The Horror Movie as Junk Food

BY NOW, serious horror fans may be wondering uneasily if I have lost my wits-always assuming I had any to begin with. I've found a few (very few, it's true, but still a few) good things to say about The Amityville Horror , and have even mentioned Prophecy , generally agreed to be a terrible horror movie, in a light not exactly unfavorable. If you are one of these uneasy ones, I must add to your feelings by telling you that I intend to say a great many good things about the Englishman James Herbert, author of The Rat, The Fog, and The Survivor in a later chapter-but that is a different case, because Herbert is not a bad novelist; he is simply regarded as one by fantasy fans who've not read his work.

I am no apologist for bad filmmaking, but once you've spent twenty years or so going to horror movies, searching for diamonds (or diamondchips) in the dreck of the B-pics, you realize that if you don't keep your sense of humor, you're done for. You also begin to seek the patterns and appreciate them when you find them.

There's something else that needs saying here, too, and I might as well give it to you straight from the shoulder: once you've seen enough horror films, you begin to get a taste for really shitty movies. Films that are just bad (like The Comeback , Jack Jones's ill-advised foray into the field of the horror film) can be dismissed impatiently, with never a backward glance.

But real fans of the genre look back on a film like The Brain from Planet Arous (It Came From Another World WITH AN INSATIABLE LUST FOR EARTH WOMEN) with something like real love. It is the love one spares for an idiot child, true, but love is love, right? Right.

In this spirit, let me quote-in its marvelous entirety-a review from The Castle of Frankenstein's TV Movieguide. The Movieguide was published in the magazine at irregular intervals right up until the day when Calvin Beck's remarkable journal ceased publication. This review is, in fact, from the Movieguide which appeared in the last issue of CofF, # 24. Here is what an uncredited reviewer (Beck himself, perhaps) had to say about the 1953 movie Robot Monster : It is a handful of flicks like this that makes all these listing chores [i.e., The Movieguide feature] something to look forward to. Certainly among the finest terrible movies ever made, this ridiculous gem presents as economical a space invasion as ever committed to film: one (r) Ro-Man invader consisting of (a) a gorilla suit, (b) a diving helmet with a set of antennae.

Hiding out in one of the more familiar Hollywood caves with his extraterrestrial bubble machine (no, we're not being facetious: it actually is a 2-way "alien" radio-TV thing, consisting of an old war-surplus shortwave set resting on a small kitchen table, that emits Lawrence Welk-like bubbles), Ro-Man's trying to wipe out the last six humans left on earth and thus make the planet safe for colonization by Ro-Men (from the planet Ro-Man, where else?). This early 3-D effort has attained legendary (and richly deserved) status as one of the most laughable of all poverty row quickies, although the pic does make some scatterbrained sense when viewed as a child's eye monster fantasy (it's all a dream experienced by a sci-fi-crazed '50s tyke). Rousing musical score by Elmer Bernstein is great and keeps it all moving. Directed in three frenzied days by Phil Tucker, who also did the little-known and equally hysterical Lenny Bruce vehicle, DANCE HALL RACKET.

Stars George Nader, Claudia Barrett, John Mylong, Selena Royle.

Ah, Selena, where are you now?

I have seen the film discussed in this review, and will personally testify that every word is true. A bit further on in this chapter we will listen to what CofF had to say about two other legendary bad movies, The Blob and Invasion of the Saucer Men , but I don't believe my heart can stand it right now. Let me just add that I made a grave mistake concerning Robot Monster (and Ro-Man can be seen, in a mad sort of way, as the forerunner of the evil Cylons in Battlestar Galactica ) about ten years ago. It came on the Saturday night Creature Feature, and I prepared for the occasion by smoking some pretty good reefer. I don't smoke dope often, because when stoned everything strikes me funny. That night I almost laughed myself into a hernia. Tears were rolling down my cheeks and I was literally on the floor for most of the movie. Luckily, the movie only runs sixty-three minutes; another twenty minutes of watching Ro-Man tune his war-surplus shortwave/ bubble machine in "one of the more familiar Hollywood caves" and I think I would have laughed myself to death.

Since any affectionate discussion of really horrible movies (as opposed to horror movies) is in the nature of a breast baring, I must admit here that I not only liked John Frankenheimer's Prophecy , I actually saw it three times. The only bad movie to equal this score in my personal pantheon is the William Friedkin movie Sorcerer . I liked that one because there were a lot of close-ups in it of sweaty people working hard and laboring machines; truck engines and huge wheels spinning in soupy mud and frayed fanbelts in Panavision-70. Great stuff. I thought Sorcerer was marvelous fun. *

But never mind Friedkin; onward into the Maine woods with John Frankenheimer. Except that the film was really shot on location in Washington State . . . and looks it. This film concerns a public health officer (Robert Foxworth) and his wife (Talia Shire) who come to Maine to investigate possible water pollution infractions on the part of a paper mill. The movie is apparently supposed to be set somewhere in northern Maine-perhaps in the Allagash-but David Seltzer's screenplay has somehow transferred an entire southern Maine county a hundred and fifty miles north. Just another example of the magic of Hollywood, I guess. In the TV version of 'Salem's Lot, Paul Monash's screenplay has the little town of Salem's Lot located on the outskirts of Portland . . . but the young lovers, Ben and Susan, blithely go off to the movies in Bangor at one point-a three-hour drive. Hi-ho.

*I wasn't able to have any fun with Friedkin's more recent film, Cruising , although it fascinated me because I suspect it indicates the wave of the future for the bad film which has a big budget; it has a sparkly look that is still somehow cheesy-it's like a dead rat in a Lucite block.

Foxworth is a figure that any dedicated horror-movie buff has seen a hundred times before: the Dedicated Young Scientist with just a Touch of Gray in His Hair. His wife wants a baby, but Foxworth refuses to bring a kid into a world where rats sometimes eat babies and the technological society keeps dumping radioactive waste into the oceans. He jumps at the trip to Maine to get away from patching up ratbites for awhile. His wife jumps at it because she's pregnant and wants to break it to him gently. As dedicated to the idea of zero population growth as he may be, Foxworth has apparently left all the responsibility for actually preventing the baby to his wife, who, played by Ms. Shire, succeeds in looking extremely tired throughout the film. We can readily believe she may be whoopsing her cookies every morning.

But once in Maine, this slightly odd couple finds a lot of other stuff going on as well. The Indians and the paper company are at swords' points over the alleged pollution issue; early on, one of the company men nearly opens up the leader of the Indian protestors with a Steihl chainsaw. Nasty. Nastier still are the evidences of pollution. Foxworth notices that the old Indian wallah (one dares not call him Chief) is regularly burning his hands with his cigarettes because he feels no pain-a classic sign of mercury poisoning, Foxworth tells Shire gravely. A tadpole the size of a salmon jumps up on the bank of the lake, and while fishing Foxworth sees a salmon roughly the size of Flipper.

Unfortunately for his pregnant wife, Foxworth catches some fish and they eat them. Very bad for the baby, as it turns out . . . although the question of exactly what Ms. Shire may deliver a few months down the road is left to our imaginations. By the time we finish the movie, the question seems less than burning.

Mutated babies are discovered in a net placed in a stream-horrible, rugose things with black eyes and malformed bodies, things that mewl and cry in almost human voices. These "children" are the movie's one startling effect.

Mother is out there someplace . . . and she makes her appearance soon enough, looking sort of like a skinned pig and sort of like a bear turned inside-out. It pursues Foxworth, Shire, and the motley band they are a part of. A helicopter pilot has his head crunched off (but it is a discreet crunch; this is a PG movie) and the Bad Old Executive Who Has Told Lies at Every Turn is similarly gobbled up. At one point the monster-mother wades across a lake that looks like it might be a child's wading pool shot from table-top level (bringing back fond memories of such Japanese triumphs of special-effects technology as Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster ) and crashes its way into a cabin where the dwindling band of refugees has taken refuge. Although he is presented to us as a city boy from the word go, Foxworth manages to dispatch the monster with a bow and arrow. And as Foxworth and Shire fly out of the wilderness, another monster rears its shaggy head to stare after their departing light plane.

George Romero's film Dawn of the Dead came out at about the same time as Prophecy (June-July 1979) and I found it remarkable (and amusing) that Romero had made a horror film for about two million dollars that managed to look like six million, while Frankenheimer made a twelve-million-dollar movie that managed to look like about two.

Lots of stuff is wrong with the Frankenheimer film. None of the major Indian parts are played by real Indians; the old Indian wallah has a teepee in a northern New England area which was populated by lodgebuilding Indians; the science, while not completely wrong, is used in an opportunistic way that is not really fair considering the fact that the movie's makers purported to have made a movie of "social conscience"; the characters are stock; the special effects (with the exception of those weird baby mutants) are bad.

All of that I will cheerfully agree to. But I come stubbornly, helplessly back to the fact that I liked Prophecy , and just writing about it has made me long to rush out and see it a fourth (and maybe a fifth) time. I mentioned that you begin to see and appreciate patterns in horror movies, and to love them. These patterns are sometimes as stylized as the movements in a Japanese noh play or the passages in a John Ford western. And Prophecy is a throwback to the fifties horror films as surely as the Sex Pistols and the Ramones are throwbacks to the "dirty white boys" of the rockabilly explosion in 1956-1959