I Got the Jubilation Lee Post X-Men: Apocalypse Blues

I saw the new X-Men: Apocalypse yesterday afternoon. While I enjoyed the film overall (good, but not even close to great), I was disappointed in the use of Jubilee (Jubilation Lee) in the film. After hearing that the character finally had an expanded role in this film -- you know, something beyond just being seen in a classroom at the school and/or standing around -- my hopes were dashed when she pretty much was just seen in a classroom and/or standing around.

I guess it really was an expanded role because we did get a little bit more of Jubilee being seen in a classroom and/or standing around, and we get her napping (actually passed out) through a chunk of the film as well. She does get a line to say, but since her name is never said at all and she never uses her powers, how would a novice ever get to know her and love her the way comic fans got to do? She also gets to go to the mall with Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Nightcrawler, but the mall scene itself (complete with a Dazzler reference) got cut from the theatrical release. (Supposedly it and a brief moment where Jubilation uses her powers will be included in the DVD release.)

I know there are a lot of characters in these films already and it is hard to find the screen time to introduce or give quality time to even more, but Jubilee has been in four X-Men films now and has done NOTHING. Why include her at all? (But, please, DO include her from here on out...) Lana Condor, the actress who plays Jubilation Lee, did a fair amount of press and interviews for the film, so it is very surprising that she has been treated so shoddily. Fox also had a chance to spotlight two Asian-American actresses in this film, and totally dropped the ball. (No surprise there.) And I guess it is way too much to hope that Jubilee might eventually team up with Wolverine like they did in the comics for a long run.

Don't even get me started on Psylocke...

The Batter Up #1: Where Have You Gone, Joe Shlabotnik?

When I was planning to post the first edition of a regular baseball project for The Cinema 4 Pylon originally a few months ago, my beloved Cincinnati Reds were just about to win their first three games of the season.

It is now the end of May -- Memorial Day Weekend, to be precise -- and the Reds are a very sad 15-33, mired in the bottom of the National League Central Division, a full eighteen games behind the division-leading Chicago Cubs. This includes, as of this writing, an ongoing eleven-game losing streak, which from all reports on the Reds website has been devastating to the team, though they had tried to prepare fans going in that this season was not going to be very easy. While I am happy to see the recent success of the Cubbies and root for them when they get close to the big prize like anyone should that is not an outright Cubs hater, I always stick hard to my very first favorite team. I will forever root for the Reds... well, if not forever, then at least until my dying days (I imagine a prolonged illness so it gives me time to say a few things to a few people, though I will probably get hit by a bus in actuality.)

Yes, I will forever root for the Cincinnati Reds (for reasons that I will get into in future editions). But the way that I root for that team, and just how hard I root, has definitely changed over the past decade. My once Grand Canyon-deep connection to the sport that was once long understood to be our "National Pastime" (everyone knows that it is social media now... I read it on Twitter) has eroded greatly in recent years. This is highly ironic because, after years of being "stuck" in Anchorage, Alaska, where the closest big league team is only reachable via a plane trip or a long down through Canada (the Seattle Mariners), I finally moved to an official Major League Baseball city. Well, sort of... I moved to Anaheim, which doesn't get to claim its team as its team exclusively anymore. 

Until recently, I lived in Anaheim, about five miles away from Angels Stadium. While I do not drive at all, it was only a brief 1.3 mile walk to a bus stop where I could catch a ride straight to the stadium to see a game. I had always sworn when I lived in Alaska that if I moved near or to a major league city, that if I didn't get season tickets, I would at least see as many games as I possibly could during the season. So, over the course of a full decade living in Anaheim, how many Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (see? a profoundly stupid name) games did I end up watching live and in person? Eleven.

I talked big, but the stick I was carrying was only one of those baseball bat-shaped pens they used to hand out as promos at Anchorage Glacier Pilots games when I was a kid. I got to a big league city and squandered my opportunity. I flubbed the easy-peasy fly ball. I had the bat resting on my shoulders softly as the called third strike -- thrown right down the middle -- blew past. I was my own goat.

Part of the reason for my reticence in seeing more games in my time in Anaheim (we moved away to another California county and town about a year ago) was the fact that I never really made many friends in Anaheim. I had friends here in Southern California, but most of them were co-workers, many of whom drove great distances to get to work, and so were not always readily available to just drop things and catch a game at a moment's notice on a Sunday afternoon. I had an old pal from Alaska that lived down the road a short ways from me, and loads of old friends and acquaintances in the L.A. area, but I rarely if ever saw any of them due to my having a decided lack of mobility because I didn't drive in an area where "nobody walks". The main problem is that I never made "local" friends at all. I was friendly with neighbors, but never to the point where we did things together. And Jen (the wife), while I convinced her to go to a couple of Seattle Mariners games over the early course of our relationship, is not a fan of the sports at all (even with, or especially because of, being an athlete in her teenage years). She had no intention of ever going to a Major League Baseball game again if she could help it. And so I had nobody to regularly go to games with me.

While I went to most of those eleven games stag, I did have some fun meeting the people in the seats around me. I once bought a cheap ticket in a section out in right field when New York was in town, and inadvertently got seated with several dozen, very boisterous Yankees fans out in right field; "Moose" Mussina threw something like a two or three-hitter and Angels fans were really pissed. I also got to go to a few games where the tickets were given to us as promos through people we knew at my soccer gig, and so some friends from the office would sometimes join me for a game. And each time that I did go to an Angels game, baseball was the same for me, the crowds were the same, the ballparks were wonderful and clean, and I made sure to keep to my routine: hot dogs, peanuts, popcorn, and a box of Cracker Jacks if I could find them. I would buy at least one pack of Topps (and only Topps) baseball cards on each visit, in keeping with my childhood tradition, so I could have the fun of opening the pack while sitting watching the game. So, while I did not go to a lot of games in a full decade in Anaheim, the sport of baseball -- live baseball -- was still just as fun for me. The experience was intact. The disconnect was not there.

Where does the disconnect lie? People often give a myriad of reasons as to why they no longer care about a sport or sports anymore, and they are all pretty viable, if not cliched: Astronomical player salaries (not taking into account the astronomical salaries of the people hiring those players or who own the clubs, who took deep and often dark advantage of the players for the first hundred years-plus of professional baseball's existence). Ballpark costs to supposedly compensate for those astronomical player salaries. The game is too slow. Too boring. Lengthy between-pitch batter routines. Lengthy between-pitch pitcher routines. Throwing to first base to check a runner over and over and over. ESPN and the rise of loudmouth sports punditry (which is nowhere near as bad a loudmouth political punditry, but yeah, I kind of agree). Too many commercials during games on television. Too much or too little of everything. What it comes down to is nobody's goddamned happy any more with anything, nobody has enough time, or if they have enough time, they have too little patience. We are fidgety and distracted and ill-informed. And, according to the internet, we hate everything before it even happens, and we hate everyone involved in everything.

Me? I just stopped caring. Part of this is due to the depression that I was developing that was slow-growing, nagging, and unspoken for many years. But a lot of my lack to care about baseball anymore was due to slight changes in the culture of baseball itself. My early love for the statistical side of baseball waned when real, genuine, brainy nerds like Bill James came in and gave us too many statistics. You would think that I would have embraced this development and I did at first, plunging headlong into the first edition of James' Baseball Abstract when it hit the mainstream shelves. But I discovered that it was that laser-focus on the minutiae of the game that drove me slowly away from the deeper statistical side. Suddenly, the stats that I grew up worshipping (homers, ribbies, batting average, simple wins and losses, and ERA) were no longer considered to be the stats that told the supposedly true story behind the success or failure of a player or his team. Sure, they are still the stats that everyone boasts about at Hall of Fame ceremonies and when the major awards are handed out annually, but once teams started to get run based on the more arcane stats, I checked out slightly.

A large part of my disconnect was also with the players, but not in the way that you might imagine. While I loved the movie when it came out (and still do), Bull Durham did more to damage my view of athletes themselves than anything else. I started paying attention to rote interviews and tried to find traces of commonality in what the players were saying. I started to realize that the bulk of the player's voices I heard were remarkably close to being "Nuke" LaLoosh in real life, and while Crash Davis (the type of player I most admire) recommended this form of generic call-and-response as a means to give the people what they want to hear and nothing more, I expected more from players than simply "take it one game at a time". It's the same anger I feel towards people who start the day blowing any qualms they have to bits by exclaiming "same shit, different day" and caving in to acceptance of their lot. 

I really don't care how much a player makes (I assume they deserve to be paid by the multi-billionaires who own the team); I just want the players to be someone with whom I can identify in even a small way, and I started to realize that over many years, I had nothing in common at all, apart from a love for baseball, with the people that I was rooting for on the diamond. While I could still be impressed by sheer athletic ability, hard-nosed drive, and smart play during a game, I did start to remove myself ever more slightly from really caring what went on during the baseball season. Why am I cheering on idiots who dive recklessly headfirst into a personal relationship with mouth cancer by chewing on hunks of horrid tobacco? And then disgustingly and obnoxiously expel their noxious sputum onto the ground with a violent heave every chance they get? Who are these neanderthals scratching their crotches on the public airwaves?

The controversy surrounding steroids and other illegal substances in baseball is one that gets mentioned quite a lot, and yes, it played a serious hand in my disconnect from the sport. The revelations surrounding Mark McGwire were personally devastating to me, as I had a couple of opportunities to not only meet Mr. McGwire, shake his hand, and have him sign my glove when he played first base for my hometown Anchorage Glacier Pilots (one of our local semi-pro teams) in the 1982 season before he hit the minor leagues. I followed him rabidly for many years, and while rumors followed him through his record-shattering homer years, he was a big strapping kid when he was young. And so nice. It was hard to believe that he was involved in something so underhanded. When all was revealed, it was hard for me to admit it, but like with Pete Rose, I had lost a hero.

I mentioned ESPN and their sports punditry earlier, and yeah, that has played a big part in my lack of ability to care about sports anymore. It had grown (and continues to grow) increasingly absurd over the years, and I soon became very weary of hearing 27 different opinions about an upcoming event or an issue in the sports world, and having all 27 of those opinions come out wrong when the actual event aired or the issue was resolved in a court or wherever. I exaggerate, of course; the actual number is far less than 27 but the feeling from watching certain ESPN "news" broadcasts is that of being surrounded by drunken nitwits who all have to get their stupid opinion in about something, and since no one is likely to call them on it later, they can say anything they want with full abandon.

Oh, yeah, that reminds me... sports bars. Avoid them at all costs.

The end result of all of this casual, gradual erosion of sports fanaticism in my mind is that I inexorably inched my way toward ceasing to really care about baseball at all anymore. Over the past five years, I have skipped the regular season broadcasts as a whole, and only watched the playoffs and World Series for the first two years. The third year I only watched the World Series, two games of the World Series the fourth year, and last year, and only three innings of one World Series game last post-season, even though I was rooting superficially for the Kansas City Royals (the residual effect of having been a major George Brett fan back in the day). I still occasionally read articles and kept up with the scores and standings on MLB.com, and also still caught sporadic highlights on ESPN over those five years, but I really stopped committing any time at all to simply sitting and watching baseball.

And now... here we are. It is the 2016 Major League Baseball season, we are almost two full months in, and I am feeling different. I realized some things about myself in the past year, especially given that, being out of work for a full year, I have had a lot of writing time where I have attempted to grapple hard with various demons and fears, trying to purge them in a concentrated effort to decrease the darkness that had been growing inside me. 

One thing that I realized in moving into a new home, with a new larger office setting where my various collections can be housed, is that I am surrounded fully by baseball memorabilia, including a couple hundred thousand baseball cards dating as far back as 1953, including every Topps card ever released of Johnny Bench. I have team hats and programs and posters and photos and pennants and several years worth of old Baseball Digest issues from my youth. I have a box full of old 1976-1977 RC Cola All-Star cans. Staring at me from a shelf, one of those RC Cola cans had long ago been converted into a transistor radio with Johnny Bench's visage still gleaming broadly from its faded surface. I have a library of about a hundred or so non-fiction and fiction books about baseball, most of which I have not even looked at in recent years except for packing and unpacking for various moves. I have autographed baseballs of Johnny Bench and Brooks Robinson sitting on the shelf behind my desk, still loved but not getting as much in the way of admiration as they used to get. It's not the crazy, multi-room spanning collection that a baseball nut who grew up in a major league city would have, but for a boy lodged in Anchorage, Alaska for the first forty years of his existence, it's a pretty good one.

All of this flotsam and jetsam in my home office pointed to one fact: at a certain place in my history, I was a full-bore baseball fanatic. (And if you got the not-so-subtle hint that Johnny Bench, of those same Cincinnati Reds, was decidedly my favorite ballplayer of all time, then you weren't paying very close attention at all.)

So, while I am still surrounded by all of this baseball memorabilia, what happened? What went wrong between me and this sport I once loved so much I couldn't think straight? I used to live and breathe baseball. I listened to ballgames weekly on my tinny Donald Duck transistor radio as a kid (I chiefly remember this as my first full introduction to Vin Scully), a single headphone plug plunged into my left ear. I couldn't wait to go to the next Glacier Pilots game, where I would sit in the meager stands and dream someday of attending a Major League Baseball game in a real stadium. And up until I left Alaska in 2005, I would take off Opening Day from work every year to watch the first day's worth of games on TV (you know, back in the time when Cincinnati -- the oldest professional team in existence -- was awarded the then-honor of starting off each season with the first game). How had I fallen so far away from the sport?

It became obvious to me that it was finally time for me to write about baseball. Not just my love for the game, but more exactly, my lost love for the game. When I conceived the notion of an ongoing series of articles about my relationship with baseball, I decided to make some small preliminary measures to attempt to renew my acquaintance with the sport. I downloaded the MLB app to my iPhone and iPad so that I could follow my favorite teams day to day anytime that I wished to do so. I watched a triple header on "Opening Day" on ESPN (what they call "Opening Day" is never really Opening Day anymore, another thing that I hate) -- three straight games to see if I could summon up that old "baseball fever". (I only caught it a little bit; two of the games were mostly unmemorable, which is not the attitude that I used to have for even the most rote of games.) I still had a long way to go. 

I pulled some of the baseball books off my shelf and started to read through them for the first time in ages, and in an odd bit of coincidence, my old pal Squeak sent me a mysterious package in the mail. When when I opened it up, it was a 1954 hardcover printing of Grantland Rice's The Tumult and the Shouting that Squeak had obtained and read recently, and wished to pass on to the other big baseball buff that he knew. While only a few of the collected pieces within the quite excellent book are about baseball, it was enough to whet my appetite for more. And I finally decided to get reacquainted with those musty issues of Baseball Digest, that I mainly kept for just such an occasion as this, the point where I was ready to start talking about baseball.

In The Batter Up series, I will concentrate solely on baseball. My reasons for calling the series "The Batter Up" I will divulge about four or five pieces into the series, but will keep a mystery for now. (Seriously, for anyone who followed baseball in the late '70s, the clues are here.) The topics will be as broad as baseball culture itself, taking in favorite moments in games, favorite players, personal disgraces on the field, my massive memorabilia collection, baseball book and movie reviews, and anything else connected with the sport. If you never had baseball fever, that's your problem; feel free to skip these articles if you are uninterested in the subject. But for my friends who stick around, I hope you will enjoy the articles. You are likely to learn to a good deal more about me in the process, from an area of my life and memory about I have written only rarely. 

And if you don't know who Joe Shlabotnik is, I will be writing about him (and his famous biggest fan) in the near future as well. Or, if you don't know (or can't wait to know), in the words of Casey Stengel, "you can look it up"...

RTJ

A Plague of Killer Frogs, One Ribbit at a Time...

Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake [aka Croaked: Frog Monster from Hell] (1982)
Dir.: Bill Rebane
Cinema 4 Rating: 3/9

Mostly because of Kermit's influence and guilty feelings left over from high school, I've always been pretty partial to frogs. I have met and even held a few frogs and toads in the time since, and I generally think they are a pretty cute and personable lot. But I must admit that they can be a bit creepy when put on film in the wrong circumstances. Frogs and toads are predatory creatures after all, and they can be quite ravenous, even resorting to cannibalism in some species. But I suppose even the world's most kindly creature, such as a baby lamb, can seem pretty creepy if you angle the camera just right, adjust the lights to a mood appropriate for menace, and add a hauntingly plinking piano chord at just the right moment.

In Bill Rebane's Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake, we are shown several brief shots of frogs early on in the film in the first couple of attack scenes, but since there is a horrible monster right on the poster of the movie, you know they are just there to throw you off the trail a bit. Sure enough, Rebane, the notoriously schlocky independent filmmaker (The Giant Spider Invasion, Monster-a-Go Go, The Capture of Bigfoot), is intent on going far beyond mere killer frogs with this effort. He gives us a monster frogman instead, as in a man-sized frog that kills people, not a murderous diver. And the way this creature kills is pretty unique to something that is half man, half frog; he prefers to chuck a spear through the victim's chest or thorax to pull his prey underwater to devour them.

The attack scenes in Rana are usually preceded by a few large bubble bursts on the surface of the water. I couldn't help but think of George Carlin's bit about the Fump, the mythic man who makes the bubbles in the bathtub when one farts in the water. But I also thought of Lawrence Welk's bubble machine the more the film went along, which also led my mind to the cult classic Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind where the bubbles start flying through the air as the short's spoof of the Close Encounters music starts to play. I also hummed the Mr. Bubble theme song too, so that might give some indicator of just how slow Rana was in the early going.

The first attack scene is pretty gruesome, and accidentally enhanced by the graininess of the print that is available on the streaming services (such as Amazon VOD and Troma's official YouTube channel). From there the film is rather slow-going as we meet character after character investigating this and that about the creature. We also meet Charlie, a wizened townie of partial native heritage and questionable intellect who claims that he knows everything that is going on with the mysterious disappearances in the town; mainly, that a race of ancient frog people haunt the area. In a truly committed performance, Charlie (played by some old dude) tells us all we need to know in several moments, but most dramatically in this brilliant bit of dialogue: "I been down to the lake. Been watchin' them frogs. They actin' very peculiar... very peculiar. They know, they know, they know, they know, they know..."

Charlie is not played by the worst actor in the film by half. One actress seems to have a particularly hard time getting through her dialogue, at one point panting out, "I'm... anxious... to see.. the site... where it... was found." She's riding on horseback, so she can't possibly be reading off of something (unless her dialogue is braided into the horse's mane), so maybe she can only repeat two syllables at a time, tops. The acting in the rest of the film is passable though, as long as you don't dwell upon it too long.

The film also goes for a little of that patented '70s-style rapiness (my term), where there always has to be at least one character, if not more, that gets a little too grabby with the lady-folk, especially when said females have passed out from being frightened. This definitely adds a bit more to the creep factor, and also makes it more pleasing later on in the film when this character meets his inevitable end at the hands of the creature. And speaking of inevitable ends, the violent fate of another noxious character, a trigger-happy local logger, gives his actor the chance to react ultra-dramatically in one of the most egregious examples of a slow-motion death scene that I have seen.

I may have rated this film pretty low, but that is not to say that I don't admire Rebane's resolve in getting his little Wisconsin-crafted films completed over the years. He has gotten a lot of knocks in cult film and genre review books over the years, but I think Rana has some scenes that work pretty well for what it is. I also know, watching this film for the first time as a man past fifty, that if I had seen Rana when I was a kid or a tween, that its atmosphere and a few of its darker scenes (such as the amphibian arm crashing through the window; always on my short list of genuine terrors) would have had me pooping my drawers, at least figuratively, if not literally. (We lived in the woods with a lot of uncovered windows in the house; the dark of winter was hell for me because of my lifelong tendency to be influenced by films like this.) There is a cool scene where the frog creature gets some of his fingers chopped off, and they continue to pulse and claw at the tabletop. Plus, Rebane's creature costume reminds me of a even poorer version of a Sleestak costume (a childhood obsession), and that is terror enough for me right there.

Troma Films, which now distributes the film, couldn't bear to go with the original Rana title and decided to gimmick it up even more by renaming it -- in Troma's usual subtle way -- Croaked: Frog Monster from Hell. In some ways, I guess this could be considered an upgrade, but the title and poster artwork for the original film were already pretty decent (as these things go). Certainly the artwork for the Troma version is far worse [see image to the right].

Rebane's films are always hard to watch on a technical level just because they seem to be shot in a fog and have terrible sound mixes. But I have always found them rather earnest in an Ed Wood-like way, and they are never tongue-in-cheek or played for straight laughs. His films are also usually shot in Wisconsin, which is always a nice thing to see for this descendant of cheeseheads.

What I said before about Rebane's efforts being accidentally enhanced by the low standards of his filming is true, at least for me. But on the Wikipedia page for this film, there is an non-cited reference to Lloyd Kaufman's autobiography where it says he included Rana [nee Croaked] as one of the five worst films Troma has released. I am going to say that if Troma had produced this film (since they actually didn't), it would have actually come out far worse than it already is. It would probably have been cheesier and laden with horrid, sexist jokes, probably the cinematic equivalent of the latter day poster they contrived for it. While there are several films of Troma's for which I have a genuine regard and even like very much, the bulk of their output is far, far below what is on display in Rana. Honestly, my heart kind of goes out to Rebane and his silly but earnest frogman film. It's really bad, but its the sort of badness I would have cherished as a kid, and the type for which I can still summon up some love today.


Frog-g-g! [aka Frogman] (2004)
Dir.: Cody Jarrett
Cinema 4 Rating: 3/9

Any fan of Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949) -- or even Vernon Zimmerman's Fade to Black (1982) which makes knowledge of White Heat a plot point -- knows that the character James Cagney played in that film was named Arthur "Cody" Jarrett. So, when I am confronted with a director named Cody Jarrett, I am apt to take a cynical eye towards the veracity of the director's name. Is is a pseudonym? Is it a joke? Tribute? Hard to say, since his bio on IMDb says nothing about his name and I have found nothing elsewhere on the web regarding whether it is a stylistic hipster thing or if he is just named Cody Jarrett, apart from a tidbit about him playing in several bands in L.A. Still, I did have a hard time getting past dwelling on whether his name really was Cody Jarrett as I went into watching Frog-g-g! for the first time.

We are shown an opening scene where a mother and her young son are picnicking by a lake. The kid runs off -- his mother told him not to run! -- to "fish" with a string tied to a stick, but instead pokes the stick at a small blob-ish object in the water. The blob, presumably a giant tadpole, snaps at the pole and the kid screams. His mother tells him that he is going to grow up to be a big frog and the kid replies, as precociously as possible, "I'm not a frog! I'm an astronaut!" The credits start, and we are subjected to a slow-motion lesbian tonguing fest in all the places a lesbian can tongue another lesbian except where we would really like to see her get tongued, in order to not get an X rating. (C'mon, you know I am talking about the elbow, the greatest but least known erogenous zone there is... you sickos.)

One half of the loving duo is Dr. Barbara Michaels (Kristi Russell) and she will spend the bulk of the film, as a scientist and inspector for the Environmental Protection Agency, battling with a local chemical company over exactly what is going on with the contaminated water in the town. If this sounds remarkably in line with a certain problem going on in Flint, Michigan in the real world, be thankful (or saddened, in my case) that we haven't heard anything in the news about any violent attacks and disappearances due to mysterious frogmen in the Michigan area. In the small town in Frog-g-g!, we will deal with a strange creature that has not just been terrorizing the locals, but has also been trying to have his way with the ladies in the town.

But before we get to that, Dr. Michaels gathers the mounting evidence that, in Prince's words, there "must be something in the water they drink". She sees a fish that has several pairs of googly eyes attached to it, is told of a tadpole "the size of a Frisbee" (probably the one the precocious kid met in the opening scene) and finds that there are acid levels 50 times the norm in some samples she has taken. She does some basic science experiments you can find in any high school science class (we even see a dissected frog), and she also experiments with her girlfriend in some more slow-motion, gratuitous lovemaking. A low speed, relatively brief film, Frog-g-g! gets nearly to the halfway point without having anything in the way of rapist frog action at all.

The contaminated water starts to affect certain members of the town adversely (as contaminated water tends to do). On the way home from the bar, Dr. Michaels and Trixie end up in a car crash when a green, sprinting figure darts in front of their vehicle in the darkness. In the hospital, none of the authorities - including the obstinate but dedicated sheriff -- believe Dr. Michaels when she tells them what caused the accident.

And then the rapes start happening. A young couple are having sex when we get to see the frogman in full view for the first time. Up until this point, the film has pretty much played everything straight, without any real jokes outside of some small character stuff. But then the frog-suit is seen for what it is, and it becomes really hard to get past the original straight, serious tone with something so ridiculous and bug-eyed making jazz hands. The frogman kills the boyfriend with a slash of his arm, and then hops onto the girl and takes over the humping. It is at this point that we realize that maybe this film is more than just a tad rapey. While the girl, her eyes closed, suddenly realizes that the sex has gotten better, she then sees her boyfriend dead on the floor and then screams when she sees what is actually hopping up and down on top of her -- yes, with all four limbs spread-eagled, the frogman leaps up and down while commencing his "love" act.

If you are thinking that all of this buildup is just so the filmmakers can use the term "horny toad" at some point, you win a cigar, boy! "You're in no shape to go toe to toe with some giant horny toad!" is indeed shouted by the sheriff at one crucial juncture. If you are also thinking that "Hey... corrupt local company experimenting with toxins... amphibious rapist creatures in a small town... rampant nudity... isn't this Humanoids from the Deep?" then you win another prize.

The filmmakers are aware that the suit is ridiculous, however; they embrace this silliness pretty well when the frogman takes over a local high school football game, and there is a goofy frogman dance over the closing credits. They also have a couple of blink-and-you-will-miss them cameo roles for cult fave Mary Woronov and Gregg Araki regular James Duval, appropriate to this sort of schlock. Some of the smaller roles in the film are acted pretty stiffly, but the leads (Dr. Michaels and the sheriff) aren't too shabby for this level of film, and those actors at least commit themselves to their material. There is also a closing scene -- silly, but completely expected -- that was reminiscent of other more memorably fun horror films, such as Larry Cohen's It's Alive. 

The tone of the film shifts from serious to downright silly when the frogman suit is seen, but it is hard to laugh when the joke is that women are getting raped. Even when the rapist is a six-foot-tall, green frogman-creature with goggles for eyes.

The Monster's on the Loose!!! #2: Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956)

Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956)
Dir.: Curt Siodmak
TC4P Rating: 4/9

Staying up late, well past midnight, before you have become used to doing so -- before you have even earned your night owl wings, so to speak -- can do strange things to your mind. As a kid, you can get a little punchy, as you fight back the curtain of sleep to try and stay up just a few precious extra minutes later than are probably good for you.

In my early days of learning where all of the good movies were on the local TV channels before cable and the VCR came into my life, my adventures took me past the witching hour with slowly increasing regularity around the far end of the age of eleven (and almost constantly so deeper into my twelfth year). I had by this time briefly met the onscreen versions of King Kong and Godzilla, I had sampled Harryhausen, and was just around the corner from seeing Star Wars in its original release (back when it was just called Star Wars; no one called it Episode IV: A New Hope then). And with my parents distracted by marital strife, eventually leading to a divorce that sickened me to my core (but which I know now was completely necessary, if only so that I could still have two parents living at the same time on this planet), I had begun to stay up later and later on Friday and Saturday nights.

Apart from our regular TV in the living room, we had a small, barely twelve-inch, black and white television that at some point ended up in the room that I shared with my little brothers. I would occasionally employ the device for some late night subterfuge, checking out old Tarzan and Jerry Lewis movies on the local CBS affiliate, along with episodes of The Saint, Kolchak the Night Stalker, and The New Avengers. Eventually, I would move over to the room next door on my own, and the TV went with me. (That little TV that could stayed with me for over thirty years, and I chiefly employed it for editing tapes together or watching old movies that would not be affected by a lack of color. and was still working just fine in 2009 when the transition from regular transmission to all digital took place. I was finally convinced that I didn't need it anymore.)

On my own, in my own room, my late night forays became more and more frequent. Once my dad left the house, it was every other weekend (since we split between his place and our old house), but eventually, I got up the nerve to convince him that I should get to stay up a little later in slightly increasing amounts, you know, given the fact that I was four years older than my brother Mark. Why should I go to bed at the same time? I am almost a teenager, dammit! Of course, my homework were suffering as a consequence, because all I could do was think about movies, especially ones involving either monsters or comedy. Who could study?

Staying up late to watch a 10:00 p.m. movie on a Saturday night was not the problem. It depended on the movie, and also the time of the year. Both of my parents took little convincing when I got to stay up to watch what they perceived to be a quality film like The Birds or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, or even The Valley of Gwangi or The Great Race. After all, in those pre-video days, that was really the only way to see some of those films again, or even for the first time, in my case. But midnight (or just after) for a ten-year-old kid in our house seemed to be the cutoff. But now that a slightly older me was pushing the bubble ever more, and with my mom upstairs with an entire other level of house between us, I started extending those late night visits. Soon enough, two or three in the morning was my regular Saturday night bedtime (I still went to bed fairly early, around midnight or so, on Fridays, because I needed to be up early to watch Saturday morning cartoons), but those extra couple of hours on Saturday night (often spent continuing to graze on the amazing pizza of which my mom had made a Saturday tradition in our home) opened up a whole other level of movie to me.

Beverly Garland, "Doctor Andrea Romar"
in Curucu, Beast of the Amazon

I have written about The World's Most Terrible Movies show on this website at length, which is where I discovered Hammer horror films and any number of genre classics over a several year period. I won't go into more of that show in great detail right now; you can do a search here on the Pylon to find the series of articles and video clips that I have posted about and from that show. But I will add that there was a chief defining element of most of the films showed on The World's Most Terrible Movies, the simple component that kept me coming back begging for more each weekend, is that the films usually paid off huge on their promises. You know, the way that you come to expect in monster movies.

When you were promised dinosaurs, you got dinosaurs; when you were promised monsters, you got monsters. It didn't matter how cheapjack the special effects were in some of the Hercules movies they showed; you believed in the effects because they sold the fantasy well enough that any element in the film in turn became the reality within the story. Sold! Not every film had a Harryhausen to orchestrate epic monster battles; they often had to rely on a guy-in-a-suit, and if the characters in the film believed that the guy in that suit was a monster, and if the guy in the monster suit believed that he was that monster, that was good enough for me.

But there was one definite outlier in the lot, and it was conspicuous by its failure to play nicely along with such promises as the other monster movies made. One film that I discovered on this post-midnight gem of a programming slot did indeed (as I discussed in the prologue to this article here) have a more than usual affect on me heading into the rest of my life on this planet. That film was 1956's Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, and it was sold by its distributing company, Universal Pictures, to the general public as a monster film crossed with a jungle picture. Here's the trailer:

What sets Curucu, Beast of the Amazon apart from the other films that I have mentioned here, or even the cadre of Hammer flicks that I also discovered on that show, is that Curucu sucks. By the time of its big reveal, Curucu was disappointing then to me as an eleven-year-old, and it is disappointing now. Even taken at face value for what it is -- a basic jungle murder mystery with a monster that turns out to be an Amazonian native in an elaborate monstrous costume, and not even a particularly good or even scary one -- Curucu is underwhelming. But it is precisely because of this fact, and the subterfuge played on the viewer of this film, that this disappointing film stuck with me for the rest of my life in a way far more memorable than films many times its superior.

Paul Simon sang in a tone appropriated satirically from Bob Dylan that he had been "Robert McNamara'd into submission"; well, at a very tender age, I was already used to being "Scooby-Doo'd". I adored the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! cartoon show since I was five, but one thing that regularly pissed me off about it was that the monster was always -- ALWAYS -- revealed to be a guy wearing a mask. (And sometimes just a stupid though convincing mask, though most often there was a full costume involved.) Regardless, it was a pain to be consistently shown some really cool ghost or creature (hell, some of them glowed!), and have all of this slapstick chaos and thrills built around its rampaging and scaring the Scooby snacks out of Scooby and Shaggy, and then have the really cool ghost or creature turn out to be, to sneak in an old Sifl and Olly gag here, "just some dude." (Their answer to the riddle, "What do you call the mailman when he loses his job?") Not that I ever tired of the famous "meddling kids" line, but eventually, it became too much. Just once, and it would come many, many years down the line as they attempted to revamped the series here and there and finally realized that their audience wouldn't hack the same explanation anymore, I wanted a real monster on Scooby-Doo.

But up to this point, the monsters in the movies were all real to me. Yeah, I knew that vampires and werewolves were actors in costumes and makeup, and yeah, I knew Godzilla was a guy in a suit and that the original King Kong was animated by some goddamned genius. I wasn't blind to the technical applications involved in making movies. I just believed in the stories they were telling me, and part of my enjoyment of those stories was in imaging that all of these wonderful creations were real within the worlds in which they existed. Godzilla stomped Tokyo, and he was real within Tokyo. He didn't suddenly take his head off and smoke a cigarette (as cool as that might have been to see). King Kong really climbed the Empire State Building, really fought pterodactyls, and really killed a Tyrannosaurus Rex by snapping its jaws wide open with a sickening crunch. A mere werewolf's bite or even scratch could turn you into one of the same ravenous kind, and Dracula really sucked the blood of voluptuous virgins (because, why not, if you can?) All of this was explained in the movies as possible and real, and I took no little pleasure in believing all of it.

At the start of Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, the filmmakers basically break the time-honored "code of the monster movie" immediately. In the vast majority of monster flicks, the monster, except for a few quick suggestions, goes largely unseen until the final third of the film. His alleged crimes mount up against the populace, but he is generally undiscovered to be the true source of the terror until much further along. And once he is out of the bottle, that genie can't go back into it. He is on the loose and rampaging and rending and destroying, and everyone does everything they can to stop him. It's been seen a zillion times, even in Jaws. Suggestion, buildup, more suggestion, more buildup, discovery of the actual creature, rampage, action, and ultimately, the victory of the humans over the monster(s). There are variations on this, of course, but its the standard. Though I often rail about how little variety there seems to be within the monster formula, the employment of suspense has roots that lie deep in the history of the narrative form. While storytellers are free, and encouraged, to toy with such formulas at their leisure, it may be at the expense of the story they are tying to tell. But done right -- for instance, in a film like Tremors, which plays with the formula in grand ways, but never fully ditches it -- it can be elating and wonderful.

And for me, pulling this off still requires allowing the audience to continue to believe in this supernatural silliness in the name of entertainment (regardless of my real world feelings towards such concerns). Tell me there is a monster, and I hope that by film's end, there has been or still is a monster; not some guy wearing a Scooby-Doo mask.

But I doubt there were any concerns of this nature on the part of Curucu's primary creator, director and screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who should have known better. He did know better. Siodmak wrote the screenplay for The Wolf Man, amongst many other latter day Universal Monster pictures, and he also gave us the original novel of Donovan's Brain, well-regarded among the science fiction set and itself adapted into three separate films. Siodmak knew his stuff; he could add thrills to even the most hackneyed situations, and looking over his filmography which is loaded with fun and even influential pictures (he even acted in Lang's Metropolis in 1927), he certainly understood the rules of the suspense and horror game. But before I go further into Siodmak in this discussion, let's get back to the start of Curucu, Beast of the Amazon.

"Me want Coooooookie!!!"

The film's rather staid credits sequence seeks to throw us off the track of the murder that is about to open the story by showing us dull shots of cattle being driven and eventually rounded up in a corral. The action begins along the Amazon itself (or what may be one of its tributaries; it really doesn't matter). The very first narrative shot of the film is of the clawed paws of the beast known as Curucu itself, as it parts the foliage of the set-bound jungle to peer in a slavering fashion (we assume at this point) at a lone female gathering water at the riverside. She looks about cautiously, and then turns back to the jungle path, all of which we see through the monster's POV, its paws parting the fronds once again in case we didn't catch what he was up to the first time. The paws are fairly ridiculous looking, and remind me very much of Muppet paws on one of their oversized monster characters. Or one of Sendak's Wild Things.

"I have come to fetch the waaaaateerrr..."

The girl stops short of the foliage, however, as she spies oddly shaped footprints in the sand on the embankment. This momentary distraction, though, will proof fatal, as the beast starts making a wild, panting ruckus, and then lashes out with his giant claws. We also get a closeup of his face: a wild-eyed visage of blue, red, and yellow (at least in the terribly colored print that I have) with two massive tusks sticking straight up on either side of its face. Curucu lashes out, the girl screams, a water jug is dropped, and the girl dies.

Enter lantern-jawed John Bromfield as plantation owner Rock Dean... that's right. Rock Dean. Go drink a stupid energy drink, and once your testosterone level has shot up enough to make you take that name in again, do so. Rock Dean. Mr. Dean is told by a police captain that his workmen have all fled the plantation back into the jungle, and then the captain shows him why. Rock Dean is brought to the shroud-covered body of the dead girl. She is the fifth victim of the monster so far, who is described by Tupanico, a local who is a friend of Rock Dean's, describes it as "a beast with claws like that of a giant bird." The captain, betraying that his head is filled with what gives Rock Dean his first name, says "A crocodile, perhaps?" Tupanico replies, "A crocodile is no bird." It is at this point that Tupanico relays that many of the locals believe the monster to be "one of those that lives behind the falls in Curucu."

Is this the track of the horrid Curucu? Or is it
Jesus carrying the horrid Curucu across the sand?

Curucu, Beast of the Amazon is definitely unique from most other '50s monster films in one important aspect: it was largely filmed on location in the region where it is taking place, and except for interior scenes, relies very little on traditional sets of the Hollywood variety. Much of the location shooting seems to be right on the edge of real jungle, the plantation shots are really on a plantation, and the hordes of Amazonian locals are just that. And so the film, in between "monster" attacks, gives us plenty of local color: dance sequences, aerial shots of the Amazonian basin, aerial shots of cities, planes landing at a Rio airport, Rock Dean going about his business in a real car on real city streets.

Curucu!

Rock Dean is upset because the murders are causing the locals to flee to the jungles. It seems to me that if there was a jungle monster killing random people, the better plan would be to flee to the cities, but I'm not from the Amazon. Rock Dean goes to Rio and meets with his fellow plantation owners to try and figure out how to stop losing their workers. Rock Dean, because he is Rock Dean, hatches a plan to travel up the Amazon River to the Curucu Falls, because that is where the legend of the monster is derived, solve the mystery of the monster, and bring his workers back with him. "Monsters that live at the Curucu Falls and come down the river?" says one of the owners incredulously. Rock Dean is told he is "talking suicide", which it wouldn't be if there is no such thing as monsters, but he commits to his plan. And, yes, none of this makes a lick of sense.

Rock Dean, in a scene where he is dressed in nothing but his tighty whities, gets a medical checkup before embarking on his suicidal plan to find monsters. Enter a blonde doctor doll named Andrea Romar, played by Beverly Garland, the best known name in the cast. Within seconds, Rock Dean and Dr. Romar are on a nightclub date. We get dancing, cigarettes, flirting, more dancing, and then suddenly the doctor tries to turn the discussion to cancer research. Dr. Romar is interested in a drug that the natives use in preparing shrunken heads. Enter Vivian, the nightclub dancer, and seeming rival to Rock Dean's affections. Caught between Rock Dean and hard place, Dr. Romar takes him to the dance floor alone to convince him to take her on his suicidal journey to the Curucu Falls. He refuses and they part ways.

Curucu!!! With claws this time
(and two extra exclamation points)...

We jump, via a title card, to the "Port of Belem, Gateway to the Amazon". Rock Dean meets up with Tupanico, whom we learn is, despite his modern dress and ways, is actually the son of a native chieftain. In fact, he is from the area where the Curucu Falls lies. I think you know where this is going. Rock Dean tries to hire Tupanico for his trip, but he has been beaten to the punch by Dr. Romar. They bicker over him, but Rock Dean loses the battle. We then get harbor scenes where boats are being prepared to travel up the Amazon. After this brief montage, Rock Dean shows up at Dr. Romar's boat to travel with her and Tupanico.

The journey begins. The boat travel is slow and leisurely, allowing for plenty of stock shots of flora and fauna. Crocodiles threaten all around their boats, and piranhas attack any animals that already attacked the travelers after they have been dispatched. As the band cruise along in their canoe, the edge of which rests about two inches from the water, this exchange happens:

Dr. Andrea Romar: Are there any fish?
Rock Dean: Thousands of 'em. Every one of them a killer.
Tupanico: Piranha.
Romar: I've seen some of those at the aquarium in Rio. Terrible looking things. All teeth.
Tupanico: They can eat the flesh off a man in sixty seconds.

These things stick with you when you are eleven years old and pretty much seeing such things for the first time. Things given as facts get lodged, and you have to find out the truth years later.

Not nearly as tasty as Captain Hook...

A snake drops from the trees and into the center of the canoe. Tupanico deftly snaps up the snake (described as "poisonous" not venomous) and tosses it casually into the river, where the "thousands" of piranhas make a meal of it. A pair of crocodiles advance on the canoe, and Rock Dean engages one of them in battle with his oar. The croc gives up on the oar, growls, and turns back on the boat. Rock takes the croc out with a couple of blasts from his shotgun, and the piranha get another easy meal. As the explorers switch to land to traverse through the thick jungle, we get shots of iguanas and even more snakes. We also see natives tracking the progress of the white intruders, and eventually there is a confrontation. Luckily, Rock Dean and Tupanico are practiced in dealing with the locals, and peace is attained.

But suddenly, there is the beating of drums in the distance, and Rock Dean recognize the beat as a sign that someone in a nearby village is sick. "Sick? That's my department!" yells Dr. Romar and she tries to spring to admirable action, but Rock Dean -- because he is a M-A-N of his time -- tells her sharply, "It's no job for a woman!" (He does add, "The witch doctor will be offended and he'll lose face," but still, you get the point.) Naturally, Doc Romar rushes to the native's side and realizes he is probably suffering from appendicitis. She gives him some meds and the man feels a bit better and smiles at her. Rock Dean says something stupid and obvious: "According to Indian custom, you are now responsible for this man's life." Well, yeah, Rock Dean. She's a goddamned doctor. I think that is why she does her job in the first place. They have that oath thing, you know.

Where the hipster weird beard craze really started...

They move the native to a nearby makeshift hospital, where the lovely doctor performs surgery on him. While they want to press on with their journey, they are advised by a priest to stay with the man until he is much better. Meanwhile, Curucu has made another kill. A male this time, walking alone in the jungle. Of course, from the way that the camera makes no bones about showing Curucu directly on each time, it is patently obvious that Curucu is not actually a monster, but because of this obviousness, it now feels to me that we are being set up for a short fall, rather than the long one that I felt when I first saw this film. Or maybe I am just older and more practiced in these things. Kids today would not be fooled for a second. But at age eleven in 1976, before home video would open up the world of movies for me, I really bought into this in the middle of the night. This is what I had.

The man is brought to the hospital, and when Tupanico shouts about the monster, the priest admonishes him -- hilariously -- for believing in such "superstition" as jungle monsters. (Well, I find it hilarious and ironic. That's my thing. You may not.) Tupanico says, "You know the legend of the Curucu monster, padre, who descends from the falls to punish the people who deserted the lands of their fathers." The padre decries this twaddle as "devil worship and voodoo" and begs those assembled to "pray for the light". Dr. Romar tells the priest about her need to find the native "headhunting" formula to aid her research, and Tupanico reaffirms his oath to help her get to his tribe to find it.

"Hey, octopuses ain't the only thing that got
eight arms to hold ya! How 'bout a kiss?"

Suddenly, the natives arrive to collect their hospitalized brother. At the front of them is their witch doctor, who was shown briefly earlier, but is now seen to full effect. He has a mask that to me looks like he auditioned at some point for the Mr. Men children's book and cartoon series, as he wears an outfit that to my eyes is utterly ridiculous. Though I guess by jungle standards, the costume is probably considered quite sophisticated. (It does have a three-dimensional mouth, after all.) Though it first looks like he is planning to attack them, Tico, the sick native, gives Dr. Romar a large knife as a gift. (Perhaps don't hold it high in the air as you approach them, Tico, if it is a gift.)

Rock Dean: He's making you a present of the knife.
Dr. Romar: Thank you. Thank you very much, Tico.
Father Flaviano: It's a sacrificial knife. The headhunters use those.
Rock Dean: Since you've accepted his gift, he's your slave from now on.
Dr. Romar: [giggles] Oh, that's charming. What am I going to do with a slave?

Monster? Just looks like first grader pee to me...

I don't know, Dr. Romar. You're white; I am sure you will figure it out. It's also telling that you think slavery is charming. But really, the slave thing seems to be more ceremonial, since Tico immediately leaves with the witch doctor and his fellow tribesman right away, despite Dr. Romar's protestations. Rock Dean and party head back on the trail to make their way to the falls. The film becomes a parade of animal action for about five minutes. They run into a large herd of wild buffalo and have to climb into the trees to avoid being trampled. While still up high, they see a coatimundi fighting for its life with a small constrictor. While the coatimundi looks doomed for sure, at the last second, he extricates himself from the snake's coiled embrace. Dr. Romar finds a sloth hanging on a tree trunk, and then plays (stupidly, I might add) with a small jungle cat's kitten that she happens upon. She then finds a small monkey that gets some attention briefly as well.

"Guess who?"

Back at the tent, while she and Rock Dean are eating some iguana dish for lunch, they are joined by a large black tarantula. After a failed, "romantic" grab-her-roughly-and-kiss-her attack by Rock Dean, he takes his frustrations out on the spider, dropping it with a blast from his ever-present shotgun. (Either they had a dead spider to throw on the ground, or they really killed one, because it looks pretty real. And as I mentioned, they didn't have the budget to make a convincing monster costume, so why would they spend it on a spider with such exacting detail?) They are then joined by Tupanico, who retrieves the rifle because there is a commotion out on the river. It seems there is a large orangish shadow moving just below the surface of the water. Tupanico shoots twice at the mysterious shadow, and it slowly moves away down the river.

Dr. Romar: What do you think it was?
Rock Dean: I don't know.
Dr. Romar: Looked like a giant river serpent. Huh... seems like anything's possible in this part of the Amazon.
Rock Dean: I don't believe in snakes a hundred feet long. Not even in the Amazon.
Dr. Romar: That was no hallucination.
Rock Dean: Might have been anything. Could have been a school of luminous fish.

The terrible truth about ChristianMingle.com...

The porters absolutely refuse to go any further on the journey because of the river shadow. They run off, but one of them attacks Rock Dean. Rock Dean defeats him and the native runs off. Down to just three in their party now, Rock Dean, the doctor, and Tupanico make camp and settle down for the night. With the doctor catching her beauty sleep in her tent, Rock Dean heads out into the jungle with his trusty gun (and that is not a colorful euphemism, though it might as well be) given back to him by Tupanico. While Dr. Romar sleeps, there is movement outside of her tent. We see the now familiar three-clawed hand of the beast Curucu part the folds of the tent. The flap is folded back, and we see the creature in his full, multi-colored glory as he starts to creep into the tent.

Frazzle Monster looked so much more put
together when he got to Sesame Street...

The camera switches to a POV shot of the monster's claws (I can't help but think of The Soupy Sales Show) as they advance on her throat. The doctor wakes up just in time and screams several times as the beast grabs her and shakes her, the camera still in a POV position. Rock Dean hears the noise and heads back. We see, in a lot of shadow, some rather effective shots of Curucu carrying Dr. Romar through the jungle swiftly, her body limp in its arms, her blonde hair nearly brushing the ground at times. Finally, Rock Dean runs into the monster and tries to shoot it, but his shots are of no effect at all. Curucu tries to rend Rock Dean with his razor sharp claws, and he roars furiously as he does. In desperation, Rock Dean raises his gun over his head and brings it down on the head of Curucu (out of frame). And then Rock Dean realizes the truth...

Tupanico totally drops character...

... and so do we, a little over 48 minutes into the movie. There is a shocked look on Rock Dean's face, and the camera cuts from his face to Curucu, where we see the savage, murderous creature slowly strip off his mask and costume to reveal... Tupanico. There is no monster; at least, there is no monster as we would categorize it normally. Just a man in a costume. Monster enough for my consideration in most cases (I am far more scared of mankind than any other creature that could exist), but in a supposed monster movie, it is a severe letdown. The supposedly civilized and Christianized native runs back into the jungle, leaving the Curucu costume behind at Rock Dean's feet. Doc Romar lies on the ground (from fainting, of course, 'cause that's what ladies usually did in old monster movies did most of the time when carried off by a monster), and Rock Dean picks her up and gently brings her back to the camp. Later, as she has come to, the pair return to the costume and examine it.

Dr. Romar: Feathers, bone, and teeth.
Rock Dean: Claws like razors!
Dr. Romar: In Africa, the headhunters... they use claws for murder! Why? Why is Tupanico doing this?
Rock Dean: I don't know. I thought I knew him... but I don't. And his voice, his face... he even put blanks in my gun. That's the reason he insisted on cleaning it.
Dr. Romar: What about the monster in the river?
Rock Dean: Tupanico's been around. He might have picked up a trick like that.
Dr. Romar: Trick?
Rock Dean: Might have been metal parting the water. Who knows?

"Now, exactly how many bases can I get to
before I lose 'hero' status in this picture?"

So, we have lost our monster, and title character for that matter, and so what does a monster movie do when the monster part has been obliterated and there are still twenty minutes left in the film? Why, generic jungle action, of course! Suddenly, Rock Dean and Doctor Romar hear a strange cry, and then a tribe of headhunters swoops in and kidnaps them into the dark of the jungle. They walk for ages, and are eventually taken to the picturesque waterfalls that are standing in for the legendary Curucu Falls. The natives throw the pair roughly into a hut in a small village and free their bonds.

They are eventually taken to a ceremony, where a gaudily dressed native woman does a snake dance to the measured but insistent beat of the jungle drums. Tupanico eventually reveals himself, and tells them that his name means "god" in the native language, thereby implying that there is no way he will pay for the murders he has committed in the guise of Curucu, for his people will protect him to the death. However, he gives Doctor Romar the formula she has been searching for in order to help her disease research. "You see," he says, "I am also a humanitarian and an idealist. I also want to make people happy." Rock Dean calls him on this dichotomy, but Tupanico stresses that it was necessary to protect his people from the encroachment of modern civilization. He has spent years trying to get his people to return to the jungle, and to keep them away from the modern world's temptations such as alcohol.

Super closeup of piranha jaws. My guess is they
are doing something eating-related...

While Rock Dean and Tupanico argue, another tribe has arrived and attacks the village. They set fire to the huts and begin to battle the Curucu headhunters. Rock Dean and the doctor take advantage of the distraction and make their escape, but the doctor loses the formula in the process. The pair are seen walking across the streams at the foot of the falls before heading back into the jungle. Soon, Doctor Romar collapses from exhaustion, and Rock Dean revives her with juice from a local fruit. They make it to a river where they find a raft on the shore, but as they attempt to board, they are attacked by a native who has been spying on them from the trees. Rock Dean engages him in combat, and Doc Romar chops at the native's legs with the oar, giving Rock Dean the chance to knock the man out for good. The native falls unconscious to the floor of the raft, his arm flopping over the side and into the water. As they push the raft off to float away, there is a shot of ravenous piranhas, tearing the flesh of the native's arm to bits.

Yup! That's what they were doing, alright...

When they land downstream a good while later, Rock Dean notices that the native's arm is now nothing but bone in the river. The pair start to cut their way through the thick jungle again, once more passing a giant snake in a tree. Rock Dean is immediately jumped by a ferocious jaguar, but he has a surprisingly brief battle with the creature, wrestling it for a few seconds and then killing it with his machete. In what seems like mere seconds later, they are distracted by a pair of fighting and snorting peccaries, and while they are watching, an anaconda drops down from the trees above and wraps Doctor Romar in its unbreakable embrace. But Rock Dean grabs the snake by the neck and struggles mightily against its powerful coils to free the doctor, chopping over and over at the snake with his machete until it is dead.

Kinda looks like Christopher Lee as Dracula...

They carry on through the jungle, and just before bad weather hits them, they make it to their old campsite. Rock Dean goes out briefly to find some food while the doctor rests on the cot. But she starts to have nightmares of natives surrounding her in the tent, and she screams. Rock Dean runs to her side, and seeing no one else in the tent, they start to kiss, in that rough way that heroes in B movies do when the lady finally gives in to him. A short while later, while Rock Dean is napping, Doctor Romar grabs the machete to collect some fruit. She sees a native in the trees and screams. She wakes up 48 hours later with the face of Father Flaviano staring down at her. She is back at the hospital, and she was brought there by her now "slave for life," Tico, and Rock Dean, her clothes in tatters. She and Rock Dean are reunited, and as they make out again, Tico enters the room to bring her another gift. It is the formula she thought that she lost, rescued from the burning hut by Tico, as it was his tribe that attacked Tupanico and his headhunters. And to give the film a final zinger, Tico has another gift for her. He reaches in the basket and pulls out a shrunken head... the now tiny head of Tupanico, with his eyes closed and his lips sewn shut. THE END.

I will admit that after I first saw Curucu, Beast of the Amazon at the age of eleven, I was pretty taken with the film as far as a jungle adventure went. I had seen a few Tarzan films (having gotten into the novels over the previous couple of years, along with Burroughs' John Carter and Pellucidar series), and also films like Stanley and Livingstone and King Solomon's Mines. But I think Curucu was the first jungle picture I remember seeing that had South America as its location, and I really liked the scenery and the array of wildlife that the film portrayed. The explorers run into animal after animal, and while that is fairly ridiculous, to me at the time it wasn't. But there is that lingering disappointment in the revelation that the monster was just a murderous human being, which does still count towards being a form of monster, but not the one advertised as appearing in this picture.

But, of course, I had already run into many precedents to the actions taken in this film. I also was into Sherlock Holmes at this point in my young life, and my favorite Holmes story was, entirely because of its monstrous overtones, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Once again, the film sets us up with rumors of a horrid creature haunting a certain location, whose supposed supernatural appearance as a "hound from Hell" induces a heart attack in a member of the Baskerville estate. The mystery is eventually sussed out, and the "monster" is revealed to be nothing but a very large dog painted with phosphorus to give it a ghostly atmosphere which frightened Sir Charles Baskerville to death. This, of course, is nothing but the doings of an ordinary human, a secreted Baskerville relation and criminal who was set upon murdering the other heirs to the estate.

There were likely, in my youthful reading experience to that point, many other examples of such turnarounds in stories beginning with supernatural leanings and atmosphere that devolved, in my opinion, into real life commonalities, including Scooby-Doo. I read mystery series like The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Trixie Belden as a kid (yeah, I liked some of the "girl" series too), and it was likely that there were setups where it seemed initially to be something spooky or ghostly in origin, but the stories were so often about espionage and bank robbers that I couldn't pinpoint this to be true after having not seen the books for so many years. But I read an awful lot around that age, so I should have been used to such unremarkable revelations by that point (and especially, now). But I really was not happen with it after seeing Curucu. It just seemed too cruel of a switch, especially after being so excited to see a jungle picture that had a monster right in the title.

As precedents go (though I did not see these examples until after Curucu) director Curt Siodmak had a couple of other passes at a similar concept -- where the supernatural elements are revealed (or are they?) to be purely within the mind's eye of one of the characters. The oldest of the two is the rather well-known Robert Florey thriller, The Beast with Five Fingers, from 1946. The film sports a magnificently charismatic Peter Lorre in a supporting role while the supposedly disembodied hand of a famous pianist torments him, and the set design, camerawork, and special effects serve the film magnificently. When I think of The Beast with Five Fingers, it is hard for me to not to recall it immediately as a true classic of the horror genre.

But, The Beast of Five Fingers has that annoying conclusion -- that admittedly kind of cool but annoying conclusion -- where after ninety minutes of not just Lorre but an entire household being convinced that a creeping, crawling something is running amok, choking people to death (and probably causing scuff marks on the floor and furniture), it is revealed that Lorre is the actual murderer. He has convinced himself that the severed hand is a tangible threat, and has gone insane because of this belief. Such a conclusion may seem fine and even necessary to sensibilities attuned to needing real world explanations, but to a monster fan, especially after having such a wonderful and atmospheric buildup (itself inspired heavily by German Expressionistic techniques), it is grandly disappointing.

Siodmak was only responsible for the screenplay for The Beast with Five Fingers, itself adapted from a classic William Fryer Harvey short story of the same title, though one with a decidedly different conclusion. (Nor does it have even a trace of a pianist within it; the original owner of the hand is a beloved man of the cloth.) In the short story, more than one person has dealings with the disembodied hand, though the story concentrates mainly on two characters. At the story's end, there is the implication that the hand's actions have resulted in the death of one of the characters. While mass hallucination is brought up early in the text, the details of the story afterward point to only one conclusion: that the hand, through whatever supernatural agency, is alive and determined to revenge itself upon the nephew of the hand's original owner, and that multiple people have not only had dealings with the hand, but have indeed seen it.

Siodmak's screenplay switched the focus of the film to more psychological grounds, supposedly at Florey's behest, and I cannot say that the film is worse for it. It is a solid concept -- letting the talented Lorre go slowly insane onscreen was always a sure bet -- and I should be happy with it. But because The Beast with Five Fingers set itself up as a truly memorable entertainment, it seemed like betrayal when I finally got the chance to see the film for the first time. And it still seems like betrayal today. I can't get around the feeling when I watch it each time.

The other Siodmak example, of what I am now terming "The Monster Switch," is 1951's Bride of the Gorilla, like Curucu, both written and directed by Siodmak this time. The film revolves around Raymond Burr getting "cursed" to turn into a horrid beast -- specially a jungle demon called a sukara -- and then committing murders in this guise. The ape in the title is a misnomer, because while the sukara looks somewhat like a guy in a cheap gorilla suit, it is not actually supposed to be a gorilla. And, as it turns out, Burr's character -- who is engaged to a voluptuous blonde played by Barbara Payton, hence the Bride portion of the title -- is not really a sukara. He has been poisoned, and while the drug causes him to go wild and commit the murders, his transformation into the beast is wholly within his mind. No one actually sees the beast, nor his hairy hands, nor his wild visage reflected in the water -- just Burr.

Original Reynold Brown artwork not used
for the poster. His other art was though...

While it has been largely derided over the years, by almost any measure, the earlier Bride of the Gorilla is a better film than Curucu. It has a rock-solid lead performance by Burr (who, as usual, never wavers in his commitment to lesser material), and surprisingly fine support from Lon Chaney, Jr. as Police Commissioner Taro, in a role not remotely in line with his actual heritage. ("How can I help but be confused? My native mind is filled with these superstitions," he laments at one point.) Still, it's nice to see him steadfastly on the side of the law in this one. And Payton looks just fine as the object of Burr's character's understandable lust (hey, she's hot enough to convince him that he is turning into a ravenous sukara over her).

Bride of the Gorilla has also been described on numerous sites and in books as being more connected to the Val Lewton mold, whose films concentrated almost completely on suggestion to build its slow-boiling suspense. Though, yes, examples can be found in Lewton's work where there are moments of outright horror -- such as the jolting and sudden appearance of the titular character in I Walked with a Zombie (also co-scripted by Siodmak, so he had worked under Lewton at a certain point), the shocking asylum conditions in Bedlam, and the murderous antics of Karloff and Lugosi in The Body Snatcher -- Lewton understood that less is often more in terms of suspense, and that the viewer's imagination can be employed as a far more powerful tool for the filmmaker than anything that could be shown outright.

I don't necessarily agree with the Lewton assessment regarding Bride, but I can see the connection. However, Lewton would likely not have allowed the hero to so openly envision his hand to be covered in fur as Siodmak does here in Bride, nor would he have allowed for the scene at the close where we and the other characters clearly see Burr is himself, dying from gunshot wounds with his clothes tattered to shreds, but Burr sees his reflection as the jungle demon in the pond water, and then slowly it dissolves to his normal face.

In most cases, emulating Lewton is probably a very grand thing to attempt. You are still probably going to end up somewhat afield of how he would have controlled the results, but it can be a noble gesture. But then you get to the pure monster movie fan, of whom I count myself among their number. We may indeed appreciate the building of suspenseful moments, but we are also coming to these films with one goal in mind: seeing a monster, doing horrible monster things like rampaging and killing men left and right without remorse, or even being completely misunderstood by humanity and blundering animal-like into situations that will certainly spell its eventual doom.

I came to Curucu, Beast of the Amazon with precisely this intention in mind. I came for a monster of a time, still had some thrills but not exactly what I hoped for, and ended up with a shrunken head. I guess somewhere in that statement is a metaphor for most of life's disappointments, so I should be used to it by now. In the words of Vonnegut (who never disappointed me), and so it goes...

RTJ

[My apologies for some of the direct movie pix in this post. They were taken from a low-grade, nonofficial DVD of Curucu, Beast of the Amazon that I acquired from one of those cheap companies on the internet. You know, the ones that specialize in selling films that have never had an official DVD release. It wasn't expensive, and it shows it. It's nice they took enough time to include both a color and a black and white version of the film, but since both prints are pretty obnoxiously terrible, it really doesn't feel like I have seen the actual film again. Also, the disc print is just over a 1 hour, 11 minute running time, while the listed time for the film on IMDb is 76 minutes. There are a few rough jumps in the color print, so it is likely that some plot elements have been left out in my synopsis. If I ever see a nice, shiny, full print of the film, I will revise this piece to reflect the full movie.

Also, while the disc opens automatically in a false aspect ratio, the image itself was better suited to 4:3, so I captured the pix that way. I guess that I will have to wait until Svengoolie has a repeat again to see a somewhat decent print (though cut up with commercials. Yes, I have spent thousands of words belittling this film, but please, somebody officially release it onto DVD or blu-ray!]