20 Million Miles to Earth (1957): The head, the tail, the whole damn thing.

(&)

The Setup

So there I was, minding my own business over at Amazon, when a particular little book flies into my cart and orders itself without my having done a thing to encourage it.

It's true the book had been on my Wish List for quite a long time.... Maybe it got to feeling ignored, even a bit panicky, wondering if it  ever would trade that cold, dark Amazon warehouse for my own tender embrace. Could be the novel felt like it had to take matters into its own hands... or pages. You know what I mean.

Of course I was shocked at its behavior: that's just not the way you win friends and influence people. (You say hello, strike up a conversation, maybe see if there are mutual interests. You don't just hurl yourself unannounced into someone's online shopping cart.)

But in the end, the pleading look that wee tome gave me, I couldn't turn it away.

And THAT, my friends, is a somewhat true story.

Well then, what book am I talking about? I'll bet, having seen the post's title as well as that poster up top, you could make an educated guess that I'm talking about a novelization of the 1957 film 20 Million Miles to Earth. (And you'd be right!) Of course one doesn't talk about a film's novelization without also giving the film a little attention, so buckle in, we're gonna be here a minute....

The (Original) Novelization

1957's Amazing Stories original

Now, if you're saying you never even knew there was a novelization of this particular film, until a year or two ago I'd've been right there with you. I didn't know the book existed until after discovering BearManor Media, where horizons were gleefully broadened on this and many another subject. (Seriously, the place is a treasure trove of film, TV and radio-themed books.)

But this novelization first saw light before BearManor was ever a twinkle in anyone's eye--it was Amazing Stories first (and only) foray into standalone novel-length fiction. This was in 1957 (same year as the movie's release), and it was written by a fellow named Henry Slesar. I didn't recognize his name off hand, but apparently the guy was quite prolific, putting out a ton of dark fantasy, detective fiction, science fiction, mysteries and thrillers in various formats--novels, short fiction, TV and radio scripts, even a stage play--over a 40 year timespan. (Go, Henry!)

Now, take a look at that cover, will you? This 1957 edition looks cool as a pool (hip as a chip), and I'd warmly welcome a copy onto my bookshelf for its hep artwork alone. However. A copy of said original currently runs north of a hundred bucks, and that's a bit steep when I have no idea if what lies behind the cover is anywhere near as cool as the cover itself. Which brings us back to BearManor Media, with its much less expensive (ten to fifteen bucks as I write this) reprint edition of the novelization.

The Reprint

2013's BearManor Media reprint

So it seems not too long ago a fellow named Philip J. Riley put a considerable amount of time and effort into getting several out-of-print horror film novelizations put back into print and available through BearManor--including the one for 20 Million Miles to Earth. He called his project "Philip J. Riley's Nightmare Series," and while I was hoping to give you a list of all the novelizations included, figuring that bit out wound up being harder than I'd thought and so... I gave up. (There you have it--an ugly truth laid bare.)

Turns out neither BearManor or Amazon (or anywhere else I could find) have an out and out list of what titles comprised the series, and since Riley wrote and edited a lot of other classic horror-themed books as well, I got all bogged down searching through synopses and cover blurbs trying to figure out which books were actually novelizations/part of the series and which weren't. So no list. I did send out an email or two that will hopefully net me some info on the subject.

Of course I couldn't speak to Mr. Riley himself, as he has left the mortal vale, but assuming I hear back from any of the folks I did reach out to, I'll update with a list at that point.

UPDATE: I heard back from author Richard Eksted, who contributed to the first few books in the Nightmare Series. He says the following is a definitive list of books included:

• THE BRIDES OF DRACULA by Dean Owen - Book #1
• REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN by Jimmy Sangster - Book #2
• THE RAVEN by Eunice Sudak - Book #3
• THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM by Lee Sheridan - Book #4
• REPTILICUS by Dean Owen - Book #5
• 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH by Henry Slesar - Book #6

So there you go. Although, now that I think, I recall seeing one for Gorgo on Amazon as well. And now that I double think, I'm pretty sure there was one for Dr. Cyclops, too. So maybe Mr. Eksted's list isn't definitive after all....

At any rate, it's a reprint copy of 20 Million..., and not an original, which had (as noted way up top there) stowed away in my shopping cart. Not nearly as cool a cover as that 1957 original had, but it has some nice extras inside to compensate.

How about we take a look?

The Reading of the Reprint

Being a longtime fan of stop motion animation master Ray Harryhausen (pictured at left, alongside his Ymir puppet), I'd already seen the film version of 20 Million... a time or two, though not in a few years. I was of course down for a re-watch, but once the novelization arrived I decided to give it a go before I revisited the film. (As one knows, one does not read a film novelization without also watching its source film within a reasonable time-frame, be it before or afterwards. This is a Law, and I am a Law Abider.)

Anyway, the reprint starts out with an intro by Randall Larson, which contains quite a bit of cool information, including interview excerpts from Slesar on his experience writing the novelization. (Slesar went on [and on] about the screenplay not offering him much to work with and that he wasn't particularly proud of his finished product.) Along with groovy intro, there are a fair number of lobby card, promo still and film poster reproductions to be had, as well as the original edition's interior illustrations (which are extremely cool).

On the down side, this book looks to have been either superficially proofread or not proofread at all. I mean there are tons of typos--enough to be seriously distracting as you read--and I'm assuming story text was scanned from a 1957 original using OCR and then just... left as-is. (Granted, I write/edit/proofread for a living, and I may be more sensitive to this kind of thing than some, but oy vey this book was rife with typos.)

Intros and illustrations aside, I have to agree with Mr. Slesar and say the novelization itself is none too impressive. And you know, Slesar was so well regarded as an author, it makes me want to read some of his other stuff, 'cause this thing couldn't have been his best work. He did gallantly try to shore things up along his way, expanding out a few side plots not in the movie--personal and political problems for the various characters to deal with, etc. And while usually those bits are the things in a film novelization that really get me going, it was falling flat for me here. It was honestly a bit tough to slog through.

Which I'm quite confident is not a reflection on Slesar's talent or lack. The guy had an impressive track record, and I've read enough novelizations where the same author went from amazing to what-the-hell (cough Hank Searls Jaws 2 → Jaws: The Revenge cough) to know the screenplay someone's given to work with can make or break their end result. And that's gotta be what happened here. So yeah, definitely want to give some of Slesar's other novels and short fiction a go, just to broaden my perspective.

The Illustrations

Oh, right. I'd mentioned the novelization's illustrations: Being originally published in pulp/digest format, this book included some sweet interior artwork. We know the original had sweet cover art (by Luigi Garonzi, I discovered), but check out these interior illustrations (artist unknown [to me]) the book had as well. I couldn't find a complete set of these illustrations on the Web, so I snapped photos directly from my reprint (hence the curvature on most of the images).

Okay, after the buildup maybe this first one is a bit underwhelming: weird looking
Ymir and all. Still.

Gronk! If anybody knows who drew these, back in the day, let me know....

Yeah, that caption doesn't match the artwork. The beast would've been coming
out of shock after the electrical equipment shorted out, and no one was calmly
standing around at that point....

...as we see here.

Yeah, so I'm placing these images in the order they're presented in the reprint
copy--can't say if the 1957 edition also used this order--but in the reprint it's out
of sequence with the story: The Ymir didn't find himself atop the Colosseum till
the very end. (Shrug.)

Nuff said.

The ignominious end of a glorious beast....

Nice, huh? Feel free to click through any of those for a larger image.

The Film

By the way, I keep calling this beast the Ymir, and nowhere in the film or novelization is that title actually used--it's always just "beast," "creature," etc. Word has it that Harryhausen had named his creation Ymir after the mythological Norse giant, and the film's original working title was The Giant Ymir, but apparently he got last-minute-worried audiences could confuse "Ymir" with the Arabic title "Emir" and had references to it removed. Too bad. I like the name and could just see a little scene in-film where the scientist dude muses on what to call it and settles on "Ymir."

At any rate, with novelization underwhelmingly finished (took me awhile to get through, even if it is a tiny tome), I finally sat down for a re-watch of the film. My take away from that?

Well, um... the movie wasn't actually as amazing as I'd remembered, either. Now this genuinely surprised me. I mean, I'd seen the film at least twice before and recalled just loving it. But a bit of reflection had me realizing my previous watchings were very Harryhausen-centric (if that wasn't a term before, it is now). I think with previous viewings I'd been so focused on his amazing creature effects, I hadn't really noticed the film in its entirety. And the film in its entirety is chock-full of awkward dialogue and wooden performances.

And the wooden performances part is especially bummersome, since I'm a big fan of William Hopper from his time on the old Perry Mason TV show. I haven't seen Hopper in a ton of things other than Perry Mason, and I'd just assumed he would be shining as Col. Calder in this film the way he does there. Nope. And it had to be the script, etc. holding him back: His character in Perry Mason was surprisingly varied, and playing him clearly called for some versatility from Hopper. I'm just saying the man was a competent actor, and you might not see it in 20 million Miles....

Anyway, here are some notes I jotted to myself as the picture progressed. Probably won't make a lot of sense unless you're quite familiar with the film (and if you're not, give it a watch--warts or not, this movie is worth multiple viewings just for the creature effects, and my notes will make sense as a bonus)....

• Hey, in that long shot the boat hook is already in the kid's hand, then in the subsequent close up the dude tells him to get the boat hook out. Hmm.
• The inside of that space ship has cinder block walls....
• But the tilted camera to mimic the ship's angle is a nice touch.
• Even though they loaded two men in, I am convinced there are no additional people in that boat as they row away.
• I'm not caring much for this actress. Not sure I've seen her in anything else to know if, like Hopper, the script/direction were limiting her performance here....
• Let's see... 1 USD = 625 Lit. in 1949, rate maintained till early 1970s... that means that half million lire the kid gets in reward money equaled about 800 bucks in 1957. Adjusted for inflation, that's a little over 7,000 USD today. Not a bad haul for an eleven year old kid. (My brain just tends to go down rabbit holes like this.... No help for it.)
• Ooh, that life-size Ymir hand and arm in the cage escape scene was nice.
• Okay, in the barn, those chickens we're obviously being thrown onto the set from off-camera.
• Wait, that beast just broke out of a heavy duty metal cage, but you guys think that old wooden farm cart is gonna hold it?
• Oh man. That stop motion Ymir/farmer fight, with live action Hopper worked in, is AMAZING.
• Hey, does that live action elephant have fake tusks? (I'm guessing, after a little research, probably not.)
• Whoa. That live action elephant looks really big next to it's trainer. What's going on, there? (Turns out, since he planned to use a real elephant for some footage, Harryhausen asked for one that was 15 feet tall, but the tallest they could find was eight feet. So to make the elephant look bigger, they got a 4' 6" actor to play the zookeeper.)
• How tall was the Ymir at this point? Let's see, elephant's about the Ymir's height.... Largest recorded Asian elephant was twelve feet high, so I'm going with the Ymir at twelve feet as well. Although if Harryhausen wanted a 15 foot elephant, was he assuming his Ymir was 15 feet as well?
• Huh. I notice the novelization had the Ymir explicitly killing the farm dog, elephant and at least one pedestrian, but the movie makes a point of showing post-battle movement and/or breath in all its victims. I guess the film wanted to garner a bit of sympathy for the beast?
• Oh. Except for the military. Lot's of Ymir-Military-Killing onscreen. Hollywood military is always fair game as creature bait.
• Totally unrelated... recently saw An American in Paris on the big screen and noticed an uncredited Noel Neill in a couple of scenes. Joan Taylor in this movie reminds me of her just a bit. In look and style, not acting.

Yep. Those were my movie thoughts. Well, not ALL of them: Per usual, I got a little preoccupied with creature size while watching the film, and got to wondering just how tall the steadily growing Ymir was in its various scenes. Which led to the following....

 The Ymir

Imagine my horror at doing an internet search, assuming I'd find a plethora of information on the Ymir's various sizes throughout the film, only to find NO SUCH THING exists. All my search got me was a series of terrifyingly general estimatations: "fifteen feet," "twenty feet," "ten to twenty feet," "thirty five feet," "the size of a small building," etc. Nothing solid at all. No way I'm letting that status quo continue.

Check out the following images with my quick, dirty and loose height calculations underneath (this is me taking screenshots from the film and mucking about with my on-screen ruler and half-assed math):

Okay, just eyeballing this one, I'm putting that newly (evening) hatched Ymir at 12-18 inches high. Why? Because he's a bit taller than Actor Guy's head is long, and the average male head (says the internet) is about 14 inches crown to chin.

Whoa! Next morning, maybe eight hours later, my (continued) eyeballing has Ymir at maybe three times the height he was the night before. Say, three to three and a half feet? At any rate, Ymir head to toe is the same height as Actor Guy head to knee in this image. Actor Guy was 66" tall (the internet tells me). Take away 24 inches (the average length of a male's leg, knee to toe, the internet also tells me) and that gives us 42 inches, or a 3.5 foot Ymir. See? Half-assed math....

Okay, now it's that evening (another 8 or 10 hours later?), Ymir has escaped his cage and we've got William hopper at six foot three, but his knees are slightly bent. Ymir is not quite as tall as Hopper as it stands straight across from him, so I'm going with, say, five and a half feet for Ymir. Growing like a weed!

On-Screen Ruler time! Next day, it's a fight to the finish and Flame Thrower Man is 1.75 inches in the image, and lets say that equals his actual height of 6 feet (all men are six feet tall in the movies). If 1.75 inches equals 6 feet, .29 inches equals 1 foot. Ymir is 3 inches high in the image, 3 divided by .29 makes him (about) 10.4 feet tall.

Alrighty. A few (?) days later, Ymir is recaptured and down for the count. Zoo Scientist is 2.4 inches in the image, which equals 6 feet in reel life. That gives us .4 inches equaling 1 foot, Ymir is 6 inches head to toe, giving a reel life Ymir height of 6 divided by .4 equaling 15 feet. Big!

Circumstantial evidence: Just after busting free, Ymir is ready to fight an elephant! Harryhausen wanted a fifteen foot live action elephant (fat chance) so we can assume his stop motion elephant was scaled to be fifteen feet high. Here they are together and sure enough, the two beasts are about the same height. (Wasn't this an amazing stop motion sequence in-film?)

More on-screen ruler math: Ymir is still on the rampage minutes later, six foot tall Lamp Man is 3 inches here, so .5 inches is 1 foot, making Ymir (towering at 8.3 inches) 16.6 feet tall.

Okay, Ymir disappears into the river for several hours and then reappears here, still growing. Definitely bigger here than he was with Lamppost Man.... Check out the two details pulled from this image below.

Barely Seen 6 foot Soldier is 1.3 inches tall, which translates
to one foot equaling .216 inches.

Ymir is 6.4 inches here. 6.4 divided by .216 equals
29.6 tall. Yowza!

And things go a little nuts, size-wise, here at the end as Ymir prepares to meet his demise atop the Colosseum. See that car back there next to the Colosseum? We're calling it five feet high at the roof line. It's half an inch high in the image, which means .5 inches equals five feet, or 1 inch equals 10 feet....

Now here's our scaly friend standing next to the Colosseum. His head is about even with the bottom of that railing there. Ground to that railing is 3.75 inches in the image, which translates to 37.5 feet (1 inch equaling 10 feet). So that gives us a 35 to 40 foot high Ymir right there! GrrrAnimals!!!

And this concludes our demonstration. My math is highly suspect and I do not stand by it except in fair weather. At least we now have something on the internet with reasonable size estimates....

Braaaiiiins!

Brain Counts? Ooh, that's a tough one. The novelization featured a barely readable story and plenty of typos to boot. That's circling One Brain territory right there, but its extras were cool and of course it gets points just for existing at all.... The original edition would score higher as it accesses Vintage Points, but I didn't get the original. Hmm... I'm saying the BearManor edition specifically is gonna land with...

TWO NOT QUITE ORIGINAL BRAINS

The movie? I was surprised at how little of it held my interest when stop motion creatures weren't on screen. As a film, sans creature effects, this would also be circling One, maybe Two Brain territory.... But the creature effects are Five Brain material and worth regular revisits on their own, so for the film I'm going with...

FOUR TINY VENUSIAN PUPPET BRAINS

Quint-style

And there you have it: 20 Million Miles to Earth--the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.

You know, I kept refering to the Ymir as a "he" throughout this post, but who knows? The film and novelization never say one way or the other. Could be a "she." Could be something else entirely; it is Venusian you know. Heck, the Norse giant Harryhausen took its name from was hermaphroditic....

Till next time.

Grizzly (1976) by Will Collins

Yes, this post is mostly about the novelization.

The movie itself was too mind-numbing for me to sit through. I think I got through the first twenty minutes or so, then started fast-forwarding to try and catch just the bear scenes. Pretty quick, even those weren't holding my attention, so I went ahead and held that FF button down all the way to the film's finale (such as it was), and called it done. 

Now don't get me wrong: the film featured a fine set of actors, and director William Girdler had talent, but for some unaccountable (I've heard so many good things about this movie!) reason the movie itself bored me. To tears. Best thing about the film (as far as I'm concerned) was its associated artwork, so I'm passing along some of that for you to feast your eyes on (click to enlarge--you know the drill):

US Theatrical Poster with amazing Neal Adams artwork....

Turkish Theatrical Poster (I know, right?)

US Lobby Card with cool illustrated sidebars....
And those sidebar blurbs are worth a click-and-enlarge for pure reading enjoyment.

Mexican Lobby Card--this and the Turkish poster both sport bear-art taken from the UK novelization's cover.
Just in case you were wondering....

And finally, an Italian Lobby Card featuring artwork more interesting (to me) than its accompanying film still.

So. Related-artwork-sharing duties now being complete, this would have been an exceptionally short post if not for my having run across a novelization of the movie written by a fellow named Will Collins. And I was all ready to write (*NPI) Will off as a one hit wonder, when I stumbled across the fact that "he" was actually the pseudonym of a more prolific author by the name of Edwin Corley. I haven't read any of his other stuff, but it's out there.

*No Pun Intended

By the way, following that link gets you to Corley's English-language Wikipedia page, which has absolutely no reference (as I write this) to his writing the novel or using the pseudonym. But the French-language Wiki article is much more robust and fills things in nicely. So look it up and do a little translating if you want to know more.

The novelization itself is pretty straightforward, following the movie (or the gist I managed to get of it with my FF button) fairly closely. Writing certainly isn't bad--and it sure as hell held my interest more than its filmic counterpart.

What did I notice about the book, over all?

Let's see... Had a fairly heavy seventies-environmental slant to it. Park Rangers and associated personnel were pretty much presented as saints (with the exception of the Park Administrator, who was the story's Mayor Vaughn), while campers/consumers of National Parks were presented as gratuitous assholes in almost every single case. So somebody (author? editor?) had an agenda going there.

We also get bits of backstory not available through the screenplay, as novelizations are wont to give us, so that's nice. The bear, it is explained, was driven down into human-populated areas by oil drillers (also villainized), plus the beast had busted a tooth and was having trouble getting it's usual prey--thus going for those easy-to-catch hairless bipeds.

The overall effect was to take some of the movie's Bear Villain-vibe, and trade it over onto the Human side of things, making the novel's bear less of a monster than the film went for, and more of a "poor giant bear just doing what it can in order to survive as we humans screw with its habitat and the world in general."

Oh, and it's mentioned this bear is a "throwback" to the prehistoric "Arctodus-Ursus Horribulus" (no such animal as far as Google could tell me), weighing in at 2,000 pounds and standing a whopping fifteen feet in height when it rears up on its hind legs. Or eighteen, if you go by movie poster/novelization cover blurbs. In-novel the height was held to fifteen.

This prehistoric beastie pictured below is clocking in around 11 or 12 feet on hind legs, for comparison purposes. (You're welcome.)

Gut-Crunching Grizzly is half again as big as this fellow?? Yikes!

Well. That's a big bear. And now for even more comparison fun, here's a pic of Hollywood's Bart the Bear (Grizzly's actual bear actor was apparently a Kodiak named Teddy--couldn't find anything on him). Bart here, stood around nine feet high on his hind legs, so Grizzly's Grizzly would have been about twice Bart's height:

I am Bart! Hear me roar!

In fact, I'm being compelled to do a quick and dirty resize of Bart from his natural nine to Grizzly's eighteen feet in height. (Quick and dirty means cropping him out and resizing the image to 200%.)

Is this really what that beast in the movie and novel was supposed to be, size-wise? That's HUGE....

Huh. So I guess everything else--mass, proportions, etc.--being equal, an actual eighteen foot bear would be downright dinosaurian in nature. But jeez, that just looks TOO big, right? Am I missing something with my image-shenanigan-mathematics? Say Bart's trainer is a six footer--Super Bart looks to be about three times Trainer Man's height, so maybe it's about right.... Still, that's SO BIG.

Okay then. By now I've mostly said my piece, so there's not much left to do here but hand you over the novelization covers. My personal copy is the UK version, whose art, as stunning as Neal Adams' American cover is, looks decidedly more bear-like to me than Adams' version does. As in more realistic. Comparatively I guess, as neither really looks terribly bear-like when you get an actual photo of a bear next to them.

But anyway here you go:

US Cover. Anyone else thinking Karloff, with those outstretched arms?
Boris Bearloff...? Just me?

UK Tea-Sipping Gut-Crunching Grizzly

And that's it.

Brain Counts, you ask? Well, the movie would have gotten a big fat ZERO from me, but since this post is mostly about the book, I'm being bookish in regards to my Brain Count and going with:

TWO AND A HALF GUT-CRUNCHING (of course!) BRAINS

Till next time, you can join me at the drive-in, where disaster's a lot of fun! (You caught that on the lobby card up there, right?)

The Lost Zeppelin (1929)

Huh. So I came across this wee film while I was wandering about the Netflix site, doing one of those periodic DVD queue replenishment things I do.

Y'see, once or twice a year I go through Netflix's movies genre by genre, slap 40 or 50 I think I might like to see (or see again) into my queue, then forget the whole thing exists until whenever the next "almost empty" reminder shows up. I figure since everything I added holds at least some interest to me, I can just not bother with upkeep and be pleasantly surprised by whatever shows up.

This clever plan works most of the time--every once in awhile I end up with a DVD in-hand that I'd unwittingly streamed on Amazon the week before, or a disc shows up I can't for the life of me figure out why adding it seemed like a good idea, but mostly my little system works and keeps me happily in weekend-movie-watching-mode.

Anyway, enough about my Netflix adding-to-the-queue game plan. YOU came here to read about The Lost Zeppelin. And so you shall:

I think what got The Lost Zeppelin added to my queue in the first place was (a) it's a 1920s talkie and I was curious what that would look/sound like, and (b) what's not to love about a cinematic dirigible disaster? (Don't you just love saying that word? Dirigible. DIRIGIBLE!)

Of course I qualify my what's-not-to-love-ness as being for the cinematic variety versus real life, since the Hindenburg tragedy truly horrifies me even today, but I do so love a good fictional disaster of almost any kind, dirigible-style included. (DIRIGIBLE!) Anyway, upon disc's arrival, this movie pretty much provided me with what I was hoping for.

The film itself runs about an hour and eleven minutes, but it feels longer on account of all the, well, talking going on during the picture. Maybe sound was so new at the time audiences were eating all that dialogue up, but for a 21st century movie-goer this thing moves pret-ty slow. Which is not to say I didn't enjoy it. I did. It was just a slow-mover, like more than a few movies of its time. And in that same vein, the acting comes off a little stilted, the direction a bit static--you know how it is. But with all that in mind, there's still a fair bit of room for enjoyment.

The film concentrated on three main characters, played by Conway Tearle, Virginia Valli and Ricardo Cortez. I don't know enough about 1920s Hollywood to say if these actors were "stars" of not, but each was quite active from the early teens through at least the mid thirties--and in Cortez's case, right up into the sixties. So, no one hit wonders carrying the film.

I didn't see anywhere that this was taken from a short story, but it has the feel of one of those air adventure pulps so popular at the time--you know, like Air Wonder Stories or Flying Aces. Air travel in general--and dirigibles in particular--were all the rage in the late twenties/early thirties, and this movie plays like one of those air pulp mags would read.

So yeah, the early talkie aspects of the film were both frustrating and enjoyable--frustrating because they were primitive enough to get in the way of the film's storytelling, and enjoyable just by way of nostalgia and a sense of "wow, once upon a time that stuff was really new and how cool to see this slice of history today" kind of thing.

The special effects for the film must have been stunning for their day though, and I'll say they actually hold up reasonably well in the here and now. At least nothing took me out-of-story by coming off as ridiculous or overly clunky, effects-wise. A lot of miniatures being effectively used throughout, along with full-sized props, and what with the thing being filmed almost entirely on sound stages, they did a really nice job portraying Antarctic terrain and conditions.

Hmm. I was about to comment on the movie's peripheral sci-fi elements, as a 1920s dirigible certainly wouldn't have been able to make it to anywhere near the South Pole, but a quick Google search tells me my knowledge deficits aren't limited only to 1920s Hollywood star status. Looks like dirigibles (DIRIGIBLE!) of the time can and did make it to the North Pole at least, so that makes this movie more of a straight up adventure, and not really even marginally sci-fi.

Annnd... I guess that's all I have to say about this little picture. Not one you need to seek out unless it's for curiosity's sake (like it was for me), but if you do, chances are you'll come away feeling like it was at least mildly worth your time. Oh, and don't bother with a Netflix DVD, this thing is public domain and all over the internet....

So there. (DIRIGIBLE!)

TWO AND A HALF ICE-COATED-AIRBAG BRAINS

Death Spa (1989) Prom Night (1980) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987)

You know, I've decided my half-brains look too much like full-brains: one-and-a-halfs look like twos, two-and-a-halfs look like threes, and so on.

I'll have to do something about that. Sometime.

Anyway we've got mini multi movies here, and the name of the game today is five--as in five things to say about each film ('cause why not?). These movies all belong to a category my sister and I affectionately/disdainfully named "boob-slashers" when we were kids.

We didn't come up with that name because women were (necessarily) being depicted having their breasts lacerated by a sharp instrument; more because the film-type always seemed to include a fair number of topless women, screaming and running away from knife (and other assorted instrument)-wielding maniacs of one type or another. So, y'know, the movies contained both boobs and slashers.

Yeah. It was an interesting childhood. On to the movies.

---

You'll sweat blood!

1. An American movie, filmed in '87, straight-to-VHS (in Japan!) in '89, and finally to eager (?) American VCR owners in 1990.
2. Weirdly, that cover is a not unreasonable representation of what you get after you press Play. And that's not (altogether) a good thing.
3. The movie features a possessed cross-dressing man, whose body transforms back and forth from his own to his dead sister's.
4. There are "Death Spa Dancers" in the film. I know this because they're named that very thing in the credits.
5. So not a good movie, but... weirdly watchable.

ONE-AND-A-HALF ANGRY SPA GHOST BRAINS

---

 This year Prom Night will be a scream.

1. Nothing supernatural here--I had this movie confused with its sequel. (Hadn't actually seen either one before last weekend.)
2. This is kind of a good movie (he says sheepishly)--reasonably decent mystery, plenty of interesting suspects, and fairly suspense-y.
3. Contains and awesome disco dance off. (Also features Leslie Nielsen disco dancing--slightly less awesome.)
4. I kind of want Seymour Crane's van.
5. Online-ness tells me there were a lot of scenes cut from the film. I think if they were put back in, its story would make more sense (but it's totally okay as-is).

THREE-AND-A-HALF CLASSY-TRASH BRAINS

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 Vengeance never rests in peace!

1. Originally, this was not even a sequel to Prom Night. It was called The Haunting of Hamilton High and totally unrelated until some suit had the bright idea to cash in on Prom Night's name/success. Re-shoots ensued. I bet it would've been better if they'd kept it as-was.
2. The movie features possession by immersion in liquefied chalkboard. That's pretty fresh thinking.
3. Also, its main character gets shot to death and then a full-size zombie claws its way out of her body. But don't worry, she pops out of a box at movie's end, and she's just fine! And, by the way, that zombie is a regenerating one and it's awesome.
4. Vickie Carpenter's mother is by far the scariest character in the movie, but that creepy rocking horse is a close second.
5. Michael Ironside is not John Saxon.

TWO-AND-A-HALF HELL-BOUND-HARLOT BRAINS

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You remember Lady Battle Cop's Universal Movie Law? If that were in effect here (and it is), we'd be looking at:

1. Enjoyably Bad
2. Enjoyably Good
3. Enjoyably Bad

'Nuff said? (I believe it is.)

Target Earth (1954) & Deadly City (1953) by Paul W. Fairman

(&)

Let's see. What do I want to say about this little film? (It is quite small, in terms of both budget--$85,000--and run-time--75 minutes.) Hmm. I think what I'll say is that it kind of surprised me by not being what I thought it would be.

What I thought it would be was a fairly forgettable 50s low-budget invasion sci-fi-er, with acting and effects so horribly unconvincing they would be hard to sit through. And while it definitely was low-budget sci-fi (complete with unconvincing effects), it wasn't in the least forgettable.

The movie in fact turned out to be a reasonably well-acted and fairly satisfying little psychological drama. There weren't really all that many sci-fi elements--they were more worked in around the edges--and the human drama going on at the film's core could have taken place in any number of settings and done just as well for itself.

So the plot is basically this: Nora King wakes up (in what I think stays an unnamed city throughout the film) with an empty bottle of sleeping pills on her nightstand, having just inadvertently survived her suicide attempt. (We learn later Nora was the one driving when she and her husband were in a fatal-to-husband car accident, and she's been blaming herself for hubby's death.) Well, she notices pretty quick her water and electricity are both off, and after knocking on a few neighbors' doors, decides to go outside and see what's up.

Off-screen at about the same time, Frank Brooks, a businessman passing thorough the city on his way back to Detroit, is coming to after having been slugged over the head, robbed and dumped in a back alley. Now the point is this: both these folks have been unconscious for a good portion of the previous day and night, and as a result have no idea what's going on when each separately wanders out to find... the city is completely deserted. The two eventually meet up and, after a rocky start, are off together in search of food, shelter, and/or a way out of town. Oh, and they're looking for other survivors, too.

Which they find (other survivors, that is) in the persons of Jim Wilson and Vikki Harris, a hard drinking, ten-years-together-but-never-married couple. It seems Jim won a little money at the track, and the two went out and got so drunk on his winnings, they ended up sleeping through whatever had emptied the city out as well, so they're no help in solving the Empty City Mystery. The group is eventually joined by a gun-toting fifth character, "Davis," and before too long we find out the man is not only unbalanced, but wanted for... muuuuurder.

So this mystery is playing out in the first part of the film while its characters are figuring out what's going on, and the actors do a really nice job portraying the fear, bewilderment, volatility, etc. you'd for sure be experiencing in a situation like this. It's just a nice bit of work.

And, while the group does eventually figure out the city has been evacuated in the wake of an--eeeeeeeeeeek!--alien invasion, and that there are myriad (though we budget-consciously only see one at a time) death-ray-sporting-remote-controlled robots wandering about killing survivors on sight, both the invasion and its robots are mostly sidelined as we follow this little group of extremely disparate individuals around in an extremely high stress situation and watch how they treat each other.

And it's pretty interesting to watch. Of course, the movie ends with the army roaring in to save the day as Nora and Frank are about to be death-rayed, and along the way there are a few bits of lumbering-robot-ness, interspersed with scenes of military scientists figuring out a way to stop said robots, but honestly these scenes feel tacked on and most of the time we're just following the group of survivors as they try to avoid being killed by each other and/or the invaders. Like I say, it's a fairly taut little psychological drama, worth a watch.

So then. I'd noticed in the film's opening credits it was "based upon the story 'Deadly City' by Paul W. Fairman," and I'd enjoyed the film enough I thought I might try to find myself a copy of the story. Which I did.

Turns out it was published the year prior in March 1953's issue of If: Worlds of Science Fiction. (Fairman had used a pseudonym, "Ivar Jorgenson," for the magazine.) And what do you know--the source story turned out to be just as, if not more, enjoyable than the derived film had been.

You can give this story, and a few others as well, a read for yourself (it's billed as a "short novel" but only clocks in at 34 pages) by following the link above to the Internet Archive, where that particular issue of If resides, all public-domain-legal and everything (I love it when that happens).

And I'll tell you this: The story is both more and less than the film it spawned. (Hey! What does he mean by that? He's being so mysterious!)

What I mean is this: the story focuses even less on the alien invasion than the film does--there are no robots at all, and the invaders are only seen by our group once and from a distance. There's also a lot less army goings on in the print story--the military just rolls up at the very end to "explain things" after the invaders have all died from some Earthly atmospheric contaminant (a la War of the Worlds). So in print this story is ninety nine percent human drama, versus the film's maybe 80/20 split between drama and sci-fi.

As far as it being more than the film, the story's characters definitely feel more gritty and "real" than the film's do, and the story's action unfolds a lot more brutally than the movie's does. I'm sure that's mostly due to censorship issues the film would have been forced to dance around, but I'm telling you, the story doesn't dance around much of anything, and the ugliness we sometimes see in human nature is well on display. In fact, the story makes a point of exploring that ugliness in a fair amount of depth, which is where much of the fun comes in. There's a fair amount of violence, a bit of nudity, and even some (out-of-scene) sex depicted in the story--a little surprising for a mid-fifties mainstream offering.

As far as main characters go, the film's Nora King is Nora Spade in Fairman's original story, and rather than being a guilt-ridden widow, she's a prostitute who can't face another day of turning tricks. Frank Brooks is pretty consistent between story and film, other than leaning more towards blue-collar than businessman in  the print version.

The print story's Jim Wilson is a violent, recently jailed thug who'd used the evacuation as an opportunity to escape lock-up. His companion Minna Trumble (the film's Vikki Harris), rather than being Jim's long term companion, is recently acquired and almost a captive--trading sex for protection and a sense of belonging.

The film's gun-toting Davis is, in print, Leroy Davis--a considerably more terrifying (than the movie's) psychopath, with a history of killing that his family has used their wealth to cover up. During the evacuation, he kills his chauffeur and sets out on a glee-filled murder spree, like a (ghoulish) kid in a candy store.

Okay, so if you're a regular, you already know deadmansbrain is a captivating-but-spoiler-ridden-land-of-enchantment, and right now I'm about to throw one of those (a spoiler) into the mix, because I really wanted to give you a sense of the story and Fairman's prose. The spoiler is this: Davis dies a gruesome death in both movie and story. There. With that being said, here's an excerpt of the very scene....

He fired the gun twice and Minna died appreciating the incongruity of his words. She went out on a note of laughter and as she fell, Jim Wilson, with an echoing animal roar, lunged at Leroy Davis. His great hand closed completely over that of Davis, hiding the gun. There was a muffled explosion and the bullet cut unnoticed through Wilson's palm. Wilson jerked the gun from Davis' weak grasp and hurled it away. Then he killed Davis.

He did it slowly, a surprising thing for Wilson. He lifted Davis by his neck and held him with his feet off the floor. He squeezed Davis' neck, seeming to do it with great leisure as Davis made horrible noises and kicked his legs.

Nora turned her eyes away, buried them in Frank Brooks' shoulder, but she could not keep the sounds from reaching her ears. Frank held her close. "Take it easy," he said. "Take it easy." And he was probably not conscious of saying it.

"Tell him to hurry," Nora whispered. "Tell him to get it over with. It's like killing—killing an animal."

"That's what he is—an animal."

Frank Brooks stared in fascination at Leroy Davis' distorted, darkening face. It was beyond semblance of anything human now. The eyes bulged and the tongue came from his mouth as though frantically seeking relief.

The animal sounds quieted and died away. Nora heard the sound of the body falling to the floor—a limp, soft sound of finality. She turned and saw Jim Wilson with his hands still extended and cupped. The terrible hands from which the stench of a terrible life was drifting away into empty air.

Yikes! Pretty intense. Oh. Belated double spoiler: Minna dies too.

Fairman also ends the story in a way that's fairly discomfiting to me (yet more spoiling ahead): He makes a point of bringing Nora and Frank together in the midst of this crisis, with Frank appearing to come to terms with Nora's past as he falls in love with her. But at story's end he sheepishly walks away, telling himself one just doesn't settle down with "a prostitute," and the very last scene has Nora back on her own, turning tricks again. Fellow-survivor Jim is back in the slammer and it almost seems like Fairman is saying "See, humanity may rise to an occasion when it's forced to, but people are basically schmucks and lasting change for the better is really just a pipe dream." Now that's chilling.

And on that depressing note (Geeze, Dan, lighten up!), I guess I've said all I set out to say about these two little items. So yeah, while neither film or the originating story are top tier stuff, both are engaging and more than worth a few minutes of your time, especially if you want to explore the whole print to film translation (which I love doing).

Let's see, brains? I'm gonna have to give the film and story each their own count, on account of their being as different from one another as there are. So here goes:

Target Earth: TWO AND A HALF LOW-BUDGET-ROBOT BRAINS

"Deadly City": THREE HIGH-BROW PULP FICTION-Y BRAINS

Oh, and guess what? Fairman also wrote another story that was later turned into a movie. I haven't read that one yet, but the movie derived from it was (long ago) covered right here at deadmansbrain. It's pretty choice in its own right....