Tuesday, October 23, 2012

October 2012 Edition #23: DIE, MONSTER, DIE!







Director: Daniel Haller
Screenplay: Jerry Sohl, adapted from a story by H.P. Lovecraft
Starring: Boris Karloff, Nick Adams, Freda Jackson, Suzan Farmer
Release Date: October 27th, 1965


Today’s movie is another adaptation of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, this time from his short story “The Colour Out of Space”. Though the filmmakers have made quite a few derivations from the original story, what they delivered is an very stylish, moody bit of gothic horror that manages to stay faithful to Lovecraft’s themes of madness and decay.




The macabre story follows Stephen (Adams) a young man from the States, visits the English village of Arkham at the behest of his fiance Susan Witley’s (Suzan Farmer) mother. After being refused directions by the villagers at the mere mention of the Witley estate, Stephen is forced to travel by foot to Whitley Manor. Along the way he spots a curious crater in a nearby field, surrounded by dead vegetation. Once he arrives at the mansion he meets Susan’s wheelchair-bound father Nahum (Karloff), who makes it clear to Stephen that he is not welcome and must leave immediately. But Stephen is persistent, and insists on speaking with Letitia Witley (Jackson), who has secluded herself in her bedroom due to a serious illness. Letitia informs Stephen that a strange sickness has begun to befall the residents of the manor, beginning with her servant Helga, who has recently gone missing. She urges Stephen to flee with Susan from the estate, and though Stephen tries Susan refuses, fearing for her ailing mother’s health. Meanwhile, it is becoming quite clear that Nahum is hiding quite a few secrets of his one, chiefly the source of the strange illness that soon also overtakes Merwyn, the butler, as well the unearthly green glow emanating from the greenhouse behind the mansion. What Nahum Witley is hiding is something sinister, something unholy, a rot of the body and the soul that threatens to devour the Witley clan from the inside out. He believes the family is suffering a curse wrought upon it by the spirit of his cultist father. The truth, while not as fantastical, will nonetheless spell his doom.




When Roger Corman’s HOUSE OF USHER, an adaptation of the short by Edgar Allen Poe, proved to be one of the most successful film’s of 1960, the film’s financiers at American International Pictures quickly churned out a succession of similar films, most of them also directed by Corman and starring Vincent Price. The formula was an enormous success, and it seems that with DIE, MONSTER, DIE! they attempted to graft that formula onto the then relatively unknown works of H.P. Lovecraft. As an unapologetic fan of the Poe film’s, this formula works like gangbusters for me, and so I absolutely adored every minute of DIE, MONSTER, DIE!




HOUSE OF USHER also began with it’s American lead traveling through a desiccated countryside to visit his beloved at family’s estate. Once there, he was made immediately unwelcome by the family patriarch, in that case Price’s Roderick Usher, who made wild claims of a family curse totally unfounded from reality. And in both cases the female leads stubbornly refuse to leave the obvious danger of their homes out of a foolish sense of family loyalty. What keeps this story from growing stale, for me at least, is the immense talent behind the camera.




DIE, MONSTER, DIE! was directed by Daniel Haller, who served as the production designer and art direct for all of Roger Corman’s Poe films, creating amazingly detailed and opulent sets on a miniscule budget. This was his directorial debut, and his skillful eye is evident not just in the magnificent set design but in the way every inch of the anamorphic widescreen frame is utilized to create an oppressive atmosphere of impending doom. The film has everything a I have come to love about gothic horror films of the 60’s, all decaying mansions and foggy moors containing horrible secrets, such as a massive greenhouse emanating an eerie eldritch glow. The flick even has the requisite freaky psychedelic gel-lighting watercolor freak-out that was common in these adaptations, though here that bit of awesomeness plays behind the opening and closing credits None of this is exactly scary, but it certainly is fun, and evokes a certain childish glee for the macabre that the Halloween season used to give me as a kid.




As an adaptation of the Lovecraft story the film is mostly successful, though I feel he would have been personally offended by the way in which the filmmakers discard the relevance of his Elder Gods, instead crediting the disease ravaging the Witley family to radiation poisioning from a meteor that crashed in the countryside near the manor. The radiation has an initially positive effect, causing nearby plant life to thrive but, as is discover inside Nahum’s greenhouse, the radiation eventually has a negative effect, causing the plants to take on a malevolent intelligence as they attack Susan. This scene in particular reminded me quite a bit of the tree rape scene from THE EVIL DEAD, and I can’t help but wonder if Sam Raimi wasn’t at least partially inspired by this film when writing his masterpiece. Also within the greenhouse is what Susan calls “a menagerie of horrors”, a room containing animals mutated by the greenery into amorphous abominations. All of this is disgusting, and somewhat cheesy, and incredibly entertaining, at least to a sick bastard like myself.




The film eventually builds to a climax in which Letitia, having mutated and melted beyond recognition, goes insane and attempts to attack Susan, culminating in a ghastly and shockingly gruesome meltdown scene. Karloff, finally realizing the error of his ways, attempts to destroy the space rock containing the deadly radiation, when the servant Helga returns, having gone insane, and attacks him. In the ensuing scuffle he ends up falling into the hole containing the meteorite and emerges as a silver-skinned monster who is dressed uncannily like the Frankenstein monster which made him famous decades earlier. While shameless, by this point in the film I didn’t mind, because I was having so much fun with the movie. Of course, as was the case with every film from AIP, the film ends with the mansion in flames, and some brief preachy moralizing about not tampering in God’s domain, or some such nonsense.




I’ve discovered in the last few years that I am a sucker for these kinds of movies, so while DIE, MONSTER, DIE! effectively worked it’s magic on me, many of you will find it silly and somewhat tedious. And that’s your loss, honestly. This flick offered everything a little bit of everything I love about the genre in a neat little package. Sure, it’s not great art, but it was made with a creative sense of passion and a great deal of fun which I happened to find absolutely infectious.

My Rating: 8/10


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