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.