As a longtime devotee of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I expected to encounter a familiar brand of B-movie schlock with the new triple-feature DVD Drive-In Retro Classics (Corinth, $22.99). The cover art depicts a man gleefully shooting death rays from his eyes, and the titles — The Brain From Planet Arous, The Hideous Sun Demon — seem ripe for riffing.
The biggest surprise may be the curated quality of these selections, as only one of the three satisfies these risible expectations. The other two features are compact, insightful, occasionally taut and even moving. And all three are distinct representations of their 1950s milieu — paranoid missives of the Atomic Age.
Even when clunkily delivered, as in The Brain From Planet Arous, these inexpensive genre pictures all explored the fallout from man’s atom-splitting folly. This message was never explored more artfully than in The Day the Earth Stood Still, but this collection is a reminder that Robert Wise’s masterpiece was far from alone in a expressing society’s conscience in a time of Cold War peril.
The strongest of the three, 1950’s Rocketship X-M, was in fact lampooned in the second season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, though it stands powerfully on its own. A patient, careful and progressive take on the moon shot released 11 years before President John F. Kennedy’s famous address to Congress, it follows a group of five astronauts —including a young Lloyd Bridges, as the chief pilot — on their maiden voyage aboard a primitive rocket. Everything’s going to plan until they lose power, veer off course and wind up on Mars, a burned-out nuclear wasteland whose only survivors are blind and deformed. If these intrepid adventurers make it back to Earth, the message is crystal-clear: Let’s not follow the Martians’ lead, eh?
Unusual for its era, Rocketship X-M features a female astronaut (Osa Massen) striving for self-determination in a misogynistic environment, who is the smartest one on the capsule despite all the mansplaining and ogling (Alas, “unless you look like a test tube or a chemical formula, you haven’t got a chance,” laments Bridges’s Col. Floyd). The film explores basic but authentic astrophysics in its Earthbound first act, and it may be one of the cinema’s first depictions of the overview effect — the stunned perspective shared by nearly everyone who has gazed at Earth through the window of a rocket. There’s even a nifty deployment of red color tinting when our explorers land on Mars. Perhaps boldest of all is the movie’s bleak ending, which renders its cautionary tale all the more potent.
The Hideous Sun Demon, released in 1959 and later spoofed by RiffTrax, a successor to MST3K, is saddled with a Z-grade title that does it little justice. The film is more nuanced and poignant than it lets on; its title character is misunderstood, not evil.
After an accident in a nuclear testing lab sends him to the hospital, Dr. Gil McKenna (Robert Clarke, also the film’s co-writer/director) discovers that sunlight transforms him into a lizard-man — a hideous sun demon, if you will — by essentially reversing evolution. “Darwin never even scratched the surface; how could he?” Gil writes acidly in his diary, shackled at home from the sun’s rays. Not content to stay shuttered from the outside world, Gil prowls the local bars, even picks up a torch singer from one of the seedier places, risking exposure as dawn approaches.
I dug the urban, noirish atmosphere Clarke creates here, with its gangsters and femme fatale, its chiaroscuro shadows and swinging lightbulbs, all unorthodox for a monster movie. There are some imaginative compositions, too: With the reptilian Gil hiding out in an oil field and seemingly kidnapping an innocent little girl, the action is framed through the suggestive churn of an oil derrick, a touch that would have made Hitchcock proud. Mostly, though, The Hideous Sun Demon endures because Clarke has real compassion for his doomed protagonist.
Then we have The Brain From Planet Arous (1957), the only picture that really fits the image of a “drive-in retro classic,” the movie that’s most appropriate for necking and ignoring — the perfect white noise for youthful indiscretions. Nuclear scientist Steve March (John Agar) explores a radioactively dense mountain outside White Sands, N.M., only to return home as “host” to an alien brain bent on world destruction — and on bedding Steve’s fiancée (Joyce Meadows), even if to the outside world Steve just resembles a dead-eyed version of himself.
Agar is menacing enough in his corn-fed middle-class blandness, but director Nathan H. Juran pitches everything to a point of hysteria. The clangorous score works overtime to sell nonexistent tension, the villain laughs maniacally when fortune swings in his favor, and we can see the strings.
Yet even here, through the terrible SFX of a diaphanous rear-projected brain with human eyes and a booming voiceover, we can’t forget that it was an act of radioactive fallout that brought the entity here. As in the other sci-fi message movies of the era, we can’t help but think back to Robert Oppenheimer’s ominous adoption of the Hindu scripture “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” It’s all right here, and remains so — no hostile extraterrestrials needed.