TARANTULA (1955) Directed by Jack Arnold Genre: Monster on the Loose
THE MOVIE
Along with movies like Them! and The Black Scorpion, Tarantula is a standout in the genre of giant bug movies which became popular in the 1950's. And as far as insects and arachnids go, even normal tarantulas are pretty freaky with their hairy bodies and giant poisonous mandibles, so one that is a hundred times bigger than normal certainly can hold its own among cinema's nastiest monsters.
Tarantula begins with a memorable and mysterious scene in which a deformed man stumbles through the desert and collapses. Like many of the other giant bug movies, Tarantula takes place in the western United States, a land of open spaces and secret experimentation. We soon meet a scientist at a remote lab in which he is developing a super nutrient which he hopes will fight the hunger that he thinks will overtake the world as the population grows in the coming decades.
In one scene, the old man looks ahead to the future predicting population growth in the far future of 1975 and 2000. As someone who was actually alive in both of those years, it felt a bit disconcerting being called out in a movie from 1955. It made me feel like kind of a backward-looking voyeur, watching this movie in 2011 with technology that had not yet even been dreamed up in 1955.
The practical effect of this super nutrient is that is causes animals to develop quickly and grow to enormous sizes. In his lab, we see oversized rats and other animals, including a very large tarantula. Why he would need to test on a tarantula is for smarter people than me to figure out.
When the scientist's former partner returns to the lab, having fallen victim to the effects of the nutrient, the two engage in a struggle which destroys part of the lab and frees the tarantula which escapes into the desert and grows to an enormous size.
Much as in the later movie, Sssssss!, the shady scientist has to replace his mysteriously missing assistant. Only this time, the replacement is an attractive young female grad student, who also catches the eye of the doctor from the nearby town. The doctor and his new friend begin to piece together the suspicious activity centered around the lab, including horses that have been totally stripped of their flesh and huge pools of arachnid venom. The giant spider soon reveals itself in the open and goes on a rampage. It is only defeated by jets which fire napalm projectiles and are piloted by young Clint Eastwoods.
You've gotta ask yourself one question spider, do I feel lucky?
MONSTERS/EFFECTS
The giant tarantula is brought to life through a mix of puppetry and trick photography using a real tarantula composited onto a live action plate. This was a well-worn technique in old movies and many an unfortunate lizard has been dolled up to look like a ferocious dinosaur. It works surprisingly well, partially because the spider is so dark but also because a large puppet wouldn't have been able to capture the creepy way that a tarantula moves.
The two scientists also undergo a kind of inexplicable transformation after having been exposed to the experimental nutrient. While the other animals suffer from gigantism, the two scientists morph into deformed snub-nosed creatures that look a bit like the pig-people from the classic Twilight Zone episode "The Eye of the Beholder." That whole subplot seems a little unnecessary for a movie that has enough going on with a hundred foot spider running around.
MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT
The brief view of the twisted flaming tarantula corpse at the end of the movie.
HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
Available on DVD in a double feature with The Mole People.
MIMIC (1997)
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Genre: Horror/Survival
THE MOVIE
Horror movies are like icebergs of which we only normally see the tip. The rest of it is generally too unpleasant to show on screen. And I’m not talking about violence or gore, that’s evolved into its own genre: the sadistic torture porn movies that are so popular now. I’m talking about horror movies that identify people’s phobic pressure points and hammer away at them. Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly and Ridley Scott’s Alien both do this. Mimic is nowhere near as good as those movies but is stylish and effective and doesn’t pull any punches: kids and animals are fair game. In fact, the movie opens with a scene in a children’s hospital in which we see a very sick child struggling to stay alive. Although, children are commonly present in movies like this there is a convention that, although they maybe in dangerous situations, nothing is really going to happen to them. You knew Ripley was going to go back and rescue Newt and everything would be okay (well until David Fincher got a hold of them), you knew Timmy and Lex really weren’t going to get eaten by Velociraptors in that kitchen. In fact, there is a pair of kids in The Relic not unlike the bug collecting kids from Mimic but the only difference is that the filmmakers in The Relic chose an unrealistic but less disturbing fate for their two kids.
Of course, if you are scared of bugs then Mimic will probably freak you out. Myself, I grew up in apartments in Chicago, so I’ve had some run-ins with cockroaches. What the production design of Mimic does very well is capture the kinds of places where you are likely to run into bugs. Everything is dark and shadowy and wet and grimy. Urban decay is the overriding design theme. The movie even ventures into the legendary subterranean New York, where the subway tunnels meet once-elegant but long-abandoned train stations from the turn of the last century.
Mimic was one of the first English-language films from Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, who has given us such great genre movies as Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth. Mimic fits well into his fascination with insects and monsters and underground places. The movie also as a subtle Latin American aesthetic to it in its Catholic imagery and especially in the way that the insects cowls close to form a face resembling Mexican folk art.
In the movie’s opening scenes, we learn that a deadly plague has swept New York’s children. The disease is carried by cockroaches who have survived all conventional attempts to eliminate them. An entomologist has genetically engineered a hybrid insect species to eliminate the cockroach infestation. The new species, the “Judas Breed” was engineered to be sterile and die out after a short period of time. We jump forward several years and there are several mysterious and violent murders happening in or near the entrances to the underground. We see fleeting glimpses of a tall figure that seems to be wearing a long cloak. Meanwhile, a couple of kids bring the entomologist a mysterious bug, resembling the Judas Breed insect but larger and more highly evolved. Several groups of characters go investigating the subway for various reasons and end up trapped and trying to escape the infested tunnels.
Mira Sorvino plays the entomologist. My first problem with this is that every time I see her I think of Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion which makes me giggle. It doesn’t help that she’s about nine feet tall and has a weird tranny voice. On top of that, her character is written as a one of a long line of movie scientists who adhere to hare-brained theories with absolute certainty. In this case, she tells a bunch of people to smear insect guts all over themselves because “they’ll think you’re one of them!” That’s right up there with “Don’t move! It can’t see you if you don’t move!”
The monsters in Mimic are man-sized insects with the ability to rearrange their bodies into a vaguely human shape, thus they are the titular “mimics.” If you see them in silhouette or without your glasses on they look like people, otherwise, they don’t exactly pass. The whole mimic thing is really just a nice little visual subplot in this movie which is more concerned with big scary man eating bugs (the movie has about as much to do with mimics as Signs has to do with crop circles). The visual style serves to cover up a pretty typical monster movie plot that is fairly derivative of other movies such as Aliens. This was a troubled production and del Torro was fired and rehired by the producers over creative disagreements.
THE MONSTER/EFFECTS
Good effects all around. There is actually a surprising amount of practical effects, handled by the great Rob Bottin.
MONSTERS
Female drones and one big giant male “king bug.” HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
Widely available in a 1st generation DVD with few features.
As of this writing a nifty director's cut has been made available on Bluray with a digital copy. In truth, the Director's cut is not THAT different but it does restore some interesting subplots to the movie. If you were ever wondering what the deal was with the mysterious abandoned church where the Asian priest was killed near the beginning of the movie, a major scene is restored which shows the place to have been a front for a sweatshop. Also more prominent is the subplot involving Sorvino's character's attempt to become pregnant.
The set has some nice featurettes about the making of the movie. Refreshingly, del Torro speaks frankly and directly to the camera for an extended chat about the difficulties making the movie and his original vision for it. More generally he talks about the craft of filmmaking and horror filmmaking in particular, especially the studio pressures to reach the lowest common denominator. I was struck by something the director said, which was to the effect that some of his best movies are the ones he never got to make, referring to some of his famously unfulfilled projects like At The Mountain of Madness. He's currently working on Pacific Rim but has had a bad bit of luck over the last few years with projects falling through, starting with his involvement with The Hobbit.
The set has some of the usual stuff, such as a few deleted scenes and even a gag reel. They did a decent job cleaning up the picture but, it is a dark murky movie from 1997 so it's only going to look so good. It's actually pretty cheap at the moment and definitely worth picking up for fans of the movie or del Torro.
MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE
None in particular.
SEQUELS
There have been two direct to DVD sequels, one crappy, one surprisingly good.
MINORITY REPORT
This is an ongoing feature in which we look at Race and Survival in monster movies.
The veridict:
It should be noted the director is not American but that doesn’t mean the genre trends don’t apply. That being said, he first dude to die is an Asian Catholic priest. Read whatever you want into that.
The wonderful Charles S. Dutton, an African American actor probably best known for the TV show “Rock” and his role in Alien 3 is one of a small group of survivors in the last act that consists of a black dude a Latino(?) dude and a white couple. The Latino dude gets it first. Then Dutton basically sacrifices himself so that the white people can get away (sort of like his death in Alien 3.) This is a movie stereotype I like to call the Sacrificial Negro. Ultimately the survivors are a white couple and an orphaned autistic Latino kid.
TRIVIA
The Assistant Director on this movie was none other than Robert Rodriguez.
Them! is the prototypical 1950’s giant bug movie and one of the best sci-fi/horror movies of the decade.The movie has a very contemporary tone and its very matter-of-fact approach to action and horror are a precursor to James Cameron’s classic movies like Aliens, as are it’s mute, terrified little girl and its labyrinthine and claustrophobic insect nest.Like its contemporaries Gojiraand The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them! is shot in stark black-and-white, which helps create a disconcerting documentary feel and loans the film a realism that it wouldn’t have had in color.
The movie opens in New Mexico, where there has been a mysterious sandstorm and several disappearances.The only witness present is a little girl who is in such a state of shock that she will not speak.This character is handled quite nicely and is the antecedent for spooked children in movies for decades to come.Her memorable freak out upon smelling the ant’s formic acid is what gives the movie its name: “It’s them!It’s them!”
The police in cooperation with a father and daughter pair of scientists, soldiers and government agents discover the presence of gigantic mutated ants who have established a nest in the area.The explanation given is that they have been mutated due to atomic testing in the area.They destroy this nest only to find out that the queen has escaped and the rest of the movie is concerned with attempts to locate and contain the nascent ant colonies.
THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS
The ants are decently realized in the form of large puppets or animatronics.The movie is filmed in such a way as to conceal the parts of them that the filmmakers did not want you to see but they are good enough and the special effects are decent for the time period.
HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
On DVD.
MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE
The opening scenes of the movie do a great job of creating a sort of menacing, apocalyptic tone, with scenes of a destroyed Western landscape and an unnatural sandstorm in which anything can be hiding.
You've gotta ask yourself one question spider, do I feel lucky?
