do a double-feature of The Last Man on Earth (1964) and Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962). Price had his agent tell me that if I did, don't expect Mr. Price to come anywhere near the theater. I got the hint.

Largely ignored and critically cursed, these two cheap-jack, grainy, slipshod movies were about as low as Price's career could go. The Last Man on Earth even has the peculiar distinction of being disowned by the author of the original novel despite the fact that he was one of the main writers of the screenplay.

In Hell, even reels of safety stock burns.

But deep in the sub-basement of history, both films have a quirky and well deserved reputation as they each closely approximate what might have happened if Carl Jung had suffered a nervous breakdown, turned to drink, and then decided to become a screenwriter (the reverse of the usual career path).

The Last Man on Earth was the first film version of the seminal horror novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson in which Price finds himself to be the only source of blood available to a city full of vampires. Shot quick and dirty in Italy (standing in for Los Angeles) with an obscure director (Ubaldo Ragona, though the U.S. version credits the B-movie director Sidney Salkow whose actual involvement was minor) and lots of people speaking anything but English, the film is a weird hodge-podge of conflicting techniques. Even the English dubbing appears to have been supervised by non-English speakers. For Price, the true nightmare would have been in the making, not the viewing.

But The Last Man on Earth works on its own terms as a surprisingly gritty, extremely irrational nightmare in which both logic and sentiment are confined to the ash heap (along with a sizable chunk of the local population). Far superior to the two later versions (The Omega Man and the recent I Am Legend), it is no wonder that the film is offered as a “classic” on the Surfing the Apocalypse web site (go to http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.tv/scifi.php).

As for Confessions of an Opium Eater, it manages the seemingly impossible by looking even cheaper than a cut-rate Italian knock-off while simultaneously converting a literary classic into a murky pulp adventure on sex slave trafficking, drug smuggling and deliriously incoherent narrative structure. The movie converts the 19^th Century English journalist (and opium drug addict) Thomas de Quincey into a hop-headed solider of fortune working his way through a byzantine Tong war in old San Francisco.

The fact that the film makes no flaming sense is a testament to the accidental power of the movie. Like a bad dream, Confessions of an Opium Eater jerks its way from one implausible moment to the next with the self-serious, glassy-eyed look of a full blown stoner. If Luis Buñuel had ever directed a B-movie, this would be it.

Even the movie's trailer (go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dcQNdw_j5o) brings up the age old question: Does this world really exist? The rest of the movie delivers a resounding: Nayh. Duplicity, hallucinations, and some messy deaths rounds out the drive-in metaphysics of this lost masterpiece.

And as Price's own agent might remind us: Success has a thousand fathers, but these movies don't even have a star who would go near them.