Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan (2011)

It’s fair to say that you’re going to see just as much, if not more, adulation for Ray Harryhausen in this review than in Gilles Penso’s documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan.  My first love as a monster kid was the 1933 version of King Kong followed closely by Toho’s Godzilla films, so stop motion animation was already one of the greatest things in the world for me (though my love for men in rubber monster suits ran a tight second).  Seeing Harryhausen’s Sinbad films was like eating your favorite food, and every time you did it was liking eating it for the first time all over again.  The thing which links Harryhausen with Eiji Tsuburaya, who pioneered the effects for the Godzilla franchise (which was directly inspired by The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms), beyond the tactile, expert care and craftsmanship put into the work is the sense of wonder that these films embody and instill in the viewer.  You cannot look at these pictures and not feel awe to some degree or another.  These are paced stories with fantasy elements that are brilliant in their technical virtuosity and their ability to spark the imaginations of young and old alike rather than just deliver spectacle (though they do this as well).  

Harryhausen’s films are simple without being simplistic, hewing to the pulp traditions from which they sprang: something happens, people are pulled into these events, people discover extraordinary things/obstacles they must conquer/overcome, people conquer/overcome them.  It’s as meat and potatoes as you can get, but this is the groundwork which supports the elements that Harryhausen adds.  The clash between the mundane and the exotic is what fuels these films and makes them compelling, something I believe guys like Stephen King took to heart (it’s been postulated that his stories are so popular because his protagonists are the type of people who buy their underwear in a ten-pack at the local K-Mart, something with which I agree).

Pensco’s film mixes a chronological overview of Harryhausen’s work with comments and opinions from a host of luminaries of fantastic cinema (Terry Gilliam, Peter Jackson, Phil Tippett, Dennis Muren, James Cameron, Joe Dante, to name just a few).  It is formulaic in structure, feeling a bit more like a featurette on a disc than a strong doc in its own right.  For example, as we move from film to film, we get the year of its release, a shot of the original poster art, footage of the original theatrical trailer, and then some discussion on it interspersed with shots from the movie along with what I feel is the real cream of this film: copious amounts of archival footage and photos, showcasing behind the scenes activities, concept and storyboard art, and animation tests.  And yet, the formula works for what this film is.  This isn’t documentary in the tradition of Frederick Wiseman or Errol Morris.  We’re not following a day in the life of a Harryhausen production or investigating the depths of the man’s soul (man, what would those films have looked like in regards to this subject?).  Instead, here we’re given the opportunity to share in the adoration of a film pioneer and vicariously bond with the professionals he inspired.  We’re never told about the hardships of Harryhausen’s life, the conflicts he ran into in the course of his career.  We simply drift along on a scenic tour through his achievements.  Consequently, this, and docs like this, appeal to both novices and acolytes alike.  It’s as much overview as it is fanboy gushing.  Something for everyone, so to speak.

There are also hints at deeper conversations going on throughout the film.  Harryhausen is credited with being the person who influenced how we, as a society, think dinosaurs moved.  This points to a truth (or a perceived truth) inherent in all of Harryhausen’s performances (and they are performances; each of his characters, and any animator’s, are a performance from the animator as they, to paraphrase the words of Henry Selick, take the journey with their characters from first frame to last).  I found it interesting that the filmmakers never talked about Harryhausen’s signature shoulder roll in this regard, which just about every single character of his capable of doing so did, but that’s a small quibble.  Likewise, the issue of auteurship comes up.  I believe it’s Joe Dante who raises the fact that something like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad is never discussed as a Nathan Juran film.  Cinephiles, of course, recognize that Harryhausen didn’t technically direct these films.  Nonetheless, they are his, in part because his was the driving vision behind them and in part because the technical demands of his craft insisted upon a level of control if the live action and the animation were to meld together onscreen.  As John Landis avers, he is the technician as auteur.  

Naturally, this all leads to the inevitable CG versus Stop Motion conversation, and Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan peppers this across its runtime.  As you can imagine, the vast majority of people, even those who work extensively with CG, are very clear in their preference of Stop Motion over CG.  Personally, I agree with guys like Tippett and Muren who know that there is an unnatural fluidity imposed by the nature of CG.  Gilliam and Steve Johnson perfectly sum up CG’s lack of charm.  Gilliam calls it cold, while Johnson elaborates that CG puts the audience at a distance from the effects/film, because you know precisely how it was done, whereas Stop Motion is like a magician who you know has tricked you but you can’t figure out the means with which it was accomplished.  Relating back to the discussion of auteurship, Muren states that there are no longer many films of singular vision due to the massive budgets and the size of the animation departments.  In other words, individuality has been more and more bred out of special effects films, and homogeneity has taken over.  Ironically, and in one of the film’s more humorous (to me, anyway) moments, James Cameron hypothesizes that, if Harryhausen were still working, he would absolutely be using CG and not puppets, as it’s the newest, most streamlined tool in the special effects arsenal.  This is followed by Harryhausen stating that he would still use puppets, as he finds it unappealing to sit and push buttons in order to get an image onscreen.  For me, this sums up the difference between an artist of Harryhausen’s skill and a technocrat like Cameron (don’t misread this: I have a great amount of respect for Cameron and his work, but he has always been more about technological advances than anything else, in my opinion).  It’s ruminations like these that stayed with me beyond the joy of reveling in the filmography and accomplishments of one of cinema’s greatest creators.

Arrow Films’ bluray is typically lush and loaded with extras, including unused interviews with Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, Peter Lord, and Rick Baker, outtakes from the interviews used in the film, Q&As with the man himself, a commentary track with the filmmakers, and more.  Whether you love Harryhausen’s work or have never seen a single one (I honestly don’t know how that’s conceivable if you consider yourself a lover of cinema, but whatever), you owe it to yourself to get on this film.

MVT:  The archival material makes this something special.

Make or Break:  Admittedly, the opening title cards/intro felt a little amateurish, but I don’t think they’re anything that will put off viewers enough to skip out on this paean to a cinematic genius.

Score:  7.75/10       

The Crater Lake Monster (1977)

It is rather distressing to me, the facility with which people will place their trust in technology.  Perhaps it’s because I work daily with machines which appear to have been “updated” simply for the sake of being updated.  Perhaps it’s that (for all my claims to the contrary) I could very well be a Luddite at heart.  I don’t think that people who trust in ever-evolving technology (let’s call them “trusters” for the sake of brevity) are by any means less smart than me or that they’re easily duped, per se, and I can completely understand the desire of making things faster, more compact, and more portable.  Hell, I’ve been tempted on more than one occasion to purchase one of these newfangled e-readers.  But my main issue (which I’ll probably get over around the time I’m on my deathbed) lies in the nature of data storage.  

Let’s say, I buy a book.  So long as I take relatively decent care of it, I can keep this book for the rest of my life.  I can open it to any page at any time in an instant.  If I buy a digital edition of the same book, I have now linked myself to a device which requires power of some variety in order to read it.  I have to wait for said device to start up and say it’s okay for me to open up the book file.  If there is an issue that the data gets corrupted or lost, I now have to go through a process to try and retrieve that which I have spent my money on or risk having to buy the file all over again (unlikely maybe but certainly possible).  I’m sure there are some safeguards built in, possibly at point of purchase, to protect against this, and you can even back your data up (and give yourself some form of physical copy of the material, thus defeating part of the whole reason for downloading a book in the first place), though I would be wary of saving anything to ”the cloud.”  How do you know you’re going to be able to get to it?  How do you know your files haven’t been lost or corrupted in the cloud?  What if you’re experiencing problems with internet connectivity?  How do you protect yourself in a growing sea of cybercrimes as you expand your presence in the digital realm?  I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.  Books rock.  You should read more of them.  And besides, I’m fairly confident that an e-reader doesn’t have that same pulp and ink smell which only a physical book can give you.

One evening, as Doc Calkins (Bob Hyman) is just relaxing at his cabin, he is startled by the sudden appearance of Susan (Kacey Cobb) who declares that her boyfriend Dan (Richard Garrison) has made an incredible discovery.  Racing to the mine-shaft-cum-archaeological-dig site, the trio wends its way down to a wall upon which have been painted ancient depictions of Native American tribes fighting with a (rather well-delineated) Plesiosaur.  At that very moment, a meteor streaks across the sky and hits the lake next door.  The force of the impact brings down the mine shaft walls and (I assume) floods the caverns with water.    Hitting up the mustachioed, limp-coiffed Sheriff Steve (Richard Cardella), the scientists try to investigate the meteor, but the heat is too much for them to handle.  Needless to say, the meteor’s vicinity to a dinosaur egg at the lake bottom will prove to have disastrous consequences for everyone.

I would wager that William R. Stromberg’s The Crater Lake Monster was produced solely to cash-in on the world’s fascination with the paranormal in general and the cryptid Nessie specifically.  It has the stop-motion wizardry of the late, great David Allen as well as Jim Danforth, Phil Tippett, and Randall Cook to recommend it.  That’s some lineup of talent, and when their work is onscreen, it’s as impressive as it can be.  However, I don’t know if it was due to budget or time concerns (probably a combination of the two), but the shots with the stop-motion creature are sparse, even though we get to see the beast quite well early on.  Consequently, the monster never really has any sort of personality for the viewer to discern, and the life-size model of the creature’s head is immobile, thus adding nothing of value other than something to physically grab a character onscreen.  It’s just a large, dumb animal which was birthed and developed unnaturally and wants to eat people. If this were a Nature Amok film, then having a creature of this type would be perfectly acceptable, acting as an unknown and unknowable quantity (after all, who among us can know what really transpires in the minds of Plesiosaurs?), but we see the thing when it’s around, and all of its attacks are telegraphed.  This is something of a letdown for someone like me who has been a massive fan of the artistry of stop-motion techniques for as long as I can remember.  But I suppose we take what we can take where we can take it. 

Nonetheless, the film does not follow a standard Nature Amok framework.  It does not follow a standard Creature Feature framework (and, to be sure, the two are quite similar).  It doesn’t even follow a standard Melodrama framework.  There is no evil corporation polluting the environment or threatening to kick the indigenous people off their land.  There is no big festival on the lake for the monster to disrupt.  There is no venal, (but not strictly) evil city council member/mayor who places his constituents lives in danger by ignoring the warning signs and allowing the annual regatta/swim meet/seasonal park opening to proceed.  Yet, we have come to expect a certain structure in genre films of this era.  We expect an inciting incident to hook us.  We expect a lot of exposition and filler, punctuated here and there with briefly satisfying bits to keep us from walking out.  We expect an ending that, even if it doesn’t bring the house down, fulfills something of the come-on which enticed us to see the film in the first place.  This is not to say that we necessarily need to see generic conventions (despite our anticipation of them), nor that a standard framework of any variety needs to be followed in a film, but we’re getting to that, as well.

The Crater Lake Monster both meets and subverts expectations.  It is, in fact, loaded with subplots which go on for far too long and contribute nothing to the story other than enabling the monster to (thankfully) make a few brief appearances.  So far, so good.  However, almost the entirety of the rest of the film has jack shit to do with any sort of hunt for the titular creature.  In fact, what the vast majority of the film centers on are the not-so-funny antics and misadventures of local shitkickers and boat rental magnates  Arnie and Mitch (Glen Roberts and Mark Siegel, respectively).  Like a Northern Californian equivalent of something Hal Roach or Mack Sennett would have produced (but not remotely as entertaining or sophisticated), this unseemly duo just sort of gad about, take advantage of the “squares,” get wasted on what I can only imagine is corn mash, and peregrinate through the woods, woolgathering about how they’re going to be successful one day.  The typically heroic characters for this sort of film, the lawman, the scientist, the old wise man, predominantly occupy the background.  In effect, it makes the film into a quasi-statement on hope and modernity.  Mitch and Arnie are low tech guys.  They can’t even fix their own boat motors.  They talk big about what they’re going to do, their future constantly ahead of them, never living in the moment.  The creature comes along, and the pair suddenly have something new (ironically from the Mesozoic era and therefore being both modern and primitive) on which to hitch their wagon.  However, their hubris in believing that this deceptively primordial animal can be mastered may very well prove lethal.  Arnie and Mitch’s dreams run into the reality of the modern world in which they are living.  It is how they adapt (or if they can) which will determine their survival.  And yet, even with all of that in mind, I still prefer physical books to digital files.  Oh, well.

MVT:  The monster is the headliner, and he (she/it) is the reason to watch.  That it gets short shrift is somewhat disheartening, but to be frank, I’ll take any excuse I can to marvel at a stop-motion monster.  Sure, they have an artificiality to them, but if that’s your argument for not liking them, I would suggest that you’re missing their charms entirely.

Make Or Break:  I was actually surprised that they showed the creature as clearly and for as long as they did for how early it first shows up in the film.  Essentially, the monster’s first appearance is both payoff and inducement, and that the rest of the film is so unusual in approach as well makes the whole movie stand just a few inches away from the rest of the crowd.  

Score:  6.25/10