Growing up ALIEN: PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, THE TERROR WITHIN

I was a young kid when ALIEN (1979) came out, too young to see it. I heard about it nonstop of course--that it was beyond scary and had a few scenes that would burst your mind. VHS didn't really exist yet (maybe a few $1,000. Betamaxes at upscale malls). and we knew it would be edited to death when it finally came to the ABC Movie of the Week, so it was all but lost to us, except through the blanched faces of the adults who'd seen it. We could try to read the novelization, maybe, but we weren't up to that level of reader comprehension. When we were finally able to rent it on VHS a few years later, we were still terrified every step of the way. By the end though --I was underwhelmed. The whole Ian Holm thing took me right out of the suspense, and the cat business was so dumb, I thought, being allergic.

Then: the summer of ALIENS (1986), and I had just finished my freshman year at Syracuse. My girl and I still just friends for I was still waiting for girls to make the first move, like a putz. So I was very pent up and tension electric, my paralysis heightening the intensity of the film when I drove up for the weekend of her ritzy Connecticut digs. Back then the point of the gore and trauma was like the threat of spanking vs. the actual spanking as a child. A good parent maybe gets us scared of it, but if we get to the point we deserve it and actually get one, then spanking doesn't work anymore. Same with gore-- The point was to get us scared of seeing it, of being scared every moment and around every corner lurked the aliens. We were all on pins and needles. But by the end, our collective fear of the boogeyman had been stretched once too often, and as a result had militarized us. Now when I see Ripley running terrified down Nostromo corridors I feel nothing as far as suspense. Not having to worry about the physical threats awaiting the final girl is a relief --repetition-compulsion disorder has proven its worth. Ripley was weaponized -- "Let her alone, you bitch!!" 

Gore is just funny now, either fake (funny) or realistic (artistic), but seldom ominous, something we're afraid to see; now we can recognize the signature of each make-up, a Savini vs. a Bottin disembowelment. Once the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, shit gets old fast. Like if you commuted to work on a roller coaster, after a few years, it's just another goddamned commute.

By the time of ALIEN: RESURRECTION in 1997, just trying to generate suspense from aliens stalking humans seemed pointless, and Ripley couldn't possibly be tougher. She was now half-alien herself, any declaration of 'you bitch' could now be only directed at the mirror, and there was no longer any recognizable human in the cast, replaced instead by French director Jean Pierre-Jeunet's METAL HURLANT-style cartoonish bizarro world exaggerations. I saw it on Christmas Day in 1997 in Portsmouth with a different girl, a real girlfriend this time, for I'd found courage to make the first move at last. This time the only cool scene is of the always welcome and super-cool Michael Wincott discussing payments and acquisition of sleeping human cargo while having a cigar and drink with military commander Dan Hedaya (below). But even there, Jean-Pierre Jeunet makes sure Hedaya's eyebrows are even more tribble-like than usual.

Then there's the alien itself. It evolves. In the first film it was truly other -- there was nothing remotely like it, nothing we'd seen before - not even remotely close to any of our species except in the most preliminary or advanced of stages. By RESURRECTION time though it was just another smart mammal, making noises that sounded like pitch shifted lions, barking dogs and braying donkeys-- the weird baroque otherness of the original HR Giger alien design prompting nostalgia rather than shivers. Even the stomach bursting scenes carry no real unease anymore.

Galaxy of Terror

That's just human culture though, ALIEN's over-exposure-disseminated fear level drainage was inevitable. Throughout its long gestation there have been imitators and films that it in turn imitated, to the point John Hurt even shows up in SPACEBALLS (1987 - below), less than ten years later, and gives birth to a Vaudeville-kicking alien, a kids' movie by all accounts -- so an alien bursting out of a stomach goes from R-rated traumatic shock to G-rated joke in under ten years.

Spaceballs

Copy cats abounded too, James Cameron even got the job for ALIENS partially based on his success as art designer for Corman's ALIEN-imitating GALAXY OF TERROR (1981). Which makes sense, as a lot of the baroque majesty and sheer alienness of Ridley Scott's original is gone for Cameron's sequel, replaced by an erector set military gun locker aesthetic and cool feminist weaponization ala TERMINATOR.

But not all films in the ALIEN imitation canon lost the Ridley Scott look, and ALIEN itself is just a very strong central link in a vast web of motifs that have been simmering for 60 years. Time enough for a space pod to carry your frozen body across the vast expanse between 1965 and 1989 for example, and with that, let's look at two drive-in classics, one an inspiration for ALIEN the other inspired BY it:

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PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES 
(1965) Dir. Mario Bava

88 minutes

*** 1/2

Some films know just how to ease you into twilight sleep. Your unconscious mind uses the impressions from the soundtrack and dialogue as paint brushes to conjure alternate vistas as you dream yourself right off the couch and into the molasses chill of something like Bava's space fantasia PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. If you love dreaming your way through patches of otherworldly fog, eyes agog with the colors purple and red, ears lulled by the whoosh of space engines and throbbing moans of ancient races, unearthly winds, and second chakra ignited via badass proto-punk leather space uniforms with yellow piping, PLANET should be your destination. And the clear points of inspiration for Alien are numerous: for one thing, we don't have to deal with the usual origin story that sinks so many unimaginative sci fi films (such as most of Ib Melchoir's other scripts), i.e. we don't have to see the space ships taking off from Earth; there's also an ancient race's crashed ship sending an SOS that turns out to be a warning, or something.

Only FORBIDDEN PLANET before it knew that we could start from a very alien place and not need origin stories; the humans even fly in a saucer UFO instead of a phallic rocket, and we don't need to know why. PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES picked up on that - the crews here aren't even necessarily human or from Earth at all, and it doesn't matter. There's a mysterious SOS signal calling two craft here to a strange planet, where they discover an ancient crashed spaceship with dead giant aliens now reduced to calcified bones that make them look like they were giant elephant men, a bit like the huge space jockey looks in ALIEN, and there’s also a great ending which in its way harkens to the theatrical ending of ALIEN: RESURRECTION.

The film's got some issues, such as it being hard to distinguish most of the cast from each other which makes the plot. It starts just like ALIEN with space ships already out in space, being rerouted to answer a strange distress call at a remote inhospitable (but lovingly lit) planet about to be devoured by its dying sun (or something), a kind of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, where the dead rise from their plastic coverings and hot Italian girls in leather jumpsuits (the kinkiest high fashion space crew uniforms ever) become possessed--hard to follow--who's playing who from which ship and who's possessed and/or dead and who's not, etc. But, with Bava devotee Tim Lucas' commentary track on the recent Blu-ray, we learn the reasoning and craft behind a lot of the maestro's DIY in-camera special effect tricks, and this knowledge enhances our enjoyment if for no other reason than it so clearly enhances Lucas's. Never merely a scholar, fan, or biographer, his commentaries are well-known to any classic horror fan and always worth hearing, related often in a kind of low whispering flow as if on the 18th fairway. He's well-versed in what actors are playing what characters, including when one character changes actors halfway through. It's a reassuring addition, that no matter what's onscreen we know it was intended just that way by one of horror cinema's great artists. We can kick back and let the soothing space noises... lull us... to... sleep. eep... ... bleep... blip.... blip... captain, the coffin's empty, all over again! 

THE TERROR WITHIN 
(1989) - Dir Thierry Notz

88 minutes
***

This New World Alien rip smartly trims effects budget by moving the setting to Earth, but "underground" in the Mojave desert on a post-plague Earth, where only snakes and wandering mutant gargoyles survive. Aside from some terribly duck-like bills and alarming rows of teeth, the gargoyles aren't quite as ridiculous as most monsters in big rubber suits shambling around after suicidally slow-witted prey in the dead of desert daytime. Their craftiness and invulnerability make them formidable as hell, able to jump out of small spaces while being seven feet tall, as if inheriting all the DNA of both The Terminator and Michael Myers. Like other Corman pics of the era, there's eroticized monster rape to make sure the board gives the film an R, and this allows for a two-for-one shock--1) the pre-PC lurid pulp cover fetishizing of sexy girls having their clothes ripped off by all sorts of claws, ghost hands, or centipede legs (his original contribution to the Alien clone formula); 2) The inevitable unwanted pregnancy, short gestation, and ALIEN-esque cesarian birth. For me, at least, that makes it somehow less traumatizing than if perpetrated by the usual suspects. When a surviving human is found running through the Mojave brush, she's sexy, terrified, and pregnant, and thanks to the reticent scalpel of the doctor --they give a cesarian so they can study the whole fetus, instead of sluicing it through, as the lord intended, (1) doomed indeed.

Star Andreef vs. Wade

That aside, I admire the ballsy pro-choice angle when Sue (Star Andreeff) demands an abortion and the lady doctor refuses and we're allowed to wonder if it's because she's got designs on Sue's man, the 80s coiffed hero David (Andrew "Kirk Douglas’s telekinetic son in The Fury" Stevens). The doc says the reason is that Sue's too weak to undergo such a surgery, and that there's plenty of time to do it tomorrow, and that it's probably David's baby, and this after already denying the first lady an abortion she begs for, knowing what's coming. Oh man, for an alternate future with ultrasound. At any rate, David's the sort who thinks a crossbow in tight quarters is an effective weapon against a giant invulnerable monster, so his genetics might not be ideal anyway. His hair, though, is perfect and he's a decent, charismatic actor with good rapport, able to sync up with any other actor's idea of what terror is, allowing for triangulation of terror.

Most of the cast dies rapidly in their Darwinian order. George Kennedy is the C.O., and his stalwart ubiquity in big ensemble casts of the previous decade subliminally implies there's other stars around, so it's almost okay that there's not. Sexy Sue, meanwhile thinks that if her man's in trouble battling an invincible seven foot tall yet stealthy and rabidly horny monster three floors below, the best way to help is to hop in an elevator, barefoot and unarmed, to come rescue him. But the rapid cast disappearance is only the start of the greatness, because we end up with a wounded terrified under-armed pair of survivors who communicate mainly through a two-way intercom as they try to obliterate a monster mutant whose only weakness is his painful sensitivity to David's dog whistle. The last stretch is just the three of them locked in endless tussle  like THE TERMINATOR meets CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. In other words, awesome.

And there’s a dog in the film who ably helps out in novel ways (he’s their tracker and early warning system and fearlessly distracts and attacks their foes) and even survives at the end. I'm not spoiler alerting for that, because dogs get a notorious bad break in horror films. When one survives, it's a cause for note... and celebration...

So... skewed pro-choice compassion, a reasonably clear idea of where each person is in relation to one another at any given time and the usual quick rush Corman-brand momentum, all conspires to make TERROR worlds better than most ALIEN rip-offs. If only they hired Thierry Notz to make ALIEN 3, the way they hired Cameron for ALIENS, someone with Corman know-how, with a knack for doing a lot with a little, instead of wasting the opportunity on that cold misanthropic clinician David Fincher, who has no flair of science fiction, so turns it into burly all-male Brit kitchen sink drama.

If I didn't mention ALIEN 3 at all in the introduction, it's because Fincher gutted everything--it barely qualifies as a sequel, WITHIN is more loyal to the themes, even set on a stretch of desert scrub. At least they get hair, and it's dry. Setting the film entirely on a dismal mud planet that could be anywhere in any closed-down prison anywhere in shit-field England is not enough. Fincher has to incite lice (not even space lice!) shave everyone's heads and piss off the hair and makeup union. So instead of a sexy Ripley or a weaponized Ripley we get an almost gang-raped cellmate Ripley who needs to be rescued by a self-righteous Muslim, and the dog, oh goddamned you, Fincher... and for what? So another CGI blur can get thrown in another dumb cauldron of "liquid metal"? Or something? The ending's straight out of TERMINATOR 2 as I recall. Actually, maybe I need to see it again. I hear the extended 'work print cut' is better, and the alien comes out of an ox instead of a dog, as nature intended. That's not a spoiler, for one is always better off knowing these things when it comes to dogs in films by boarding school sadists.

I'm prejudiced too, for I remember renting ALIEN 3 from Blockbuster while visiting my brother in Arizona back in '92-ish, and not being able to understand what the hell was going on half the time thanks to bad pan and scanning, and seeing double thanks to a 1.75 liter of Seagram's, many one hits, and the constant interruptions by Fred's dumbass buddies. But hey, that's what Growing up ALIEN is all about, starting as a child savoring his terror in with two whole riveted families as a child in 1980, to the sequel as a college kid on a date in 1986, and now in the dry desert, drunk off my ass, after shooting empties in the backyard with an air rifle in 1992, picking on the dumbass friends of my well-armed little brother and slowly going from excited to bored to angry to just plain drunk, as a Bush-era layabout. I was never so lonely and miserable as I was in that desert with those lost boys. Damn you, Fincher.

The internet came soon after that and DVDs. AOL discs floated in from the mail like holy wafers and connected us to a buzzing phone modem of instant omnipresence. Our modem's alien bang bang-ing connecting noises lulled us into trances, like when we slept suspended in our M.O.T.H.E.R, not knowing what yet what she looked like, not knowing the modem beeping wasn't a distress signal at all... but a warning. Until the inevitable unmasking-- the grim evening we erupted out the Kane white T-shirt ether, and plopped into the opposite chair of our 1995 Astor Pl. Starbucks rendezvous to face her with a choking scream. She was our old freezarino, our empty helmet reflection dream beforehand and, afterwards, our whiskered freshwater monster. We needed to run, but just weren't fast enough to start. By then the buzzing modem was gone; we'd evolved, if you call it that. By the time we got our restful tomb prepared, it was already moved... ++

FUTURE WARD:
The Evolver Virus: PROMETHEUS, The Dead Files (10-21-12)

NOTES
1. You should know by now I don't mean Jesus, though I do believe in him, and believe that the devil is only the Kali to his Durga, and both have a sense of perspective and irony far beyond expectations.  

The Rosebud Principle

 

"Maybe it was something he lost"

Gawker founder Nick Denton recently learned the Zuckerbergian teachings of THE SOCIAL NETWORK the hard way: don't go changing formats in midstream, i.e. you can't expect people to endure slow confusing menus on their lunch break. Denton's recently lost tons of readers in a bid to redesign Gawker for the future. Redesigning is never smart until you have a billion friends, which is why Mark Zuckerberg is so uptight about the server being down even for a day in David Fincher's movie. You can't have doubt, or distraction or difficulty - the competition is too great. Was it self-sabotage, a fear of getting too big too fast that sent Denton on the wrong trail? And if one is, like Zuckerberg, free of such self-doubt, is it because of confidence, or just that the self-doubt already has a home, in bad relationships?

NETWORK's semi-fictionalized (?) Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is not as pompous--yet--as Charles Foster Kane in decreeing people will think "what I tell them to think!" and he's smart enough to never go down with the ship, because he sells everybody else out first. By contrast in the Big Jim Gettes segment of CITIZEN KANE (the only movie SOCIAL NETWORK can really be compared with), Welles' egotistical billionaire lets go of his common sense and decides to not bow out of New York's gubernatorial race, even if means exposing his love nest with "singer." Zuckerberg knows far more about the death knell of bad press than Kane, who smears right and left in his Inquirer but thinks himself immune. Hmmm-hmmm Zuckerberg knows better.

But I mention Rosebud because of the overarching theme of Fincher's film, which begins with Zuckerberg on a date with Erica (Rooney Mara) and hints Facebook was the result of a drunken bit of coder geek vengeance against her after she broke up with him just because he was more concerned with getting into snooty Harvard clubs than he was about her and her stupid personal issues. Once all Mark's problems are solved, and he's got 24 billion dollars, he remembers he invented Facebook just to stalk her, and lives obsessively ever after.

If old Foster Kane had been around in the age of Facebook, maybe there wouldn't have been so much confusion over who or what Rosebud was: he'd have a picture of it in his online FB albums! He'd have a sledding game on there, and a 'design your own vintage sled' app. The ornate picnics and famous guest-collecting could be canceled, because he wouldn't need to see his friends to prove they existed (only their pictures). He could make Xanadu online via one of those online worlds with the Sims.

In short, for all his fancy talk, Kane failed to crush the social sphere down to a small enough crumpled ball that he could find his obscure object of desire, that Rosebud. Zuckerberg on the other hand destroys the last vestiges of the gasping public sphere all so he can continually orbit around his beloved lost sled/girl because, in the process of amassing his fortune, he dissolved the meaning of wealth. The need to flaunt has been replaced by the need to haunt. A hundred bedroom mansions mean nothing if a poor hipster can party with 500 friends just from a desk in a studio apt.

In each case (Rosebud, Erica) we're caught in the same dramaturgical principle: the 'suspension of functional maturity.' The subject 'freezes' in time when the opportunity arises to escape the confines of his current life - and it resumes when he's climbed so far up there's no one in sight to see him 'need' openly. As a boy Kane dropped his sled when it was time to go to New York and learn to manage his inherited fortune. He remembers it only later, but "singer" Susan Foster comes into his line of flight right as he's about to go uncrate it. Finally preparing to project his objet petit a, Kane's receptivity finds an accidental screen in Susan. His purpose changes from resuming his interrupted childhood to trying to enforce the success of an unwilling opera star on an unwilling public. When his whole life crumbles to shit and he's on his death bed, only then he finally remembers the sled again. It's as if the 'story' of the rope ladder to success at the price of your soul hinges on this surrender of linear personal evolution, or something.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK is similarly constructed as the long personal grudge/obsession of a genius computer nerd over a girl... entrusted to inhabit the parameters of his objet petit a by the near-guarantee of her never wanting to see him again, no matter how many billions he amasses. Once she gives in and sleeps with him (or Kane finds Rosebud and holds it in his hands), the dream is over - it's just wood again.

As David Fincher is so able a candidate for the role of '21st century Welles' let's examine the nature of genius auteurs in depicting genius millionaires, with the fact borne in mind that movies are an intensely expensive endeavor. Even the smallest indie picture can cost millions and one can only assume that there's more skulduggery involved getting a film made than we will ever know. Compare for example Welles'--perhaps unconscious but nonetheless inexcusable--sabotaging of RKO via his boondoggling in Brazil in 1942 whilst attempting to edit both JOURNEY INTO FEAR and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS via long distance phone calls and telegrams while he slept with local models, waxed poetically over the suffering poor, and danced through Carnivale. (1) Compare that kind of infantile entitlement to Zuckerberg's in SOCIAL NETWORK and all the dots suddenly connect. "You don't make a billion friends without making a few enemies," and sometimes a billion friends are the worst enemy you can have.

Welles in Rio, alone with his million friends

Mark Z, with his.

The ultimate tragedy in both AMBERSONS and FEAR is they could have been great, if Welles had been there to see them through the studio machine to distribution. He wasn't, and ran so far over budget in Brazil he basically bankrupted the studio, then got sore when they re-edited and trimmed AMBERSONS without his consent. The nerve! Fincher seems more reliable as far as wasting other people's money, but don't forget ALIEN 3, which sucked - he all but sabotaged the entirety of the franchise. And frankly I don't like SEVEN, which seems the most claustrophobic and misanthropic of the post-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS genius serial killer movies imitations, and features one of Brad Pitt's most annoying performances, yeah?

Fincher digs coding

But all is forgiven with FIGHT CLUB, which almost started a revolution in the theater on E. 86th Street where I saw it, and of course ZODIAC. I still can't listen to any Donovan, let alone "Hurdy Gurdy Man" without getting nightmares. And yet, it's telling that there exists the question of which came first, Fincher's inability to create human warmth onscreen, or his themes of alienation and the collapse of the social sphere?

Like many emotionally-challenged auteurs, Fincher finds warmth at the office -- the autumnal 70s mod beauty of the newspaper bullpen in ZODIAC, the chummy office spaces of Facebook, but overall his worlds are dark and cold and always on the  brink of savagery. THE SOCIAL NETWORK then, is perfectly suited to his talents, or is it the other way around?

The night Zuckerberg creates the first FB prototype-- a 'who's hot / not" program-- Fincher cuts back and forth between Matt in his dorm and a sterile yet self-consciously 'decadent' exclusive Harvard club party, with bimbos bussed in from all around, for what is basically a long night of strippers and douchebag boys in club ties and backwards white baseball caps. Perhaps it's because my experiences on these lines were clouded in cigarette and pot smoke, full of drunk shouting and noisy bands, but this exclusive party Fincher depicts strikes me as tragically sad and date rapey hollow. Fincher's clinical dep-ick!-tion of it sets the tone for all subsequent SOCIAL gatherings. The women are all drug-addled groupies or wise, centered ladies who look down from their taut heels at lesser mortals--and the boys are either the aforementioned douchebags or rich nerds hiding behind CRTS, funnels, shots, and/or six-foot Graphix bongs. No one is 'connecting.' Ever. Even superstar Napster-creatin' Justin Timberlake is just boastin' and toastin' in a void where he knows everyone's name, but only to show off his memory. A Jewish fraternity's Caribbean night party, for example, is dead in the water since there could be a better party elsewhere. No one can enjoy a party if a better one might be going on somewhere, and by the laws of Groucho Marx, the best party is the one so exclusive they don't even know about it. During the day, lectures and classes are merely backdrops for late arrivals, note passing, and early, dramatic departures.

In sum, Fincher's version of Harvard represents the beginning of the end of the social sphere even before the arrival of Facebook. But again, which came first, the nanny state censoring nearly all our public acts (sexual harassment, smoking, basically everything done by Don Draper in MAD MEN) or the rise of online communities satisfying our final social need, allowing us to stay home alone forever without getting lonely?

Jack Daniels makes a brilliant 1.75 cameo

And is Fincher a misogynist or is the SN mise-en-scene meant to conjure misogyny, and gender stratification? By the end of THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Zuckerberg is blissfully alone, to stalk... and stalk... without getting rained on, or splashed by passing cars, or noticed, or paying for his crimes. The only ones who suffer in this new deal are the women who would prefer their men not hide, sneer, or shout obscenities from the safety of their limousine windows. But that's what money's for. It's to make willowy gorgeous waitresses with attitude smile at you for a 20% tip that could buy a jet ski.

I remember I used to suffer from great social anxiety before the arrival of Friendster. What helped me were my precious testimonials: "Erich is so cool" etc. I had like 300 of them! Being able to read that list of validations any time, like alone at four in the morning after a bad date, saved my sanity. So at the same time, the need to socialize in real time dropped off. By the time I'd migrated to Myspace and Livejournal I was depressed again (neither had testimonials) but I now had my insatiable urge fulfilled and, as smoking anywhere indoors became verboten, my socializing dropped off to nothing.

Now, on iMeds and Facebook I never go anywhere. Bars look weird with all that clear air. Now you can see the sad drunk all the way in the back of the room...  on his laptop, and the cute girl has her iPhone at the ready, repelling any and all would be hitter-onners with the inarguable pre-emptive presence of her black mirror while she waits for her internet date to show. Might as well stay home then, and hide, and wait for the collapse to complete, or until girls who aren't coke-addicted groupies finally find a way to see keyboard clacking as something sexy.... maybe via the flesh of the crushed black centipede?

But anyone can see that the gap between the 'real' of physical nuts-and-bolts-and-eye-contact reality and the safe anonymity of the web is widening to the point that soon not even a ten-foot pole will vault you across it.

A Rosebud by any other name would smell as sweet, until one finally uncrated it. Once exposed to modern air it would smell of musty, warped wood, traces of snow having long since gone to glowing liquid rust along the blades, the oxidation tempered by the crate's suffocating darkness. Better to keep it crated, then, forever, and just dream of it--all perfectly, preciously sad and abandoned--while you race down white sloping hills on that online winter sports app on your phone, pressing 'play again' over and over... until suddenly it's morning and there's no one left online to hear you crack your snow globe balls.

1) See Simon Callow's Orson Welles Volumer 2: Hello Americans