Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

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As I watched The Incredible Shrinking Man, I realized how many classic sci-fi movies I haven’t seen, creating a mental wish list that, ironically, doesn’t seem to be shrinking at all. At least I’m off to a good start, as the signifying combo of director Jack Arnold and writer Richard Matheson have crafted the perfect gateway to the outer limits of old-school speculative fiction.

Based on the novel by screenwriter Matheson, everyman Scott (Grant Williams) is subjected to a mysterious cloud while boating with his wife one afternoon; maybe if he hadn’t been too lazy to get his own beer, he wouldn’t have been hit with this glittery dust. But he is, and within a couple of months, his clothes begin shrinking, creating adorable li’l khakis on him.

But his everyday wear is the least of his problems because, as he shrinks more and more, soon he’s living in a dollhouse and fighting a bastardly housecat in one of the most harrowing battles I’ve ever seen. Of course, I say that and, a few minutes later, he’s trapped in the basement fighting off a fucking spider with a sewing needle — yikes!

Complete with a truly metaphysical ending I think no one in their right mind was expecting — especially in 1957 — Arnold has crafted a thinking man’s science-fiction film that truly turns everyday household objects — and household creatures — into apocalyptic struggles of survival, ones that might prove a prick of irritancy to me but a visage of destruction to Scott.

And Pat Kramer, but at least she had that gorilla. —Louis Fowler

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Reading Material

Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It

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I’ve been a fan of Jason Bailey’s work for several years. To tie me over waiting for his next “real” book, I bought both of his self-published books — extended essays, really; physically thin, figuratively meaty — on Richard Pryor and private-eye pictures of the 1970s — sight unseen.

Now, Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It is finally here! Bailey’s such a terrific writer, the book’s magnificence is a foregone conclusion. But upon its arrival, when I opened the book to a random page, only to find my second-favorite film in history, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, staring back from a dedicated spread, I have to acknowledge this may have been destined in the stars.

Hyperbole? Yes and no. This book couldn’t, wouldn’t exist if NYC were “just” a city; it’s an icon. As Frank Sinatra crooned, if you can make it there, you can make it practically anywhere. When it comes to capturing the city that never sleeps on celluloid, however, you must make it there. (Just ask Rumble in the Bronx, the Jackie Chan actioner actually shot in Vancouver, as the Canadian mountain skyline fails to disguise.)

The movies Fun City Cinema examines and celebrates employ New York City as not merely a setting, but a supporting character. Would Taxi Driver feel as threatening in Dallas? Would the grandeur of Gershwin translate if Manhattan were, say, Boston? Would the suspense of Dog Day Afternoon tick with such piercing intensity if the bank stood in Boise?

All three questions are rhetorical; you didn’t need to be told that. But maybe you don’t know how Bailey goes about managing about 100 years worth of material. Starting with the 1920s, he provides an alarmingly cogent essay of how each decade’s movies reflect the Big Apple at that moment in time — and in grime and in crime, economically, politically, sexually — weaving reality and fiction like an expert tailor.

While he’s picked one film as the encapsulation of the city’s era to front each chapter (not always the title you’d expect), dozens upon dozens of others are recruited to complete the full picture: big and small, commercial and indie, beloved and unknown, Criterion and not Criterion — nary a one is shoehorned in to check a box or fulfill some fan obligations. Not even cult items like Maniac Cop, which other authors would dismiss outright; each serves a purpose.

Like the aforementioned placement of After Hours, a select few films earn end-of-chapter honors for dedicated two-page looks. While this is where you’ll find such top-of-minders as Ghostbusters and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, you’ll also be wowed by some real left-turn choices, from Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart and Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends to Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence. (While I’m slinging plaudits, let me point out if you haven’t heard The Projection Booth podcast’s interview with an irritated and irascible Baron on Blast of Silence, you simply must. It’s all kinds of awkward and hysterical.)

If Bailey’s words alone didn’t already make Fun City Cinema the essential book on New York Movies and the Movies That Made It, the exquisite design work of Eli Mock would push it over the edge. Abrams, the publisher, could have let this project be a “coffee table book,” where the text is secondary to imagery, included to be skimmed if read at all. That’s not the case here; they complement one another to form an irresistible whole. (Intentional or not, Mock’s choice to use sans-serif text for body copy reminds me of the signage for the arterial subway system.) This isn’t one you’ll want to leave on any coffee table, lest it encounters a spilled cup — greatest in the world or otherwise. —Rod Lott

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Sex

Crazy Nights (1978)

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As the story surrounding Crazy Nights goes, French sex symbol/disco queen Amanda Lear thought she was shooting a documentary about herself. Instead, she was tricked into hosting a mondo movie of most prurient interests.

Why was she targeted? Her ideal last name notwithstanding, one guesses Lear represented the perfect mix of naïveté, narcissism and affordability. How strange to think a director as upstanding Joe D’Amato (Deep Blood) would engage in such chicanery when just a year before, he advanced the art of cinema by filming a woman masturbating a horse. Ethics? Neigh.

The finished product — Crazy Nights, not a wrist coated with stallion semen — is a look at either “sordid pleasures from around the world” or “the wild, wicked world of night.” Take your pick; either way, its bits are obviously staged and embarrassing enough for Lear to bring legal action — an act that earned the picture scads more attention than it deserves, then and now.

After a cape-clad Lear performs her hit song “Follow Me,” we’re supposed to do just that, and believe me when I say strap in, because the ride will be bumpy. By definition, mondo movies are supposed to be weird, but when Tokyo frickin’ Japan is the site of the most “normal” activity of all — a woman and man bite strips of newspaper from the other’s unclothed body — you know something is seriously off. Mondon’t.

Our globetrotting tour of kink, mink and stink begins at a Vegas stage show, where one lucky audience member is bamboozled into fucking a goat. Next, in an underground cavern located in a country I didn’t catch (like it matters), a couple copulates atop an altar, prompting the men watching to hike their numbered black robes up just enough to form a human millipede. Much later, a ballerina act in Stockholm proves to viewers once and for all that, by gum, blue is the warmest color.

An S&M hotel in Berlin affords an unclothed elderly man his fantasy of getting nailed. Oh, I don’t mean intercourse — I mean a woman in leather hammers a metal spike into his genitals. (To each his own, recht?)

Meanwhile, in Beirut, a witch demonstrates her ability to levitate things: first, a toupee (yes, of course the string is visible); then, penises. Move over, Peter Popoff!

Do you like magic? Wait, don’t answer yet! A magician in Marseille produces live doves, colored hankies and more — all from the vagina of his assistant. Okay, now answer.

I have neither the wherewithal nor fortitude to talk about the panther, the suspenders, the gender-switcheroo box, the necrophile or the excruciatingly explicit blowjob. I will tell you that Lear appears in between segments to show off her property. Finally, in a gold jumpsuit and on a motorcycle, she returns at the end to sing another hit, “Enigma (Give a Bit of Mmh to Me).” Then, as the credits roll, she tries on wigs. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Terror Within II (1991)

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All I recall about 1989’s The Terror Within is that I’ve seen it. Going into The Terror Within II, retention doesn’t matter, were you so worried. The opening titles fill in any narrative blanks with broad, questionably need-to-know strokes: Biological warfare beget an apocalypse and “grotesque genetic mutations.”

Andrew Stevens (Munchie Strikes Back) isn’t one of those, but he’s back toplining as David — not to mention making his directorial debut and writing the screenplay. Roaming the post-apoc desert where everything, per all of Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures, is uncomfortably too orangey, David and his glue-on beard spear a lizard for chow and communicate with his peeps back at Rocky Mountain Lab. There, scientists (including Stevens’ mom, Poseidon Adventure victim Stella) rush to formulate a vaccine to combat an unpredictable virus, but conspiracy-duped parents upend school board meetings they lack key ingredients David hopes to find. Until then, Full Metal Jacket’s R. Lee Ermey — and you’re not gonna believe this — shouts orders.

This being a Terror Within movie, there’s a terror, all right — but since it’s prowling the sands, it’s not yet within. It’s also not yet seen, depicted only by an arm swatting into frame and, for the rare POV shot, a completely blue screen. (Folks, in just three years’ time, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski would go from blue to black and white … and win the cinematography Oscar for Schindler’s List.)

Soon, David witnesses a young man and woman grappling with the creature. Following a fruitless attempt at subjugation by boomerang, the man dies, but David pledges to watch after the poor sap’s sister, Ariel (Clare Hoak, Cool World). Not even a day passes before Ariel thanks David with a guided tour of her uterus.

Ariel does not afford the terror within this same pleasure; it simply takes her from behind — but tastefully, y’know, because Stevens shows us just one thrust. Later, at the lab, when she’s scanned for pregnancy, we get a hilarious animation of a lone white sperm (David’s) peacefully flagellatin’ its way into her egg … momentarily followed by one black sperm (the terror’s), spikes and all, aggressively shoving in for sloppy seconds. The resulting infant is so hideous, not even principled YouTube influencers would hesitate to rehome it.

Somewhere between the crawling in the air ducts, the “Come to Papa!” quip and especially the reveal of the monster looking like a grown man dipped in marinara and sporting a head hernia, you realize you’re watching a simultaneous rip-off of Alien and Aliens … and then asking yourself, “Why?” —Rod Lott

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Thriller

The Crowded Sky (1960)

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A Technicolor template for the Airport franchise, The Crowded Sky gets its title from two planes headed straight for one another: a California-to-D.C. Navy jet and a D.C.-to-California airliner.

The two-man military jet is flown by Cmdr. Heath (Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Hot Shots!), shortly after his hot, estranged wife (Rhonda Fleming, The Nude Bomb) eschews accountability for the fact penises not attached to his body tend to make their way into hers. Add in that Heath was responsible for a midair collision a few years prior, and one understands why an enlistee (Troy Donahue, Palm Springs Weekend) is hesitant to take the passenger seat, but being pressed for time, has no other choice.

Piloting the Trans States flight is past-his-prime Dick Barnett (Dana Andrews, ironic considering his eventual plot function in Airport 1975), who’s none too pleased archenemy John Kerr (Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum) has been assigned co-piloting duties. Meanwhile, Kerr’s distracted by his affair with the lead stewardess (Anne Francis, TV’s Honey West), who’s pushing for a ring with rather unconventional, that-settles-that justification: “I’m the ex-champ of tramps, and ex-tramps make the best wives.” Incidentally, her name is Kitty.

While much of the movie is devoted to flashbacks detailing these turbulent relationships, Crowded Sky director Joseph Pevney (Man of a Thousand Faces) and writer Charles Schnee (The Bad and the Beautiful) make a choice to grant their most notable passengers a backstory as well — exposition via voice-over. A TV scribe (Keenan Wynn, Bikini Beach) hits on his seatmate (Jean Willes, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars) without realizing they used to be lovers. On the other side of the aisle, a sad sack (Louis Quinn, Superchick) wants to hit on his seatmate (Hollis Irving, Frogs), but has no game; she’d welcome the attention, but tells herself, “Too bad I’m a dog.” Rough!

Pevney moves among these internal monologues so quickly, they unintentionally carry comic beats, as if the characters are popping out of hidey-holes within Laugh-In’s “joke wall” just long enough to deliver their lines. Although Airplane! exists because of 1957’s Zero Hour! (which also plopped Andrews in the cockpit), the parody clearly cribbed its thought-bubble bit from the Sky.

Speaking of bubbles, this one’s full of soap — like Peyton Place at 20,000 feet, back when commercial air travel was considered a novel, even glamorous venture. So why not have a society’s worth of trouble play out above the clouds? With Airport a decade on the horizon, the disaster portion is secondary — if even that high — on The Crowded Sky’s ladder of importance; had Pevney and Schnee excised the threat of physical danger, audiences still would be left with an outmoded riot.

Having said that, wow, am I thankful they didn’t! With the movie making good on its titular promise in the home stretch, the collision and aftermath are a marvel of miniature work — a sequence well worth a rewind. Inside the cabin, preparing passengers for a crash landing, Kitty instructs them to remove their false teeth. As many periled-plane pictures as I’ve seen, I’ve never seen that. —Rod Lott

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