William Cameron Menzies directed two pictures, Things to Come in 1936 and Invaders from Mars (released in 1953). At first blush, one might characterize this filmography under the rubric: "Oh, how the mighty are fallen!" Things to Come was a British big-budget prestige film, written by no less than H. G. Wells and starring such worthies as Raymond Massey and Ralph Richardson. Invaders from Mars is a micro-budget exploitation picture, made with unknown actors (some of them like Leif Erickson and Milburn Scott migrated to TV in the next decade), only 79 minutes long that features men in green suits running along tunnels decorated with inflated condoms. But Things to Come is preachy, inert, and over-designed; by contrast, Invaders from Mars is a surrealist masterpiece, a bizarre film maudit that once seen can never be forgotten. No one has shown any inclination to remake the turgid Things to Come; in 1986, Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) adapted the original script from 1953 into a reasonably amusing new version. Hooper's version is 96 minutes long and, if you are inclined, you can watch the two films as a double creature feature.
Menzies was primarily a set designer and very accomplished at that work. He managed sets for many silent films in his native England and, then, moving to Hollywood worked on sets for many very expensive pictures, including, it seems, Gone with the Wind, Hitchcock's Spellbound (he re-shot the surrealist dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali) and other pictures. Menzie's sets for Invaders from Mars are brilliant and memorable and achieved with no money at all -- indeed, the austerity of the design accounts for much of the film's appeal: in a nightmare, there are various salient elements and everything else is a luminous sinister void. Since Invaders turns out to be nightmare, Menzies' glowing, empty sets are perfect for the film.
A ten year old boy, David, lives what seems to be an idyllic existence with his father and mother in a house that is weirdly situated under a huge dune of sand. The sandhill, at first, appears at night like a conical bluff with a large patch of what seems to be glowing white snow forming a crescent on its slopes. An eerie looking trail lined by barren, twisted trees and an old fence runs along the crest of the hill toward the place where the heath has fallen away to reveal the gleaming bone-white sand underneath the grass. (The expressionistic shots of the trail with trees and fence are clearly studio-bound and redolent of Max Klinger's engravings, particularly one that shows a dead woman sprawled alongside a fence line on a trial next to a row of desolate trees.) During a thunderstorm, David thinks that he sees a flying saucer land in the sand and, then, burrow under it. He runs to his parents in terror and they assuage his fears. (David's mother is weirdly wearing make-up in bed -- she has ruby-red lipstick on her mouth and eye-shadow and a complex hairdo that seems glued in place.) Dad is some kind of scientist who works at a top-secret military base a few miles away. Comes the dawn and Dad, who has been inexplicably wandering around outside, appears in the door as a lobotomized brutish zombie. He strikes David when he asks where he has been. (No one seems to regard Dad's violence as anything too abnormal -- this was the fifties when fathers ruled the roost and their mercurial moods had to be accepted like the weather, something to which you had to adapt but about which no one could do anything.) Dad swills boiling hot coffee as if it were cold water and, then, threatening everyone to keep quiet stalks away. David sees a little girl who lives nearby seeming to dive into the sand pit. The film's surreal narrative doesn't explain the identity of the child when we first see her -- in the distance, a figure just drops into the sand. Only later do we discover that this child is the daughter of the research director at the secret military complex where David's dad works. The little girl appears lobotomized as well and sets her house afire. David has noticed that Dad, and, then, Mom, and Kathy, the little girl, all have bright red x-shaped wounds on the back of necks, right at the base of the skull. David goes to the cops but the Chief of Police has become a zombie as well. The child is thrown in a typical 1950's film noir jail cell, all criss-crossing shadows of bars cast on the boy's face and body. A kindly female doctor, made up with ruby-red lips and wearing a huge abstract and scarlet boutonniere (she's an eerie clone of Mom who is now running around knocking people out) interviews David and immediately believes his story. She helps him escape the malign zombie authorities and they go on the run. Meanwhile Kathy, the little girl has mysteriously dropped dead -- in the autopsy, Dr. Blake, the lady-doctor who is assisting David, discovers that a steel needle with a kind of tiny bomb at its tip has been inserted into the child, controlling her and, later, destroying her brain when she is no longer needed. David and Dr. Blake have sought the assistance of another scientist, an astronomer who explains that the secret military facility is developing a missile with a nuclear warhead and that the Martians, a race of aliens who live underground since the surface of their planet is dead, are alarmed. The Martians have sent a flying saucer to destroy the earthling's nuke. In order to accomplish this task, the Martians have evolved "mew taunts" with the accent on the second syllable -- these are green giants with slit-eyed green masks working as "slaves" for the "ultimate human intelligence", a creature that turns out to be a bronze mask in a huge green light bulb with some weird tentacle-like appendages, also made of sculpted bronze on both sides of the monster's immobile face. (This artifact is one of the great designs in cinema history, beautiful, comical, and strangely frightening -- the monster can't express anything because, after all, his burnished face is made of bronze and so he simply moves his eyes rapidly to the right and left, peering out of the corner of his eyes since he's got no neck and can't otherwise move the elegant metal mask of his face.) With dreamlike efficiency, the military is convinced by this weird, and improbable, story that the nuclear base is under attack. The army deploys a thousand tanks to the site and, inexplicably, begins to shell some part of the terrain that has nothing to do with the monsters. (I think this is to distract the critters in their condom-lined underground tunnels). The soldiers dig into the Martian's (except they aren't Martians but "mew-taunt" humans) anthill. People get sucked into the white sand, slipping underground in funnel-shaped vortices and David with Dr. Blake end up underground. Dr. Blake, who faints at the sight of the "mew-taunts" is poised on a transparent operating table and a spinning drill-bit with the mind-controlling needle is poised to penetrate the woman's neck. In the nick of time, the Marines battle the "mew-taunts" who are repeatedly shone loping through the tunnels. The sides of the tunnels are covered with vaguely breast-shaped orbs (these are the condoms) -- this is supposed to simulate bubbles of glass formed when the monsters drilled out their passages using an infra-red heat ray, but the grape-like shapes dangling everywhere look like testicles or the breasts of the mother-goddess Artemis of Ephesus. The green giants get machine-gunned but they fight back with their brilliantly red glowing ray guns. A bomb is set to detonate. Dr. Blake is rescued just before the needle goes into her first cervical vertebrate and a huge explosion blows the monsters up. David then wakes up to find that he is returned from Oz -- it was just a nightmare caused by the thunderstorm of the night before and his precocious interest in astronomy. But, then, he sees the flying saucer again lurking in the sky.
A bare account of the plot, which makes no sense, doesn't convey the luminous strangeness of this film. Poverty results in many of the sets, particularly the police station and observatory, as being pale glowing voids in which a couple of outsized props are installed -- the station has two night-court pillar-like lamps, for instance, a surrealistically tall desk and nothing else. The film is shot in over-saturated, unreal and vibrant colors -- the blood-red ray guns melt red holes in the sand, the women have blood-red lips extravagantly painted, the green monsters are bathed in emerald radiance and the bronze brain glows with supernatural burnished amber light. As Dr. Blake lies unconscious on the operating table, her hand is open under her face like a lily and the sinister drill approaches in a beam of brilliant violet light. Although the movie is only 79 minutes long, it seems immensely padded with repetitive shots that don't really match the rest of the film. For instance, the deployment of the army tanks seems to be shown in some kind of army training footage with dozens of vehicles rambling along dirt roads with the film manipulated into greyish day-for-night -- the soundtrack plays jaunty variations on "'The Caissons keep Rolling Along" and the scenes go on for minutes at a time, showing us nothing of any significance. There's a huge bombardment, also shown in military stock footage, with big explosions but it has nothing to do with the movie. When David and Dr. Blake go to the man of science to complain about the strange events, the huge astronomical observatory is shown slowly rotating and opening its doors, a long sequence of repetitive shots, and, at last, the telescope isn't raised to the heavens but lowered to the horizon to show the rocket with the nukes that the Martians are trying to disable. The acting is terrible which contributes to the sinister dream-like effect. Everything is overwhelmed by Menzies' astonishing sets which are made from cellophane, inflated condoms, and swaths of weirdly glowing light. Scenes of vehicles racing here and there are cut with mismatched shots -- the cars turn left but are, then, seen roaring off in the opposite direction. (It turns out that these effects were achieved by optical printing that just reverses the direction of the motion -- this accounts for the nightmarish sense of a terrain that makes no sense at all; similarly, the effects of the space ship eating its way into the melting sand were achieved by pushing the space-ship model up out of the sand and, then, printing the footage in reverse.) The film is one of those pictures that truly deserves the description "marvelous."
Tobe Hooper's remake is campy, but expensively made with impressive special effects. It's not a work of genius like Menzies' hallucinated film, but okay and it holds the viewers attention. By contrast with the 1953 version, Hooper favors "jump scares" -- that is, shots in which something startles the viewer -- and he inserts one of these shocks into the film at about five minute intervals. (Most of the jump-scares are pointless, but there is one truly frightening image involving Louise Fletcher that is memorably alarming.) Hooper's adapts the 1953 script without much variation from the original. Instead of the sojourn with the police and the zombie police chief, the ten-year old boy. here also called "David Gardner", is persecuted at Menzies Elementary School where his teacher (played by Louise Fletcher) is conducting "frog week" -- this involves dissecting apparently living frogs. Louise Fletcher is a mind-controlled zombie with a bandage on the back of her neck and, when she gets hungry, she munches on frogs, swallowing them whole. Fletcher's zombie teacher knows that David is aware of the Martian's scheme to destroy NASA's rocket ship and, so, she relentlessly pursues the lad. The role of the kindly Dr. Blake is assigned to the School Nurse, here played by Karen Black in a bizarre part in which she seems to regard the ten-year old boy as her romantic partner -- he defends and protects her (she's prone to hysteria), not vice-versa. Instead of the sandpit, there's an open pit copper mine behind David's house and the aliens are powering their laser guns with copper wire. All of the explanation as to the Martian's motives (and the stuff about "mew-taunt" humans) is eliminated. The "supreme human intelligence" (that is, the bronze head with tentacle shoulders) is relegated to the boiler room of the Menzies Elementary School, glimpsed among disused relics of old school plays and pageants. There's a cigar-chomping Marine who proclaims that the Marine's aren't afraid to kick Martian ass and some firefights in the Martian's underground sanctuary beneath the sands of the nearby open-pit copper mine. Dan O'Bannon was recruited to tinker with the script (he was one of the creator's of Ridley Scott's blockbuster hit, Alien) and he supplies some interesting creature effects. Gone are the men in bulky green giant suits -- here the aliens reside in the skeletal chambers of a subterranean space ship; the interior of the place is full of xylophone-like stairs that seem to be made of some keratinous material and fluted gristle columns. The monsters are weirdly endearing -- they look like critters imagined by Maurice Sendak (for instance, in Where the Wild things are): they're toothy hippos that are sometimes bipedal and, other times. roaming around like bison on all four legs; the tooth-monsters who always seem to be grinning, carry eye-ball shaped ray guns that also dispense a brilliant red-light and melt through the rock to create bore-holes. The leader of the Martians is a small football-sized talking hemorrhoid who, of course, lives in a sphincter and moves around on the tip of cartilagenous tongue that is about twenty feet long. Explosive charges are set in the Martian's space-ship with a timer poised to detonate the bombs in five minutes (it was six minutes in Menzies' version) and everyone has to hurry to get out of harm's way.
Hooper didn't know whether to play the movie for comedy or horror (all the jump-scares) or suspense and so the tone of the pictures is all over the map. O'Bannon clearly admires Menzies and tries to one-up the master set decorator with his effects -- and O'Bannon's sets and creature design are probably the best thing in the movie; the film retains a couple of shots of the ghostly trail with the fences along the trees that was prominent in 1953 film. Hooper's movie doesn't provide much explanation for the events underway, but, somehow, seems far more prosaic and less surreal than Menzies picture. In fact, where Menzies' movie seems like the progenitor of a long line of future pictures (most notably Invasion of the Body Snatchers in both 1956 and 1976 versions); Hooper's picture is self-consciously decadent -- it comes at the end of this line of movies and has no recourse but to make fun of what preceded it. Menzies' picture redeemed its trash origins and ridiculous plot; Hooper's strategy is to make fun of its origins and to ignore the plot entirely substituting lurid special effects for narrative. (Bazookas, for instance, blast tooth-monsters and spray their entrails all over everything.) But Hooper's film is an estimable effort: a major actor of the era, Timothy Bottoms, plays David's dad and Larraine Newman of Saturday Night Live is cast as mom -- this strange choice is motivated by the fact that Larraine Newman is famous for playing the "Cone-heads" in the sketch comedy show and, several times, she reverts to her monotone "Cone-head" voice to create sinister, if funny, effects. Karen Black as the school nurse seems always on the verge having sex with the adorable David (Hunter Carson famous from Wender's Paris, Texas released two years earlier). Menzies' film created the conventions used in innumerable other movies of this genre; Hooper simply winks at you, utilizing those conventions for kitsch effects.
I must have seen the original Invaders from Mars when I was about six or seven. The movie has haunted my imagination all my life, particularly the scenes involving the drill-bit embedding needles into the flesh of the victims of the mew-taunts. (However, until I watched the movie last night, I didn't recall what it was named.) I saw the movie on TV and in black-and-white. So I would have missed the effect of spectacular technicolor. But the picture would have scared the hell out of me. Contemporary critics remarked that the movie seemed to be made for children but was much too scary for them.
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