Cardboard Science: Roger That

Now that we’re firmly settled into our Amityville marathon, it’s time for that other October tradition: Popcorn Culture’s annual crossover with Hunter Allen at Kinemalogue! I’ve given him three more Census Bloodbath slashers to peruse, and in return I shall be covering another trio of 50’s sci-fi pictures for Cardboard Science!

Year: 1958

Director: Roger Corman

Cast: Peter Graves, Beverly Garland, Lee Van Cleef 

Run Time: 1 hour 11 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

Can you believe we’ve been doing this project for four years now and I’ve never been assigned a Roger Corman movie until now? I’m trying to get into the Cardboard Science undergraduate program after all, and Corman is a pre-requisite. The man has worn many hats (including shepherding a host of Poe films for AIP, starting the careers of Jack Nicholson, James Cameron, and Francis Ford Coppola, and more recently producing a slew of SyFy Channel originals), but the man who can shoot a film in five days with a script written on a napkin has rightfully earned his status as an icon of 50’s B-movies.

I’ve only spent time with Corman-as-director in 1960, having seen two of his films from that year: Little Shop of Horrors and House of Usher. And if you’re surprised he had two films come out in the same year, you’re not paying attention. But I digress. Let’s get to the topic at hand, my very first 50’s Corman film and one of his four pictures released in 1956 (it must have been a slow year): It Conquered the World.

And no, that’s not a headline describing the box office of September 2017.

The It in question is an alien being from Venus, who is holed up in a hot spring cave in that exact stretch of rocky, deserty wilderness that lies just outside every small town in America, according to 50’s B-movies. It has been in communication with Dr. Tom Anderson (Lee Van Cleef, of every spaghetti Western you’ve ever heard of), a physicist who has become a laughingstock thanks to his theories about extraterrestrials spying on planet Earth. Unfortunately he turns out to be right when a team led by Dr. Paul Nelson (Peter Graves of Airplane! and probably some other stuff) launches a satellite into space, prompting It to pay earth a little visit.

While It uses its eight mind-controlling devices (attached to flapping plastic bats) to take over the town leaders by removing their emotion and humanity, Paul runs around trying to save the world and Tom attempts to help It carry out its dastardly plan, believing that It is helping to create a more sable, rational world in which he will be a high-ranking member. Meanwhile, Tom’s wife Claire (Beverly Garland) tries everything she can to talk him into resisting It’s evil influence.

It Ruined Her Marriage

At first glance, It Conquered the World is very derivative of a lot of other sci-fi flicks. When It arrives, it causes all the machines in town to shut down, á là The Day the Earth Stood Still. And there’s no ignoring just how similar the Controlled humans are to Pod People (Invasion of the Body Snatchers did come out in the same year, but the five months between the two should have given Corman more than enough time to steal the idea, considering his typical production schedule. Although it might be the case that both films were ripping off Invaders from Mars). But what works works, and when Corman sets his mind to it, he can make an allegorical B-movie even better than the next guy.

The way I see it, It Conquered the World is another treatise against communism and conformity, only with an unexpectedly rich philosophical duality between the red-blooded American Paul and nebbish outcast Tom. The movie is extremely wordy, with scene after scene of the men and their wives carving their way through mountains of dialogue, but the ideas at the center - while naturally pretty simplistic and retrograde – are fleshed out in a way that’s both consistent throughout the film and actually pretty compelling.

Plus, it’s for the best that the movie is mostly dialogue, because when we do pay a visit to the monstrous Venusian, it’s… rough. It resembles nothing more than an ice cream cone with fangs, drizzled in chocolate, wearing a condom on its head. Also it has lobster claws for some reason. It’s a perfectly hilarious B-movie creature, which is one reason I signed up to watch these things, but it makes it harder to take that parts that I actually like very seriously.

Behold his divine majesty!

Not only is It Conquered the World reasonably smart, it’s also unusually dour for a film of its vintage. More cautionary tale than rah-rah jingoistic fantasy, it has no qualms about straight-up murdering major characters. It’s not like we haven’t seen people being shoveled into the mouths of monsters by the handful in films like Godzilla, Beginning of the End, or The Giant Claw, but there’s something about the deaths here that are particularly brutal and violent. 

There’s no blood of course, but the deaths are perpetrated by other human beings rather than monsters. I dare you to watch through every 50’s sci-fi movie and find a single other scene where a woman is casually strangled to death or a man shoots his own wife point-blank. Hell, a portion of this movie’s microscopic effects budget was doled out to a plot-nonessential sequence of an airplane falling out of the sky and exploding! It’s very intent on grinding your face into the darker side of an alien invasion.

It Conquered the World feels like it’s breaking the rules of what these things are supposed to be, even as it’s trafficking in all the genre trappings, plot beats, and subtext that contemporary audiences had seen a million times before. Plus, although things end up pretty much exactly as expected, in the third act Beverly Garland takes up arm against the creature in a badass release of pent-up rage and feminist fury. Of course no 50’s movie was equipped to handle that type of scene well, but it’s one of the best, most exhilarating examples that I’ve yet seen. Forget film noir femme fatales, Beverly Garland is a proto-Linda Hamilton and I’m into. it.

In short, It Conquered the World is actually a pretty stellar piece, for what it is. It’s no minted classic like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it has a unique sensibility that propels it a very long way.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• The idea that an alien intelligence would notice the launch of a single satellite has now become quite preposterous.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• When a lieutenant is informed that the town is now under martial law, he exclaims, “Golly!”
• Claire’s tiny little woman brain can’t handle Tom and Paul talking science over dinner: “Maybe you’ve got something in space medicine I can use for a headache.”
• When the satellite equipment malfunctions, the one woman in the room feels the need to apologize.
• At one point Paul describes his too-small bike seat as being built for the “spanking size,” which I’m pretty sure can Only mean what I think it means.

Sensawunda:

• At one point, Tom refers to having worked on the Manhattan project in “War 2.” In addition to being the 8000th B-movie to name-drop nuclear testing, it’s the weirdest way I’ve ever heard of referring to that war.
• Dick Miller is featured here in only his third movie role, at the bright beginning of the career that would give him parts in dozens of movies produced by Corman and his compatriots.

TL;DR: It Conquered the World is a cheap, crappy sci-fi picture with a surprisingly violent sensibility and strong subtext that lifts it above a lot of its contemporaries.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1311
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)

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)