Big, Bigger, Biggest

A little while back I decided to have a "giant people from the 50's day"...

I started with Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) proceeded to The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), and wound it all up with War of the Colossal Beast (1958). Let me say that, apart from sheer amusement value, none of these films is actually worth watching. They are all unrelentingly stupid - I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment.

So, let's start with the one with, at least, the best title. Attack of the 50 Foot Woman evokes everything that is best about 1950's B-grade movies. What it doesn't warn you about is that there isn't a single character in the movie who's even the least bit likeable. Nancy Archer (the titular character, played by Allison Hayes) is a spoilt (and stupid) rich woman with a philandering husband, who is obviously only after her money. She runs into an gigantic alien on the way home, with the result that she grows really, really big overnight.

Apart from the blatant misogyny of the script, the biggest fault with this film is the fact that, quite often, you you can see right through Nancy as she strides across the landscape, and the giant alien is also transparent a lot of the time. Now, giant people are one thing, but giant transparent people seems just a bit stupid! At any rate, I can only recommend this film to all the people out there who, just like me, will just have to watch it because its famous and has a great title!

The Amazing Colossal Man is often considered to be the "Gone With the Wind" of giant people films, and with good reason. It has all the required ingredients (crazy explanation, stupid physics, even stupider physiology), some really good effects (and some equally shoddy ones).

Lt. Col. Glenn Manning (Glenn Langan) gets a little to close to a plutonium bomb explosion, and gets a little burned... Like, 3rd degree burns over just about his entire body. At any rate, he miraculously heals overnight, then begins to grow. And grow. And grow. Where it gets really silly, though, is in the explanation that his heart is, for some reason, not growing as quickly as the rest of his body. Why this should be is both never explained, as well as not making any sense at all, but there you go.

His small heart causes circulatory problems, which results in him having a really bad temper for most of the film, and leaving him really, really stupid at the end of it, when he goes on the obligatory rampage, before being "disposed" of. While the miniatures were excellent, and many of the other effects shots were equally impressive, there were some "transparent" moments as well, which detract from the overall affect.

Which brings us, at last, to War of the Colossal Beast, sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man, and, I think, a better film than either of the others. Lt. Col. Manning has made his way down to Mexico, where he is hijacking food trucks to feed his enormous appetite.

Where this film stands out is the makeup. Manning is left horribly disfigured after his "demise", with half his jaw exposed, and one eye missing. While obviously an "additive" effect (i.e. makeup over the actor's face), it is still very impressive, and quite gory. It holds up extremely well, despite the film's age. The miniatures are also very impressive, even if they don't always match the full-scale vehicles at all times! There were also far fewer "transparency" problems in evidence.

Manning appears to have lost his mind completely in this one, and is basically just a giant monster. He finds his way to California, with a climax at the Griffith Observatory which is a lot of fun. Oh, and his heart attacks don't seem to be a problem any more (he should be long dead, according to the experts in the first film!).

At any rate, of all of these "giant people" films, War of the Colossal Beast is, surprisingly, the standout. It's fun, silly, and has the best SFX. You really should watch The Amazing Colossal Man first, if only so you get the whole story, but it's probably not absolutely necessary (the original distributors certainly didn't think so - they didn't even bill it as a sequel). I know for a fact that, now that I've seen it, I won't be feeling the need to watch Attack of the 50 Foot Woman again any time soon (or ever!).

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

A masterpiece.

No matter how dedicated one is to a genre, or even to film in general, there are always some classics that you just never get around to seeing. You know they're gonna be good (or at least they should be, with all the fuss that's made about them), but, for one reason or another, you just keep missing 'em on TV, or there's always something newer and shinier at the local video shop to attract your attention. Or, more and more often these days, you've seen the remake and it was pretty good, so why bother watching the old black & white version of the same story...

Invasion of the Body Snatchers lived up to its reputation. Taut, tense, and action-packed,  modern-day thrillers owe a lot to this film. It's only 80 minutes long, but it's got more action and suspense in it than most films manage to pack into 3 hours. I was literally on the edge of my seat for almost the entire time!

Directed by Don Siegel (who's other films include Escape from Alcatraz and Dirty Harry), and starring Kevin McCarthy as an ordinary GP who, upon returning from a medical conference, finds that an awful lot of people in his home town seem to have developed an identical paranoid delusion... Their relatives are not their relatives. They look like them, sound like them, and even remember things that only they could possibly know, but they are not who they appear to be. He investigates, and, slowly but surely, the evidence starts to accumulate, until even the "rational" Dr Bennell can't help but admit that something terrible is going on.

This has to be McCarthy's best role. His character is the absolutely archetypal small-town doctor. He's friendly, debonair, sophisticated, and caring. He's divorced, because his patients always came first. He's witty, charming, and handsome. Of course, by the end of the film, he looks like he's just escaped from a psych ward, but that's the beauty of it.

Of course, by this time he also hasn't slept for about 48 hours, not to mention the horrors he's just been through!

Dr Bennell's love interest in the film, Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) also goes from total glam (the dress she wears in her first scene is just gorgeous) to dishevelled wreck during the course of the film. This, of course, is something that we don't see very often, especially in films from this period - Normally, no matter what the heroine's suffered through, the worst that will happen is that she might have a little mud on her dress, and, perhaps, a misplaced hair or two!

As impressed as I was by Kevin McCarthy's performance and character, the cast highlight for me was the always exquisite Carolyn Jones. Her big eyes and delicate features (not as accentuated as they were in The Addam's Family, of course) always portray an extreme level of vulnerability, especially when she plays the role of "the woman who screams at the scary thing".

While described as metaphor for either the imagined communist threat of the 50's, or, equally, as a metaphor for the all-too-real threat of McCarthyism, none of that matters while you're watching it. As you're propelled from one chase scene to the next, and introduced to the exact nature of the threat one step at a time, you are simply buffeted along by the whirlwind. The last thing you care about is the politics; all you care about is whether the hero and his girl are gonna escape...

Yes, it's a bit dated. Some of the romantic scenes are a little flowery and over-the-top by today's standards, and the patriarchy of the 50's is, well, conspicuous (Becky is just a little bit too hopeless when she starts to get tired!). Nevertheless, this is a genuine masterpiece, and one that anyone who wants to make a taut, suspenseful action thriller could learn a lot from.