A Spoopy Month #18: The Wasp Woman

It's my last Corman of this October. It's 1959's The Wasp Woman.

To be completely honest, this was a much better movie than I expected. Well, let me rephrase. The story, and implications, of this film were much better than I expected. The film shows all the hallmarks of early low-budget Corman productions, the science makes no sense at all, and the monster makeup at the end of the movie is truly laughable. But the meaning of the film shouldn't be laughed at, not at all.

First off, this is a unique type of mad-scientist-makes-monster movie. To start with, the scientist isn't mad at all. As this article points out, our Dr. Zinthrop is cautious and methodical. Unique among movie scientists, his experimental documentation is painstaking and complete. The monster only happens because Dr. Zinthrop is required, for plot purposes, to stagger into traffic before he can stop the abuse of his method.

And why is our heroine, Janice Starlin, abusing his method in the first place? Well, she's a woman who got ahead in business using the only tools available to her in 1940's and 50's America: her youth and beauty. Since she abdicated her role as spokesperson for her cosmetics company, sales have been dropping. And she only abdicated because -- horror of horrors -- she's starting to look like she's on the far side of 30! So when Dr. Zinthrop's youth restoration method isn't working fast enough for her, Janice goes behind his back to multiply her personal dosage of his untested drug, a drug he didn't want to give her in the first place.

Don't get me wrong -- Ms. Starlin is far, far more than just a pretty face. The movie goes out of its way to show us she has a keen business sense and a strong grasp on the whims of the market. But she's lost confidence in her physical appearance. The age-makeup worn by the actress is fairly good for a film of this era and budget, but the youth makeup, when Janice starts to feel 20 again, is only part of the bargain. When the treatment has finally taken hold, Janice feels 20, and that gives her a bounce in her step and a huge smile. More importantly, it makes her once again feel confident that she can not only run her company, but serve as the trusted public face. 

On the other hand, now she's some kind of monster who kills people, drinks their blood, and (thankfully offscreen) is probably eating every bit of their bodies. She's going through at least one a day by the end, and no amount of market share is worth that.

In the end, this monster is made not by the evils of science, toying with things man was not meant to know, but by internalized sexism. The female voices in this movie are strong, and mostly admirable (or at least relatable), but it's clear that AMERICAN INDUSTRY is still very much a man's man's man's world. 

We all see what we expect to see -- it's part of the human condition. When the male board members of Starlin Cosmetics see Janice Starlin showing doubt and weakness, it never occurs to them that they might play some part in her self-doubt. When Janice looks in the mirror near the end, and sees herself looking 20 years younger, it never occurs to her that her smile and wide-open eyes have so much to do with it. And when we look back on a movie with this title, made by Roger Corman in this era, with this budget, we don't expect to have to think much about it. It's so easy to write it off as another cheapy monster exploitation movie (it even quotes the previous year's The Fly, as Janice screams "Help meeee!"). But we're better off if we don't. 

This film is, again, in the public domain, so you can watch it (or download it) at archive.org, which includes the ten minutes of extra padding added to the film (the loooooong opening sequence, where Dr. Zinthrop walks through fields and gets fired from his previous job, and the looooong search scene, where police drive around and around, looking for him since he was foolish enough to wander into traffic without carrying ID). I can't find a release of the film with that stuff taken back out, but here's a buy link for you anyway, just in case:

A Spoopy Month #7: A Bucket Of Blood

So here's our next full film review of the year: Roger Corman's low-budget nasty, A Bucket Of Blood. It's from 1959, and was Corman's first attempt at comedy (that Wikipedia link there is full of great info and background, and you should definitely read it if you're interested). More importantly, the success of this film led to Corman's next production, probably his best-known film, Little Shop Of Horrors. 

This is set in the world of the beatniks, and apparently is well-regarded as a fair, honest portrayal of the beatnik (though some of the jokes feel a little mean-spirited to me these days). It opens with a lengthy poem, recited over a saxophone, as the credits roll, but don't be fooled: The literary ambitions of that poem don't indicate that the movie is equally inaccessible.

Our protagonist, poor sweet-natured Walter the waiter, isn't particularly smart or creative, and sadly for him he's living in the beatnk world, which values smarts and creativity above all else. A series of accidents leads Walter down a dark path, and he learns he can exploit others to get acclaim and money for his "art". He's a sweet schlubby guy, with very little ambition in that direction, so it's a wild ride when we see him turn. (The screenwriter, Charles B. Griffith, also used that character arc to make Little Shop.)

In the long run, this movie is about artistic vampires: for centuries, artists have worried that the only way to make relatable, human art is to cannibalize their own lives and the lives of their friends and loved ones. (My first exposure to this concept is an essay by Neil Simon, wherein he tells us that he's always observing, never participating in life, since he's concerned more with getting things down to make his plays more real. He tells us that he worries his friends and family will complain about his use of their personal lives to further his career.) I can just imagine Griffith churning out these scripts, despairing that they'll always be low-budget triple-bill exploitation fare, wondering what he has to do to make the scripts more human, more real. It's, by this point, an old horror trope for an artist to sacrifice others for his continued efforts, sometimes quite literally like here or House Of Wax, but those stories rarely turn out well for the "hero" artists. Luckily, we know the ending of Griffith's story, and it's a lot happier than Walter Paisley's.

This movie has lapsed into the public domain, and if you want to spend the time, you should definitely feel free to watch the archive.org version embedded above, but the official DVD release linked down here is well-reviewed and will be a nice clean copy to own forever. I like to give you a buy link for everything I can, you know.

25 Days of Christmas #12: MST3K "Santa Claus"

So here's the second Christmas Mystery Science Theater: a 1959 Mexican film entitled Santa Claus.

Santa lives in his enormous workshop on a cloud high above the North Pole, with dozens of international children (who make all the toys) and his wondrous array of surveillance gadgets, made for him by Merlin. Yes, that Merlin. It's nearly Christmas, so it's time for Santa to finish setting up his nativity scene and sing a song urging his child laborers to finish that year's toy manufacturing. Then, evil rears its ugly head...

Satan really doesn't want Santa to succeed, so he sends Pitch, one of his lesser demons, to defeat Santa. Pitch tries to get our adorable little heroine, Lupita, to steal her only Christmas desire, a beautiful dolly, as Santa watches and listens helplessly (he can spy on us all the time, but only visit in person on the night of the 24th),

Santa and the narrator urge Lupita to resist Pitch's wheedling, and she repeatedly tells Pitch that stealing is bad and she wants to be good. And then it's the night of the 24th, and Santa has to wind up his clockwork magic reindeer:

Good, old-fashioned, nightmare fuel.

And we, the audience, are scarred for life. And that's only the first half of the film: After that, Santa and Pitch have several weird slapstick fights and Santa helps another good child, a poor little rich boy who only wants his parents to love him (Santa doses their drinks with a magical remembering potion). Pitch cuts a hole in Santa's bag of magical sleeping powders, and Santa loses his invisibility rose, and gets treed by a dog. Did I mention that Santa and Pitch have weird slapstick fights? Because they do. A lot. This is truly strange, and inexplicable. And, like Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, I can't imagine any Hollywood studio would make anything this damned weird.

The previous MST Christmas episode was a Joel-era one, and this is only about the tenth episode Mike hosted. The writing is, at this point, indistinguishable from the earlier part of this season, and Mike's in-theater riffing is already perfectly in-character and has a great flow. I watch both these Christmas episodes almost every December, and I think I've seen them more than any other MST3K, even Manos and Pod People and Mitchell. The two episodes, I noticed this week, do a few similar things in each:

1) Frank and Clay re-enact "Gift of the Magi."
2) In the riffs, Santa has Vietnam flashbacks.
3) A bot makes reference to "Carmen Miranda rights."
4) They make a reference to The Dick Van Dyke Show.
5) "Diarrhea is like a storm raging inside you."

If you care to read more about the riffs, there's an incomplete roundup here.

Coming up next, I have three Christmas-related episodes of Homicide: Life On The Street...

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Santa Claus   Mystery Science Theater 3000: XVI