My God, what is it?

It’s easy to laugh at some of these old movies, and The Creeping Terror is worse than most. The movie revolves around a bizarre looking monster that is attacking people in a rural county in California. Here’s clip of the monster and the way that people don’t really run away from it. 

 
If you watched more than a few seconds of that, you’ll see the way the creature feeds - it sucks people in through a hole in its front. If the meal is a girl, she screams and kicks her legs. It takes a long time for the creature to get beyond her ass. If it’s a guy, we just see a pair of shoes sticking out. 

I was surprised, though, at the first part of this scene, where the movie establishes the dance hall. 

Here it is. 

 

If you watched for a minute, you saw that we open on a woman in tight, gold, sparkly pants and a bare midriff. She is dancing and having a good time. 

If you convince an attractive woman to dress in tight anything and shake her ass in your movie - whether for love or money - you have a responsibility to show it to the audience, so the camera lingers on her a while. 

Then the camera slowly pulls back, while other couples dance through, doing what I assume is some variety of the Twist. 

As we continue to pull back, we pan to the left to see people at the tables, including little bits of a drama, like a guy who’s too drunk to stand and a couple where the woman won’t dance with a man, who goes off and dances with somebody else. 

The directing of this scene is flawless. Even though there’s no dialog and no character that we’ve met, the scene holds your eye. 

I wondered, as I watched, astonished at this gem in the compost pile, whether I’d misjudged the movie. Maybe there was competent camera work throughout. Maybe, as I watched the rest, I would see other scenes that were just as workmanlike and efficient. 

 No, the rest was indifferent. 

But credit where credit has been earned.

Salt for your tail, Daddy-O

Remember that gushing praise I heaped on cheesy rubber monsters in my post about last week’s movie? Well, I may need to un-gush, a little.



This week’s movie was The Giant Claw (duhn-duhn-DA). The flying monster - or Big Bad Bird - attacks anything that moves, including planes, trains, and automobiles. Just standing still doesn’t help, because when it gets bored, BBB attacks tall buildings.

Models and man-in-suit can work perfectly well for visual effects. Look at Clash of the Titans - no, not Liam releasing the kraken. The first version. Look at Gojira. Not Matthew Broderick. The first version.

Sometimes, though, even when we are laughing at something obviously bad, it can get too cringe-worthy to stand. Stir in a walking sexual harassment lawsuit as a hero and military officers who I would never trust with a government plane, and is it over yet?

Aside from the goofy BBB, one scene stuck in my mind. Our heroes were on their way back from destroying one of the BBB’s eggs when they encounter a foursome of rowdy teenagers racing along in their car, fast and with lights.



Not only did the kids shout disparaging things at Our Hero (Get that tin can off the road, Daddy-O!), but they flouted the danger of the BBB!

Hey, man, who’s afraid of the Big Bad Bird!

Don’t worry about us. We’ve got salt for its tail.

According to the VAST CLOUD MIND KNOWN AS THE INTERNET, there’s an old folk belief that if you put salt on a bird’s tail, it can’t get away.

Naturally, BBB is having none of this. It swoops down to grab the rowdy teens, killing two of them, injuring the others.

At the end of the scene, our heroine kneels down to check a pulse - and finds a salt shaker!

What’s your SFZ?

I was a little disappointed, last night, when Sandra didn’t win the Oscar for Gravity. Still, she didn’t do much acting in that movie. It was more of heavy breathing role.

I haven’t seen every Sandra movie. Sandra’s movies have been, let’s say, varied. The run the gamut, and run the gamut hard, from high minded to goofy to sweet, and from awesome to unwatchable. Sandra was awesome in The Blind Side, but that was a little high minded for me. I probably would never have seen it if my wife hadn’t been taking a film class.

(Speaking of my wife, let’s not mention this blog post to her. I mean, you paste a picture of Sandra’s head on your wife’s body in one little wedding photo, and suddenly you have an “unhealthy fixation.”)

Every Sandra Bullock fan can be placed between two of her movies. For most people, this is as easy as liking Speed, but not Speed 2. For those of us who are a little more fanatical, well, it’s complicated.

But, if we go down the list, we should be able to find my personal Sandra Fan Zone (SFZ).

So, The Proposal and The Heat, well, no help there. Those are marginally worse than Love Potion Number Nine. And stinging insects.

The Lake House, yes.

Miss Congeniality, yes, Miss Congeniality 2, are you kidding?

Two Weeks Notice, yes.

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, guilty pleasure.

28 Days, good, until you realize that it isn’t about zombies.

Yes, I think my SFZ is right between The Lake House and 28 Days.

What’s yours?

Rubber Suit

Last year’s Gravity was visually stunning, offering a credible portrayal of a disaster in orbit that makes you hold on the armrests in the theatre. I thoroughly enjoyed it. A lot of credit goes to the artists who made everything in orbit look so real, but -

Forty-five years ago, Stanley Kubrick stuck a pen to a plate of glass with scotch tape and got a similar effect.

When it comes to a movie monster or creature or grotesque, the modern filmmaker can create photo realistic depictions of - well, anything. With enough time and money, studios can make any visual come to life, if nothing else, pixel by pixel, and you can get good movies out of it.

But give me a woman in a rubber suit, any day of the week!

Wait - that could be misinterpreted. Let me try again.

This week’s matinee was The She Creature, which features a love triangle between our poor Andrea and the side show carny hypnotist, Doctor Lombardi and our clean cut, academic hypnotist, Doctor Erickson.

Doctor Lombardi can hypnotize Andrea, casting her into the past to be a seventeenth century English wench or a sea monster with boobs from the dawn of time. He says things like this: “As long as I’m alive, I’ll possess you.”

Delivered with some enthusiasm, that line could be sinister and creepy, on top of pompous. Delivered in a monotone, it’s just creepy and pompous.

There’s some other stuff about gullible rich people and Erickson being above money and above rich blonde girls, but let’s get to the suit.

The rubber suit is bulky and has fins jutting off it in weird directions. And it has blonde hair and boobs, two things characteristic of mammals, not fish monsters from the beginning of time.

The monster comes out of the ocean and must return to it at the same place, but also fades in and out of existence right before our eyes.

Lombardi can call the monster out of the depths of time to kill people by giving hypnotic suggestions to Andrea. Why he does this isn’t clear. I guess to burnish his credentials as a spiritualist or something -

But let’s not get distracted from giant rubber boobs.

The creature - She Creature - was on screen only for a few minutes throughout the movie. She comes in, kills somebody, goes back to the ocean - and this is the right amount of time to spend with the creature. Maybe the suit would look stupid if we sat down and talked to the creatures, discussed the vast abyss that is time or where she could buy a good underwire, the kind that doesn’t pinch.

The movie makers create the frame that they are painting their picture in and pick out the colors in their pallot. If you introduce it right and play it straight, a rubber monster with boobs will put the blue cat people in Avatar to shame.