2024 Lies in Wait Beyond the Time Barrier

Now Playing: Beyond the Time Barrier (1960)

Pros: Creative location shooting and use of repurposed state fair exhibit halls; A fairly unique explanation for its dystopian setting
Cons: Gets bogged down with a lot of pseudo-scientific dialog; Some of the principal actors are as stiff as dept. store mannequins

Many thanks to Barry at Cinematic Catharsis and Gill at Realweegiemidget Reviews for coming up with the Futurethon event and inspiring their fellow bloggers to explore the future through movies. If you haven’t already, check out their sites for links to more cinematic prognostications.

So here I am in the futuristic year 2023, and I’m only now getting around to reviewing the film that provided the name (in part) for this blog. All I can say is that it’s about time. 2024, the year in which Beyond the Time Barrier is set, is almost upon us. If there is even the slightest possibility that the events depicted in the film are prophetic, then there is precious little time to prepare.

As a public service, Films From Beyond is breaking through the time barrier to present our near future as envisioned in the 1960 movie. Are these events highly improbable? Perhaps. Impossible? You be the judge.

Robert Clarke stars as Major William Allison, an Air Force test pilot who has been assigned to fly the X-80 rocket-plane to the edge of outer space. After firing the rocket engine and soaring to an altitude of 100 miles, the plane accelerates uncontrollably, and Allison loses contact with the base.

Put your tray tables up and fasten your seat belts -- 2024 is going to be a bumpy ride!

Once Allison gets control back and brings the plane in for a landing, he’s amazed to find that the base is completely deserted and in an extremely dilapidated state. Off in the distance he spots the ruins of a city, and next to that, weird structures, including huge towers with blazing lights illuminating the landscape.

As Allison approaches the structures, he’s hit with a paralyzing ray, whereupon figures in radiation suits trundle him off to an underground lair.

The major soon finds that he’s not in Kansas anymore. After being decontaminated in a giant glass enclosure and getting into a shoving match with some guards, he is introduced to the elderly leader known as The Supreme (Vladimir Sokoloff), his second-in-command, the Captain (Boyd “Red” Morgan), and The Supreme’s granddaughter Trirene (Darlene Tompkins).

Allison learns from The Supreme that he is a “guest” at The Citadel, a subterranean complex built as a haven from the hordes of violent mutants that roam the contaminated surface. The Supreme and the Captain are the only members of the Citadel that can hear and talk -- all the others, including Trirene, are deaf mutes as the result of a mysterious plague (although Trirene has the extrasensory ability to read minds). The major is mightily confused, not understanding how so much could have happened in the short time he was aloft in his rocket plane.

"Excuse me, but I seem to have taken a wrong turn at the ionosphere..."

Allison’s troubles are compounded by the Captain, who is suspicious that he is some sort of spy. The major is thrown into a dungeon reserved for captured mutants, but is released a short time later when Trirene, who has taken a shine to the handsome pilot, convinces her grandfather that he’s no threat.

After gaining The Supreme’s confidence by way of Trirene, Allison is allowed to meet three other “guests” of the Citadel: Gen. Kruse (Stephen Bekassy), Prof. Bourman (John Van Dreelen) and Captain Markova (Arianne Ulmer), who, conveniently, can also hear and talk. It’s this crew that clues the major into the fact that he’s traveled into the 21st century -- 2024 to be exact.

Kruse explains that the notorious plague was caused by radioactive dust from above-ground atomic tests breaking down the atmosphere’s protective layers, allowing deadly cosmic radiation to blanket the earth. Much of the planet’s population was killed off, with most of the survivors ending up either sterile deaf mutes or ravening bald-headed mutants.

Like Allison, all three accidentally broke the time barrier traveling in spaceships that approached the speed of light, and ended up prisoners at the Citadel after crash landing. The Captain, not wanting to let their knowledge and expertise go to waste, put them to work developing a solar energy plant. Markova cattily suggests to the clueless major that his job is now to mate with Trirene, one of the few women left who isn’t sterile.

When the group learns that Allison left his plane at the base intact and ready to fly, their eyes light up. Bourman excitedly explains that there’s a chance that they can send Allison back to 1960, where he can prevent the plague from ever happening. The professor lays out a deceptively simple formula on a chalkboard: take the rocket-plane’s escape velocity and add the velocities of earth’s rotation, its orbit around the sun, and the solar system’s movement through space, and voila!, you’ve got the near-light speed you need to enter the fifth dimension and travel back through time! (Uh-huh...)

"Pay attention class, there's going to be a quiz later."

Standing in the way of the plan is the paranoid Captain, who has surveillance devices everywhere and is not likely to just sit back and let his prisoner jet off to parts unknown. And then there’s the Kruse crew -- one or more of them may have plans of their own for the plane. Finally, there’s Trirene -- who wouldn’t be tempted to stay put and regenerate civilization with such a special, beautiful girl? (And that doesn’t even take into account the mutants, who are itching to burst from their confines and wreak vengeance on their cruel masters.)

Okay, rather than spoil the ending, let’s see what Beyond the Time Barrier got right about life in the roaring 2020s:

✔ The ruling elites live in luxurious enclaves surrounded by bleak ruins and decaying infrastructure.
✔ Xenophobia runs rampant.
✔ Draconian security measures and omnipresent surveillance keep everyone in line.
✔ The general rule is to shoot your ray gun first and ask questions later.
✔ Society’s undesirables (the mutants) are consigned to poverty and prison.
✔ Much of the population is mute and goes along with whatever the elites say.
✔ A well-meaning but doddering old man nominally rules over the whole mess.

And on the bright side:

✔ Solar power is an up-and-coming energy source.

What it got wrong:

✔ The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 prohibited all above-ground nuclear tests, which were the cause of Time Barriers’s cosmic radiation plague. (However, the plot point does prefigure the depletion of the ozone layer that became an issue in the ‘70s.)
✔ Interior design predominantly based on the equilateral triangle never caught on.
✔ Jumpsuits that made everyone look like 1950s gas station attendants never became mandatory work attire.

Beyond the Time Barrier also predicted the advent of 5G cell towers... or maybe not.

The man responsible for Time Barrier's prophecies was Arthur C. Pierce. In addition to Time Barrier, Pierce wrote a number of B sci-fi scripts in the ‘50s and ‘60s, including The Cosmic Man (1959), Invasion of the Animal People (aka Terror in the Midnight Sun, 1959), The Human Duplicators (1965), Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966) and The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966), among others (see my reviews of the first two films here and here). 

While Pierce never penned any true sci-fi classics, he had a knack for writing scientific-sounding dialog and tweaking familiar themes in unique ways (i.e., atomic testing degrading the earth’s protective atmosphere). On the downside, Pierce was a bit too enamored with pseudo-science; his movies were often bogged down by characters laboriously mansplaining cracked science concepts (like Prof. Bourman’s chalkboard lecture on time travel and the speed of light).

While working on Time Barrier, Pierce created one very tense, dramatic scene that never made it into the script. In his memoir, Robert Clarke (who produced the film in addition to starring in it) recalled a story conference between the screenwriter and director Edgar G. Ulmer that became overheated:

“One day in the office at General Service Studios, Art [Pierce] turned in the umpteenth rewrite of one particular scene and once again Edgar seemed to be displeased, and he said something that provoked Art. I don’t remember Edgar’s comment, but it was like lighting a firecracker under Art. Edgar was seated at a desk and Art was sitting in a chair, doodling with a long yellow pencil. Something snapped in this poor, tormented writer’s mind: He jumped up out of his chair and leaned across Edgar’s desk and broke the yellow pencil in half right in front of Edgar’s nose. …
  It was a very dramatic moment, but later on, one could see the lighter side of it. Art was a conscientious and resourceful sci-fi writer who knew the necessary nomenclature and had done his homework on the technical aspects, but his dialogue wasn’t what Edgar was seeking and finally Art got fed up with Edgar’s goading. … The incident seemed to bother Edgar a little bit; I remember that later on, Edgar in his heavy Hungarian accent referred to Art as ‘This wrrriter who brrreaks his pencil in front of my face!’ But Edgar’s resentment soon passed; he was the type who let everything roll off his back.” [Robert Clarke and Tom Weaver, Robert Clarke: To “B” or Not to “B”, A Film Actor’s Odyssey, Midnight Marquee Press, 1996, p. 202]

No one, especially Ulmer, had time to hold a grudge. Beyond the Time Barrier and The Amazing Transparent Man were shot back-to-back at the same Texas location over the course of only two weeks (neither Pierce or Clarke were involved in the latter production).

These would be the last films Ulmer would direct on American soil. Savvy fans know Ulmer as one of the great B movie directors, with a resume that includes such cult classics as The Black Cat (1934; with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff), Bluebeard (1944; with John Carradine), Detour (1945; the low budget film-noir masterpiece with Tom Neal and Ann Savage), and The Man from Planet X (1951; also with Robert Clarke).

By the time Time Barrier and Transparent Man rolled around, Ulmer’s best work was behind him. As hinted by the story conference fracas, Ulmer was probably not greatly inspired by Time Barrier's script; he was content to shoot long, plodding scenes of dialog in stationary medium shots and call it a day. On the plus side, the veteran director managed to get his daughter Arianne the part of the duplicitous, femme-fatale-ish Capt. Markova.

Trirene and Major Allison relax after a hard day listening to incessant technobabble.

WARNING: SPOILERS ARE LURKING JUST BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER

The film manages to break through the boredom barrier at the climax, when Markova has treacherously let loose the imprisoned mutants and Allison is desperately trying to escape and get back to his plane. In the scenes where the maddened mutants chase down terrified Citadel dwellers, it’s obvious that the bare-bones production could only afford to outfit a handful of mutant extras with ratty clothes and ill-fitting skull caps. The extras are supplemented with mismatched stock footage of scruffy dungeon dwellers from Fritz Lang’s 1959 costume potboiler The Indian Tomb.

But the mutants' screams and shouts as chaos ensues are truly jarring, and you feel sorry for the poor Citadel denizens whose only fault was to blindly (and mutely) follow inept leaders. On top of that, the back stabbing comes fast and furious as various characters jockey to see who gets to ride on the rocket-plane back to their original time period.

For these and other scenes, Clarke and crew made great use of ready-made locations. The futuristic Citadel consisted of structures and exhibits left over from expositions held at Fair Park in Dallas, Texas. Carswell Air Force Base near Ft. Worth stood in for Major Allison’s home base, and a nearby abandoned WWII-era Marine Corps Air Base was utilized for the deserted 2024 ruins. [IMDb trivia]

When Clarke made Beyond the Time Barrier, he was hoping to become a B movie mogul. After appearing in the micro-budgeted sci-fi thriller The Astounding She-Monster (1957), he was astounded by how much money the threadbare production made at the theaters. He told himself he could do even better, and the result was The Hideous Sun Demon (1958), which Clarke wrote, produced, directed and starred in (see my reviews of She-Monster and Sun Demon). 

He took a print of Sun Demon to American International Pictures (AIP) in the hopes of securing a multiple picture distribution deal, but was turned down. On the rebound, he signed with a small outfit, Miller Consolidated Pictures, to do Beyond the Time Barrier. It wasn’t long after Time Barrier hit the theaters that the overextended company went under, and ironically, AIP ended up taking over distribution of the picture. After the dust settled, Clarke never saw a dime of profit from either Sun Demon or Time Barrier; all he had to show for his efforts was his $1,000 salary for acting in Time Barrier.

AIP executives hold Robert Clarke hostage while they run off with all the profits from Beyond the Time Barrier.

But Clarke was nothing if not resilient. In a interview with film historian Tom Weaver, Clarke insisted that he was grateful for his experiences behind the camera:

I would never say I was sorry because if I had not done it, I think I would have been sorry and would be saying that I wish I had tried it. It was an interesting experience. I wish, of course, that it had turned out more profitably and that it had led to other things that would have been more mainstream. With Roger Corman, pictures like these were stepping stones to bigger productions. But I took such a terrible bath with the bankruptcy on both Sun Demon and Time Barrier that I just felt there was no way to make another one and come out with anything. [Tom Weaver, Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers, McFarland, 1988, pp. 90-91.]

If you decide to check out Beyond the Time Barrier, here’s hoping you’re as resilient as Robert Clarke and don’t regret your decision. Because, Prof. Bourman’s theories notwithstanding, most physicists insist that traveling back in time and undoing past actions is impossible.

Where to find it: Streaming #1 | Streaming #2 | DVD

When Genre Worlds Collide: Crooks vs. Creatures, Part Two

Now Playing: The Astounding She-Monster (1957)

Pros: The whole crazy concept of the She-Monster (if you’re a fan of bad movies); there’s some fun banter between the kidnappers.
Cons: The whole crazy concept (if you’re not a fan); the action scenes are repetitive and dull.

Remote places in the countryside have been such a staple of horror movies over the years that urban settings seem almost as rare and out-of-place as RuPaul at an Amish barn-raising. More specifically, the venerable Cabin in the Woods has appeared so often that it inevitably became both the setting and the star of its own meta-horror film that hilariously lampooned several decades worth of the subgenre.

While ostensibly representing rugged self-sufficiency and a sanctuary from the rat race, the remote cabin is the perfect place for the movie monster to ply his or her trade. Potential victims are cut-off from easy communication with or access to the outside world, including police and medical care. And once the monster gets them trapped inside, the cramped quarters combined with high anxiety can get the victims fighting among themselves and make them even easier to pick off.

In The Astounding She-Monster, the titular creature has her victims nicely trapped in a remote mountain cabin, but this being a late-50s B movie, instead of being a psycho or an in-bred mutant hillbilly, she is a sci-fi menace from outer space. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, depending on your affinity for bad movies), the She-Monster is an astoundingly odd duck.

The creature (portrayed by Shirley Kilpatrick) is like an antimatter version of Vampira with thick, pointed eyebrows that make a dramatic V on her face, but instead of a black Gothic outfit, she wears a shimmery bodysuit that hugs her like a second skin. She’s almost as slow as Universal’s mummy, carefully putting one foot in front of the other as if she’s making her way through broken glass. She’s also mute like the mummy, and has about as much personality.

Separated at birth, one chose the path of darkness, the other, the path of spandex bodysuits.

To add to the strangeness, the movie employs a double-exposure process in the She-Monster’s scenes to simulate a sort of radioactive glow, but the wavering, undulating effect reminds me more of trying to look at someone through the haze of an all-night drinking binge (not that I know about such things first hand, but I’ve heard stories).

Lastly, her touch means instant death, but owing to the production’s cheapness and its amateurish direction, this “feature” isn’t nearly as dramatic or suspenseful as it could be. Several characters (and unfortunately two animals) get the She-Monster’s fatal touch, but their deaths have all the impact of a joy-buzzer handshake: the touch, a short, muffled scream, and bam, they’re done.

The She-Monster rambles around in a plot made super-simple by the exigencies of producer-director Ronald V. Ashcroft’s super-low budget and super-fast shooting schedule. A trio of kidnappers led by gruff, hard-boiled Nat (Kenne Duncan) nab wealthy socialite Margaret Chaffee (Marilyn Harvey) in broad daylight. On their way to a hideout in the San Gabriel mountains, the driver Brad (Ewing Brown) swerves to avoid a bizarre, shimmering figure in the road and wrecks the car.

In the meantime, lonesome geologist Dick Cutler (Robert Clarke) is talking to his dog Egan (played by Egan, Clarke’s stepsons’ dog) about the apparent meteor he saw crashing nearby, and what an opportunity it would be to find pieces of it. He gets a nasty surprise when Nat barges into the mountain cabin, demanding the keys to Dick’s decrepit jeep to make their getaway.

Unfortunately for the crooks, night has fallen, and the jeep’s headlights are broken. Dick warns Nat that the road back to the highway is treacherous, and they’ll never make it without lights. Of course, we know that the meteor was no meteor, the weird lady on the road was no lady, and before the night is over, they’re going to get an unwanted visitor, and it won’t be Avon calling.

"Hello, are you the lady of the house? I'm wondering, have you had a
chance to sample our fine line of beauty products?"

Actually, the kidnappers barging into Dick’s humble abode is the liveliest part of the movie (that’s not saying a lot), with the crooks barking sarcastic zingers at one another and at the hapless geologist. Nat is especially fond of hard-boiled one-liners. When he first pushes his way in and Dick demands to know what he wants, Nat sneers contemptuously, “Well pardon me, I’ll write you for an invitation next time.” Moments later, when he learns that the jeep’s lights don’t work, he tells Dick, “Don’t worry my partner will fix ‘em, he did post-graduate work at San Quentin.”

Nat’s alcoholic girlfriend Esther (Jeanne Tatum) is also along for the ride, and together with her caustic boyfriend and nervous Brad, they bicker and jab at each other like they're auditioning for a boozy, noir version of I Love Lucy. Later, when the She-Monster shows up outside the cabin and Brad and Nat leave one after the other to investigate, Esther gets her turn in the spotlight.

Esther, alone in the cabin and with a gun trained on the captives, drains the last bottle of booze and then asks Dick if there’s any more. Realizing they have a slim opportunity, Dick and Margaret start playing mind games with the soused moll. First Dick offers to fetch a bottle from the bedroom, then Margaret, then the two suggest that Esther get it herself. When the phone rings, Dick tells her that it’s probably his friend the fire warden, and if he doesn’t pick up, the warden will think something’s wrong. The flummoxed Esther mutters to herself, “If I had a drink I could think better…”

Esther examines the bottom of her bottle as Dick and Nat discuss options.

At least Esther’s scene has a little pathos going for it. By contrast, there’s no pathos and little suspense in the action scenes with the She-Monster. Characters dutifully tromp out into the woods at night, shoot their guns, try to avoid the death-touch, get spooked and retreat to the cabin -- and do this more than once. Viewer patience is mightily tested, as the scenes are flat and amateurishly directed. The biggest problem is the She-Monster, who is mute and expressionless throughout, and about as scary as a mime-in-training.

The scenes featuring the kidnappers and the captives without the She-Monster are interesting enough, and the dialog snappy enough, that one wonders if producer/director Ronald Ashcroft and writer Frank Hall would’ve been better off doing a straight crime flick.

But this being 1957, with distributors crying out for more atomic mutants and assorted space-age threats to feed into the voracious maw of the teen market, straight crime would not have been nearly as easy a sell. So, in addition to a deadly, radioactive space-babe, Ashcroft and Hall dressed up their bargain basement crime thriller with a pre-titles tour of outer space complete with a portentous narrator to get the ball rolling, and a “Day the Earth Stood Still”-type message to wrap things up.

"Hurry Margaret, we're going to miss The Andy Griffith Show!"

In Robert Clarke’s memoir To “B” or Not to “B”: A Film Actor’s Odyssey (with Tom Weaver, Midnight Marquee Press, 1996), the actor related a couple of amusing examples of how the cheap production prompted some “creative” improvisation:

“To give [the She-Monster Shirley Kilpatrick] an unearthly appearance Ronnie [Ashcroft] also gave her pointed eyebrows and he focused a bright light on her in the outdoor scenes so that she would look like she was glowing with radioactivity. … Mostly it was the tight, shiny suit that gave her the look of a weird yet appealing kind of alien -- but the first time she moved in the doggone thing, it split right up the back. The outfit was so skin-tight that there was no way to properly repair it, and so what they did was use safety pins to hold it together in the back. That’s why, in the movie, she never leaves a scene in any way other than backing away from the camera -- it added to the weirdness of the character, but the real reason she did that, if she turned around, she’d be showing the camera her backside!

  One of the big ‘scare’ scenes in the picture was going to be a shot of the She-Monster unexpectedly crashing through a window and into the geologist’s cabin. A candy-glass window and frame were made at a cost of one or two hundred dollars, which is a big outlay for a single prop when you’re working on the sort of budget Ronnie was. But as some of the guys were trying to get the thing into position, they dropped and broke it. … Ronnie very resourcefully had them put some of the bigger fragments back into the frame of the window and then had Shirley jump through. Later, when he edited the film, he cut that shot in such a way that it actually worked pretty well.” [pp. 174-5]

"Dagnabbit! Somebody's paying for that window!"

In spite of a bottom-of-the-barrel monster held together with safety pins, there seems to have been little doubt that Ashcroft would sell the thing for distribution. Clarke again:

“Ronnie decided to offer the picture to AIP [American International Pictures} for distribution, and he showed it to Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff at Nicholson’s house. After the movie was over, the three of them were in the projection room and Nicholson was rewinding the film. Arkoff, puffing on his trademark cigar, made the offer.

  ‘Well Ron, I’d like to buy it,' Arkoff told Ronnie through a cloud of blue smoke. ‘You know, you’re going to tell me that you’ve got $50,000 into this, but I know you’ve only got 40 so we’ll give you 60.’

  Ronnie grinned and told him, ‘You’ve just bought a picture.’

  … What Arkoff didn’t know was that the cost of Astounding She-Monster -- which Ronnie had originally projected at around $50,000 -- had come to just $18,000.” [p. 176]

Clarke was sufficiently impressed with the financial return on Ashcroft’s shabby She-Monster that he decided he would produce his own, higher quality independent creature feature, and The Hideous Sun Demon (1958) was born (see my review here).

"Oh crap, I split the seat of my bodysuit again!"

I doubt that Ronnie Ashcroft could ever have guessed, even in his wildest dreams, that the picture would be remembered beyond a single drive-in season, much less be touted over 60 years later as a “schlock classic,” with a long list of TV broadcasts and home video releases on its resume.

Even though it exudes cheapness from every pore, She-Monster at least tries to do something different by pitting wisecracking gangsters against one of the more oddball alien menaces of the era. If you haven’t seen it, it might be worth a look if only for curiosity’s sake (and it’s only a little over an hour long.)

Where to find it: The She-Monster is streaming on demand right here.

Films From Beyond’s Public Health Alert for Summer: Stay out of the Sun!

Now Playing: The Hideous Sun Demon (1958)

Pros: Effective monster mask/suit; Adds an unexpected alcoholism angle to its twist on horror movie themes.
Cons: The monster doesn’t have a lot to do until the final third of the film; The protagonist is so self-destructive he becomes unsympathetic at the end.

There’s bad news for those of us with extreme melanin deficiency. The killjoys at the Food and Drug Administration report that all that sunscreen we’ve been slathering on ourselves to keep from sizzling like a ribeye on the grill may not be so good after all. It seems that all those chemicals they list on the tube in micro-sized print -- the ones that end with -zone, -lene, -phate, -oxide, etc., -- can get absorbed through the skin (duh!), fan out through your bloodstream and potentially invite cancer cells to come party with them in your body.

While the media coverage of this development has been uniform in cautioning that the harm has not been definitively established and no one is recommending throwing out all of your sunscreen (at least not yet), I do find this quote from a Health.com article a bit concerning:

“The editorial [in the Journal of the American Medical Association] also calls for sunscreen manufacturers to commit to more safety tests, claiming that industry leaders have been hesitant to do so in the past. ‘Despite multiple efforts by the FDA to persuade sunscreen manufacturers to conduct key safety studies, the manufacturers have failed to produce such data, forcing the FDA to conduct its own studies,’ the editorial states.” [Maggie O’Neill, “FDA Warning Says the Chemicals in Sunscreen Can Be Absorbed in Your Bloodstream,” May 7, 2019]

So let me get this straight. A product that Americans coat themselves with to the tune of millions (billions?) of fluid ounces every year is not officially regulated (well hey, it’s not a food and it’s not a drug, so there you go), no one outside of the industry knows if it’s really safe or not, and if anyone on the inside has a clue, they’re not saying. All the government regulators can do is ask pretty please for more data, which they’re not getting, and only now, after all the ships have sailed and all the barn animals have disappeared, are conducting their own safety tests. Forgive me while I do a slow burn.

I suppose at this point I will have to trust the corporate media and keep applying all those -zones, -lenes, -phates and -oxides to my precious skin until some authoritative source tells me to stop. I don’t have much choice. I need my sunscreen to avoid living like the world’s most pathetic vampire. I don’t exactly turn to dust and blow away in direct sunlight, but within minutes, I feel my skin gently sizzling, and in no time at all I look like the main course at a Red Lobster.

On the upside, I have what you could call a very patriotic complexion. I start out white, then I add red stripes and patches where I haven’t applied the sunscreen well enough. The network of blue veins that I’ve developed in my old age completes the effect. No matter what time of year, I’m ready for the Fourth of July.

Mild-mannered scientist Gil McKenna contemplates the new
FDA report as he bakes under the summer sun.

But it could be so much worse. Like the poor protagonist in The Hideous Sun Demon, I could have been exposed to radiation causing me to transform into a reptilian monster whenever I stepped out into the sun. (And then the FDA -- or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- would politely ask the atomic lab for data about radiation that turns people into humanoid lizards, and no doubt be told to mind their own business. But I digress.)

Typical of B sci-fi of the time, Sun Demon showcases the mutating effects of radiation, but instead of amazing colossal men, radioactive dinosaurs, or giant insects, the result is a human-sized scaly monstrosity. (Of course, the very low budget in the ballpark of $50k precluded anything more sophisticated than a man in monster suit and mask.)

Although born out of atom-age fears, the Sun Demon is more closely related to the classic horse and buggy-age horrors of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Universal’s Wolf Man than the irradiated creatures that had paraded across drive-in screens in the ‘50s. Like Dr. Jekyll, a mild-mannered scientist (Gilbert McKenna, played by writer-producer-star Robert Clarke), morphs into a dangerous throw-back on the evolutionary ladder. Like Dracula, the night is his friend. And like Larry Talbot, Gil McKenna is a tortured soul.

Unfortunately, the cut-rate production values make the Sun Demon a poor cousin to his cinematic antecedents. To make matters worse, the film spends far too much of its short 74 minute runtime on dull scientific exposition and clunky dialog, while showing the hideous monster only sparingly until the denouement.

It all starts when the butterfingered Dr. McKenna drops an exotic new radioactive isotope in the lab, passes out, and is exposed for several minutes. His colleagues, Drs. Ann Russell and Frederick Buckell (Patricia Manning and Patrick Whyte), and his primary physician (Robert Garry) are baffled that he’s not showing any of the typical symptoms of extreme radiation poisoning. They wisely keep him in the hospital for observation.

Soon, the sun hits the fan. The doctor prescribes a bit of sun and fresh air for McKenna, so a nurse wheels him up to the solarium on the hospital’s top floor. After a fitful nap under the noonday sun (with no sunscreen!), McKenna wakes up and proceeds to scare the daylights out of a little old lady sitting next to him on the terrace. He races back to his room and for a split second sees a terrifying lizard-man staring back at him from a mirror before he smashes it.

In full Bill-Nye-Science-Guy mode, the doctor patiently explains to Ann and Frederick that the exotic radiation McKenna was exposed to causes his cells to mutate to a prior evolutionary stage -- a walking lizard -- but only when exposed to direct sunlight. The colleagues are alarmed, but still hopeful something can be done. McKenna on the other hand completely freaks out, checks himself out of the hospital and goes into hiding at a remote estate on the California coast.

McKenna does his best Philip Marlowe imitation as he
watches Trudy croon a torch song at the local dive.

Earlier, Frederick had gently suggested to Ann that Gil’s drinking may have been a factor in the accident. Frederick’s assessment is confirmed when Gil decides to drown his sorrows in booze instead of seeking a cure. This is an interesting development for a ‘50s B sci-fi picture, and may at the time have caused some head-scratching among audiences used to seeing heroic (and sober) scientists successfully battling atom-spawned monsters.

The picture takes a noirish turn at this point, as McKenna, trying to avoid becoming a lizard-man by day, turns into a lounge lizard by night, throwing back drinks at a local dive while listening to Marilyn Monroe wannabe Trudy (Nan Peterson) croon songs at the piano.

Gil doubles down on his bad choices by hoisting a few with the torch singer, who of course has a sleazy jealous boyfriend (Peter Similuk). After a dominance-establishing fistfight, McKenna whisks Trudy off in his convertible to find a secluded beach for some moonlit romance. They indulge in some PG-rated horseplay, then, with the voluptuous Trudy wrapped only in a towel, Gil awkwardly celebrates the night with a bottle of whiskey he brought along.

In the morning, Gil wakes up on the beach, Trudy sleeping next to him. With the sun rapidly rising, he races to his car, leaving the confused woman on the beach to fend for herself. He’s already turned into a lizard-man when he pulls up to the house. Seeing Ann’s car in the drive, he climbs a fence and enters the house from an upper story to avoid running into her. She finally finds him, human again, in a dark cellar where he’s gone to de-tox from his reptilian state. After Ann tearfully pleads with him, Gil agrees to get help from a worldwide authority on radiation poisoning, Dr. Jacob Hoffman (Fred La Porta).

Ann tries to coax Gil out of the storage closet.

Drs. Hoffman and Buckell join McKenna at the house, where the seemingly ungrateful patient barks at Hoffman as he examines him. Cool as a cucumber, Hoffman calmly tells McKenna they will keep him at the house for a few days for observation before transferring him to the hospital, but under no circumstances should he leave the house, even at night (why they can’t transfer him right away under the cover of darkness is a bit of a mystery). Of course, we all know that alcoholics channeling their inner lounge lizards are their own worst enemies, and Hoffman’s warning will go unheeded.

Right on cue, the fretful patient wakes up in the middle of the night, needing a drink and just perhaps, needing to unleash his reptilian alter-ego. With no one at the house to watch him (?!), in a head-slappingly self-destructive move he heads right back to the bar where the girl he left stranded on the beach is a regular. Of course, he’s beaten up by the sleazo boyfriend and his gang, whereupon the astonishingly understanding Trudy takes pity on him, dusts him off, and takes him back to her apartment.

The next day, the boyfriend shows up at Trudy’s and discovers Gil there. At gunpoint, he forces Gil out into the sunlight to get what’s coming to him. Instead, the sleazeball gets his just deserts at the hands of an enraged lizard man. When the police investigating the murder show up at Gil’s place, things quickly go downhill from there…

Gil McKenna makes for a very interesting and unique B sci-fi protagonist. I can’t think of any others off the top of my head suffering from such a double whammy -- mutating radiation poisoning and alcoholism. Instead of the more conventional hubris that brings about the hero’s fall, it’s a plain old addiction that causes the tragic accident in the first place and greases Gil’s descent into chaos. The lizard-man is not a metaphor for addiction, it’s part and parcel of it. Sun Demon is the “Lost Weekend” of B monster movies.

"Hey Gil, wait up, you forgot your sunscreen!"

The problem is, Gil’s alcohol-fueled self-pity and self-destructiveness chip away at the audience’s sympathy for the character. After he kills Trudy’s boyfriend, McKenna retreats back to the house, where he confesses to Buckell and Hoffman. By the time he’s worked himself up into a self-pitying lather and screams at Buckell, “Why should I be the one, can you answer me that, why me!!!,” you want to reach through the screen and slap him silly (I flashed back to the classic scene in Airplane! where fellow passengers are lining up to shake, slap and bludgeon a woman who is freaking out).

Another problem is the film’s slow build-up to the action-packed climax. The first two-thirds of the film spends a lot of time on a scientific explanation of Gil’s condition (with charts!), Trudy’s torch songs, unconvincing bar fights, and shots of waves crashing on the beach, while only teasing us with brief glimpses of the monster. The core of the monster action, set in a forbidding industrial area on the edge of Los Angeles, is crammed into the last twenty minutes or so.

I don't know about you, but that doll in the background
creeps me out!

In addition to the Jekyll and Hyde angle, the film pays homage to another horror classic, Universal’s original Frankenstein, by having a little girl discover the fugitive scientist in a dark equipment shack that she’s been using for tea parties with her dolls. As she peppers him with innocent questions, there’s more than a little suspense that somehow the sun’s rays will seep through and transform him in the middle of the tea party. It’s a nice touch that compounds the suspense as the police -- and fate -- converge on McKenna.

The Hideous Sun Demon was the brainchild of prolific B actor Robert Clarke. Among the many B pictures on his resume at that point were Val Lewton’s Bedlam (1946) and Edgar Ulmer’s atmospheric The Man from Planet X (1951). But it was his recent experience on the ultra-low budget The Astounding She-Monster (1957) that planted the idea to make his own picture:

“I made a nice piece of change for myself starring in The Astounding She-Monster, but more important than those paychecks was the fact that the experience gave me an awareness that a very profitable picture of that sort could be made for a very small amount of money… If a shoestring picture like The Astounding She-Monster could make a pile of money, why wouldn’t a picture of my own, made with a bit more of an eye toward quality?” [Robert Clarke and Tom Weaver, To “B” or Not to “B”: A Film Actor’s Odyssey, Midnight Marquee Press, 1996, p. 181]

Part of that eye toward quality was borrowing from the classics. Together with a technical writer friend, Phil Hiner, who was an aspiring author, Clarke developed a concept which “flipped” Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde plot from a physician drinking a potion which transforms him, to a scientist suffering chromosomal damage from a lab accident. They also borrowed from the 1931 Frederic March film, giving the character “two girlfriends, one serious and loyal [Ann], the other a ‘bad girl’ from the wrong side of the tracks [Trudy]. [Clarke, p. 182]

This is what might happen to you if you don't use sunscreen.
Or maybe if you do. Oh, to heck with it!

Using a non-union production crew recruited from local film schools, a mix of experienced and amateur actors willing to work on the cheap (e.g., the little girl, Xandra Conkling, was Clarke’s niece), and locations that were either free or dirt-cheap to rent, they shot the film on twelve weekends over the course of thirteen weeks.

Elsewhere on the blog I go into Clarke’s luck finding Richard Cassarino, the actor who developed the unique creature mask and suit on a next-to-nothing budget, and who also appears in multiple bit roles in the film.

For all its faults, The Hideous Sun Demon delivers an impressive monster and pays respectful homage to its horror roots. Clarke himself summed it up:

“[I] am proud about two things with respect to Sun Demon: One, that we had a good story (we followed a very good pattern laid down by Robert Louis Stevenson) and, two, that the picture has pace. That picture never stops. It moves. And to this day I have people telling me that it holds up and it’s still interesting and it engages their interest as an action/sci-fi/horror film.” [Clarke, p. 198]

Where to find it: stream it on Amazon Prime.

Independent Filmmaking the Fred Olen Ray Way: Alienator (Part One)

Now Playing: Alienator (1990)

Pros: Cast features an intriguing selection of action and horror stars of the past; The concept of a female cyborg assassin is a nice twist.
Cons:Several of the veteran actors are wasted; Too many storylines and character backstories slow down the action.

For over 40 years, Fred Olen Ray has been living the fantasy. A big horror & sci-fi movie fan in his youth, Fred, like many of us boomer “monster kids,” tried making his own movies on 8mm. Then in his early 20s, he landed a gig at a Florida TV station where he discovered an old 16mm camera and some unused film. Scraping together a few hundred bucks with the help of a friend, he made his first feature, The Brain Leeches (1978), featuring a “supreme alien intelligence” made out of tinfoil and manipulated like a puppet, and rubber ants purchased at the local dime store.

Although it was admittedly “dreadful,” the experience of getting a full-length movie in the can inspired him to keep going, and to this day he hasn’t stopped. In the intervening years he’s done it all -- producing, distributing, directing, writing, special effects and makeup, cinematography… you name it.

The range of films he’s directed -- over 150 and counting -- is similarly impressive (although the one constant is that none have been big budget productions). Fred started out in the ‘80s doing very low budget sci-fi, horror and action, gradually moved to softcore comedies in the ‘90s and 2000s (e.g., Girl with the Sex-Ray Eyes, 2007), and today is mainly cranking out made-for-TV romance movies (e.g., A Christmas in Royal Fashion, 2018).

Over the years, Fred Olen Ray would get
many more films "in the can." cc

In his book The New Poverty Row: Independent Filmmakers as Distributors (McFarland, 2006), Ray talks frankly about the hard lessons he learned starting out, handing off his films to distributors with questionable ethics and accounting practices, and ending up empty-handed for all his trouble. In one egregious case, after a year out on the theatrical circuit, the distributor of one of Ray’s early films, Scalps (1983), reported back that instead of a payout, the filmmaker owed the distributor $30k (on a film that only cost $15k to make!) (New Poverty Row, p. 179)

After getting burned, Ray decided that he would either work for hire and get paid upfront, or control the distribution rights as much as possible. He would end up doing both under the banner of American Independent Productions, Inc., formed in 1985.

Like his predecessor from the previous generation, King of the B’s Roger Corman, Ray learned how to beg, borrow or steal (make that maximize) resources to keep the cameras rolling and keep costs way, way down. Fred’s women’s-prison-breakout flick set in space, Star Slammer (aka Prison Ship, 1986) is a perfect example:

“As in other films we cannibalized our fellow filmmakers to get this one together. Some costumes came from Metalstorm and Galaxy of Terror; we used Dean Jeffries’ Logan’s Run land rover; the monster from Ted Bohus’ Deadly Spawn was shipped in from New Jersey; and the spaceship footage was culled from several films including TV’s Buck Rogers, Carpenter’s Dark Star, and Battle Beyond the Stars. The picture certainly had a big look for its meager budget, but even after all these intervening years I have yet to see any of my profit participation money. This was yet another lesson in the film distribution game.” (New Poverty Row, pp. 182-83)

Maximizing resources to make pictures quickly and cheaply is one thing, but even the cheapest film needs paying customers to turn a profit (if only to line the pockets of shady distributors). Ray realized from the get-go that in order to make his low-budget films stand out from all the other product out there, he needed recognizable actors to goose the marketing.

Through his work at the TV station, Ray met Buster Crabbe, famous for his portrayal of Flash Gordon in the 1930s serials and for his work in countless westerns in the ‘40s, and enticed him with a decent wad of cash ($2k out of a total budget of around $12k) to appear in The Alien Dead (1980). Even though Crabbe had been out of the limelight for decades (and only worked one day on the set), his participation was a game changer.

In addition to being a plus for a film’s marketing, the ability to secure the services of a “name” actor -- no matter how old or out of the game -- bolstered the filmmaker’s legitimacy in the eyes of potential investors. Ray made the leap very early on and never looked back. His films of the 1980s and ‘90s in particular are a collective who’s who of actors in the downswings of their careers.

Another early lesson was to take popular movie/pop culture trends and mix ‘em up just enough to distinguish your stuff from the rest of the pack. If sexy-women-in-prison is all the rage, mix it up and set in in outer space (Star Slammers). If Arnold Schwarzenegger can wrack up ticket sales as a special forces Commando (1985) going rogue to save a loved one, then bend genders and have ex-Playboy centerfold Kathy Shower lead a Commando Squad (1987) to save her boyfriend. At the same time, keep yourself interested by adding your own quirky style and humor to the mix:

“My feeling has always been that these films have been done before and all you can hope to do is give the audience something a little bit different that makes your tired concept a bit more entertaining. I have always leaned toward an offbeat sense of humor and self-mockery that tries to say ‘Yeah, I know you’ve seen it all before and better, but check this out…,’ and I’ll do something weird or funny.” (New Poverty Row, p. 182)

While not the best or the quirkiest of Fred’s output from the period, Alienator (1990), is a good object lesson from the Ray Film School of Hard Knockoffs. It took a popular title (The Terminator, 1984) and added a unique spin to it. It featured not just one, but a whole gaggle of name actors -- a couple of former matinee idols in Jan-Michael Vincent and John Phillip Law, and several veteran character actors in Robert Clarke, Leo Gordon and Robert Quarry. To top it off, it was released at a time when anticipation was building for the Terminator sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which hit theaters the next year.

For a low-budget quickie with a 93 minute running time, Alienator is very ambitious, with spaceships, laser cannons, a female bodybuilder dressed like a wild post-apocalyptic punk rocker, and a large mix of veteran and young actors running around in multiple storylines.

Kol channels his inner-Luke Skywalker as he makes his escape.

The main story features Kol (Ross Hagen), a member of a humanoid alien race and rebellion leader who has been captured and sent to a remote prison planet to be executed. While the guards are distracted by the execution of another rebel, Kol manages to break free, steal a ship and crash land it in the woods of a California state park.

The prison commander (played by Jan Michael-Vincent in permanent snarl-mode) unleashes the Alienator (Teagan Clive) to track down and eliminate the fugitive. As a remorseless cyborg, she is programmed to let nothing stand in the way of her objective. Unfortunately, unwitting earthlings in the form of a group of vacationing college students (Jesse Dabson, Dyana Ortelli, Dawn Wildsmith, Richard Wiley), a park ranger (John Phillip Law), an alcoholic country doctor (Robert Quarry), two backwoods good ol’ boys (Fox Harris, Hoke Howell), and an ex-military survivalist (Leo Gordon) all get in her way and are forced to fight for their lives.

All well and good, but the film’s pace suffers as it tries to cram in all the characters and their exposition in between action sequences. As the Alienator lumbers around in pursuit of Kol, we see the comic relief backwoods boys ineptly trying to evade the ranger as they set animal traps on public land; the brainy college kid Benny (Dabson) gets his moment as he exalts about taking part in “man’s greatest historical encounter”; and we even get a bit of history of the tough-as-nails survivalist, Col. Coburn (Gordon) as he distributes his cache of weapons to the survivors of the alien assault.

Kol and Benny binge-watch Game of Thrones as they wait
for the Alienator to show up.

And that’s just what’s happening on earth. Yet another storyline, set on the prison station, plays out intermittently even after Kol has made his escape. Veteran B actor Robert Clarke plays Lund, a sort of space-based bureaucrat whose anti-capital punishment views are a thorn in the side of the prison ship commander. The prison side drama is vaguely reminiscent of Star Wars in its space Empire vs. feisty rebels backstory, and it (kind of) gets tied in with the earth-based action in a head-scratching “twist” ending, but it’s tedious nonetheless and could easily be jettisoned.

Ray’s lineup of veteran actors is impressive, but one movie can hardly do justice to all of the characters. Robert Quarry of Count Yorga fame is wasted in little more than a cameo -- he gets a brief scene talking on the telephone, then is promptly set on fire when he encounters the Alienator.

The Alienator herself is either inspired or laughable depending on your taste. The bodybuilder Ray hired for the role, Teagan Clive, is certainly impressive, giving even Schwarzenegger a run for his money in terms of sheer physicality. Her getup is fine (acknowledging that this is a very subjective call) -- it’s both cheesy and formidable-looking, what with the platinum wig, silver half-mask, chrome “hubcaps” covering her chest, and the huge laser weapon she wears on one arm.

Coburn and Ranger Armstrong practice
skeet shooting with a surplus landmine.

Ray pays tongue-in-cheek homage to the original Terminator, when the cyborg stops in the woods to get her bearings. A doe wanders into the clearing, and at first we subjectively see the Alienator training her bionic crosshairs on the animal. When the digital read-out processes the data and delivers the verdict “non-hostile,” she relaxes. The doe walks over to the cyborg, who reaches out and pets it. I can see Ray smiling over that bit of “Bambi meets Alienator” business.

The Alienator doesn’t really become a proper menace until late in the film, when she confronts Kol and his new earth friends at Col. Coburn’s cabin, and is introduced to good ol’ American firepower in the form of guns, crossbows and even a surplus landmine. Nothing seems to faze her though. In one amusing scene, she pauses with the cyborg-equivalent of a perplexed look, reaches around the back of her head and pulls out a hunting arrow.

"As soon as I finish this assignment I need to turn myself in
for my 50 million mile check-up and an oil change..."

For all its faults, Alienator is still an interesting exercise in low, low budget sci-fi filmmaking, having been made near the cusp of the new era of CGI-driven blockbusters. Jurassic Park was released just a few years later, and its amazing computer-generated dinosaurs would spell extinction for Ray’s brand of low-budget sci-fi thrills. Digital bits and bytes effectively swept away the rented warehouses doubling as spaceship interiors, the borrowed spaceship models, the recycled costumes, and the optical effects and stop-motion creatures that were Ray’s early stock-in-trade.

Fred adeptly pivoted from cheap action pictures to softcore to Hallmark Channel-style romance, and is apparently doing quite well. Along the way, he gave audiences something “a little bit different” for pennies on the dollar. Here at Films From Beyond, where we treasure “different” and “low budget,” we salute him for it.

Coming soon! Don’t miss part two for an exclusive interview with Jesse Dabson, “Benny” from Alienator and a veteran of movies and TV.

Where to find it: Alienator is on Blu-ray or DVD from Shout Factory