The Gorgon (1964)

**I’m afraid there will probably be SPOILERS of some sort in this review.  Sorry about that.**

In the accursed village of Vandorf, dandy artist Bruno (Jeremy Longhurst) sketches his topless paramour Sasha (Toni Gilpin) for a future painting.  After revealing she is pregnant with his child, Bruno, naturally, overreacts and heads off to confront her father who already had a low opinion of the painter in the first place.  Giving chase, Sasha runs into something in the woods which petrifies her.  Bruno is found hanged the next day.  Sasha’s stone body is brought to local Doctor Namaroff (Peter Cushing).  The Gorgon Margera has returned.

There are several interesting things going on in Terence Fisher’s The Gorgon just from the concept on down.  First of all, the Gorgon in question isn’t the infamous Medusa.  It is one of her sisters, Margera.  To my knowledge, though, the three Gorgons were Medusa, Sthenno, and Euryale.  There never was a Margera according to any Greek myths I was able to get a hold of, but I could be wrong in this.  But, by not using Medusa, they keep that portion of Perseus’ myth intact, and they also sort of hint at the idea that the other two had to flee in order to escape destruction (the method of flight also tensing the two siblings’ immortality).  It’s as if they were expanding and extrapolating on the extant fable, and this sort of implied backstory rears up at several points in the film.  Further, it is not an eternal Margera living in Castle Borski, though of the three sisters, Medusa was the only mortal.  It is her spirit which haunts the village.  Further, Margera’s spirit has taken over the body of one of the village people (hopefully not the Cowboy – sorry), so this adds a possession aspect.  To make things even more gonzo, Margera’s spirit is most powerful during a full moon, thus making her a quasi-Were-Gorgon, truly a unique creature.  Why, it’s almost as if the folks at Hammer had a werewolf script with a Dracula plot, but through some insane quirk of fate they just didn’t want to do it, and someone raised their hand at a meeting and said, “How about a Were-Gorgon?”

Of course, this presents us with one of my very favorite themes in film, in case you hadn’t noticed (or haven’t been reading my reviews; for shame), and that is one of duality.  The Gorgon is two people, one evil, one innocent.  Naturally (for anyone who has seen Clash Of The Titans, or, I don’t know, ever read anything), the only safe way to gaze upon Margera is in her reflection, and there is a nice sequence where Paul (Richard Pasco) encounters her and looks at her in a pool of water, a window, and so on.  A brief tangent; Fisher is also careful to not show the monster clearly for the majority of the film, and this is an effective way to hide a rather disappointing makeup.  Fortunately for the filmmaker, though, it also masks her from the audience in such a way as to heighten her menace.  After all, we know what she can do.  It’s right there in the title.  And Fisher and company are protecting us by not showing her directly.  Back to the point; the reflective aspects of the film point out not only Margera’s weakness but also the idea that what is in the mirror is opposite in appearance and nature from what is in front of it.  It’s an interesting way to delineate this Jekyll/Hyde, Leon/Werewolf doublet.  

This also plays on the role of art in the film.  Bruno is a painter, and he is about to create a representation of his ladylove on canvas.  She becomes a literal statue, no longer represented in a medium, but the medium itself.  In the same way that some groups believe that photographs and so on can capture a person’s soul, here art takes your life.  People are transformed into another state of being.  Their corporeal bodies exist, but they are vacant now (presumably).  Thus are they robbed of their identity, a major theme in Horror films for as long as they have existed.  This act of transformation also changes its victims into something hideous, with welts breaking out on their brows, before finally becoming smooth and arguably beautiful, in a very definite final repose.  This mid-stage equates Margera’s victims with her own ugliness.  She gets to “live” with it, though.  

Furthermore, the transformations in the film represent a sort of sexual repression and punishment for defiance of sexual mores (as a great many Hammer films seem to discuss).  People are either lured to their doom by a kind of siren song or run into Margera as a consequence of following their hearts (and consequently their loins).  Even though women can be victims too, predominantly they are men, and that they turn to stone is an interesting metaphor for male turgidity.  The Gorgon in its human form has been in a form of remission (read: repression) for some time, and when the human side begins to fall in love, Margera gains power and begins killing more.  This plays into the horrible past/conspiracy of fear angle of much of the story.  The history of the Gorgon’s human side can be seen as a sexually liberated one (this is tacit, not overtly stated), and it was this promiscuity which brought about the curse of the Gorgon in the first place.  Repression is forced, and the human side’s personality is quashed in order to save lives.  

Fisher’s direction is as solid as it has ever been, and the production design is up to Hammer’s normal high standards.  Naturally, seeing Cushing and Christopher Lee (the DeNiro and Pacino of British cinema) onscreen together is an absolute delight, and Lee’s Meister is a wonderful curmudgeon in opposition to Namaroff’s icy dispassion.  However, the film focuses largely on the romantic Melodrama aspects of its story to the detriment of its Horror aspects.  This also causes the majority of the mid-section of the film to falter in pacing, essentially forming a cinematic spare tire around its gut.  This is despite some of its more outré facets, and this is startling since these outlandish elements are so left-of-field, one would almost think that they could carry a movie on their own.  Disappointingly, they can’t.  The film is still worth seeing, it’s just not top tier Hammer for me in the same way that their more oddball films like The Abominable Snowman or Quatermass and the Pit are.  Perhaps if Nigel Kneale had a hand in this one too, I might feel different.  

MVT:  Cushing takes the honors.  I mean, you really can’t elaborate more on that.  He’s Peter Cushing.  You’re not.

Make Or Break:  After a mildly interesting opening scene, the Make is when Sasha’s body shows up at the hospital.  When her gorgon-ized hand appears from under the white sheet, we know we’re off to the races.  It’s just more like Shetland ponies rather than Thoroughbreds.  

Score: 6.25/10

The Flesh Eaters (1964)

Necrotizing fasciitis is some truly scary shit. Essentially it's an infection that rots away your flesh (hence the nickname "flesh-eating bacteria"). What it actually does is annihilates skin and meat through the release of toxins into a particular area and then spreads if not treated. While most people who contract this heinous (you can read that "high-anus" if you wish, I know I do) have some pre-existing condition (i.e. diabetes, immunosuppression, and so on), sometimes it affects people who are, by all accounts, in good health. This is, I think, what terrifies most people about the illness, that they are not necessarily out of harm's way just by being healthy. Now, I'm not sure if Arnold Drake, the writer of Jack Curtis's
The Flesh Eaters, had ever heard of necrotizing fasciitis or not, but the premise makes for a cracking good pulp horror film.

Aboard a luxury boat, Fred (Ira Lewis) and Ann (the beautiful Barbara Wilson) engage in some light grabassery. But when Fred steals Ann's top and jumps overboard with it, Ann is forced to follow for the sake of her, um, modesty. Within seconds the water seethes and smokes, and Ann comes up with handfuls of blood (read: Bosco). The bathing beauty is overcome and goes back under for good. Meanwhile, grounded seaplane pilot, Grant (Byron Sanders), is hired by souse actress, Laura Winters (Rita Morley), via her assistant, Jan (Barbara Wilkin), to fly them to Provincetown. Needless to say, the flight has some hiccups, and Grant is forced to land in the ocean just off a small, seemingly-deserted island. Also needless to say, the island is indeed inhabited by the shifty-eyed, Teutonic-toned scientist and amateur Udo Kier impersonator, Professor Bartell (Martin Kosleck). When Ann's fully-intact skeleton washes up on the shore stripped of all flesh, our hapless travelers quickly savvy to the fact that there's something in the water which would love to make a meal of them.

This is first and foremost an exploitation movie, and that fact becomes readily apparent within the first couple of minutes. Both Fred and the camera ogle Ann as she sunbathes, and once her top is stolen, we're treated to lingering moments focusing on her bikini-bottomed-only back. When Ann is attacked, there's not just a trace of blood for effect. No, her hands are loaded with dark, viscous life's blood. The name of the game here is flesh and blood, and, while there's no explicit nudity, the filmmakers come up with all sorts of reasons to display their actresses' pulchritude. Jan has to strip off her shirt to bind Grant's leg. Later, she struts around in her bikini, because her clothes are wet or dirty or something (frankly, the reasoning is moot). Laura flounces about in the sort of tops that gave horny men the inspiration for both torpedoes and the 1959 Dodge Royal Lancer (the name itself a double entendre). She also sports some semi-opaque black tights that would make Ann Margaret blush.

On the sanguinary end of the equation, the film is fairly graphic in its depiction of violence. When Grant accidentally dips his calf into the infested water while saving Laura from her own stupidity, the chunky after effects are dwelt on at length. And when Bartell digs into the meat with a knife to extract the feasting flesh eaters from Grant's leg, the camera does not turn away. Later, a character is eaten from the inside out, and that chocolate syrup-y blood gushes out past their entwined fingers. As the film reaches its bonkers ending, blood itself plays an integral part. 

Herschell Gordon Lewis's seminal Blood Feast had come out one year prior to Curtis's film, and was heralded as the first gore movie. The Flesh Eaters was (if I'm not mistaken) written about three years prior to Lewis's opus and isn't quite up to the Grand Guignol levels of splatter struck by Feast, but it certainly has its mind on the same things. And while both films have an unmistakable veneer of sleaze about them, in my opinion Curtis's is a little more shudder-inducing. The reason is because it was shot in black and white. While Lewis's opus was touted as "more grisly than ever in BLOOD COLOR," it's the verisimilitude afforded Curtis's film by the monochromatic film stock that has a greater impact. It feels like an old newsreel, and the (mostly) flat lighting helps emphasize this aspect.

Writer Drake is best known amongst geeks for his comic book work. He co-created some of the more offbeat characters of the 1960s (and that's saying something, when Jimmy Olsen was engaging in shenanigans with and/or getting engaged to gorillas almost constantly). Most famous are the Doom Patrol and Deadman, but my favorite was always Stanley and His Monster (the reasoning should be apparent if you read my War In Space review). I don't know if Mr. Drake was ever involved with the sort of low brow/high adventure magazines that littered newsstands of the time ("Man's Conquest," "Man's Adventure," ad infinitum), but this film is suffused with those same pulp trappings. Our hero is lantern-jawed, always willing to stick his neck out for a dame, and leery of shady, foreign-accented strangers and hippies. There are sadistic overtones prevalent throughout, and there are even direct references made to Nazi experiments. The beauty is that the filmmakers don't try to disguise any of this as anything other than what it is. It's like a "sweat mag" at twenty-four frames per second.

The film's effects are hit-or-miss quality-wise, but they always achieve the desired result. The miniature flesh eaters were rendered apparently by scratching directly on the film's emulsion. When we later see them a bit bigger, they're obviously rubber-flappingly fake, but their bulbous, alien appearance is truly creepy. Bartell's "solar battery" is clearly constructed of large sheets of construction paper over plywood, but it seems to belong here. The roiling water inhabited by the creatures is a simple dry-ice effect, but it works. 

The thing that holds the film together, though, is the writing. The story is built on very basic, clear-cut conflicts. Even though, the characters themselves could never be accused of being well-rounded, they all inhabit their archetypal roles to the letter. Meek Jan must stand up to her browbeating boss. Laura drinks out of depression and her need to be the constant center of attention. Grant has to protect his female companions from threats human and inhuman. Bartell messes in God's dominion out of greed. This is not high art, nor is it needlessly complex. Like The Ramones' modus operandi of two or three chords stripped down to the bone and executed like a musical blitzkrieg, The Flesh Eaters is a straight-ahead gore/horror movie that is all the better for its total lack of frills and pretense.

MVT: Arnold Drake takes the MVT on this one. His imaginative, traditional storytelling skills set and maintain a fun, satisfying tone throughout the film.

Make or Break: The prologue scene with Fred and Ann is the "Make." It contains everything great about this movie in just a few minutes. From T&A to gore, horror to mystery, this is a tight set-up to a truly gratifying monster movie.

Score: 7.75/10

Episode #100: The Man With No Name Trilogy

It is here!!! A gigantic episode for a gigantic trilogy!!!

There are few trilogies that encompass the GGtMC like Sergio Leone's Man with No Name Trilogy, the listeners selected this content and the Gents delivered with an almost 4 hour program for your listening pleasure.

We cover A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966).

We go over what we watched and in that section Will wanted to mention the influence that Kenneth Anger's films, particularly Scorpio Rising, had on current directors including William Friedkin and others. He forgot to mention the Friedkin connection so I am mentioning it here in the show notes.

We also talk about the top 10 films that we have turned each other on to over the last two years...Enjoy!!