Cardboard Science: Siri, How Many Fathoms Are In A League?

Year: 1953
Director: Eugène Lourié
Cast: Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway
Run Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

Happy Halloween, everybody! It's time for the final leg of the 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/60s B-movies. Last time, we covered a film from Cardboard Science stalwart Bert I. Gordon. This time, we're tackling The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which brings us another legend of the genre, in the form of stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen. Also, it was directed by Eugène Lourié of The Colossus of New York, but I hope nobody will blame me for finding that fact a touch less exciting.

We've seen Harryhausen's work many times before as part of this project and others, in titles including Mysterious Island and It Came from Beneath the Sea. But you know what The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms has that they don't? The distinction of being a direct inspiration for a Cardboard Science Hall of Fame title, 1954's seminal Japanese masterwork Godzilla. 

Comparing The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms directly to Godzilla is a fool's errand, and we're gonna do it anyway. But first, the plot.

That is, if you really need a story hook other than "big monster go aargh."

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (which, for good measure, is based on the Ray Bradbury short story "The Fog Horn") follows Atomic Energy Commission physicist Tom Nesbitt (Paul Christian of The Day the Sky Exploded). After he witnesses a bomb test in the Arctic freeing an ancient, still-living Rhedosaurus from the ice, he tries desperately to get anyone to believe his story as a series of mysterious and deadly incidents take place along the Atlantic coast, heading south.

He, and eventually the lovely paleontologist Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond) and her mentor Professor Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and, more importantly, 1959's The Shaggy Dog), are the only ones who know that a giant monster is the reason for these attacks. That is, until the monster surfaces and stomps around in Manhattan for a bit.

Honestly, he's doing the neighborhood a favor. What's knocking over a couple buildings if it lowers the rent?

Let's cut right to the good stuff: the monster. Ray Harryhausen's work is a perfect encapsulation of the best of 1950s science fiction filmmaking. You're never at any point unaware that you're watching a stop-motion creature interacting with composited shots of humans running away screaming. However, at a certain point the magic of cinema takes over and you stop caring about any of the flaws (which include the fact that Lourié keeps trying to shoot the monster through ugly distorted lenses).

That's because, no matter how jerky the frames got, Harryhausen simply got how to breathe life into a stop-motion model. The second the Rhedosaurus stops hanging around and attacks, its muscular physicality is absolutely captivating. Your disbelief has gone weightless. No suspension is required.

I also think that there is one advantage to this being a dry run for Godzilla, which is that the monster is rather smaller than you might expect for a kaiju movie. He is not city-stomping size, which requires him to pummel buildings and rip them apart instead of merely squishing them beneath his sheer bulk. 

Another part of what makes this particular monster so convincing are the little touches. Its eyelids are blinking, and its tongue is flicking out, smelling the air. In addition to stomping around town, it is doing all of those little unconscious, barely noticeable things that living creatures need to do in order to stay that way.

Thanks to Harryhausen's delicacy and attention to detail, when his Rhedosaurus looks toward the camera, you feel like it can see you. And that makes every second spent with the monster absolutely worthwhile and dazzling. Alas, there is a larger number of monsterless seconds than just about anyone would prefer.

Oh yeah. Them.

I'm a seasoned veteran of Cardboard Science, so I knew not to expect 80 jam-packed minutes of monster mayhem. They simply couldn't have afforded that. We had to have a human plot in there somewhere. 

While The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms' human characters could certainly have been worse, they mostly just rattle around the frame, reenacting various sci-fi tropes until the screenplay can finally dispense with them in the third act. Yes, the movie itself clearly resents that it had to have people in it, too, to the point that it has the most perfunctory finale, both in terms of the conclusion of its romantic arc and its literal final frame.

That said, the bland human story does have its bright spots. Its requisite "stirring narration about the progress of science" opening sequence is a particularly good one, running through a roughly hourlong countdown in the space of just a few minutes to ratchet up the tension, and kicking around the movie's most dramatic lighting in the process.

None of the rest of the human plot can live up to those moments. Though Lee and Tom do parade around in some pretty nifty coats throughout the movie that prevented my attention from ebbing entirely.

But really, the most interesting way to watch The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is one that was not available to audiences at the time: comparing it to Godzilla. It was fascinating to see how differently a Japanese film handled the idea of a nuclear monster as opposed to an American movie (though with a Russian-French director and a Swiss lead, Beast is hardly the most flag-waving American motion picture there ever was).

It should be no surprise that Godzilla handles things better, tapping into its premise in a more potent and impactful way. Its nuclear monster is a stand-in for the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rather than The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms' approach involving a nation's fear of its own power growing too great (which, come to think of it, is also a thematic motif in Godzilla that is handled better). 

Beast is best represented by its final sequence, which takes place on a flaming roller coaster. It's meant to be a thrill ride that deposits you safely on the ground at the end. It's not its fault that Godzilla sought to be something more complex and interesting and devastating than that. And we should thank Beast for being one of the many reasons that Godzilla exists in the first place. But it's hard to completely admire The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms knowing what was soon to stomp its way through global cinemas just over a year after its release.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*The most fantastical moment of all in this monster movie was the fact that they expected us to believe Professor Elson could climb through a hatch in a diving bell that was clearly about half his size. You can't trick me with a judicious cut, editor Bernard W. Burton.
*Yes, the best place to store those barrels of flammable materials is at the base of the wooden roller coaster, why do you ask?
*I can't even come up with a joke that roasts the name of the top secret research project harder than just telling you what it is: "Operation Experiment."

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*About 25 minutes in, I noticed that Tom Nesbitt hadn't gotten a standard-issue sci-fi movie love interest, and I wondered out loud if he was going to just stay single the whole movie. The movie then answered my question by more or less immediately cutting to the door of the university's Paleontology department, which reads something like "Professor Thurgood Elson, Assistant: Ms. Lee Miller." They quite literally hung a sign on it.
*The duties of said Lee Miller would lead me to believe that she only minored in Paleontology while majoring in Making and Dispensing Coffee and Sandwiches.

Sensawunda:

*Seeing Times Square bedecked with posters for Clark Gable and Judy Garland movies is such a lovely time capsule.
*One less delightful time capsule is the absolutely arbitrary underwater sequence where a shark and an octopus fight to the death, presumably to entertain us without adding to the special effects budget. Boo.
*I must praise the Manhattan sequence for being unusually brutal for a sci-fi movie of its vintage. Sure, we see the monster munching on a person or two, but where the movie really kicks things up a notch is a harrowing sequence of a blind man being trampled as the people around him try to escape the destruction. This is a much more effective "the horror, the horror" moment than the knocked-over mailbox from The Spider.

TL;DR: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms rocks some excellent Ray Harryhausen effects, though the material that surrounds them is understandably a bit drab.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1479

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: 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: I'm Looking Through You

Year: 1963
Director: Roger Corman
Cast: Ray Milland, Diana Van der Vlis, Harold J. Stone
Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes

Happy October, everybody! It's time for the 12th Annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue. For those who are new here, it's the time of year when I assign Hunter three 1980s slashers from my Census Bloodbath project to review. Keep an eye out for those. In exchange, he assigns me three of his Cardboard Science titles, which are science fiction movies from the 1950s (well, mostly the 1950s - his timeline is not quite so strict as mine).

Notice that I did say three movies! For the past couple years, I've only had the bandwidth to do one title in October, but this time I was able to jump pack into the pool with both feet and return to the traditional trio of reviews, which I'll be publishing throughout the month! Thankfully, that pool has been nice and warm and comfortable, because this year, Hunter has been especially nice by assigning three titles with huge names of the genre attached. 

We're gonna kick off with one of the biggest. You see, X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes was directed by the late, great Roger Corman. Corman is the perfect lynchpin for any year's Switcheroo, because - in addition to helming titles under the Cardboard Science purview like It Conquered the World - he went on to produce a number of Census Bloodbath movies as well, including Stripped to Kill, The Slumber Party Massacre, Sorority House Massacre, and Mountaintop Motel Massacre. 

What can I say, the man loved a massacre.

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes follows Dr. James Xavier (Oscar winner Ray Milland; you know, the guy from Frogs!), who experiments with eye drops that will allow him to see a broader spectrum of light than any person has ever seen before. Dr. Sam Brant (Harold J. Stone) has grave misgivings about this, but helps him anyway. Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diana Van der Vlis), who represents the foundation that is funding Xavier's research, has less grave misgivings, but mostly because she has the hots for him.

Anyway, his experiment gives him X-Ray vision, but only for temporary periods. However, his continued use of the drops leads to permanent, compounded intensity of his X-Ray vision, to the point that he can see through the fabric of the universe into the Lovecraftian madness at its center. Things don't go all that well for him. 

Oh, and along the way he works at a carnival briefly because... well, why not, I guess.

So, I do love a time capsule, and X certainly provides on that front. Even though it's a fairly tried-and-true sci-fi horror story about a scientist's hubris destroying his life that boasts a screenplay that could have been written a good 10 years earlier, its aesthetic trappings allow you to carbon date it to the exact second it was shot, which is one of the great things about many Roger Corman movies.

Largely, this is evidenced in the overall look of the movie, which is cozy and colorful, with great big splashes of that burgundy red that we used to have in such abundance back when movies had saturated color schemes. But there are some sequences that are totally far out, including the big purple spiral swirling behind the opening credits and the hyper-mod party where everyone does that absurdly gyratey 1960s dance that everyone seemed to innately know how to do back then, where you swing your little T-Rex arms around too rapidly for the human eye to process.

Unfortunately, in spite of these manifold 1960s delights, there really just is no getting around that story. It starts off fine, at least. It cuts right to the chase, which I appreciate, to the point that Ray Milland is giving himself X-Ray vision by the time we hit the 12 minute mark. And about 3 of those minutes were credits.

However, once it gets cracking, the pacing immediately goes slack and the movie just sort of meanders around for an hour and change until it's had enough of itself. It has no direction whatsoever, and I wish it had just chosen a path. If it was hornier, it would have been camp fun. If it made the lead into more of a Bond villain, it would have been camp fun. If it was more cosmic, it might have been legitimately great.

More of this, please and thank you.

However, it just kind of floats around like a detached retina. There are several clear attempts to mold the story into some genre or other, but they never stick. It's a romance sometimes, and a sci-fi movie other times. Then it's a horror movie and eventually even an action movie. Like, it literally ends on a car chase.

It's perhaps at its best when it's a horror movie, because that's the register that Ray Milland's plummy, perfect performance is channeled in the most exciting way. I could watch him waxing poetic about the skeleton of a city or his unwanted ability to see through his own eyelids all day. If it was purely a character study giving Milland free reign, it might have been an all-out masterpiece.

It's just too distracted to ever really get there. Yes, some of the moments that the movie vomits up on screen are quite good. I do like when the movie gets cute with his X-Ray vision (particularly in a scene where he's being given an eye test, or the part where he sees everybody at the party dancing naked). And he briefly has a fabulous scene partner in Don Rickles as a crooked carnival barker (Rickles laces a bit of poison around his showman's charisma that is quite compelling).

But ultimately, the sum of X's parts swings the wrong direction, especially because some of those parts are, say, the scene where Xavier is diagnosing a sick little girl by X-Ray visioning through her clothes and only then through her skin. And then his colleague comes in and comments about how pretty the little girl is and Xavier agrees and we're meant to be heartwarmed or something. Let's just say that not everything about a time capsule is worth the effort of digging it up.

Oh, also, I unequivocally hate the way his X-ray powers actually look onscreen. The shots that are filmed in what I've dubbed "eyeball-vision" are surrounded by this blood red frame that's meant to mimic the shape of an eye. Never mind the issue that you don't see your own eye sockets when you're looking out of them. You've got to let a genre movie do its thing. But it's just an ugly visual, and we get so damn much of it. Boo.

Anyway, it's so good to be back! Long live Cardboard Science!

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*So in the scene where he can see everybody at the party dancing naked, including being able to see through their shoes, how come everybody's feet are touching the floor instead of floating a couple centimeters above- you know what, nevermind.
*I would also like to take issue with Xavier's "X-Ray vision" while driving into Vegas, which is literally the same collage of neon signs that any movie with a Vegas sequence does, but seen through a distorted filter.
*I've been really trying not to nitpick a silly Roger Corman movie, I promise, but it's baffling how Xavier is able to see the blackjack cards using his X-Ray vision. It would canonically just show him the back of the next card in the deck. Make it make sense!

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*The scene where Ray Milland lights a cigarette using a Bunsen burner might be the most 1960s thing I've ever seen, and I'm including that party sequence.
*When Dr. Xavier pushes Sam out the window in a fit of pique (happens to the best of us), Dr. Fairfax urges him to escape, lest he be accused of murder. She, however, stays put in the room where a man was just murdered, because I guess the police would never suspect a woman of having the upper body strength to pull off such a crime.
*As he begins his winning streak in Vegas, Xavier hands Fairfax a coin and she protests "I don't gamble!" as if it would somehow be a moral failing to put his coin into the machine so he can try and win some money. Some people need to take a chill pill.

Sensawunda:

*I shall not embarrass myself by revealing how long it took me to notice that Dr. Xavier's name begins with... an X!
*By far the best scene in the movie is when Roger Corman stalwart Dick Miller and his Little Shop of Horrors co-star Jonathan Haze show up to heckle Dr. Xavier when he's working at the carnival.
*The movie starts on a 37-second still frame of a bloody eyeball with music playing behind it, which was actually effectively unsettling, but mostly because I was worried I had broken my TV.

TL;DR: X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes is a charming movie, but it's ultimately pretty empty.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1541

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: Just Wait Till You Meet The Teacup Men

Hey... Is this thing on?

So, you may have noticed that I haven't been posting as much on here lately. Because of life and the bills that are inherent to it, I've had to prioritize writing for places that pay me, like Screen Rant, Horror Press, and Alternate Ending. Check out my stuff there, if you like!

Don't worry, Census Bloodbath at the very least is still a sword of Damocles hanging over my head that I will return to someday. But in the meantime, while I strive to find that work-life balance I've been hearing so much about, we can't simply let our annual traditions die. I've still got a big ol' flashback post of the best and worst of the year coming at ya on New Year's Eve. But also it's October, which means it's time for the (holy shit) tenth annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen at Kinemalogue. I don't have the bandwidth to do three reviews this year, but he thankfully agreed to accommodate my dire straits and exchange one title apiece.

So that means this year, just like every other, we'll be swapping our areas of expertise. I'll be covering a 1950s B-movie from his Cardboard Science catalogue, while you should keep your eyes out on his end for a Census Bloodbath piece reviewing a 1980s slasher. Blood Rage, no less!

Year: 1957
Director: Edward L. Cahn
Cast: Steven Terrell, Gloria Castillo, Lyn Osborn
Run Time: 1 hour 4 minutes

So, this time, Hunter gave me the opportunity to choose between three options for sci-fi B-movies. One was a masterpiece, one was a seminal overview of the genre, and one was Invasion of the Saucer Men. Guess which one I chose. At this point, I know better than to be fooled by an excellent title and poster, but a 64-minute run time? Sign me the hell up!

Also, credit where credit is due: Making a misleading poster is a rite of passage for a cheesy '50s sci-fi movie, but this publicity image also never actually occurs in the movie either (the aliens aren't even that size). They really put in the work to trick as many people as they could. Now that's what I call chutzpah!

Invasion of the Saucer Men has a tremendously simple plot. Just outside the small American town of Hicksburg, a flying saucer makes a landing. The short-statured aliens inside, which look kind of like a group of kids wearing unlicensed Kang and Kodos masks, run around wreaking havoc. Multiple groups of people encounter these aliens, but the adults and the teenagers have very different ideas of how to deal with the invading menace.

A small contingent of Men In Black-style authorities attempt to cover up the whole thing, which basically means shooting at the saucer a whole bunch, accidentally blowing it up, and patting themselves on the back. Meanwhile, a pair of 30-year-old teenage lovers named Johnny (Stephen Terrell, who is exactly the same age that Steve McQueen was when he made The Blob, which should tell you something) and Joan (Gloria Castillo) struggle fruitlessly to get anyone to believe them, and are in fact implicated as potential murderers when it looks as though the aliens' first victim was actually hit by Johnny's car. Oh, did I mention that the saucer men are running around trying to stab people with their venomous claws, which pump their victims full of pure alcohol?

Freddy Krueger, eat your heart out.

Invasion of the Saucer Men really is a strange case. It's kind of objectively bad as a cinematic text by almost every aesthetic yardstick I can imagine. Though I try not to over-criticize specifics of the looks of movies of this vintage, especially ones like Invasion of the Saucer Men that have never had the pleasure of a spiffy, big-ticket restoration. Half a century of disrepair can run a film print ragged, so it's possible that what we're seeing today isn't at all how the movie looked in 1957. 

It certainly is how the movie was edited back in 1957 though, and this is edited oh so poorly, in choppy quick cuts that crash images together at such speed that they totally elude the human eye. I suppose the biggest compliment I can give the editing is that it's ahead of its time, considering it's reminiscent of the quick-cut music video editing that marred a vast swath of cinema in the early 2000s. But at the end of the day, to be frank, it's hard to imagine that the poorly lit, poorly framed, overall just plain murky look of the movie as a whole wasn't at least in part the fault of the filmmakers. 

Really, who's to say?

However, there is no denying the fact that the movie is - dare I say - saucy. Its ramshackle quality seems to have allowed it to feel comfortable breaking from the script a bit more than the average B-movie. (Frankly, it might even be a C-movie, because the movie it was a B-side to was in fact the Michael Landon corker I Was a Teenage Werewolf.)

When I say it breaks from the script, I certainly don't mean to imply that it breaks from the B-movie formula. Heaven forbid. But it has a rather unique willingness to get a little weird with it, which I appreciate. Take its strange meta opening and closing, which imply that the goings-on of the movie are the contents of a book written and narrated by con man Art Burns (Lyn Osborn). The opening credits are depicted via a hand turning the pages of said book, which has the credits printed inside (a nifty low-budget trick that also sets up a cute gag at the very end). This is followed by some narration where Art seems in on the joke about how cliché the story he's setting up really is, also displaying the fact that he's something of an unreliable narrator.

It's a tremendously postmodern touch for a movie that wasn't really post-anything. And this is the one movie for which I will believe the myth that it was originally developed as a straightforward drama before, when they realized what they had, it was tipped over into an out-and-out comedy. The "audiences hated my movie" to "said movie was totally a joke" pipeline has justified the existence of many a bad movie (here's looking at you, Tommy Wiseau), but here the comedy is very foregrounded and actually quite pleasant a hell of a lot of the time.

The comic moments in which the movie itself is most confident, of course, don't always land. These are the ones that have the silliest music, which of course is the height of comedy. However, there are quite a few intentional jokes that do really sing, especially when the movie is highlighting the incompetence of the team of adults who has set out to bury the news of the flying saucer's arrival. 

Other sequences are perhaps less overtly comic but lean in so hard on their B-movie dopiness that they can't help but be enjoyable to witness, like the scene where the aliens savagely attack a drunk bull, or the one where the aliens bang a dent into the kids' car so it looks like they ran over a man. And still more scenes, seemingly by accident, are just plain creepy, including several moments with a severed alien hand that desperately wants to get up to a little murderin'.

I've heard of backseat drivers, but this is ridiculous!

Invasion of the Saucer Men consistently takes what meager strengths it has and leans in toward them as far as its spine will stretch. This is also the case with its mile-wide nasty streak. Plenty of alien invasion movies feature the aliens maiming and murdering human beings, but there's something compellingly dark about the fact that these aliens' claws are quite literally just dripping syringes. In juxtaposition to the movie's overall loose, kind of shaggy vibe, the murders also feel a mite more amoral and gross.

This is also a horny movie, and it makes little to no effort to hide that fact. Makeout Point is one of the primary locations, and there is some lascivious flirting in the opening scene of the movie proper that tweaks the nose of the Hays Code something fierce. All in all, it's a genuinely enjoyable experience packaged in a forgiving run time, so it far from overstays its welcome. It's not the best movie I've watched for this project (that would be Godzilla, which is hardly fair to compare any movie to), but it is far, far, far from the worst despite its production value, which isn't quite bottom-of-the-barrel but is close enough to taste the oak.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*Did you know that in the 1950s, you had to replace the "battery water" in your car? Well, you do now!

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*I gotta say, hearing someone pronounce it "alkie-hol" with a completely straight face really felt like I was watching a transmission from another planet.

*It also feels so utterly 1950s (and so "white teenager") for the police to leave their manslaughter suspects alone in a room with wide open floor-to-ceiling windows and then just go "d'oh!" when they see that the pair have escaped.

*Invasion of the Saucer Men has a profoundly square relationship to alcohol, which in the world of the movie seems to be a vice for adult losers only and not good, horny, American teens, who would never touch the stuff.

Sensawunda:

*Probably the most effective joke in the entire movie is the fact that Joan calls her car Elvis because she "bends and shimmies but she really goes."

TL;DR: Invasion of the Saucer-Men is nobody's idea of a titanic masterpiece of cinema, but it's definitely a good time.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1647

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)

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)