The Abysmal Swarm

The phrase “mistakes were made” was custom-built for use after a night of boozing: The Missus was already trashed and I was half in the bag, so the idea of popping Irwin Allen’s 1978 sci-fi ecological disaster movie onto the Netflix Streaming seemed like a good idea at the time, a pleasant dose of mega-cheese to wind down the night.
Boy, were we wrong….

Aside from vague generalities regarding the plot—killer bees (remember that boogeyman?) arrive in the US and cause all sorts of havoc for an all-star cast—all I remembered about the flick was that I sat through it twice during its initial run at Brooklyn’s King Plaza movie theater (yep, that theater’s been there since forever—listen, sonny, I remember when it was a duplex!).
Jeez, my parents must’ve been fighting a lot during that summer, because The Swarm is a bad, bad film.

Honestly, although short on logic, there is much more excitement, surprises, craftsmanship, smarts and pure entertainment in Plan Nine From Outer Space or Attack of the Crab Monsters than this flick.
The Swarm is the type of bloated H’wood nightmare than must make Roger Corman grind his teeth to nubs thinking about what he could have done with its budget.

Meanwhile, The Swarm has to absolutely have the ugliest color scheme and art direction ever. (And that the movie was nominated for an Oscar in costume design is further historical proof that at least one branch of the Academy has always been out of it.)

Actually, everything about The Swarm is awful, starting with a script that is colossally-overburdened with exposition:
People stand for sheer, excruciating minutes telling each other about the awful stuff they’ve seen.
What is this, a first draft?
Sheesh, the “Carrot Man” episode of Irwin Allen’s Lost in Space TV show had a better script!

Usually I appreciate it when a film tries to be mean-spirited, but in The Swarm it just seems lazy and cheap—cynical attempts to pull at our heartstrings, but ineptly maneuvered.
Regarding the plot, so much is picked up and then put down inexplicably, the basic rules of storytelling and coherent lively filmmaking ignored so completely, that only that all-star cast chock-a-block full of Hollywood has-beens kept me from thinking that The Swarm was actually a kind of cheap Eastern European anti-film.

Because how else do you explain that all the dead bodies show no signs of bee stings? There is zero attempt to apply any makeup onto the extras playing victims. No welts, no discolorations, no swelling—
It was kind of shocking the…gross incompetence that allowed something like that to get by. It’s insulting.

Also,
The effects are pitiful, a shame on L.B. Abbott’s lustrous career (the stuff he did for weekly shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea or Batman were infinitely better than the coffee grinds in the sky or Tinkertoys set on fire here), and the cinematography looks like it was shot through a turd filter.

That is, with the exception of any shots that prominently featured female lead Katherine Ross: she always looks great in this flick—her close-ups are like perfume ads—it’s like director of photography Fred Koenekamp had a HUGE crush on her! Not that I can blame him…so do I…

Film was never really Irwin Allen’s forte if you ask me—
Of his theatrically released films and TV movies, The Poseidon Adventure is the only one that I think is a genuinely good film, with moving performances and an excellent technical side. Many will point out that Allen only produced that film.

Allen really shined with TV—specifically his mid-1960s output: who still doesn’t love shows like Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea or Land of the Giants? That stuff was really cool and weird, and at the time probably more popular than Star Trek!

It was the fickle taste of the public killing off his TV shows that eventually pushed Allen into imitating and jacking up the formula introduced in Airport, a flick many say is the first “disaster movie,” with the all-star cast in danger (in Airport’s case there’s a maniac with a bomb on an airliner).

The PoopSideDown Adventure (hee-hee!) was a goldmine, and Allan imitated and jacked up his own formula again with The Towering Inferno (a movie I don’t like, because unlike Poseidon, it has no socio-political relevance—I choose to interpret The Poseidon Adventure as a metaphor for the US at the end of the 1960s: everything’s upside-down and fucked-up, including “…and a child shall lead them,” and going to the bottom is the only way to get to the top, dig? Meanwhile, Inferno only exists to hurt. It’s a mean and nasty movie. McQueen’s cool, though—as always.)

It’s obvious that Allen wasn’t in tune to popular tastes after a certain point, but a film as incompetently put together as The Swarm never deserved an audience.

The always-readable This Island Rod (where I swiped the awesome frame-grab/title card below) has an impressive review/commentary/essay on The Swarm, read it HERE.

Ten Posters I Like

An incredible image--that doesn't give away how campy the flick actually is.


A classic! (Although the poster is a little busy, but that in itself is highly representative of the time...)


Oh yeah, I need to see this flick toot sweet!


Jack Davis perfectly captures, and enhances what this classic is all about.


Haven't seen this flick; would like to; and need to post something to keep the "Zexy Replikantz" fans happy....


When this was originally released, I saw this in the theater (the old Georgetown Twin in Brooklyn), twice! For fans of 1970s dystopic future flicks like Soylent Green or The Omega Man/
Chosen Survivors is worth a look.


Boobies! (And a great piece of cinema from good old Otto Preminger.)


A childhood favorite--the poster and the ad campaign on TV, that is. When we finally got around to seeing The Legend of Boggy Creek (at the Tannersville movie theater in upstate NY), well...I learned a lesson, that's all.


I'm not sure if I've ever seen any of these flicks--they're the type of movies that probably had lots of different titles over the years... But I've loved this poster since I was a kid, and saw it advertised in the late, great and lamented The Monster Times.


Gotta love Oliver Reed! (And Sitting Target is highly recommended!)

“Instead of watching horror movies and nothing but, in October I watched…”

Jeez, look at that list, willya?
Compared to September’s movie madness, it’s positively mundane!

A big chunk of viewing time was spent in massive marathon sessions catching up with my missed television viewing—

Parks & Recreation: Season Three (I’m proud to say that I was probably in one of the last classes Amy Poehler taught at the old UCB Theater on 22nd Street);

The Walking Dead: Season One (great gore, but JEEZ! Shut up about your damn feelings already!);

and my new super-fave, the third season of Sons of Anarchy—a biker gang—excuse me, “motorcycle club” soap-opera based on Hamlet? Of course I love it!

[Don’t know about you, but I can’t watch weekly TV anymore—I don’t like having to be on someone else’s schedule; I do that enough at work, y’know? Besides, I prefer to take it all in at once, treating a show’s season like a mini-series or novel—
which isn’t too difficult since The Walking Dead and Sons of Anarchy are shows with a definite story arc (they’re essentially mini-series),
and while it’s a more “traditional” show, and doesn’t stray too far from the sitcom rule that each episode must be a self-contained unit, Parks & Recreation does build on progression—the slate is not wiped clean every week.]

So for October, it was
Thirty-three movies (if you allow the counting of a whole season of a TV show as one movie—and you better!)—the same number of years in age Our Lord was when nailed to the cross….

Not too many Halloween-centric flicks, I’m afraid to admit…
But the numbers admit that I could partake in one of those 31 Days of Shocktober blogathons if I wanted to (next year. Maybe).
(On the other hand, what do I care? Who do I have to prove my horror movie bona-fides to? I guess I just want to belong, to hang out with all the cool kids….)

It’s an
Odd group of films for October, I must say—no real patterns of themes that jump out—except maybe stuff the NYPL’s finally gotten around to shipping to me; or “desk-clearing” the uber-volume of boots passed on to me by good buddies from the gray market.
Otherwise, just a typically cinephiliacal month…

What We Watch in October When We Watch Movies in October:

Parks & Recreation: Season Three (2011; 16 episodes)

The Walking Dead: Season One (2010; 6 episodes)

Sons of Anarchy: Season Three (2010; 13 episodes)

Super Troopers (2001)
Funny, funny movie that’s often all over the place—but the pre-credits sequence (“Littering, and… Littering, and… Littering, and… Littering, and…”) could be a perfect short film on its own, and Brian Cox as the befuddled, angry but basically sweet commander is a joy.
My only gripe? They never used the Abba song on the soundtrack!

Jack, the Giant Killer (1962)
I like this more than the flick it rips off, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad—Jack is faster-paced, it’s crazier, it has more monsters, and while the stop-motion animation isn’t as smooth and balletic as Harryhausen’s, neither is it as pretentious—I always feel like Harryhausen is trying too hard, and misses the forest for the trees:
While the effects of Seventh Voyage of Sinbad are “better” (and I do LOVE the dragon and its horizontal spout of flame), Jack’s effects are punchier, weirder—and there are more of them!

Jack’s stop-motion effects were created by Gene Warren and Wah Chang (and an uncredited Jim Danforth), who also worked on the original The Outer Limits and plenty of George Pal’s films.

Rubber (2010)
AWFUL! The post-modern, self-referential bits RUIN what could have been an interesting movie.
I mean, what if an old rubber tire came to life with terrible psychic powers and went around killing everyone by making their head explode? Sure, about five rounds out of a cop-issue pump-action shotgun would turn that tire into chucks of carbon black scattered all over the asphalt, but before that? That damn tire could do a lot of damage.
This flick is a completely missed opportunity, and far too “clever” for its own good.

Kings of Pastry (2009)
Intense foodie documentary—earning/winning the tri-colored collar of the Meilleur Ouvrier de France is frickin’ tough!
Some moments are heartbreaking (an elaborate sugar scultpture collapses and shatters moments before the judges look at it), but a good view for food-fans.

Detour (1945)
Another flick I’d heard too much about before seeing, and as such couldn’t be surprised or properly entertained. But yeah, it’s way fucked up—absolutely fascinating, and a must-see for film historians or noir buffs.

Three and Out (2008)
Great premise given the lamest sit-com treatment. I couldn’t even finish watching it. “Eye wuz dizguztedz!”

A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966)
Fans of gambling/con game movies need to check out this sharp western-comedy that keeps the tension high—it helps that the cast is all master thesps, but especially foxy Joanne Woodward and eternal sly fox Kevin McCarthy. This is a flick I was so glad I watched knowing extremely little about going into it.

The Magician (1958)
Beautiful mind games courtesy of Grandmaster Ingmar Bergman

Exodus (1960)
Directed by Otto Preminger, and watched as R&D for my Skidoo post. Exodus is… very dated, especially socio-politically, and has a… very quaint feeling about it.
The movie is “Shot On Location!” and beautifully so, but it’s also kind of a… snooze: a hotel is blown up, and we’re shown a long-distance shot of a big fireball, but no scenes of destruction. No combat scenes (this IS about the creation of the nation of Israel), although there is a pretty damn neatly choreographed prison break-out scene…

If you like Stanley Kramer’s movies, you might like Exodus.

Brewster McCloud (1971)
Altman’s bird-shit crazy follow-up to M*A*S*H, loosely adapted from a script by Skidoo’s screenwriter, Doran William Cannon—
Megapost about this wild film and Ivanlandia Favorite in the works—promise!

The Battle of Britain (1969)
About 20 minutes too long—especially since the air battles all look the same after a while—although the last one is the best: no dialog, no sound effects, just a stirring score against a brilliantly cut montage of aerial combat, with close-ups of its participants and observers intercut throughout—

The Battle of Britain is often incredibly moving (don’t get attached to anybody), and with the type of massive production scale that “epics” of the time did well on a regular basis.
Director Guy Hamilton (of many James Bond flicks) does a great job for the most part guiding the viewer through a complicated tale.
And if you’re like me and cannot understand what the fuck those goddamn limeys are yakkin’ about, thank God for subtitles.

Shakedown (1950)
Unavailable since forever, but probably not because of some dark secret but because while there are some brilliant moments, occasional flashes of genius, much of the flick is tepid confusion.
However, the bootleg I watched was of middling quality, with plenty of glitches—and the flick often has some gnarly scenes, like the lead (a news photographer) “directing” a chick as she attempts to jump out of a building, or telling a guy to wave his hands more—as his car sinks into the river—so the photo’s better. After snapping the pic, the cameraman splits—leaving the guy in the river.

I’ve known about Shakedown since the mid-1980s, when I read about it in the (once very awesome, but now perhaps dated) Catalog of Cool, a book that was, back in the day, many a kids’ bible/playbook for what was needed to be seen, read, heard, worn or left around the house as decoration.
Was the Catalog of Cool the Big Bang of our current hipster infestation? Perhaps, but I was glad to have it when I did.

The Satan Bug (1965)
Wow, John Sturges really drops the ball here—great Jerry Goldsmith score and cool animated titles, though. There’s a good reason this flick has been unavailable since forever….

Whirlpool (1949)
More Preminger R&D, and a snoozer

Throne of Blood (1957)
Kurosawa’s classic—but why the original Japanese title, “Spider Web Castle,” isn’t used is beyond me; it’s a much better title. I guess it wasn’t “arty” enough; it was too “exploitative,” or something…

Modern Times (1936)
Dude, I don’t know why, but seeing Charlie Champlin’s simpering face makes me want to smash it in with a tire-iron. I’ve never liked his brand of silent movie comedy—it seems to be begging “Love Me!” more than making me laugh. Fuck him, the rotten baby-fucker. Give me Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd or Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle any day of the week.
Paulette Goddard is a stone fox, though, and really is quite fetching as a feral child.

Ned Kelly (1970)
After the mind-blowing incredible that was Mademoiselle (a flick that was SAVAGED on its release), Tony Richardson started slipping—first, with the meandering The Charge of the Light Brigade, then with Ned Kelly. While he’s a terrible actor, it’s not really Mick Jagger’s fault the flick’s a snoozer—the script is… dreadful.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
A camp horror classic, re-screened in prep for the Sergio Leone Etc. Quiz.

My Dinner With Andre (1981)
It could be really easy to slam this flick as pretentious, wool-gathering, navel-gazing twaddle—but then the flick acknowledges that its participants are of the moneyed class, and that pretentious, wool-gathering, navel-gazing is kind of what they’re doing—and by subverting that, the film then treats us to some incredible philosophical conversations.
I’m surprised it took me so long to see it, though….

Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions (1991; short)
Before Henry Selick was given the go-ahead to direct The Nightmare Before Christmas, he was prepping this as a pilot for MTV. I’m not sure how it would’ve worked as a weekly series, but it’s a kooky, krazy visual delight, with some creepy undertones. Worth hunting down, especially for stop-motion animation fans.

Universe (1960; short)
Cool old educational short from our pals at the National Film Board of Canada, that is probably best remembered as an influence on the Great Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—in fact, Douglas Rain, who narrates Universe, was picked by Stanley K. to replace Martin Balsam’s voice-over of HAL 9000, when the director felt Balsam packed too much emotion into his voice-over.

The People Vs. George Lucas (2011)
There but for the grace of God go I….
But y’know what? Back in 1977, I saw a movie named Star Wars, not Star Wars Episode Whatever: A New Pooper-Scoooper.
That movie, the one that was released into theaters in May 1977, I loved--and still do--and I actually prefer to not think about any of the sequels, including the one that everyone loves but that has no ending, Empire Strikes Out.

Star Wars was a fun spoof of action comics/Flash Gordon serials, and was also really the best stoner movie ever: medium level intellectual stimulation (no “what does it all mean” headaches like with 2001) with plenty of eyeball kicks.

BTW, The Pimples Vs. Gorge Suckass fails because it never brings up the director’s divorce, and how by intrinsically changing the movies, he gets to cut his ex out of the money loop.

The Black Marble (1980)
A bit too “shaggy dog” and Romantic Nowheresville for my tastes, but this mature, bittersweet romance-drama-thriller is a fascinating flick where the parts (especially every scene with Harry Dean Stanton) are better than the whole.
The unclassifiable nature of this flick makes it very much part of that 1970s New American Wave/Whatever movement that included Scarecrow, Night Moves and The Late Show.
But man! Is Paula Prentiss hot! (And brainy! Mrow!)

Kill Baby… Kill! (1966)
Dude, Fellini TOTALLY ripped off this flick when he made Toby Dammit. Mario Bava should've sued.

High School Confidential! (1958)
Sex, drugs, beatniks, 1950s rock 'n' roll, hot rods, hep talk, beat poetry, people too old to be teenagers playing teenagers, dope, reefer, smack, The Big “H,” and best of all:
Check out Mamie Van Doren! Va-va-VA-VOOM!

Dinosaur (2000)
I got smashed and watched some well-designed Disney computer-cartoon dinosaurs.
And liked it. So sue me.

Jabberwocky (1977)
Terry Gilliam’s first solo directorial effort—and it shows: he hasn’t figured out how to balance comedy and misery properly yet, and Michael Palin’s character is a bit too much of a saccharine dim-bulb—I prefer it when Palin plays someone sharper or more menacing (see “Ken Shabby,” or one of the Italian gangsters he’d regularly perform on Monty Python or “Jack Lint” from Brazil).

And I can’t be the only one who wished that Gilliam never abandoned the animation technique and style that we got to know him by, can I?

Promised Land (1975)
GOREHOUND ALERT!
About an hour into Andrzej Wajda’s quasi-epic about the construction of a factory in late-1800s Poland and the corrupting influence of capitalism, there’s a scene where a factory engineer and the company owner get into a fight because the boss has been shtupping the engineer’s teenage daughter for kicks.
The two men argue violently, struggling near some big machines (with those BIG iron wheels spinning round and round, so hypnotically…), then they topple, falling into the gears—the two disappear inside the enormous metal contraption, and then…
SPLOOSH! Fuckin’ blood and body parts and gory chunks everywhere. It looks like a sheet of stripped flesh is being splashed against the wall! Arrrrrrrrgh…
As the scene ends, the gnarled head of the boss (I think it’s him) pops out of the wheel housing, wobbling about.

The whole scene is so damn fucked up, it’s brilliant. I love heavy-handed metaphors when they are drenched in blood.

Willam Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet (2009)
Uhhhhh… This is only for Shatner completists, only—really.
No, really.
Unless you show up at BBQs wearing a Mr. Spock shirt.

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop (2011)
Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop Whining, you mean—turned off in disgust after 20 minutes. What a creep.

The Inadvertent Psychedelia of GORGO

The National Film Board of Ivanlandia loves it some giant monster movies!
Whether from the sci-fi, fantasy or horror genres, movies about big, BIG monsters are always in heavy rotation at the Imperial Palace.

We’re really looking forward to the upcoming release of such flicks like Monsters, Skyline and The Troll Hunter.

Monsters from the Land of the Rising Sun
predominate the cinematic landscape by sheer volume.
And Yankees get the silver medal due to so many dinosaur movies,
but our Limey cousins haven’t really been on the scene but occasionally—and then it’s something like Konga, a flick I don’t remember liking.

But recently, out of curiosity, The National Film Board of Ivanlandia screened Gorgo, and WOW!
This has got to be one of the most inadvertently psychedelic flicks—on par with Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster for bizzarro mash-up of LSD and kaiju, but more inadvertently.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote about seeing big lizards when he was wigged out on LSD, and now here’s a movie about a big lizard that feels like it was made for people to watch while really fucking high.

GORGO (1961)
After an immense underwater earthquake/volcanic explosion in the North Sea, a couple of salvage divers capture a 50-foot-tall dinosaur/monster off the coast of Ireland.

Unlike Gojira or Gamera or The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Gorgo wasn’t frozen or in suspended animation, but rather the Gorgosauruses lived in some sort of giant cavern underneath the ocean floor—some strange mega-ecosystem from prehistoric times—and after the quake, the Irish waters are filled with weird, dead jurasssic-esque fish—
indicative of what the Gorgos were eating?
Or just cool stuff? Like the parasites in Cloverfield, a monster also from the ocean floor (or outer space, depending on whom you’re listening)?

Back to the story:
Blowing off requests from Irish museums and zoos, the divers make a very lucrative agreement with a circus-sideshow to exhibit the beast in London.

Kept in an electrified pit, the monster—now called “Gorgo” by the circus promoter (after the mythological Gorgon)—is a big hit with sell-out crowds.

But sadly, most ticket buyers aren’t there to marvel, but to jeer and sneer at a chained and shamed unique natural wonder.

Then the divers and the circus promoter get a warning: what they captured is a child—in fact, practically a newborn!
When it becomes an adult, it will be about 200 feet tall, the biologists say.
Then they realize, if this is the baby, where’s the mommy?

Meanwhile, back at the island off Ireland where the baby Gorgo was captured, a very large adult version shows up, wrecks the place, and starts following the spoor her offspring left behind.

Along the way, she trashes the British Navy, and gets to London, the town that put her little baby in a pit to be laughed at by a bunch of slobs and dumbasses.
Mommy’s not happy…


A lot of folks consider Gorgo to be a kid’s film, and while I don’t necessarily agree, I’ll concede that it’s a point that’s hard to argue against:

First, the film presents a child-viewer surrogate in young Sean,
the 10-year-old islander who warns the divers not to disturb the beasties (but is ignored, like most kids are ignored), and
later the child-viewer stand-in becomes baby Gorgo—which ties in a young child’s feelings of persecution and helplessness, as well as body image or feelings of self-worth: “I’m a monster.”

The child-like perspective the film brings aids in its emotionality—you feel bad for baby Gorgo being teased, and when Mama Gorgo shows up, you cheer (and the way Gorgo is filmed, it gives the impression that the more they shoot at Mama, the angrier she gets—like Mongo in Blazing Saddles, “shooting only makes him angry,” and since the audience can see that—while the puny humans in the movie can’t—we join the monsters in mocking all the attempts the grown-ups make at stop pure maternal emotionalism, which kids can tap into better than adults anyway…)

But consider this:
Since it’s a film about a mother rescuing a child, Gorgo must be looked at from a psychological perspective—
Mom saves us, but she wrecks the joint.

See, Baby Gorgo should’ve kicked ass and taken names on his own—we must break free of the apron strings!
If we keep Mommy too much in our lives, massive havoc and destruction may occur.


Originally released in 1961, full of swirling reds and purples, and many, many crazy opticals, this (almost forgotten) monster movie is coincidentally one of the trippier flicks I’ve seen in a long time.

A delight for fans of man-in-a-monster suit flicks, as well as appreciators of travelling matte optical work (which always leaves a shell or trail around the items being superimposed: oooo trippy!), it often feels that Gorgo’s SPFX crew only had a very tight budget, and instead of spreading it around too much, spent it all on some wild, you-must-suspend-disbelief keiju-esque city trashing, and then spent what was left on stock footage.

I found Gorgo’s unconscious lysergicness to be much more engaging—and convincing—than the super-self-aware madcapness of the recently-released-to-DVD Hausu (1977)—as a comparison [more on Hausu in a moment]

Some examples:
At 59:38, there’s a beautiful scene of Mama Gorgo stalking towards Big Ben, the burning and smoke behind them not smoke bombs, but optically superimposed time-lapse photography of clouds pretending to be flames and smoke!

These shots look like they should’ve been used as the cover of a rock album—but I’m not sure if Deep Purple or Black Sabbath….But not Blue Oyster Cult!

My screengrabs will never do it justice—and to imagine seeing this flick in an old NYC movie palace with a new print: Yow!










And maybe being psychedelisized wasn’t an inadvertent subtext:
By 1:02:16, young Sean, the flick’s character for kids to relate to (as I already mentioned), is watching Mama Gorgo trash the joint—
and the boy has a fixed grin of rapt glee that the orange glow from the burning city only makes more LSD’ed out.
(It could also be the joy the child-surrogate feels when it is being vindicated: “SEE?!? I told you this would happen, but I’m a kid and you wouldn’t believe me! HA!)

Go FURTHER!






Director Eugene Lourie also directed the stop-motion animation packed The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and The Giant Behemoth (1959; also set in England), and created the special effects for Crack in the World (1965) [review below] and Krakatoa, East of Java (1969)—both of which have color palettes as lurid as Gorgo’s;
and just look at the bulbous smoke behind and around our lovely monster!






Like these other films, Gorgo has a style that I would call Terry Gilliam-esque: design heavy, leaning very heavily towards an anti-naturalism that I enjoy, not afraid to show its seams because it has faith that the audience will be caught up in the fantasy and suspend disbelief properly.

After all, there’s no way Lourie & Co. cannot see that their monsters and miniatures are paper mache—but their suspension of disbelief connects with their artistry, and is infectious.
I love Gorgo!


And I just have to say that Gorgo is much better as an exciting movie than Lourie’s previous Beast From 20,000 Fathoms—while Beast’s FX animation, done by the incomparable Ray Harryhausen, is better than the FX of Gorgo, there is only so much of it, and the rest of the movie is weighed down with dumb, boring dialog and stupid scenes of stupid people pretending to be scientists. Very fast-forwardable until the monster makes landfall in New York City.

In addition to some fun action and an increase in tension (monster germs?), when the Beast shows up in NYC, there is a lot of great, crisp footage of the Big Apple, especially the docks and tenements (the stuff Robert Moses—damn him!—tried to get rid of).

As for The Giant Behemoth, it’s been ages since I’ve seen it (and I’ve got it at the top of my N-flix list; but if I’m finished with this post before it gets here, well, tough), but I remember it was a decent and spooky Big Monster flick. A vicious, radioactive brontosaurus-like beast shows up in England, causing the routine amount of mayhem—but one cool thing about the flick I remember is that the beast could project its radiation, zapping helicopters out of the sky and frying soldiers where they stand.

Hausu (1977)
Hausu was a disappointment—perhaps I had been spoiled by all the pre-DVD-release hype heaped on this flicks for months beforehand.

Hausu must have been a mind-roaster for those fortunate enough to see it near or around its 1977 release, but as a spoof/riff on the haunted house genre (especially the ones by William Castle, I feel), it does not have “legs”—and personally, I found Hausu’s maxed-out quirkiness to be very annoying after a short time—the film (and filmmakers) are not taking their subject seriously, so why should we?

(And Hausu isn’t funny enough to be a comedy—at least to those who do not speak fluent Japanese: Sumimasen, nihongo wakaramasen!
It’s not that self-conscious weirdness is always a bad thing, it just needs a foundation of some sort, it has to really be about something—look at Eraserhead, also initially released in 1977: Yes, it’s a completely self-consciously arty piece of cinematic madness.

But that weirdness is the dressing on a very personal tale of parental fear and the lack of responsibility. It’s an extremely harsh personal assessment, I feel: all the more brilliant because it’s dressed in total id imagery. I saw Eraserhead in 1980 when I was 15, liked it, but didn’t love it.
Now I’m an old fart, and boy-oh-boy, I get it. The film (and I) have grown.

I cannot even think that about Hausu—a Scooby-Doo episode has more cultural relevance (and enjoyment) for me.
Hausu is about nothing except making fun of a genre that has grown and mutated far beyond what Hausu was trying to spoof. Hausu isn’t bad, it’s just very dated.

Crack in the World (1965)
Recently finally released to DVD after being MIA for a long, long, long time—
I credit the American Cinematheque in L.A. for renewing interest in this flick when they screened it in L.A. in 2007—
Crack in the World was on TV constantly when I was a kid, and I loved it then and watched the movie practically every time it was on:
Massive earthquakes! Train wrecks! Underground labs! Atomic bombs! Volcanoes! Upside-down rockets! Copious stock footage! Obvious miniatures! TOTAL FUCKIN’ DESTRUCTION!
All of it stuff a 10-year-old sci-fi nerd could fall in love with!

Crack in the World was also more ambitious than the disaster movies that followed it (this movie wasn’t going to destroy just one city or building!), and is really the grandfather to contemporary disaster movies, like 2012 and The Core (both flicks that I enjoyed immensely!), that feature exciting, exquisitely crafted global-scale destruction--and huge gaps in logic.
That said, Crack in the World, while still charming in its quaint mid-1960s way, has been ultimately surpassed in pacing and quality of special effects by other films (including the disaster flicks from the 1970s, like Earthquake, and anyone who wasn’t some sort of disaster movie completist might find the flick slow and clunky.
Its greatest value may be to nostalgia buffs (and I could be one).

I’m very happy to have managed to get a copy of this film’s DVD, and every now and again use it to satiate the disaster movie monkey on my back…