Cardboard Science: Spins A Web, Any Size

Year: 1958
Director: Bert I. Gordon
Cast: Ed Kemmer, June Kenney, Eugene Persson
Run Time: 1 hour 13 minutes

It's time for the second entry in our annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue, in which I task him with tackling three 1980s slasher reviews and in exchange he assigns me three 1950s B-movies. Hunter is now bringing us The Spider (previously known as Earth vs. the Spider, which is a much less accurate but much better title). After all, it's not truly Cardboard Science without a movie helmed by the notorious Bert I. Gordon (The Cyclops, Beginning of the End, and so many more).

The plot of The Spider is just as simple as its updated title: high school student Carol (June Kenney of Attack of the Puppet People, which was at the time Gordon's most recent of three 1958 directorial features) ropes her reluctant, gaslighting boyfriend Mike (Eugene Persson) into helping her find her missing father. When investigating a cave near where they find his car abandoned on the side of the road, they discover the lair of a giant spider. Said giant spider emerges from the cave to rampage about in their small town of River Falls for a bit. Then it returns to its cave, where special effects are cheaper, for a final confrontation with the unlikely duo of Professor Art Kingman (Ed Kemmer) and Sheriff Cagle (Gene Roth of Attack of the Giant Leeches).

They're gonna need a LOT of rain to wash this spider out.

Now, cheap movies can be great fun. I can appreciate that. I did give It Conquered the World 7 out of 10, after all. But Roger Corman knew how to wield a shoestring budget like a lasso. Bert I. Gordon may have gotten it right every couple movies or so, but more often than not, he ended up accidentally tying both hands behind his back.

This is one of those pictures, unfortunately. There's just not a lot of spark here, at least when it comes to finding creative ways of bringing its core premise to life. In a movie like this, it's wise to tap into gut-level emotions rather than appealing to the rational side of the brain with convincing special effects. The effects used to supersize the spider do look somewhat decent, but said spider mostly just ambles around, waggling his legs in a friendly manner. It doesn't exactly keep you on the edge of your seat.

Nor do the majority of the spider-related deaths, which mostly involve people cowering as the camera slowly approaches them (a very traditional, but boring approach).

The best way to overcome a low budget is with a sharp script and compelling actors, which don't tend to cost quite as much money as, say, a giant rampaging spider. This movie has neither a sharp script nor compelling actors, alas. The screenplay is tedious as all get out, doling out endless expository dialogue (hardly unusual for a 1950s sci-fi movie, but I can't pretend to love it) and relying on Carol and Mike to supply The Spider with its most intense moments of pathos.

Unfortunately, Carol and Mike are outrageously miscast. It's hardly shocking to see a Hollywood movie where high schoolers are played by people who actually look like teenagers. Plus, Kenney was 25 and Persson was 24, so they're nearly a decade younger than Stockard Channing was in Grease, at least. But an actor in this position needs to do their best to play a teenager, and both of them look and act like a newlywed couple who are bickering about their plans for an upcoming dinner party.

Don't even get me started on their classmate Joe, who is weeks away from getting his pension.

Carol and Mike's sniping drags down a subplot where they get lost in the spider's cave during the climactic battle. This is deeply troubling, because that subplot was actually clever enough to have covered up the holes in the movie's budget if they had pulled it off. 

For one thing, the cave does look pretty neat, especially when it comes to the expressionistic diagonal slash of a stalactite-covered ceiling that marks one of its first chambers. It's one of the only things in the movie that feels like it was designed with cinematic aesthetic in mind (unlike the spiderwebs, which are clearly made of rope that the actors must pretend is sticky - at least spray paint the rope white or something!).

The other thing is that "we're trapped in this cave" could have been a compelling low-budget subplot that takes some of the pressure off the more expensive spider mayhem. However, in practice it just traps the viewer with Carol and Mike, who are irritating and have long since ceased to have any sort of plot function.

Pictured (left to right): Carol, Mike, The Movie's Momentum

I've been mean to The Spider for long enough that I should probably point out some things it does right, because those do exist! It sometimes slips into campy time capsule mode in a way that is satisfying (the teens having a sock hop in the restricted room that contains the supposedly dead giant spider is an indelible scene). And it has quite a few moments that are more intense and ooky than horror films of this vintage usually boast.

I'm a sucker for any scene featuring an air raid siren, but there are other moments that effectively crank up the horror atmosphere out of nowhere. For instance, Carol discovering the desiccated corpse of her father, or the casual shot of a lonely toddler on the street covered in what is heavily implied to be his mother's blood. The Spider quite frequently goes a bit harder than was strictly necessary, and I respect it for those instincts.

So all in all, the movie isn't terrible. It's charming just often enough to prevent that. And most of what it contains is just tedious rather than bad. Except the music. The score is awful oooooWEEEEEEoooo horseshit that makes it sound like the spider is seconds from being abducted by an alien at all times.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*Professor Kingman tells us quite a bit about how spiders operate, including injecting their prey with venom to stun them and sucking all the juices out of its victims. So it's weird how he neglects to actually explain the science behind this particular spider's M.O., which is mostly to smack people about the face with one of its legs.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*When the kids inform Professor Kingman that they have discovered a giant spider, the first thing he says is "the man to see about it is the sheriff." If you say so, Artie...
*Speaking of, the first thing the sheriff does when he arrives in the cave (which is known to have stalactites so delicate that a mere shout can knock one from the ceiling) is shoot a bat to death by firing multiple rounds into the ceiling.
*I'm so sad that the 1950s are over and I've missed my chance to stop by River Falls to shop at Gay Mattress Company.
*At the end of the big rampage sequence, the filmmakers linger on a shot that they clearly view to be a potent metaphor: a U.S. Mail box has been tipped over. The horror!

Sensawunda:

*Mike's dad's movie theater is heavily advertising Bert I. Gordon's The Amazing Colossal Man and just got in Attack of the Puppet People. In fact, the latter title is so new that Mike tries to excuse himself from a second cave adventure so he can stay and watch it. If only he had. I certainly wish I had gotten to watch Attack of the Puppet People rather than spending more time with Carol in that cave.

TL;DR: The Spider is a reasonably affable B-picture, but it doesn't have a whole lot of gas in its tank.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1331

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture 

2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

2022: Tarantula (1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

2023: Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)
2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

2025: X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) The Spider (1958) The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)

2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

2025: Superstition (1982) The Carpenter (1988) Visiting Hours (1982)

Cardboard Science: Be a Doll

Year: 1958
Director: Bert I. Gordon
Cast: June Kenney, John Agar, John Hoyt
Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes

And just like that, it's Halloween again. I'm hoping to be back into fighting shape to do a full three-part Cardboard Science/Census Bloodbath crossover with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue next year as part of what will be our 12th annual Great Switcheroo, but traditions must be honored in whatever way we can, so for this 11th Switcheroo we're trading a single title once again. He will be covering a 1980s slasher over on his blog, so keep an eye out, while I have been assigned the 1958 sci-fi movie Attack of the Puppet People from B-movie stalwart Bert I. Gordon, who we've encountered thrice before with The Cyclops (terrible), Beginning of the End (cheesy), and The Amazing Colossal Man (solid). Midway plot spoilers will abound in this review, so if you're genuinely curious to see it before reading ahead, I highly recommend that you do so!

Spoiler #1: There are no puppet people in this movie. Spoiler #2: They don't attack anything, certainly not a dog, using a steak knife. And you thought slasher posters were big ol' liars!

So, Attack of the Puppet People, after a brief ominous prologue, picks up with Sally Reynolds (June Kenney of B.I.G.'s The Spider) answering a want ad to become the secretary of Dolls Inc. While Mr. Franz (John Hoyt of When Worlds Collide), the unusual owner and sole employee of the doll factory, makes her nervous and want to back out, he press-gangs her into starting right away. As she settles into her role, she falls for salesman Bob Westley (John Agar of Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula, The Mole People, and The Brain from Planet Arous) for reasons unknown, all while nursing a growing suspicion that the mysterious disappearances of people around the office building must somehow be related to Franz, his eerily lifelike collection of dolls that look like the missing people, and his secret locked room in the back of the factory.

When she tries to quit her job and leave town with Bob, she finds out that her suspicions were entirely correct. Franz goes haywire and shrinks her down to doll size. You see, he's been lonely since his wife left, and whenever other people threaten to leave him too, he turns them into dolls so he can love them forever. Don't worry. They go into a trance state when they're in their jars, but he takes them out and revives them whenever he can think of something fun to do with them. They soon meet other people who have been doll-ified, including Georgia Lane (Laurie Mitchell of Queen of Outer Space), who's kind of into being pampered by Mr. Franz and not having any responsibilities, and Laurie (Marlene Willis), a teenage girl who Franz keeps trying to force to sing. There's also a bland square-jawed military guy and a blond guy whose name I can't remember who does not seem to have any character traits, so we're actually fitting quite well into the slasher tradition of cardboard filler characterizations here.

Never say these crossovers aren't well-conceived. Meet the Meat, everybody!

Attack of the Puppet People is the rare 1950s sci-fi picture that works both before and after the big reveal where the special effects sequences kick in. While Sally is kind of a flat protagonist (we learn next to nothing about her desires, personality, or even where she lives), Mr. Franz more than makes up for it with an eccentric, layered performance from Hoyt that is easy to bounce off of with a wide-eye stare or two. This helps keep the tension cooking in the mystery portion, and once the doll people are unveiled, the second half of the movie is jammed to the brim with escape thriller setpieces that hum with vibrancy.

While Franz is finding it increasingly difficult to hide his involvement in the growing roster of missing persons cases and trying to juggle the intrusions of his overbearing friend Emil (Michael Mark of The Wasp Woman and Return of the Fly) and the suspicions of policeman Sgt. Paterson (Jack Kosslyn of The Amazing Colossal Man, War of the Colossal Beast, and The Spider), the doll people are trying everything in their power to escape. Well, the male ones are. This is the 1950s, after all.

As much as it makes me seem like I've hit myself in the head with a hammer before writing this review, this portion of the movie reminded me of nothing other than What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in the way it is constantly able to string the audience along with attempts that seem like they just might work before going invariably awry. This stellar parade of thrilling moments is aided by some of the best special effects work of the notorious B.I.G.'s career. 

It's pretty easy - and cheap - to make people seem small. Just make some big props and mount the camera up high. This is exactly what they do, in fact, and it works like gangbusters. But this also allows the bigger and more exciting sequences to feel convincing and dangerous in a way that the superimposed locusts of Beginning of the End simply do not. Sequences like climbing up to a giant doorknob or being forced to perform opposite a marionette (an exquisite giant puppet that is effortlessly creepy) just plain work and hold up quite well to modern scrutiny, largely because those props and setpieces were actually present on set with light hitting them and everything.

The filmmaker even has a pretty solid eye for the composite shots where Franz is interacting with the little people. The two main sets where this happens are built specifically so that walls in the back block off the doll people's environment, allowing the effects shot to have easy, square seams rather than trying to cut a silhouette around a moving figure (this trick does happen later on, with a tiny cat, and it looks as terrible as you'd expect). While the effects have their flaws, including the cat as well as the bits where the dolls are in their jars, which are clearly just 2D printed images, almost everything involving the core characters is convincing and grand, to the point that they show off a bit by having Franz set things on top of their squared-off environment and interact with them in ways that aren't just having him on the left side of the screen and them on the right.

This was probably a hell of a lot of fun to shoot.

While I'm not suggesting that Attack of the Puppet People is one of the great subtextual works of its time, these thriller moments are given added depth by Franz. He is superb both on the page and on the screen, with Hoyt and screenwriter George Worthing Yates working in tandem to deliver one of the greatest tragic antiheroes of the cinema. Franz's loneliness is intense and very real, and it drives his actions in a way that makes it almost impossible not to sympathize with him to some degree. While you're rooting for his prisoners to escape, you're also forced to contend with a deeply melancholy portrait of a broken man, whose position in the story is underscored by the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde marionette that makes an extended appearance in the third act.

It is perhaps telling that the final moment of the movie focuses on Franz, as it has spent an unusual amount of time developing him as a more layered - and significantly more devastating - version of the stock mad scientist character of '30s horror and '50s sci-fi. In fact, he's probably the second-best scientist character I've seen in one of these Cardboard Science movies, only behind Godzilla's brooding and brilliant Dr. Serizawa. Hoyt makes sure you can feel Franz's emptiness when he sees his friends running away from him, and it's a gut punch every time, even though what he's doing is categorically, well, mad.

So sure, I have some quibbles with the movie, beyond the ones I've already brought up. For instance, Agar's performance slips considerably during the scene where Bob has to panic. Maybe he's too much of an All-American Hero to feel those kinds of emotions, I don't know. Plus, the movie never actually follows up on the characters that Franz turns into dolls over the course of first act, namely his ex-secretary Janet and the mailman Ernie. The plot just forgets about them entirely and, even though we see additional dolls in his collection, focuses the entirety of the second half of the movie on Sally, Bob, and these four other characters we have no real reason to care about. It's a weird choice, definitely.

But with all that said, while Attack of the Puppet People is maybe not the best movie that Hunter has shown me over the years (we've covered Godzilla and Invasion of the Body Snatchers here, after all), it's damn close. I'm beyond delighted to have had the opportunity to give it a whirl.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*The explanation of the science here is deliciously wacky, comparing the resizing of humans to moving a slide projector closer to the wall. First, of course, Franz deatomizes them via a high sonic frequency. His example of this is a high note shattering a glass, which I would argue should mean that their bodies would just break into tiny fragments of bone and viscera, not atoms, but Cronenberg never remade this movie so I guess we'll never know.
*Bob and Sally fret about having to run the equivalent of six miles through the city in their tiny forms, and then immediately do so in the space of a cut. Somebody sign these two up for the Olympics.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*The want ad that Sally responds to is asking for, and I quote, a "general office girl." Mr. Franz is cancelled.
*Men are constantly grabbing Sally by the shoulders within seconds of meeting her for the first time. She doesn't seem to mind, though, because she gets engaged to the first one who does it. But yikes.

Sensawunda:

*There's a long sequence where Bob and Sally watch The Amazing Colossal Man at a drive-in that was deeply unnecessary but reminded me of the joy of Switcheroos past, so I'm not mad about it.
*The "does anybody know the phone number for the police?" sequence sure taught me a lot about what a scattershot mess the telecommunications system used to be. Like, I'm glad I don't ever have to know what an "exchange" is.

TL;DR: Attack of the Puppet People is a surprisingly excellent thrill ride from one of the 1950s' least consistent purveyors of B-movie schlock.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1811

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture 

2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

2022: Tarantula (1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

2023: Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)
2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)

2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

Cardboard Science: My Giant Fiancé, Season 2

Year: 1957

Director: Bert I. Gordon

Cast: Glenn Langan, Cathy Downs, William Hudson

Run Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

The second entry in our annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue (in which I task him with 3 '80s slasher reviews and in exchange he assigns me 3 '50s B-movies) takes us to 1957 and The Amazing Colossal Man. It's this year's entry from notorious director Bert I. Gordon, boasting a screenplay co-written by Gordon (who, at the time of release, was just three months out from having delivered more or less the exact same premise in the abominably stupid The Cyclops) and Mark Hanna (who, at the time of release, was about seven months away from delivering more or less the exact same premise in the minor masterpiece Attack of the 50 Foot Woman).

And you know what? It reads exactly like a movie written by both the Cyclops guy and the 50 Foot Woman guy.

The Amazing Colossal Man opens with the military testing a brand new plutonium bomb in Desert Rock, Nevada (not to be confused with Desert Rock, Arizona from Tarantula, a film that has provided fodder for an incredibly specific double feature this month). After the bomb's chain reaction has been set off, it doesn't detonate properly, and the soldiers who are holed up in a nearby trench for some reason are forced to wait until it either goes off or enough time has passed that it becomes disarmed. Unfortunately, this is the exact moment that a small civilian aircraft crash lands right at the foot of the bomb, so the intrepid Lt. Col. Glenn Manning (Glenn Langan) disobeys orders and rushes to the rescue right when the bomb goes off, exposing him to a whole hell of a lot of radiation. 

For his troubles, all of Manning's skin and hair is scorched off, though doctors are astonished when it grows back within a single day. Unfortunately, the new out-of-control growth of his body's cells is paired with an inability for his old cells to die, causing him to grow at a rate of 8 to 10 feet per day (something that doctors have established after he reaches a total height of 18 feet in 2 days, which - considering the fact that he certainly started at a height of about 6 feet - leads me to suspect that maybe we actually shouldn't take their word for it). While his fiancée Carol (Cathy Downs) attempts to keep him tranquil while doctors seek a cure, he begins to despair that he will never return to the world that is rapidly shrinking away from him.

What a hulk! One might even be tempted to call him incredible!

Any time math or science is touched on, The Amazing Colossal Man accomplishes the amazing feat of making every other '50s sci-fi movie look like a pristine, peer-reviewed thesis. I wouldn't dream of sitting here listing all the ways this movie calls upon square-jawed actors to utter the most garishly stupid thing you've ever heard as if it's a basic fact of the world. Especially because there's already a place for that later on in the review. But trust me, it's outrageous, and really won over my bad movie-loving heart.

In every other respect, The Amazing Colossal Man is actually... kinda good? It's certainly good on the scale of this kind of low budget B-movie, even if it can't achieve the elegant heights of actual great movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Blob. For one thing, it's able to include the title monster a lot more often than a lot of similar projects, because there's no makeup necessary for Langan (nor really a costume - he's in a big 'ol loin cloth for 85% of the movie), and they can make him look big as long as they shove him in a room with some tiny props and keep people from joining him in the frame too often.

For another thing, Langan is delivering a committed and rather unusual performance. Although the character loses his mental faculties at about the point that he goes on a rampage around old-timey Las Vegas, he is otherwise completely coherent while considering his fate. In the hands of any other B-movie actor or screenplay, Manning would probably either face his fate with grit and determination or maniacal panic. Langan finds a completely different route, channeling Manning's rage into the quiet simmer of a man who has already realized his fate is sealed and is only capable of bottling his feelings within gallows humor. This is a much more quiet and contemplative character than a movie like this should even be capable of delivering (see The Cyclops, which handles more or less the exact same character by turning him into a vicious groaning ogre). The last time a movie performance zagged on me so hard from what I would have expected from the character on paper, it was Rebecca Hall in The Night House, and I don't just throw around that comparison lightly.

Although Manning could probably throw ANYTHING around lightly, if he wanted to.

Also, The Amazing Colossal Man is quite capable of drumming up moments of tension, which are generally few and far between in Cardboard Science. While almost every entry we've covered is nominally a horror film, it's not often that the films can reach through the many decades of horror cinema between then and now to really shake up any modern viewer. But it has a little something for both gorehounds (some excellent burn makeup, for one thing, and a war flashback with a gruesome scene shooting an enemy soldier in the face) and people who love simmering tension.

That Schrödinger's Bomb opening is genuinely quite tense, and it's followed by a rather thrilling sequence of "women's picture horror" involving Carol trying desperately to find out what happened to her fiancée and is met with a brick wall everywhere she asks. She gets sidelined pretty quickly after that, but nearly everything in the first act works, and the scenes that follow might be patchier more often, but they always err on the side of enjoyable.

Not everything about the giant special effects has aged particularly well. There are moments of bad compositing that make it possible to see objects through the side of his head, for instance. And for some reason, the sound recording in any scene where Carol and giant Manning share the screen is shit awful. But all in all, The Amazing Colossal Man is both well executed within its limits and entirely entertaining. You certainly won't catch me complaining about that.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*I've already harped on the delightfully bad science, but this film also doesn't seem to realize that we already did use plutonium in atomic bombs, so it wasn't really necessary to test it out.

*Now that we're talking about it: Holy shit, how glorious is the reveal that his heart is growing slower than the rest of the body because - as everybody knows - the heart only contains one single cell? 

*Another particularly fishy moment comes when Manning reaches 10 times his height and a total of 18,000 pounds because apparently he has the density of a dying star.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*When the men are waiting to see if a plutonium bomb within a couple hundred yards from them will detonate, one asks if he can smoke. And he's told "yes, of course you can!"

*It was deeply weird to see a Swift delivery truck show up in one scene, being all 1950s. 

Sensawunda:

*Was naming the news reporter H. Wells stupid or charming? I vote both.

TL;DR: The Amazing Colossal Man is an entertaining lark with just enough bite to propel one through its morass of hilariously awful junk science.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1313

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

2022: Tarantula (1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

Cardboard Science: My Giant Fiancé, Coming Soon To TLC

Year: 1957

Director: Bert I. Gordon

Cast: James Craig, Gloria Talbott, Lon Chaney Jr.

Run Time: 1 hour 6 minutes

The time has come to turn our eye to the final film in the 8th Annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue. The final 50's sci-fi movie he assigned this year is 1957's The Cyclops, from B-movie maven Bert I. Gordon, who we've previously covered in the "giant locust" picture The Beginning of the End, which also came out in 1957. As did his film The Amazing Colossal Man. 

You can really taste how much care he took with his films, can't you?

The Cyclops is a film set in Mexico, which is a great idea for a white cast and crew who've seen a couple Spanish words and are pretty sure they've got it figured out, no need to check with anyone. Apropos of nothing, this film is set in the fictional town of Guayjorm. 

G U A Y J O R M

If you know the first thing about Spanish, roll that one around in your mouth for a bit. Then spit it into the garbage where it belongs. 

Anyway, the desert outside of *ahem* Guayjorm is the last known location of Bruce, the fiancé of Susan Winter (Gloria Talbott, who would go on to appear in I Married a Monster from Outer Space) who disappeared three years ago when his plane crashed. She has gathered a team of men to bankroll and execute her search mission, though everybody has their own motives for being there. Russ (James Craig) is Bruce's best friend and clearly wants to discover that Bruce is dead so he can have Susan for himself. Marty Melville (the Lon Chaney Jr.) is intent on finding a huge uranium deposit he suspects is located under the mountains. And Lee Brand (Tom Drake) is the pilot. Frankly, I can't remember what he wants. He's just another squarejaw to have on hand to gawp at things.

Pretty quickly, but not quickly enough for a 66 minute film, they discover that the desert is irradiated and all the creatures that one might find at one's local pet store have grown to enormous size. They also discover a save where a giant cyclops mutant resides, just a stone's throw away from the wreckage of Bruce's plane. The idea that the irradiated monster might be what has become of Bruce is floated exactly eight minutes before the end of the movie.

Y'all. Get with the program. I haven't even met Bruce, and I know this is him.

I think I'll start with what I like about this film. Don't worry, this won't take long. I do enjoy that this film has plenty of interpersonal conflict with which to fill its monster-less first act, even if it's fucking stupid (Marty knocks out the pilot in a frenzy of what can only be described as uranium horniness, nearly killing them all, and is forgiven within five seconds). And although the film is very much in the "nuclear monsters" vein that so many 50's films are, it takes on a more modern horror film structure where the conflict arises from the transgressions of the protagonists rather than humanity's hubris in pushing science forward. If the crew had simply not broken the explicit rules of the... Guayjormians(?), they wouldn't be in this mess at all.

Well, I hope you liked all that positivity! 

Yikes, The Cyclops is pretty bad, innit? It's a taut film without any fat but it also doesn't have any meat to speak of. For one thing, Susan and Russ's incipient romance is wan and narratively broken, not helped by the fact that they are styled to look like the two least appealing people in the world. Craig just looks like one's worst nightmare of a boring white man, but Talbott has her hair dressed in this combination of a Goody Proctor bonnet and Handmaid's Tale bangs that is positively eye-blistering. And Lon Chaney seems to be competing in a private competition for the title of World's Sweatiest Man. All of these people have looked like totally normal human beings in other works, but somebody on the hair and makeup department needs a quick blast with a fire hose.

The way they look is bad enough, but the way they behave is befuddling at best, and downright sociopathic at worst. I would like you to practice the most bored monotone in which you could deliver the line "Now I know I wasn't imagining things when I saw that giant lizard yesterday," and know that Russ's delivery is still eight times worse than that. I'll take the studied flatness at least, considering that it's preferable for the callous disregard with which they treat other human beings. Russ' introductory scene is him mocking a shopkeeper for not speaking English in a village in Mexico that is her hometown, and the way they end up handling the monster once they realize it's Bruce is cruel beyond all measure. It's positively mind-boggling.

Luckily, there are other monsters in this movie, right?

Right??

Typically all sins can be forgiven when the giant monsters are fun to behold, even if they're terrible-looking composites as they usually are. Unfortunately, the laziness of the effects here knows no bounds. They reek of "let me raid my nephew's terrarium" and only meaningfully seem to exist within the same plane as the actors in one single shot of a big lizard licking Russ's arm. Chilling stuff! But stuff like the Cyclops' grasping hand waving in front of Lon Chaney's face by a margin of about 8,000 miles isn't bad in a cute way. It's just insulting. At least the Cyclops looks decent. I dig the exposed teeth design around the mouth, and while the way its forehead wrinkles and pulsates is clearly just wrong, it does at least look uncanny. The closest the film gets to a spark of bad-good joy is the iguana that roars like a lion, which I must confess I enjoy very much. 

I have seen and enjoyed a great many bad monster films with bad effects, but there's something just so putrid about this one. It's not like anyone needed me to warn them away from seeing The Cyclops, but in case you're curious how about you check out *checks notes* literally anything else instead.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• Obviously the uranium is what's making these creatures grow to incredible size, but the thing that inhibits their pituitary glands to allow infinite growth is, as Russ explains, "something."
• I also fail to understand why Lon Chaney thinks they'll be able to wander into a restricted area in Mexico and just like... open a uranium mine? Because they're white people who "discovered" something that the Mexican officials clearly already knew about? The true white man's burden is being such an enormous jagweed.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• When attempting to communicate with the big monster, Susan insists, "Try to understand, please!" Yeah, that'll work. It's something she probably said to everyone she encountered who only spoke Spanish.
• There's a running gag where Russ keeps inflating the proportion of how much "Indian blood" he has any time he successfully executes an outdoorsy activity. Jeepers.

Sensawunda:

• "That giant monster you saw is probably just the plane's shadow," is my new "it's an old house" or "maybe it was just the wind."
• I should have known what I was in for when the opening credits were just unembellished white text on a black background. So really, this is my fault.

TL;DR: The Cyclops is a B-movie with bad effects that are so lazy they doesn't even rise to the level of charming.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1290

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

Cardboard Science: Patience, Young Grasshopper

Year: 1957

Director: Bert I. Gordon

Cast: Peter Graves, Peggie Castle, Morris Ankrum

Run Time: 1 hour 16 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

For our third Cardboard Science review in this Halloween crossover with Hunter Allen over at Kinemalogue, he couldn’t have picked a better title: Beginning of the End. And by “title,” I’m literally referring to the name of the movie, because for once this crossover is actually concluding on time, in the month of October. Bust out the ticker tape! I’m so proud. He could have picked a better movie, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Godzilla were so solid, I would have even been happy if the last movie was Rob Zombie’s Halloween. And – to be honest – while Beginning of the End is a bit of cliché waffle, it’s not half bad as a sugary slice of vintage entertainment.

But hopefully not TOO sugary, or it’ll attract bugs. 

In Beginning of the End, intrepid reporter Audrey Aimes (Peggie Castle) hits a road block on the way to a story. A literal road block. The national guard is preventing entry to Ludlow, Illinois as the town has been mysteriously leveled overnight, the entire population having vanished. She investigates the local agricultural research center to see if they caused it because Science is Bad, and teams up with the handsome entomologist Dr. Ed Wainwright (Peter Graves), whereupon they discover that giant, irradiated locusts are rampaging through the countryside. They must race to find a solution for this modern plague before the military drops a bomb on Chicago.

You know, as you do.

Beginning of the End is a thoroughly typical 50’s B-movie. Two patriotic civilians stand up to defend their country, badly composited creatures emerge from behind things on the horizon, and the strong female character is calmly tossed into a corner to twiddle her thumbs when the going gets tough. Been there, done that. 

And what it does, it doesn’t do especially well. Giant insects were done better in Them!, a flirtatious couple solving a deadly mystery was done better in the first half of The Giant Claw, and radioactive subtext was already perfectly crystallized in Godzilla. Nevertheless, these tropes are put to work to create a reasonably fun exercise in goofy sci-fi. The living definition of “well, that escalated quickly,” Beginning of the End careens from its gonzo opening sequence (a classic make-out point sequence is interrupted by ten feet of mandibular death) to a town being destroyed (the military arrives less than 3 minutes in, a record time) to grasshoppers swarming the South side of Chicago, and it has a deliciously bonkers good time doing it.

As always, the best effects sequences are left to the imagination, ousted by the budget, and when they do arrive they’re pretty damn shoddy, even on the sliding scale of 50’s B-movies. But the flick, from schlock maestro Bert I. Gordon, is nonetheless resolutely charming. It pulls you in on the level of pure cheese (for the dozen locusts killed during the climax, they endlessly reuse one of three shots), but it does have a little to offer for the non-ironic viewer.

As if there were such a thing. This is 2016, for crying out loud.

I’m thinking particularly of a scene where Our Hero is experimenting on a captured locust, trying to find the right frequency to lure its brethren to their doom. As the clock starts ticking down, he tries higher and higher pitches, the warbling siren getting more and more agitated, producing the same feeling in the viewer. It’s a truly effective bit of mood creation, and a wonderfully intense scene.

And I must admit, when the locusts interact with miniatures of buildings and city streets, the mostly spotty effects are quite convincing. That really helps increase the credibility of the insects as an actual threat, because their guileless, limpid grasshopper eyes are hardly menacing. Does this aid the feeble metaphor of America being visited with a modern plague in response to Science’s hubris? Hell no, especially considering that it lauds the very man who caused the problem in the first place, albeit inadvertently. But at least they work in any capacity.

Beginning of the End winds up being mostly forgettable thanks to its paper-thin characters, which are bland even by the standards of Cardboard Science (our leads don’t even kiss at the end, because in order to have a romantic subplot, you need to have any sort of chemistry with at least one character trait between them). But it’s certainly a trip down cinema’s memory lane that I didn’t mind taking. If the other two flicks we covered this month were like Steven Spielberg epics, Beginning of the End was at least a solid Peter Berg.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• Science only takes place in labs with bubbling beakers and test tubes, I don’t care whether you’re studying bugs or clouds or psychology.
• They make such a huge deal in the first act about grasshoppers perishing without access to food that you’ think it would be an actual plot point.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• Audrey gives her word that she will hold off on reporting the story, so the General immediately lets her into a Top Secret meeting. I suppose it’s not like she could Tweet what was going on, but that’s quite a level of trust.
• One of the characters is a deaf-mute, which is first used as a source of tension as a terrified Audrey desperately attempts to understand why he’s not listening to her, after which point he becomes a quaint little sidekick, treated with the same cutesy head-patting as a dog in a bow tie. The 50’s, everyone!

Sensawunda:

• I love the assertion in 50’s movies that every building, no matter how confidential the work done inside, announces itself with a huge white sign.
• I’m pretty sure you don’t retract a military order with the phrase “mission cancelled.”

TL;DR: Beginning of the End is a typical but charming 50's B-picture.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1008

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture

2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend Without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)