Four Fun Robot Toys from Mego’s Micronauts Line

In this last installment of my year-end series about cool robot toys from Japan, I've decided to look back at one of the classics: Takara’s Microman line, which was released in the U.S. in the late '70s by Mego under the name Micronauts. Micronauts was a contemporary of another line of imported Japanese robot toys, Mattel’s Shogun Warriors, and both lines even had comic book series published by Marvel. While Shogun Warriors featured Super Robots from several anime series that had pilots and combination configurations, that toy line didn’t have any pilot figures or robot figures with combination capabilities; in contrast, Micronauts provided the first examples of mech and combiner robot toys to kids in the U.S. Read on for a look at four of Micronauts’ groundbreaking toys.

Before getting into the list of noteworthy Micronauts toys, it should be noted that Takara’s Microman line was a spin-off of another innovative robot toy line, Henshin Cyborg. Henshin Cyborg figures were modeled after Hasbro’s line of 12-inch G.I. Joe action figures from the '60s and '70s, but they differed from Hasbro’s figures in two significant ways: They were made with transparent plastic so kids could see the figures’ mechanical insides, and they had magnetic joints that allowed for greater flexibility and disassembly/reassembly.

A Henshin Cyborg figure.

The Microman toy line was a miniaturized version of the Henshin Cyborg line, and the modularity of the Henshin Cyborg figures carried over to the modularity of the Microman/Micronauts vehicles, robots and playsets. Even though the Micronauts line ended during the early ’80s, Takara continued the Microman line in Japan for many more years. Some of the later Microman toys would also become part of Hasbro’s Transformers toy line. While Takara’s Microman line features plenty of great robot toys, I am only including on this list the toys that were released in U.S. under the Micronauts line.


Biotron

Biotron is an early example of a combiner mech toy. It can be “piloted” by a smaller 3 ¾-inch Micronaut figure, and it can be disassembled into a tank and a rocket sled. It also required two C batteries, which allowed Biotron to roll in tank mode and walk in robot mode.

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Microtron

Microtron is like Biotron in that it is also battery-power and can be re-arranged from a robot configuration to a vehicle configuration. Microtron’s head opens to form as seat for a Mirconaut pilot in both robot and vehicle configurations.

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Giant Acroyear

Giant Acroyear was an amazing combiner robot toy: It consisted of two humanoid robots, a missile-launching rocket plane and a missile-launching land vehicle that combined into a single large robot. Years before kids heard of Voltron, they had the Micronauts’ Giant Acroyear.

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Hornetroid

Hornetroid was one of the later releases in the Micronauts line. It was designed by Mego and not Takara, so it had no Microman counterpart. Even though it looks like a vehicle toy, Hornetroid is basically a giant flying robot that looks like an insect, complete with flapping transparent wings, six retractable legs, and figure-gripping pinchers.


For more information about the Micronauts and Microman toy lines, check out Innerspace Online and the Microman Forever site.

Ray Harryhausen, 1920 - 2013

I heard this week that stop-motion effects legend Ray Harryhausen passed away at the age of 92. Geek sites of all stripes have been doing obit and retrospective pieces about Harryhausen and his astonishing legacy, so it's only fitting that I share a few thoughts of my own about this amazing monster maker.

I was first exposed to Harryhausen's work the same way I was first exposed to most classic fantasy, horror and sci-fi cinema: through syndicated TV, during weekend afternoon sessions of channel surfing. I initially didn't know who Harryhausen actually was, but I knew his work when I saw it. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, It Came from Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Mysterious Island ... whenever these movies would air, I would tune in and gawk in amazement at Harryhausen's stop motion creations as they terrorized us feeble, fragile human beings. I couldn't have told you a thing back then about how he brought his creations to life, but I knew that there was something magical about them. Harryhausen was a master puppeteer and animator, and his attention to the details of emotion, form and movement was so meticulous that even after I had a firmer understanding of how stop motion animation actually operates, it still felt like these creatures had a kind of life of their own. Some may complain that stop motion animation isn't "realistic" enough, but such a complaint completely misses the wonder and excitement that comes from artistic inspiration and ingenuity.

If we can learn anything from Harryhausen's work, it is that the creation of illusions is an art form unto itself. Making things move that do not otherwise move, making things big that are actually small, and making things appear close together when they are actually far apart were techniques that Harryhausen skillfully applied to make his creations seamlessly share scenes with flesh-and-blood actors. It's easy to take these techniques for granted, especially since movies in general specialize in creating a wide variety of fantasies, but Harryhausen was an artist in a truest sense who in turn influenced subsequent generations of special effects artists.

I don't mind CGI effects in general, but something gets lost when physical effects like stop-motion are replaced by digital images, when computers do most or all of the sculpting, animating, assembling and calculating; the craftsmanship and creativity of artistic vision gives way to the novelty and convenience of technology. The mass production of CGI effects has led to the mass production of flashy yet forgettable blockbusters with no uniqueness of their own. In contrast, Harryhausen was a pioneer of imaginative cinema and his distinct and distinguished work will live on long, long after the CGI-overloaded movie franchises are forgotten.

Great Moments in Creature Feature Special Effects History: The Monster That Challenged the World (1957)

It's almost impossible these days to read online discussions about new and upcoming creature features without encountering some debate over the effectiveness of practical effects versus CGI. I personally think that a combination of both is the best option, although I've been told by someone who works in the industry that the major studios will often dump practical effects for CGI for the sake of cost-cutting and expediency. That's a disappointing development, but unfortunately that is how Hollywood seems to work these days.

Regardless, for those of you who appreciate practical special effects in your monster movies, you should check out the 50s-era "big bug" movie, The Monster That Challenged the World (1957). There are a few things that are misleading about the title--in particular, there is more than one monster in the movie, and the monsters never actually get around to challenging the entire world. Also, this film is technically not a big bug movie because the monsters are actually giant prehistoric mollusks; nevertheless, the film's plot uses conventions that are very similar to the big bug movies from that decade, particularly Them! (1954) and Black Scorpion (1957).

Where this film earns its place in the history of monster movies is in its special effects, where early animatronics technology was used to bring the titular monster to life. Before there was a mechanical shark in Jaws (1975) or a life-sized Alien Queen puppet in Aliens (1986), there was a giant mechanical mollusk in The Monster That Challenged the World. Read on for more details about this early attempt at using animatronics to put giant monsters in the same sets as their human co-stars.

For a film that was shot in 16 days for a budget of $200,000, the 10 foot tall fiberglass mollusk puppet that was featured in The Monster That Challenged the World is still very impressive to watch. It was designed by Augie Lohman so that the head could tilt in various directions and its mandible pincers could twitch menacingly. According to producer Arthur Gardner, the monster's movements were controlled by Lohman and two assistants through a series of air pressure valves. Gardner estimated that the monster cost around $15,000 to build, and that it weighed around 1,500 pounds. After production, the monster was sold to the Ocean Park Pier in Santa Monica, CA, where it was incorporated into one of the attractions. (Fun horror trivia: Ocean Park Pier was the setting of the 1961 cult classic thriller, Night Tide.)

The film never shows a monster in its entirety. At first, you only see its head and neck, which look like some kind of fanged caterpillar; in other shots, large shells are shown, suggesting that the mollusk monsters looked as a whole like giant snails. I suspect that the giant snail design choice was made for budgetary reasons: As you watch the movie, it becomes clear that only one mollusk puppet was made even though the script says that there are dozens of mollusk monsters lurking in the waters of the Salton Sea, waiting to escape to the Pacific Ocean through a series of water canals. Thus, the filmmakers used the single puppet for attack scenes, and then used several giant shell props (in which the mollusks retreat to rest when they are not on the move) to indicate that there is more than one monster present.

Unfortunately, such a production decision drains the narrative of much of its tension. Even though the mollusk puppet is more impressive than the puppets from Them!, the giant ant film has two things going for it that the giant mollusk movie did not: Them! had 1) a better script and direction and 2) it had more than one puppet. A film is more likely to scare audiences with the threat of a pending giant monster invasion when more than one moving monster appears on the screen. With only one mollusk puppet available, you can't get past the feeling that you're watching the same monster in every attack scene--because you are. In that sense, the movie's title is a Freudian slip: there was only one monster to challenge the world because there was only one monster on the set, no matter what the characters say. Then again, many of the scenes feel like they were scripted in a manner so that characters could talk around the fact that the audience would never see more than one attacking mollusk at a time.

Another shortcoming of the movie that didn't help the mechanical puppet was the monsters' aquatic origin. Even though several scenes in and around the Salton Sea will remind horror fans of Jaws, the mollusk puppet wasn't designed to function in the water. Thus, the water attack scenes were either shot on a set with a rear projection of the Salton Sea or on a set that was supposed to look like the bottom of the Salton Sea. Neither approach is very convincing and they ultimately detract from the puppet's effectiveness.

Don't let my criticisms keep you from watching The Monster That Challenged the World; it may not be an influential classic, but it actually is one of the better creature features from its decade. Watching this film will give you an idea of what it was like to include complex practical special effects in a movie with a low budget, particularly during a certain era of Hollywood history. If you need a break from CGI effects in your horror and sci-fi movies, then you might want to spend some time with The Monster That Challenged the World.

A resin model kit of The Monster That Challenged the World

(photo courtesy of The Doctor's Model Mansion site)

Robotech Returns (Sort of) with the Genesis Pits Role-Playing Game Sourcebook

2013 will see the return of several beloved horror and sci-fi titles, including Iron Man (as a sequel), Evil Dead (as a remake), and Aliens (as a video game). Yet one that I didn't expect to return was Robotech, the popular anime series from 1985 that has yet to see a successful and consistent continuation in the decades since. From I've read on various anime sites, another straight-to-video film titled Robotech: Love, Live, Alive is scheduled for release sometime this year, although its exact release date has yet to be determined. This post isn't about that. Instead, I'm focusing my attention on a role-playing game (RPG) sourcebook that was published less than a month before the end of 2012: the Robotech Genesis Pits Sourcebook.

The Robotech RPG has been around for a while and new modules of the game usually mirror what is considered to be "canon" (i.e., the animated episodes, as opposed to the comic books or novels). In contrast, the Genesis Pits Sourcebook takes some of the most interesting ideas from the Robotech saga and goes absolutely berserk with them, in a way that makes it sounds like the most promising Robotech release I've seen in years.

According to Palladium Books, the Genesis Pits Sourcebook "takes an in-depth look at the Invid Genesis Pits, their purpose, function, the mutants and monsters they unleash and the dangers they pose for non-Invid. It is jam-packed with never before seen source material, mutations, mutation tables (so you can generate your own Genesis Pit monsters and characters) and more." Here are a few of the things that are included in the sourcebook:

* Inorganics and other war machines of the Invid Regent
* Gura-Invid: Monstrous mutant Invid that do not leave when the Regess and her Invid legions depart a planet
* Evolutionary experiments gone wrong, like giant insects and extinct creatures from Earth's past
* Genesis Pits on alien worlds filled with strange monsters
* Frankenmechs: Monstrous machine hybrids created from the remains of older mecha
* The last surviving Robotech Masters and their clones
* Mutated Zentraedi
* The fate of the Alaska Grand Cannon

I don't even play RPGs outside of video games that include RPG-like scoring systems, but I might pick this book up anyway to see how it pushes Robotech into strange, freaky new directions. Armies of mecha, monsters and mutants, all in one game--what's not to love?

KMD Artistry Restores Two of Hollywood's Classic Human-Insect Freaks of Nature

KMD Artistry, which is owned by visual artist Kelly Delcambre, specializes in restoring and replicating props and costumes that have appeared throughout Hollywood's history. To date, KMD projects have included replicating costumes from Universal's classic monster movies to restoring mechanical props used in films such as the original Fright Night (1985). Delcambre has also designed and produced many cosplay costumes, which are very remarkable in their own right. Yet with me being a huge fan of "Big Bug" movies, I wanted to call attention to one of KMD's restoration projects that is near and dear to my dark, twisted heart: the human-fly costumes from the original The Fly (1958) and its first sequel Return of the Fly (1959). Click below for more pictures of the human-fly monster restorations, as well as a few thoughts about how the restorations compare to the original costumes. All pictures are provided courtesy of KMD Artistry.

KMD's recreations of the human-fly monsters from the early Fly movies speak for themselves--they are very faithful to the original designs. The fly head from The Fly is closer to human proportions to accommodate the hood that concealed it through most of the movie, while the fly head from Return of the Fly is larger and more grotesque to add shock value to the sequel's lean, low-budget script.

Because KMD's fly head recreations are not meant to be worn by actors, additional details were be added to the heads and claws while others were removed. For example, David Hedison could move the fly head's proboscis in The Fly by using his mouth. As you can see from the replica produced by KMD below, the proboscis does not move because there is no one inside the mask to move it.

David Hedison in The Fly ... 

... and KMD's replica of The Fly.

The fly mask in Return of the Fly had two triangle-shaped patches of mesh fabric that were below the eyes, one on each side of the mouth. These patches were put in the mask to allow the actor who wore the mask to see and breathe.

The man-insect monster from Return of the Fly ...

... and the same monster mask on display at the "It's Alive!" Animatronics Exhibit at

the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, 2006.

Note the triangular patches on the lower half of the mask.

Since KMD didn't have to worry about an actor underneath the mask, additional monstrous details were molded into the fly head in place of the mesh patches.

 Kelly Delcambre and his Return of the Fly replica.

KMD's life-size Return of the Fly bust. 

The Delambre-Delcambre connection: Brett Halsey (who played Philippe Delambre 

in Return of the Fly) and Kelly Delcambre at Monsterpalooza 2010. 

Check out KMD Artistry's Facebook page and YouTube channel for more examples for Delcambre's amazing work. Click here for some additional commentary about the original Fly trilogy.

Giant Insects Reign Supreme in Wii's Escape from Bug Island

I'm a big fan of "big bug" movies, so it would seem obvious that I would pick up a copy of a survival horror video game called Escape from Bug Island for my Nintendo Wii, right? Well ... not necessarily. When the game first appeared in the U.S. back in 2007, it was panned by most video game reviewers. Yet with this game's drop below the $10 price point, I recently decided to give this game a chance anyway to see if the critics were right. Speaking as a big bug movie fan, they weren't.

I can think of several survival horror video games for the Wii that have better graphics, better level designs, and better stories. Even Wii's other bug-centric game, 2009's Deadly Creatures, has better production values. Yet where Escape from Bug Island really delivers is where it delivers the most: It's got plenty of big, icky, human-eating bugs ... and that is AWESOME! Read on for my complete review.

In Escape from Bug Island, you play as Ray, a university freshman who reluctantly accompanies Michelle (Ray's secret crush) and Mike (Ray's best friend) to Beelzebub Island, an isolated location that's perpetually shrouded in a thick fog, so that Michelle can study the island's insect population. After Michelle and Mike wander off from the characters' camp site, Ray goes after them and encounters the island's many monstrous residents while searching for his lost friends.

Bug Island is a basic game as survival horror titles go. The graphics lack polish and the music cues are few in selection. The game's story is simple--there aren't many characters, and there are no puzzles to solve or secret codes to remember. Even the game's time travel subplot, which has you playing some of the levels again with new weapons and unlocked areas, doesn't complicate the overall story or game play. That said, the game's dialog is written in a hokey style that openly pokes fun at the game's b-movie premise. (Case in point: one of your weapons is a can of bug spray.) Bug Island isn't the same over-the-top exercise in camp as Zombies Ate My Neighbors! or Stubbs The Zombie, but its attitude of self-mockery is impossible to miss.

The game is played mostly from a third-person perspective, with occasional shifts to a first-person perspective depending on the weapon(s) you are using. Your weapon inventory grows from simple blunt objects (a stick, a baseball bat and rocks) to more sophisticated means of self-defense (knives, swords and guns) as the game progresses, and each level consists of maze-like forests, swamps, caves and ancient ruins that you have to traverse from beginning to end. Even though controlling Ray's walking and running motions through the Wii nunchuk is somewhat clunky at times (he doesn't handle sharp turns very well), controlling the weapons through the Wiimote is both accurate and intuitive.

A giant centipede feeding frenzy.

As the game's title suggests, Bug Island provides an ample supply of bugs for you to avoid, squash, beat, shoot and/or kill. The bugs range in size from a foot long to human height to car-sized, as well as various points in between. They include centipedes, flies, cockroaches, spiders, crickets, praying mantises, moths and maggots. (Curiously, spiders are the only arachnids in the game--over-sized scorpions, ticks and mites are nowhere to be found on the island.) These bugs crawl on you, jump at you, fly into your face, stab at you with their claws and cut you with their sharp mandibles. They buzz, screech and make other noises that one would expect to be made by really big bugs. The only normal-sized insects are the ones that fly together in large swarms that will eat you alive in a matter of seconds if you attract their attention. Fighting off this menagerie of creepy critters will inevitably make your skin crawl, so much so that anyone who has entomophobia and/or arachnophobia should avoid this game.

If the big bugs aren't enough, Bug Island provides plenty of other monsters as well, including sharp-toothed flying fish, bear trap-like carnivorous plants, giant frogs, and King Kong-sized apes with exposed brains and glowing red eyes. There's also a selection of human-animal hybrids such as lizard women, dog-like creatures with human faces, and a delightfully disgusting human-insect hybrid that has a steady stream of maggots dripping from its abdomen.

Indeed, Bug Island has enough monsters to rival any Resident Evil game, and the scares they produce are intensified by the game's use of ambient noises and pervasive application of fog. In a practical sense, the fog hides some of the game's graphic shortcomings, but it also leaves you guessing time and time again as to what will crawl, jump or fly towards you next.

If you're a creature feature junkie like me, then Escape from Bug Island is the game for you. It's the worst camping trip that you'll love to play.

A Deviant Artist Takes a Closer Look at Mimic's Judas Breed Bugs

As anyone who follows this blog knows, I'm a huge fan of monster art. In particular, I'm an avid collector of various mediums (books, magazines, toys, and scale miniatures) that provide accurate and detailed representations of certain movie monster designs that I consider to be art. Such designs would include the mechanical shark from Jaws, the biomechanical parasites from Alien, the submersible monster suit from The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the various stop-motion puppets that Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen used throughout their respective careers in movie special effects. Such an interest becomes an exercise in frustration when I find a movie monster design that I like but I cannot find any pictures or miniatures that provide me with a clear look at the design. Case in point: the Judas Breed insects, the giant GMOs from Guillermo del Toro's Mimic (1997) and its two sequels.

As demonstrated in the behind-the-scenes featurettes that were provided in the recent Blu-ray release of the Mimic director's cut, del Toro and his Mimic crew put a lot of work into the Judas Breed, both in terms of their fictional biology and the effects that were used to bring the creatures to life. Unfortunately, even the high-resolution images provided in the Blu-ray release didn't provide any clear pictures of what a Judas Breed insect looks like in its entirety. On the other hand, the only pictures I can find of the Judas Breed online are either incomplete or murky.

Thankfully, I have just found someone online who not only has a mutual interest in the Judas Breed design, but also has the talent to produce detailed pictures of what del Toro's carnivorous and camouflage-capable critters look like, both in the original movie and in the sequels. The Mexican artist in question goes under the screen name of BlackCoatl, and he added his Judas Breed pictures to his account on the deviantART site a few months ago. Click below to see BlackCoatl's beautiful renderings of the different Judas Breed designs, as well as some additional thoughts about the designs and their changes in the sequels.

The first picture below is of an adult Judas Breed female as it was seen in Mimic. Not only is this an accurate depiction of the creature's complete design, but it is also reminiscent of the scene in the movie when Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) has her first encounter with the mutated, human-sized version of her creation in a subway station in New York. If you take a close look at the creature's thorax, you will see where the creature's "lungs" are located that provide enough oxygen to sustain its larger size.

The second picture is of a wingless adult male as it was seen Mimic. You can see the females in the background assuming their mimicry of humans through a rearrangement of their wings and limbs; because the male lacks wings, he cannot mimic the appearance of humans at all. The lighter color of the male is a holdover detail from one of the earlier screenplay drafts, which featured a much different ending from the final cut.

The third picture is of the lone winged adult male from Mimic 2 (2001). This same design was used again in Mimic 3 (2003). While each Mimic film utilized CGI effects and life-sized puppets for the Judas Breed, the sequels also used actors in costume for tight, close-up shots. Because the sequels were produced on a much lower budget than the first film, I'm assuming that it was cheaper in some scenes to put an actor into a Judas Breed costume than to build a highly-detailed animatronic puppet. To better accommodate the actors in the suits, the Judas Breed was redesigned with a larger thorax, larger eyes, and different mandibles. So far, BlackCoatl has not produced a drawing of the winged male's appearance after his last metamorphosis at the end of Mimic 2.

A photo of a Judas Breed head from Mimic 2

(photo courtesy of the YourProps site).

A Judas Breed insect after its final metamorphosis in Mimic 2.

Click here to see all of BlackCoatl's work on DeviantART, which includes depictions of monsters from other movies such as Gremlins, Hellraiser and Pumpkinhead. The Mimic pictures can be found in the gallery folder named "Mutants", which includes pictures of other insect and arachnid horrors from movies such as Mansquito (2005) and the remakes of The Fly (1986) and Earth vs. the Spider (2001). Click here to read more about del Toro’s creation of the Judas Breed on the Monster Legacy site.

Experiments in Unorthodox Horror: House (1977) and Detention (2012)

When crafting a horror film, directors use a variety of cinematic tropes to convey to the audience that the story they are watching belongs in the horror genre. Sometimes, the director may choose to get under the viewer's skin by keeping the source of terror off screen and only hinting at it through narrative hints and suggestive sound effects and camera angles. In other situations, the director may opt for graphic depictions of explicit violence and gore--either in brief and sudden bursts or repeatedly throughout the story--to keep the viewer anxious and off balance. But what happens when a director foregoes the mood-building techniques that are often associated with horror movies and chooses instead to utilize tropes from other genres to tell a story of dismemberment, death and despair?

Two examples of off-kilter horror can be found in Nobuhiko Ohbayashi's House (1977) and Joseph Kahn's Detention (2012). Even though these films are three decades apart, they both are coming-of-age horror films that are difficult to describe due to their unpredictable, illogical selection of counter-intuitive cinematic styles as a key part of their storytelling process. House is a dark fairy tale that's told in a psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness succession of images and moods, while Detention is self-referential teenage comedy/drama that's vigorously mashed together with time travel sci-fi, body horror and slasher film archetypes. Both films could have been scripted and shot as conventional horror movies, but the fact that they weren't makes them fascinating films to watching in their own right. Read on for my complete comparison.

House tells the story of Oshare (Kimiko Ikegami), a teenage schoolgirl who is looking forward to spending her summer vacation with her widowed father (Saho Sasazawa). Yet when she learns that her father's new girlfriend Ryoko (Haruko Wanibuchi) will be going with them on vacation, she decides to visit her aunt (Yoko Minamida) and brings several of her teenage friends along with her. When the girls start disappearing in the aunt's house, the surviving girls struggle to survive by fending off a slew of demonic, supernatural attacks, including a few from possessed furniture.

House is a hard movie to pin down in terms of what it's supposed to be. It's filled with horrific images, but it's not exactly a horror movie; it's campy and absurd, but it's not a comedy. It's frequently childish and immature, with scenes that could easily be inserted into a live-action TV show for kids, and yet it's not a film for children (at least by American standards). These observations may make House sound like an absolute mess of a film to watch, but it's not. In fact, I think that Ohbayashi's approach to how he filmed the script for House allows him to tell and haunting story of when adolescent idealism and naïveté collides with--and is annihilated by--the pain, possessiveness and sensuality of adulthood.

The movie focuses on Oshare and her friends, a group of teenagers who are reaching the end of their educational years. Each girl has a simple nickname that summarizes her personality: "Prof" is the nickname of the smart girl, "Melody" is the nickname of the girl who plays the piano, "Sweet" is the nickname of the girl who always does what she can to help, and so on. The characters' childlike approach to life is reflected in the movie's visual style: all of the settings are very stylized and obviously artificial. This idealized world runs amuck when the girls are attacked one by one at the aunt's house, as if their immature view of the world is turning against them as adulthood (as represented by the aunt, her past and her expansive house) exerts control over their lives. Essentially, House depicts the transition between childhood to adulthood as a sort of death that is traumatic, ghastly and inescapable in equal measures.

Curiously, House utilizes nudity as part of its grim depiction of growing up, although not in the way that most American audiences would expect. For example, nudity in slasher films usually happens in the context of teenagers having sex before they are inevitably murdered by a psychotic killer. In contrast, the nudity in House happens shortly before, during and/or after the girls' deaths--not as part of any sex act, but as if it was an inevitable component of dying. In a sense, the act of dying in a gory manner in House eroticizes the girls, reflecting their transition into sexual maturity and adulthood and the gruesome "death" of their pre-adulthood lives. Adding considerable unease to these death scenes is how some of the girls giggle with glee over their new status as unclothed and dismembered corpses.

Detention doesn't have the same thematic depth as House, but it still knows how to tell as coherent story in what otherwise appears to be a calamitous mixture of incongruous styles. Detention focuses on Riley (Shanley Caswell) as she struggles her way through high school in Grizzly Lake, a town that has been experiencing a rash of UFO sightings. Riley wants to ask Clapton (Josh Hutcherson) to the prom, but her wishes are complicated by her inexplicably spiteful best friend Ione (Spencer Locke), her amorous guy pal Sander (Aaron David Johnson), and a masked serial killer named "Cinderhella" who has been murdering students and has targeted Riley as his next victim. At times, Detention reminded me of Scream, Donnie Darko and a few episodes from the first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and yet it’s nothing like those titles.

While Detention bears similarities to the storytelling approach used by House, these films differ considerably in terms of how they view the relationship between adolescence and adulthood. Whereas House views the transition of adolescence to adulthood as a fixed point that can only be passed once in a lifetime, Detention takes a much more fluid approach by showing how the two age groups occasionally overlap. Part of this could reflect how the mainstream cultures of Japan and the US differ in their views of adolescence and adulthood, but I also think that this might have something to do with when both films were made. Ohbayashi's wild visual style reflects the incongruity between how adolescents view of the world and how adults live in the world; in contrast, Kahn's wild visual style emphasizes how incongruity dominates modern teenage life.

The movie world of Detention--where time travel, masked killers, human-insect hybrids and flying saucers coexist in a sort of mundane way in the halls of a high school--is a thematic parallel to the omnipresent information overload that real teenagers are bombarded with through the Internet, cell phones, computers, and high-definition, multi-channel media. One of Detention's subplots features a student who becomes the most popular student in school after travelling back to 1992, with the rationale that a digital-media-saturated teenager from 2012 is much more savvy and cooler than an analog-media-saturated teenager from the early 90s. The movie may lack the pervasive fatalism of House, but it pulls off a very impressive feat by telling a complete and satisfying story from a selection of disparate characters, situations, themes and styles--much like our fragmented-yet-interconnected electronic world, a world that even adults cannot escape. If Detention has any underlying metaphorical message, it is that if teenagers can make sense of and survive our current digital age, then there may be hope for us in the future after all.

Horror films like House and Detention are not for everyone. These films are more like frantic, feverish dreams than traditional narratives that feature well-defined, easily-understood plots and firmly established moods. But if you're willing to try something that's much different than what you normally expect from a horror movie or a horror-comedy, then House and Detention make for an unforgettable double feature.

Jack Arnold Builds a Better Big Bug in Tarantula (1955)

I like big bugs and I cannot lie. From Them! to the Mimic trilogy, these giant creepy-crawlers always fascinated me with their M.C. Escher-esque distortions of scale. On the other hand, finding big bug movies that are actually worth watching can be a challenge, since the overwhelming majority of them are low-budget, low-talent rip-offs of better movies.

Jack Arnold's Tarantula is one of the better big bug movies from the 50s, the second best movie of its type after Them!. I can't add much more to what has already been said about the quality of Tarantula as a movie, but I've decided to post about it anyway to look back at its impressive effects work. In our modern era where Hollywood's overreliance CGI technology has drained the creative spark out of many horror and sci-fi titles, Tarantula stands as a textbook example of how talented people can make a simple optical illusion yield amazing results. Read on for my complete retrospective, which includes video clips.

The big bug movies of the 50s brought their macro-monsters to life by using one of three methods: scale-sized puppets, stop-motion animation, and/or shooting real bugs with miniature sets and then compositing that footage with human actors and human-sized sets through techniques such as rear-screen projections and traveling mattes. Them! and The Deadly Mantis used the first method, and The Black Scorpion used the second method. Arnold used the third method in Tarantula--as did another filmmaker, Bert I. Gordon, during the same decade for the giant monster movies he shot. The end results from both filmmakers couldn't be more different, as you can see in the clips below.

Arnold's Tarantula:

Gordon's Beginning of the End and Earth vs. The Spider:

Arnold would later build upon his experience with distorting the size of a spider in The Incredible Shrinking Man, where he had to reduce actor Grant Williams from human-sized to microscopic:

On the other hand, Gordon shot so many giant monster movies during his career that earned the nickname "Mr. Big", but his creative output strongly suggests that he never learned to refine his trick photography techniques. For example, the giant ants in his Empire of the Ants look just as hokey as his grasshoppers in The Beginning of the End, even though the films were shot two decades apart:

Not all of the spider shots in Tarantula are perfect. A spider's leg simply vanishes into thin air in one shot, while the spider appears to be walking over--and not on--the desert's surface in another shot. The spider's exact size also shifts between shots, and it never casts a shadow on the desert no matter how big it gets. In spite of these drawbacks, the overall effect works much better than you think it should.

I believe that a lot of the film's success is due to how well the spider is placed within the shot and how the spider remains opaque, even in daylight desert shots. By keeping the details of the spider's body concealed, it forces the viewer to concentrate on the spider's body motion instead of the smaller details that could give away the spider's true scale. Then again, the spider's slow, creeping motions suggest a creature of a large size and weight; these motions build a sense of impending doom whenever it closes in on a victim. Compare that to Gordon's bugs, whose twitchy, jerky motions betray their actual sizes. Furthermore, compare Arnold's work in Tarantula to other movies where the "giant" insects, spiders, and lizards--and even rabbits--are shown in complete detail and in full lighting in composite shots with actors, and the difference in quality becomes apparent:

For a special effects technique that is comparative simple in terms of both concept and execution, it's still amazing that Arnold remains one of the few directors to actually get it right. (Of course, having a solid script also helps, since Tarantula is also better written than most of its counterparts.) Tarantula may not be the best creature feature ever made, but it's a welcome respite for horror fans who have reached their limit of CGI effects and want to see an example of when a filmmaker's knowledge of photography, scale and illusion could produce amazing results on a modest budget.

Monster on the Campus (1958): The Hulk's Missing Link?

I don't know what it is about creature features from the 1950s. Even when they descend into the depths of accidental camp, there's still something quite charming about them. Maybe it's because creature features were still finding their aesthetic legs, or that the still-new Atomic Age had generated so many larger-than-life anxieties that only creature features could do them justice on the big screen. Regardless, I just re-watched Monster on the Campus, one of Jack Arnold's lesser sci-fi flicks from the 50s. I first saw it a long time ago when running this kind of movie on syndicated TV during the weekend was a common practice, and I was looking forward to seeing it again. Read on for my retrospective of this cult classic, which includes some thoughts as to how it’s connected to Marvel Comics’ not-so-jolly green giant, the Hulk.

For those of you who don't know anything about this film, Monster on the Campus is about a college biology professor named Donald Blake (Arthur Franz) who cuts his hand on teeth of a coelacanth, a prehistoric fish that his department just received from Madagascar. As he begins to suffer blackouts during attacks made against him by an unknown assailant, the professor notices how animals that are exposed to the coelacanth suddenly take on attributes of their prehistoric ancestors (larger fangs, bigger body sizes, etc.). After making this discovery, Blake realizes that his attacker could be a visitor from humanity's distant past, a visitor who is much closer to Blake than he ever could imagine.

While the plot is similar in many respects to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Monster on the Campus is actually a rip-off of an earlier creature feature called The Neanderthal Man (1953). (You can watch The Neanderthal Man on YouTube here.) It's also worthy to note that the same ideas from The Neanderthal Man and Monster on the Campus would be re-used in Altered States (1980), a hallucinatory body horror film that was directed by Ken Russell and based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky.

Monster on the Campus doesn't meet the same standard of quality as Arnold's other sci-fi films, such as Creature From the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Arnold himself has voiced his displeasure with the film in interviews, saying that he agreed to direct it as a favor to someone at Universal. Nevertheless, I have a soft spot for this film because Arnold was able to add some polish and charm to an absurd script and poor special effects. Adding to the film's appeal is the enthusiasm of the cast, particularly Franz's performance as Blake. During the movie, Blake does several things with the dead coelacanth that anyone else would know never to do with raw, rotting meat; thus, Blake shouldn't be allowed to cook food let alone teach a biology class. Yet Franz keeps you believing in the sincerity of Blake's motives and actions, no matter how unintentionally funny they get.

I think that the most intriguing aspect about Monster on the Campus is how at times it feels like the missing link between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Marvel Comics' superhero Hulk. Stan Lee has cited Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as one of the key influences in the creation of the Hulk, but there are enough details in Monster on the Campus to suggest that Lee and Steve Kirby probably saw Arnold's film and drew a lot from it when they developed their monstrous hero.

For example, the Hulk is the alter ego of Dr. Bruce Banner, who became the Hulk after being bombarded by gamma radiation. In Monster on the Campus, Blake finds out that the coelacanth itself is not causing the evolutionary regressions (including Blake's own regressions into a Neanderthal) but that the fish was exposed to gamma radiation to preserve it and thus gave its blood a regressive property. The Hulk hates his human half, and Banner feels lingering remorse over the destruction wreaked by the Hulk. Likewise, the Neanderthal that Blake transforms into harbors a raging anger against him--to the point where local police even think that someone is stalking Blake--and Blake becomes overwhelmed with guilt when he realizes that it is he who is the murderous beast that has been stalking his campus. Furthermore, the relationship dynamics between Banner, his love interest Betty Ross and her father General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross is similar to Blake's relationship with his fiancée Madeline Howard (Joanna Moore) and her father Professor Gilbert Howard (Alexander Lockwood). Another bit of Jack Arnold/Marvel trivia: "Donald Blake" was also the name used for the former alter ego of Thor, another superhero character created by Lee and Kirby.

Monster on the Campus isn't the only example of a commonality between creature features from the 40s and 50s and Marvel Comics characters that were first published in the 60s. I've posted before about how the Fantastic Four bears some similarities to other space radiation films, and two of Spider-Man's archenemies, Electro and the Lizard, have backgrounds are similar to the respective titular monsters in Man-Made Monster (1941) and The Alligator People (1959). I can see why Lee would prefer to mention a literary classic by Robert Louis Stevenson over a b-movie as a source of inspiration for the Hulk, if for no other reason than to suggest an air of artistic sophistication to the creation of a superhero. Nevertheless, movies like Monster on the Campus serve as a reminder to fans of the close conceptual kinship between b-grade creature features and pulpy superhero adventures. The way I see it, that's a beautiful thing.