The Movie Jack Arnold Didn't Hate

Monster On the Campus (1958)
Directed by Jack Arnold
Starring:
Arthur Franz as Prof. Donald Blake
Joanna Moore as Madeline Howard
Judson Pratt as Lieutenant Mike Stevens
Troy Donahue as Jimmy Flanders

Jack Arnold (1916 - 1992) was, by general agreement, the most skilled director to have worked in the B-movie, sci-fi genre during the 1950s. If Arnold had only directed The Creature From the Black Lagoon, he would have done enough for a significant shard of screen immortality. But with other movies in his oeuvre like It Came From Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and (my favorite) Tarantula; Arnold has garnered attention from film scholars not known for their love of "giant bug movies."

Monster On the Campus (Dir. Jack Arnold, 1958)

That is to say, Arnold is a B-movie director preferred by slumming members of the film intelligentsia who toss off the phrase "rises above the genre," with grand benevolence - like Cesar's generals tossing coins from horseback. Before one considers this backhanded compliment as the final word on Arnold, please consider that Orson Welles was an enthusiastic fan of Arnold's work in Shrinking Man without feeling it necessary to qualify his praise.

The film under discussion today, Monster On the Campus, is one seldom cited or reviewed by even the most ardent fans of the director. Indeed, hard-core Arnold fans take pains not to mention it, as did the director himself. In a 1979 interview for Photon, writer Mark McGee asked the director about Monster On the Campus: "Oh, please!" said Arnold. "Frankly, I did it as a favor for Joe Gershenson who was head of music at Universal. I thought the script badly written. I only did it because of my love of Joe. I tried to take a bad script and make it look good."

The interview is very charming in that one can tell Mr. McGee, who also wrote 1970s Equinox, is a fan of Monster On the Campus - yet the most positive statement the writer could wring out of Arnold was that he "didn't hate it."

So, considering the above, you may logically ask why I am wasting your time with this campus monster? Well, dear friends, there are many reasons I love this film and consider it time well spent: First and foremost; It's directed by Jack Arnold. Yes, it's not his favorite, he did it as a favor, he hated the script, blah, blah - It's still Jack Arnold. As the man said himself: "I tried to take a bad script and make it look good." He succeeded.

Secondly, the three leads do fine work. Briefly, they are: Arthur Franz - an actor so intense he practically burned holes in whatever he looked at; Joanna Moore - who's sexuality was so far off the charts she could make clothes look like skin; and finally, Troy Donahue who, while not being the most emotive actor ever to toe the line, could be as comforting and likeable as the red, yellow, and blue balloons of a Wonder Bread wrapper.

Final point worth loving (well, perhaps "loving" isn't quite the proper word to use): The striking level of brutality in the film. Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not talking about "violence" in the modern sense of the word ala the horrid bloodletting and wetly exposed human insides seen in current day "horror" films; no, no. That type of hip, red spillage we confine easily to our screen experience and doesn't really touch us in our "real world." For all the gothic, heavy-metal grinding of films like Saw (Wan, 2004), the violence therein is cartoon violence, not dissimilar in its unreality to a Bugs Bunny cartoon. What I'm talking about here in Monster On the Campus is good old American brutality; that is: The blunt use of force depicted so casually, so surprisingly, that our own world seems suddenly harsh. Because of this quality, moments in Monster still have the power to jar over half a century later.

I've tipped my hand a bit, discussing this good stuff first, but I will expand more on each pleasure a bit later. Now, let's go over the plot and storyline:

In essence, Monster is an atomic age Jekyll-Hyde movie. Paleontologist, Prof. Donald Blake (Arthur Franz) teaches and does his research at a southern California university; where he spends a great deal of time packing his pipe, staring off morosely into space, and being very concerned about the baser instincts of man - those primal, warlike urges which, the professor is convinced, must be understood and controlled if the human race wishes to avoid self-destruction.

Opening the crate (Arthur Franz and Troy Donahue)

Early in the movie, Blake receives a preserved coelacanth (a species of fish unchanged by evolution since the Devonian Era). The fish is delivered by Blake's student assistant, Jimmy Flanders (Troy Donahue) and his trusty German Sheppard, Samson. During transit, the fish has begun to thaw, dripping pools of bloody water. Once the van is parked in front of the lab, Samson licks from a pool that has drained from the bed of the van onto the street. Within a few minutes, Samson goes rogue, snapping at everyone and attacking Blake's fiancée (Joanna Moore). Once caged, it temporarily reverts to a pre-historic wolf, growing saber-like incisors.

Prof. Blake eventually discovers that after capture, the coelacanth was given high doses of gamma radiation as a method of preserving the fish from decay . In true atomic age fashion, the gamma rays have mutated the fish corpse, causing anyone who ingests any part of it (yuck) to revert to a prehistoric state - matching the fish's Devonian origins (approx. 150 - 300 millions years ago).

Soon, a dragonfly, feeding on the carcass of the coelacanth, is transformed into a hawk-sized Meganeura (a prehistoric ancestor of the dragonfly from the Carboniferous period); and (naturally) Blake himself is infected by the irradiated fluids of the fish when he scraps his hand on its teeth and sucks at the wound. The professor is even given an extra dose of Devonian juice when the tobacco of his pipe becomes saturated with the blood of the monster dragonfly. After dispatching the giant insect with a letter opener, blood from the impaled insect runs down the length of the opener while Blake carries it around like a shish kabob. The blood drips into a very continently placed pipe bowl (this is one of the film's most contrived moments, but not the only one). Not only is the pipe's placement an astounding play of chance; as a pipe smoker myself I can attest that one would have to incinerate the pipe with a blowtorch to make such soggy tobacco ignite. In Monster, Dr. Blake is able to light his blood-drenched pipe with one pass of a lighter. Perhaps even more astoundingly, Blake notices a foul taste - ya think? - but just keeps on puffing. With this wild contrivance, Blake is now occasionally transformed into a prehistoric, hairy beast-man; answering only to his own primal instincts (which forces him to instantly attack and kill every human he sees).

Eventually, after a couple of murders that leave police scratching their thick heads, Blake realizes the monster is himself (the film's major weakness is its ham-fisted, police-procedural plot structure - with dull, chunky policemen fumbling around with prehistoric hand and footprints). In a final nod to author, R. L. Stevenson, the film ends with Blake killing himself before the primal monster within can take over his soul completely. After nearly killing his super hot fiancée, Blake injects himself with fish extract in front of Police Lt. Mike Stevens (Judson Pratt), who is only to happy to empty his police revolver into him. While the closing music soars, we watch the prehistoric monster, laying now belly-up on the side of a hill, transform back into Prof. Blake, his eyes staring blanking Heavenward.

With that, let's hop right on top of the good stuff outlined earlier:

The Good Stuff, Part I: Jack Arnold (even on a bad day)

Despite bringing absolutely zero enthusiasm to this particular project; Jack Arnold couldn't help but be Jack Arnold. Actually, it is probably wrong to credit the director with no enthusiasm whatsoever. He was making a film, and by his own words he at least wanted to make one that looked good. This means that Monster, at the very least, engaged that part of Arnold's DNA wherein the film making gene is contained. Jack Arnold was a fluid, often thrilling cinematic storyteller. He couldn't help himself. Consequently, Monster goes down smooth with no glitches or speed bumps.

Sure, Arnold was absolutely hogtied by the "police procedural" or "mystery" plot structure of the film. Every time we see the particularly stupid cops blunder into a scene, discussing "clues" and "suspects," the energy drains out of the picture as though someone pulled the power cord (one can only guess that the police presence was a misguided attempt to stay close to the Jekyll and Hyde source material). Yet Arnold had on important ace up his film making sleeve for Monster: Cinematographer, Russell Metty - who was one of Orson Welles' favorite cameramen. Metty worked with Welles on The Stranger (1946) and Touch of Evil (1958). His credits also include Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1954 & 1955); Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960); and Flower Drum Song (Koster, 1961). With such a great cameraman working at his side, Arnold is able to give the film many fine moments.

Moments after injection (Arthur Franz)

The best example of such a moment is the scene when Blake injects himself with "coelacanth plasma" in an attempt to record the transformation on tape and film. The physical transformation is smooth and creepy; and once transformed into a prehistoric man, Blake "awakes" lost and confused. The trip-rigged cameras he has placed around the room begin flashing at him, so he smashes them along with the tape recorder. Prehistoric Blake picks up an axe by the fireplace and handles it - clearly discovering tools (much like a similar moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey - Kubrick, 1968). The cleverest touch, though, is when Blake becomes frantic when he can't escape the room because he no longer understands what a door is. Finally, thinking a window is just a clear hole, he cuts himself when he puts his hand through the glass. Enraged, he uses his new tool to shatter the window frame and escape. Pretty cool.

The Good Stuff, Part II: Casting Call!

Monster would have been a much different movie, and a much less interesting one, without the fine casting. The players are:

Arthur Franz:
Arthur Franz had a boyishly handsome face and a killer smile (which he used very seldom). His gift as an actor was an ability to portray an intense inner life behind the clear façade, often haunted an obsessed (as here) - even tortured (see his superior performance in The Sniper - Dmytryk, 1952). His sharp, clear eyes held incredible focus when gazing inward, and the things he saw there made him twist into a knot of bitter self-loathing. In Monster, this uncompromising, puritanical introspection - this sense that he can never look away from what he has done - demands the ultimate punishment. Others, most notably writer Bill Warren in Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (McFarland, 2010); have argued that Blake's self-sacrifice at the end of Monster is cowardly. As a dedicated scientist he should have lived to become an object of scientific study; offering the world a glimpse into primal man. I don't agree. By the end of Monster, the scientist in Blake is no longer supreme or even important. He is instead a man unable to live with what he has done - a man unable to see himself become less. Perhaps a different man might have been able to offer his living body to the alter of science, but not Donald Blake - not Arthur Franz. Those burning eyes had stared inward, locked themselves upon a terrible judgment, and demanded death. He could not allow the man to live to save the scientist. A living sacrifice for science is far too subtle and nuanced a response for this rigid soul. One may as well expect glass to be cut with a sledgehammer.

No other fate is possible for this character, and no other actor from the era could have made the conclusion as believable as Arthur Franz.

Joanna Moore:
Prof. Blake certainly has it all going on. Not only is he clearly the young Turk of the University's staff (probably on the verge of tenure), he's engaged to the Dean's beautiful daughter. Moore's spectacular, natural sexuality as fiancée Madeline Howard seems a perfect fit against the ramrod straight scientist, and more than once she makes Blake forget himself and actually smile. Blake's infatuation with her is made clear in their first scene together: She is laying flat on a table under protective towels, her face covered. Blake is making a plaster cast of her face which will represent "modern woman" in a display of the steps of mankind's evolution. When Blake gently lifts off the cast, her beauty is luminous. "How'd it come out?" she asks, fluffing at her hair. "Oh, perfect," he answers.

Joanna Moore in Monster On the Campus

Heaven knows, atomic age sci-fi is rife with beautiful fiancées, stunning wives, and sexy lab assistants. Yet in Monster, Moore - probably because of her real chemistry with Arthur Franz - never seems a romantic contrivance, despite the fact that she isn't given a great deal to do. The scenes she has with Franz click just right. Moore's Madeline seems to find such genuine pleasure when clearing Blake's storm clouds.

"Unless man learns to control the instincts we've inherited from our ape-like ancestors, the race is doomed," says Blake a bit later, in one of his typical cheery sermons.

Madeline steps up to him, high heels clacking across the tile of the lab, and she wraps her arms around his shoulders. She lets her weight drape a bit as she grins up at him. "Why don't you learn to control your instincts," she says grinding her hips against his, "and stop being so pessimistic?"

He suddenly beams. "You know, you're right!" he says, smiling. You're goddmamned right she is, Donald. The two seem destined for a laboratory nooner, but the mood is broken by the delivery of the frozen coelacanth.

It is said that opposites attract. Personal experience suggests that opposites do indeed attract; but eventually wish to kill one another. Whatever may be true, these two opposites work fabulously as a pair and, by the end of the picture, Blake cannot live with the memory of harming Madeline - or that he might easily kill her. In fact once primal, Madeline is the only thing that Blake seems to recognize from his "civilized" life. Near the finale, Blake as beast is running wild across the hilly country of southern California and startles Madeline, who has been racing to his house in her convertible, so that she runs off the road. She is knocked unconscious and Blake, poised to kill her, stares at her instead. After a moment, he brushes her hair clumsily with his huge hand. Their relationship has been so well established by earlier scenes, the moment works. It is easy to imagine the memory of Moore piercing the bestial mind.

Joanna Moore was a Georgia girl; a beauty contest winner whose natural radiance was jettisoned into the exotic by a stunning pair of eyes - twin dark lamps in cream hinting at deep, carnal reserves. In this performance in 1958, her voice had a hint of smoker's husk wrapped up in a southern accent that could be heard at the fringes of sentences (she had worked hard to loose her Georgia palette). She was featured in a small, juicy part in Welles Touch of Evil (1958); but mostly appeared all over television in 1960s (most notably as Andy Taylor's love interest on the great The Andy Griffith Show - another match of opposites made in Heaven).

The bare details of Moore's life do not suggest a happy passage. Orphaned young, married and divorced young, spotted by a Universal scout at a Hollywood cocktail party young - all the light footprints of a youth over too quickly. Moore was very briefly and very loudly married to Ryan O'Neal in the mid-sixties, producing a daughter and son (Tatum and Griffin O'Neal). By 1970, Moore's drinking was prominent. By 1980, Moore was financially supported by her daughter. Her last decade was littered with DUI arrests. A heavy smoker, she died of lung cancer in 1997 - her daughter, Tatum, at her bedside.

These brief, gossipy facts do nothing to commemorate Moore, offering only a sort of Hollywood outline in neon. I include it here because it affords a real sense of wonder - a moment of reflection upon Moore's beautiful, celluloid phantom. In Monster, she moves with such perfect, sexual grace; her eyes and smile so full of an easy happiness. She places gloomy Blake in sunshine with her touch; with her voice and smile. With her ways. Moore's nearly tangible presence here makes it so easy to believe another biography was possible, even deserved.

Nearing the end - Donald and Madeline (Joanna Moore and Arthur Franz)

Troy Donahue:
It makes me feel wholesome just to watch Troy Donahue in Monster. With his cuffed jeans and sandy, blond hair - with his freckles and untroubled, Nordic handsomeness - Donahue was the perfect, blank American canvass.

He was tall, naturally, but modestly so at 6'3" - nothing ostentatious or overwhelming. His perfect, neat face friendly and completely free of cruelty, pettiness, or anything else that might suggest an unpleasant inner life. His smile radiated simple kindness and a confidence only those born beautiful can ever know. Why shouldn't a guy smile, after all? Occasionally, the smooth, open expression might reflect a girlfriend's unhappiness, or perhaps he may frown because his car won't start, but the clear, blue eyes gaze forever forward - never darkened by true melancholy or (snort) depression. At his worst - at his very, very worst - a Donahue character might go a bit sulky.

Watching Donahue as student assistant, Jimmy Flanders, is a profoundly comforting experience. His Jimmy seems a young man genetically designed to never lie or cheat, abuse a friendship, respond selfishly in an emergency; or hurt a girlfriend. It is absolutely no wonder that the very next year after his work in Monster, the actor was catapulted to stardom after appearing with Sandra Dee in Delmar Daves', A Summer Place.

His acting? Don't be so quick to judge. His acting, free of trouble, only enhances the aura of safety that surrounds him.

His voice is modulated - never nervous, never angry - never giving anything but a pleasant reading of words. He speaks with such a simple, pure lack of emotion a consistency emerges that might be called a style - one that projects a fine diet and plenty of fresh air. After watching a generation or two of shrill shouters (Pacino leaps first to mind), I find Donahue a simple pleasure. No, he can't act worth a damn, I suppose. But to my eyes, his hitting the mark looks far less silly that does the grandstanding bullshit of Nicholas Cage.

The Good Stuff, Part III: Brutal, plain and simple

This film isn't violent by today's . . . well, I guess there is no other word to use than "standards," yet the very concept of a standard for film violence isn't applicable in an age when an entire, wildly successful franchise (Saw) is based on scenes of torture porn. The next step, naturally, will be the mainstreaming of snuff films. After that? Hollywood investors are considering "reality cannibalism" filmed in a Manhattan apartment in hologram HD.

In Monster we see no severed limbs exposing the sliced-bone center and no teenage girls holding in their own entrails. In fact, there isn't any blood at all in Monster. Still, and despite these obvious drawbacks, Monster has a few jarring moments that obtain power because of Arnold's innate skill as a film maker.

In modern horror films, with their hyperkinetic editing, grinding soundtracks, and "gritty" hyper-realistic cinematography; an audience is predisposed to grotesque acts of graphic violence. The glut of action or slasher/horror movies today are only ugly vehicles carrying ugly cargo. We, the audience, are assaulted long before the violence happens, thus the potency of the actual moments of violence is lost - as is all tension. By trying so hard, these movies have lost us - left us with only those shit kids sitting in the row in front of us, giggling at the carnage. (a grand exception to this trend would be Sam Raimi's 2009 effort, Drag Me To Hell; which - due to Raimi's love of "traditional" film making - is full of tension and actual horror).

The hanging (far right: Judson Pratt, Arthur Franz, and Joanna Moore

By contrast, Monster works a placid, ivy-league context as a framework. The music is lilting, young men wave happily from frat-house porches, and Troy Donahue loves to take his pretty girlfriend for walks on campus, arm in arm. The students all look virginal - clean and safe in an atomic-age, well-groomed youth. Even the young lady we see dead, hung by her hair from a tree limb, has on a beautiful dress and perfectly done makeup.

We see her first dangling in the background of a nighttime scene, a slightly bloated, white doll. Her dress is only a little bit torn; and her bouffant hair style only tussled where the campus monster has wrapped it around a limb, suspending her in the air like a cocoon. Her eyes stare. The cops have to push her up by the armpits to untwine her hair. When we first see her, a luminescent corpse hung in moonlight, it is a jolt. A blessed, enjoyable jolt.

Sure, this was Jack Arnold's least favorite Jack Arnold movie. But don't take his word for it. After all, Arnold himself admitted he was his own worst critic (as are most artists). See it for yourself, and don't forget the butter for the popcorn.

****

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Ten Dead Men

Zombies of Mora Tau (1957)
Directed by Edward L. Cahn
Starring:
Gregg Palmer as Jeff Clark
Allison Hayes as Mona Harrison
Autumn Russell as Jan Peters
Joel Ashley as George Harrison
Marjorie Eaton as Grandma Peters

The zombie evolution in movie history is a lurching march of ever increasing levels of physical corruption and widening areas of infestation.

In the first zombie movies, beginning with White Zombie (Helperin, 1932) and continuing through early genre entries like King of the Zombies (Yarbrough, 1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943), the walking dead are small in number and of the "traditional" zombie classification; i.e., corpses that have been revived for the purposes of control by an overseer - often a wizard or sorcerer gifted with supernatural powers. The zombies in these early films move as though in a trance, are completely absent of souls or individual will, and display no bodily corruption beyond the pre-existing conditions of their death. They appear lifeless, with coal-darkened eye sockets, a bloodless luminescence or chalkiness, and perhaps milky irises.

Zombie of Mora Tau

The most significant evolutionary step came with Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968); which introduced the concept of a zombie apocalypse. In Night, the undead rose not at the bidding of a mastermind, but as the result of atomic radiation from a fallen satellite. Also, Night introduced the zombie as cannibalistic carnivore and the exponential growth of a zombie population through an infectious bite.

The final, significant development in the zombie ladder of evolution came with one hell of a double whammy: Dawn of the Dead (Romero, 1978) and, more importantly, Zombi II (Fulci, 1979). Both these films featured zombies with profound levels of corporal decay absent from previous movies. Most evident in Fulci's work, zombies decay rapidly as would a corpse exposed to the elements. This trend of physical degeneration has continued to the current day without changing significantly beyond Fulci's maggot-crawling putrefaction. Zombie movies have progressed along the same gore-filled line as have horror films: Splatter has replaced atmosphere. Filmmakers strive for a sense of visceral repulsion, even nausea, which has become the new "scary."

Interesting also is the burgeoning popularity of the zombie genre. After the milestone, White Zombie (still my favorite zombie picture), appeared in 1932, the next ten years saw approximately 19 international films in which zombies, or the undead, played a crucial element. To appreciate the intense appeal of the zombie mythos, one need only compare these humble beginnings to the output in 2010, wherein movie lovers enjoyed the release of over 100 zombie-themed movies within a single year.*

Zombies of Mura Tau falls in the late first cycle of zombie movies and, true to form, the zombies are shambling, inexpressive hulks exhibiting no body rot despite having been dead for many years. Yet, with Mora Tau, one can sense changes in zombie evolution that would be ushered in more fully after Night of the Living Dead. That is, the dead of Mura Tau rise and are driven not by the bidding of an individual or mastermind. In fact, this is the first zombie picture where the zombies have a collective will of their own, separate from a living man or sorcerer. The back story of the zombies of Mora Tau goes like this:

The Susan B., a 19th century trading vessel, took harbor along a forsaken stretch of African coastline looking for supplies. While in port, the sailors discovered a lost temple in the nearby jungle, and within this temple they discovered a golden cask full of uncut diamonds. The sailors stole the diamonds and a ferocious fight broke out among the men over possession of the cask. Ten men were killed and left dead in the jungle - the ship's captain among them. The remaining sailors returned to the ship with the cask. Before the ship left port, however, the ten dead men, re-animated by a temple curse, returned to the ship as the undead, slaughtered the crew, and scuttled the ship in the bay. These ten zombies were then cursed to guard the cask of diamonds from all thieves and fortune hunters for all eternity.

Our story begins a generation later. We find the widowed wife of Captain Jeremy Peters, late of the Susan B., living in an estate on the African coast where her husband's ship sank. The captain's widow (Marjorie Eaton) has been living in Africa since the turn of the century after hearing native rumors of her dead husband being seen roaming the jungle. Over the years, Mrs. Peters has learned of the temple curse and of her husband's walking death. The old woman lives by herself, still dresses in mourning black, and waits for the opportunity to somehow release her sea-bound, undead husband from his terrible zombie curse.

Into this somber, dank setting come two factions. The first is the arrival of Jan Peters (Autumn Russell), granddaughter of the Mora Tau matriarch, returning home to Africa to visit her grandmother. The second is a ship full of fortune hunters led by George Harrison (Joel Ashley), who has heard the legend of the Susan B. and wants to salvage the diamonds from the scuttled wreck. Harrison has assembled a team who have come with him to Africa, the principals being his avarice, curvaceous wife, Mona (Allison Hayes); professional, square-jawed diver, Jeff Clark (Gregg Palmer); and writer/historian, Dr. Jonathan Eggert (Morris Ankrum) - who is writing a book on the legend of the Susan B. This crew has by pre-arrangement contracted the use of Grandma Peters house as a base of operations for their off-shore treasure hunting.

The movie begins with the youthful, terribly blonde and wide-eyed granddaughter, Jan Peters, being driven to her grandmother's estate through the back roads of the "dark continent" by family retainer and chauffer, Sam (Gene Roth).

"It's a good thing Africa hasn't completely changed," says Jan, peering out at the thick jungle passing by her window. "I was afraid after ten years you'd be driving me home on a superhighway."

"Not much has changed in this part of Africa, Miss Jan," replies Sam, keeping his world-weary eyes on the road. "Not in ten years. Not in fifty years."

Suddenly a large man, shabbily dressed and covered in seaweed, steps out of the jungle and stands in the road before them, blocking their way. Sam sets his jaw and, instead of swerving, gives it some gas. We hear a soft thump and see the car's occupants jostle.

"Sam!" squeals Jan, "Stop! You hit a man!"

"It wasn't a man," says Sam. "It was one of them."

Jan coming home. (Marjorie Eaton, Autumn Russell, and Gene Roth)

After arriving at the estate, Jan is a naturally a bit Jittery. She explains to her grandmother that they've hit a man, maybe killed him. Sam quickly explains that the "man" was covered in seaweed, that he had moved to stop the car. Grandma Peters simply nods her head, listening to Sam. Finally, she tells her granddaughter that there was no one in the road, that she should just go inside and freshen up. In response, Jan's face goes still. "So you still believe in this Voodoo," she says. "I thought it was all a nightmare from my childhood. I thought everything would be different."

Grandma Peters says calmly, "Later on, Jan, you can decide for yourself."

Meanwhile, offshore, the ship of treasure hunters is about to run into their own problems. As the men aboard the trawler prepare for their first crack at the Susan B., we are introduced to the crew, primarily Mona Harrison, wife of ship captain, George. Mona is busy slinking around an interior cabin in a very tight sweater with the primary men of the venture, sharing drinks and sizing them up by how each plans to spend his share of the diamonds. "Oh, now that's real romantic," she chides Jeff, the diver, her voice shedding layers of sarcasm, after he says he plans to put his money in the bank. She all but pastes herself against him as she speaks, ostensibly to give him a kiss for luck, and gazes up at him with naked lust.

"Your listing to port, Mona," says Jeff. "Your husband's the one over there."

"Oh, can't you take a friendly, little kiss without trying to make something out of it?" snarls George of the sinister, black mustache (George's ego and bluster is so huge, he clearly can't be seen admitting his wife would tear the clothes off Jeff - the hired help - with her teeth if given half a chance).

Jeff gives a shrug of his shoulders, sets his drink down, and squares himself; but before he can move in with manly authority, Mona closes the space like a leopard and locks him in a kiss that sucks the oxygen out of the cabin. George does a slow burn, but still can't comment without looking even more the fool.

"How about me, Mona?" says tall, avuncular Dr. Eggert, forgetting for the moment the rewards of academia. "Don't I get a kiss, too?"

"Listing to port." (Morris Ankrum, Gregg Palmer, Allison Hayes, and Joel Ashley)

"You don't get a share of the diamonds, doctor," says Mona, making things clear.

"But had I known what went with them," counters the doctor, "I would have insisted on a share." Mona gives him a look of carnal reconsideration for this bit of classy smart-assiness, which actually makes the doctor shift his feet around, realizing his wit has written a check he hasn't the resources to cash.

The sexual fencing comes to grinding halt after everyone gathers on deck for the lowering of the launch. As the boat is lowered down to the water line, we see a man (clearly one of them) swimming lazily around in the water, waiting. He lunges up out of the water and grabs a sailor over the rail of the launch. The swabby barely has a second to yelp before he is dragged under the waves. Hearing their comrade's cry for help, all come rushing to the rail. George pulls a revolver and fires two shots into the attacker. "I got him!" hollers George. "Both times!" The shots have no effect, however, and the two vanish below. A few moments later, the sailor bobs to the surface.

As they haul the sailor out of the drink, they discover he is dead from a broken neck. After some hectic discussion, they decide to take him to shore.

Back on shore, Grandma Peters has heard the shots and gone down to the water's edge with one of her many massive dogs. She stands looking out over the water, her dog barking nervously. Inside the house, Jan is preparing for bed when she hears the dog barking. She goes to the window and sees her grandmother. Jan stares into the dark, struggling to see, and realizes suddenly that her grandmother has been joined by another man near the shore in the gloaming. Jane sees her grandmother wave her cane at him, the gesture more a communication than threat; and he walks passed her, moving along the shoreline quickly. It's hard to tell in the dark, but he appears to walk right off into the water.

Jan rushes outside to the water's edge. "Who was it?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," says grandma. "You didn't learn such things in school." Jan, who will remain for most of the film in a wide-eyed state of disbelief and confusion, remarks that it looked like a man, and that he seemed to walk right off into the water.

Grandma Peters speaks while gazing out over the bay. "He came down to watch the ship arrive. I didn't expect them so soon. But after what happened to you on the road, I knew they'd be here tonight."

Right on cue the launch putters to shore, bearing the corpse of the dead sailor and a somewhat haggard bunch of fortune seekers. Dr. Eggert makes the introductions (it is clear that it was the doctor who has made the arrangements to stay at the Peters' home), and it is quickly understood that contacting the police over the murder of the sailor would be useless. There really are no police in Mora Tau, and any sort of law enforcement is days away. Grandma Peters insists that they bury the dead sailor promptly (her urgency suggests that the sailor may return to life, or be somehow turned into a zombie, but this is never made clear). Grandma Peters can't offer anything as fancy as a coffin, cut she can have Sam sew him up in some sailcloth. Jeff, showing sound reasoning, says "Well, he's dead. We may as well bury him. If the police want to dig him up later, that's their concern."

Next, grandma leads the principals to the house via a trail snaking down a hill through the edge of the Peters' estate graveyard. As they enter the yard, waving their lanterns around in the pitch darkness, they see a surprising number of graves, all arranged in neat groups marked by year in ascending order. These are the graves - the many graves - of past diamond hunting hopefuls. Grandma raises her voice like a tour guide and waves a cane at the first collection of markers:

"These are the graves of the first group that came after the diamonds. That was in 1906. They were British." And so it goes, with our troop marching in a line behind the matriarch, gazing around with increasing fear: "This was a German expedition in 1914. Just before the outbreak of war" Again the cane makes a pass. "Another British group tried their luck in 1923. Portuguese in 1928."

The Graveyard Tour - "This was the German expedition in 1914."

"What I want to know," says Jeff. "Is how did they die?"

Grandma turns to look at him, says nothing, and continues. She leads them to the final collection of markers and says, as if in answer, "The first Americans showed up ten years later in 1938."

The grim procession move through a bit of jungle into another, smaller part of the graveyard. Here they look down and see several freshly dug and open graves. "Yours is the sixth attempt to recover the diamonds," says grandma, hobbling along slowly.

Who's graves are these?" asks the blustering George.

"The first is for your dead sailor," says grandma, turning to face him.

After a pause, Jeff smirks grimly "And the others are for the rest of us."

"She's trying to scare us!" snaps George (who wears a silly captains hat as though clinging like a child to a rapidly deteriorating authority). "She wants the diamonds for herself!"

Grandma looks at George for a split second too long. She locks his eyes to hers. "I have learned that no one who comes for the diamonds can be frightened away."

Gratefully, the tension of this brutal tour (the elder Mrs. Peters need not submit her name this year for the annual Mora Tau Hospitality Award) is broken by a rustling as Mona screams behind them. She has slipped in her high heels and tumbled straight into a grave (and yes, this is foreshadowing). She claws frantically at the sides of the hole, screeching all the while, until the men pull her out. "That grave," she gasps cradled like a child in her husband's arms, "It's for me, I know it!" She faints, and the party moves into the estate house to put her into bed.

Once ensconced in the Peters' home, the film meanders a bit between scenes of the crew diving for the cask of diamonds and the principals fighting off zombie attacks at the home (unlike later films, the zombies in Mora Tau don't come in waves but as single emissaries). Mona is eventually captured by the zombies and turned into one of them; and Jeff, George, and Dr. Eggert track the ten dead men to a crypt on the cemetery grounds (The ten men of the temple curse rest somnambulant in their coffins, all in neat rows inside the crypt, until the call of the diamonds animates them to action). They manage to rescue Mona - or the dead thing that looks like Mona - from the zombie nest and return her to the home.

The moment they walk into the house, leading Mona as though she were sleepwalking, Mrs. Peters demonstrates her usual tact: "She's dead," says the old woman, her voice like an ax hitting the block.

Miraculously, George refuses to believe in this voodoo nonsense despite the fact that during the recent rescue of Mona, he and the others have just witnessed the ten men rise from their coffins. Grandma Peters refuses at first to keep Mona in the house but is persuaded by her daughter, Jan, to let her take a bedroom so she might "recover." That night, naturally, the undead Mona - having adapted the curse of the temple diamonds once zombified - goes on a knife-wielding rampage, killing one of the crewmen in his sleep (the calm, methodical way she sinks her knife into the man's sleeping body has a nice, creepy jolt). After disarming her, the principal players walk Mona back to her bed. As a precaution, Grandma Peters surrounds her bed with candles to keep her bed bound (The zombies of Mora Tau fear only fire).

Crewmen - late of the trading vessel, Susan B.

Finally, Jeff and George, diving as a team, manage to retrieve the diamonds; but by this time their always tenuous partnership completely dissolves and George steals the golden cask at gunpoint. Still imagining he might cure his wife, George leads undead Mona from the house and down to a waiting launch with the golden cask, and Mona follows the cask with the slow steps an automaton. Once they reach the shore, the ten zombies appear from the jungle nearby and begin to advance. While George frantically works at untying the launch, undead Mona (with the same, smooth ease she had knifed the sailor in his bed earlier), lifts the heavy cask off the ground and fractures his skull. Thunk! Mona carries the cask to her Zombie men, and they all melt back into the jungle (Hmmm. Mona and the Zombie Men. The imagination reels).

Meanwhile, we learn that Jeff has done a bait and switch. George was given an empty cask - Jeff still has the diamonds in a pouch, which he jiggles before the small group back at the house, grinning broadly. He wants to get them all to safety, whisk Jan away to New York; where they can live happily forever after on the riches provided by the diamonds.

Grandma Peters argues that the zombies will never stop following them. They will follow them to New York or anywhere else they may take the diamonds (Now that's a sequel I'd buy a ticket for! Jeff and Jan with a pocket full of diamonds, hunted through the streets of New York by a band of ten waterlogged zombies! I'm in!). The curse of the dead men, explains grandma Peters, is that they must follow the stolen diamonds wherever they go - for all eternity . The undead men can only find peace (and here's the beauty part of the curse) when someone of their own free will gives the precious diamonds away, scattering them to the sea, so no one may ever steal them again. This is the salvation for her husband, Captain Jeremy Peters, that the old woman has spent her lifetime waiting for.

Jeff is not persuaded. I'll sell the diamonds all over the city, he argues. They'll be scattered all over the world. What will the zombies do? Canvas every jewelry store on Fifth Avenue? (again - another great scene for the sequel). Grandma Peters refuses to leave, but Jeff tells her bluntly that he will carry her to the launch if he has to. She believes him, and all rush to the shore.

Just as they are ready to push the small boat into the bay, a single zombie appears. He seems particularly wan and haggard, covered in seaweed and wearing a captain's uniform. He stands near the shore and stares at the launch - in particular, at Grandma Peters.

Grandma Peters eyes glimmer in recognition, and she begins to cry. Her voice is cracked and weak. "Captain Peters. Must you go on?" She sits in the launch, completely defeated, her head bowed.

The three others look at one another, listening to the sobs of the old woman. Clearly, this was her final opportunity to see her husband released from his dreadful curse, and she has failed. Finally, and without a word, we watch Jeff surrender to his better nature. His shoulders slump. "All right," he says. He holds out the diamonds, gives them a shake so they rattle. The old woman is so grief torn, she doesn't understand. "Take them," says Jeff. "The diamonds, Mrs. Peters. They're yours. Do what your want with them." By his voice, one can tell Jeff is a bit disgusted with himself for his generosity - even a bit impatient with her slow understanding.

Grandma Peters can't believe it, and she is barely able to speak words of thanks, her voice a thin squeak. She takes the diamonds, carefully measures them from the pouch into her hand, and lets handful after handful of diamonds drop into the water. She is sobbing a kind of whimpering keen. After the last of the diamonds has been returned to the sea, she faces the cursed thing that was once her husband. "At long last," she says. "Jeremy Peters. At long last." Staring at her for just a moment longer, the corporal body of the captain vanishes, and his uniform drops to the ground.

"Captain Peters. Must you go on?"

While Grandma Peters sobs in bliss, Jeff grumbles, "I'll probably never be rich again." He manages a smile and, after gazing at him for a moment, Jan clasps his face and kisses him passionately (The number of B-movies that end with this sort of embrace are legion. This one works particularly well largely because Jeff's "conversion" to good guy seems more a momentary flash of grudging sentiment than lasting, soul salvation - and thus it seems much less cornball). As their kiss deepens, the violins soar and we fade to black.

It's high time to discuss the Good Stuff:

The Good Stuff, Part I: Lightening Flashes From the Middle

Yep, the middle part of this picture becomes a bit static, like an engine revving over and over before it catches; but do keep your eyes open. There are moments that reward. For example, the scene where the principals confront the dead men in their zombie lair is particularly effective, with the ten cursed sailors rising form their coffins like luminous grubworms rising in moonlight. In another scene, a zombie attacks Mona and Jan in the girl's bedroom, advancing on them as they scream. His face is grim and pale, yet somehow imbued with a kind a frantic obsession. Overall, I found the zombies very subtly and effectively handled by director Edward Cahn and his cinematographer, Benjamin Kline. The zombies in many modern films move with the swiftness of jungle cats, snarl and growl like demented dogs, and (of course) drip maggots and teeth. A modern zombie attack is more like a swift, horrible siege whereas the zombies of Mora Tau move with an eternal, unrelenting, unstoppable plodding. One may come tonight. One may come in twenty years. But they will come. Some still night, you will hear a rustling. A siege one may survive. A curse lasts forever.

The Good Stuff, Part II: Bernard Gordon By Any Other Name

The script comes courtesy of Bernard Gordon, working here as Raymond T. Marcus. Gordon often worked during the 1950s, when he could, under an alias. He was a member of he Communist Party and had been blacklisted in 1954 by the dreaded HUAC (House Un American Activities Committee). Producer of Mora Tau, Sam Katzman, made a steady practice of hiring blacklisted talent, often seeking these professionally ruined artists out to offer work under an alias. Katzman used Gordon several times during the writer's exile, with such B-productions as Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (Sears, 1956) and The Man Who Turned to Stone (Kardos, 1957). Never lacking a pair of brass nuts, Katzman considered nothing but the quality of an artist's work or, to look at it another way, what an individual could offer him. For Katzman, employing blacklisted commies (or reputed commies) was a win-win situation: First, it was an opportunity to extend a fat, happy "fuck you" to the HUAC which, by all accounts, gave Katzman no end of pleasure. Second, the blacklist afforded the producer a golden window to pick up some first rate scripts, from some first rate writers, at fire-sale prices. All in all, a pretty sweet setup for all concerned.

Consider the following bit of script from the Gordon typewriter:

Early in the picture, Jan pleads with Jeff to leave, to give up the search for the diamonds, before others are killed. The risks, she says, are just not worth it.

Jeff: "Oh, yes it is. If those diamonds are worth half what they're cracked up to be, my share may come to a million dollars. That's a lot of loot."

Jan: "What is it worth if your dead?"

Jeff: He laughs. "Look, Ms. Peters, I may be a dumb diver, but I got an A in arithmetic at PS 81. That's in New York. And this is the way it figures: Usually as a diver I make one hundred bucks a day, and if I'm lucky I work three days out of every week. That's fifteen grand a year. You know how many years I'd have to work to make a million? Sixty seven years."

Jan: She stares at him flatly. "You better go back to school and learn how much sixty years of life is worth; or fifty or twenty - or even ten."

Good stuff from Mr. Gordon. Solid as a rock, even if he was a commie bastard.

The Good Stuff, Part III: Allison Hayes and Others

Director Edward Cahn gets some good, or at the very least committed, stuff from this troop of actors - something the director was known for during his long and nearly forgotten career (Creature With the Atom Brain, 1955; and The She-Creature, 1956; being my Cahn favorites). Here, old pros Morris Ankrum (who always played a doctor, scientist, or military figure) is on hand as Dr. Eggert; as well as one of my favorite B-movie character actors, Gene Roth (He played the sheriff in Attack of the Giant Leeches - Bernard Kowalski 1959). Particularly good as well is Marjorie Eaton, who pulls out all the stops as the weathered-by-hopes matriarch, Grandma Peters.

Mona - On deck (Allison Hayes)

And finally, the B-movie legend, Allison Hayes (Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Juran, 1958) contributes her presence. She is very good in Mora Tau, dominating every scene she gets close to. Hayes was such a big personality, her terrific body and terrific personality eating up the 1950s B-scene; that I would kill for an authoritative biography. The actress, who died in 1977, appears to have been universally liked by all who remember her.

Once, during one of director Roger Corman's infamously grueling and often hazardous shooting schedules (Gunslinger, 1956), Hayes, soaking wet and cold from working in rain and mud, turned to Corman and said "Tell me, Roger. Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?"** Corman laughed out loud. Suffice to say, if I had my time machine, first stop would be Hollywood circa 1954 just so I could ask Hayes for her phone number. My guess is that her response, whichever way it went, would be worth the trip.

* Zombie Movie Data-Base (www.zmdb.org)
** Corman, Roger. How I made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost A Dime. New York: Random House, 1990

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When They Come, They Will Look Like Us

The Brain Eaters (1958)
Directed by Bruno Ve Sota
Starring:
Ed Nelson as Dr. Paul Kettering
Alan Jay Factor as Glenn Cameron
Cornelius Keefe as Senator Walter K. Powers
Joanne Lee as Alice Summers
Robert Ball as Dan Walker

"It may not show on the outside," says Dr. Paul Kettering (Ed Nelson) in Bruno Ve Sota's, The Brain Eaters, discussing the growing number of alien possessions that threaten the quiet town of Riverdale, Illinois. "A victim may act normally."

This theme wherein an alien invasion will come via possession of our friends and neighbors, who will appear friendly and known to us, was a popular one for movie makers during the atomic age. Several of the great movies from the 1950s utilized this theme to potent effect; among them Invaders From Mars (1953), I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958); and most famously, Invasion of the body snatchers (1956). In the paranoid world of these films, those that appear "normal" and friendly - even family members that we have loved and known all our lives - could possibly be possessed by an alien hostility. They may smile at us with their familiar faces, but they will no longer be themselves. And they will want to assimilate us - kill us - and control or remove our souls and minds, using only our familiar bodies as host. They want to make us one of them.

First sight of the "aliens"

Unlike these classics, The Brain Eaters is not a great film, or even a very good one if the viewer insists on going all film-school on its ass. It does have solid pleasures, however, for those with antennas tuned to the B-movie wavelength (No. This does not mean that the movie falls into the horrid, college-frat-house category "its so bad it's good." This is more like "It has some fine surprises amid the dross worth loving," which is the true attraction of the B-movie). The Brain Eaters feels just like the bottom half of a drive-in double feature, which only increases interest for the chosen.

The film opens with narration: "A few weeks ago Riverdale, Illinois was just another quiet, small town. Then on a Saturday shortly before midnight, a living nightmare began." We see a man shambling slowly along a deserted late night street, his shadow moving across the darkened glass of storefronts. His footsteps tap a hollow sound on the pavement. Another man, younger - moving along quickly and holding a glowing sphere wrapped in a towel cuddled against his chest, collides with the first man. The lighted container is dropped, shattering on the pavement. Instantly, the younger man attacks the other, pushes him against a wall. He throttles him violently. The camera moves to the legs as we see the spilled contents of the jar - a black, viscous sludge that appears smeared across the sidewalk like the slime trail made by a slug. We hear a hissing, slithering sound as something not quite seen moves along the shadows of the building; and we hear the sound of quiet, desperate retching. We watch the shadows of the men's legs now, with the older man's feet do a skittering tap dance as he is strangled to death. Cue music, Fade to black, roll title credits.

After the credits roll, we find the narrator, Glenn Cameron (Alan Jay Factor), tooling along a country road with his fiancé, Elaine (Jody Fair). "All was right with the world," he tells us via his voice narration. They are returning to town after a weekend getaway wherein they have decided to get hitched, and are rushing back to tell Cameron's father, the town mayor, the good news. Suddenly, a blinding flash of light and nearby explosion drives them off the road. The couple wander into to the woods to investigate. As they step into a clearing, their determined march becomes a slow, cautious placement of steps - as though they were making their way through a mine field: The clearing is littered with dead, feral dogs; their bodies looking slightly mangled. Cameron goes from one dog to the next, finally kneeling by one. "All of them," says Cameron. "Dead."

They press on, pushing through the brush toward the light, the sight of a field of dead dogs having only heightened their curiosity (the newly engaged are so blind to danger). In the next clearing, they both become stock still and look up into the source of the light. They move together. Alice puts her hand on Cameron's shoulder.

They stand bathed in light, staring up as so many couple have done through the canon of atomic age sci-fi, and then we see what they see. It is something clearly alien: a large cone perhaps four or five stories high - an ascension of spirals narrowing to a point (one is reminded of the interior staircases of the Guggenheim museum). "What is it?" asks Alice, sounding profoundly stupid. Glenn, coming from a more gallant age, tells her kindly that he doesn't know ("How the fuck should I know?" seems a more modern response, in keeping with our savage times).

After the couple report the cone, Hell begins a popping. In Washington, a committee is hastily convened, resolved to keep public knowledge of the cone under wraps until it can be determined exactly what the hell it is. Spearheading "Project Damper" is chief scientist, Dr. Paul Kettering (Ed Nelson). He quickly builds a scaffolding around the cone. Senator Walter K. Powers (Cornelius Keefe), a blustering demagogue with a massive, irritating overbite, is sent to Riverdale. His mission: insure that all reports coming from Dr. Kettering serve to completely debunk any theory of the cone as alien spaceship, and to make sure the debunking happens quickly. The citizens of Riverdale have already begun talking about seeing flying saucers, etc. Fearing a panic, Senator Powers tucks his coat under his arm and heads off for Riverdale with his personal assistant, Dan Walker (Robert Ball). "We're heading to the little town of Riverdale," says the right senator. "I'm going to poke so many holes in that space ship fairy tale, the lid will be off in twenty-four hours!"

Ed Nelson as Dr. Paul Kettering

Once in Riverdale, the senator finds the hole poking to be very hard going. Powers is met at the airport by Glenn Cameron. The senator wants to know why the mayor isn't there to greet him. Cameron explains that his father, the mayor, has gone missing - and that there have been some other "disturbing developments," such as three local murders that have gone unexplained.

The senator rushes to the cone site and, without permission, he and his aide scale the scaffolding around the structure and join chief scientist, Kettering, and his associate, Dr. Wyler (David Hughes) near a small hatch or entrance. Powers immediately begins bullying Kettering for "action." Dr. Kettering, who naturally smokes a pipe (this was always a sure sign of a serious yet thoughtful intellect in 50s sci-fi), listens to the politician's puffed-up bluster for a moment, then explains that as of yet it's been impossible to determine very much at all about the structure. Its material is of an unknown metal and completely indestructible. Without knowing what the basic material of the ship is (goes Kettering's reasoning) it is impossible to draw any conclusions as to the structure's purpose.

"Look at this," says Kettering, pulling a revolver from a holster hanging on a scaffolding rail. Proving he's no slave to strict, scientific method; Dr. Kettering fires a shot straight into the small portal, then pushes everyone away from the entrance. We hear the bullet zinging and zanging inside the ship, buzzing and ricocheting around, then it shoots back out the portal.

"What's it mean?" asks the senator. "It's cyclic," answers Dr. Wyler, which elicits a blank look from the politician. Dr. Kettering explains as though quoting ancient wisdom: "The point of origin becomes the point of return."

"I can do without the double talk," snaps Powers. Hmmm.

The senator then harasses and berates both Drs. Kettering and Wyler for being "science boys" too wrapped up in their test tubes and theories to see the obvious; and it's high old time that someone go into the space ship and see what's what. One would imagine Kettering had proven his no-nonsense credentials when blasting into the ship's entrance with a .44, and what exactly "the obvious" is in this case isn't explained; nonetheless - Kettering rises to the bait. He straps the revolver into his Sam Brown belt and holster and crawls into the ship, braving the chance that if there are any living aliens left inside the craft after his .44 caliber exploration, they might be pre-disposed to a hostile response.

The doctor crawls back out hours later, his hair a mess and sweating. The cone is nothing but a series of tunnels, he declares, "Like a toy railroad train, spiraling up and down, over and over again." "Well, the thing has some purpose," declares Senator Powers. "What's it for?" "I don't know," says Kettering. Well, shit.

With the movie's foundation thus set, the film gather's speed quickly. After Kettering crawls out of the ship, the team receives a phone call: The mayor has finally returned to his office.

As the team travels back to town, we find the mayor (Orville Sherman) in a terrible state. He sits at his desk in his office, shaking and sweating, apparently in the throes of a suicidal anxiety. As though working against some invisible force, he pulls a pistol from a top desk drawer and tries to force it against his temple. "Oh, leave me alone," he pleads. He is unable to hold it to his head but for a second or so, then yields as though to a greater power, returning the pistol to the drawer.

Powers, Kettering, and the rest of the team file into the mayor's office. "Dad," says Cameron, "We've been so worried." The mayor sits behind his desk, staring at them like a bullfrog caught in a gigging light. His behavior becomes increasingly strange, particularly after Dr. Kettering observes a large growth or bulge on the back of his neck. Finally the mayor pulls a pistol, threatens everyone, and finally pistol-whips his own son. Kettering gives the back of the mayor's neck a karate chop, making him scream in pain. The mayor pulls off a couple of shots in a kind of spasm, then is gunned down in a hail of fire from the sheriff (Greigh Phillips) and one of his deputies.

After an autopsy of the mayor's body, we learn that a large parasite had attached itself to the mayor's brain by two, long antennae/fangs thrust through the base of the neck. When Kettering gave the mayor's neck the chop, he had inadvertently forced the parasite to withdraw its fangs. The examining doctor also explains that once the parasite had left the host, it had injected the mayor's spinal column with acid, which would have killed the mayor in short order anyway (although surely not as quickly as the five or six rounds the sheriff and company pumped into him). In short, once the parasite attaches itself, it is tantamount to a death sentence for the host.

Conducting his own autopsy of the still living parasite, Kettering notices that the creature is difficult to kill. He cuts a piece of it off. "It has the reflex actions of a snake," he explains to his (naturally) attractive lab assistant, Alice Summers (Joanne Lee). "Cut a snake in half, the two pieces go off in different directions." Kettering pauses a moment to puff his pipe and flirt with Alice, and a piece of the parasite attaches itself to his forearm. He screams horribly, finally burning it off with a Bunsen burner.

After a scene or two of the senator blustering and the team bumbling around the "restricted cone area," Kettering concludes that the parasites have emanated from the cone spaceship. He surmises as well that they had first inhabited the field of dead dogs, but quickly realized that humans were the highest life form on the planet. In the meanwhile, we have seen scenes were zombie-like citizens, carrying around the glowing spheres scene in the introduction. These zombies are in fact infected hosts, spreading the alien, parasitic takeover of the town. We see one parasite, looking like a large, furry amoeba; being lifted from a sphere like a handful of stringy gelatin.

". . . A victim may act normally."

The parasites, it is discovered, are not very mobile and need to be transported in fishbowls (the glowing glass balls ) where they can be placed within striking distance of a host. Eventually, nearly the entire town is taken over, including the sheriff and his men, the telephone and telegraph operators, etc. In effect, Kettering, Powers, and our small core of principals become trapped in the town as the aliens close in around them. Finally, even the beautiful lab assistant, Alice, is taken over in her sleep and joins the others in a trance walk (like nearly all alien possession in 50s sci-fi, the alien hosts adapt a flat affect, or at least an unhappy skewing of emotion. The exception to this is the great I Married A Monster From Outer Space, wherein the aliens quickly learn to enjoy the staggering, new range of human emotion available to them in their new sweating, pulsing, lustful host bodies).

Nearly deranged by the abduction of his sexy lab assistant and possible love interest, Dr. Kettering goes back to the cone site with renewed passion. There he and his team discover a dying old man who has apparently crawled out of the cone. The man is Professor Helsingman (Soul Bronson), a long lost scientist who went missing years ago, along with his team of explorers.

Helsingman, who exhibits the two fang punctures of all parasite victims, is rushed to the hospital, Before he dies, he manages to say a single word: "Carboniferous" - as in Carboniferous Age; Kettering understands from this that the cone comes from deep within the Earth, and is not extraterrestrial in origin. the cone, then, is a ship of sorts, but one that his drilled to the surface of the planet from deep within. The parasites, therefore, are not aliens, but are rather some sort of ancient Earth life, risen to claim the surface as their own. Armed with this new facts, Kettering decides to reenter the ship.

Kettering and crew are forced to engage in a wild shootout with the sheriff and his deputies (now parasite drones) as they begin to enter the cone. Miraculously, the science geeks win going away (for a team of bookish, science nerds, Kettering's team is amazingly capable with firearms. Not only does Kettering pull a weapon from his jacket like Wyatt Earp, so does Dr. Wyler and Glenn Cameron. All blast away like untouchables, shooting parasite men off scaffolding - standing their ground as growling parasite zombies charge, etc.).

After the gunfight, Kettering reenters the ship, which now can be seen to resemble a long cone-shaped drill, and discovers inside a very old, bearded man cloaked in wisp-like fog, whom he recognizes as one Professor Cole (a nearly un-seeable Leonard Nimoy - hired for his beautifully deep voice), once a prominent scientist and a member of the scientific team thought lost. He announces that he is helping the parasites take over the earth. Kettering pleads with the Professor to return to the light of humanity. "I was once Professor Cole," says the old man, standing in the mist. "I now hold a much higher order.Leaving Professor Cole to his ramblings of higher orders and world domination, Kettering decides upon a final solution, a kind of scorched-earth policy featuring a rigged electrocution by overhead high-tension wires. Kettering has commandeered an electric company, air-powered "harpoon gun" used for shooting cable over trees and rises. He plans to shoot a conducting wire over the high-tension lines, then allow the two ends of the now-electrified wire to drape over the cone - in effect, plugging the ship into the massive electrical output of the nearby power plant.

Dr. Kettering on the scaffolding

Just before pulling the lateral and preverbal trigger on his plan, Kettering sees Alice standing high up in the scaffolding, still dressed in her flimsy nightgown (she was brain-linked by a parasite while sleeping in her bed). She calls to him, urging him to come to her.

Kettering hands the cable-shooting rifle to Cameron and rushes to the scaffolding. Shot against the arc lights of the skeletal scaffolding, we watch Kettering climb up and onto the planks near the entrance. Alice, her thin negligee whirling around her - backlit by the bright lights, snarls at Kettering. Her face now distorted with hatred, she pulls a revolver from somewhere and shoots Kettering, who clutches his belly then rushes to Alice with his dying efforts. She screams as he pulls the parasite off her back, freeing her, and killing her, in the same action. As the two struggle in their death spasms, Kettering screams for Cameron to shoot the gun.

After a bitter argument with Powers ("He's as good as dead! Shoot the Gun!"), Cameron steels himself and fires. The cable makes an arc, drapes itself over the high-tension wires, and falls into place. The night becomes bright with the flashing of electricity and the crackle of burning ozone. Everyone shields their eyes as white light washes out everything. We see Kettering drop dead from the scaffolding like a stone, his struggle for life short circuited in an instant. Inside the ship, we see Professor Cole, despite his high order, throw up his hands and vanish in a scorching flash of white. We watch the parasites writhing and whipping around their antennae fangs frantically as they fry.

After the sizzling dies down, Senator Powers and Glenn enter the ship, quickly concluding that everything inside is dead as they waft away clouds of burnt parasite. How about the townsfolk still walking around Riverdale, taken over by the parasites? wonders Cameron. Don't you worry about that little detail, assures the senator. "Watch my dust," says Powers, a bit oddly. "I'll get them, or you don't know Walter K. Powers!" (I challenge anyone to sit through this movie without calling the senator, at least once, an ass hole). One is left to imagine the senator, going pure homicidal, marching through the streets of Riverdale with is aide, the reptilian-like Dan Walker - both of them armed with axes and hacking wildly at the backs of the parasitic citizenry. Remember, nearly the entire town has gone parasite. Surely after hours of diligent work the pair would be laughing and giggling hysterically, drenched head to toe in blood; perhaps even given to a mistake now and then in their fervor.

The film ends with Powers marching off toward town, eager to begin the slaughter; while Cameron and his ineffectual fiancé (all fiancé Elaine has done through the entire movie is look worried, confused, or just flat stupid) hold one another in the traditional atomic age "we have overcome" final embrace. Music swells, and the pair stroll off to a life of quite TV diners, a nice split-level, and a couple of kids.

Despite this "happy" ending (actually, we have never given a shit about either Cameron or his extremely dull fiancé - the two interesting people in the picture - kettering and Alice - die horribly unhappy deaths), The Brain Eaters is a very grim and gritty 60 minutes. Like Hobbes solitary life of man, the movie is "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Which certainly isn't necessarily a bad thing at all.

Which takes us straight into the Good Stuff!

The Good Stuff, Part I: The B-world of Bruno Ve Sota

Bruno Ve Sota is best remembered by atomic age B-movie fans for his excellent portrayal of Dave Walker - Yvette Vickers cuckolded, shotgun-wielding husband in Attack of the Giant Leeches (Bernard Kowalski, 1959). In Fact, throughout the 1950s, Ve Sota was a member of Roger Corman's unofficial stock company, appearing in bit parts in many of the legendary movie maker's quickies (Bucket of Blood, The Wasp Woman, War of the Satellites, Teenage Doll, etc.).

Roger Corman was the executive producer of Brain Eaters, and recruited Ve Sota as director (previously, Ve Sota had directed Female Jungle in 1955) presuming, I imagine, that De Sota could work quick and cheap. In a 1976 interview with actor and writer, Barry Brown, Ve Sota made the following pertinent points:

• The Brain Eaters was shot in six days for $26,000.


• Ed Nelson, star of Brain Eaters, and Ve Sota were acting buddies, having worked together on Corman's Teenage Doll (Nelson would go on to a successful career in television, becoming a hot property due to his work on Peyton Place.


• Ed Nelson created the parasites for Brain Eaters. He glued fur onto a child's toy - a windup metallic ladybug popular at the time - and used pipe cleaners for the antennas.


• The cone in Brain Eaters was a one-sided wooden structure about 50 feet tall, built by a local lumber company. It was originally covered with a shiny, silver paper to make it look metallic. One evening some kids playing in the hills around Pomona (where the movie was filmed) spotted the thing and peppered it with rocks (the little shits). Ve Sota and company had to cover the thing with galvanized tin to resist these nightly attacks. In all, the cone was built for about $500.


• The part of Dr. Kettering was to have been played by Brain scriptwriter, Gordon Urquhart, who died of cancer before production began. Corman suggested Ed Nelson (also a member of the Corman company) who Corman liked for his commitment and enthusiasm to any project given him.


• Leonard Nimoy came to the project via a friendship with Ed Nelson, who thought of Nimoy as a great "character man." During filming, Ve Sota, who had extensive training in radio and had once supplied the voice of Winston Churchill in a radio production, taught Nimoy some vocal tricks to sound like an old man.

Brothers and sisters, if the above facts don't make you tingle with B-movie joy . . . well, actually, if you have read this far, I know they do.

In Brain Eaters, Ve Sota and cinematographer, Lawrence Raimond, achieve a dark, gritty, uniform tone via imaginative camera angles and effectively stark lighting. Despite the puny budget and blistering shooting schedule, Ve Sota clearly brought an artistic sensibility to the project beyond what one might expect (this was true of most projects that fell under the Corman banner, which is probably why so many Corman B-nuggets have survived the dust bin of history).

Ve Sota also exhibited a real flair for action scenes in Brain, as well as managing to provide some very creepy moments. The scene when the possessed mayor clubs his son, and is then in turn gunned down by the sheriff's men, is explosive in its force. Also very effective is the final shootout, when our team of kick-ass scientists blast the parasite cops into the next world (as Kettering shoots one of the parasite/deputies off the cone's high scaffolding, he hits the ground like a sack of potatoes. After a moment, he rights himself and begins to advance quickly on Kettering, hunching along nearly on all fours and making a guttural sound like a mad dog - remember, the parasites had once attached themselves to feral dogs!).

The Good Stuff, Part II: The McCarthy Connection

On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia; wherein he claimed that he had a list of 205 known communists working in the State Department, shaping policy. The number of known communists changed several times in the months ahead, and no such specific list was ever produced; yet the effect on the American psych was potent and sudden. Imagine: these communists would look and seem like average Americans. They might be your friends, your family, your trusted leaders. Someone might even think you were one of them. Could you prove you weren't if someone swore you were? And worse - an accusation, in terms of reputation, was as good as a conviction. Paranoia, like the song says, does indeed strike deep. The resulting wave of McCarthyism quickly found its easiest and most vulnerable targets in Hollywood. With chief council Roy Cohen at his side, and the House Un-American Activities Committee his right arm, McCarthy put the hammer on many Hollywood careers (the glory of B-movies from his period is that many black listed actors and directors managed to find work in them).

Films which feature an alien hostility cloaked in the appearance of normalcy, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, have often been written of and discussed as parables to McCarthyism; whereas both hinge their feelings of paranoia on the concept of "the other" seeming just like "us" (Kevin McCarthy, star of Invasion, has stated flatly in many interviews that the makers of Invasion, primarily Don Siegel, had no such thing in mind).

Of all the films featuring alien or foreign invaders cloaking themselves with the bodies of normal citizens, none seem as committed to conjuring McCarthy as does Brain Eaters.

Consider the scene where Senator Walter Powers and his aide, Dan Walker, are about to leave for Riverdale:

Senator Walter K. Powers and aide, Dan Walker

As he is leaving the committee chambers, Powers puts his arm around the shoulder of his assistant, Dan Walker, and pulls him close, speaking confidentially in a harsh whisper. "Call the Signal Corps. Get General Prescott on the line. Say that Senator Walter J. Powers will not tolerate departmental interference. That if that spaceship film has been doctored in any way, he stands in a very shaky position. Lay it on thick! I want him so busy cleaning out his own closet, that he won't have time to get in my way out there at that ship."

Walker nods smugly and winks. "I'll use the old "investigation" threat. That always works."

Substitute the spaceship concept for the investigation of communists, and we have a perfectly imagined reenactment of Senator McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohen, discussing an attack on some suspected communist sympathizer in the Army Signal Corps. Or, actually, we have a glimpse of McCarthy and Cohen at the very cusp of McCarthy's very sudden and ruinous fall from power.

What makes this scene so fascinating is the mention of the Signal Corps. In 1953, McCarthy began an investigation of the military, claiming that he had proof of a spy ring active in the Army Signal Corps. McCarthy quickly learned that fucking with the United States Military is a far, far different kettle of fish that kicking around some defenseless Hollywood actors and directors. By 1954, after a much publicized senate investigation in which the senator was humiliated and crushed, his career as a commie buster was over. He died in disgrace in 1957.

All in all, The Brain Eaters is a real blast of atomic age, low-budget film-making. Someone make some popcorn and let's get paranoid!

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Now let's take a look at that trailer! -- Mykal

Outer Noir

The Outer Limits - "O.B.I.T."
Episode #7 (air date 11/04/1963)
Directed by Gerd Oswald
Cinematographer: Conrad Hall
Starring:
Peter Breck - as Senator Orville
Jeff Corey - as Byron Lomax
Harry Townes - as Dr. Clifford Scott
Joanne Gilbert - as Barbara Scott

Twilight Zone had the hipsters.

With Rod Serling's overt, chain-smoking intellectualism and cool patter; Zone was definitely the talk of the young Turks around office water coolers on Monday morning. First airing in 1959, it quickly became the show to watch for the in-crowd.

Yet there was another sci-fi anthology show, The Outer Limits, that premiered a few years later (1963) that was regularly shades darker and somber as a judge on Sunday. Where Zone fired the synapses, Outer Limits seemed more oblique and dense. It had the shadows of noir, the angles of Dr. Caligari; and could send a shiver of chilled, existential anxiety over the skin. Where Zone crackled with space age electricity and a feast of words, Outer Limits felt more like a bleak, ancient shadow play - perhaps a ritual of corrupted hypnosis where good meanings were drained from normal things; leaving the world a half-familiar façade.

In the hotel room. "O.B.I.T."

Zone was sometimes lyrical, with the occasional episode going rather spritely (See "Once Upon a Time" featuring Buster Keaton). Such was the nature of the show's edgy, scattershot brilliance. The Outer Limits was never so. No, no. The Outer Limits had a more underground soul that could never trade in sunshine and space. It was instead a world of small rooms seen in fisheye; greasy, sweating faces and long shadows that crawled the walls and floors. Even the outdoors looked like a world shrouded in a dimension of isolation, as lonely as Poe's House of Usher. The best moments of Outer Limits could never be quoted, because those moments were pictures, not words - perfect images of doom, of paranoia - of fear and panic. They were inky reflections that fell upon the eye and moved the spirit to dark places, speaking in a language without sound.

Outer limits was more often than not the equal of Twilight Zone in the crucial areas of writing and directing. What set Limits apart, however, was the visual look of the show as defined by the regular man behind the camera, cinematographer Conrad Hall.

Brief career overview: Conrad Hall was voted in 2003 one of the most influential cinematographers in history by International Cinematographer's Guild (ICG). Over the span of his career, he won three Oscars for Cinematography (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), American Beauty (1999); and Road to Perdition (2002). Conrad Hall passed away in 2003.

Despite being remembered best for bringing a painterly look to his color films (Sam Mendes, director of Road to Perdition, called Hall the "Rembrandt" of cinematographers) Hall began his career in television working moody wonders in black and white as a principal cinematographer on The Outer Limits. Hall's B&W work on Limits is so fine, one sometimes wishes he had been born a generation earlier, thus having a lifetime to work in shades of gray. Had it been so, his memory might today be aligned with other B&W masters of the 1930s and 40s like Joseph August , William Daniels or John Alton (stylistically, Hall's work on Limits easily reminds one of Alton, who shot noir classics like T-Men, Raw Deal, Border Incident). For a sneak peak at what a Hall B&W career might have been, one need look no further than Richard Brooke's brutal In Cold Blood (1969). Hall cinematography provided the film's harsh beauty and earned Hall an Oscar nomination.

For a sampling of Hall's magnificent work on Outer Limits, let's look at an episode from the first season: "O.B.I.T.", which aired November 4, 1963:

The opening teaser (the short scene that began every Limits episode, establishing a central theme), presents a middle aged man, well dressed and wearing glasses, sitting in a bleak hotel room in the dead of night. The room is dark save for street light coming through a window. This pale light is swathed across the drab wallpaper behind the man, who is sitting at what might be a large radar machine, or perhaps an atomic age computer console. It makes a soft high-pitched whirring - an elliptical, looping sound. The man turns a knob, looks up at a monitor, works a switch. His face reflects the light of the monitor like a wane moon floating in space. His glasses occasionally frost over as he looks up, then down, then up again. As the man works the dials, we notice his hand. The camera gives us a close-up as the hand pauses a moment on the edge of the machine - the back of it is thatched in long, black hair.

We finally see what he is looking at on the screen: a large monster with an enormous, knobby head - ghostlike in its whiteness - shambling toward us. The man has shown no alarm at its sight. The creature has no mouth, no eyes - only deep depressions where these things might be, hidden within shadows.

Fade to black and cue music, and the wonderful, familiar introduction by announcer Vic Perrin begins: "There is nothing wrong with your television set . . ." (For those not familiar with this classic TV intro, please refer to video at end of post)

The story proper begins with a lonely, overhead shot. We are looking down upon another man working a machine - a man - an officer in uniform. He is working the console of a machine like the one seen in the teaser, this one set on a circular dais. The man and machine are alone in a large room, working in a pool of light in the center of the empty space. His surroundings are cavernous and full of cold, black shadows. The vast space is needless - useless. He hear the machine bleeping and whirring softly. The man looks terribly alone - isolated (one of the re-occurring themes of Limits is the profound isolation of man. Men and women are always isolated in times of danger or fear).

The voice over narration (again, Vic Perrin) tells us: "In this room, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, security personal at the Defense Department Cyprus Hill's Research Center keep constant watch on its scientists through O.B.I.T., a mysterious electronic device whose very existence was carefully kept from the public at large. And so it would have remained but for the facts you are about to witness . . ."

" . . . something on the machine he was not supposed to see."

We watch the security officer bring a figure into focus on the circular screen of the mysterious device, O.B.I.T.; a scientist in a lab coat. The scientist, imagining he is talking in private, criticizes a college harshly. The technician begins a tape machine, records the incident: "Subject - Doctor Anderson. Derogatory remarks against superior. Twelfth occurrence." He snaps the tape recorder off, swivels in his seat, adjust some more dials on a console. We see the rows of dials are marked to indicate several monitors throughout the facility.

Suddenly the technician sees something - some kind of monstrous shape walking - with huge claws and taloned feet. It shimmers in and out of focus on the screen (it's the same creature we have seen in the opening teaser). The officer quickly adjusts some dials, assuming the machine has malfunctioned in some way. While following the shambling creature, the security officer realizes that it has entered the room where he is. He turns quickly, smiles as if recognizing someone, then is brutally strangled. We watch him now on the round monitor in close up - two mammoth claws, or perhaps paws, strangling the man to death.

This concurrent murder investigation leaves some troubling questions about the behavior and morale of the Cypress Hill Research Center personnel; and Senator Orville (Peter Breck) arrives at the center to head up a senate investigation. He meets Mr. Byran Lomax (Jeff Corey) who heads up the O.B.I.T. personnel surveillance project (we know very quickly that Lomax is the culprit, or monster, or something sinister, as the camera soon shows us a close up of his abnormally hairy hand.)

The senator's investigation, conducted in the same room where the technician was killed (and with the O.B.I.T. machine at the very center of the room), quickly reveals that morale is indeed very, very low at the military facility: Friendships and marriages have broken down, parties at the Center are never attended, personnel pass in hallways without talking - or even looking at one another and, most significantly, the doctor in charge of the facility has even suffered a nervous breakdown.

The senator is quickly able to establish that the O.B.I.T. machine is at the root of the ruined morale and the overall sense of crippling oppression. "They know everything," says one scientist giving testimony. "They know what you say in your sleep." The tension deepens as the investigation is unable to determine the origins of the O.B.I.T. project.

As witness after witness testifies, the tension builds layer upon layer. Every witness seems terrified, their faces sweating - and Hall's camera makes us feel their paranoia, moving around the room like a graceful serpent; searching for a more revealing perspective. Hall builds to his close-ups so that, jarringly, there is not personal space left - for anyone. Hall makes us understand the story's principal theme - paranoia and oppression - by allowing us to experiencing it ourselves.

"They know what you say in your sleep."

Eventually the Center's chief scientist, Dr. Clifford Scott (Harry Townes), who has been sequestered to the "rest home" of a military hospital, agrees to give testimony (in private conversation with Senator Orville, he admits that he has been afraid to ever leave the rest home for fear of his life. Someone, he tells Orville, would rather see him dead that have him tell what he knows). Under questioning, Scott explains that he had been a strong opponent of O.B.I.T. from the beginning, had daily arguments with project director, Byron Lomax, who insisted the machine was essential in eliminating "undesirable elements."

(Beyond this point be Spoilers!) Lomax, under the guise of demonstrating the machine's effectiveness, has shown Scott images of his young wife (Joanne Gilbert) flirting innocently with a young officer. Once this germ of suspicion has sent its black roots into Scott's mind, the doctor forgot about his opposition to O.B.I.T., even began using the machine to spy on his wife. As a result of Dr. Scott's obsessive scrutiny and suspicion, his wife actually was driven to begin an affair. Scott describes under testimony his hours of sitting in front of O.B.I.T., tuning in his wife's image, but being unable to see the image of the man with her (It is left to the power of our imaginations - this image of a Dr. Scott, sitting in a dark room, watching his wife on a monitor making love to some invisible phantom).

"His was the one image I couldn't pick up on O.B.I.T.," says Scott.

"You never found out who this person was?" asks Senator Orville.

"I found out," says Scott grimly.

Dr. Scott eventually reasoned that there was one person at the Center who never appeared on any O.B.I.T. reports. Who, in fact, had configured the machine so that his particular wave lengths could not be seen by O.B.I.T. By violating the machine's operating procedures, Scott was finally able to see his wife's lover - and what he saw broke his mind and spirit.

"Do you know why Captain Harrison (the operator from the opening scene) was murdered?" asks Orville.

"Because he saw something on the machine he was not supposed to see," says Scott.

"And what was that?"

Scott blinks. His eyes lose focus for a moment, then come back. He raises his face. "What I saw," he says.

Scott then walks over to the machine and turns it on. The ominous whir begins. Scott deftly works some dials and we see the creature, the massive, white monster; appear on the screen, sitting behind one of the witness tables. It shimmies in and out of resolution.

Scott can barely speak, and he is clearly in the grip of horrible memory. He looks at the screen with a mixture of fear and hatred. "Mr. Lomax -" he begins.

Lomax stands- spreads his arms wide in a gesture encompassing space far behind the small room. "The machines are everywhere!" he declares.

In a ranting monologue, Lomax explains that the O.B.I.T. machines have been introduced by alien invaders as a means of conquering the Earth (while the human Lomax rants, the monster Lomax rants on the O.B.I.T. screen). Once exposed as an alien himself, Lomax goes on a tear; telling the senate committee that the machines have been installed all across America and the world, and that the intense paranoia they produce will soon break down all societal structure, making Earth ripe for alien conquest.

"The machines are everywhere!"

"When we come here to live," says Lomax, "you friendless, demoralized flotsam will fall without a even a single shot being fired."

As guards move in to arrest him, Lomax kills himself via some alien suicide device and vanishes. The episode ends, as nearly all Limits episodes do, with the timeless, perfectly modulated voice of Vic Perrin, speaking over the scene's stunned last moments: "Agents from the Justice Department are rounding up the machines now . . . In the final analysis, dear friends, whether O.B.I.T. lives up to its name will depend on you."

When announcer Perrin tells us as we fade to black, "We now return control of your television set to you," one feels as though released from the muscular windings of a Boa Constrictor. Many elements contribute to this episode's ratcheting tension: The script, by Mayer Dolinsky, is taut as a drum with moments of chilling brilliance ("People with nothing to hide have nothing to fear from O.B.I.T.," says Lomax. "Cypress Hill is like a ghost town," says a testifying scientist. "People whisper in their own houses." In addition, the reoccurring hairy hand, used by Dolinsky as a way of identifying aliens masquerading as human, has a kind of primal power - like suddenly seeing the hidden mark of the Beast.

Likewise, the acting is fine, with Jeff Corey mesmerizing as the malevolent, terrifying Lomax. Also good is Harry Townes as Dr. Scott, the man who must summon the dregs of his strength and dignity in senate testimony. Finally, the direction of Gerd Oswald is brisk and flawless (All directors should learn their craft in television, where brisk efficiency is highly prized).

Yet the most potent victory belongs to the camera work of Conrad Hall.

The senate investigation takes place in the same room that houses the O.B.I.T. machine - the same room were the technical officer was murdered. Thus, Hall is given a confined, claustrophobic place to weld his anxious camera.

Hall makes us feel the rooms' hideous, tight paranoia through oblique angels and dense shadows. He creates tension in a tight place - an atmosphere of pulsing, increasing conflict where a simple thing, a glass breaking, might realistically set off a chain reaction of murder or insanity. The feeling is one of unresolved horror, of something lurking forever unseen, and the actors in the small room are scratching and digging and sweating, waiting for this anxiety to be released. Conrad Hall makes this episode sing with tension by closing in the walls, restricting the movement, casting faces and bodies just right against the dark spirits of shadow. He simply closes us into this box of fear, gives us no back-up room. His work in this episode is typical of his work throughout the series which, taken in whole, constitutes some of the finest camera work ever done for any television show.

In "O.B.I.T.", Conrad Hall distorts reality, turning a room of middle-class suits and uniforms into a fear-drenched pit of self-loathing; and he turns a computer into a squatting devil, a humming demon at the center of the pit, content to await mortal weakness.

Always, Hall knew exactly what we needed to see to make stories burn into memory.

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Let's watch that trailer! - Radiation Cinema!