|
Jack Arnold sketches the arid setting along Frostian lines, the desert was once the floor of the ocean, "it gives people wonderful ideas." A lateral scan of the windswept Arizona prairie spots a mysterious figure stumbling amid rocks, a closer look reveals a mutant in striped pajamas. The corpse befuddles the local doctor (John Agar), the experimental biologist (Leo G. Carroll) assures there's nothing out of the ordinary before returning to his lab, which holds a rodent built like a tapir and a tarantula grown "hundreds, even thousands of times its regular size." The serum is meant to battle overpopulation and hunger, it goes the mandatory way of Fifties sci-fi. ("The isotope triggered the nutrient into a nightmare.") Curiosity and dread exist side by side in Arnold's view of the unknown, the landscape contemplated by the doctor and the intern (Mara Corday) is "serene, quiet, yet strangely evil," from behind one of the hills emerges a mammoth arachnoid leg. The marauding beast helps itself to cattle and prospectors and leaves behind puddles of milky venom, a descending crane gives the view as its hairy mandibles close in on shrieking victims. An acerbic Cold War surrealist, the filmmaker is equally beguiled by the illusionism of miniatures and the uncanny corners of Nature—a few choice moments of documentary footage present a spider defending its burrow from a rattlesnake, later on the King Kong shot has a giant glistening eye peeping at the heroine through a window. "Just part of the world around us." A napalm blitzkrieg led by a young Clint Eastwood saves the day, Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly evinces a vivid memory. With Nestor Paiva, Ross Elliott, and Hank Patterson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |