THE BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES
1955
Directed by David Kramarsky and Roger Corman
When The Beast With a Million Eyes came out in June 1955, Roger Corman's directorial debut Five Guns West was only two months old, though as science fiction horror it's obviously less a follow-up to that oater than it is to the first film he produced, the previous year's Monster From the Ocean Floor, and in a strict sense it's not Corman's film anyway, but, at least going by the credits, David Kramarsky's, formerly a production assistant on Five Guns West and subsequently, well, not much, and not a single further directorial credit. Corman's name doesn't even show up in these credits (he was the film's executive producer, via an imprint that started out as "Pacemaker Productions" and became "San Mateo Productions," so we can add those to the veritable pile of different movie companies that Corman founded over his lifetime). Still, that hasn't stopped the persistent suggestion that Kramarsky was simply Corman's cut-out, far more than Wyott Ordung had been on Ocean Floor. Corman's shapeshifting business entities and withdrawal into the background were, it's said, mostly just an attempt to juke the unions, while it's apparently an acknowledged fact that, with the help of his cinematographer cohort, a similarly-uncredited Floyd Crosby, Corman at least directed most of the interior, studio-bound scenes himself (the figure bandied about is "48 pages," and this script couldn't have had too many more pages, interior or otherwise). And so we would've been obliged to treat with it, for Corman's sake, even if it would've made for a serviceable Cardboard Science entry regardless.
Only serviceable, though, and while the film is, pretty objectively, a more mechanically-functional object than Ocean Floor was (for a third of this one's runtime isn't locked into a go-nowhere subplot), it still lacks the spark and joy of Corman's first creature feature. It gamely tries to make up for that by having an actual sci-fi idea, rather than only a cheap, generic monster, although this particular idea attracted Corman less for the humanistic optimism it sets up, and more because its monster would be even cheaper: initially called The Unseen, Tom Filer's original script grabbed Corman's attention because the alien creature it imagines is, indeed, invisible—the beast of its punched-up title, you see, gets its million eyes from its proxies, the terrestrial life over which it exercises mental control. Not everyone was happy with this poetic license: the film was intended to satisfy Corman's original three-movie deal (besides Five Guns West, the other was The Fast and the Furious) with an American International Pictures that, like Corman, was also still struggling to be born (it was such early days that it was still just "the American Releasing Corporation"), and indeed, Million Eyes would prove the confirmation of that fruitful yet fractious partnership, though the fractiousness was inaugurated right here when AIP chief Samuel Arkoff said, "no, you can't have an alien invasion movie with an entirely invisible alien, our posters might be intentionally misleading but they can't be that intentionally misleading." This doubtless stressed Corman, considering that his budget for Million Eyes was already perhaps as low as $20,000 (or 5¢ per eye), thanks to overruns on Five Guns West having been met with the money for this one. Hence doing even as much "monster" as Ocean Floor was still out of the question. Nevertheless, Corman met Arkoff's challenge, his way: the alien's ship (Arkoff had also demanded a ship) looks like a broken espresso machine, and the alien, a puppet, is confined to an exceedingly small "reveal" at the end; Corman also stood true to his and Filer's vision, because, by God, this alien is a psychic force, and so that puppet, built and performed by debuting effects man Paul Blaisdell, is, well, a puppet, merely some random extraterrestial lifeform, one more victim of the rapacious, formless monstrosity that Filer had invented and Corman had embraced.
You can see that we have some inklings of intelligence in this ultra-low-budget sci-fi B-picture, and on that very forgiving curve, it's not too dishonorable an example of its form. So, typically enough, let's head out to the desert, though this time they actually are the nearby Californian hinterlands, specifically the date farm of Allan Kelley (Paul Birch), where also lives his wife Carol (Lorna Thayer) and their daughter Sandy (Dona Cole), plus, though he has a shack to himself, their mute and mentally-addled farmhand known only as "Him" (Leonard Traver), whose absence of identity will turn out to have the opposite of any justification in the script, though that's getting ahead of ourselves. In fact, what we start with, even before the opening credits, is voiceover narration from the titular monster itself, who lays out with astonishing forthrightness its nature (a disembodied intelligence), goals (Earthly conquest), and methods (the aforementioned mind control, starting with the less complex minds of animals before taking on humanity), and altogether coming pretty close to offering a plot summary that renders the movie we're about to watch redundant.
I kind of like the brusque arrogance of this opening gambit—"and how the hell are you pitiful Earth savages going to stop me?", even if it's likely as much an expression of nervousness regarding that whole "we don't actually have a monster" thing—but either way, I'd like it much more if Bruce Whitmore, providing the Beast's voice, sounded more like a star-spanning, hate-eating conqueror and less like he was pitching you a new brand of toothpaste. The narration, aided by montage (a symbolic, albeit singular, eye; footage from later in the film) then gives way to a series of surrealist paintings (possibly even semi-sculptural photo collages), presumably courtesy art director Albert Ruddy, which are all about "eyes": things that don't have eyes, like trees and rocks, and even virtually abstract shapes that might be more rocks but don't necessarily "need" to be anything, that have nonetheless sprouted numerous eyes, not a million but definitely dozens, and it's some good and creepy imagery.
Still, this is as much a buffer so we can have another voiceover, Allan himself—in case you're getting worried by the cumbersomeness of all the narration here, fear not, because whatever else it's at least not that kind of B-horror movie—and the effect, however clumsy, is to counterpoise this cosmic marauder's grand design against the humble domesticity of one family unit, and that's fair enough, given that the point of the movie is precisely that the latter is more powerful than the former. The Kelleys, anyway, are one unhappy family unit: Allan confides that the date farm hasn't made money in years; Carol stews in resentment, not just a housewife but a housewife in the middle of nowhere on a broke-ass farm; and she takes this out on everybody, even Sandy, who overhears Carol, in her tantrum, avow that of course she seethes with jealous hatred of their daughter, because Sandy hasn't completely fucked up her life yet; and "Him" has his own less-defined frustrations, though we can probably assume he's getting tired of whacking off to his girly mags, and would rather whack off to Sandy, which is why he contrives to peep on her while she swims in the irrigation channel, and why he expresses enmity towards her boyfriend, local cop Larry (Dick Sargent). The Kelleys' troubles are about to be thrown into relief: this day, some kind of high-pitched whine travels over the farm, shattering glasses and windows, and they initially assume it's just the Air Force being negligent again, but they're wrong, it's the Beast, who's just landed and begun to spread its influence across this stretch of desert. Soon, they're up against completely inexplicable animal attacks—a cow, a lot of birds, and even Sandy's pet dog Duke, whom Carol honestly didn't want to kill because she doesn't hate Sandy like that. In time, however, the Kelleys will begin to grasp the true severity of their situation.
This certainly has potential, and while I said it's "typical," it is unusually single-minded in keeping its immediate stakes low (at no point in the film are they ever any bigger than four people and their immediate neighbors), its suspense-horror high (we know everything, and it's kind of a wonder that they ever figure out anything), and its focus narrow (no stolid science heroes stumbling into the scene here); all along, the threat itself remains embedded to a striking degree solely in the interlocking domestic dramas, not even in the sense that the former solves the latter for them, but to solve the former they have to solve the latter, because the one thing that seems to frustrate the Beast's will is to combine their mental forces against it. The setting, likewise, between its weaponized animals and besieged isolation, is automatically laden with nicely dangerous atmosphere: once the Beast conquers the dog, it's clear there's some of Campbell's "Who Goes There?" in the film's genetic makeup, and from pretty much the first attack there's obviously been a bit of Du Maurier's "The Birds," though what it most forcefully reminded me of was McClusky's "The Crawling Horror," the much obscurer one that "Who Goes There?" likely knocked-off. We find there a shapeless, semi-intangible monster, animal guises, a farm, and even a (less lame) insistence that it's only human connection that can save us; I'd bet a little money that Filer was well aware of it, but then, I'd bet money he'd read all three. (Then Brown's The Mind Thing came in 1961, and I'd bet that he'd seen this movie, because sci-fi is crazy incestuous that way.)
And there's always that ever-reliable Southwestern Desert. Like Carol says, they've built something akin to a space colony out here, and there's a real unsettling feeling to be wrung out of spending half the movie amidst the rigid patterns of these date palms that just kind of stop once they hit the sand (though it is still Roger Corman's second movie, so I'm afraid you will need to overlook the sometimes very-obvious human activity going on in "the wasteland" that can be readily observed in the gaps between the trees). There's just something neat about a horror movie that seeks to make palm frond shade spooky, and it works, redounding to the great benefit of either Crosby or credited DP Everett Baker, frequently tasked by this screenplay with shooting day-for-night, and winding up delivering some legitimately good day-for-night, an outright miracle for a movie of this class and vintage. It's thanks to sunlight that's already persuasively dimmed so the cinematographer can, I think, just underexpose things a bit, rather than erring too far one way or the other. (And the remaining highlights just kind of read as "studio moonlight," which is even cooler.) To be clear: it's not grand-looking, and it took them at least one shooting day to figure out how to move the camera over the lumpy date farm terrain, because early on the camerawork is downright bumbling and the camera direction will largely remain so; but it does reach "handsome." (We might as well include "flashing lights at actors pretending to be mesmerized by a spaceship in a big hole" in that description.) As for the interiors, I can see why Corman never got obsessed with getting credit for these turgid dialogue-driven blocks, with only occasionally-appropriate shot scales. (Interior or exterior, this movie is awfully nervous about close-ups for some reason, using them only when it absolutely has to.)
So we've reached the "is this even a real movie?" question, and the answer is "by the skin of its teeth." Unsurprisingly, the movie that didn't have the money to do a regular outer space monster still doesn't have the money to do a conceptual outer space monster either, even if I am slightly impressed by the scrappiness of the attempt. Editor Jack Killifer, anyhow, is doing as much as he possibly could with very limited footage of dogs and cows not actually menacing anybody—Carol's bovine duel has a damn-near avant-garde snap to it, with Killifer even playing a fun joke on the audience with that disorienting cut to Allan running over to her prone body that, thanks to the previous shots (and certainly no previous shot of Allan actually shooting the cow), you'll unavoidably spend a split-second parsing as Thayer about to get trampled by the object, probably the enemy cow, that's precipitously entering the frame. Meanwhile, there's a lot of people getting pelted with what appear to be literal cardboard "birds," though, hey, it's better than pelting them with pre-killed ones.
I'm focusing on the technical crumminess here because it's easy and enjoyable, but it does underline one of the problems with its narrative—it's awfully arbitrary-feeling. Even with all of its exposition (and somehow, even without any science hero, we wind up with a whole bunch), it's not ever particularly clear what the Beast's doing with all this animal mayhem. Eventually, the Beast's goal becomes keeping them on the farm because the creatures it wants are the humans, and sure, of course it does; therefore the initial attacks were entirely counterproductive. I think the idea is that wearing them down psychologically is conducive to the Beast's ends, which doesn't really square much with how several of the attacks are often designed to kill them and in some cases do. So I guess "the idea" is that "we're making a horror movie here, asshole," and I suppose it's fair enough that they perceived a need to start abusing the Kelleys as soon as possible, though it also means we start cutting short the domestic drama pretty quickly in favor of "shit, is it just me, or is our date farm getting alien invaded?"
Which is as good a strategy as any to deal with the fundamental weakness of Million Eyes: it's a domestic drama that's pretty badly acted, and the actors' characters, however much detail they've been given, were going to stay hasty smudges anyway because even if the cast were somehow giving good performances under the circumstances pertaining to this movie Corman made in a week, you wouldn't be able to tell when the sound recording is essentially pre- or non-professional. Accordingly, Cole, who already seems barely able to remember her lines and is sort of mumbling through them, is occasionally almost indecipherable noise; the intermittently committed work that Thayer's doing on behalf of the heartsick mom (tantalizingly, there's this glimmer on the extant copy right under her face that I think really might be a damn tear falling from her eye onto their kitchen table) feels hollowed out, and some of her performance might have been looped; Birch's dialogue tends to have more faithful reproduction, but confronted with a script that offers only the two obvious modes, "absurdly indifferent" and "beatifically arch," it's honestly distracting how little he fights against either to actually make "a character" out of Allan. Even so, it's not altogether uncharming in its tiny, striving way, so I think what sinks it is two things in combination that conspire to suck the low-rent fun out of it: it is weirdly long for what it is—78 minutes, so, comparing like-to-like, still seven minutes longer than Corman's own It Conquered the World, which had a whole lot more (cast, concept, even money) to work with—and it appears to have even consciously pursued this runtime, because the other thing is the irritating cross-cut furball of the climax, so that if you laid out the characters' movements on a map by the end the map would be a hash of lines completely blotting out any date farm, altogether a confusing bustle for a story that only ever requires the intersection of just four characters to get to its humanistic epiphanies—I mean, sure, Corman pads, but the Corman of just a few years (or even few months) later would've understood the uselessness of putting this much shoeleather into the third act of a movie that anybody should've realized was already actively courting its audience's disappointed boredom, and could've been 65 minutes because it was going to be sold as part of a Goddamn double-feature anyway.
Score: 5/10
That which is indistinguishable from magic:
- In southern California, there's actually water to flood the north grove when it needs it.
- They use the phrase "birds and animals" a lot, like Filer's only phylogenetic text was the Bible.
- It takes it as read that a dog's brain is an entirely different order of complexity from a human's, and I'm not sure I buy that.
The morality of the past, in the future!:
- Relatedly, the movie is, obviously, playing around with "the guy with brain damage is more vulnerable to alien takeover because he's literally less human, sorry, those are the rules," but you might not even have to notice that—it barely denotes a distinction, for the purposes of alien mind control, between his brain and Sandy's—if it weren't for Filer being way too in love with his baffling twist reveal and surrounding exposition. ("Why didn't you tell us?" is, I believe, the verbatim line; whatever Allan's response was, I didn't hear it over my own, "Yeah, why?")
- It is not wholly sufficient to explain why Allan laughs off "Him" stalking his daughter, though. On the other hand, that bathing suit is so demure that I'm surprised he didn't sigh in disappointment and go home.
Sensawunda:
- Blaisdell expressed disappointment with his alien, not because it wasn't as-such good (it's kind of hard to tell, though you absolutely can discern the Blaisdell mentality that would go on to be so memorable in It Conquered the World and Invasion of the Saucer-Men and more), but because the whole sequence was a rapidly-shot pickup, so whatever its capabilities as a puppet, all they had his alien actually do was fall over and die due to lack of psychic food for the intangible parasite riding it. But, conceptually, that's actually pretty cool!
- The power of love, man.
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