Finny predators (9/20/02)
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The Unearthly. [Brooke L. Peters, 1957.]
Laid low but hardly flattened by a nervous breakdown, erstwhile fifty-foot-woman Allison Hayes [the New Girl] arrives at the remote country sanitarium of mad doctor John [“To the true scientist, nothing is impossible!”] Carradine for a rest cure; and, though she can hardly be expected to realize that the avuncular procurer who escorts her here has already reported her as a suicide, she might at least take the hint from the howling dogs, the Gothic setting, and the fact that Tor Johnson [still bearing the monicker “Lobo” hung on him by Ed Wood] answers the door when she rings the bell that her personal physician may not have had her best interests in mind. Indeed, it rapidly becomes apparent that, under the guise of treating the anxiety disorders of his patients [nubile young bimbos apparently preferred, see in particular very tasty but alas expendable former Playmate Sally Todd], Carradine is performing [but of course] Forbidden Experiments with the aim of discovering the secret of Eternal Youth; which, unfortunately, keep going awry one way or another, meaning that he keeps discovering instead the secret of Eternal Jaw-Twitching Pizzafaced Drooling Into A Bucket — and, gnashing his teeth in bafflement, must repair to the pipe organ for another therapeutic rendition of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. [Just once, I would like to see somebody sit down for one of these Phantom-of-the-Opera moments at the pipe organ and play Louie-Louie.]
The stage thus set, a guy [Myron Healey] who looks a bit too much like a romantic lead to be, as advertised, an accused murderer on the run, stumbles into the compound, is offered sanctuary conditional on services to be named later, and immediately starts snooping around like a detective — and, at this point, the resemblance of this device to the old undercover-cop-masquerading-as-juvenile-delinquent ploy from
High School Confidential and of Carradine’s blonde-bombshell assistant Marilyn Buferd to Mamie Van Doren, not to mention Carradine’s bizarre and indeed terrifying explanation of his quest for immortality in terms of a search for a hypothetical Seventeenth Gland [as if there were not enough already], firm the suspicion that this is yet another allegory of high school; and, sure enough, from here on in the entire plot seems to turn on a love quadrangle involving the competition of Carradine and Healey for the attentions of the curiously passive Ms. Hayes [here playing very much against type as a dim and malleable specimen of Fifties femininity] and the consequent jealousy of displaced main squeeze Buferd [not a nurse but a doctor herself, and therefore, in Fifties typology, dangerously selfassertive], the [lumpy, grotesque, and curiously hairy] failures of the Forbidden Experiments all begin to look like steroid-induced exaggerations of the theme of puberty [cf. the famously metaphorical
I Was A Teenage Werewolf], and their subsequent banishment to the sanitarium basement suggests the advertised fate of all those black-leather-jacketed greasers who hung around the auto shop smoking Lucky Strikes and looking at dirty magazines: that’s what will happen to you if you jack off all the time and don’t get an education. — The doom of Carradine [the radical educator] himself is, of course, a foregone conclusion, and the whole thing reads [convincingly] as a solemn warning that though Frankensteinian tinkering with the secrets of Life and Death might be tolerated by the gods, any attempt to meddle with the secrets of Adolescence will meet with swift and terrible punishment.
The dialogue is laced with quotable zingers [“You’ve got it pretty well figured out, haven’t you?” asks Healey. — “I am a scientist!” Carradine replies. “Thinking is my business!”], and there is certainly a moral to be read from the embarrassing fact that the screwball theoretical premise of a B-movie like this looks, actually, more sophisticated than the classical theories of the physiology of the human organism [seventeen glands are quite a few more than four humors, after all.]
But the main impression you carry away is that left by the denouement, in which the cop in charge of the contingent of uniformed representatives of the patriarchy called in to restore Sanity and Order regards aghast the dungeon full of shambling zombies and shakes his head, saying: “It’s a good thing we have institutions that will take care of them for the rest of their lives.” Surely this confuses cause and effect.
____________Mehr Licht (9/17/02)
