Boris the Spider

Film: Tarantula
Format: Internet video on Fire!

There’s an entire genre of giant monster movies, many of which appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Movies like The Killer Shrews, The Deadly Mantis, The Giant Leeches, The Giant Gila Monster and more were all over the 1950s. Them! is one of the original greats, taking a normal creature and growing it to gigantic proportions. Even humans got into the act with The Amazing Colossal Man and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. Tarantula is naturally in the same vein, and the monster in this case is not a surprise.

It’s also worth noting that Tarantula feature the talents of one John Agar in the main role. Agar originally made what bones he had playing second fiddle to John Wayne in films like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Sands of Iwo Jima and by being married to Shirley Temple for a few years. On his own, as a leading man, Agar was typically in B-movies, often as a scientist who knew everything and, more often than anything else, spouted a bunch of nonsense. Bluntly, most of his movies were terrible, or at least dumb. It’s hard to take someone seriously when the sweet spot of his career includes films like The Mole People and Attack of the Puppet People.

Ten Days of Terror!: Revenge of the Creature

Films: Revenge of the Creature
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on The New Portable.

There’s plenty of old-school horror in the original Universal monsters, but not a great deal that’s genuinely scary. What’s interesting is just how many of the monsters are, once you dig past the horror trappings, really tragic. The Gill Man, better known as the Creature from the Black Lagoon, is one such tragic monster. While much of his tragedy is the story, perhaps the bigger tragedy is that he never got a really good sequel. Revenge of the Creature is about as good as we’re going to get for him, the poor fishy bastard.

So what’s wrong with the sequel? Well, for starters, it stars John Agar, the square-jawed, mostly talentless version of an A-list actor in B-list movies. A lot of Agar films, including this one, wound up on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I have, in fact, seen the MST3K version of this film so many times that I remember particular quips from it. Still, it’s only fair to give this its honest due for this website.

Ten Days of Terror!: It Came from Outer Space

Film: It Came from Outer Space
Format: Turner Classic Movies on big ol’ television.

There’s a particular vibe when it comes to 1950s science fiction, specifically when it comes to alien invasion movies. While there are some rare exceptions, the vast majority of alien invasion films are going to feature aliens dead set on attacking, destroying, or enslaving the human race. I mean, I get it. On a visceral level, Independence Day is more interesting than E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Movies where the aliens aren’t evil are really rare. Movies where the aliens are neither evil nor good are vanishingly scares, but that’s what is on offer from It Came from Outer Space.

So, there’s a lot to cover here. We can start with the fact that It Came from Outer Space is based on a Ray Bradbury story, and that’s going to boost it a lot in my estimation. I’ve been a fan, perhaps even a fanboy, of Bradbury for a touch more than four decades. One of Bradbury’s many gifts was having a unique ear for dialogue. No one in the world really speaks like a Bradbury character, but the poetry of those lines is something really special. About half an hour into the movie, our hero, writer and amateur astronomer John Putnam (Richard Carlson) questions Frank Daylon (Joe Sawyer), a telephone lineman, about anything he might have seen. How Frank responds, talking about 15 years of working in the desert and the wind getting into the wires and talking is goddam beautiful even if no telephone lineman ever talked like that in the history of things.

Ten Days of Terror!: Creature from the Black Lagoon

Film: Creature from the Black Lagoon
Format: DVD from Morris Area Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

Of the classic Universal monster movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon is in many ways the strangest. Most of the monsters—Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, the Mummy—have precedents in literature or folklore. I’m not sure that’s the case with the Gill Man. He seems to be something made from whole, scaly cloth. The creature is presented as something like an evolutionary dead end, sort of a prehistoric progenitor of the link between our ancient aquatic past and our land-based current form. In that respect, it’s kind of silly. However, I kind of love the Gill Man because he is so freakin’ weird.

Creature from the Black Lagoon is something of a high concept film. What would happen if a group of scientists discovered a half-fish/half-man monster in the Amazon? Dr. Carl Maia (Antonio Moreno) discovers a massive fossilized claw dating back to the Devonian while on a geology expedition in the Amazon. He shows it to Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson), an ichthyologist currently guesting at Maia’s institute. Reed and his scientist girlfriend Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams) propose mounting an expedition, which is immediately agreed to by their boss Mark Williams (Richard Denning) in an effort to find the rest of the skeleton.

Shrinky Dink

Film: The Incredible Shrinking Man
Format: DVD from NetFlix on big ol’ television.

A “high concept” film is one that essentially asks “what if?” and goes from there. A surprising number of classic B-movies have this basic idea at heart. The Incredible Shrinking Man is certainly one such film. The premise couldn’t be simpler: What if something happened to a man and he started shrinking? What if there was no way to stop the shrinking?

Scott Carey (Grant Williams) is out on a boat with his wife, Louise (Randy Stuart). When she goes in to get him a beer, the boat sails through a strange mist, covering Scott in a fine spray of strange liquid. He shrugs it off, not putting it up to much, but six months later, he notices that his pants don’t quite fit and that his shirts are loose. He’s concerned, naturally, and after a few check-ups with his family physician, he realizes that he is indeed shrinking. Exposure to some sort of insecticide followed by his exposure to the radioactive mist has caused this bizarre, almost comic book-like transformation.