The Killer Shrews (1959)
The
Killer Shrews (1959)
This film is famously awful, and it is true that it has some blatantly terrible
elements but, in fact, was it was effectively executed for most of its length. That
makes it the perfect example of “So Bad It’s Good” because it was just barely
well-made enough to hold one’s attention, so when it goes wrong, we laugh
because we’re not asleep yet. Not surprisingly, it was featured on TV show “Mystery
Science Theater 3000” (aka MST3000, and this episode was aired in 1992).
It also speaks of the value of a centralized film industry despite all its
faults, because this piece of marginal is buttressed by a collection of people
with remarkable resumes, mostly Hollywood work, even though this was an
outside-Hollywood production. A common complaint among unsuccessful people is,
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” but that proves a virtue here; these
were people working on a product beneath their worth, only there because of
pre-existing relationships, and their professionalism is the thing that makes
the film tolerable.
Director Ray Kellogg was better known for being the Head of FX for 20th
c. Fox and a Second-Unit or Assistant Director on some legitimate Masterpieces,
but also proved pretty terrible while sitting in the Director’s chair in films like “The
Giant Gila Monster” (also 1959) and “The Green Berets” (1968, a credit he
shared equally with two others including, improbably, Actor John Wayne). "The Killer Shrews" should've been the worst of the lot but is in fact, the best. It was an
Ultra-Cheapie with a near-impossible-to-realize Monster because of the Budget. Meanwhile, though “The Giant Gila …,” was even cheaper, was a conventional
Kaijū with clear antecedents to follow and Monster that should've been easier within reach. “The Green Berets” was lavishly
budgeted but some scenes are shockingly incompetent, and the script was crap.
Kellogg seemed to respond well to Writer’s Jay Simms unambitious but well-thought
script. Simms would soon become a prolific Writer for B-movies (he also Authored
the far worse “The Giant Gila …”) and TV, frequently displaying both awkward
dialogue and ambitious narrative ideas in the same gesture (example, “Creation
of the Humanoids” (1962)) but here the dialogue is mostly solid (meaning only silly
on it was meant to be) while the ideas are all cliché.
What gives this film distinction is the
narrative line, a sharp, economical, Base-Under-Siege tale that bears
remarkable similarities to the later, and far superior, “Night of the Living
Dead” (1968). These films are, in fact, such close brothers that it’s impossible
to image the latter’s Director, George Romero was unfamiliar with “The Killer
Shrews.” They are even closer akin than the acknowledged influence that
Director Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo” (1959) had on Director John Carpenter’s “Assault
of Precinct 13” (1976).
In its
claustrophobic visceral-ness, it’s a pretty modern piece of story-telling, but
it was nostalgia-fodder even at the time of its release because it harked back to
the poverty-row Mad Scientist films of the 1930s and ‘40s that Actor Bella
Lugosi was reduced to because Universal studios refused to give him a contract
to even though he was one of their Biggest Stars. The score (Composed by Harry
Bluestone and Gordon McLendon, and as you’ll see, McLendon was far more
important to the film than just this), certainly evokes those films more than
it did then-contemporary Monster Movies. Actor Baruch Lumet (one of the greats of Yiddish
Theater and father of the great Director
Syndey Lumet) played Character Dr. Marlowe Craigis with a Polish accent that
seemed a flawless mimic of Lugosi’s Hungarian one. An important difference is
that Marlowe isn’t at all Mad and the Monster wasn’t unleashed by the Unstable,
merely the Incompetent.
The
crisis is laid-out efficiently in the first 20-minutes, it’s presented and a Mystery,
but one the audience already had the solution of based on the opening narration
(McLendon in one of two parts in the film). The known Mystery still has to be
solved by our Hero Captain Thorne Sherman, as
and his First Mate Rook Griswold (James Best and "Judge"
Henry Dupree, respectively).
They arrive at the
private island of Dr. Marlowe for a scheduled delivery of equipment and are
expected to take Marlowe’s daughter, Ann Craigis (Ingrid Goude), off the island
immediately. Thorne explains he can’t, there’s a hurricane bearing down on them
and he’ll have to stay overnight; he would’ve warned Marlowe of this, but the
island’s radio is out. This is clearly distressing for Marlowe, Ann, and the
three other inhabitants of the island, but they’re unwilling to say why.
Thorne, no fool, realizes they are hiding something, but as a calm and stoic
Hero, Thorne gently teases out the truth instead of losing his temper
immediately.
Marlowe proves chatty
and brags about his successes in Breeding Experiments, facilitated by Exotic Chemicals,
with shrews, which he describes as truly nasty little beasts except too tiny to
harm humans (actually, shrews are really important in controlling more directly
damaging pests so they are Humanity’s friends, except in this movie). What Marlowe
doesn’t talk about is his failures, but we do get to overhear a conversation
between Ann and her very recently ex-fiancé, Jerry Farrell (Ken Curtis), and
that he drunkenly left a cage open and whatever escaped was why Marlowe was so
anxious to get Ann off the island ASAP. This is not the only reason she’s soured
on Jerry, he’s also a Bully and a Coward (“When they came at us last night, you
knocked me down getting inside the fence”). Ann immediately warns to Thorne,
making Jerry jealous.
Kellogg chose it show
the Monster early and clearly, before the 20-minute mark. A bad mistake. The Monster
Shrews are played by German Shepard dogs with ratty-looking rugs wrapped around
their torsos and, later, even rattier-looking hand-puppets. Though the dogs are
convincingly vicious as dogs their sounds are costumes are not (turning real
dogs into Monsters with costumes almost never works, examples: The Werewolf in “The
Beast Must Die” (1974) was inappropriately adorable and the Mutant Feral Dogs
in “Dreamscape” (1984) looked so terrible that mid-production the costumes were
abandoned and dogs were instead just given red, glowing eyes). Given Kellogg’s
FX background even in a Cheapie the Monsters should’ve looked better. No one took
an on-screen credit for the film’s appalling FX.
Despite Kellogg’s big studio connections, this film wasn’t
only Independent but wholly non-Hollywood, considered a piece of “Regional
Cinema,” part of a small wave that emerged from Texas and elsewhere to serve
the Drive-in Market. Kellogg’s Hollywood connections counted for something
though, it was one of the rare Regional Films to get National, and later
International, distribution and was quite successful. The above-mentioned McLendon owned the biggest Drive-In movie chain
in the USA and I’m sure that was helpful. Soon after, the film lapsed into Public Domain because to
the inattention of its marginal studio, McLendon’s own Hollywood Pictures Corporation (based in Dallas, Texas). McLendon paid far less attention to his own
productions than the properties he became responsible for when he became Majority
Shareholder of Columbia Pictures.
As
for why this film has earned such legendary derision, we can start with the Acting
even though it wasn’t entirely awful:
Actor
Lumet as Character Dr. Marlowe is surprisingly good in the self-contradictory
role.
Actor
Best as Character Thorne is appealing mostly because he doesn’t take the
proceedings too seriously. Best was Classically Trained and later a respected
Acting Teacher, and later explained in an interview, “I did the original ‘The Killer Shrews’ as a favor. I made a movie
with Sammy Ford, who was friends with a special effects man, Ray Kellogg, who
wanted to Direct his own picture. And we looked at the original’s script, and
he didn’t have hardly any money whatsoever, but I did him a favor by acting in
it … so I went down there to Texas where we shot this thing. I didn’t realize
it was so cheap. I mean, it was really cheap. For me it was a blast, but it was
so bad! I think it was voted the worst picture of the year at the time. And
then it caught on as a drive-in cult film, and believe it or not, after so many
years I noticed that it was playing all over the place.”
Producer/Composer McLendon
played the Narrator and Dr. Radford Baines with both oddness and conviction.
On the other hand, Actor
Curtis, also one of the film’s Producers (also the son-in-law of the great
Director Jonh Ford and McLendon’s War-time buddy, who got him his first job in
Hollywood) and had an impressive resume in film, TV, and pop-music, but here he
gets less convincing as Charscter Jerry as the film progresses because Curtis couldn’t
fake drunkenness that well.
And then there was Actress
Goude, a former Miss Universe who, as Character Ann, seemed dedicated to
redefine our conceptions of what Transcendent Awfulness is among the Thespian class.
One silly element is that the script had to awkwardly and not-really explain was
her totally inappropriate accent.
The film was blatantly,
but likely unintentionally, Racist with its two non-White Character existing
only for their servitude and were also the first two to die. Actor Dupree as Character
Rook is the more glaring example, playing heavily to clichés and whose fate is
treated with shocking disregard by the film’s allegedly non-Villainous
Characters because Black Lives Matter Less.
I should also throw in that the Experiment
makes no sense. Early on we learn that the Giant Shrews were released by
accident, but later on we’re told that the island was chosen so the Researchers
could observe what would happen if they were allowed to run free. More
seriously, this reveal made the SF Breeding Experiment unnecessary. Marlowe’s
Experiment was clearly inspired by the demonstration of the dangers of pressing
Malthusian limits done in the Real-World by Dr. John B. Calhoun with rats and mice starting in 1947. Calhoun
didn’t need Exotic Monster-Making Chemicals to run his experiments, so Marlowe
didn’t either. Marlowe’s dialogue tries to address this, but only adds another
layer of silliness; Marlowe insists the Exotic Chemicals were to help the
shrews, already the world’s smallest mammals, breed even smaller and then
refine it to use on Humans ("If
we were half as big as we are now, we could live twice as long on our natural
resources") but somehow the opposite happened. That doesn’t make much
sense of the face of it and contradicts some of his other descriptions of the Experiment.
The
results of Dr. Calhoun’s Real-World Experiments were grim and heavily publicized.
Starvation threatened, Disease raged, and the rats and mice became increasingly
Aggressive in the enclosed pen with a steady food supply not adjusted for the Increasing
Population so Cannibalism was also observed. But the Press poorly reported the Findings,
like how the reproductive cycles adapted to the limitations, so threatened Starvation
was never fully realized because the females started bearing fewer children;
the projected population was 5,000 but in truth never exceeded 200 and
eventually stabilized at a workable 150. The rats’ Social Structure didn’t
completely break down either, they didn’t become randomly scattered but
organized themselves in twelve or thirteen Colonies within the Enclosure.
Stress and Phycological problems were evidenced when a Colony exceeded a dozen
rats, but as those crises emerged, the rats would then split into smaller, more
manageable groups. Writing about these Experiments generations after-the fact,
Marissa Fessenden observed, "Instead of
a population problem, one could argue that (the mouse universe) had a fair
distribution problem."
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