87 Minutes and Entirely Non-Tantric: Stung, and How Not to Get That Way

Stung (2015)
Dir: Benni Diez
TC4P Rating: 4/9

Wasps are fuckers.

I can look at most predatory species and recognize the beauty behind nature's design even when it results in the death of smaller, weaker creatures. But wasps are fuckers. I defend sharks and spiders from people who are afraid of them, who see only terror where I see wonder at the natural order of things and for efficiency and cunning. Wasps are still fuckers. I can even look at common social insects like wasps -- such as ants, bees, and termites -- and after recognizing both the benefits and downsides of all species, come out with a solid realization of just how necessary they are to the planet. But with wasps, even understanding their place in our world (they are vital in controlling many invasive and pest species of insects), I can only come to one conclusion. Wasps are just plain horrid, scary fuckers.

I think it is because wasps seem to take delight in being outright assholes. I think that if you were able to ask a wasp one on one if they took pleasure in messing with your day, the wasp would just stare back straight at you with its big waspy eyes... and then stab you right in the thorax. Because they are fuckers.

And I have had a few run-ins with wasps and hornets (which are categorized as wasps) over the years, and have learned they are not something with which one should mess. I am wholly unafraid of bees when they are zipping about, but show me one wasp and I give the area a wide berth. For me, their over-the-top aggression is more brutal than necessary, and in that way, I guess they seem a little more human to me than other species. And that form of humanity is something I prefer to avoid at all costs.

The other day, I wrote about a small film called Harbinger Down that was created with the intent of showcasing the use of practical special effects over the currently preferred measure of computer-generated effects. While the film ultimately fails on a dramatic level, its intent and the eventual execution of its effects work was sincere and ably done. While I did not love the film, I liked it and truly enjoyed the attempt. It gives you a cool looking monster, gets you caught up in the action, and delivers a finale that makes the trip worthwhile.

Here now is Stung, another such attempt at showcasing practical effects, but which has wasps as the main antagonists. (As if wasps could be anything but...) Immediately, I assumed there was going to be an extra scare and "ick" factor involved, simply because of the giant wasps (especially if they were even halfway to being done well). And Stung does have a doozy of a poster (see above), and while I know that I should never do that whole "book-judging-cover" thing, from the outside view, Stung looked interesting. 

Once I heard about it, that is. I didn't know Stung existed until my buddy Aaron sent me a message on Facebook saying he had just watched it. "Pretty neat effects and creature work, but really really boring go-nowhere story," he wrote. This did not kill the movie for me, though, since I am a "monster first" kind of guy. All Aaron did was guarantee that I would have to see for myself if the effects and creature work were indeed pretty neat. And the story? They have stories in these things?

Stung starts with a pair of caterers -- the driver, Paul, and his boss, Julia -- and they are as mismatched as hell. Paul finds her attractive but Julia is wholly committed to making a go of the catering business after inheriting it from her father; he, at least in what we are given to go on, is somewhat of a loser who would rather party on and smoke weed than work hard or make a good impression. And yet, making an impression is exactly what Paul wants to do in regards to Julia, but she has no respect for him, and rolls her eyes at his awkward attempts at establishing a rapport with her. Preparing for a party on a huge estate owned by a widowed matriarch and her reclusive son, Paul seems to run afoul of Julia's gaze with every step.

Then the wasps attack. The wasps are relatively normal at first, bigger than they should be but not outrageously so, only where anyone passing them would give them as wide a berth as possible. But as the party kicks in (though it never really seems to get kicking, and in fact, seems like it is barely populated by anyone except a handful of guests), the wasps get more and more aggressive. When they start attacking the guests with force, and the running and screaming start, it seems like a basic bug attack movie. Then, from out of the mouth of an attractive MILF, who had hit on Paul just a few moments earlier, come a pair of enormous insect limbs, and then her face and body split apart as an almost fully formed, human-sized wasp replaces the MILF. The film takes a turn here, as the partygoers finds itself being taken over one by one by gigantic wasps. Guest with even the slightest sense of survival flee for the mansion and lock the doors behind them.

From here, Stung becomes one in which the small contingent of actors who were paid to deliver lines do battle against the wasps, trying in vain to keep them from entering the mansion, and also discovering that those who had been stung by the wasps outside have the potential to turn into wasps themselves. From the information that I can gather from Stung, the filmmakers have combined social and solitary, parasitoid and predatory wasps into one huge wasp species, and given the creatures in this film the ability to reproduce in multiple ways. There is clearly a queen wasp introduced in this film and she is quite evidently laying eggs. There is even an attempt to ram one of her pupae down the throat of a certain character, and I assume the intent is for the pupae to feed on that person's insides. 

But there is no way that the people being rendered from the inside out at the party, which hasn't been going on that long when the attack happens, could have been turned to mulch so quickly nor would there have been opportunity to introduce larvae into their systems in the first place. Unless the wasps were pumping their eggs into the hors d'oeuvres (something which we never see, by the way). And even taking into account the vagaries of monster movie science, while insects the size of the ones in this film are a physical impossibility, it is hard to swallow that their exoskeletons, rather necessary for their bodies to operate and keep form, could have hardened so quickly, especially in what seems to be mere minutes in many cases.

Despite the basic unbelievability of the hybridization of wasp characteristics, I am happy to report that I too found the creature effects -- averaged out, of course -- as neat as Aaron did. There were a few moments that had me cringing as the filmmakers would wish, and I chalk this up to their having sold the illusion properly to me. Like Harbinger Down, the discarded facial skins of the victims can be seen hanging off the limbs or body of the monster, and I found it as effectively gruesome here as I did in that film. The film is exceptionally gory, as it should be, and there is a genuine sense of menace from the invading creatures through much of the film. 

However, after watching the much superior creature puppetry, the small bits of CGI that have been used in Stung stick out like the red lipstick that your least favorite aunt's poodle pops out at you every time you are forced to pet him on your bi-monthly visits. There is a fire effect used late in the film that looks terrible close up during the action in which it is used, and looks even worse from a distance when we see it on top of a vehicle flying down the road. Bad digital fire and explosions have already ruined at least one episode of Psych for me, along with other shows and films. Here, it just made me laugh out loud after I had been fairly, though not totally, caught up in the ceaseless wasp attack. And, by the way, fire apparently does not burn either insect or human flesh even when both are enveloped in what must be several minutes. This I learned from Stung.

Stung does have a couple of strong cards hidden in its hand. The first is that the slimy, skeezy son of the matriarch who owns the estate is played by Clifton Collins, Jr., and true to form, he is gives his usual, off-kilter performance in what could have been a nothing role. (It's still not much of a role, however.) He's twitchy, he's nervous, and he's beyond weird, and fits in well with the premise in which he is more than likely to have had a hand in bringing down on his party guests. Stung is also brightened by the presence of Lance Henriksen, who just so happened to appear in Harbinger Down as well. As the mayor of the town in which the estate is located, Henriksen gets a chance for a little character work before the film becomes rife with bug attacks for good. He, unfortunately has to deal with lines like "That young man has balls of steel. To be a man you have to be a man." And to be an actor, you have to deliver your lines, whether they are weighted down by stupidity or not. Henriksen does his job, and with his practically trademarked gravitas makes us believe that his character means every dumb thing he says.

But the lead characters are where the film has real problems (besides that stupid fire scene). The actors (Jessica Cook and Matt O'Leary) are appealing and do fine with what they have been given, but Stung tries both too hard (at first) and then not hard at all (the remainder of the film) to convince us that these two belong together. There was potential for some fun toying with sexual politics here, but it gets squandered and resorts to the obvious at every turn. Paul, a nebbish basically rejected by Julia at the beginning of the film (though it is clear she finds him a little cute), goes Die Hard on the wasps, and we discover there is potentially a man of action underneath his juggling stoner exterior. He takes to fighting giant wasps as if to the manner born, and don't think for a second that Julia doesn't notice this. However, he is no Bruce Willis, and there are definite limits to his badassery. To counter this, Julia will get ample opportunity to strip down to her inner Ripley and save Paul's bacon more than once. (She has a good cry first before she releases the Rip though.)

I guess someone could argue that the filmmakers are just trying to outguess our expectations for each character, but from the way the behavior of the wasps were not so carefully considered, it is hard to believe any discussion of the motivations of Paul and Julia went beyond, "They don't realize they are perfect for each other. Then he goes nuts on the wasps, and then she goes nuts on the wasps. And then maybe they bang."

In the end, despite the fun wasp attacks, I enjoyed Stung far less than I did Harbinger Down. Because of moments like the CGI fire scene, Stung comes closer to the territory that I thought it was going to represent when I first put it on, which was in the realm of a Syfy-style, tongue-in-cheek production where there would be little regard given to making the effects work even semi-believable. To their credit, director Benni Diez and his crew (the film is a German production filmed in English) do a decent job in making Stung as watchable as it is. If you just want to see a film where giant wasps attack a group of truly stupid humans, this is your huckleberry.

But if you like your burning bugs nice and crispy (and your side dish composed of charred human forearm), you are going to be disappointed.

For One Practical Purpose: Harbinger Down

Harbinger Down (2015)
Dir: Alec Gillis
TC4P Rating: 5/9

You would be forgiven if you thought from the rating that I gave to Harbinger Down, a new monster picture release from the Oscar-winning special effects team of Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr., that I didn't like it. My "5" rating is what I use for an number of things: outright product with no real soul or purpose apart from crass monetary gain, the most rote or trite of projects that probably bored me to tears with their unoriginality, and anything middle of the road that didn't really strike me as good or bad either way so I have no place else to put it.

I liked Harbinger Down. I just didn't like Harbinger Down as much as the makers of Harbinger Down would like me to like it.

Harbinger Down has purpose, so it definitely does not belong in the category in which I placed it for that reason alone. And its purpose is one that is close to my heart: bringing back the use of (mostly) practical special effects to the monster picture. This gets the film as close to soulful as it can get for me. 

I am not going to launch into a diatribe against the ever increasing use of CGI effects, because that territory has been far too well trod by fanboys and geeks of all stripes for eons. It has become a cliche in its own rite to rail against CGI, and I do not disdain their use as another tool in the filmmakers' bag of tricks. I have the same gripes as many a grumpy old man about how everything feels dark and muddy onscreen these days, but computers are used in so many different areas these days that it just becomes downright quixotic to tilt against the subject anymore. Like any other area of expertise, I feel that when the proper talent and attention are applied in that area, the results can be truly astounding. Of course, this often means the proper amount of money as well, and that is where things get sticky. In this age of the Sharknado, where you can sell the audience on a fake-looking tornado teaming up with an even more fake-looking shark to do ridiculous things that sharks and weather would never do together as long as you have a graphics guy who wants to make a few bucks and is not concerned about artistic reputation, it has become really hard to knock a success that turned out exactly the way that its creators intended. They won't make them if you guys don't keep coming to them. (And I will admit that I watch the really crappy stuff just as much as I watch the primo stuff, so I am at fault as well. But how you can not want to watch something called Sharknado, Sharktopus, or Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark?)

Gillis and Woodruff want to, as much as possible, return us to the not actually bygone days of practical effects. After their elaborate effects work for the 2011 remake of John Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing was rejected and replaced with mostly CGI work (and the film landed with a thud), they launched a Kickstarter campaign to create their own practical effects film. They wanted us to take a trip back to the late '80s, when computers hadn't chiefly taken over the monster game (or even our lives in such a total way), and when puppeteers, makeup experts, and live effects teams still held sway in making incredible visions come to life on the movie screen. A large cross-section of fannies ranting about CGI now probably weren't alive when a half-assed effect attempt back then would get kicked around just as much as today, but of course, we didn't have online boards on which people could overly obsess about these things back then. The backlash wasn't as immediate, was far more localized in its impact, and sometimes took months to travel around.

In 1989, there were a spate of underwater-themed action/sci-fi flicks released (generally with monsters), and I saw three of those in the movie theatre: DeepStar Six, Leviathan, and The Abyss. The last one, of course, is the classic and we responded to it appropriately. It was yet another film that my friends and I saw a zillion times but the film was reported to be disappointing at the box office. (Apparently, money and tickets gathered in Alaskan theatres is not counted the same.) But we saw DeepStar Six first, and then the Peter Weller-starring Leviathan. 

Back then, I had an Apple IIe, and while the internet, in an extremely embryonic form, was just getting started, I wouldn't have access to the WWW for a few more years. The planet was just on the verge of bursting fully flowered into a magical new age of information access, but at that moment, trying to learn something was still mostly based in practicality. Seeing it for yourself or using resources at hand to find the information you needed. Did you have the time to look it up and read through it? You may have to write everything down so be sure to have a notebook at hand. If I wanted immediate information on those then-current underwater films, I had to rely on whatever newspapers might have been laying around or saved in the house, and a few months later, microfiche at the library to look at -- you got it -- more newspapers. We relied on movie credits and what we remembered from them, and then books in the library or bookstore about cinema to fit info together. (And it was fine... and we liked it!)

And as each succeeding underwater flick came out in 1989, if you wanted to discuss how much more cheesy the monster in DeepStar Six looked in comparison with the creature you saw in Leviathan when it came out a few months later, you went afterwards with your pals to a Denny's and stayed up until three a.m. while you shoved down a chili size cheeseburger with fries and a Dr. Pepper, and pretty much left it at that. And once in a while, I might go home and sit at my Apple IIe and pound out a couple thousand words about the movie I just watched. Then maybe I might have printed it up slowly on my dot matrix printer. Maybe I would show what I wrote to my brother or a friend. That was the extent of it, until the next film came out, and the cycle began again. Your friends would share their responses to a film, friends of friends and family members might be influenced by these opinions, but that would be largely it. The majority of the world didn't hear it, didn't see it, and certainly, our responses were never gauged or collected online by studios or filmmakers to tell them immediately of our displeasure in or our fangirl squees over their efforts.

So, now it is just a handful of hours since I have watched Harbinger Down -- online, of course, and streaming -- but it's now 26 years later from the caveman days. I am ready to use several modern forms of popular social media to tell the world -- or at least my meager slice of that audience -- how I felt about a relatively simple monster effects movie that would have garnered not much more than a few minutes of discussion at that old Denny's table while we shot our soda straw wrappers across the table at one another. But we have websites now where I can swiftly gather any technical detail I wish about the making of Harbinger Down, where I might have to wait years for it to be published before. I can find full bios and filmographies of every person involved in creating the film, and I can also find scores of fellow reviewers giving their varied opinions on the film's success or otherwise. I can know so much more information in seconds about the film than I ever could before at any point in time. Immediacy is everything. But the ultimate question at the end of all the gathering and collating and searching remains the same as when one would leave a theatre, bundle up for the cold weather outside, pile into your buddy's car, and drive to that still appealing after-film gab session at a popular dining establishment.

Did you like the movie?

I am the precise audience for whom Gillis and Woodruff created Harbinger Down. I am a monster movie fanatic, and yes, the purveyor of fine, fanged fiends is certainly targeted by this film. And while I said that I won't use this as a forum to rail against CGI, I will admit without reservation that I feel a special kind of glee when someone even attempts practical and/or live effects in a film these days. So, mark me down for #2. And then there is the intangible third, which I have not mentioned thus far: Harbinger Down takes place in Alaska, off Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, to be precise. While I have never gotten even within a thousand miles of that outpost from old apartment in Alaska's biggest city, the fact that it takes place in my home state pretty much ensured that I would see it eventually (even if I am fairly certain that little if any of it was actually filmed there). And finally a fourth point: Lance Henriksen. As I said, I am the audience... precisely.

First, a brief synopsis. The film opens on June 25, 1982, the date Carpenter's version of The Thing was released, which is not coincidental, but whether such an in-joke pays off depends on how the film delivers. A Soviet space capsule comes hurtling to earth, while a cosmonaut is desperately trying to fend off some form of attack by a dripping liquid... something. Cut to the present, in Dutch Harbor, where a college professor and a pair of female students are driving a rented vehicle to the docks to take a boat out into the Bering Sea to study beluga whale activity. Up until the title of the film appears, the action is being captured on a camera by one of the students, though this conceit goes away completely (and thankfully) after the title. Captain Graff of the fishing ship Harbinger is played by Lance Henriksen, and it turns out one of the college students is his granddaughter, Sadie. We meet the crew, there is some bickering as happens between a lot of people in small quarters, but all seems fine.

When Sadie goes to collect data on belugas, she locates a faint signal, and notices a flashing light inside some ice. She convinces the captain to pull the ice chunk out of the water, and pulls the remains of the capsule onto the deck. The ice melts, the alien evil drippy thing is released, and the games begin. The creature will take over the first body, make a lot of mess, shock the population of the craft, and then run amok for the remainder of the picture. Nearly everyone will be wary of everyone else, and everyone will be a suspect. Who is the creature now? What forms will it take? Why has everyone stopped worrying about fishing or beluga whales? The film will continue to build in gore and violence on the route to its inevitable, foreshadowed conclusion. (The goddamned ship is named Harbinger and we are told in the title it is "down".)

And I just sort of liked it. The pace is fairly brisk, and Harbinger Down doesn't get bogged down in anything too philosophical or in strained, personal dramas. There is enough mystery planted about a couple of characters to paint them as possible wild cards later in the action, and the truly annoying characters that you can't wait to see killed (mainly because they yell at everyone else, sometimes for no reason whatsoever) are set up pretty quickly so that you can enjoy it when their fate is ultimately revealed. For his part, Henriksen is far more committed here than he often is when he signs up for these quickie sci-fi roles, where he usually plays a sheriff, a farmer, or a corporate baddie. He shows enough fire here to remind me (not that I needed it) as to why I fell in love with him onscreen in the first place. The film is efficient enough where I felt it probably could have used another ten minutes to flesh out some details, but damn if it doesn't just keep moving solidly to its destination.

And that destination -- in fact, its stated purpose, and the reason I showed up as well -- is those effects. And for the most part, they play pretty well, even if some of the editing lets them down in places. The first transformation scene is held a little too long and there is a shot or two that not only reminds you too much of the puppetry at work, but also that Carpenter's team did it so much better. After that, we get several scenes of flashing lights and briefer glimpses at the creature that, for me, were too brief as I really wanted a chance to take it in longer. (I know that I have just wished for the thing that didn't work right in the first creature scene, but so be it.) I really enjoyed the way the creature would still be wearing (really, dangling) the skinned face of its previous host from its ever-growing body while it attacked the crew. It was a solidly gruesome touch. The finale is the best part of the film, and where I feel the creature effects really shine. But I don't want to say anything more about that lest I spoil the result.

If anything, the film serves as a metaphor for the perils of constructing a non-direct remake out of references to another film or films. Stan Winston, who created the dog creature in the 1982 The Thing (though Rob Bottin and his team did the bulk of the effects), was the mentor for both Gillis and Woodruff, and they have built Harbinger Down from the top down with echoes from that earlier film (and also from the original film, 1951's The Thing from Another World). Apart from the aforementioned date in-joke, there is the way the crew stands in a circle staring in awe around the found object. There are the transformation scenes that do nothing but directly recall Carpenter's superior effort. There is the paranoia that runs rampant among the crew as they try to determine in any others or all of them have been taking over by the creature. There is the isolation of the icy locale of the film (above the Arctic Circle in the 1951 film; Antarctica in the 1982). If anything, the fact there are even more than a couple of references to another specific film pinpoints Harbinger Down as not just an homage to a better work, but also creates so much weight on its shoulders that it cannot possibly ever lift itself up. 

Which brings me to why I could not like this film any more that I did, which is just below my calling it a good film. Were it mere homage to The Thing, and then went off wildly in a new direction, I might be more willing to drop to my knees and begin servicing the film without pause. But Harbinger Down, despite its good intentions to bring monster and effects fans something for which they have been clamoring greatly over the past couple of decades (though we have had other films), is entirely too slavish to the concept of being a new example of The Thing. I will stop short of calling it a parasite upon the host body of Carpenter's film, sucking out its essence and replacing it with a carbon copy, because Harbinger Down has just enough of its own nerve to make things interesting. But I will say that Gillis and Woodruff could have used the opportunity to do something more original with the money they raised and then married their wonderful effects knowledge to that.

The Shark Film Office - Octopus Arm: Below the Sea (1933)

Director: Albert S. Rogell / Columbia, 1:18, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 5
Appearance: Giant Octopus (of a species which doesn't occur naturally where this film takes place)

We get so used to modern special effects and believing in their effectiveness in filmmaking -- when it really could not be further from the truth in most cases -- that we tend to dismiss everything that came before. Modern audiences also like to scoff at what they consider “primitive” techniques, where I would argue that those “primitive” techniques, however moldy they may seem to us, were often far more efficient at helping the director tell his story than many of the slicker, more recent attempts where the effects overtake the story itself and make the films nothing more than empty spectacle, sapping any true feeling away from the proceedings. In an age where any action can be slickly rendered, filmmakers have to be careful to blend those effects in with the remainder of the film's assets properly to make us truly believe in them, i.e. those monsters are really in the same room and taking an emotional and physical toll on their victims.

Part of the charm in searching out old films that one has never seen before is discovering moments that not only look incredible to the immediate eye, even today, but also cause one to be amazed that such a moment or story was even attempted, especially in the earlier days of the cinema. Even if the moment doesn’t really work or looks kind of jerky or static, it still can seem amazing through the sheer chutzpah it must have taken to try it in those less technologically advanced days. Most often, these moments are in films already considered to be part of the canon: the films we are told are great, and it just waits for us to discover them ourselves. Early on in my youth, I felt this with Keaton and Chaplin, and then Fairbanks’ The Thief of Baghdad (Fairbanks films in general, really…). Murnau’s Sunrise, which, as a teen, I was taking at first to be a boring drama, slowly revealed its epic intensity to me through some still amazing 1927 camera effects. Welles took me to another planet – not literally, but his films… well, you should know the score there yourself. And need I mention how Strangers On A Train became my favorite Hitchcock film via its carousel-gone-wild sequence, which I was not anticipating at all, and which then burrowed itself into my mind the way only the most thrilling scenes can? To top all of this was that moment when I met the Mighty Kong – it wasn’t just special effects to me, even then, but my mind still reels over the balls it took to make that film, let alone pull it off.

These films loom far, far above the film subject of this particular post, but that vague sense – that “Eureka!” moment of personal discovery – is precisely the same. Smaller, quieter, less ambitious films can have those moments too, and silent films and the films of the 1930s are top-loaded with these moments. You just have to know where to look. TCM makes it easier to find them than it used to be. Their Forbidden Hollywood series focusing on pre-Code delights contains scads of these types of scenes, and not all of them are hot girls in lingerie. (Those scenes certainly count, though, towards the same effect…)

Also on a special night on TCM, where Robert Osborne was concentrating in tongue-in-cheek fashion on films with octopi in them, came this tiny, extremely flawed but somehow entertaining sideshow: Below the Sea, a Columbia “B” from 1933, featuring Ralph Bellamy in the hero’s role getting all gooey – understandably – over that living doll, Fay Wray. The mechanics of the plot are so ridiculous its not even worth going over it, but in a nutshell: a German U-boat laden with a chest of gold bars worth $3 million goes down in the sea during WWI, sunk by a Norwegian ship, but the German captain and his first mate survive. Crawling to shore, they make a map of the gold's whereabouts on the ocean floor, but in a stunningly done murder scene almost worthy of Hitch himself, the captain pushes the unsuspecting crewman off a cliff, which he bounces down satisfactorily.

Years later, the captain teams up with the top deep-sea diver in the game, played by Bellamy, and through the auspices of a third party, a lusty wharf madam with a cache of coin, they make attempts to retrieve the gold. Only, the captain will not reveal the whereabouts nor even show the map to anyone else, but through a series of double-crosses, Bellamy eventually forces the captain into a pact by stealing one-half of the map (why he doesn’t take the whole thing and do away with the obviously crazy German I don’t know, except that it would cause Bellamy to no longer perform effectively as the eventual hero of the piece, given the standards of the day).

Another attempt to retrieve the gold, this time on a ship owned by the family of a high society flibbertigibbet portrayed by Ms. Wray. Naturally, she falls for Bellamy, but only after making use of his diving equipment for her own photo shoots, and also making him jealous by openly kissing her photographer inside the diving bell. Scenes of Wray scrambling to fit her tiny little self into his giant diving suit are also a delight. After the darker drama of the treasure hunters, this romantic interplay is, for once, a good deal of fun, especially as a build-up where the film is ultimately leading. Wray matches Bellamy jibe for jibe, and even dive for dive, with a very buoyant spirit unfettered by thoughts of inequality between the sexes. She simply is who she is and never apologizes for it.

I must be honest and say that, even though they were showing it on a night devoted to octopi, I was watching this film to hopefully catch an early film glimpse of a shark on screen. Sadly, there is none, but while I was expecting an octopus to show up at some point, I didn’t realize to what extent it would. Especially, in 1933 (even though though there are earlier films with octopus attacks). While Ms. Wray was also in that year’s King Kong, that film was made by Cooper over at RKO, a man with serious attitude, and I didn’t think that Columbia Pictures had it in them to try their own monstrous attack film in that era. While the octopus is not insanely huge, it is big enough to drape itself fully about the diving bell in which Ms. Wray and the photographer are trapped. The octopus wraps its arms about the instrument, and eventually causes the capsule to disengage from the air tubes that give continued life to its mortal occupants. I would judge that each of the creature’s arms, taking the size of the bell into consideration and the size of Bellamy fighting the creature in his suit, were anywhere from 12 to 18 feet in length. And while it is not a real octopus for the most part on screen, the methods used are still most effective in creating a bumbling sort of almost accidental though spooky menace.

But even menace brought solely about by the natural curiosity of a large cephalopod checking out an object which has dropped into its territory is automatically an outright attack by human terms. Especially terms as identified by human movie characters, who are often even more ridiculous than the real thing (but not always). South Park’s “It’s coming right for us!” hunting attitude regarding monsters and animals of all types is perfectly apt for this film, where the dive-suited Bellamy uses the only weapon at his disposal – an underwater welding torch – to do away with the massive creature. Honestly, it’s an approach I never would have considered – a knife or spear seemed most reasonable – but its spark-spitting underwater flashiness is certainly a far more visually intriguing sight than someone simply plunging a rubber knife into a rubber costume. After a couple minutes of struggle, there is finally an explosion of – what? Ink? Blood? A combination of the two? Whatever causes the dark cloud to erupt around both diver and attacker, it is remarkable to see. The octopus collapses to the ocean floor, the tubes are reconnected to the bell, and the future of Bellamy and Wray is assured. At least, for a happy ending to the film. Just not the octopus.

And for me, regarding Below the Sea, this fight is one of those moments of which I spoke. Going into the film, I did not know that a movie combining these various elements even existed --- and here it was. Did I need a film in which a giant octopus molests a diving bell containing Fay Wray which ends in a breathless fight between giant sea monster and a welding torch? Not necessarily, but I don't blame the octopus for trying. After all, it's Fay Wray.

And I am glad that my own stumble-footed octopus ways led me to accidentally wrap my tentacles around the film.