THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (PG)

It’s been a while since we watched a sci-fi movie with K, and so our viewing of The Incredible Shrinking Man was even sweeter the other night.

It’s a pretty innocuous film, from 1957, but there is something that stays with you afterwards in an unsettling, sort of creepy way. Now that I think about it, I think it may have simply aroused some very old memories of seeing a movie called Attack of the Puppet People when I was a kid. It made for fine Saturday afternoon television viewing, but I think I had bad dreams later that night. The idea of having a completely altered physical existence from the one you know and live everyday is pretty terrifying; imagine suddenly becoming tiny, gigantic, invisible, glowing green ...

In The Incredible Shrinking Man, a young, happily married man encounters a strange, radioactive cloud while out boating one day, and later notices some very strange things. He is, of course, shrinking.

The effects are surprisingly good. In the beginning, staging tricks make his wife appear larger, and his clothes are just a little more ill-fitting each day. Slowly, his physical frame appears child-like on oversized sofas and standing at windowsills he can barely reach. Soon he’s living in a dollhouse, and fearing the house cat, as well he should.

The artistry that went into the sets, and in creating objects many times their true size (scissors, straight pins, mouse traps, twine balls), was impressive. This “shrinking” film inspired others (such as Puppet People), but this is one of the best of the lot.

Without giving anything away, you need to know that it takes its time getting to the juicy stuff, but stay with it, as it’s well worth it. Our hero’s encounter with the spider (did they use a tarantula?!) is what you want to stick around for.

And my bad dreams, back in the day of Saturday afternoon horror movies on television? After reading up on Puppet People, I’m reminded that the disturbing thing about that movie was that the miniaturized people were kept in a state of suspended animation in bottles, like dolls under glass. What ten-year old wouldn’t be a little freaked out by that?

PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (PG)

If you haven't seen this cult classic, you've surely heard of it: Plan 9 From Outer Space is often branded the Worst Movie Ever Made. It’s a hilarious spectacle of cheap sets, visual incongruities, bad writing, acting and editing, and... oh, bad directing, of course!

Everything about it is bad.

But it’s so darn fun! It had been years since I’d seen this, and we recently watched with K, who really has been fulfilling his dad’s dream of Saturday nights being classic monster movie nights. I guess we’re really lucky K loves all this sci-fi and ‘50s horror (such as it was); it’s just what husband D had planned for him.

Basically, the story is about some (very human) aliens who come to earth to raise the dead in order to, um, tell living Earthlings that they (the aliens) exist. Or something. So you’ve got hubcaps as flying saucers, cardboard crypts and gravestones, plenty of fog, Vampira (and her disturbingly small waist), Bella Lugosi playing Bella Lagosi, zombies, dumb cops, hysterical women, and a few macho men. And more!

I was surprised to find the film was, at its core, clearly an anti-bomb, anti-war statement. I didn’t remember that from seeing it 20 years ago. The aliens are afraid, now that they’ve seen we have the A-bomb and the H-bomb, that we will discover the next mega-powerful technology (gee, the name escapes me) which will obliterate the sun; they already have the technology, but don’t trust us “small brained Earthlings” with the knowledge, and are certain we’ll destroy more than ourselves. They’re here, really to save the galaxy from our stupidity.

But that comes at the end, and before that, it’s all belly laughs and root beer through the nose. As cheesy as it is, though, I’ll say that for younger kids who’ve not ever seen a zombie or dark, creepy graveyard scenes, or heard women screaming as if they’ve ... seen a zombie, it could be a bit scary. (For the younger ones.) Ok? I dunno if that means 8-year olds in your house, or 10-year olds. You know ‘em best.

If your kids are younger, just get this for yourselves one night, and make it a double feature: watch the 1994 Tim Burton film, Ed Wood, starring a fantastic Johnny Depp as Wood, who not only enthusiastically made awful films, but wore women’s underthings as he did it. (Martin Landau is stellar as Lugosi.) Then go on to Plan 9, you’ll appreciate it more.

(Note: This double feature calls for double martinis.)

THE BLOB (PG)

“How do you get people to protect themselves from something they don't
believe in?”

While there have been some remakes and a sequel to the classic 1958 film The Blob, the original is the only one that matters.

Not only does it star Steve McQueen (in his debut role!) but there's something about the amorphous mass that eats people – and even engulfs an entire building – that is both scary and just a bit silly at the same time. There is also an undercurrent of the quintessential ‘50s theme of teens vs. cops, and you’re rooting for McQueen to break through a general sheen of teen prejudice in the town so that he can save the day.

Parts of the movie were filmed in Phoenixville, PA, and that town’s recently restored Colonial Theater is featured in a famous scene where moviegoers run in terror out into the streets, as the Blob suddenly appears during a screening of Daughter of Horror (a very strange film with an interesting history all its own!). Phoenixville celebrates the town’s 15 minutes of fame with an annual “Blobfest,” and one of the events is a re-enactment of the scene, where townspeople and tourists have the chance to run from the theater, screaming in their amateur-acting best.

Parents can feel good about the storyline offering up positive spins on concepts such as community, responsibility, honesty, prejudice, and the feel-good meme of doing the right thing. And in the meantime, you can have a good, ol’ fashioned, scary movie night with the kids.

1950's Sci-Fi/Horror Flicks

There are so many great sci-fi/horror movies from the 1950s that I’ve decided to bundle a few here and there into single posts (much to husband D’s chagrin; he could write pages on each of them!). I just think I’ll cover more ground quicker if do quick pieces on one or two at a time.

(I also have to confess that K’s very existence is owed, in part, to D’s desire to have a kid sandwiched between us, with a big bowl of popcorn and some Mug Root Beer, watching what was called, in the Bay Area, “Creature Features,” on Saturday nights. It was a tradition in his family, and also in mine, and early on in our married life, D felt the addition of a kid to the mix was necessary. I said, “Ok.”*)


While some of the films from this period are viewed as “cult classics” and perhaps a little kitschy (they pretty much fall under the “B movie” rubric, and B-movies generally get short shrift), these films stand up today as involving, thought-provoking and even a little spine-tingling because they were well-crafted and well thought-out. They often played on very real fears of the time, about nuclear war and the “Red menace" (communism, for you youngsters), about the rapid advent of technology and new science ... a sort of unspoken, intangible fear that our glorious, apple pie-scented, U.S. of A. might wake up one morning only to find everything had changed and there was no going back.

The very idea of alien beings landing on your neighbors’ farm, or people being “replaced” by replicants, or shapeless monsters coming in the night, can still be extremely entertaining for kids and adults alike. But, with these older films, you pretty much know you’re free of worrying about the kinds of things that color so many sci-fi and horror films today.

Ok, you’re sort of free.

This is why I’m here, to help guide you!

I’ll open this whole can of worms with a recommendation of sorts (it comes with an age caveat), and look at another film that represents the kinds of surprises you may encounter in work from this era. Doing your own homework (on titles you can’t find here on KidsFlix) will help you out, of course, as it does with every other genre.

As I mentioned before, we made the mistake of watching the fantastic 1954 film, THEM!, when K was just a bit young for it. He was about eight or nine years old, and our own memories of the giant, mutant ants (they were, of course, a result of radioactive fallout from bomb tests) were that they were a bit silly and the entire movie was just oodles of fun. Well, we were part right: the movie was oodles of fun, and the ants were actually cooler than we remembered – but what freaked K out at the tender age of “under 10” was a scene neither of us thought much of when we all watched it. But K lost sleep that night. And the next. And the next.

It was a scene (or two) of a young girl, in shock, traumatized by what she had seen when the ants descended on her town (of course, the implied carnage – implied – may have been a bit much for a young kid, too). The girl was fair haired and delicate looking, and walked as if in a trance ... her eyes were deep wells of emptiness.

Who knew this image would give K nightmares for a few nights? I’m sure some kids who are exposed to more mature themes than K was at that age might not have been bothered by anything in this movie. (You know your kids best, etc.) But I feel more comfortable saying that THEM! is probably fine viewing for kids 10 and older.


The other film was one that just caught us off-guard. It came from the 1950’s horror film calendar hanging in our kitchen; the calendar features 12 B-movie classics, and we’ve tried to see each month’s featured film. (I’ll be doing posts on the titles we found that were successful, and skip the titles that didn’t fly so well.)

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1959) was, to our surprise, pretty risqué and a bit more terrifying than the calendar artwork and any IMDB notes would have us think. But I blame D for this goof; a look at the user reviews on Netflix would have steered us away from this one (“I highly recommend it, especially for the mid-movie catfight between strippers [in all their 1950s pinup glory] and the evil head.”) Ooops. (Note: we never found the head to be all that evil.)

In this movie, our mad doctor/protagonist saves the severed head of his girlfriend, who died in a car crash, and sets about finding the perfect body for her. As you might imagine, this opens up all kinds of opportunities for injecting a bit of sexploitation into the mix, including the aforementioned wrestling match/cat fight between two scantily clad women, grappling and pulling each other's hair on a nightclub dressing room floor. Yes. We watched strippers wrestle, with our 11-year-old son. (You’re not calling the authorities, are you?)

As if that weren’t bad enough, there was a mutant creature hidden away in a closet that became more monstrous as the film went on; the thing is never on camera, and so of course one’s imagination takes flight, and it becomes as hideous as one can imagine. The creature’s tortured existence leads him to violence and revenge in the end, and for a ‘50s flick, it was a bit more intense than we had anticipated.

A couple of years in age can make a huge difference, though, and K didn’t seem much phased by any of it. His mom and dad were the ones wringing their hands through the whole movie.

So, if you’re interested in this genre – and perhaps in a range of B-movies from this era – stay tuned and I’ll help you figure out which ones might not scare the bejeesus out of the kids, or have them asking, “Mom, why is that woman in a restaurant in her underwear?”

I'll also write up a few great movies for Halloween season in the coming days.

*Ok, there was a little more involved in the decision-making process than this.