I don't know that I celebrate Presidents' Day in any fashion other than watching close to twenty-four hours of science fiction film with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch at the Somerville Theatre, but I don't know that I need any other observance, either. This year marked our ninth 'Thon together. It was a nice one, too.
Thanks to the ever-diminishing returns of the MBTA, we did not this year get to shout the traditional noon countdown to Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953), but I am very glad we did not miss Steve De Jarnatt's Miracle Mile (1989), a deserved cynosure of '80's cult cinema whose elegiac apocalypse, however unmistakably grounded in the last gasp of the Cold War, has really not dated as much as one might like. The plot is a rom-com on the doomsday clock, bookended by the deep time of the La Brea Tar Pits where jazz trombonist Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards) and late-night waitress Julie Peters (Mare Winningham) meet cute among the saber-toothed fossils and the keychains and plushies of the gift shop that affirm extinction as something that happens to other people—except it might just be happening to us later that night, when Harry accidentally answers a wrong number from a terrified, babbling silo worker who just wanted to talk to his dad before their government's preemptive strike is returned with MAD interest. "This is really it! This is the big one. Thor Arthur 66-ZZD . . . Nuclear fucking war." It's a few minutes past four in the morning, the titular stretch of Wilshire Boulevard as peacefully deserted as if the end of the world has already been and gone; the nighthawks of this Reagan-era diner don't believe Harry until they do. Quick as a short-order cook whipping out a snub-nosed Colt Python or a businesswoman discovering that her D.C. contacts have just booked it to Antarctica, the film snaps from ambling affectionate irony to freezing mortal terror without jettisoning its fine-grained humanity, so fragile, irrational, selfish, precious, and maybe not going to make it this time after all. This is Ragnarök at street level, witnessed in real time by people so far from the corridors of power that they weren't even supposed to know about the warheads until their world charred to shadows on a wall. Even as Harry fights ever more bravely and sometimes horrifyingly to locate Julie in the twilight zone of pre-dawn L.A. and get the two of them safely to the sanctuary of the heliport atop the Mutual Benefit Life Building, the movie increasingly suggests that it's a race less against time than against the dying of the light. All those mastodons and sloths in their bituminous skeletal glory, testifying that the more you struggle in the tar, the faster it drags you down. And yet the film is not the exercise in nihilism it could so easily have been, even when the action escalates from bursts of surrealism and paranoia to the car-burning chaos of a prepper's dream. It finds room for the authority of a cool-headed woman, the strong-jawed heroism of a gay man, the poignancy of a long-estranged elderly couple reconciling in the last hour of their lives. If no one gets out alive, then all that matters is what you do while you're here. Coming at the tail end of a decade of such frantic affluence as the '80's, it's a simultaneously unconsoling and affirming moral and it makes the uncompromised ending something much better than a sick joke. "Forget everything you heard and go back to sleep," the Army-brusque voice that takes over the phone orders Harry, but this movie argues for staying awake. You might as well be as alive as you can, until you're not.
Please do not watch Arthur Crabtree and Richard Gordon's Fiend Without a Face (1958) under the misapprehension that it is a good movie. I have in point of fact been known to describe it as a Z-movie. For 60 out of its 75 minutes, it plunks dutifully along the atomic-age formula of a military installation conducting experiments in nuclear power which seem to have meddled just a little in God's domain as the locals begin to collapse with looks of unspeakable terror on their faces, tiny paired punctures at the napes of their necks, and their skulls and vertebral columns inexplicably devoid of the neural material usually contained therein. That's more macabre than your average radioactive kaiju, but the film presents it with deadly straightness, lacking even the WTF anti-grace of something like Invisible Invaders (1959) except in the occasional oddball line like "You ever think of trying sleep instead of Benzedrine?" The Canadian setting must have been a compromise between the American source material and the British production, but no one onscreen sounds like they ever lived in Manitoba, so I'm not sure why they bothered. I am confident I'm missing the point to wonder how running a radar station off a nuclear reactor is supposed to extend its range as far as Siberia. Beyond the airbase medico played by Gil Winfield, who gets through his burden of exposition by looking mordantly amused by the weirdness of it all—and received a round of applause a beat later for reminding his superior officer, "I'm a doctor, Colonel, not a detective"—I can tell you nothing about the characters that isn't their plot function. Some soldiers are fearless and some scientists are rational and some farmers are superstitious and a girl is the love interest. Some invisible things rustle the foliage and some redshirts scream and clutch the air around their throats as they die. The phrase "mental vampires" is bandied about with a straight face. And then the stop-motion brains come out. And they scratch across the floor with their little spinal tails and limbs of naked nerves and snail-like eyestalks, irresponsibly materialized by the crystal-radio, desk-set Krell machine of a scientist obsessed with the power of thought, and they cling in the darkened trees like squashily pulsing fruit and they fling themselves slimily through the air onto their human prey and they explode in blurts of gritty black gore like Satan's own sufganiyot when shot at point-blank range or smashed with axes and if you are gathering that the climax of this movie would be impressive by the standards of splatterpunk, I'd stand it up against Cronenberg or Carpenter any day when you didn't want to eat anything afterward. They plop, they splat, they putrefy, especially when abruptly deprived of their vital radiation by our hero, because no one ever went wrong detonating an atomic reactor with TNT. (Just ask the cast of Chernobyl!) It's outstandingly gross. It's honestly kind of beautiful. I can't care about the rest of this movie, but I acknowledge the necessity of its existence as the run-up to the flying, bleeding, disembodied vampire brains the likes of which I have seen in no other film of the 1950's, God bless them. My sole complaint about its inclusion in the marathon is that I would have shown it at four in the morning when no one would have known what hit them.
I had not seen Mel Brooks' Spaceballs (1987) since childhood, when I feel like it was playing at a classmate's house and I got absolutely none of the jokes. As a parody of Star Wars, beyond a couple of gags like the brilliantly interminable opening shot and the running monetization of absolutely everything franchise-adjacent, I think it's only okay—it's a better parody of the space opera serials that Star Wars descends from, not to mention It Happened One Night (1934)—but that's not really relevant when just thinking about moments from this movie makes me laugh. I'm sure someone's run it back to Aristophanes, but Brooks' kitchen-sink-to-the-wall approach to comedy really feels straight out of pre-Code to me, not just the ethnic in-jokes or the exuberant vulgarity but the three-ring fusillade of yuks so fast and freewheeling, you can ignore any one you like in favor of five more coming up. Stupid jokes can be set-ups for clever ones and vice versa. Dada barges through the frame on a regular basis and every so often turns out to be a brick joke. No riff is too much of a reach, so in addition to the usual sci-fi suspects we get why-not shout-outs to The Wizard of Oz (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Chuck Jones' One Froggy Evening (1955). It doesn't all work, but it doesn't all have to work: I can take or leave the rimshot about Druish princesses, but "Spaceballs: The Placemat" is a treasure. Michael Winslow does incredible vocal foley. John Hurt shows up for the chestburster spoof himself. All the dialogue about the Schwartz remains the sort of thing I remember sixth-graders quoting endlessly to one another, but the famous line about how "Evil will always triumph because Good is dumb" is actually funnier when chased by Good doing something smart. Just about everything Rick Moranis does as Dark Helmet is delightful; I reserve a particular affection for his dazed, post-ludicrous-speed delivery of "Smoke if you got 'em" and his self-insert improvisation with tie-in action figures, although the movie's most inspired meta-moment is his existential freakout while watching a VHS of Spaceballs: The Movie in real time, Abbott-and-Costello-ing through the fourth wall as he plaintively demands to know, having fast-forwarded into his own present, "When will then be now?" That's just gorgeous and worth any quantity of agreeably disposable slapstick. But even some of the cheap shots ricochet memorably, whether they were intended to or not. Who can't relate to a plangent cry of "Fuck! Even in the future, nothing works!"
Without an obvious dinner slot, we darted out to Mortadella Head at the start of Cy Endfield's Mysterious Island (1961) and returned with assorted slices just in time to watch our mix of ex-Civil War heroes take on and successfully boil for dinner a man-eating giant crab. In the absence of James Mason, Herbert Lom makes a fine Captain Nemo, but the film is much less Jules Verne than Ray Harryhausen, cf. the giant terror bird, the giant ammonoid, and the giant bees. I enjoyed it most for the Dynamation and then really enjoyed the interview afterward with Vanessa Harryhausen, who shared stories of growing up on the sets of her father's movies and around his models. She loved Gwangi from The Valley of Gwangi (1969), she said, and used to take him out in a perambulator, much to the discomfiture of passersby who would lean over benevolently expecting a doll and get the ferocious needle-toothed grin of an Allosaurus instead. She was joined onstage by Connor Heaney, also of the Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation. Anyone who can get to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art's Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema this summer, it sounds like you really should.
I agree that a queer reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is barely a stretch, but I still don't see why Clara Beranger in adapting it into John S. Robertson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) felt the need to fuse it quite so thoroughly with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) right down to repurposing the cynically seductive epigram, "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." Once you get past the notion of Henry Jekyll as a saintly idealist fallen into the demimonde out of corrupted experimentation, however, I understand why John Barrymore's performance is considered one of the benchmarks for the dual role. Tall and clear-faced, shy as if embarrassed by his own unstained beauty and much more comfortable tending to his charity patients than being admiringly appraised by a foreign dancer in a music hall, his Jekyll transforms for the first time into Hyde in a wrenching one-take feat of physical acting, dashing the potion down his throat as if the apparition of Sir George Carew has dared him into it and immediately convulsing, clutching at his throat as his body contorts in angular strychnine jerks, his hair shakes out wildly, he hunches and shudders and wipes his eyes with the back of his wrist in a curiously vulnerable gesture for the creature revealed as his face lifts to the camera, a jutting, predatory, demonically gleeful stranger whose crooked shoulders and clawed hands give him a look less of human deformity than some inhuman thing in an ill-fitting meat sack. A close-up touches in lines of age and debauchery with makeup and a dissolve extends his fingers by a spidery extra joint, but that first shock of replacement is all Barrymore, as terrifyingly estranged within his body as a possession. The return to the good doctor relies more on special effects, but I appreciate Barrymore throwing himself no less literally into the changeover—a prosthetic fingertip flies across the room with the violence of his reversion. I watched the rest of the movie as much for that theatrical physicality as for the plot, which like many versions of the story supplies a woman for each side of its protagonist's split life, here his sheltered fiancée Millicent (Martha Mansfield) and the ill-used performer Gina (Nita Naldi). The nightmare vision of a Hyde-headed spider clambering across the floor and into bed with the horrified Jekyll, feasting on him, fading into him, until he wakes with pleasure as his other self, struck me as a much more successful invention since it actually translates some of the novella's multivalence of addiction/sublimation/repulsion/desire. Other elements are reproduced with nasty fidelity, as when Hyde brutally tramples a child in the street and then blank-checks the damage to Jekyll's account or beats Carew to death with vicious delight, his appearance growing ever more raddled and animalistic. For the record, I understand the convention of depicting Hyde as visibly monstrous, but I hope someone, sometime has filmed a faithful portrayal of the original character, who has nothing very much wrong with him to look at, except for no obvious reason he makes everyone's skin crawl. I have met, occasionally, people with that affect; it is always a good idea to get away from them. I would be quite frightened of a deceptively ordinary Mr. Hyde. Barrymore's bestial interpretation is a blast, however, and I even like the ending of this version, with its bleakly truthful double-speaking. "Hyde has killed—Dr. Jekyll!" Jeff Rapsis' live accompaniment was as good as it always is.
I missed the first fifteen minutes of Ken Russell's Altered States (1980), which I was later informed had included sexual hallucinations of a beast made of eyes and the Shroud of Turin burning; I came in at the point where disaffected psychologist William Hurt manifests his midlife crisis as one did in the '70's, by flying off to Mexico to do ayahuasca, except he's such an arrogant pill that he convinces himself the cosmic ablation of his soul was some kind of native trick, or perhaps that's only the excuse to return to Harvard and keep trying to burrow back through his own DNA to the "original self" he claims really exists under six billion years of evolution, authentically accessible if he just spends enough time in a university-funded float tank tripping balls. You can't tell if he wants revelation or just obliteration. He lectures with eloquent contempt about the self-destroying rituals of domesticity and the meaninglessness of pain, but when challenged by the equally brilliant anthropologist he married and fathered two children with, he sounds like any fumbling slacker trying to get out of his responsibilities. As he drives himself to ever more hallucinatory extremes of physical and psychological dislocation, his fellow researcher played by Charles Haid begins to speak for us all as he exits a scene bellowing, "And I'm not going to listen to any more of your cabalistic quantum frigging dumb limbo mumbo jumbo!" That is a beautiful self-own of the science in this movie. But I almost don't care. I care to the point that I wish there were less technobabble, because everything about this story gets less plausible every time someone tries to rationalize it, but even the technobabble can't neutralize the primal psychedelia of the universe cracking open inside Hurt's Dr. Eddie Jessup, warping him through visions of lava and lizards and fireworks and himself and Blair Brown's Emily as sphinxlike statues scoured to dust under the endless wind of time. He regresses into a veldt-dwelling hominid, escapes into the streets of New York standing in for Boston and eats a wild sheep in a zoo before "reconstituting" into his modern sapiens self. (I can see absolutely no way for this film to have influenced Simon (1980) given the release dates, but that zeitgeist must have been really something.) At the heart of the primordial whirlpool into which all the rational machinery of the experiment has dissolved, a beating heart becomes a black sun becomes a blood cell becomes an event horizon, churning ever farther back into the abyss of eternity. "He finally got it off with God!" But it's only a human hand that can pull you back into your own true shivering human skin, like Janet with Tam Lin, and that reaching out into the dark has to go both ways. If we're all terrified and alone, we can at least be terrified and alone together. I've seen six films by Ken Russell now and enjoyed all of them; the best of them seem to be fearless about plunging into human silliness and out some kind of transcendence on the other side. I should write about a couple and see a lot more.
Neither of us really felt like rewatching David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), so we took the opportunity to catch a bus home and feed the cats. We did not want to miss the after-midnight movie.
Written and directed by Jeff Nichols, Midnight Special (2016) was one of my favorite movies of its year; it remains one of my favorite science fiction movies full stop. The title comes from the old prison ballad, shine a light on me. The film has the blue-collar feel of a ballad itself, though its Americana is up to date with the dreams and anxieties of the twenty-first century, incorporating millenarian cults and government agencies, AMBER alerts and NSA satellites, motel windows blacked out with cardboard and duct tape and a 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle the patched primer grey of a hastily activated, not yet ready for primetime plan into a four-day, off-the-grid odyssey from a religious ranch in Texas to a tall-grass swamp in the Florida panhandle to keep a rendezvous with . . . It might be the end of days. It might only be a threat to national security beyond the wildest paranoia of the DoD. Ground zero for these converging shockwaves of conspiracy is an eight-year-old boy (Jaeden Martell) in a neat blue shirt and jeans, his little ghost of a face half-masked by blue plastic goggles. Much of the time he wears earmuffs; carefully shielded from sunlight, he wakes only at night. He reads comic books, avidly, by flashlight under sheets and in the back seats of cars. The reasons for these precautions come into focus as matter-of-factly as the rest of the laconic, watchful screenplay: Alton Meyer awake by day is the focus of violent electrical disturbances, poltergeist-like breakages, and from his eyes shine blue beams of communion like windows not to the soul but something addictively, indescribably elsewhere. He channels a Spanish-language radio station and bleeds from the nose. The UFO-like lights of a meteor shower separating in the sky slam into the asphalt of an all-night gas station in flaming chunks of highly classified ex-technology as Alton mumbles tearfully, "I'm sorry." He's a child for all his dangerous fragility; he should not have to meet the adult world's demands for a savior, a secret weapon: "I'm not any of those things." The film builds toward the obvious question of what, then, this desperately loved and vulnerable kid actually is, but it feels emblematic of its care for character over concept that while an answer is not denied the audience, it is not in itself more important than how the rest of the cast take it. Without reducing itself to metaphor, Midnight Special asks serious questions about what it means to parent a child, to support them as they—and not you—require. Roy Tomlin (Michael Shannon) looks like a fanatic with his hard-grooved face and his nervous trigger finger, but his unconditional devotion to Alton, exposed by gestures as tender as rocking the weeping child in his old denim coat or as heedless as waving a shotgun around the aftermath of a road accident, is not faith-based; it's his childhood friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton), a crew-cut state trooper as bluntly grounded as Roy can be hectic, who sounds new-baptized when he speaks obliquely of "that thing with his eyes . . . that's powerful." Sarah (Kirsten Dunst) still keeps the nocturnal hours and thick wheatsheaf braid of the cult she was raised in, but she's more fearless than any of the faithful in following Alton as far as he needs her. Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) is as funnily sympathetic as only a long tall dork in browline glasses who in the age of the cloud still approaches interviews with a camcorder and a legal pad can be, but he still works for the NSA—he might only be the secular counterpart of the Ranch's Brother Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), preaching apocalypse in sermons that sound like a numbers station. These complexities ricochet so far down the script that they touch even an otherwise unwavering enforcer (Bill Camp), reflecting before a moment of holy violence, "I'm an electrician, certified in two states. What do I know about these things?" And then having so firmly established the mundane, humane bona fides of its working-class sci-fi, the film can go for the otherworld with breathtaking directness and more success than almost any other recent genre piece I can think of. I don't see a lot of movies that remind me simultaneously of Winter's Bone (2010) and Zenna Henderson's People stories. I don't even mind the echoes of Spielberg, King, and Carpenter when there's so little schmaltz in its sense of wonder, beautifully shot on night-blue, sodium-gold 35 mm by DP Adam Stone while David Wingo's score pulses with radiophonic unease. It has all the heart it needs in a parent kneeling underneath the concrete ribs of an overpass, hearing their child tell them not to worry: "I like worrying about you . . . I'll always worry about you. That's the deal."
And neither of us really felt like rewatching John Frankenheimer's Seconds (1966), so we took a binder of DVDs sent me byhandful_ofdust into the microcinema and made sure the two people who were setting up to sleep in there had another darkened theater to doze off in and Rob showed me Thom Eberhardt's Night of the Comet (1984), which like most of the rest of this marathon I had never seen. The premise sounds like a broad cartoon—gun-toting Valley girls fighting off zombies and scientists in an eerily red-smogged L.A., depopulated like the rest of Earth from passing through the deadly tail of a comet last seen at the end of the time of the dinosaurs. Big hair and a body count, that's comedy, right? The actual film does include lines like "Come on, Hector, the MAC-10 submachine was designed for housewives" and a delirious freebie shopping spree interrupted by a gang of zombifying stockboys, but it has an unworried B-movie charm that feels as comfortable hanging out with Reggie and Sam Belmont (Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney) as they adjust to their ironically emancipated circumstances as it does putting them in any kind of peril. They listen to pre-recorded radio, drink beer on the hoods of ownerless cars, watch the traffic lights change above the deserted streets in cycles of undisturbed automation that reminded Rob of Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains." Their survival is not treated as a punch line but as plausibly as any other random quirk of disaster: statistically, why not? It's more than reasonable that the first survivor they meet should be Chicano (Robert Beltran) and when one of the girls makes a flippantly racist remark in his direction, the film checks it as not cool. Relations soon improve to the point of Sam sulking, "My sister, who swiped every guy I ever had my eye on, has now swiped the last guy in the whole freaked-out world," but romance hangs fire a lot longer than trust, foregrounding the gum-cracking, arcade-gaming battle duo of the sisters more than any eventual, admittedly adorable pairing off. The comedy blackens and the plot quickens slightly with the introduction of a secret government bunker full of lightly comet-dusted scientists whose purpose in seeking out survivors is not exactly the betterment of mankind, but since it permits Mary Woronov to steal a whole bunch of scenes from Geoffrey Lewis, I'm not complaining. The tone never drops into grimdark just to show it means it; it remains a technically viable Christmas movie from start to finish and I can't imagine it didn't influence the hell out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The haze-red filters over the street scenes are a cheap but effectively creepy touch. I don't know what the underwear double nightmare fakeout was doing, but it's very 1980's. I had not expected to see Los Angeles get two different destructions in the same night. As for Seconds, I did appreciate that the theater was playing Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" as we got back. My God! What have I done?
Daniel Haller's Die, Monster, Die! (1965) is not a great version of "The Colour Out of Space" (1927), but it's terrific Lovecraftiana. Transplanting the town of Arkham and the "blasted heath" on its outskirts from western Massachusetts to northern England, the screenplay by Jerry Sohl retains the original idea of a mysterious meteorite that emits both a weird color and a blighting radiation, but adds elements of black magic and doomed heredity recalling both The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941) and "The Dunwich Horror" (1929). Living alone with his sheltered daughter and his bedridden wife in the mansion his grandfather built, proud Nahum Witley (Boris Karloff) disclaims the blasphemies of his father Corbin who practiced unspeakable rituals in the dungeon-like cellar and called on "dark forces" out of the grimoire Cult of the Outer Ones: "Chains for devils!" He considers himself a man of science, dreaming of vineyards and gardens flourishing with the prodigious growth of the meteorite's influence, but the audience can't help noticing that he installed the stone under his father's skull-crowned altar whose sacrificial grate fits its dimensions as closely as if it had been built to contain it. Bits of its terrible color glint from Corbin's old murals of skeletal goat-legged demons and things with not enough face for their eyes. "Corbin was invoking the dark powers when he died," Letitia Witley (Freda Jackson) reminds her husband wearily from behind the shrouds of her four-poster bed. "Now his call is being answered." Of course the rational American on the scene (Nick Adams) thinks it's just radioactivity causing the mutations of plants and animals into monstrous, eventually faceless, crumbling forms, but the camera lingers on the portrait of Corbin Witley as if to question otherwise. The impact site is withered as if by fire, the trees around it decay into black rust at a touch. The color itself is not all that otherworldly, but it is successfully unpleasant, a sort of acrid, chlorinated beryl that whines and crackles like a frustrated oscilloscope, stickily parasitic. That's all well done even without creeping details like the racking cries in the night or the doctor who's been a reclusive drunk ever since attending Corbin's death. The major strike against this film for me is the insistent presence of Adams' Stephen Reinhart, who is so flatly no-nonsense that in actual Lovecraft he would be toast but here is savingly in love with Susan Witley (Suzan Farmer) and therefore plot-armored despite the fact that I've seen mannequins provide better scene partners for Boris Karloff. The abstract credit sequence is very good, churning luridly into an ominous vortex. Seeing Karloff in color is its own fascinating treat. Points to the house music for coming up on the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's "Tentacles."
Everything you need to know about Jack Arnold's Tarantula! (1955) is contained in the exclamation point at the end of its title. We used the first half-hour of its runtime to forage for breakfast at Davis Square Donuts & Bagels, after which Rob went off to nap and I ate my old-fashioned cake donut while watching some not unenjoyably muddled mid-century mad science. The movie doesn't have any of its metaphors or even some of its logic lined up, but if what you want to see is a three-story tarantula skeletonizing cows and knocking over power lines, you got it. The effects are quite good since they are mostly a regular-sized tarantula filmed doing regular tarantula things and then matted into the highways and deserts of Arizona. The protagonists are B-stalwarts John Agar and Mara Corday; Ross Elliott hangs around as one of those skeptical reporters who grouses that he'll have to see the tarantula to believe it and is forebodingly told, "You'll see it, Joe—and you'll wish you hadn't." I felt a little silly for asking a friend to identify the familiar-looking lead scientist for me and hearing he was Leo G. Carroll: I should have known that from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
Run, do not walk, to your nearest library or streaming service and make time for Julia Hart's Fast Color (2018), which I would call one of the best superhero films I have ever seen if that did not sell its wild, intimate, achingly beautiful drama of generational trauma and reclamation much too short. In a near-future America where no rain has fallen for eight years, where the shells of pickup trucks and roadside diners blister beneath skies the color of faded denim and a motel room costs $35 a night but a full jug of water costs $50, a fragile, feral drifter named Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) runs open-mouthed, lung-wracked, like she's never done anything else in her life. She steals cars, hitches rides, pores over a crumpled highway map until her hands shake uncontrollably. Her wrists are braceleted with bloodied rope, with which we learn she is accustomed to tie herself into bed at night: like one of N. K. Jemisin's orogenes, her seizures trigger earthquakes. She carries an NA chip in her pocket, a ragged stuffed bear in her kit bag. Cagey, jagged, and driven, she's so spellbinding that Hart and her co-writer Jordan Horowitz could have made an entire movie just watching her roam this parched, not far-fetched landscape, but it deepens immeasurably when it reveals the existence and "abilities" of her mother Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) and her daughter Lila (Saniyya Sidney) from whom she's been estranged for so long that she spends her first night home in years camping out in the barn like a tramp, long-held defenses and longer-kept secrets on all sides. Slowly, through items as ordinary and important as a mended bowl, a record collection, an after-dinner cigarette, the film begins to illuminate a rich lineage of power manifested as destruction and restoration, which sounds heavy but can also be used for magical shoplifting by a fix-it-minded ten-year-old impatient with the progress of her project car—just because the special effects are sparing does not mean that the script ducks the question of what life might be like with superpowers woven casually through it, even when the existence of the abilities has kept the family in hiding for as many generations of women as have written in the thick, time-stained book that Bo studies, looking for something to solve or at least shed light on her daughter's elemental affliction. Dayenu again, if we only got to soak in the love and difficulty of the relationships between stoic Bo, wounded Ruth, eager Lila, none of them really so easily described, any one of them a convincing protagonist and all together something a bit like having breakfast with the triple goddess. The echoes in this film run from Flint, Michigan to the myths of Demeter, Oyá, and the Fisher King; the cinematography by Michael Fimognari takes the wasteland spaces of the Western and fills them with the luminous dusk-and-dawn pregnancy of the world about to change shape. The soundtrack, too, hums with revolution when its queens include Poly Styrene and Nina Simone. Ruth was not running just from her demons when she booked it out of a midnight warehouse in the opening scenes; we heard the hunger in the voice of disingenuous G-man Bill (Christopher Denham) as he tried to make his superiors understand, "She can affect the energy of the earth," and the plot begins to gather toward a confrontation which even the concerned local sheriff Ellis (David Strathairn) might not be able to avert, and more importantly, perhaps should not. Poetic, apocalyptic, and the absolute opposite of empty CGI, the finale is spectacular. "A new world is coming. This is only the beginning."
After that there was no point in watching anything else, especially Soylent Green (1973), so we caught a not horrifyingly delinquent bus home and fed the cats again and read books and passed out and then it took me a week to reconstitute sufficiently to write about any of these movies, but I am so glad to have seen all of them in a theater. Next year in Davis Square. This holiday brought to you by my recurring backers at Patreon.
spatch at the Somerville Theatre, but I don't know that I need any other observance, either. This year marked our ninth 'Thon together. It was a nice one, too.Thanks to the ever-diminishing returns of the MBTA, we did not this year get to shout the traditional noon countdown to Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953), but I am very glad we did not miss Steve De Jarnatt's Miracle Mile (1989), a deserved cynosure of '80's cult cinema whose elegiac apocalypse, however unmistakably grounded in the last gasp of the Cold War, has really not dated as much as one might like. The plot is a rom-com on the doomsday clock, bookended by the deep time of the La Brea Tar Pits where jazz trombonist Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards) and late-night waitress Julie Peters (Mare Winningham) meet cute among the saber-toothed fossils and the keychains and plushies of the gift shop that affirm extinction as something that happens to other people—except it might just be happening to us later that night, when Harry accidentally answers a wrong number from a terrified, babbling silo worker who just wanted to talk to his dad before their government's preemptive strike is returned with MAD interest. "This is really it! This is the big one. Thor Arthur 66-ZZD . . . Nuclear fucking war." It's a few minutes past four in the morning, the titular stretch of Wilshire Boulevard as peacefully deserted as if the end of the world has already been and gone; the nighthawks of this Reagan-era diner don't believe Harry until they do. Quick as a short-order cook whipping out a snub-nosed Colt Python or a businesswoman discovering that her D.C. contacts have just booked it to Antarctica, the film snaps from ambling affectionate irony to freezing mortal terror without jettisoning its fine-grained humanity, so fragile, irrational, selfish, precious, and maybe not going to make it this time after all. This is Ragnarök at street level, witnessed in real time by people so far from the corridors of power that they weren't even supposed to know about the warheads until their world charred to shadows on a wall. Even as Harry fights ever more bravely and sometimes horrifyingly to locate Julie in the twilight zone of pre-dawn L.A. and get the two of them safely to the sanctuary of the heliport atop the Mutual Benefit Life Building, the movie increasingly suggests that it's a race less against time than against the dying of the light. All those mastodons and sloths in their bituminous skeletal glory, testifying that the more you struggle in the tar, the faster it drags you down. And yet the film is not the exercise in nihilism it could so easily have been, even when the action escalates from bursts of surrealism and paranoia to the car-burning chaos of a prepper's dream. It finds room for the authority of a cool-headed woman, the strong-jawed heroism of a gay man, the poignancy of a long-estranged elderly couple reconciling in the last hour of their lives. If no one gets out alive, then all that matters is what you do while you're here. Coming at the tail end of a decade of such frantic affluence as the '80's, it's a simultaneously unconsoling and affirming moral and it makes the uncompromised ending something much better than a sick joke. "Forget everything you heard and go back to sleep," the Army-brusque voice that takes over the phone orders Harry, but this movie argues for staying awake. You might as well be as alive as you can, until you're not.
Please do not watch Arthur Crabtree and Richard Gordon's Fiend Without a Face (1958) under the misapprehension that it is a good movie. I have in point of fact been known to describe it as a Z-movie. For 60 out of its 75 minutes, it plunks dutifully along the atomic-age formula of a military installation conducting experiments in nuclear power which seem to have meddled just a little in God's domain as the locals begin to collapse with looks of unspeakable terror on their faces, tiny paired punctures at the napes of their necks, and their skulls and vertebral columns inexplicably devoid of the neural material usually contained therein. That's more macabre than your average radioactive kaiju, but the film presents it with deadly straightness, lacking even the WTF anti-grace of something like Invisible Invaders (1959) except in the occasional oddball line like "You ever think of trying sleep instead of Benzedrine?" The Canadian setting must have been a compromise between the American source material and the British production, but no one onscreen sounds like they ever lived in Manitoba, so I'm not sure why they bothered. I am confident I'm missing the point to wonder how running a radar station off a nuclear reactor is supposed to extend its range as far as Siberia. Beyond the airbase medico played by Gil Winfield, who gets through his burden of exposition by looking mordantly amused by the weirdness of it all—and received a round of applause a beat later for reminding his superior officer, "I'm a doctor, Colonel, not a detective"—I can tell you nothing about the characters that isn't their plot function. Some soldiers are fearless and some scientists are rational and some farmers are superstitious and a girl is the love interest. Some invisible things rustle the foliage and some redshirts scream and clutch the air around their throats as they die. The phrase "mental vampires" is bandied about with a straight face. And then the stop-motion brains come out. And they scratch across the floor with their little spinal tails and limbs of naked nerves and snail-like eyestalks, irresponsibly materialized by the crystal-radio, desk-set Krell machine of a scientist obsessed with the power of thought, and they cling in the darkened trees like squashily pulsing fruit and they fling themselves slimily through the air onto their human prey and they explode in blurts of gritty black gore like Satan's own sufganiyot when shot at point-blank range or smashed with axes and if you are gathering that the climax of this movie would be impressive by the standards of splatterpunk, I'd stand it up against Cronenberg or Carpenter any day when you didn't want to eat anything afterward. They plop, they splat, they putrefy, especially when abruptly deprived of their vital radiation by our hero, because no one ever went wrong detonating an atomic reactor with TNT. (Just ask the cast of Chernobyl!) It's outstandingly gross. It's honestly kind of beautiful. I can't care about the rest of this movie, but I acknowledge the necessity of its existence as the run-up to the flying, bleeding, disembodied vampire brains the likes of which I have seen in no other film of the 1950's, God bless them. My sole complaint about its inclusion in the marathon is that I would have shown it at four in the morning when no one would have known what hit them.
I had not seen Mel Brooks' Spaceballs (1987) since childhood, when I feel like it was playing at a classmate's house and I got absolutely none of the jokes. As a parody of Star Wars, beyond a couple of gags like the brilliantly interminable opening shot and the running monetization of absolutely everything franchise-adjacent, I think it's only okay—it's a better parody of the space opera serials that Star Wars descends from, not to mention It Happened One Night (1934)—but that's not really relevant when just thinking about moments from this movie makes me laugh. I'm sure someone's run it back to Aristophanes, but Brooks' kitchen-sink-to-the-wall approach to comedy really feels straight out of pre-Code to me, not just the ethnic in-jokes or the exuberant vulgarity but the three-ring fusillade of yuks so fast and freewheeling, you can ignore any one you like in favor of five more coming up. Stupid jokes can be set-ups for clever ones and vice versa. Dada barges through the frame on a regular basis and every so often turns out to be a brick joke. No riff is too much of a reach, so in addition to the usual sci-fi suspects we get why-not shout-outs to The Wizard of Oz (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Chuck Jones' One Froggy Evening (1955). It doesn't all work, but it doesn't all have to work: I can take or leave the rimshot about Druish princesses, but "Spaceballs: The Placemat" is a treasure. Michael Winslow does incredible vocal foley. John Hurt shows up for the chestburster spoof himself. All the dialogue about the Schwartz remains the sort of thing I remember sixth-graders quoting endlessly to one another, but the famous line about how "Evil will always triumph because Good is dumb" is actually funnier when chased by Good doing something smart. Just about everything Rick Moranis does as Dark Helmet is delightful; I reserve a particular affection for his dazed, post-ludicrous-speed delivery of "Smoke if you got 'em" and his self-insert improvisation with tie-in action figures, although the movie's most inspired meta-moment is his existential freakout while watching a VHS of Spaceballs: The Movie in real time, Abbott-and-Costello-ing through the fourth wall as he plaintively demands to know, having fast-forwarded into his own present, "When will then be now?" That's just gorgeous and worth any quantity of agreeably disposable slapstick. But even some of the cheap shots ricochet memorably, whether they were intended to or not. Who can't relate to a plangent cry of "Fuck! Even in the future, nothing works!"
Without an obvious dinner slot, we darted out to Mortadella Head at the start of Cy Endfield's Mysterious Island (1961) and returned with assorted slices just in time to watch our mix of ex-Civil War heroes take on and successfully boil for dinner a man-eating giant crab. In the absence of James Mason, Herbert Lom makes a fine Captain Nemo, but the film is much less Jules Verne than Ray Harryhausen, cf. the giant terror bird, the giant ammonoid, and the giant bees. I enjoyed it most for the Dynamation and then really enjoyed the interview afterward with Vanessa Harryhausen, who shared stories of growing up on the sets of her father's movies and around his models. She loved Gwangi from The Valley of Gwangi (1969), she said, and used to take him out in a perambulator, much to the discomfiture of passersby who would lean over benevolently expecting a doll and get the ferocious needle-toothed grin of an Allosaurus instead. She was joined onstage by Connor Heaney, also of the Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation. Anyone who can get to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art's Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema this summer, it sounds like you really should.
I agree that a queer reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is barely a stretch, but I still don't see why Clara Beranger in adapting it into John S. Robertson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) felt the need to fuse it quite so thoroughly with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) right down to repurposing the cynically seductive epigram, "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." Once you get past the notion of Henry Jekyll as a saintly idealist fallen into the demimonde out of corrupted experimentation, however, I understand why John Barrymore's performance is considered one of the benchmarks for the dual role. Tall and clear-faced, shy as if embarrassed by his own unstained beauty and much more comfortable tending to his charity patients than being admiringly appraised by a foreign dancer in a music hall, his Jekyll transforms for the first time into Hyde in a wrenching one-take feat of physical acting, dashing the potion down his throat as if the apparition of Sir George Carew has dared him into it and immediately convulsing, clutching at his throat as his body contorts in angular strychnine jerks, his hair shakes out wildly, he hunches and shudders and wipes his eyes with the back of his wrist in a curiously vulnerable gesture for the creature revealed as his face lifts to the camera, a jutting, predatory, demonically gleeful stranger whose crooked shoulders and clawed hands give him a look less of human deformity than some inhuman thing in an ill-fitting meat sack. A close-up touches in lines of age and debauchery with makeup and a dissolve extends his fingers by a spidery extra joint, but that first shock of replacement is all Barrymore, as terrifyingly estranged within his body as a possession. The return to the good doctor relies more on special effects, but I appreciate Barrymore throwing himself no less literally into the changeover—a prosthetic fingertip flies across the room with the violence of his reversion. I watched the rest of the movie as much for that theatrical physicality as for the plot, which like many versions of the story supplies a woman for each side of its protagonist's split life, here his sheltered fiancée Millicent (Martha Mansfield) and the ill-used performer Gina (Nita Naldi). The nightmare vision of a Hyde-headed spider clambering across the floor and into bed with the horrified Jekyll, feasting on him, fading into him, until he wakes with pleasure as his other self, struck me as a much more successful invention since it actually translates some of the novella's multivalence of addiction/sublimation/repulsion/desire. Other elements are reproduced with nasty fidelity, as when Hyde brutally tramples a child in the street and then blank-checks the damage to Jekyll's account or beats Carew to death with vicious delight, his appearance growing ever more raddled and animalistic. For the record, I understand the convention of depicting Hyde as visibly monstrous, but I hope someone, sometime has filmed a faithful portrayal of the original character, who has nothing very much wrong with him to look at, except for no obvious reason he makes everyone's skin crawl. I have met, occasionally, people with that affect; it is always a good idea to get away from them. I would be quite frightened of a deceptively ordinary Mr. Hyde. Barrymore's bestial interpretation is a blast, however, and I even like the ending of this version, with its bleakly truthful double-speaking. "Hyde has killed—Dr. Jekyll!" Jeff Rapsis' live accompaniment was as good as it always is.
I missed the first fifteen minutes of Ken Russell's Altered States (1980), which I was later informed had included sexual hallucinations of a beast made of eyes and the Shroud of Turin burning; I came in at the point where disaffected psychologist William Hurt manifests his midlife crisis as one did in the '70's, by flying off to Mexico to do ayahuasca, except he's such an arrogant pill that he convinces himself the cosmic ablation of his soul was some kind of native trick, or perhaps that's only the excuse to return to Harvard and keep trying to burrow back through his own DNA to the "original self" he claims really exists under six billion years of evolution, authentically accessible if he just spends enough time in a university-funded float tank tripping balls. You can't tell if he wants revelation or just obliteration. He lectures with eloquent contempt about the self-destroying rituals of domesticity and the meaninglessness of pain, but when challenged by the equally brilliant anthropologist he married and fathered two children with, he sounds like any fumbling slacker trying to get out of his responsibilities. As he drives himself to ever more hallucinatory extremes of physical and psychological dislocation, his fellow researcher played by Charles Haid begins to speak for us all as he exits a scene bellowing, "And I'm not going to listen to any more of your cabalistic quantum frigging dumb limbo mumbo jumbo!" That is a beautiful self-own of the science in this movie. But I almost don't care. I care to the point that I wish there were less technobabble, because everything about this story gets less plausible every time someone tries to rationalize it, but even the technobabble can't neutralize the primal psychedelia of the universe cracking open inside Hurt's Dr. Eddie Jessup, warping him through visions of lava and lizards and fireworks and himself and Blair Brown's Emily as sphinxlike statues scoured to dust under the endless wind of time. He regresses into a veldt-dwelling hominid, escapes into the streets of New York standing in for Boston and eats a wild sheep in a zoo before "reconstituting" into his modern sapiens self. (I can see absolutely no way for this film to have influenced Simon (1980) given the release dates, but that zeitgeist must have been really something.) At the heart of the primordial whirlpool into which all the rational machinery of the experiment has dissolved, a beating heart becomes a black sun becomes a blood cell becomes an event horizon, churning ever farther back into the abyss of eternity. "He finally got it off with God!" But it's only a human hand that can pull you back into your own true shivering human skin, like Janet with Tam Lin, and that reaching out into the dark has to go both ways. If we're all terrified and alone, we can at least be terrified and alone together. I've seen six films by Ken Russell now and enjoyed all of them; the best of them seem to be fearless about plunging into human silliness and out some kind of transcendence on the other side. I should write about a couple and see a lot more.
Neither of us really felt like rewatching David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), so we took the opportunity to catch a bus home and feed the cats. We did not want to miss the after-midnight movie.
Written and directed by Jeff Nichols, Midnight Special (2016) was one of my favorite movies of its year; it remains one of my favorite science fiction movies full stop. The title comes from the old prison ballad, shine a light on me. The film has the blue-collar feel of a ballad itself, though its Americana is up to date with the dreams and anxieties of the twenty-first century, incorporating millenarian cults and government agencies, AMBER alerts and NSA satellites, motel windows blacked out with cardboard and duct tape and a 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle the patched primer grey of a hastily activated, not yet ready for primetime plan into a four-day, off-the-grid odyssey from a religious ranch in Texas to a tall-grass swamp in the Florida panhandle to keep a rendezvous with . . . It might be the end of days. It might only be a threat to national security beyond the wildest paranoia of the DoD. Ground zero for these converging shockwaves of conspiracy is an eight-year-old boy (Jaeden Martell) in a neat blue shirt and jeans, his little ghost of a face half-masked by blue plastic goggles. Much of the time he wears earmuffs; carefully shielded from sunlight, he wakes only at night. He reads comic books, avidly, by flashlight under sheets and in the back seats of cars. The reasons for these precautions come into focus as matter-of-factly as the rest of the laconic, watchful screenplay: Alton Meyer awake by day is the focus of violent electrical disturbances, poltergeist-like breakages, and from his eyes shine blue beams of communion like windows not to the soul but something addictively, indescribably elsewhere. He channels a Spanish-language radio station and bleeds from the nose. The UFO-like lights of a meteor shower separating in the sky slam into the asphalt of an all-night gas station in flaming chunks of highly classified ex-technology as Alton mumbles tearfully, "I'm sorry." He's a child for all his dangerous fragility; he should not have to meet the adult world's demands for a savior, a secret weapon: "I'm not any of those things." The film builds toward the obvious question of what, then, this desperately loved and vulnerable kid actually is, but it feels emblematic of its care for character over concept that while an answer is not denied the audience, it is not in itself more important than how the rest of the cast take it. Without reducing itself to metaphor, Midnight Special asks serious questions about what it means to parent a child, to support them as they—and not you—require. Roy Tomlin (Michael Shannon) looks like a fanatic with his hard-grooved face and his nervous trigger finger, but his unconditional devotion to Alton, exposed by gestures as tender as rocking the weeping child in his old denim coat or as heedless as waving a shotgun around the aftermath of a road accident, is not faith-based; it's his childhood friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton), a crew-cut state trooper as bluntly grounded as Roy can be hectic, who sounds new-baptized when he speaks obliquely of "that thing with his eyes . . . that's powerful." Sarah (Kirsten Dunst) still keeps the nocturnal hours and thick wheatsheaf braid of the cult she was raised in, but she's more fearless than any of the faithful in following Alton as far as he needs her. Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) is as funnily sympathetic as only a long tall dork in browline glasses who in the age of the cloud still approaches interviews with a camcorder and a legal pad can be, but he still works for the NSA—he might only be the secular counterpart of the Ranch's Brother Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), preaching apocalypse in sermons that sound like a numbers station. These complexities ricochet so far down the script that they touch even an otherwise unwavering enforcer (Bill Camp), reflecting before a moment of holy violence, "I'm an electrician, certified in two states. What do I know about these things?" And then having so firmly established the mundane, humane bona fides of its working-class sci-fi, the film can go for the otherworld with breathtaking directness and more success than almost any other recent genre piece I can think of. I don't see a lot of movies that remind me simultaneously of Winter's Bone (2010) and Zenna Henderson's People stories. I don't even mind the echoes of Spielberg, King, and Carpenter when there's so little schmaltz in its sense of wonder, beautifully shot on night-blue, sodium-gold 35 mm by DP Adam Stone while David Wingo's score pulses with radiophonic unease. It has all the heart it needs in a parent kneeling underneath the concrete ribs of an overpass, hearing their child tell them not to worry: "I like worrying about you . . . I'll always worry about you. That's the deal."
And neither of us really felt like rewatching John Frankenheimer's Seconds (1966), so we took a binder of DVDs sent me by
handful_ofdust into the microcinema and made sure the two people who were setting up to sleep in there had another darkened theater to doze off in and Rob showed me Thom Eberhardt's Night of the Comet (1984), which like most of the rest of this marathon I had never seen. The premise sounds like a broad cartoon—gun-toting Valley girls fighting off zombies and scientists in an eerily red-smogged L.A., depopulated like the rest of Earth from passing through the deadly tail of a comet last seen at the end of the time of the dinosaurs. Big hair and a body count, that's comedy, right? The actual film does include lines like "Come on, Hector, the MAC-10 submachine was designed for housewives" and a delirious freebie shopping spree interrupted by a gang of zombifying stockboys, but it has an unworried B-movie charm that feels as comfortable hanging out with Reggie and Sam Belmont (Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney) as they adjust to their ironically emancipated circumstances as it does putting them in any kind of peril. They listen to pre-recorded radio, drink beer on the hoods of ownerless cars, watch the traffic lights change above the deserted streets in cycles of undisturbed automation that reminded Rob of Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains." Their survival is not treated as a punch line but as plausibly as any other random quirk of disaster: statistically, why not? It's more than reasonable that the first survivor they meet should be Chicano (Robert Beltran) and when one of the girls makes a flippantly racist remark in his direction, the film checks it as not cool. Relations soon improve to the point of Sam sulking, "My sister, who swiped every guy I ever had my eye on, has now swiped the last guy in the whole freaked-out world," but romance hangs fire a lot longer than trust, foregrounding the gum-cracking, arcade-gaming battle duo of the sisters more than any eventual, admittedly adorable pairing off. The comedy blackens and the plot quickens slightly with the introduction of a secret government bunker full of lightly comet-dusted scientists whose purpose in seeking out survivors is not exactly the betterment of mankind, but since it permits Mary Woronov to steal a whole bunch of scenes from Geoffrey Lewis, I'm not complaining. The tone never drops into grimdark just to show it means it; it remains a technically viable Christmas movie from start to finish and I can't imagine it didn't influence the hell out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The haze-red filters over the street scenes are a cheap but effectively creepy touch. I don't know what the underwear double nightmare fakeout was doing, but it's very 1980's. I had not expected to see Los Angeles get two different destructions in the same night. As for Seconds, I did appreciate that the theater was playing Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" as we got back. My God! What have I done?Daniel Haller's Die, Monster, Die! (1965) is not a great version of "The Colour Out of Space" (1927), but it's terrific Lovecraftiana. Transplanting the town of Arkham and the "blasted heath" on its outskirts from western Massachusetts to northern England, the screenplay by Jerry Sohl retains the original idea of a mysterious meteorite that emits both a weird color and a blighting radiation, but adds elements of black magic and doomed heredity recalling both The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941) and "The Dunwich Horror" (1929). Living alone with his sheltered daughter and his bedridden wife in the mansion his grandfather built, proud Nahum Witley (Boris Karloff) disclaims the blasphemies of his father Corbin who practiced unspeakable rituals in the dungeon-like cellar and called on "dark forces" out of the grimoire Cult of the Outer Ones: "Chains for devils!" He considers himself a man of science, dreaming of vineyards and gardens flourishing with the prodigious growth of the meteorite's influence, but the audience can't help noticing that he installed the stone under his father's skull-crowned altar whose sacrificial grate fits its dimensions as closely as if it had been built to contain it. Bits of its terrible color glint from Corbin's old murals of skeletal goat-legged demons and things with not enough face for their eyes. "Corbin was invoking the dark powers when he died," Letitia Witley (Freda Jackson) reminds her husband wearily from behind the shrouds of her four-poster bed. "Now his call is being answered." Of course the rational American on the scene (Nick Adams) thinks it's just radioactivity causing the mutations of plants and animals into monstrous, eventually faceless, crumbling forms, but the camera lingers on the portrait of Corbin Witley as if to question otherwise. The impact site is withered as if by fire, the trees around it decay into black rust at a touch. The color itself is not all that otherworldly, but it is successfully unpleasant, a sort of acrid, chlorinated beryl that whines and crackles like a frustrated oscilloscope, stickily parasitic. That's all well done even without creeping details like the racking cries in the night or the doctor who's been a reclusive drunk ever since attending Corbin's death. The major strike against this film for me is the insistent presence of Adams' Stephen Reinhart, who is so flatly no-nonsense that in actual Lovecraft he would be toast but here is savingly in love with Susan Witley (Suzan Farmer) and therefore plot-armored despite the fact that I've seen mannequins provide better scene partners for Boris Karloff. The abstract credit sequence is very good, churning luridly into an ominous vortex. Seeing Karloff in color is its own fascinating treat. Points to the house music for coming up on the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's "Tentacles."
Everything you need to know about Jack Arnold's Tarantula! (1955) is contained in the exclamation point at the end of its title. We used the first half-hour of its runtime to forage for breakfast at Davis Square Donuts & Bagels, after which Rob went off to nap and I ate my old-fashioned cake donut while watching some not unenjoyably muddled mid-century mad science. The movie doesn't have any of its metaphors or even some of its logic lined up, but if what you want to see is a three-story tarantula skeletonizing cows and knocking over power lines, you got it. The effects are quite good since they are mostly a regular-sized tarantula filmed doing regular tarantula things and then matted into the highways and deserts of Arizona. The protagonists are B-stalwarts John Agar and Mara Corday; Ross Elliott hangs around as one of those skeptical reporters who grouses that he'll have to see the tarantula to believe it and is forebodingly told, "You'll see it, Joe—and you'll wish you hadn't." I felt a little silly for asking a friend to identify the familiar-looking lead scientist for me and hearing he was Leo G. Carroll: I should have known that from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
Run, do not walk, to your nearest library or streaming service and make time for Julia Hart's Fast Color (2018), which I would call one of the best superhero films I have ever seen if that did not sell its wild, intimate, achingly beautiful drama of generational trauma and reclamation much too short. In a near-future America where no rain has fallen for eight years, where the shells of pickup trucks and roadside diners blister beneath skies the color of faded denim and a motel room costs $35 a night but a full jug of water costs $50, a fragile, feral drifter named Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) runs open-mouthed, lung-wracked, like she's never done anything else in her life. She steals cars, hitches rides, pores over a crumpled highway map until her hands shake uncontrollably. Her wrists are braceleted with bloodied rope, with which we learn she is accustomed to tie herself into bed at night: like one of N. K. Jemisin's orogenes, her seizures trigger earthquakes. She carries an NA chip in her pocket, a ragged stuffed bear in her kit bag. Cagey, jagged, and driven, she's so spellbinding that Hart and her co-writer Jordan Horowitz could have made an entire movie just watching her roam this parched, not far-fetched landscape, but it deepens immeasurably when it reveals the existence and "abilities" of her mother Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) and her daughter Lila (Saniyya Sidney) from whom she's been estranged for so long that she spends her first night home in years camping out in the barn like a tramp, long-held defenses and longer-kept secrets on all sides. Slowly, through items as ordinary and important as a mended bowl, a record collection, an after-dinner cigarette, the film begins to illuminate a rich lineage of power manifested as destruction and restoration, which sounds heavy but can also be used for magical shoplifting by a fix-it-minded ten-year-old impatient with the progress of her project car—just because the special effects are sparing does not mean that the script ducks the question of what life might be like with superpowers woven casually through it, even when the existence of the abilities has kept the family in hiding for as many generations of women as have written in the thick, time-stained book that Bo studies, looking for something to solve or at least shed light on her daughter's elemental affliction. Dayenu again, if we only got to soak in the love and difficulty of the relationships between stoic Bo, wounded Ruth, eager Lila, none of them really so easily described, any one of them a convincing protagonist and all together something a bit like having breakfast with the triple goddess. The echoes in this film run from Flint, Michigan to the myths of Demeter, Oyá, and the Fisher King; the cinematography by Michael Fimognari takes the wasteland spaces of the Western and fills them with the luminous dusk-and-dawn pregnancy of the world about to change shape. The soundtrack, too, hums with revolution when its queens include Poly Styrene and Nina Simone. Ruth was not running just from her demons when she booked it out of a midnight warehouse in the opening scenes; we heard the hunger in the voice of disingenuous G-man Bill (Christopher Denham) as he tried to make his superiors understand, "She can affect the energy of the earth," and the plot begins to gather toward a confrontation which even the concerned local sheriff Ellis (David Strathairn) might not be able to avert, and more importantly, perhaps should not. Poetic, apocalyptic, and the absolute opposite of empty CGI, the finale is spectacular. "A new world is coming. This is only the beginning."
After that there was no point in watching anything else, especially Soylent Green (1973), so we caught a not horrifyingly delinquent bus home and fed the cats again and read books and passed out and then it took me a week to reconstitute sufficiently to write about any of these movies, but I am so glad to have seen all of them in a theater. Next year in Davis Square. This holiday brought to you by my recurring backers at Patreon.
