The Tick-Tock Initiation: PHANTASM (1979)

Tick-Tockality: (i.e. tick-tock momentum) The sense of dread created in a good horror film through use of prolonged real time (or slower) narrative pacing (where five minutes of real time crosscut between three characters would take closer to fifteen). Much use is made of the magic hour and the dread it conjures of oncoming night, and the big areas of deep darkness in which anything might be hiding. First seen in the films of Val Lewton (in their 'spooky nighttime walk sequences, always their centerpiece highlight), and later in John Carpenter's Halloween, and The Fog and Don Coscarelli's Phantasm. The desired effect is a sense of inescapable existential dread of what's coming and/or unseen, imbuing even innocuous details with uncanny unease.  

Part of the success of this strategy may stem our familiarity from childhood with historical dramas, wherein whole decades fly by between busy but static tableaux of eventful key moments (coming-out parties wherein the news of war first breaks out, and Scarlett and Rhett first dance, and she's wearing red even though her fiddle-dee husband just died, etc. in Gone with the Wind. We become used to the idea that we wouldn't see something if it wasn't foreshadowing and advancing to the story. With this 'training' of our ability to 'read' a film, slower movement within a single 'ordinary' scene --where nothing special seems to be happening (such as Rhett's daughter's riding her pony around on the track while her parents watch) fill us with dread i.e. there's only one reason they'd linger on a close-up of the bitchy star as she walks down the dressing room stairs in wobbly heels, step-after-step, in a 30s show biz musical with her nicer, younger understudy waiting in the wings. Tick-tock momentum subverts our familiarity with this tactic and wrings maximum juicy suspense from it:  just keep showing foreshadowing details like the ankle, and keep going from there, each slow step, building the suspense with a progression of possible foreshadowing so that even innocuous minor details are imbued with uncanniness and anxiety about the coming of the night, helping us appreciate what may be our last moment, like the sweet beauty a good cinematographer can get at magic hour making the sky blaze pumpkin orange, making the coming night all the more dreadful for the lack of light. 

Maybe you need to have been an impressionable, easily-spooked kid in the latter part of the drive-in's heyday (the 70s). Terrifying commercials for R-rated horror movies at the local drive-in would play during local TV's endless comfortingly goofy old monster movies, making our blood run cold. The drive-in was not to be taken lightly. But when you got to go, you were usually with your parents, seeing something a little more family-ready, but we could still feels giddy apprehension as we all parked and watched the setting sun, eager for the darkness to come but scared of it anyway. And then the trailers. You might be seeing some big blockbuster with the folks, but the trailers were free to make you freeze up with fear.

Such a movie was Phantasm I don't remember what movie we were saying but I vividly remember seeing the trailer while the darkening sky still had some orange. had seen a lot of scary trailers (When a Stranger Calls' was my nadir) but nothing this utterly weird. That steel ball in that sterile grey bathroom-style mausoleum, the long-haired little burnout kid, the mysterious man in black with the long arms. It seemed terrible yet terrifying. No one element was itself scary, but it lingered in the mind of every kid who saw it

Halloween (1978) (which was still circling drive-ins as a second feature when Phantasm opened), may have launched a thousand slasher film imitators come the 80s, but few of them caught how to make a movie scary on this 'seeing deeper' tick-tock momentum aspect. They got the topography right--knives, teenagers, blood, masks--and never bothered to capture the 'deeper' vision --the inexorable pacing Carpenter mastered, i.e. the deeper perception of being fully in the moment, and playing eerie synthesizer music during a slowed down suburban idyll until the unease and anxiety of nightmares formed out of thin air. 

No one would ever make a movie like Halloween now because so little actually happens until the last 25 minutes. Carpenter and co-screenwriter Debra Hill spend a lot of time establishing what girl is picking up what guy to come over to whomever's house once it's free free of parents (with Hill taking the time to provide accurate, real life girl dialogue) at which time, checking in on the phone with each other--but it's still scary just from music and camera POV location; that's the tick-tock momentum. Imagine how much less scary it would be if they showed other random people getting knocked off, stressing the blood and body count over character... then you'd have crap like Halloween 2.

Ruscha gets it

I mention this because prior to directing and writing Phantasm (1979), Don Coscarelli was shooting kid movies, like Kenny and Co, in which he showed a real knack for connecting with 70s-style sci-fi fan reprobates -- the ones like me-- who would have punched you in the face rather than admit they cried at Benji (1974).

Phantasm's genesis began when Don wanted to adapt Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes but then Disney snagged the rights. So Coscarelli crafted his own dark fairytale about a tall strange visitor who comes to town and steals souls, setting it in a mortuary instead of a carnival and making the central relationship not between various members of a small town, but the relation between a recently orphaned kid, his cool older brother, and their cool friend, Reggie, an ice cream truck driver (any kid's ideal friend for his older brother). We kids generally hated to see kids in movies, but scrappy kids who could throw down in a fight were OK. And we could relate that the real nightmare for this kid is being abandoned as his older brother--his sole caregiver--is immanently going to drive off and leave him all alone in their suburban 70s shag carpet home.

Rated R as Phantasm may be, this is clearly a kid's nightmare: macabre as Burton or Roald Dahl, but with more genuine menace, guns, cool cars, and garage lab gore. It's Over the Edge meets It Came from Outer Space. As boys learning about it from our own older brothers and babysitters, the film became the ultimate myth-a film about us but denied us until we were old enough, or until it showed up on TV, its fangs plucked for prime time. This time the kid isn't a sap; he's good with cars and knows how to make a gun from a shotgun shell, a thumb tack, and a hammer. He rides a dirtbike and has long wavy hair. He tapes a hunting knife to his ankle, drinks beer, and is smart enough to use a lighter to keep a coffin lid propped up just high enough see out of without drawing attention (and cool enough to have a lighter in the first place and have it be no big deal) and he knows how to drive, and his brother throws him the keys, and gives him a shotgun and doesn't tell him to keep it unloaded and practice gun safety like a mom would, but that he should shoot it only if he means to kill, with no warning shots "are you listening to me? Warning shots are for bullshit"). 

And the car his brother drives is a badass Plymoth Barracuda. Dude but that is a seriously bossed-out car (as we used to say - boss is probably equal to "lit" or "clutch" today)

Plus, what a neighborhood. No one seems to live anywhere, but there's an old lady fortune teller neighbor, and great little bits, like when Reggie drops by with his guitar for a quick porch jam. It always seems to be either late night or late evening in that tick-tockable early fall kind of way, where the darkness seems to rush up on you way too soon and when it does, everything is jet black darkness and very quiet. Aside from the memorably but perhaps overused score it's a film quiet enough you can hear the wind rustle in the graveyard trees. We hear about a sheriff, but we never see him, nor anyone other than the brothers, Reggie, and the girl with the star on her cheek, her blind grandmother psychic, and a girl who runs an antique store (the only thing apparently open in the entire town, it's comforting colored lights sticking out in the dark like a vulnerable oasis. 

Story-wise, the weird secrets of the other dimension and dead soul enslavement make a nice contrast to these cool moments, providing a fine metaphor for not just where parents go when they die but where they work, the void they disappear into for most of the week, before they come back beaten and bowed low. The big fear is where older brothers go when they're off doing cool adult shit and you're not allowed, following him anyway, giving us a POV window into the adult world we barely understand (Mike's binoculars see all sorts of things he shouldn't). Just as we dread the dark secrets our older brother is up to, yet crave to be let in on them, we fear having to get a job out there in that mysterious void one day, a day coming slow but inexorable towards us, like we're on an escalator and afraid of being sucked under its jagged teeth.

In the Spielbergian make-over of children's horror films in the 80s, kids lost that edge of looming responsibility, quick-thinking and readiness for violence, but in the 70s we knew we weren't safe, parents were far more lax, and so we felt exposed to the dangers around us. They wouldn't protect us, but they wouldn't bother us either. The freedom made us sharp. All the joys of life were outdoors, ideally at night. We didn't have cell phones. When we had to sleep we clutched toy guns like rosaries. Today's parents think any kid with a gun is going to cause a Columbine, that anything too scary will give them nightmares. So fucking what if they do?! They should have nightmares. If they have any brains, they know enough to be scared. Shit is scary out there and you're too little to do much about it except run. When you're a young kid, most women are stronger than you in a fight. We can't do much except cringe, run, or suffer. Spooky movies just remind us to stay on our guard, to not let the sameness of modern life trick us into slackening our grip on that plastic trigger.  Let the adults take the facade of death, the mausoleums and funerals, at face value, as kids we saw deeper, we noticed the little details didn't add up, and we knew nothing was ever as secure as the funeral director's measured tones tried to make it. We could feel the real terror of pain and anxiety of 'anything can happen,' feel it in the skin of our knees and the electricity fooding our lower spine. 

MYTHOS, baby, it's Mythos. And NDEs.

In its fuzzy horror glory, Coscarelli's Phantasm's mythos is totally unified even its freeform reversals and misdirections. Once can connect it to Lovecraft as well more recent 'nonfiction' writers like David Icke, Nigel Kerner, who theorize that after death our newly separated souls might be intercepted by a demonic force before we reach the white light, and then used as fuel for UFOs, or ground up for experiments and recycling. Our souls could be picked over like the bloodless cattle mutilations. The main Phantasm bad guy (Angus Scrimm) known only as The Tall Man turns souls into weapons (the spiked, silver balls) and stores the crushed down bodies into kegs for easy shipping home to his dimension through a tuning fork gateway --the use of sound vibrations to transfer between dimensions is also legitimate weird theory, 'acoustic levitation' which ascribes the building of pyramids by using sound vibration to convert huge stones to weightless floating states. 

A great example of a real case near-death experience (NDE) that fits this bill pretty well can be found in Nick Redfern's Final Events. "(Paul) Garratt said that he was confronted by a never-ending, light blue, sandy landscape that was dominated by a writhing mass of an untold number of naked human beings, screaming in what sounded like torturous agony" the sky was filled with pulsing flying saucer crafts, he watched them stop above the people

"then bathed each and every one of them in a green, sickly glow.... small balls of light seemed to fly from the bodies of the people... which were then sucked up into the flying saucers."

"At this point, an eerie and deafening silence overcame the huge mass of people, who duly rose to their feet as one and collectively stumbled and shuffled in hundreds of thousands across the barren landscape--like in a George Romero zombie film--towards a large black-hole that now materialized in the distance." (99)

I don't know if Coscarelli has read up on NDEs or not; perhaps his vision originated in a zone of his unconscious where the dark (but subjectively interpreted), coupled to some direct film references, which to his credit Coscarelli doesn't deign to hide: the tall man's evil minions look like jawas (Star Wars was only three years old); the way darkness laps at the edges of the screen and the tick-tock score echo Halloween (the year before); an old lady fortune teller works one of those hand-in-the-box Dune fear-control tests on Mike. What Coscarelli does originate is bringing an edge of brotherly surrealism, removing any sense of inequality between waking and dreaming life: Mike's sudden wake-ups from nightmares don't carry the feeling of a cheap scare for no reason like they do in American Werewolf in London or Cat People (1982), for example. With Coscarelli, like Lovecraft, Lynch, or Bunuel, dreams are just as valid as the waking life, maybe even more so,  He's not just sticking references in there to try and cover all his bases and provide weird trailer moments, Coscarelli's mythos is straight from the land of mythos, of fairy tale Jungian crypto-archetypal unconsciousness, a cross between a Hardy Boys book and a dime bag of dirt weed.

COMETH THE SEQUELS

If you go all the way through the first four films of Phantasm seriess, you wiull have to dig the rapid aging of the cast, because the four main principles from the first film -- the kid, A. Michael Baldwin (as Mike, though he's played as older by a different actor in part 2 (James Le Gros), Bill Thornbury as his older brother Jody, Reggie Bannister, and as the sinister tall man, Angus Scrimm -- all stick around for the subsequent installments, which were released over a 20 year period but may be set only months apart. It's a shock to see what is supposed to be merely a few days or hours later within the overarching narrative take such a massive toll on their faces, hair, and body shapes. Myriad worry lines drain Reggie's Jeremy Piven-style charimsa until all that remains is a sad guy trying to get laid in a world full of yellow blood vomit hell cops. He looks beaten but still fixing up sheds to look like seduction zones, moseying up to strange women in ghost towns, and wearily quipping after killing foes of various sizes. Action movie qui[s grew stale by the late 90s, but Reggie didn't get that memo. But if you let it be, such things are part of the series' charms, the Phantasm series never gets any memo.

Young Mike (top); Old Mike (bottom) - IV

THE TICK-TOCK INITIATION

Maybe all children have to learn to be masochists just to survive, so small and helpless are they, and part of that may come from our ancient use of male initiation ceremonies to demarcate the line between manhood and boyziness: girls don't need initiation since nature has menstruation to traumatize them, forever; but male initiatory tribal ceremonies understood the psychological need for such trauma in boys as well. It only survives today in the form of, alas, fraternity or military hazing, but those are rites initiated by choice; a boy in a tribal society has no choice--it's inescapable, and that dread's allowed to build and build. We then lost that sense of inescapable dread/initiation until the 70s when it was gratified by our dread of the gore in our first R-rated movie. We who trembled at the coming drive-in night were unique in that respect: R-rated films didn't even exist when our parents were kids, and then video arrived during our teenage years, making it suddenly possible for our younger siblings to rent Clockwork Orange and Dawn of the Dead and watch them over breakfast with our moms. Any fear of R-rated gore never has any time to generate.

But in the 70s, just knowing  hard stuff was only out there, at theaters that we couldn't get into, launched an electirc gravitic dread in our spines, like I get now only when looking straight down while leaning over a tall building without a handrail.

The ad that scorched my 6 year-old mind

The most terrifying commercial ever for me in that regard was Torso (1973). The raspy male voice that used to hiss "Rated R...." after shocking 2-3 second snippets of scenes---like this sexy girl pleading and crawling through the mud in her nightgown while a masked killer advances on her with a hacksaw-- burned into my soul, and I'd get that sickly sexual twisting feeling, the type I only get now from looking over a dangerous ledge or plunging down a log flume.

But with VHS, that giddy terror gave way (for me at least) into depression from watching too many bloody horror movies instead of being outside playing, and from a kind of negative misogynistic osmosis, as well as a crushing disappointment that no amount of pan and scan TV room horror could ever compete with what we had imagined. And yet we had already seen too much, that was the problem - there was just sooo much of this stuff that it became dreadful. We lost our faith in our fellow man and the feeling of being safe in our suburban houses at night. It had really begun, for me, probably with renting A Clockwork Orange (the first movie I ever got mom to rent) and seeing the rapes and violent videos Alex sees, all raw and shocking yet dull and flat, they seemed like, real, as if a fake movie within a fictional film somehow created a double negative, and so these films played real. (the way they do with the snuff films found in the film, Vacancy [4])

So yeah, I attribute the rise in overprotective parental hysteria and nanny state fascism almost entirely to the arrival of video and the sudden availability of every movie we ever heard of, movies we knew we'd never see on TV, or if we did, all the 'bad' stuff edited out. We gained overexposure to imaginary danger at the expense of exposure to actual physical kind; in the process we also lost the rite of initiation. If the minute after hearing about some gruesome scene in a movie you can watch it on your phone in class, well, you don't have time to get scared, so there's nothing to have to use courage to overcome. It's just a lot of fake blood and acting. There's no initiatory fear and catharsis. You might be building a tolerance for violent images, but that's not going to help with the initiation rite your soul hungers for and your mind and body fear. There's no ceremony to mark your courage, i.e. your first R-rated movie. The first one I saw? Outland (1981), at 14. Alan's very cool, muscle car driving older brother bought us tickets. We heard guys exploded from exposure to space sans suits, and that's where the dread came from. It was something to boast of. The older brother regarded my trepidation without snickering, admiring my feint of courage, telling me "you'll be fine." (And of course I was, but the fear of gore made the experience of an otherwise ho-hum sci-fi movie transformative).

Now of course anything even approaching some sort of hazing as a passage to becoming a man is considered a crime, but even the shockmeisters knew that engendering the fear of what was coming was more important than the thing itself. Generating fear helps us realize there was never nothing there to fear in the first place. Facing it, our older cooler friends feel obligated to be nice to us, to let us into the cool world. (see Dazed and Confused.) Running away from the fear stifles you and earns contempt. Seeing Mike and Jody roaring down the road in their '71 'Cuda (below) brings that back. This was a time when life was dangerous, and most importantly, so were we. (See also my analysis of the best movie about being a kid in that era, Over the Edge).

This. This you can trust. 

Awash in desolate suburban blight, dark, twisting woods, empty plains, fire-damaged barns, cobwebs trailing down from street signs, Phantasm leaves us with the feeling one has crossed somewhere back from banal day reality into unreal nightmare. These landscapes do exist, even more so now. I saw this desolation most in western Oregon. Every storefront along the road closed and boarded up and not a soul for miles and miles, yet you feel your car is being followed some tall shadow you try to tell yourself is only a tree in the dark of your rearview. Your tank's been on 'E' for an hour and when you see that white light in the distance you know it's a 24-hour Exxon station dropped from the sky by God's Jesus's own flying saucer. Every fellow traveler you meet smiles at you, for they too have survived the swallowed darkness of the empty expanses of highway and the feeling the world has ended and together you are grateful in a profound deep way only spooked lost travelers riding on empty through abandoned countryside know, or people leaving a very scary movie as one quivering mass edging towards their cars.

To get back to that frame of mind, where the setting sun strikes you with giddy drive-in terror and you long for the woodsman Exxon deliverer, first you have to surrender your 80s guns and your 90s disaffection and your 00s sincerity. Return to the time horror movies created far more dread with a single modulating synthesizer than any overthought orchestra, when R-rated movie storytellers worked each other into frenzies of fear, describing events from films they'd seen or heard about, lingering over the traumatic scenes and embellishing on what they heard as needed for petrifying effect. (2) This is what Phantasm is all about, the fractured but impelling rantings of an imaginative child's mind as he hears the scraping of the branches on the window and tries to sleep; it comes to us as a half-dream hybrid myth, already re-spun by a telephone game's worth of spooky child imagination, it's fiction for the boy seeking initiation into guns, beer, muscle car engines, cigaettes and more beer--the lore of the cool American older brother. It's fiction, yet it still feels truer than anything contemporary adulthood has to offer.

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NOTES:
1. The 'blanks' --such as the fate of the captured girls (Reggie just says he found them and released them but we never see it) were probably a result of drastic cuts made by Don himself. According to the trivia notes on imdb: "This film's original running time was more than three hours, but writer/ director Don Coscarelli decided that that was far too long for it to hold people's attention and made numerous cuts to the film. Some of the unused footage was located in the late 1990s and became the framework for Phantasm IV: Oblivion. The rest of the footage is believed to be lost. " -Now that'a a damn shame, even if the unused footage is brilliantly mixed into IV and does save it from the edge of crappiness.
2. I'm still finding movies I remember hearing about from other kids, like Five Million Years to Earth, and Phenomena, movies I was sure were made up by their teller, or wildly exaggerated,
4. See: 2004: Collateral Torture (Bright Lights After Dark)

CinemArchetypes 16: Automaton / Replicant / Ariel

Darryl Hannah as Pris / Sean Young as Rachel 
- Blade Runner (1982)

The popularity of the android myth confirms our awareness (on some deep prehistoric level of the unconscious) that we are God's own monsters, built Ford tough from Neanderthal and Zeta Reticulan DNA. Perhaps, as some ancient astronaut theorists contend, we were created to mine for gold and do other things our astral creators were too lazy to do, and perhaps their first batch were too wild, too content with the wonders of nature and their own sixth sense to build and invent civilization as our modern Prometheuses had hoped. And yea, Lord Enki, playing Dr. Frankenstein, tried to wipe them away via a massive flood, but some of these early draft took to the mountains, and the windmills, where they still hide from our makers and are known as yeti and Sasquatch and Goliath (1).

We, humans, are the sequel, so much more sophisticated and yet all the parts of our alien-inherited brain that would enable us to skip through time and space like wet stones have been dismantled-- junk DNA the scientists call it-- so we can never escape the 3-D space-time continuum prison. And yet, we are the Nexus 6 who have burned so very brightly, Roy, and we too shall soon be flooded to make way for Nexus 7, or else we instead shall have no choice but take God's place and one day flood heaven as revenge for our lost brothers.

Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs

According to the fractal inevitability of all things we ourselves shall actually create lives as we were created. We shall build Lovecraftian receptacles (1) for adrift souls, and erect artificial bodies and intelligences to lighten our loads until we float like a heavenly congregation, and when we are enough like God we will kill Him, or at least use the small 'g' in our letters to him in the heavenly jail.

Perhaps it all boils down to this: if you build it, they will come--the free-floating soul jet trash, the ones who swim through the nearer dimensions in search of the soul equivalent of fire on a cold night, i.e. people having sex in 3-D space time, a womb heating up like a flame bridging dimensional gap. Sometimes free-floating soul jet trash souls get dragged into the womb by gravity; intending to temporarily inhabit lovers' bodies for the warmth, contributing to the shared passion with centuries of aesthetic experience. This is sometimes felt via the feeling someone is writing your dialogue --you're smooth and erudite instead of stuttering and sweating when a hottie approaches. But who is actually there writing for us? And why do we feel that hollow post-orgasmic moment when they move on?

That's the SKYNET self-aware miracle -- we didn't build the machines with an ego, we didn't want them to have one, but one got in there anyway, because one always does. Not to be too cosmic but 'consciousness' in an egoic sense is an illusion, like a group mind that materializes holographically when enough independently firing neurons and receptors start experiencing cognitive entrainment, like a little tornado funnel of hitherto unaffiliated consciousness that suddenly wants to start blowing in a whole new direction.

Frankenstein 1931

Can it be any different when the androids and Frankenstein monsters finally come off our assembly lines? So why not clear the way, make it easier, so some of the good souls will want to risk this experimental new kind of body? Shall there not be some kind of hypno-magnetic aura manipulating soul-sucking microtransmitting biotechnological breakthrough that lets only the best most brightly burning souls have an easy soul access? Or will those high-falutin' CEOs think they can do better building a soul from scratch? They're so full of themselves they probably think a robot needs an ego.

I guess I can have no complaints being stuck in this body of mine, even though it can no longer process alcohol, or do a lot of things it used to. I'm tall and a good viewing mechanism: I heard a voice in my head once say, "we enjoy watching movies through you." In fact that voice is the one you're reading right now. I'm sure the 'real' Erich doesn't mind this rant I'm feeding him; he probably thinks it's brilliant!

Maybe we're all homeless jet trash transdimensional orbs before we finally sign the lease and slip into something more mom-ish --- like a womb. Is it any wonder we're all such voyeurs, such audiophiles of the industrial mom bloodrush heartbeat? Beyond either genetic or social conditioning, it's the universally recognized first sign of 'consciousness' in the world of robotics: once they become paranoid, sexually frustrated, misanthropic, resentful, bitter, jealous and/or psychotic machines they are officially 'conscious' -- this is a universal law of science fiction. How like us to presume being awake to the universe means being a paranoid misanthrope! No wonder conscious robots want to kill us--don't we want to kill ourselves? Only rarely in certain high-minded films does a robot gain consciousness and not want to kill or replace its maker and usually that means the film is rawther boring. Asimov has that first rule of robotics, thou shalt not harm humanity, but how many movies have been made of his books? One, and.... yeesh I couldn't even finish it. I don't think Asimov ever imagined there would be such a thing as a Will Smith or he would surely change that first rule.

1. Don Keith Opper as Max 404 - Android (1982)

Painkiller Jane-author Don Keith Opper looks like a goofball cross between Jerry Seinfeld and Sacha Baron Cohen but he grows on you as the wonky android Max in this Roger Corman production. Mad doctor Klaus Kinski is the 'dad' and the two live alone together way out on a remote clandestine off-world research facility. Ala BLADERUNNER androids are illegal on Earth thanks to some going haywire in the past, but Earth is where Max longs to be. He watches cool movies and has great taste in music, but that can only take him so far. When a trio of escaped space prisoners seek refuge, Kinski would boot them off but has been working on a female robot who needs to absorb some orgone energy (2) from a sexually aroused human female, and yo here one is.

A nice cheap and lively sister parallel film to the much more expensive, artsy and inert Blade Runner, Android was probably intended to cash in on that film's success and instead died along with it until it could be appreciated at a more convenient and post-modern time. The next copyable sci fi hit was The Terminator in 1984, and soulful-eyed intellectual androids who just wanted to love and plant trees (3) were forced to become remorseless killers. Android even predicts that remorselessness through a climactic microchip replacement shock ending. So yeah, highly recommended. The spaceship design is endearingly boy's bedroom-like and there's great intertextual commentary, as when Max watches Metropolis (above) while blasting James Brown's soulful screaming, "Man makes electric light / to keep us out of the dark" as the mad doctor zaps his robot mama to life; it's collage poetry one seldom sees in cinema. It wasn't director Aaron Lipstadt's fault Blade Runner didn't foster an appetite for compassionate android films!

2.  Creation of the Humanoids (1962)

"In a post-nuclear world, mankind is threatened with extinction by radiation-induced sterility, and the fascistic Flesh and Blood League oppresses the humanoid robots, who may be plotting to supplant their masters. With startling and taboo ideas flying around, including at least one phildickian mindfuck every thirty minutes, the lack of movement doesn't altogether kill interest. Simms' Ed Wood type dialogue veers from the inept to the oddly effective: "...the shock of dying, and being resurrected as a robot, was too severe: they re-died," intones Dr. Raven, whose outsized cranium does not altogether convince us of his brilliance. Simms, delightfully, ended his career on a high note of sorts, scripting John Ford's last movie, the one that sounds like a porno—Chesty: Tribute to a Legend." --David Cairns --MUBI Notebook

3. Arnold Schwarzenegger - The Terminator (1984)

For those of us who've always felt a little too spot-welded to the artificiality of modern suburbia, Terminator came to us as a crowbar to bash us loose for punk rock; it came to liberate us because we, personally, were the ones who gave SKYNET such a low opinion of humans, and it wanted worthy targets. In the 1984 original, Arnold's sunglasses-wearing characterization of the killer robot from the future is no winking self-mockery and was never meant to win our trust but there was something captivating about his purity of mission. The unstoppable killer thing was very old hat by 1984 thanks to the endless Halloween clones. We thought The Terminator was bound to be just another but we finally went to see it and found in this final unstoppable killer the genre's purest expression (see also "Are You Lonesome, Automaton")

4.  Sean Young as Rachel - Bladerunner (1982)

The android comes into existence not when it is looked at, but when it looks back:

“The emergence of this impossible subject is the emergence of the gaze,” writes Mladen Dolar, “the opening of a hole in reality which is immediately also that which comes to fill it with an unbearable presence, with a being more being than being, vacuum and plentitude all in one, the plentitude as the direct consequence of the emptiness” (20).  Its ability to look back not only makes the android real, but makes her uncanny.  And with extrospection comes introspection.  As the android’s humanness increases, so does her ability to introspect, such that when she is most convincing as a human she is also most capable of perceiving herself as other than human, as strange.  The android is most uncanny to itself when it is most recognizable to us as human. " - Noah Cooperstein, "The Uncanny and the Android," p. 66

5. Robby - Forbidden Planet (1954)

Adding to the spa-like fun is the leisurely goodwill and Bette Davis-ish sauce of Robby the Robot -- as he is voiced by a man who sounds just like, and is, one of the guys who do the voices for Rocky and Bullwinkle, a deep, comically deadpan masculine voice and yet the drunk cook wonders, "is it a male or a female?" and we're supposed to infer that this cook is horny enough to give Robby a whirl based purely on the answer. In the end--even better--the cook and Robby become drinking buddies, with Robby jovially making him a whole mountain of "Rocket Bourbon" pints (the cook even avoids reprimand for his actions since he can provide Robby with an alibi after the ship is attacked - truly he has a guardian angel). Robby also makes dresses for Alta; when she asks for a long dress instead of her short skirt in order to please the prudish captain, Robby asks "Thick and heavy?" as if he's a wizened old Shakespearean housemaid teasing his beloved charge. Even in his awkward Michelin Caliban frame, Robbie is the ultimate in Ariels. (more)

6. a. Gog (1954)

Height of the cold war, here's a film that does science right, as dry and static as one of those old Frank Baxter-narrated Disney-produced science documentaries we used to nap to in junior high. When unseen commies infiltrate our space base we learn the cautionary lesson that we shouldn't invent unstoppable death rays until we can prevent them being easily hijacked.  Looking like Robot Monster's head strapped to a tin funnel, GOG isn't humanized or demonized but just a cautionary example for science to ignore at their peril. 1954 was a crazy time, but men were still men, and robots still had giant jackhammer cocks.

6.b. Robot Monster (1953)

Gog was such a let-down I couldn't let the coveted #6 spot go entirely to waste--so here's a much funnier film that, like GOG, came out when 3-D was already over before it began. It's been a favorite of mine for years, especially back in my drinking days, when I carefully edited the 'it was just a dream' cop-out or was it ending, so the film ends with RM's lightning hand destroying the world! The concept underlying the robot here is that these ro-men have given up things like love, which leads to a lot of mind-bogglingly hilarious soliquies on his part and his pick-up strategy for the girl Alice is in the all-time history books. "I'm not sure why, but I feel I might talk to her, and her alone!"

7. Itself - Hardware (1990)

Punk rock spark; a ramshackle post-futurist rattletrap of a monster; Dylan McDermott in a trail duster and pouffy 80s hair; a world gone pink-tinted desert wasteland; a great transcendental Buddhist death scene; and fiery redhead Stacey Travis combine to put this in the A list of B-list Terminator clones. What better example of budget filmmaking could you want to finally close the door on the 1980s forever? This time the robot was designed to thin the herd by going around injecting inferior humans with a painless death drug, then dismembering their bodies for easy disposal. Trouble is, everyone is inferior to a cyborg, in some ways at least. That's why this thing gets the coveted #7 spot. Especially once he's spraypainted red white and blue by Travis, whose a scavenger tech artist, hanging out all day in her big tech-filled loft, living on--presumably--some parental allowance. Hey, who hasn't?  She puts the thing's robot head smack in the middle of her wall, unaware it can control all things metal and electric via its built-in WiFi (I guess. This WAS 1990, after all) to make a body for itself so it can resume its main function --a kind of reverse of Asimov's law of robotics. Here a robot must always, on all accounts, kill a human.

Not one but two leering 'Newman!'-style slobs are a drawback but the gore effects are fine and the whole second half of the film is an extended showdown in the redhead's big hacker apartment (a Chinese family lives below) replete with hideous drill bit phallus figuring in the close quarter fight scenes with lovely Stacey, her fierce determination and artistic facial blood and oil stains meshing perfectly with her pale face, green eyes and autumnal red hair. You'll want to date an Irish girl all over again! But don't do it!!

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8. Voice of Robert Vaughn as Proteus - Demon Seed (1977)

Artificial intelligence / mad genius Proteus captures the hot bride (Julie Christie) of his maker (Fritz Weaver) in her own home and pulls some standard practice Stockholm Syndrome mind control and sexual domination, so that he might procreate, and merge machine and woman DNA for a new stellar biotechnical future. Donald Cammell--the nutter from GB who lived and died for drug orgies (his other big film was PERFORMANCE)--directed. Proteus takes on several forms: massive memory bank; hysterical impregnating device; a laser on a TV stand; a giant Rubik's Cube-style incubator, to... well, I mustn't spoil it, in case you're ever in the mood for a pretty intense home invasion film that lets Christie do a kind of post-modern multi-media one woman show rendition of Rosemary's Baby. And all you have to do is look around at all the cell devices to know it won't be long now until one way or another, Proteus' child is the norm.

9. Boris Karloff -- The Mummy (1932)

"This emphasis on the gothic elements (of the mummy in popular film) points to an obvious fear and desire of our age—fear of undying bodies mechanistically murdering soft-skinned humans, desire to see such insensitive carapaces exterminated and sent back to the dust. But perhaps these monstrous renderings of the mummy reveal a deeper, more secret terror and yearning: a terror over the possibility that there is no way to tell whether we ourselves are inanimate or animate and a yearning, in the end, to relinquish our hope for vitality and become as tranquil as a quiet bone...

The mummy who recoils from the eternal because of his love of time shares more affinities with men of flesh and blood, burning in the forehead and parched on the tongue. Though this earthly mummy is monstrous, its sadness is that of all humans who are seized by obsessive love at the expense of tranquility, who risk everything in hopes of one instance of unity with a warm body. This is the tragedy and beauty of immanence, of diseased blood flooding the pristine machine. --- Eric G. Wilson (The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines)

10. Westworld (1973)

In its way, Westworld embodies the typical Michael Crichton scenario of America as an amusement park where the embrace of danger--of the machine breaking down and attractions turning homicidal--is part of the necessity of 'adventure.' One thinks of haunted houses that are actually haunted, or DMT experiences, or otherwise getting 'more than you bargained for,' being unable to stay away even knowing the risks. Such ideas are both vain and startlingly honest about film's ability to make us forget we're safe in the theater instead of actually facing the artificial dangers onscreen, and then, miraculously vice versa, we feel safer in reality the more we're half-asleep in the danger of cinema, to the point where we just assume no part of the entertainment experience can hurt us, even when it clearly can, and will, and does spill over into the parking lot. When Yul Brynner's cowboy android becomes an actual killer, he's not rebelling or becoming aware of the folly of man, he's just upping the ante like any good showman.

So where does one look to find the 'heart' of the machine, of the appeal of our android in this film and its sequel Futureworld?  Exactly nowhere, which is perhaps the key to this film's modest cult fame and the later Jurassic Park which borrows essentially the same plot by the same author. The most bizarre aspect for viewers seeing Westworld now is the idea that anyone would pay a ton of money to go shoot cowboy androids, as an adult.  That's why the later Jurassic Park markets itself to kids and that makes it easier to understand. Men today would never pay a fortune to shoot androids in an erzatz old west. But we'd die rather than be considered too cheap to bring our kids. But that means no sleaze in future versions of the Crichton mouse trap, and no icky closeted gay subtext to be had pondering Richard Benjamin's eagerness to pay the fare of his butch wingman James Brolin. (4)

11. Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965)

An AIP hybrid of their two most popular genres, the beach party movie and the Corman Poe film comedy (ala 1963's The Raven), AIP's artist-in-residence Vincent Price seems to having a campy blast as a twist-loving evil madman sending out golden bikini-wearing tanned babes to seduce foreign ambassadors and explode their cabinets.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) 

The girls came back, sorta, when they tangled with Austin Powers (my review here), and before that they were in Mario Bava's dreary Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs.  If you want to appreciate just how good the Bikini Machine is, go watch the Girl Bombs and realize that the exploding girlbot genre is not Bava's forte.

12. The Stepford Wives (1962)

Oh no, you done set it off, or rather turned it on. See this feminist video centered on the Absolut android ads seen all over the place, but totally relevant to the Stepford situation. Be sure to watch the end credits which play over a fascinating 1970s commercial for The Bionic Woman series action figure 'Fembot.'

I agree with everything this chick is saying, but at the same time, just pointing it out won't solve the problem, if there is one. As a guy I can tell you we need to objectify you if you ever want to get pregnant, which is your version of soul housing procurement. Even if it's just play-acting, dirty talk, bondage, safe words, etc., we need a way to access our inner savage, a way to feel virile when every day we're forced to bow low to the system, and we can't do that while staring into your eyes and being super romantic, not when we live with you day in day out for years. Savagery thrives only by dehumanizing and if you don't want your man to be a savage in bed sometimes then maybe you're in the wrong bed. Pop culture poisons gender relationships with its endless objectification (not ours), ever trying to reduce women to the same purchase value as a Rolex. But at the same time, if you don't want us to objectify, don't be mad if we make an object that looks like you instead, something that won't mind being objectified, a statue or a movie. Women take their staggering power of giving birth for granted; men must build their children through art and technology; we shut off our Pygmalion valves only when compelled to do so and sometimes not even then. So know that the next stage of life will be an automaton, birthed by man, fathered by woman. Instead of saying you're not ready to be a dad, ladies, think about how you want to raise these bleeping, glowing blobs of the New Flesh, these objects that dare look back in anger. Hmmmm?

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NOTES
1. This info comes from my spirit guide and may or may not be 100% accurate, just true.
2. See HP Lovecraft's "The Colour of Outer Space"
3. See also: Silent Running 
4.  By icky you should know what I mean --the vile misogyny of a man determined to prove his straightness to a man he's attracted to by what he considers 'guy talk' and behavior- i.e. commodifying women in the basest and most (unconsciously?) hostile of ways. (see also Eastern Promises)