#radiation horror

[teatime-tangents-and-toys]

Photos with Living Dead Dolls variant Toxic Molly, a major grail doll. Read my review of her and see her striking unmasked face here!

[novella-november]

Writing Prompt: Radiation Horror

one of the funnest (!?) parts of reading 100+ year old books is how *casually* characters will go around, with full confidence, spouting the health benefits of *radium springs*, so here's your horror prompt for October:

Write a story where your characters are dealing with a main plot of your choice, and one of the key points in the plot is that the location they are visiting / item they have picked up is causing some strange side effects, or has some weird legends surrounding it, that to the characters seem like the description of just your average everyday magical curse, but to the reader's growing horror, is a clear description of radiation sickness and the generational effects from such.

The fact that radiation is present is never outright stated in the story, but by the time a character reveals they have this weird little canister in their pocket that they picked up from the crater sight, your readers will be breathless with horror

[badbadmovies-blog1]

Attack of the Crab Monsters - Director Roger Corman; 1957: Looks Like We Got The Dynamite by Mistake

I’ve seen countless bad movies by this point in my life, and none has ever taken the place in my heart that this film has. Attack of the Crab Monsters is the absolute cream of its particular crop; this is the pinnacle of poor quality cinema. Attack of the Crab Monsters is a bad movie you can clearly tell a number of people spent plenty of time on; the special effects are shaky, the dialogue poor and the concept ridiculous. This movie fails at being a quality movie, but it succeeds in being highly entertaining in every possible aspect.

This is a movie both produced and directed by Roger Corman (what a shock), and it bears all the hallmarks of what make movies by the acclaimed master of cheap cinema so enjoyable. Far from modern bad movies like hastily produced Adam Sandler comedies and formulaic romcoms, movies by Corman continue to be so loveable because you get the sense that the people involved seriously enjoyed themselves in the production. It would be disingenuous to claim that a Corman film like Dinoshark is any less of a crash grab than Adam Sandler’s amazing flop Jack & Jill, but Jack & Jill feels like more of a soulless cash grab. Corman produced 35 movies between his first film in 1954 and 1960 alone, and Attack lands squarely in between Not of This Earth and The Undead. Corman, if you’re curious, is still alive and very much still making films; his IMDB roster currently has him at 415 producing credits and 56 directing credits. He currently turns out CGI X vs. Y monster movies for SYFY channel’s in house movie studio. If Roger Corman sounds like a familiar name to you but you don’t spend your weekends taking in the cinematic equivalent of potato chips, it’s probably because Corman was the man behind the so-terrible-it-never-got-released 1994 film The Fantastic Four, which received some renewed publicity and interest a few years ago when the Fantastic Four movie series was rebooted.

Roger Corman and his…special set of skills rose to prominence at exactly the moment Hollywood was getting into radiation based monster horror. With the world gripped by fear of the atomic bomb, Hollywood began turning out dozens of quickly and cheaply made films about radiation and atomic bombs bringing about the end of the world one way or another. The fact that Corman managed to time his emergence into filmmaking so perfectly with this trend is honestly nothing short of divine providence. The plots of these movies are all fairly samey: an atomic test is undertaken in a location thought to be safe and either awakens, angers, or creates a monster (The most famous of these is, of course, Godzilla). Either the monster invades civilization or a small group of scientists, nearly always including exactly one woman, is sent to investigate. The plots begin to diverge here, but they almost always re-synchronize with each other at the end with a quick, timely lesson or quip about the folly of humanity or the power of nature or the danger of science or something passingly similar.

“I’m not so sure you are right Monsieur Quinlan…maybe their bodies are gone, but who can tell of their souls, eh?”

So says the comically fake French accented Jules Deveroux (played by the very American Mel Welles, a frequent actor in Roger Corman’s films) in the first of many amazing lines. What this movie lacks in anything resembling finesse, it makes up for in quotability. The basic outline of the film is as follows: a group of scientists has been sent to a remote island near the Bikini Atoll to study the effects of nuclear testing on the plant and animal life after the previous group of scientists disappeared without a trace.

One of the men assisting in bringing supplies to shore falls off his small boat into the water, and we get our first glimpse of the monster: a large, extremely poorly constructed eye. The fellow who’s fallen off the boat isn’t long for this world. He’s flailing, you get about 2 seconds of paper mache crab, and then the poor dude’s headless corpse is being drug from the water (it’s not a convincing corpse either). So we’re 4 minutes in and already we have our first body. A German man with a fake accent as bad as the Frenchman’s asks why the whole atmosphere of the island feels wrong. Another character notes that there’s “no animal noises of any kind”. Ooooh, spoopy. The camera takes a moment to linger, completely silently (there is no score in this moment), on the confused faces of the German and one of his partners. The movie really wants to make sure you know: this is spooky. It wants you to know so badly it’s going to beat you over the head with it.

As our large and almost completely indistinguishable cast of people who are definitely going to die are unpacking their supplies into their lodgings and scientific lab on this deserted island, which is, of course, an improbably nicely appointed mid century suburban home, random guy #3 moving crates speaks not only my favorite line in this movie, but my favorite line from any movie ever: “Looks like we got the dynamite by mistake”. That about sets the tone.

From this point the movie rolls on in pretty much exactly the same way you’d expect: people start disappearing, disasters start happening, and worrying discoveries start getting made. The menace ends up being, of course, very large, very irradiated crabs. The crabs themselves appear to be paper mache and are hilarious in appearance, clearly somewhat sloppily made.

This is seriously what the crabs look like.

There’s a whole lot of bad dialogue and a whole lot of technobabble. The best bit of the latter has to be the scene where the scientists discover the titular crab monsters are non-solid and objects pass right through them; this gets explained as the crab’s “atoms being too far apart” so that they’re more space than matter. The crowning glory of this film both in concept and execution was the choice to make the crabs telepathic, hyper intelligent, and able to absorb the minds, personalities, and therefore voices of the people they consume, meaning that the crabs are able to communicate with the characters while impersonating the ghosts of their dead friends. The crabs eventually consume the Frenchman, and all this together means the characters are eventually running from a non-solid giant killer crab that’s speaking to them in a bad fake French accent.

I’ve seen actors accused of chewing on the scenery but I have to wonder if an entire movie has ever been accused of it. This whole film spends its time cutting its teeth on the poorly constructed sets around it, making a very audible racket in the process. And my god is it good. Attack suffers from every technical problem imaginable, from bad dialogue to poor SFX to questionable set design to bad acting, and it’s the most fun it’s possible to have watching a film. You will laugh hysterically watching this movie. I recommend taking this one on with a group of like minded friends – Attack of the Crab Monsters is so much more fun together.