HE ONLY HAS EYE FOR YOU

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The Cyclops (1957)--It's often pointed out that Bert I. Gordon's initials spelled out B.I.G., appropriately because his niche was making movies about people or animals turned amazingly colossal via clumsy rear-projection special effects. Most of these films are terrible; most of them are also entertaining. Christopher Nolan he wasn't, but Gordon did make a film that was a nod to a famous episode in The Odyssey, this 1957 saga of a one-eyed giant.

The beautiful, bob-haired, delicate-boned '50s scream queen Gloria Talbott leads an expedition--consisting of a scientist (James Craig) a pilot (Tom Drake) and a shady speculator (a vigorously hamming Lon Chaney, Jr.) into a remote, radioactive, forbidden valley in Mexico. She's looking for her fiance, who disappeared there a couple of years earlier. The group soon finds it's a canyon of horrors, with giant lizards and other creatures mutated by the uranium in the soil. Then they encounter a bald giant with a disfigured face and one huge, bulging eye. Who might that be?

Made to share a double bill with Daughter of Dr. Jekyll--a Gloria Talbott two-fer!--this movie is slight even by '50s low-budget sci-fi standards, and there's an unsavory tinge to it from the pre-humane animal action. Even so, the title character here, played by Duncan Parkin behind the memorable makeup, and with gratingly persistent groans and snarls supplied by the superb voice actor Paul Frees, has a grotesque pathos. And Homeric action asserts itself: the giant traps the party in a cave with a boulder, and he meets his waterloo from the proverbial poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

MEAT PUPPETS

In theaters this weekend:

Stopmotion--The peculiar low-tech magic of stop-motion animation has always been one of the special delights of cinema for me; it's one of the reasons I became a movie lover as a child. Because of the work of masters like Willis O'Brien, Jim Danforth, Karel Zeman and the great Ray Harryhasuen, the labor-intensive, expensive technique is often associated with whimsical fantasy or science fiction. But it can be used for nightmarish horror as well, and this nasty, self-referential British chiller, directed by Robert Morgan from a script he wrote with Robin King, takes us to that dark side.

Ella (Aisling Franciosi) is the daughter of famous stop-motion animator Suzanne (Stella Gonet), and an animator herself.  Because she no longer has the use of her hands, Suzanne directs Ella in painstakingly manipulating her puppets; she refers to Ella herself by the affectionate--or maybe not so affectionate--nickname of "puppet," and she's quietly, passive-aggressively tyrannical toward her, constantly unsatisfied with her work, constantly demanding retakes. Ella would like to contribute her own ideas to her mother's work, yet when asked what these ideas are she's stymied, daunted by Suzanne's greatness. 

But when Suzanne falls into a coma, Ella meets a nervy little girl (Caoilinn Springall) in her building who talks her into abandoning Suzanne's project--a traditional tale involving a cyclops--and starting a new stop-motion film based on a storyline she suggests. It involves a terrified girl fleeing through the forest and taking refuge in a cabin, stalked by a hideous figure called the Ashman. She also insists Ella start using actual dead animal parts, and worse, over her armatures. Before long Ella is haunted by visions, some of them pretty hair-raising, of the gruesome characters in her film.

The live action side of Stopmotion has a strong streak of Cronenberg-esque "body horror," while the stop-motion sequences show the influence of Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers. It's a potent one-two punch of creepiness. This is one of those movies where the line between dreams and reality isn't always certain, but Morgan keeps enough of a coherent narrative that this doesn't become tiresome, and there are freaky erotic touches, as when Ella is having sex, and fingers her lover's back as she would a stop-motion puppet.

Like many films of this sort, when Stopmotion shifts to overtly murderous, gory grapples in its last half-hour or so, it loses some of its macabre potency. But Franciosi, who played the stowaway in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, is a compelling presence, and on the whole, this is one of the more memorable horror pictures in a while. The only real complaint is the same one that applies to most films that showcase stop-motion: there isn't enough stop-motion.

EYE ALONE

Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, which opens tomorrow, features a character, played by Wesley Snipes, called Cyclops.

So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …a Cyclops would seem to be in order, but as we’ve already repeatedly honored the greatest movie Cyclops of all time—Ray Harryhausen’s thuggish stop-motion specimen from The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad—this week let’s give the nod to Johann Tischbein’s 1802 version:

MONSTER MASHUP

Happy Halloween Everybody!

If you haven’t seen Guillermo del Toro’s opening for this year’s Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, check it out here. It’s a near-comprehensive extravaganza of pop-culture monster and horror homage—a friend of mine especially liked its torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mob made up of monsters…

But I think my favorite, and thus…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree, is Chief Wiggum as this donut-relishing Cyclops…