The Creature vs the Invisible Man

SAVAGE GILL-MAN STRIKES AGAIN

4 DEAD IN EVERGLADES MASSACRE

Florida City--Four are dead in the wake of the latest attack of the so-called "Gill-Man." Names of the victims have not yet been released pending the notification of their loved ones.

The four were killed by the Gill-Man while sunbathing at Pelican Cay yesterday afternoon. None of the victims knew each other, according to eyewitness accounts.

"It came out of the swamp like a thing from hell itself," said Maribel Frost, a vacationer. "I recognized the awful thing from the newsreels. Those eyes! The claws! It tore through those people something terrible. Just sliced them up for no reason at all."

Citizens of south Florida are calling for more action from the authorities. Chief of Police Hayrock Tamshill says his department has called in a "special expert" to assess the situation, but refused to comment further . . .



"You're sure you know what you're doing?" asked the police chief. He had a hard time looking at the strange little man next to him, who must have been sweltering in his long overcoat and black fedora. The sun beat down mercilessly on the asphalt.

Jack Griffin tittered behind the bandages wrapped around his head. "Why am I here again?" he asked, his voice half-muted by the thick cloth.

Tamshill cocked his head down at Griffin. "The brass up at Miskatonic said you had the talent and the moxie to take care of the Gill-Man. You don't remember?"

Griffin clapped his bandaged hands together. "Ah! The creature from the black lagoon, yes! Gill Man, Gill Man, pray thee take a pill, man! Ha ha! Wondrous, yes. Take care of my things, will you?"

With that, Jack Griffin tossed his hat to the ground and shrugged out of his overcoat. Piece by piece, he removed his clothing: vest, shirt, slacks, shoes. Beneath these accoutrements his entire form was wrapped tight in those same white bandages; a pair of dark glasses covered his eyes.

Tamshill asked no questions. He'd learned it was best to stay quiet and obey orders when strangers came down from Miskatonic. If they thought this eccentric little man could rid Florida of the creature, he wouldn't argue.

But when Griffin handed over his glasses, Tamshill gasped involuntarily, staggering backward and nearly losing his balance. For where Griffin's eyes should have been there was only darkness.

Griffin tittered again.

"Look into a man's eyes and see his soul!" Griffin said. He reached behind his head and began unwrapping the bandages.

Griffin had no head! Tamshill took another step back. As lengths of cloth coiled on the road, more and more of Griffin's essential nothingness was revealed. He had no visible form at all, as if his clothes had been placed on a mannequin of perfect glass, glass so fine it reflected not, refracted naught.

"I'm the invisible man!" cried the nothingness where Griffin had once stood. "I'm the invisible man! Incredible how you can see right through me!"

There was a splash. Tamshill snapped his gaze in the direction of the sound, and saw ripples in the swamp water--ripples with no observable cause. After a moment, some air bubbles percolated to the surface; they popped silently, and then the water was still.

Tamshill sat cross-legged on the edge of the road. He'd been told to watch. So watch he would.

Gradually, the sun sank over his left shoulder, casting longer and longer shadows. Soon it was just Tamshill and the darkness and the silence; not even the insects were stirring.

Even at night, the heat was oppressive. There was no escape from it, so Tamshill stewed in his own sweat, his uniform sticky and cloying.

He fell into a fitful sleep, his head hanging down against his chest. He dreamed that his eyes were gone, but he could somehow see the empty sockets when he looked at his face in a mirror. His wife saw this and wailed, her body stiffening and then transforming into water, which held her form for a second and then crashed to the bathroom floor, washing down an air vent that was for some reason covered in moss.

Tepid water splashed him in the face, and Tamshill woke to horror.

The Gill-Man stood before him, shrieking in uncanny rage and pain. The monster's green skin had turned translucent; Tamshill could see thing thing's internal workings. Massive emerald lungs, a thick, dark, five-lobed heart, and a yellowish sac that was the stomach...which as now, too, turning invisible to reveal the half-digested parts of a human figure, a man--a man with a face frozen in terror, with bulging eyes, the freshly dead--

Griffin. The Gill-Man had eaten Griffin.

Tamshill couldn't move; he was frozen in the early morning heat, eyes agape as the Gill-Man stomped and thrashed and clawed at it's own head. Something in Griffin's body must have infected the Gill-Man not only with his invisibility, but his madness.

Was that Miskatonic's plan all along? Suddenly Tamshill knew it was so. But why? Why transform an already dangerous creature into something insane and unseen? There could be no hunting the Gill-Man now. It wouldn't be long before the Gill-Man was not merely transparent, but as utterly invisible as Griffin had been.

Tamshill drew his revolver. The Gill-Man had shrugged off bullets before, but there was nothing else he could do. Maybe he'd get lucky. He held his pistol in both hands, still cross-legged, aiming at the monster's left eye. Shooting at the creature's centre mass was futile; perhaps even the eyes were tougher than lead.

Tamshill fired. The bullet sang as it ricocheted off the monster's scaly skull. The creature roared even as it faded away to complete invisibility. Tamshill might get one more shot. He fired at where the monster had been. The bullet chased the horizon.

Tamshill scrambled to his feet. His only chance now was to dash for his cruiser, parked about a half-mile away where the road curved sharply from east to south.

The sun was rising in the east. At least he'd seen it one last time. One last caress from the divine before one last caress from the demon.

He could hear the Gill-Man's webbed feet slapping against the road in pursuit. He was only a few feet behind. No way could Tamshill dive into the cruiser before he was caught.

Sweat clouded Tamshill's eyes, stinging them, blurring his vision. He saw two lights suddenly hove into view behind the cruiser. A large vehicle--a moving van--

Tamshill realized he was running down the middle of the road. He dove aside with a scream.

There was a wet thump behind him as the van slammed into something. It careened off the road, burying its cabin in the swamp before bursting into flames.

Tamshill rolled from belly to butt, crawling backward toward his cruiser. The Gill-Man's wet footprints ended where the van's skid marks began. The van's engine sputtered and died, and then there was only the sound of crackling flames--suddenly broken by an anguished scream that ended with a bloody gurgle.

Tamshill fled to his cruiser. A moment later, he was gone.

Chucky and Lydia

This is the first time I've attempted to paint a flesh-toned minifigure using Jeff's most recent tips. I underpainted the hands and face with the thinnest coat of light red I could, then added very thin layers of flesh tone. The result is certainly better than typical for me; I shot the figure in two different places to try it out under different lighting conditions.

Note, however, that I did not add an ink wash to Chucky's flesh. This becomes relevant below.

Here are two photos of Lydia, Diana's conniving rival in the television series V. I painted this model the same way I painted Chucky, with one exception: I added an ink wash, typically recommended for miniatures to make small details like the shadows between fingers distinct. 

Lydia still looks better than a lot of my human figures, but the ink wash has given her a ruddy look; I was hoping for something paler to better approximate Lydia's actor, June Chadwick. 

I'm using Reikland Fleshshade for ink wash, but I wonder if perhaps there's a lighter shade I could use to avoid this muddy/ruddy effect. Or I could forego a wash altogether; Chucky seems fine without it. 

Some Thing from the 80s

I'm pretty happy with this Thing. Fans of John Carpenter or 1980s science fiction or horror films will recognize this monstrosity. 
 

Universal Soldiers

Liminal Effort

I can't say what compelled me
The door was open and a ray of sunlight revealed warped floorboards so I 
Went inside and the boards creaked under my weight 
There was an old locket in that beam of sunlight so I
Stooped to claim it but there was a sound from
The shadowed hall beyond like
Claws ripping at the couch cushions and then stopping suddenly
And I looked down that hallway, locket in hand--it was cold--
And I decided to back out but it was too--

 

10 Monsters I could Outrun If I Had To

1. The Mummy (Boris Karloff version) 
2. The Blob (original version) 
3. Frankenstein's Monster (Boris Karloff version) 
4. The Bride of Frankenstein
5. The Invisible Man (Claude Rains version) 
6. The Creature from the Black Lagoon (on land) 
7. Standard Dalek (no antrigravs installed) 
8. The Creeping Terror
9. Romero-style zombies
10. The Green Slime

The key in all cases is to ensure you don't get cornered. Given an open playing field, the average healthy human being who doesn't panic or take stupid chances or box themselves in should be able to escape any of these guys without too much trouble, although there's a chance you might get shot in the back by a Dalek with a death beam.

 

The Corruption Within

A few nights ago, I dreamed that I was in my 20s again. I was walking through downtown Edmonton, and my fingers hurt. They were swollen, and the pain was blunt as a hammer blow. I stood on the sidewalk as 90s-era ETS buses passed by, and looked down and wrapped the fingers of my left hand around my right index finger. I formed a tight ring around the base of my index finger and felt something squirming inside. I moved the ring forward, forcing whatever was inside my finger toward the tip. When I could feel the cyst or whatever it was at the tip of my finger, I looked and saw that a blister was forming--a greenish blister with something wriggling through the thin skin. I pushed and strained until that blister popped, and like some form of hellish toothpaste, a dark green slug-like pustule slid free. Disgusted, I flicked my finger to fling the corruption away, then looked inside the hole left behind. Instead of bone, there was a dark tunnel inside my finger, but the flesh was clean and pink and the missing bone didn't alarm me at all; instead, I felt relief. 

I repeated the process on two more fingers on my right hand, then two more on my left. I felt like I'd had a narrow escape. And then, startled, I looked across the street into the eyes of the camera watching me, the camera that was the older Earl in the "real" world, watching his dream. My dream. 

Boneless fingers, clutching at the bottomless well of time. 

Books I Read in 2022: The Fail Edition

 

Blogger wiped out about 80% of what had been a 2,000 word post right before I could save it. And no, I didn't write it in Word first, like an idiot. 

I was pretty happy with what I'd written, too, and flew into a fit of angry depression thereafter. Happy New Year to me. Bah. 

Hopefully I can muster up the desire to rewrite this post in a couple of days, based on what little was saved. Sigh. 

From Heck It Came

I tried to get Stable Diffusion to render a person being chased by a man-eating toilet, as in the unproduced Toilet Chase screenplay. I hope the AI isn't trying to tell me something. 
 

The Maltese Brain Served Up on a Silver Platter

Here are 28mm scale models of the Maltese Falcon and the criminal brain used to create Frankenstein's monster. I agonized over how to paint the Falcon so as to reveal the details of its surface, but then I watched a clip of the film and realized that yep, it's just black, and you see detail because of the light reflecting across its contours. So I just painted it black. 

The road to Castle Frankenstein wasn't exactly paved with gold, Sam Spade thought. In fact, it wasn't paved at all, except maybe with the blood and sweat of the poor peasant saps of the village that sat below and apart from the tall stone towers of the castle. That road now had a little extra paving in the form of Spade's blood and sweat, though not his tears - never his tears. 

Spade's right hand was clenched tightly around his Colt M1911A1 as he kicked open the door to Victor Frankenstein's lab. 

"Freeze, you butcher!" Spade cried. A stout hunchback carrying a silver tray yelped in surprise, and in his shock the hunchback's spastic motions launched the tray's contents - a bloody scalpel and a disembodied human brain - into the air. 

"You fool!" shouted Frankenstein, his mad eyes wide with anguish. The scalpel clattered harmlessly across the stone floor into a dark corner, while the brain plopped to the floor and was smushed by the impact. 

Spade's lips twisted in disgust as he eyed the broken, oozing brain. Horrified, the hunchback made his escape, dashing for the staircase to the lower levels as his master kneeled and scooped up the remains of the brain in hands wrapped up with black lambskin gloves. 

As Frankenstein lamented, Spade took a precious moment to assess the scene. The centrepiece of the laboratory was a human shape on a metal slab, a shape covered by a white sheet. The slab was attached to chains on a pulley system that seemed to suggest the corpus could be raised to the ceiling. But for what purpose? 

"Say, what is this screwy business?" Spade asked.

Tears streaming down his cheeks, Frankenstein offered up the smashed brains, chunks leaking between his fingers. 

"The stuff that dreams are made of," Frankenstein whispered. 

"Well, sweet dreams to you, sweetheart. Here's a love letter from Miles Archer," Spade said, aiming his Colt, squeezing the trigger, and plugging Frankenstein between the eyes with lead hot as hell.  


 

Ode to Boris

He was The Man They Could Not Hang
The Man Who Lived Again
Doomed to Die
The Man with Nine Lives
The Phantom of the North
The Body Snatcher"
The Mad Genius
The Mummy
The Terror
The Ghoul
British Intelligence
The Invisible Menace
The Public Defender
King of the Wild, King of the Kongo
Dynamite Dan, The Incredible Doktor Markesan

At The Old Dark House on Black Sabbath he chose his Targets
A Hatchet for the Honeymoon, as The Devil Commands
He held The Night Key to The Strange Door to The Black Room
Saw the Ghost in the Invisible Bikini
Counted down The Fatal Hour, held The Yellow Ticket
Ruled The Fear Chamber on Devil's Island
Lured the Son of Frankenstein--Die, Monster, Die! 

He was all this, he did all this and more--but furthermore--

He was--Karloff!

Where They Found Him

Toothy Grins

 

Shorts Worth Watching: Thunder

The face of a haunted woman bathed in staccato sparks and ropes and flashes of neon light, senses assaulted by a cacophony of electronic noise that beats in time with not only the light and stop-motion movement across the screen, but our heroine's trauma. Five minutes of off-kilter terror. Takashi Ito, 1982

Macabre Earl

Review: Visiting Hours (1982)

I went into Jean-Claude Lord's Visiting Hours (1982) with low expectations, but as it turns out this is a pretty effective slasher film set apart from the big slasher names of the 80s--the Friday the 13ths, the Halloweens, and the like. There are two major differences: there's not a hint of the supernatural in this story, and both villain and victims act in (from their different perspectives) reasonable and realistic ways.

Michael Ironside plays Colt Hawker, an unhinged psychopath who hates women, particularly strong women who advocate for themselves. Gradually, through a series of flashbacks spread throughout the film, we discover that Colt's mother attacked and disfigured Colt's father after suffering years of abuse from her husband. Those same flashbacks also imply, in subtle yet truly nauseating fashion, that Colt's father may have been sexually abusing their son. While this disturbing background doesn't excuse Colt's actions, it helps explain his twisted motivations.

Colt's breaking point, it seems, comes when television journalist Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) advocates for an abused woman who was put on trial for defending herself from her husband. Station manager Gary Baylor (William Shatner) plays a supporting role as Deborah's rather ineffective boss and friend, and he's fascinating to watch, especially in contrast to his heroic turn in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in the same year. Baylor is well-intentioned and advocates, somewhat weakly, for Deborah's right to speak out, but it's the women in this film who provide the strongest thematic and story opposition to Ironside's Colt.

First among them is Ballin, of course, who fights back gamely during Colt's initial attempted murder but winds up in the hospital, badly hurt and forced to endure an extended recovery before she'll be able to return to work - and to her advocacy for women's agency and rights. But interestingly, Ballin fades into the background for about the middle third of the picture, and in her place as protagonist steps nurse Sheila Munroe (Linda Purl). When Colt learns that Deborah Ballin is in hospital, he makes multiple attempts on her life in the hospital, killing other patients along the way, and he's foiled by Sheila, which puts her on his list of targets.

The focus shifts yet again as we follow Colt's grimy life outside murder, when he picks up a young woman named Lisa (Lenore Zann) and violently rapes and physically abuses her during what she thought was going to be a date. But Colt doesn't kill her, and she winds up in hospital under Shelia's care. We learn later on that Lisa took revenge offscreen by rounding up some of her friends to invade and trash Colt's apartment, an incident that occurs offscreen and is revealed only later in the film, but struck me as an interesting display of women's agency. (Perhaps even more fascinating, all three female leads are presented as single, either explicitly or via implication by absence.)

Lisa later becomes instrumental as her raid on Colt's apartment uncovers evidence of his crimes, which she hands off to Sheila. Unfortunately, Colt is one step ahead of everyone and sets a trap for her, gravely wounding the nurse and putting her, ironically, back in her own hospital. At this point, the focus shifts back to Deborah Ballin for the final confrontation. In the best traditions of the "final girl" trope, she of course dispatches Colt and sets the world right again....until the next slasher film comes out.

Many reviews of the era slammed Visiting Hours for its exploitative violence, and that's fair, particularly in Lisa's case; the scene where Colt assaults her is definitely exploitative and deeply discomfiting. On the other hand, most Lisa-like characters in this genre don't get to fight back and survive like Lisa does, which doesn't necessarily redeem the film, but I think speaks to its sincerity when it comes to the movie's central theme, that of female empowerment. I think it's very telling that none of the male characters, including alleged heroic lead Shatner (who's barely in the film, really) nor the scores of determined but hapless police officers, really contribute at all to the film's ultimate resolution. The collective bravery and actions of Deborah, Sheila, and Lisa lead directly to Colt's defeat. In effect, there are three "final girls" (and we really should be calling them "final women" if we're going to use the trope at all).

I wouldn't go so far as to call this a feminist movie (far from it!), but I think given the limits of the genre, it's more progressive than many similar films of that era. And it has other merits, of course--effective cinematography and production design, solid editing, and good performances all around, particularly from the women leads and Michael Ironside. It's no classic, but I think Visiting Hours deserves a better reputation than it has. 

What Hath I Wrought?

The Colour Out of Time

The Vampire Bat (Frank R. Strayer, 1933) is an early mad scientist film disguised as a vampire movie, but other than that interesting conceit, there isn't much to distinguish this film from other horror efforts of the decade--other than a short sequence, captured above, where villagers chasing a monster (or so they think) are carrying torches that dance with vibrant hues of yellow, orange, and red. 

At first I thought I was watching some kind of strange experiment in restoration, a modern print of the film with some added CGI. But a little research revealed that the frames with colour were painstakingly hand-painted back when the film was originally produced. The effect is really quite beautiful and striking, and also adds thematic weight to the chase sequence, the hungry flames symbolizing the madness of the mob. 

Gummy Joe

Last night, I came up with an idea: gummy organs. Everyone loves gummy bears, gummy worms, and so forth; why not gummy organs?

As Sylvia tried to fall asleep through my babbling, I designed the snack and its presentation. The container would take the form of a 12-inch action figure, like the old GI Joe dolls, but with no articulation. Instead, the container would be split down the middle and hinged so that you could open him up like a refrigerator. Inside, you'd find the gummy organs, all in their anatomically correct positions, with perhaps the scales exaggerated in some cases for the smaller organs.

Let's go over the organs, colours, and flavours by body part:

Head and Neck
Gummy brain and spinal cord (cord gently housed in plastic vertebrae down the back of the container so it can be pulled out with the brain): light pink, strawberry
Gummy tongue: medium pink, watermelon
Gummy teeth (come out as an upper and lower set of 16 connected teeth each) : transparent, pineapple
Gummy eyes (visible through cutouts in the container): transparent and brown, cola
Gummy trachea: brown, root beer

Chest
Gummy heart: deep red, cherry
Gummy lungs: blue, blue raspberry
Gummy stomach: yellow, lemon
Gummy liver: peach, peach
Gummy large intestine: orange, orange
Gummy small intestine: purple, grape
Gummy kidneys: green, lime
Gummy pancreas: dark pink, bubblegum
Gummy spleen: light green, green apple

Arms and Legs
Gummy muscles: medium red, black cherry; wrapped around white candy bones made of the stuff they used to make lick 'em stix

If properly marketed, this snack would not only be tasty, but also fun and educational as kids explore the mysterious inner workings of the human form. 

The First Thing You See in Hell