Conference bookie::movies

128.0. "Caltiki, the Immortal Monster, Revisited" by DSSDEV::RUST () Fri Apr 09 1993 16:52

    Yahoo! "Caltiki Returns From the Grave!" With thanks to Cathy-who-was-
    mucking-out-her-mail-files:
    
                <<< ::EOT_NOTES:[NOTES$LIBRARY]MOVIES.NOTE;1 >>>
                             -< You be the critic >-
================================================================================
Note 4153.0               Caltiki, the Immortal Monster                3 replies
DSSDEV::RUST                                        168 lines   7-OCT-1992 22:39
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Ah, those golden memories of childhood - how they linger! Warm summer
    evenings when I'd ride my bike well past dusk; busy family dinners,
    everyone chiming in about the day's schoolwork or news or what have
    you; crisp winter days punctuated with snowball fights - and, prominent
    among all these Hallmark moments, Nightmare Theater (channel 4 on
    Friday night, at the astonishingly late hour of 10:30). 
    
    It was a fairly typical horror-movie showcase. The introductory music
    had a cardiac-rhythm pulse to it that made viewers' hearts begin to
    race in anticipation; the host was a disembodied Karloffian voice, who
    simply introduced each film with an evil laugh and then disappeared.
    We (usually my brother and myself - our parents tended not to
    appreciate the Nightmare Theater film fare, and would go to bed,
    reappearing only if we got too rowdy later in the evening) would
    prepare for the show with a batch of fresh popcorn and a beverage
    (often Kool-Ade, mixed with food coloring to turn it some yucky color
    or other). Then we'd settle down for an evening of chills and thrills,
    from such classics as "I Was a Teen-Age Frankenstein," or "Daughter of
    Frankenstein," or "I Was a Teen-Age Werewolf," or...
    
    ..."Caltiki, the Immortal Monster"!
    
    This little flick was released in '59, but I'd estimate that I first
    saw it as a Nightmare Theater presentation circa 1965 or so, when I was
    12 or 13. I may have seen it once more within a year or two, but after
    that I never encountered it again - until its appearance on Showtime
    this week. ("I have always depended on the kindness of E-netters.")
    
    OK, OK, enough of "Our Town" already - what's the _movie_ like? I'm
    glad you asked that question. Basically, it's a "blob" movie, but that
    doesn't convey any of its considerable charm. Its opening sequence
    presents us with Mayan ruins overgrown by jungle, with a fuming volcano
    in the background. (Some of this is courtesy of matte painting; the
    rest appears to be on-site footage of actual ruins. These scenes are
    edited together with, um, varying degrees of finesse.) The voice-over
    tells us about the Mayan people's mysterious abandonment of many of
    their vast settlements, and hints that the reason for this was the fear
    of the wrath of the immortal goddess Caltiki, whom we presume (from the
    title) that we are going to meet. Then the camera zooms in on a
    terrified man fleeing from something or other; he crawls over some real
    rocks, runs across a matte painting, dashes around a corner to a sound
    stage, and encounters the major characters: a strong-jawed scientist,
    his beautiful blonde (and begirdled - easily armor class 2) wife, a
    wiry and sardonic Scientist's Best Friend (this is a stock role in
    horror movies), and the beautiful dark-haired native woman who is in
    love with the best friend (who is in love with the wife who is in love
    with her husband - but never mind that now).
    
    Where was I? Oh, yes. The fleeing fellow collapses, gasping the usual
    unhelpful but tantalizing phrases, and seems unable to tell them what
    happened to the scientist who was with him. Our heroes, with a
    supporting cast of native bearers and some cannon fodder, set out to
    search for the missing man, and find themselves in an underground
    chamber in one of the ruined temples.
    
    This part is really pretty neat, and - possibly due to the fact that,
    in Mexico, where the film was made, actual ruins are lying around all
    over the place, just begging to be filmed. Or maybe they were just
    really cool sets, I don't know; anyhow, they looked good and creepy and
    ancient, and what more can one ask? At any rate, they find a rift
    beneath a wall, crawl through it, and discover an underground pool
    surrounded by Mayan carvings depicting an annoyed-looking deity of some
    kind. While somebody copies down the inscriptions so that they can be
    translated later to tell us what's going on, one of the cannon fodder
    fellows dons skin-diving gear and enters the pool to explore.
    
    Better and better! It's a sacrificial pool, and the diver comes across
    a skeleton bedecked with golden bangles! He seizes the gold
    (dismembering the skeleton in the process), and continues - and, sure
    enough, we see that the floor of the pool is covered with more and more
    skeletons, some complete, some in fragments! This is neat stuff!
    
    The diver surfaces to show off his finds, and to get a bag with which
    to collect some more loot. Down he goes again, but this time Something
    sneaks up on him (yes, underwater). All we get is his reaction shots,
    and then we're on the surface with the scientists, hauling the poor sod
    out of the water. They rip off his diving mask, and -
    
    Oh, paroxysms of delight! The man's face has been eaten away - a
    moist-looking skull gazes blindly out! (I distinctly remember the
    thrill I felt the first time I saw that scene. And that was in the days
    before VCRs, so I couldn't go back and look at it again - those brief
    seconds stayed with me for decades. And in the re-viewing, the scene
    was just as fine; whatever other problems the production team had with
    special effects, they surely could do wondrous things with skeletons.)
    
    Things start to happen fast now. A huge blob-like Something rises out
    of the pool, and the scientists all turn to flee - except for the
    sardonic best-friend, who dashes back to grab the gold. In the process
    he stumbles and falls into the onrushing blob, which splorches onto his
    arm. His buddy Strongjaw spots a handy axe and chops off (no, not the
    hand!) a chunk of the blob, and drags his now-screaming pal, be-blobbed
    arm and all, to safety.
    
    Then comes a truly hilarious scene. After everyone has fled the ruins,
    with the blob in lukewarm but persistent pursuit, Strongjaw looks
    around for a way to stop it, and sees a "Danger! Gasoline!" sign nailed
    prominently on a handy tree! He runs past the sign and finds a gasoline
    tank truck (how convenient), which he starts up and sends rolling into
    the opening to the ruins. The ensuing explosion and fire causes the
    blob to sizzle away to nothing, and our heroes head off home with their
    wounded to try and make something out of it all.
    
    That was maybe the first 20 minutes of the movie, and easily the best.
    After that there's a long talking-heads stretch, with periodic Warm
    Family Moments between Strongjaw, his wife, and their cute little
    daughter (whose lines have apparently been dubbed by a twenty-year-old
    trying to sound cute; the effect is amazingly perverse). Which reminds
    me - the dubbing in this film is an entertainment in itself. Dubbing
    English onto Spanish speakers is always a bit of a trick; matching the
    Spanish speech patterns tends to make the English sound frenetic and
    odd, but if one doesn't match them then the characters' mouths would be
    moving long after the dubbed dialogue was over. The filmmakers here
    chose the match-the-lip-movements-at-all-costs technique, with truly
    hilarious results. Here's some sample dialogue (you'll have to imagine
    the inflections):
    
    From one of the aforementioned tender moments, Strongjaw to his wife:
    "I miss not being with you and Jenny but I must." Wife: "Yes I see."
    
    Or, from one of the scenes with the Betatron (yes, radiation _is_ a
    plot element), Strongjaw commenting on the proceedings: "The first
    thing I think about this is, as soon as that reaches a point, the
    radioaction will appear, and then it will show life." (The person to
    whom he was speaking nodded solemnly. I cracked up, and played the
    scene back three times so I could transcribe it accurately.)
    
    But enough levity. We learn from the translated inscriptions in the
    ruins that Caltiki is one, and immortal, and "her mate from the sky
    will come," whereupon she will destroy the world. When the blob-sample
    that's been consuming the Sardonic Friend's arm is discovered to
    consist of a single cell (!), dated via electronic brain at over 20
    million years of age (!!!), the scientists all decide there must be
    something to this Caltiki legend - so they start bombarding the chunk
    with gamma rays to see what will happen.
    
    It grows, that's what happens. But - clever scientists - they turn off
    the machine, and the bloblet stops growing. (However, there's another
    blob chunk in Strongjaw's lab at home, so we just know that disaster
    will ensue.) Meanwhile the Sardonic Friend (who featured in the only other
    really good scene in the movie when the bloblet was peeled off of his
    arm to reveal - any guesses? Yes! Raw, damp-looking bones! All
    _right_!) has been going slowly insane due to the influence of having
    most of one arm dissolved. He breaks out of the hospital and heads for
    Strongjaw's house, while in another part of the movie somebody says,
    "Hey, there's this comet due any second, and it's shedding gamma rays
    up to level .6 [whatever that means]; wanna watch?" and somebody else
    says "Comet? Hey, they're in the sky, right? Mate from the sky - and
    radiation makes the thing grow - oooooooh, shit!" [Well, that's not
    what they said in English, but I bet it's what the original lines
    were.] So Strongjaw orders the lab-blob burned, asks somebody to send
    the army, with flamethrowers, to his house, and sets off home himself
    at a high rate of speed, upon which he's picked up for speeding. [I am
    not making this up.]
    
    Well, the comet shows up, and the backup blob grows, and grows, and
    starts dividing into things that look like giant beanbag chairs covered
    with chenille, and the little girl wakes up and calls for mommy, who's
    having her own problems with the Insane Sardonic Best Friend, and the
    army flamethrowers show up just as Strongjaw gets away from the police,
    and there's a grand finale of sorts involving a daring rescue and lots
    of toy tanks rumbling around miniature sets and...
    
    ...but that would be spoiling it. ;-)
    
    It's really a _wonderful_ movie.
    
    -b