There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #12 – "Sea Monster" by Elephant Revival

In my post about the Eddie Noack song, Psycho, the other day, I went through various other versions of the same tune. One more recent attempt, that committed to recorded life by the husband-and-wife team of author Neil Gaiman and performer Amanda Palmer, rather annoyed me. First, the versions that I have heard (all of them live) were rather lackluster in performance, which disappointed me mainly because I thought the idea of Gaiman – an author and personality whom I admire most highly – striving to croak his way through a country song could at least have been a little fun. 

The end result wasn't fun for me; it was clumsily staged and no two elements from the selection of the song to the pairing of guest musicians with star performers seemed to fit together at any time. I blamed it mostly on a rampant mood of unchecked hipsterism dominating the stage, replete with a group of weirdos delivering some OK singing saw atmosphere that might have worked just fine with this particular song had a little more thought gone into the arrangement and genuine interest in the actual audience bled through the whole affair.

Now, it might sound like I am playing Pick on the Hipster here, and maybe I was to a certain degree. It is, after all, kind of fun and easy to do. But I did state in my original post that I would, as an example, love to find an entry point into the music created by Ms. Palmer, but just haven't been given one yet. I don't want to go through life simply hating certain music without a very good reason; I would rather call a Nickelback a Nickelback, and be done with it. I would point to my forays in facing off with Rolling Stone's Best 50 Songs the past two years as further examples that I am willing to take a chance on music that I normally avoid or just don't encounter in my day to day life. (And there will be a new version of Best 50 Songs coming up in early December, most likely. Watch for it... I have been pleasantly surprised with the past results.) And maybe I went into Gaiman and Palmer's version of Psycho hoping too hard for a decent take on the song to come out of it, after having listened to four good to great versions before it. Still, that hipster vibe of insincerity, unchecked irony, and self-possessed cool just came at me too hard, and I couldn't let it pass with comment.

A slight detour...

Let's skip to archive.org for a moment. One of the things that I love most about this public domain website – aside from the easy access to just about every p.d. film in existence – is their Live Music Archive. There are thousands and thousands of free, accessible concerts available in their archive, many of them recorded openly by visitors to these concerts, and many also coming directly from soundboard recordings (much better quality in general, but I have heard some great ones made right in the crowd). Now, before you get on me about artists' rights and all that, there is one notable point to add about the Live Music Archive: to add any concert to the site, the user and/or the site must have published direct permission from at least one member of a band or the band's management to post said concerts. When one finds a Man or Astro-Man, Robyn Hitchcock, or Camper Van Beethoven performance available for legal download on archive.org, one does it with the knowledge on the artist's page that said performer has approved such posting and further sharing with their audience.

So, you won't find a Radiohead, Wilco, Muse or Red Hot Chili Peppers concert on there; most of the bigger name artists and groups don't allow such easy access. There are, however, some surprises to be found. Some in my list of personal faves do show up in the Live Music Archive, such as Warren Zevon, Cracker, the Drive-By Truckers, Smashing Pumpkins, Ryan Adams, Elliott Smith, and Ween. Mostly though, given the rather socialist notion behind the sharing of all information on the site, it is not surprising that the vast majority of bands to be found there are – ahem – ahem again – jam bands.

That's right... so many jam bands. Hippie jam bands. Stoner jam bands. Hipster jam bands. Psychedelic jam bands. Bluegrass jam brands. Electronica jam bands. Hippie stoner hipster psychedelic bluegrass electronica jam bands. Jam bands from just about every place in the world (but no strawberry jam bands... gotta go to Knott's to score some of that...) At the top is the biggest jam band ever of all time, the Grateful Dead, who have somewhere in the neighborhood of over 11,000 concert recordings ready for either streaming or download on the site. (They have a special page set up on the site.) And then, after the Dead, come all the Dead spinoff groups, many of them containing at least one or two members from the band's past (Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, etc., etc.) After that, you've got Disco Biscuits, the String Cheese Incident, moe., Umphrey's McGee, Yonder Mountain String Band, the Radiators, and eventually Little Feat and Blues Traveler. (Surprisingly, Phish  is not on archive.org officially, and I find that a truly stunning fact.)

As it turns out, while I love 22-minute guitar solos and 12-minute drum solos if either the right guitarist or right drummer are performing them – I would never turn off an Allman Brothers album if given the choice – I am not really a jam band guy. The same way that Seinfeld wasn't an orgy guy; I'd have to go buy jam band clothes, get new jam band friends, and with them came new jam band drugs. Incessant noodling without real purpose except to stretch out an already long concert can often be annoying. I wouldn't mind being at any of these concerts, but that's not really what I listen to normally (with the open admission that some groups I adore, such as Built to Spill, Frank Zappa, Wilco, Cream, and early Pink Floyd – none of them on archive.org, mind you –  are or were really jam bands at heart or started out that way). 

Despite all that, I quite often check out concerts by any group that seems interesting to me, whether they eschew needless jamming or not. I've dipped a toe into the offerings of some of the jam bands I mentioned earlier and even partake of an occasional concert by the Dead, even adding some of the better shows to my own collection. At my collector's core, I have a basic urge to find new music constantly, and the Live Music Archive makes it easy to do at the only cost that I can currently afford: free. (And without annoying commercials like on Spotify or Pandora; I only have the free versions of those apps/sites as well.)

... eventually leads me to...

Elephant Revival. That was the name of the band I encountered on archive.org. A very simple name. The "elephant" part was attractive to me because I love those creatures dearly, and also because of some residual love for the Elephant 6 record label (home of Apples in Stereo and Of Montreal) from way back. "Revival" made me think immediately, of course, of CCR, and there is nothing not to love about that, unless it is a version not involving John Fogerty. The name "Elephant Revival" seems like maybe it is missing a couple of words in the middle, like their real name should be "Elephant Foot Massage Revival" – itself a dangerous proposition – the way that "Monty Python" is not nearly complete without the apostrophe and "s" and the "Flying Circus" part. But still, even the short name "Elephant Revival" intrigued me enough to make me click on the concert first over shows from other bands that had been uploaded that day.

Now, I was guessing that "jam band" would be the eventual outcome of my first listen to Elephant Revival. Past experience had given me a working knowledge of the basic audience on the Live Music Archive, including those who relentlessly tape and post new concerts. The law of averages sees to it that the majority of bands encountered on archive.org are jam bands, and I believe, by and large, that law still stands. And, of course, I always do some research first before digging into anybody's music. Before I even heard a note, I found out that Elephant Revival was a bluegrass/folk contingent, and while I do like bluegrass far more than I usually acknowledge, I still feared the "H" word in all of this. Folk hipsters are over the radio these days, and while I do like some of the sounds I hear, the songs quite often leave me pretty cold. I can find no connection to them. Most of the time, when a pack of Mumfords with crazy facial hair, antique instruments and toothy grins show up knocking on the door to my iTunes, I turn them away roughly 90% of the time.

The first listen to the band floored me. Absolutely floored me. At first, it was the lush instrumentation; the usual suspects as far as mandolin, guitar, and fiddle went, but even if they turned into a jam band, the assured picking told me they could keep up with just about anyone. But this was a hybrid that had bluegrass at its center but seemed informed by nearly every style of music available, including pop, reggae, jazz, and even the occasional electrified solo that rocked the house as assuredly as the sharpest axeman.

And it is of significant note that the first song I heard, Will Carry On, featuring vocals by one Bonnie Paine, who may be changing my listening life as we know it. Her quavering voice on this song seems so odd on that initial encounter, and I was slightly reminded of the first time I heard Katherine Whalen on a Squirrel Nut Zippers record doing her Billie Holiday riffing. (Not a dig, just a note.) But then, a few songs later, Paine lets loose with wailing along the lines of early Grace Slick, and then I understood that Bonnie Paine was capable of so much more. When I finally watched a few live clips, I realized that Paine is also the band's main (and sometimes sole) percussionist as well, thumping a djembe or stomp box while singing the band's introspective lyrics. (She also plays cello and musical saw at times.) She is not the only vocalist though; all five members split duties here and there, and all of them are multi-instrumentalists, easily and eagerly swapping the tools of their trade between songs.

The songs were largely original, but on that first concert listen, there was the remarkable inclusion of Pink Floyd's Have a Cigar, usually a rock monster of a song with heavy guitar licks. In the Elephant Revival version, Paine takes up the role of the sleazy record agent, and the song loses none of its nastiness in being transposed to the folk/bluegrass world. In fact, it seems rather... er... revived from it. And that comparison to Ms. Slick a bit ago? In listening to a second downloaded concert from archive.org, Elephant Revival launched into their own stab at Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, and I realized that I must not be the only one who stumbled into that comparison. And if it wasn't quite as surprising as their cover of Floyd, it was still really great.

But where is the monster stuff?

OK, Elephant Revival is not a band that you would immediately think would have some horror cred, but keep in mind their folk traditionalist roots and you realize that a walk along the dark side is not that far from their repertoire. I would not be surprised to hear them do a murder ballad or two in their career, but for now, they have a couple of interesting songs that nearly cross over to the Halloween path. The Paine-penned track, Raven Song (which they used to open at least one concert taking place on Halloween), takes on the notion of the raven as a presager and messenger of death, carrying loved ones to the great beyond. It's not necessarily dark in concept, though, and is more lovely than anything, but it still fits the mood.

The howling of wolves is also represented in their track, Sing to the Mountain. In the chorus, we are told "Go and sing to the mountain, go and sing to the moon". When " sing to the moon" is offered, other band members – and in live versions, the more than willing audience – howl wildly and without concern for stepping on the lyrics. I guess it is their version of making an impromptu shark fin on top of their heads while Jimmy Buffett sings "You got fins to the left, fins to the right". Despite being a huge shark fan, as you know, I will take the wolf howls over drunken island hoppers in this instance.

But let's get to the track I have chosen to be added to my Countdown to Halloween mixtape for 2017. The song is called Sea Monster, and immediately, it seems like, yes, such a song belongs here. One could easily read the lyrics and see little more than a purposefully vague imagery involving a possible siren of the sea, calling out to sailors to lead them to their doom. That is fine for any song with that title and surely belongs in any Halloween collection. But what if the monster is not what it seems at first?

Let's listen to the song and read its lyrics first before continuing...

Sea Monster by Elephant Revival

(Music and lyrics by Elephant Revival / ℗ 2016 Itz Evolving/Thirty Tigers, Elephant Revival Publishing]

I’m going out over the sea,
I’ve got a boat, I’ve got a dream.
I trim the sails with my own hands

The song Sea Monster can be
purchased on this album.

leave all my thought back on the land.

I’m going out over the sea,
I won’t be back until I’m free.

I hear a voice, a siren’s review,
I hear it calling out of the blue.
A song of a strange unbearable thing,
it grows in the water, it goes unseen.

I’m going out over the sea,
hearing the song I’ve come to see.

What is this monster in the gyre?
All that’s thrown over the side,
And I want to know…

How we live in a world that provides and expires,
How we grow, come to know our hearts desire.

I’m going out over the sea,
All I have heard, all I have seen,
We are all out, out in a dream,
We are a boat, we are the sea.

After all the rise and fall is all that still remains.

At the end of the second verse, there is the line, "A song of a strange unbearable thing, it grows in the water, it goes unseen." In the bridge, the singer has encountered what it takes to be the true beast and asks, "What is this monster in the gyre? All that's thrown over the side..."

Before you groan and think you are being lectured on the horrors of pollution when you thought you were merely delving into a folksy tune about a sea monster, keep in mind that Puff the Magic Dragon has already had his day. Mere child's novelty has given way to a darker turn of mood. I don't suffer gladly those who pretend that mankind has no sway over the destruction of the natural world, and I suspect that Elephant Revival doesn't either. In the introduction to this song on that first concert listen, Paine attempts to set up the song but encounters some slight difficulties in doing so: chiefly, the type of audience members who grouse when bands try to bring something deeper to the stage than the mere strumming of acoustic instruments. Paine said...

"The Sea Monster in some aspects is a collection of plastic bottles and trash that have accumulated in the gyre of the ocean, which is a large thing...(laughs)... not to cause boos or anything before you sing a song... (laughs)... but it is something worth bringing consciousness to."

That "something" is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive man-made "soup" that was discovered in the mid-'80s  in a place known as the North Pacific Gyre. Not the only such vortex in the oceans of the world, just the most prominent in size, the "patch" is largely made up of minute particles but is thought in the public eye to be almost like an island or a creature made of garbage, though it is actually thin enough in most places (and chiefly under the surface of the water) as to be undetectable even from those floating through it, let alone be seen from space. This is not to say that there aren't vast areas where plastic is to be clearly seen. Whatever the imagery the patch invokes, whatever its true visibility, it is almost certainly a monster of our own devising, a Frankenstein's Monster of pollution that could be altered and even stopped if mankind changed its ways drastically.

I was not expecting any of this when I encountered Elephant Revival for the first time. For all my wailing about millennials and annoyance and ironic stances, Sea Monster is a reminder that sometimes even possible hipsters can pass by and leave us something small, sad, and crystalline in its fragility. It's a crushingly lovely song with a hard truth buried deep within it. If the siren that sings to us from the depths of the ocean is merely a call to responsibility for our world, I can live with that. Until then, we have a monster on the loose, and the death of marine life from the increased ingestion of our plastics is a horror that I cannot accept. It's probably a horror more true than anything you would normally encounter on a mere Halloween mixtape, with its usual focus on silly supernatural things.

Elephant Revival. When I get into some spending cash again, I will own all of their available material in one fell swoop. Or one swell shop. Take your pick; I will make them mine. And I will order one Bonnie Paine to go, please...

RTJ

See? Sea Monster!: Amphibious Creature of the Deep (2010)

Amphibious 3D (2010)
Dir.: Brian Yuzna
Cinema 4 Rating: 4/9

There is a brief rumination on the lust for power and its connection to the sea at the beginning of Amphibious 3D which left me peeling off into my own thoughts regarding what sort of power I would want given the chance to acquire it. I am a simple man... I don't require much in the way of power, but if I could have it, I would certainly crave the means to make a far more ambitious sea monster movie than Amphibious 3D.

Amphibious 3D has an alternative title -- Amphibious Creature of the Deep -- and it was that version I certainly saw instead since my VOD rental on Amazon was only in two dimensions. While I have clearly put off seeing the film for a few years, I did have some small hopes in finally watching the film due to the participation of Brian Yuzna. For those not familiar with Stuart Gordon, Yuzna was one of the producers of Gordon's trio of Lovecraft epics -- Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon -- and a director in his own right, handling the Re-Animator sequels -- Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator -- as well as Return of the Living Dead III, segments of Necromonicon, The Dentist and its sequel, and Faust: Love of the Damned. Yuzna's first foray into directing -- Society, from 1989 -- is a cult favorite of mine and a couple of my friends, though I will admit the film is a bit of an acquired taste. But isn't that the way of genre movie love anyway?

A type of prehistoric eurypterid.

Like other directorial faves from the '80s and '90s (though he is on the floor directly below the others), Yuzna seems to have slowed his production efforts down in recent years, which, despite what I am about to write here, is a shame. While I really only truly love a couple of his films, also being fond of his Re-Animator sequels and the crazy notion of an impossibly hot punk zombie chick running around in RotLD III, Yuzna always seemed to have an eagerness to his films that made them pleasant to at least encounter for the first time. Making no bones about the genre to which he had committed, his films were often fun, intentionally humorous, and ultra gory as a result.

And I can say that it seems he has done the same here with Amphibious 3D, just to a lesser degree than usual (and without much of a sense of humor this time). Without knowing the true details of the genesis of this project, I would hazard a guess that once Mr. Yuzna found himself in Indonesia filming under the auspices of a Dutch film company (and hence the Dutch lead actress -- more on her later), he made the most of it. While Yuzna and fellow screenwriter John Penney seem to have done the final screenplay, the film is based on a story by the head of the production company, San Fu Maltha and the well-regarded science fiction writer, S.P. Somtow. I assume that Yuzna possibly saw the chance for a Southeast Asia working vacation (why not?), while also getting the opportunity to sit in the director's chair again (and once more, why not?) I would kill for such working conditions.

What the eurypterid Megalograptus looked like.

For a film based on and around the water (the film even opens with a dual attack by the only partially seen creature on a beach area), there is very little underwater photography. There are no diving scenes, and there is also barely a smidgen of deeper water footage. So, what exactly is this "amphibious creature of the deep"? It seems in recent years that low-budget filmmakers have latched onto the idea of eurypterids being an ideal creature to transport into the 21st century to serve as a replacement, when needed, for crocodiles, sharks... what have you. Eurypterids were basically large, prehistoric water scorpions. For those confused, water scorpions are not actually true scorpions; there is a large taxonomic disparity between the two, and they only gained the name due to some noticeable physical similarities between the two groups, namely two large predatory appendages that jut out from the front of their abdomens.

The underwater lab adventure film DeepStar Six somewhat got this tiny specific ball rolling cinematically in 1989, supposedly portraying a particular type of eurypterid, the Megalograptus, on the loose in a wild rampage through the underwater structure that provides the film with its title. Though that version of the creature was mutated to a large degree, and given a more recognizably monstrous form (somewhat in the then nominal style of the Alien films), it was still fairly well-identified as an eurypterid in the press surrounding the film.

Amphibious, however, seeks to up the monster ante a tad by having its eurypterid wreak havoc above the water, though technically, always still on the water itself. The bulk of the action takes place on top of a very ramshackle landing structure that rises above the surface of the water. The shack is owned by a local Sumatran smuggler and all-around creep named Boss Harris, who keeps a group of child slaves at his beck and call, mostly having them fish from the water and perform odd jobs around the structure. (Let us not muse too long upon what some of those odd jobs might be, but given the usual conditions of child slavery, some of them are likely none too savory.) Amongst the ragamuffins is a young girl named Tamal, who straps her chest down to pass as a boy, lest some of those none too savory thoughts of Boss Harris come fully blown into fruition. Tamal bears a pendant around her neck in the form of an eurypterid, and you would be right in assuming the film will play fast and loose as to whether she has any control over the titular creature or not. Or whether the creature has any control over her.

The lead character is played by Michael Pare, a long long way from Streets of Fire and Eddie and the Cruisers. He is a little more weathered, a good deal older, but still handsome and does a decent job in this film. His character, Jack Bowman, is a boat-for-hire captain who has to deal with Boss Harris and his team occasionally, though he remains fairly skeptical of the criminal's operation. Bowman has been hired by Dr. Skylar Shane, a marine biologist doing some research on prehistoric fossils in the waters. It is a good thing that sea monster or shark films are always stocked fairly well with passing marine biologists just in time for the monster to strike. Skylar Shane is played by Janna Fassaert, a Dutch actress who makes the scale move in both directions for me in terms of delivering her performance. At times she is remarkably out of her depth, but there were moments when she fit the role quite well. Dr. Shane has recently lost her daughter in a tragic accident, and so when Bowman and Shane stop by Boss Harris's landing and a terrified Tamal entreats Shane to rescue her from slavery, well, the plot has been formed.

Well, except for the main monster. You see, it seems that when Tamal gets agitated or scared, this monstrous creature rises to the surface and does away with those that get in its way. Eventually, through a series of mishaps, miscommunications, and evil and/or deviant behavior on the part of Boss Harris and his crew, including his disgusting Irish henchman Jimmy Kudrow (played to good effect by veteran actor Francis Magee), the massively powerful giant eurypterid will attack again and again until Tamal has been freed. What this means for the innocent who get in the monster's way is exactly why we are watching this movie in the first place.

And then there is my Pet Peeve of the Week, one of those things that you see a lot (in slight variances) in monster films, usually a move so inexplicable that it just really starts to gnaw at me. In this case, it is the use of the creature's tail as an all-seeing, all-knowing device that the monster employs much like the periscope devices on the top of the flying saucers in the original 1953 film of The War of the Worlds. The creature's tail will be used in a place, such as through a floor or into another room, where the eurypterid can clearly not see what is going on, and then the tail reacts like it had a pair of eyes on it. Now, I am all for setting up for us that perhaps there are sensory organs on the creature's tail (or whatever appendage is being deployed to move about in such a way) that allow to weave in or around objects in pursuit of prey or revenge or whatever the monster is doing. But you have to set that up for us!

We see this time and again when films have a giant octopus or squid character, where every separate tentacle acts as if it has "Spidey sense". Whether it is Harryhausen's octopus (actually, as the Master termed it during the making of the film, a "sixtopus," since they only had the budget to animate six arms) that attacks the Golden Gate Bridge in It Came from Beneath the Sea, the mini-series of Peter Benchley's The Beast, or the massive Kraken in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean films, each one has an animal whose tentacles seem to be acting independently of actual line of sight on the part of the creature, and are able to anticipate the moves of their victims with stunning precision. Sometimes the tentacles even seem to have personality of their own. Not always, but quite often enough to really be a thorn in my side, even in films that I really enjoy or are meant as nothing more than mere B-movie fodder.

And here, too, we get the eurypterid and its magical all-knowing tail. And a full-on land scorpion's tail too, not the very different water scorpion type. The monster really seems to be more of a cross between a lobster and a land scorpion, and it was hard for me at times to believe it was anything but that. Still, this is a completely fantastical concept, and if one is to be believe in the monsters they are seeing on screen, sometimes one has to accept that perhaps a movie monster is not going to look exactly as one would wish or prefer. Come in expecting a true to life eurypterid, it is going to be much smaller, and you won't get many scares. Come in expecting a monstrous eurypterid that has been designed with attachments that you weren't envisioning, and you might have a fun time. Besides, monster movies often have so many other hurdles to overcome: bad scripts, subpar acting abilities on the part of the cast, low budgets; they should at least be able to get by on the notion that if they can at least make the monster look pretty cool and scary, then maybe that will be all the audience needs to accept the film. And I do have to admit that, at times, the monster is kind of cool-looking here.

Amphibious is a film that nearly comes together for me, but not quite, though I cannot completely write it off as unenjoyable and rote. But neither can I consider it a truly good film and worthy of future likely re-watching (though I have just watched it twice, out of necessity, in recent days). Yuzna does a decent job in moving things along and the direction is mostly tight, but the whole affair is laden with an overall cheapness -- mostly marked by being a deep water creature film where we never get a scene in the deep of the water -- that it can never really escape. I decried the film at the beginning of this piece for its lack of ambition, and it is sad that it doesn't try to do more with its setting. But neither is it completely unambitious; the angle built around the connection between the biologist and Tamal is an interesting one that has a somewhat surprising climax, though I wish the film had gone deeper in this direction. The film's chief asset is the location shooting and hiring of local actors (limitations of talent set aside), allowing us a chance to see a film that is, for once, not fully populated by boring, bickering, white American teenagers. If there is one thing I am tired of in modern film, it is boring, bickering, white American teenagers.

As to the main reason for watching one of these films, the special effects are, for the most part, fairly well done, and in some shots, far better than I had reason to expect. There is the usual problem in CGI effects where you often get no real sense of the creature's weight and mass, and of it reacting naturally to objects around it, but that is an ongoing battle that I have had with this style of effect since the beginning. Here, it hardly matters, for the full battle against the creature that takes up the back portion of the film is mostly well staged and a definite step above the type of ultra low-grade effects proffered by Syfy Channel films. Compared to those, Amphibious is almost a masterpiece of high ambition.

RTJ

Flickchart Comment #28: I Tentacoli [Tentacles] (1977) vs. Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)

The theme with this match-up seems to be one of rising, the well-known to be thoroughly "Abominable" Dr. Phibes literally doing so even in the title for the sequel to his far-superior first effort. On the other side, you have the hamhandedly filmed antics of a massive octopus rising to the surface to wreak havoc upon landlubbers in the Italian Jaws-ripoff I Tentacoli (known to Americans, especially those of us unfortunate enough to catch this as part of a double feature onscreen back in the day, as Tentacles).

All that rising to very little effect. If you like a lot of murkily shot underwater cinematography, then Tentacles is your octopus. Double bonus if you want to watch a lot of Hollywood stars -- Henry Fonda, Shelly Winters, John Huston -- slumming it up big time in what I hope was a decent payday for all of them. Winters' abrasive voice does its usual number on me (i.e. making me want to not hear her at all), and the fact that she and Huston play "Ned and Tillie Turner" just makes me want to gag all the more. And who leaves a baby carriage unattended by the ocean, let alone anywhere? (Well, I would, but I hate babies in general... actually, it's baby culture that I hate.) Killer whales are the heroes here, and if you watch this film back-to-back-to-back with Jaws 2 and Orca, your head might explode.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes was great fun, and I return to it time and again, but I have never been able to whip up quite the same passion for its sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Yes, the revenge-driven doctor indeed comes back to commit a string of murders (this time with an Egyptian theme) as in the first, all the while attempting to resurrect his dead wife. And there are some decently strange scenes, gratuitous Robert Quarry acting, and an intriguing ending. Vincent Price, as always, is a fabulous presence (especially in his unmasked and scarred Phibes makeup), but following the first one, this one pales just enough for me to consider it a rather generic entry.

It's miles better than Tentacles, though, with the camp factor of Phibes defeating the sleaze factor of the Italian film handily. Maybe even "ham"-handily...

Buzzing Thru the Pylon: Halloween Free-For-All, Pt. 4: Midnight Matinees

OK, so I treated myself. Halloween rolls around, and I get all crazy with the DVD buying. Specifically, horror and science fiction movie buying. You may have noticed already from the fact that this post is Part 4 of my Halloween Free-For-All, with at least three more posts in sight.

Here's the deal: Amazon often has a big horror movie sale on their site at this time of the year, and for once, I was prepared. Instead of going for the bigger ticket items which are often on some form of sale throughout the year anyway, I decided to jump into their pile of 5.99 or less DVDs, and see what I could roust out of there. The first things that popped out at me were a quartet of discs from MGM's (and occasionally, 20th Century Fox's) ongoing (and seemingly popular, at least with psychotronic freaks like me) Midnight Movies series. A few years back, I grabbed about a dozen of these discs from Wal-Mart for 5 bucks a shot, finishing off my Corman Poe collection in the process. Now, it's a similar situation on Amazon: only about $20, and I have eight more films in my collection, two of which I actively like, another two which are so innocently bad they just cannot be missed, four of which I have never seen, and three of those four never-seens are ones which I have always wanted to watch. So, I can't really lose on any front with these selections, and they are going to make for some interesting viewing over the next week. The discs:

20th Century Fox and MGM Present(s) Midnite Movies Double Features
Disc #1
Panic in Year Zero! (1962)
Director: Ray Milland AIP, 1:33, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet

The Last Man on Earth (1964)
Director: Ubaldo Ragona & Sidney Salkow
API/AIP, 1:26, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

First, a Ray Milland film of which I have heard a good deal -- some decent, some moderately ill -- but given that I am a huge Milland nut (I will not rest until It Happens Every Spring, my favorite baseball movie, is on disc), I figured that I just have to own a movie that the man himself directed. Post-apocalypse, here we come -- at least, before our government's rapture nuts take us there. Also hanging out in that time after decent civilization has finally gotten out of its own hair is Vincent Price in the first film version of the awesome I Am Legend, The Last Man on Earth. Like all three film versions, this one is not quite the novel, but for a neo-zombie flick with the great Price, it ain't hay. And while I have yet to watch this disc, it just has to hold a better print, coming from a major studio like MGM, than the umpteen versions of this public domain flick bopping about on cheap, fly-by-night video companies (or on the internet for free). I'm hoping to discover that I will like it all the more without all of the pops, crackles and erratic cuts. Then again, it could backfire and ruin the atmosphere.

Disc #2
A Blueprint for Murder (1953)
Director: Andrew L. Stone
20th Century Fox, 1:17, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet

Man in the Attic (1953)
Director: Hugo Fregonese
20th Century Fox, 1:22, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

For fans of mysteries or psycho killers or both, Man in the Attic has just got to be seen for a terrific performance by a young but always edgy Jack Palance as a serial killing pathologist named Slade, who rents a room from Andy Griffith's Aunt Bea (no joke) -- ala The Lodger, a relationship noted in the credits -- and then proceeds to murder showgirls all over London. Low-budget but very tense mood, lots of sleazy girls in heels and stockings, and a maniacal Palance -- why would one miss this? I caught up with it recently on TCM, and had a good, gritty time watching it. I have not seen A Blueprint for Murder, which came out the same year as Man in the Attic, but it gives me an opportunity to see Joseph Cotten, always a favorite of mine, working his magic away from Hitchcock and Welles. I don't really know much else about it, but I am looking forward to it all the same.

Disc #3
Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955)
Director: Dan Milner
Milner Bros./ARC, 1:20, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 3

The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955)
Director: David Kramarsky & Lou Price
San Mateo/ARC, 1:15, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 2

Boy, are these a pair of really crappy films. Bottom of the barrel sludge, both of them, and as far as I know, both floating about in the public domain. I own Phantom on one such disc (one of those "50 movies for 12 bucks" things), and while I really don't need to own it a second time, I do have a thing for mutant sea creatures, so having an actual widescreen print of Phantom made the decision for me. And this monster is such a dopey sad sack that you almost want to cuddle it, even when he is attacking girls in bikinis.

There is no actual creature with a million eyes in Beast, not even a dopey one, and if you go in waiting for such a creature like I did, there will only be sad disappointment. Thank goodness I'm not an ophthalmologist. However, if you are interested in seeing just how absurdly boring a film with such a title can actually turn out to be, this will be your cup of tea. It's like someone fed the Cleavers or the Nelsons downers and then followed them around with cameras, all the while making them believe that aliens are out to get them. Despite the fear factor, everyone still practically walks around in a stupor, making this one just drip, drip, drip along... and yet, I find it fascinating that someone would even release this. And now, because my taste for these things is set extremely low, and because I am a rubbernecker of the old school, I own this slow-motion trainwreck.

Disc #4
The Return of Dracula (1958)
Director: Paul Landres
Gramercy/United Artists, 1:17, b/w (partial color)
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet

The Vampire (1957)

Director: Paul Landres Gramercy/United Artists, 1:15, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet

OK, I have no doubt that these two are going to end up seeming supremely disappointing to me, but I am looking forward to watching them all the same. A pair of Paul Landres-directed films that I have never run into through all of my video travels, but have read plenty about in numerous horror movie texts. Even the texts lead me to not expect too much, but I can't help but get excited about even the worst or even just plain boring films when they have been so hidden from me all this time. Obscure plays HUGE with me, and ultimately, for me, sometimes the experience means more than the actual outcome of the experience.

So it is with all four films on these discs that I have not seen. It means that instead of watching the same two dozen films on TCM or AMC for the Halloween weekend, I will have a stockpile of undiscovered treasures at my fingertips. Treasures, no matter their quality. As I said, it's the experience. Sometimes you just have to take a cinematic Cleveland Steamer to the chest to get your senses straight and your movie sights re-calibrated.