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| (Night #3 of the Ten Days of Ed Wood - Acidemic Holiday Special) |
"I'll make you the most powerful thing on the universe! (sic)
Move over Kenne Duncan, James Craig is on his way to the podium. He just won the Ed Wood award for meanest character in films, and he's in a shoving mood. The film is confusingly called Revenge of Dr. X in the opening credits, which are from a different movie (one of those Eddie Romero 'blood island' films). Regardless of his name appearing nowhere in these credits, the script is clearly Wood's. How do we know for sure this attribution is 'correct'? Opening thunderstorms? Scientific jargon from supposed experts? The way normal conversation is tried for but instead comes off slightly manic, with the lead character seeming to always work himself up to a furious froth and/or dial out his spiel to utter profound 'truths' about the cosmos? All Wood signatures. But maybe the giveaway is the climax, which finds Craig's crazed burly rocket scientist-cum-atomic botanist standing at the lip of an active volcano, shouting "Insectovarus!" over and over, while cradling a baby goat in his arms.
No one out-crazies the Wood!
Craig plays Dr. Bragan, a Cape Kennedy rocket scientist with a lot of stress-related issues. He berates the other NASA scientists about the importance of accurate calculations when they come to him with what "could be" an error in their recently launched rocket's trajectory.
"COULD-Be's? Could-be's I cannot use!" Bragan rants. "I need facts! Facts, DO YOU HEAR?!!".
He rants against the storms of Florida and the people who thought it would be a good place to build a rocket platform. His rants are superimposed over some NASA stock footage. The latest rocket finally away, his assistant convinces him to take the summer off and go to Japan. As soon as he's done refusing, he finally agrees. Soon Bragan is driving up the Gulf coast to the airport (stopping along the way in case he finds some "interesting flora and fauna")
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| real life Ama |
At the gas station of a muddy-faced snake handler (Al Ricketts). Bragan realizes instantly he's found just the right experimental subject to bring to Japan--the Venus Flytrap! He digs one up, keeps it in a little box and gives it a seat on the plane, and has no problem whisking it through customs. He's smitten with this thing. Apparently, Darwin wrote about it being the most evolved of plants, so Bragan figures he can turn it human, you know, for a hobby.
Bragan is more relaxed than he's been in years!
Noriko (Atsuko Rome), the cousin of Bragan's assistant at NASA, meets Bragan at the airport to act as guide and to help with his experiments. English is clearly not her first language, and that's OK - nothing seems dubbed so she sounds just right. And if it was dubbed by some native speaker, it would be merely trite instead of strange, even though her lines are all in that weird Wood wording, i.e. unnatural and uncanny to begin with. As a result, her conversations with Bragan have a weird hallucinatory secret code abstraction that should prove a manna for Wood connoisseurs.
Noriko is a good assistant but get on his nerves by forever trying to get him to take a nap or eat breakfast, or all the things humans have to do to keep their strength. Doesn't she understand? He has NO TIME for rest! No TIME for breakfast! He cares only for his project. This is supposed to be a vacation but he's more insane and ornery than ever. But like the abusive blowhard he is, After his most intense blow-ups, he sheepishly apologizes, and so it goes.
Their days together clink by in a delirious montage set to kooky but soothing organ music that sounds like Raymond Scott's "Music for Baby" crossed with Candace Hilligoss's organ in Carnival of Souls. The hunchback caretaker of Noriko's family's remote Osaka greenhouse laboratory contributes to the noise by playing Bach's Toccata Fugue (over and over) on his pipe organ and raising a brood of ever-yapping puppies. Like Rickets wore, back at the snakes-n-gas garage in Florida, the hunchback walks around with big smears of mud on his face. No explanation needed, or probably existing.
And so the days go by, and Bragan's fly-trap grows up, as do the puppies. There's time for dalliances, though! Noriko and Bragan drive to the train station and stop and admire the view. They go to Tokyo to buy lab supplies. They drink sake. They get to know one another. They drive up the side of the volcano and are almost crushed by falling rocks.
But we don't care how much they dally in the valley because the music and dialogue are so weird we're continually gobsmacked. One can only guess that the director and producers didn't understand English enough to make script changes, and the actors weren't much for improvising, so we get an English language (not dubbed) film shot in Japan, written by Ed Wood with all his strange 'no human being would ever talk like this in the real world' genius making up for the murkiness of the video image (the only surviving print. i.e. what's floating around on the internet, is a washed out blur of whites-turned-turquoise and hungover faces).
And, man oh man, that crazy soundtrack never relents in its bouncing oboes, sudden military snare rolls, xylophone scales, and gentle chimes washing over with a whole sound effects record set worth of thunder, sea gulls, crashing surf, crow caws, cock crows, puppy whines, electrical appliance whirring (with animated electric current!), long slide whistles, and whistling, willow-whipping wind--all topped off by a glistening organ so full of roller rink jubilation it seems at times to wander down the street to the film next doo. The soundtrack to the beach and ocean scenes (Bragan needs a "Venus" Vesiculosa' to splice with his flytrap) are especially dreamy: church organ, rolling surf, swirling lute, chimes, skittering xylophone and a never-ending stream of bubbling all whirl together like some marvelous electronic lullaby. It's the soundscape equivalent of an industrial strength Ativan drop following a nervous breakdown at the mental hospital.
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| "now you bring the red to my face," |
Bragan and Noriko enlist the help of some topless local Japanese Amas (above left) and not just to shoehorn in nudity. And, once the Vesiculosa has been procured, Bragan, Noriko, the hunchback, and the puppies start wiling away the hours at their remote volcanic greenhouse (one wonders how splicing two plants together takes so much daily effort, rather than simply making a splice and waiting for the sprouts).
At night, Bragan skulks around through the stormy graveyard, which Noriko watches from her bedroom, in a negligee; she would be amenable, no doubt, to a nocturnal visit, but he only has eyes for his creature, whom he dubs "Insectovarus" and raises with as much Nietzschean cruelty as James Mason raises his human son in Bigger than Life. ("You can move, I'll make you move!") He reasons that to be able to walk around, Insectovarus will need to consume human blood, the kind of cause and effect insight that's the sole province of scientific geniuses like Wood: "If it takes the blood of a human heart to prove my theory, you will have the blood of a human heart!" (no one thinks to tell Ed that 'blood from a human heart' is almost redundant.) So he sneaks into a hospital in the dead of night and steals a syringe worth from a sleeping topless female patient. With the zeal of a sugar-addled twelve year-old kid bluffing his way through a science project he never studied for, Bragan delivers priceless Wood-brand jargon like: "I'll make you as human as the human element itself."
Wood was an avowed fan of the Universal pantheon, so it fits that Venus/Dr. X pays homage to Son of Frankenstein by incorporating Lugosi's "Your mother was the lightning!" speech to the monster, but he can't remember it, or Craig can't --so there are four variations over the course of the film:
You can think. You can reason. You must be part-human. But like all humans you're weak! I'll find a way. Mark my words, I'll find a way. Make you the most powerful thing on this universe (sic). Your mother was the soil... perhaps.... the lightning will become your father!"
Later he tries again: "Your father will be the rain! Your mother was the soil, maybe your father will be the lightning!"
But then he even gives a tertiary variation, less full of 'maybe's (science has no room for "maybes"!) later on. Now drunk and inspired: "Your father will be the rain! your powers are lightnings!" and later he drives it home while drinking and staring at Insectovarus as yet another thunderstorm crashes outside, noting rhetorically, "I do love wild things!" Then adding.
Your mother was the Eartth! The rain your blood! The lightning your power! Ahahahahaha!"
At which point he passes out and the plant finally starts moving around. GASP! It was just waiting for dad to pass out so he could sneak out and run amok downtown, just like me in the 80s!
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| "as human as the human element itself" |
Soon, Insectovarus is standing straight up and looking like some tall kid auditioning for a part in Matango or a school play on gardening, his pink flower petal shoulder pads and radish top hair just two parts of hius fun punk rock look. He has fanged pink catcher's mitt-style flytrap hands (and feet!) and big empty eye sockets. He cries a lot, talks in a pitch-shifted baby voice, and when he moves, we hear bent-note plucking like fleas sound when jumping around on dogs' backs in old WB cartoons. Noriko wants Insectovarus destroyed ("I wish that thing had died!") and for Bragan to take better care of himself ("you should eat!") She's very obsessed with his rest and nutrition, reflecting no doubt Ed's cagey worship/resentment towards the maternal.
When she gets pushy about it, Bragan barks at her ("Stop harping!"), only to sheepishly apologize, later, and finally come in for breakfast. As Joseph Ziemba says the film has a "beautiful warmth." Bragan is a hilarious drunk blowhard, but he's also warm and friendly, sometimes, like a big sloppy dog that only occasionally snaps at you. In fact, in that uneven oscillation he reminds me of my own drinker father. So I guess I really relate to Insectovarus.
Insectovarus needs to eat too. And there are lots of real dogs (those puppies) around... for awhile. Bragan takes forever wondering why Insectovarus isn't growing on a diet of sun and water alone. He's big, doctor! He needs big meals. It never dawned on you that a Venus Flytrap grown to man-size might want something more than just sun and water?
"You are no longer Dr. Bragan, scientist!" yells Norikio. "You are becoming Dr. Bragan, madman!"
The climax finds Insectovarus staggering loose and Noriko and Bragan hearing stories he's rampaging through the village. (we have to take their word for it). We do see him approaching and presumably eating a child, sparking the citizenry (again, shades of Frankenstein) to torch-wielding search party tradition. We see townspeople creeping up the face of the volcano with torches but they're more like a funeral procession than an angry mob. Dr. Bragan tells Noriko he must go up and find his beast alone and bring with him, only a "small farm animal." His last words to Noriko are: "Noriko, stay... Noriko.... stay here!" He sounds like he's talking to a dog that's trying to follow him into the grocery store. Bragan does this mainly as he wants to rescue his 'son' and sneak him into a less uptight town--knowing Ed as we do--we know a small part of him (and us) wanted to see him succeed. They can split the baby goat along the way! But Bragan and his creation fall into the volcano together, rather suddenly and matter of factly, leaving Noriko holding the goat. Only the lives god himself creates-- the goat and the girl who takes care of herself-- go on!
The answers are there in the howl of the wind, the crow of the cock, the whining of the puppies, the hum of the electrical equipment, the bouncing of the organ, the tipple of the xylophone, and the flea bounce pluck of the pizzicato string.
Answer received. Ed, we know it's you.
See also the Other 11 Nights of Wood, and Wood-esquery:
If i ever run into an ex im gonna bust out that licorice line.
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