Saturday Matinee

Ah, the monster movie. One of the best parts of my childhood.

I absolutely loved them. You could watch two or three on a Saturday morning over a couple of bowls of Honey Combs. And while I did a fair share of cartoon watching, I think I prefered to see the Movie. Television in the seventies was quite different. During the week, Channel 7 always had a 4:30 movie, ending at 6 pm with the news. They liked themes: one week World War II movies, the next, westerns, and after that, cop movies. But I always loved when they played the monster movies, which they did, as I remember, fairly regularly.

Monster movies can be grouped into several broad genres, as the programming team at Channel 7 was aware. First to mind is the Godzilla movie. There must have been a dozen Godzilla movies alone when I was growing up, not to mention six or seven Gameras that were shown often. Occassionally Rodan was thrown in, too. Godzilla was originally made in 1954 in black and white as a not-too-deeply-veiled analogy of the atom bomb drop nine years earlier. There was something about it that turned me off as a young child. It could have been its grimness, its heavy-handedness. I do recall the sad theme music. But I think the worst part of that movie was that Godzilla is definitively killed at the end. What a downer.

Everyone knows the best Godzilla movie is Godzilla Versus King Kong. I can still see, in my mind's eye, myself as an eight-year-old, completely absorbed as the slimy giant octopus slithers up to the unsuspecting tribal village. Remember King Kong getting drunk on the wine, and then the helicopters flying him in to Japan to fight Godzilla? And as an aside, what was up with King Kong's face? A seriously bad case of teenage acne. But the best parts of the movie were the bouts between the two giant beasts (and the ringside commentary of the newsmen). I remember Godzilla almost winning and Kong somehow got charged with electricity and somehow drowned the aquatic reptile.

A close second for best Godzilla movie is the one with the three-headed monster. It goes by several names: Ghidra, Monster X, and I think the movie also has more than one title. Best scene: Rodan picking up Godzilla and flying the dinosaur, legs stretched out in front of him, straight into Ghidra. And what is up with those aliens? Weird. Another great Godzilla movie was the one with the mechanical King Kong. Now that was a cool rubber monster suit. For some reason the scene where the psycho crazy evil mad scientist shoots the Japanese woomanin the arm sticks out in my memory.

And for some reason Gamera was huge in the late-seventies. I don't remember much of these movies, only that they were magnets for me and my friends. You have to wonder how much of a flying giant turtle with jets coming out of its shell was inspired by some illicit drug use over in Tokyo. I have a vague recollection of the climax of one movie being the plucky determined turtle hoisting his nasty foe on his back and plodding up the side of a volcano, to dump the hapless foe in for a hot bath.

Another broad category is the black-and-white classic. Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, Frankenstein versus the others in various permutations. I would even throw in the 1933 King Kong, Son of Kong, and Mighty Joe Young with this group, even though they were giant beasties. I don't think I enjoyed this category as much, but these movies definitely scared me more. Probably the moody gray atmosphere, the English-accented mad scientists, the tragedy that somehow registered in my young heart. I can recall scenes from all to varying degrees. I would like to obtain DVDs of them all and watch them again as an adult, analyzing them for the undoubted layers of complex themes they encompass. One movie, with Lon Chaney Jr as a sad electrified man, brought me to tears.

I can think of two more genres of my monster movie madness youth. There was the action-adventure. Most of these were solid entertainment, but one, Journey to the Center of the Earth, stands out as an incredible experience, one of the greatest movies of my childhood. I could watch the movie over and over and over again and still love every minute of it. The sets! The matte paintings! The lizards scaled to the size of dinosaurs! The duck that that evil guy ate! Professor Lindebrook's accent! There were other movies in this category, but I can't seem to recall most of the titles. There was something like the "Lost World" were a group of explorers were hunting for something and came up against more lizards scaled to the size of dinosaurs as well as a very creepy scene of giant tarantulas in thick giant silken cobwebs. Inevitably there'd be a lava eruption that would destroy the world. I think Fantastic Voyage would fit nicely in this category, and it alone ranks as an all-time classic, though not strictly a "monster-movie." I think I can call it a monster movie only because of a scene near the end, where the evil scientist, trapped in the disabled sub, is slowly digested by the blobous white blood cell. Other movies I throw in this category are the Sinbad movies and, of course, Jason and the Argonauts.

But my all-time favorites fall into the category of the 50's science fiction movie. That decade brought some of the greatest classics to the screen than any other. Some had the eerie black-and-white effect going for them, others had the "modern" color look to make the monsters more menacing (and more bloody). Topping this list is the scariest movie I have ever seen: The Blob. That movie freaked me out! I mean, it scared the living s*** out of me in the strongest sense of that cliche. The first time I watched it, listening to the opening credit's loopy song, I knew I was in for something mean. I nervously continued watching ... and couldn't anymore after that poor old man had that blob latch onto his hand and slide up his arm. The way that old guy screamed/muttered/agonized! It took me into my adulthood until I could watch the whole thing. [And then there's the 1988 remake: a meaner, nastier blob. I agree wholeheartedly. I watched the remake on regular TV; still haven't the guts to watch it unedited.]

But there were lots and lots of other classics. Aliens entered our lives in this decade. My favorite is probably Earth vs. the Flying Saucers for the stop-motion effects of the spaceships and the whole feeling of total warfare about it. The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing, all the giant-monster-by-radioactivity movies, It Came from Outer Space, Invaders from Mars, The Incredible Shrinking Man, This Island Earth, even The Magnetic Monster: all classics, hands down.

Ah, the memories of youth ...