Fifty Nights of Science Fiction Thrills

Recently I purchased fifty grade B 1950s-era science fiction movies for fifteen dollars. I also recently bought forty 50s era Time magazines for a hundred dollars. But let's talk about the DVDs--in a package called "Sci-Fi Classics" by Mill Creek Entertainment.

Having watched just four of the fifty, I can already recommend this collection to anyone who wants to laugh, become baffled at trying to figure out how anyone could conspire to make anything so bad, wonder at how these trifles ever got shown in a theater, marvel at the unrepentant and continuing fatuousness, try to decipher a connection between the chilling titles (like "The Incredible Petrified World") to the dull doings on screen, and watch, in a historiographic, postmodern manner, the effects of sexism, racism and lousy cinematography at work in a culture struggling with such newfangled phenomena as radiation and the possibility of outer-space travel.

I have laughed out loud at certain moments in these movies: as when a random, large lizard that has nothing to do with the movie puts in a brief, pointless appearance; or when scantily-clad women wrangle in a prurient cat-fight. My wife, a vocal critic of anything that emits even a whiff of sexism, has vowed the films are a disgrace and beneath one's intelligence. Of course she is correct.

But I cannot forego the pleasure of marveling at the wide gap between what is promised (chills, thrills and earthshaking revelations) and what is actually in the movie, usually a tawdry mash-up of tepid acting, embarrassingly poor special effects (no Ray Harryhausen here), nonsensical plot-twists and what appears to be a general heedlessness to the notion that one might actually ask another human to pay money to view the resulting dreck.

Perhaps the most strking example of this canyon-wide gap (at least so far) has been "The Monster that Challenged the World". The monster turned out to be a species of mollusk that grew (because of radiation, as appears to be the rule) to the size of an old gumdrop-shaped Fiat in an inland lake and then tried to escape through an irrigation system. Sure, there were a couple dozen of them. And they could walk on land! And they actually killed some folks. But they were slow, and not that big, and for heaven's sake they were mollusks after all. Besides scaring people to death and strangling a poor doddering old man at a guardpost, the monsters' worst offense was to leave behind a white slime that looked like toothpaste in outsized volume (and was not harmful except to one's sense of aesthetics). This, I submit, is hardly a challenge to the world as much as to the State Agricultural Commission.

But that is all part of the fun.

After a hard day trying to get other people to do what you want them to do (at work or business), or being made to do what other people want you to do (at work or business), why not mix yourself a toddy and sit back to enjoy fifty of these wonderfully idiotic movies guaranteed not to inspire or frighten or connect one to "what's really going on out there" but that may, after the effects of the toddy sets in, cause you to chuckle and smile and knit your brows in wonderment at the cinematic genuine silliness of which our so-called advanced race of creatures is capable.

Full of Monsters

In a recent article in the New York Times, the excellent columnist Olivia Judson (an evolutionary biologist) noted:

". . .there’s no need to invent monsters: you just need to imagine how terrifying it would be if ants were the size of rhinos."

I would like to shout "huzzah" to this and add to the sentiment. My personal belief has long been that the imagination of monsters natural, supernatural and alien springs from the unwieldy, even somewhat catastrophic knowledge the race of humans secretly owns about the near-unimaginable strangeness of thousands of our fellow species here on earth.

Specifically I would like to point out that if one were to spend half an hour looking at any book with close up photographs of common insects, one would have to be convinced that we are living in a world literally crawling with bizarre monsters that feature as much oddity as any we might ever find on any distant planet in our supposed interplanetary future.

Can we hope (or fear) to discover anything anywhere that will be as weird or as creepy as the type of fly that buries its young in the throat of a living deer, and in which its young multiply and fatten, only to fly eventually out of the deer's mouth having mostly destroyed the deer's ability to swallow (leaving it for dead)? Or how about those worms that get into people's eyes and grow gigantic and then slither out of the corners of the poor host's eyes when they feel a need to move on to the next nefarious stage of their squirming, alien existence?

Indeed, review the heads of insects close up with their giant multifaceted eyes and their merciless cutting jaws and read some about their entirely shocking antics--you'll come away shivering with horror; and it will be made worse to know these tiny wretches are currently in the business of making up the majority of the earth's biomass (or perhaps you will fall in love with the little creeps and become a candidate entomologist).

Further, I believe our collective subconscious (let's assume for a moment Jung had a point) registers all this and agrees that we are better served by inventing fantastic versions of these biological realities than by learning in depth about the reality of their biology. This is because, by projecting them out as fantasies, we can put them collectively at a distance and claim they're certainly terrifying but not "real"; and when it comes to science fiction and the hunt for alien life we can even project that they are "far away"; all more comforting fodder than to spend time thinking about the motes in your own eye right now; or the microscopic bugs that infest your pillow (dust mites) that, when blown up to poster size outclass in awfulness the most awful fantasies ever churned out by Hollywood or even folklore.

Ms. Judson's article was partly about the coming Year of Biodiversity and she calls for a "Wild Celebration" of same and I suppose therefore it may be the wrong time for me to be carping about the horror inspired in me by so many of our fellow bio-travelers on this planet (especially the very small ones) stocked so richly with biological wonders.

In any case I certainly hope we never discover any outer-space-creature weirder than any typical insect already on this planet. I don't think I will be able to stand it.