Monster on the Campus (1958)

Monster on the Campus is a 1958 science fiction monster movie but it includes the words “directed by Jack Arnold” in the credits and that always inspires confidence. No matter how outlandish the ideas you know it will be a well-crafted movie.

This movie belongs to the smallest of all movie sub-genres - the coelacanth horror film. Yes, coelacanth, the famous “living fossils” - the fish species assumed to have been extinct for 60 million years before its rediscovery in the 1930s. These fish were at the time thought to have remained unchanged for several hundred million years. It was believed that they had not evolved at all. In this movie these odd fish spread horror and mayhem on an American university campus.

It all begins when the university acquires a fine specimen of a coelacanth. Professor Donald Blake (Arthur Franz) just can’t wait to start dissecting.

The coelacanth arrives in a truck, packed in a crate. While it’s being removed from the truck bloody water from the crate drips onto the roadway and Samson licks it. Samson is a German Shepherd, the much-loved mascot of a fraternity house. He’s a very friendly very gentle dog.

Shortly afterwards Samson turns savage. He has never done this before. He has to be locked in a cage for veterinary observation. Professor Blake notices something else very strange and inexplicable about the dog.

Professor Blake is feeling very tired and the campus nurse, Molly Riordan (Helen Westcott) offers to drive him home. Some hours later Molly’s dead body is discovered.

Professor Blake is now an obvious murder suspect but Detective Lieutenant Mike Stevens is inclined to think the professor is innocent. The fingerprint and footprint evidence seems to clinch the matter. Professor Blake is not the killer. But there is a killer loose on campus.

The footprints help to clear Blake but they mystify the cops. What kind of man could leave footprints like that?

Professor Blake comes up with a wild theory. I won’t spoil things by revealing his theory other than to say that it has to do with the peculiar nature of the coelacanth. The science stuff is this movie is delightfully silly and off-the-wall. You expect that in a 50s sci-fi monster movie, but in this case the insane pseudoscientific ideas are at least interesting and amusing and have some original elements.

The professor believes the giant dragonfly (two feet long) that flies into his laboratory window confirms his theory.

He tries to explain his theory to his department head and to his colleagues but they think he’s gone nuts.

His girlfriend Madeline (Joanna Moore) wants to stand by him but she thinks his theories are crazy as well.

Poor Molly was just the first victim of the mysterious monstrous campus killer.

Professor Blake eventually figures things out and comes up with a plan to destroy the monster.

The special effects and makeup effects are mostly laughably silly (especially the giant dragonfly) but surprisingly there’s a transformation scene that is superbly done.

The various cast members try to take it all very seriously which adds to the fun.

Jack Arnold made much much better movies than this but he does his best with the material he’s given.

The sheer lunacy of the premise is delightful. The fact that we’re meant to think the professor is a genius but his scientific methods are so sloppy adds more enjoyment.

This is not by any stretch of the imagination a great movie or even a particularly good one. It’s strictly a beer and popcorn movie. If that’s what you’re in the mood for it’s worth a look.

Universal's Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection offers five films on DVD and all are worth seeing. The Monolith Monsters (1957) is particularly good. Monster on the Campus gets a very nice transfer (the movie is in black-and-white).

The Living Skeleton (1968)

In the late 60s Japan’s Shochiku studio made a short-lived and tentative attempt to break into the booming market for science fiction, horror and monster movies. Criterion’s Eclipse Series 37 DVD boxed set When Horror Came to Shochiku includes four of the movies made at Shochiku at that time. When Horror Came to Shochiku is a cool name for a boxed set but a bit misleading since these movies are not quite what one would think as typical late 60s horror films.

The Living Skeleton (Kyûketsu dokuro-sen), made in 1968, is one of these four movies.

You have to bear in mind that this is not a low-budget independent film. It was made by a major studio, with the resources of a major studio. It was made by people who had learnt their craft in a studio system. They were professionals. They knew how to make movies. It has a certain amount of major studio polish.

The Living Skeleton opens in fairly spectacular style. A freighter, the Dragon King, has been captured by pirates. The setting is contemporary - it’s worth remembering that piracy still goes on today. These pirates are particularly ruthless and the crew and the handful of passengers are massacred.

Three years later we meet a young woman named Saeko (Kikko Matsuoka). She lives in a small Japanese costal town. She is an orphan and along with her identical twin sister Yoriko was more or less raised by the village priest. He’s a Catholic priest - Japan has a large Catholic community.

Saeko is a nice girl but she has been troubled since her twin sister disappeared. The sister is assumed to have been drowned when the freighter on which she was travelling went down in a typhoon. Of course the audience knows that the twin sister was killed by those pirates.

Saeko has a boyfriend, Mochizuki (Yasunori Irikawa). He’s a decent guy and they plan to get married.

They go scuba diving and see something unexpected - skeletons.

Later they see a ship. Not on the bottom of the sea, but afloat. Maybe it’s the ship on which Yoriko met her fate. Saeko wants to reach the ship, she does so, and she is disturbed by what she finds.

Then things get spooky for a bunch of people all of whom have something to hide. What they have to hide is connected with the events on board the Dragon King.

Viewers will have their suspicions about what is going on but it may not be so simple.

This is one of those movies that plays around with genre. You think you know what kind of movie it is and then you start to think it’s not that sort of movie at all. And then you find yourself thinking it could belong to any one of several genres. Is anything supernatural going on? Certainly strange creepy things happen. We’re kept guessing. Maybe we’ll get a definite answer at the end. You’ll have to watch the movie yourself to find out.

There are some nicely crazy plot twists.

There’s a touch of ambiguity to at least one major character. We might understand a character’s motivations without entirely approving of the actions to which those motivations lead.

We have to talk about the special effects. There are some very obvious miniatures shots. I don’t mind that. In fact in a movie such as this where you’re not always entirely certainly that everything you see is real or truthful obvious special effects can be an asset. There are some really ambitious effects shots and they’re often quite effective and disturbing.

This film was shot in the ’scope aspect ratio in black-and-white, a combination I always find rather appealing. The cinematography is suitably moody.

This movie has a lot of the qualities you expect in a horror exploitation movie combined with some genuinely unsettling atmosphere. It has some outlandish moments and a few crazy moments.

Overall The Living Skeleton is entertaining with enough weird touches to make it a cut above average. Highly recommended.

The DVD transfer is very good. So far I’ve watched three of the movies in the boxed set. The X from Outer Space (1967) is goofy fun while Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968) is delightfully demented.

Prince of Darkness (1987)

Prince of Darkness is a 1987 movie written and directed by John Carpenter that could be described as a return to the supernatural horror of The Fog but with some important differences.

Donald Pleasence is a very worried Catholic priest. An older priest has just died. That priest had belonged to an order called the Brotherhood of Sleep. For two thousand years a priest from that order has acted as a guardian of a terrible secret. Something that must remain confined. But it appears to be breaking out of its confinement.

Odd things are happening. Insects are behaving strangely. Homeless people are behaving very strangely indeed, as if they had some mysterious common purpose. The sky looks a bit funny. Everything just seems a tiny bit wrong somehow.

There’s also the old deceased priest’s diary, and a very ancient manuscript.

The priest begs Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong) for help. Birack believes in science not religion but he works on the frontiers of theoretical physics so he’s rather open-minded about ideas that sound crazy. Birack recruits a team of graduate students. They are going to investigate this matter scientifically.

What they have to investigate is a very ancient cylinder in a 500-year-old church crypt. They’ll need someone with experience in translating ancient religious texts as well. That manuscript may contain vital clues. In fact it contains things you would not expect in an ancient religious manuscript.

Donald Pleasence knows something of the history of the Brotherhood of Sleep. It’s very disturbing. It casts doubt not just on the accepted version of Christianity but on accepted scientific principles as well. There is a very ancient evil which is not the evil in which everyone has always believed. That evil is now awakening.

Or investigators do not even know what they’re dealing with much less what to do about it. And that evil may be intent on picking them off one by one. Maybe not killing them. Maybe something much worse.

This is a kind of variant on the classic haunted house story in which a group of people are stuck in a house in which ghostly manifestations are happening. The differences being that this is a haunted church and while the manifestations might be supernatural they are not ghostly as such.

Of course it could be debated whether this is a supernatural horror movie or a science fiction horror movie.

The ideas here are very cool and very frightening. The enigmatic nature of the evil makes it more scary. Carpenter builds the tension very effectively.

The special effects are generally impressive. This was 1987 and for commercial reasons there were going to have to be gross-out gore scenes. I always find such scenes to be cheesy even when they’re done well. Gore is just something that doesn’t impress me. I think that the ideas here are clever enough and creepy enough to make the gore unnecessary. I am of course in the minority on this issue and in strictly commercial terms Carpenter knew what he was doing.

I rarely notice film music but Carpenter’s music for this movie (which he composed himself) is memorable and very disturbing.

Donald Pleasence is of course very good, and Victor Wong is marvellous as the eccentric but brilliant and determined Professor Birack. The other cast members are all very solid. Look out for Alice Cooper in a memorable appearance as a terrifying homeless person.

Prince of Darkness has some affinities with Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing in that both movies deal with possession, of sorts. It also has definite affinities with The Legend of Hell House (1973) with its scientific investigation of a haunted house.

Prince of Darkness is a fine creepy horror film. John Carpenter really was on fire in the 80. Highly recommended.

I had previously only seen this movie in a terrible pan-and-scanned VHS release so seeing it on Studiocanal’s Blu-Ray release was a revelation. This release is packed to the gills with extras.

The Haunting (1963)

The Haunting, released in 1963, has the reputation of being one of the best ghost movies ever made. There was a remake in 1999 which I haven’t seen and don’t intend to see. It is the original 1963 version with which we are concerned here.

This was from the start a personal project for Robert Wise. He had read Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House and knew he just had to make it into a movie. The movie retains the novel’s New England setting but was shot in Britain. MGM’s British branch offered Wise the budget he needed.

Anthropologist Dr John Markway (Richard Johnson) is obsessed by the idea of scientifically proving the existence of the supernatural. For this he needs a haunted house. The notorious Hill House is ideal - it has a particularly sinister reputation. He will also need witnesses. He needs people who have had some previous encounter with the supernatural. Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) and Theodora (Claire Bloom) seem suitable. The two women along with Dr Markway and Luke Sannerson (Russ Tamblyn), the nephew of the house’s current owner, will spend several days at Hill House.

Spooky things start to happen early on. Lots of disturbing noises. Cold spots. All clear signs (to Markway) of ghostly presences.

The story of the movie is the gradual disintegration of Eleanor. She provides voiceover narration so this is very much her story. Eleanor is pretty crazy to begin with. She has wasted her youth caring for her invalid mother. She is guilt-ridden over her mother’s death. She feels she doesn’t belong anywhere. It’s also a fair assumption that she is both sexually and emotionally frustrated. She is timid and mousy. We can be quite certain that she is a virgin.

We can be quite certain that Theodora is no virgin. She’s Eleanor’s polar opposite - sophisticated, worldly, confident, comfortable with being a woman, outgoing and sexy.

There is immediate tension between these two women.

Apart from the noises nothing obviously supernatural happens. The four people in the house cannot be certain at first that there is anything inexplicable going on. Odd noises in old houses are not unusual. Dr Markway believes the sounds are evidence of the supernatural, but that’s what he wants to believe. Eleanor becomes convinced that the house wants her in some way. She becomes increasingly distraught and unstable.

The spiral staircase scene is terrifying but again there’s no certainty that anything supernatural is occurring. It’s a decaying old house and such houses are full of perfectly natural dangers. Of course eventually someone is going to crack and try to escape, but will the house let anyone leave?

Wise, cinematographer Davis Boulton and and production designer Elliot Scott create the right gothic atmosphere without resorting to the obvious. There are no cobwebs. No crypts. No mysteriously empty coffins. No mysterious figures glimpsed on the battlements. Wise and Boulton do employ plenty of camera tricks. Exterior shots of the house were shot using infra-red film. Wide-angle lenses were used. Things look distorted, but in a fairly subtle way which adds to the creepiness. Eleanor thinks the house is watching her and that’s the impression the audience gets as well.

There are so many ways this movie can be interpreted. We do eventually have fairly clear signs that something outside the range of the normal laws of nature is occurring but what it is remains obscure, and Wise wants it to be obscure. These people are isolated and highly suggestible.

Does the evil come from the man who built the house ninety years earlier, wicked old Hugh Crain? Does it come from his daughter Abigail, or from the nurse who allowed Hugh Crain’s wife to die? Does it come from some demonic entity? Does the evil come from the house itself? Or does it come from Eleanor? Is there in fact anything supernatural going on or is it just Eleanor’s madness? You will have to decide for yourself. Wise has no intention of spoon-feeding the viewer with a glib explanation. What I do like is that neither a supernatural nor a non-supernatural explanation can simply be dismissed out of hand.

The lesbian sub-text between Theo and Eleanor feels a bit tacked on but it does serve the purpose of increasing Eleanor’s feelings of isolation. Her normal instinct would be to turn to another woman for emotional support but she does not want to turn to Theo. And it certainly adds extra tension.

This is also a movie about a woman falling apart, and Eleanor has been falling apart for a very long time. She sees Hill House not so much as a threat but more as her last chance to find herself.

This would make a great double bill with Kubrick’s The Shining - there are some striking similarities in the way these two films approach the haunted house movie.

The Haunting is an object lesson in how to do horror that is very subtle indeed, and very frightening indeed. Highly recommended.

Blood: The Last Vampire (2000)

Blood: The Last Vampire is a fascinating anime film that, with its running time of 48 minutes, is not quite a feature film.

It was shot in a mixture of Japanese and English. The Japanese characters speak Japanese and sometimes English, the American characters speak English. There’s also a mixture of traditional animation techniques and CG and you’ll either like that blending or you won’t depending on personal taste. Overall I found the visuals to be effective and atmospheric.

It starts in a wonderfully enigmatic fashion. It is Japan in the 1960s. A young Japanese girl (we will later learn that her name is Saya) slaughters a passenger on a train with a samurai sword. Then she is joined by a couple of American guys. David might be Saya’s boss. He might work for the Japanese Government or the US Government or for some shady outfit like the CIA or he might work for some private organisation. Whoever or whatever he is he is in the same line of work as Saya - killing chiropterans. We don’t yet know what chiropterans are.

There’s some tension between Saya and David but there’s obviously some trust as well. Maybe they’re uneasy allies but they’re definitely allies.

Then Saya goes undercover as a student at the school for the children of American military personnel at a U.S. Air Force base in Japan. For some reason she wears a Japanese schoolgirl uniform although it’s an American school. Saya looks rather weird dressed that way - she doesn’t look like a cute teenager, she looks like a stone-cold killer.

She has an uneasy encounter with the school nurse. The school nurse gets very disturbed when Saya whips out her sword and slices up another girl student in front of her. The nurse is horrified but she’s even more horrified when she gets a good look at her first chiropteran. They’re horrifying demon monsters.

We then get a rollercoaster ride of action and mayhem.

What I love most about this film is the thing that a lot of people dislike. It gives us nothing but tantalising hints at the backstory. You expect a Van Helsing-like character or a scientist to pop up to explain what is going on. But that doesn’t happen. We have to figure things out for ourselves.

We find out a few things about Saya but they raise more questions than they answer. The very short running time means there’s no time for detailed explanations. We are plunged straight into very strange and frightening events and we really don’t know much more than the unfortunate school teacher caught in the middle.

Which makes things much scarier. We don’t know the full extent or the exact nature of the threat. We don’t know how heavily the odds are stacked against Saya.

This is a very stripped-down very minimalist story. There are no subplots. Virtually no exposition. It hits the ground running and the pace remains frenetic. I like that. I’m told there was a later live-action version with double the running time that ruined the story by adding the backstory that was very deliberately and wisely left out of the original.

Right at the end we find out something very important about Saya but once again we don’t get a full explanation. It answers some of our questions but it adds further puzzles.

There was clearly a reason for choosing the mid-60s as the time setting and for including Vietnam War footage. Presumably the point was that we humans are every bit as bloodthirsty as the chiropterans. Fortunately this stuff isn’t intrusive and it does add to the atmosphere of paranoia.

Saya reappears as a character in the 2011 TV series Blood-C.

Hiroyuki Kitakubo directed. Blood: The Last Vampire was made by Production I.G. and originated in a study group set up by Mamoru Oshii (director of Ghost in the Shell) to explore ideas for future films. Kenji Kamiyama wrote the screenplay. He went on to be director and chief writer for the excellent Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex TV series.

Blood: The Last Vampire is very much about style. That style is very harsh, dark and brooding. This may be the least cutesy anime ever made. Very entertaining movie. Highly recommended.

The Manga DVD (they’ve now released in on Blu-Ray as well) looks very good and includes a “making of” featurette which is interesting for the insights it offers into the aesthetic choices that were made.

Hardware (1990)

Hardware is a 1990 post-apocalyptic science fiction-action-horror movie that borrows heavily from other movies in these genres. There’s nothing original about the ideas but the execution is interesting if a bit pretentious at times.

It’s the usual post-apocalyptic setup. The United States is now mostly a radioactive scrap heap. The government is vicious and tyrannical but perhaps not very efficient.

One way to survive in this world is by scavenging. There’s a lot of discarded tech stuff around if you’re prepared take a few risks to find it. Some is just junk. Some is worth money.

A strange wandering dude finds a couple of interesting items in the desert. A mechanical hand and a robot head. He sells them to a scrap dealer, who sells them on to Mo Baxter (Dylan McDermott). Mo gives them to his girlfriend Jill (Stacey Travis). Jill is a crazy artist who makes weird sculptures out of scrap metal, discarded tech and plastic dolls.

Mo is a kind of Space Marine but he’s not particularly motivated. It pays well and he needs the money.

Jill is paranoid, which is a sensible thing for a girl to be in this world. Her apartment has ultra-sophisticated security.

The relationship between Mo and Jill is uneasy. They’re in love but relationships are difficult in this world. Mo’s job takes him away a lot of the time, which Jill resents.

The robot head is not mere junk. Unfortunately it still functions although nobody has realised that yet. It’s part of a military android. The world is in ruins but the government can still find the money to finance horrific killing machines for the military. The Mark 13 combat android is very nasty indeed. It is of course only supposed to kill the enemies of the state which would be fine if it were functioning properly, which it isn’t. It sees everyone as an enemy.

And it’s now sitting in Jill’s living room. This is not going to end well. Of course we know it will go on a killing rampage.

Jill also doesn’t know that she is being watched by a very creepy Peeping Tom in a neighbouring apartment. His name is Lincoln and he’ll play a part in this story.

Mo’s good-natured spaced-out buddy Shades will play a part as well.

There are several rock stars in this movie which is appropriate since it plays a bit like an ultra-violent MTV video. Iggy Pop’s voice is heard for about 90 seconds in total (as a DJ) but he got prominent billing and a pay cheque so I guess he wasn’t complaining. Lemmy contributes a cameo as a water-cab driver.

This was a low-budget movie but the special effects are very impressive. It has a very strong and very effective cyberpunk vibe, but this is a grungy decaying post-apocalyptic cyberpunk world. There’s nothing wildly original about the aesthetic at work here but it’s executed very well. The killer android looks convincingly evil and menacing. The budget may have been small but the money that was spent is all up there on the screen.

The whole thing is hyperactive and gets a bit self-consciously clever at times. It tries very hard to be arty. Sometimes it succeeds. There’s a lot of gore.

The acting is barely adequate.

There is a steamy sex scene which apparently got the movie into trouble with the moral watchdogs.

What this movie does have is plenty of action and energy. It’s reminiscent of Alien in the sense that it’s about horrifying events taking place in a confined space. There’s nowhere to run to for either the monster or his potential victims, so it’s kill or be killed. And that works extremely well.

Hardware offers exciting mayhem done in a visually interesting way and it’s highly recommended.

Hardware looks great on Blu-Ray.

Gor (1987)

Gor is a 1987 American science fiction/fantasy adventure film from the Cannon Group. It was shot in South Africa. It is based on Tarnsman of Gor, the first of John Norman’s rather controversial Gor novels. Harry Alan Towers co-produced and co-wrote the script.

The initial setup follows the novel reasonably closely. It begins in the present day. Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) is an American college professor who is obsessed by a rather wild theory. He believes that a Counter-Earth exists. It’s a planet within our solar system but due to the particular nature of its orbit it has remained undiscovered. It is a very Earth-like planet and its inhabitants are human (in the novel it is explained that the people of Gor came originally from Earth). Tarl has a ring given to him by his father. He believes it is the secret to reaching Gor. And indeed Tarl does find himself on Gor.

It is a planet at roughly the cultural level of the Bronze Age. There is no modern technology. Warriors use swords and bows. There are countless tiny city-states. And there’s a megalomaniac who wants to absorb all the city-states and create an empire. This villain is Sarm (Oliver Reed).

Tarl joins up with a small group of rebels. One of his motivations is the fact that one of the rebels is a very attractive young woman warrior, Talena (Rebecca Ferratti). Sarm has sacked their city and stolen their home-stone (which has immense religious significance to them). Tarl has to learn how to become a warrior. The ultimate objective is to reach a forbidden mountain range where Sarm has his stronghold, destroy Sarm, retrieve the home-stone and free the city-states that he had conquered.

This small band has lots of misadventures along the way. There’s plenty of action, including a girl-fight between Talena and a slave-girl. It all builds to a reasonably OK action finale.

Not surprisingly Oliver Reed is by far the best thing in this movie. Oliver Reed as a sinister, cruel, power-crazed, sexually depraved super-villain - what’s not to love?

Urbano Barberini is an adequate but rather colourless hero. Rebecca Ferratti is OK and she certainly looks great in skimpy warrior-woman outfits.

Don’t get too excited about Jack Palance’s name in the credits. He gets about two minutes of screen time. His brief appearance is a teaser for the second movie (Gor 2: Outlaw of Gor) in which he plays a major role.

The first problem with this movie is that the low budget made it impossible to include one of the coolest features of the novel, the tarns. These are gigantic birds of prey which warriors ride into battle. Dropping them from the story was a wise idea - in 1987 you would have needed a fairly substantial budget to do them convincingly.

With his Gor novels John Norman was certainly trying to write popular entertaining adventure tales but he was trying to do a whole lot more than that. Norman is a philosopher by profession. He used the Gor novels to engage in all kinds of philosophical, political, social and cultural speculations. This meant that the world-building was a lot more important than the action-adventure plots. Norman created a fictional human society radically different from our own in all sorts of ways. The society of Gor is alien, shocking and totally fascinating. None of that makes it into the movie. The movie is a stock-standard barbarian warrior adventure tale.

A major problem is that this movie is ludicrously tame. There’s one mildly shocking scene (a slave-girl being branded) but overall the violence is very subdued. There’s zero sex. There’s zero nudity. There’s zero sexiness. Even the cat-fight between Talena and the slave-girl is very very tame. This is a movie based on a novel with BDSM overtones set in a society in which female slavery is a central component of that society and it’s clear that the producers were terrified of such subject matter and decided to ignore it.

In fact they ignored every single element that makes the novels fascinating and provocative. This movie has absolutely zero connection to the novels.

And unfortunately as a stock-standard barbarian warrior adventure tale it just doesn’t have enough sufficient pace and energy.

I admit I’ve only read the first three novels but they’re actually extremely interesting and deal with touchy subject matter in a complex and intelligent way. They’re provocative, but in a good way. Norman offers both titillation and food for thought. He’s challenging us to think about how societies work.

I can’t help thinking that this movie would have been a whole lot better with someone like Jess Franco directing, or even Joe D’Amato, or even perhaps Lucio Fulci.

Gor just doesn’t make the grade.

The German release offers both Gor movies on Blu-Ray and DVD, with both German and English language options.

I’ve reviewed the first three Gor novels and I recommend them - Tarnsman of Gor, Outlaw of Gor and Priest-Kings of Gor.