Alienated

Movie monsters such as those in Men in Black II are computer cookie cutouts. Give us the days of good old fear of the unknown.

By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic

© St. Petersburg Times
published July 5, 2002

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[Photo: Columbia Pictures] Men in Black II aliens fit into the molds of comedic relief or quick violence before the kill.

Nothing in the movies creeped me out more as a child than The Brain That Wouldn't Die, which was only B-movie actor Virginia Leith's head poking through a hole in a table. A towel wrapped around her neck and some bogus medical apparatus convinced me that a mad scientist was keeping his wife's decapitated noggin alive.

Just like a wad of silicone and food coloring made me wonder if that sticky stuff on the theater floor was The Blob coming to get me. Or the way extreme close-ups and tiny balsa-wood buildings taught me a lasting respect for gila monsters, scorpions and 50-foot women.

Watch those old monster movies today and the first impulse is laughter. Audiences have been spoiled by the hyper-realism offered by makeup and computer-generated effects. Modern movie monsters have more eyes, sharper fangs and more hostile mobility than ever. But there's one thing they're missing:

Our imaginations.

Creature features got too slick around 1981 when we watched David Naughton's snout grow in An American Werewolf in London. The reality of this milestone sequence, accomplished with new hydraulic prosthetics and Rick Baker's makeup, was hairy-head and shoulders above Michael Landon's time-lapse transformation into a teenage werewolf. Then it became a matter of one-upsmanship as new tinkering toys were invented, all the way to George Lucas' digital dream.

Any imagined terrors of moviegoers could now be realized, and the audience's imagination atrophied. Movie monsters became more elaborate, but they're not really monsters anymore. Monsters reside in our dreams and filmmakers are determined to do our dreaming for us.

"You imagine something much scarier if you don't see it," said Scott Hamilton, co-founder the StompTokyo.com, one of the Internet's foremost cult movie sites. "Our imaginations tend to be better than what they put on screen, even today."

The results are creatures that satisfy our immediate need to cringe or laugh, but barely survive in our memories, where monsters surely aren't supposed to die.

[Photo: Columbia Pictures] Lara Flynn Boyle plays Serleena, an evil Kylothian monster who leads a group of aliens, in Men in Black II.

Go see Men in Black II this weekend (everybody else will) for the latest example of how movies have systematically stripped monsters of their ability to thrill us beyond the screen. The most memorable non-human is a talking dog. The rest are a parade of exaggerated mutants and schoolboy doodles come to life. Their main purpose is giving Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones something to wisecrack about. The nastiest ones make fast appearances then explode, and the others are silly sidekicks.

Rule No. 1 for making monster movies: Don't cast big name stars who won't appreciate being upstaged or eaten by the monsters. John Agar and Kenneth Tobey wouldn't be as funny as Smith and Jones, but those 1950s movie stars knew their places on screen, dodging a brain from planet Arous or James Arness -- the future Marshal Dillon -- dressed as a carrot in The Thing From Another World.

Rule No. 2: Don't overdo the monsters. One pod from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the original, not Philip Kaufman's gooey remake) or a single species of giant insect is equal to the ensemble freak show of Men in Black II, and almost as amusing in hindsight. Monsters should never try to be funny anyway; part of the imagination process is making up our own punchlines, often as a defense mechanism against fear.

[Times photo: Allied Artists Pictures] Kevin McCarthy confronts a pod in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Rule No. 3: After selecting a monster to hold our attention, keep it hidden, teasing us until those carefully chosen moments of surprise. How many times did you see the shark in Jaws? Probably fewer than the number of times you jumped. But today's computer-driven designers want to constantly show off what they can do, either diluting the impact or raising the bar too high to clear for a big finish.

"Now that we can show monsters more realistically, some directors think we should show them all the time," said Hamilton's Web partner Chris Holland. "That's not necessarily good filmmaking."

It's no coincidence that the past decade's most memorable movie monsters -- the bug-eyed fishbowl-heads of Mars Attacks! -- were director Tim Burton's affectionate spoof of 1950s sci-fi schlock. Mars Attacks! is a rare modern sci-fi film that successfully broke all three rules and flopped at the box office for its efforts. Probably because it looked cheesy and outdated, but that was Burton's warped idea.

[Photo: Universal Pictures] David Naughton is transformed into a werewolf with Rick Baker’s makeup in the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London.

Moviegoers have succumbed to the filmmakers' fancies, our bodies intact but our imaginations snatched. All we demand from monster movies these days are a few "boo" moments, a fair amount of ick and big-name movie stars winking at the camera instead of running like hell, totally in control because their images demand it. One monster looks like the next, maybe with different jaw or an extra claw attached by someone claiming creativity.

The scariest creatures in movies today are humans, which will be the past generation's horror-flick legacy for future social scholars, same as they credit Hiroshima and Nagasaki with spawning Godzilla or the Cold War dropping those pods among us. Hannibal Lecter is the icon of movie fear in the Internet age, intellectual to a sociopathic degree, while the same technology makes traditional monsters too strange to respect.

As our cultural fears change, so will the movie images created to scare us beyond them. The current state of terrorism is bound to inspire filmmakers to devise monstrous allegories capitalizing on our nervousness. And the root of that fear is our imaginations.

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