Monster from Green Hell (1957)

... aka: África en las garras del monstruo (Africa in the Claws of the Monster)
... aka: Beast from Green Hell, The
... aka: Creature from Green Hell
... aka: Il pianeta dove l'inferno è verde (The Planet Where Hell is Green)
... aka: O Monstro do Inferno Verde (The Green Hell Monster)

Directed by:
Kenneth G. Crane

"This is the age of the rocket, the jet, atomic power, when man prepares to reach for the stars... But before he dares to launch himself into space there is one great question to be answered: What happens to life in the airless void above Earth's atmosphere? Will life remain untouched, unharmed, by flight through space? Or will he change into... what? There was only one way to find out and we were working on it." So says Dr. Quent Brady (Jim Davis), who has just helped successfully launch a rocket 208 miles into space. Seeing how man will one day want to venture out there himself (which would actually happen in 1961 when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first traveled to space), they've decided to fill the ship with a variety of test animals. Among those are wasps, crabs, spiders, guinea pigs and a monkey. The rocket doesn't return to the U.S. on schedule. Tracking devices determine it's instead going to come down somewhere off the Atlantic coast of Africa.

Meanwhile, strange things start going down in and around a small village called Mongwa, particularly near an area called Green Hell. Green Hell is already avoided by the locals due to local legend that it's cursed by evil spirits, but other things that can't be explained away as just mere superstition start occurring. Birds now suddenly fly right by and won't even rest on the trees there. Other animals, even large elephants, flee whenever they get near it. And then people start dying. Scientist Dr. Lorentz (Vladimir Sokoloff) and his assistant daughter Lorna (Barbara Turner), who run a hospital and mission there, do an autopsy on a body and determine the man was killed by poison. However, the poison is in such high concentration that it couldn't possibly had been administered by a snake or any other animals... at least not one known to man.

Back in the U.S., Dr. Brady and colleague Dan Morgan (Robert E. Griffin) ponder whether recent headlines about Africa being in a panic over recent monster sightings have anything to do with their rocket. They analyze other test animals they had sent to space on other ships and note some interesting changes. A brown guinea pig has turned white, lizards appear to be in a trance and a pregnant crab gave birth to a baby that grew to be twice her size. Seeing how the animals on the missing rocket received much more exposure to radiation (40 minutes as opposed to 40 seconds), Brady convinces Dan ("You've seen pictures of the survivors of Hiroshima, haven't you?") that there may actually be giant monsters on the loose. More specifically, giant mutated wasps. The two men are able to get approval for a leave of absence from their posts and then travel to Libreville, Gabon. They are stuck there over a week organizing their safari while other people in Green Hell disappear.

Finally, Dr. Brady, Dan and their team of supply-carrying natives are ready to go. While their travel agent manages to set them up with "the best guide in Central Africa; an Arab named Mauri" (played by Italian actor Eduardo Ciannelli), he does not provide them with any vehicles so they're forced to make the over 400 mile trip (!!) to Mongwa on foot. If they average 15 miles per day, Dr. Brady figures, they will get there in a month, adding with his monotone narration, "I found out soon enough that being on a safari meant putting one foot in front of the other and then repeating the process." The safari encounter not just sore feet on their trek, but also a spear-chucking and arrow-shooting tribe of hundreds of angry Africans. After several are killed, they're able to ward them off by setting a huge fire on the savanna.

Even though he's able to help send a rocket into space, an exhausted Dan apparently isn't smart enough to know how the human body functions and notes he "never realized how much the human animal depended on water" until now. With their supplies running low, they finally come across a watering hole but discover it's undrinkable due to the amount of vultures around ("Water poison! No drink!") Thankfully, a thunderstorm gives them all the water they need to complete the trip. They finally arrive at Lorentz's mission in Mongwa just in time for Lorentz's buddy Arobi (Joel Fluellen) to report the bad news that the doctor has been killed by the wasps. Dr. Brady, Dan, Mauri, Lorna, Arobi and a bunch of native helpers (who all flee at the first sign of trouble) then set out to locate the monsters, who've has been hanging out near an active volcano.

Unlike some other movies from this time, we actually get several good looks at the monsters in the first 15 minutes. However, after a few appearances early on, they're not seen again on screen until there's only 15 minutes left, which makes the middle portion of people walking around endlessly in "Africa" a colossal bore. Any footage that even remotely resembles something large scale or convincingly being in Africa was taken from an archive source. Much of it came from the Spencer Tracy adventure film Stanley and Livingstone (1939), which had bits filmed on location in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. All of the original scenes were shot in California, with Bronson Caves being used for the (weak!) finale. The only noteworthy things here are the effects. There's a large size model wasp head and giant pincers that are used, plus some charming, though briefly seen, stop motion effects from an unbilled Gene Warren, who'd go on to win a Visual Effects Oscar just a few years later for The Time Machine (1960). Louis DeWitt and Jack Rabin (who received screen credit) and Irving Bloch and Wah Chang (who did not) also worked on other effects.

Leading lady Turner was married to actor Vic Morrow and is the mother of future star Jennifer Jason Leigh (the two look quite a bit alike and even have the same perpetual scowl). While Turner's acting career never amounted to much, she had much more success as a writer. She scripted or co-scripted Cujo (1983), the Oscar-winning Pollock (2000), the Emmy-winning TV movie Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012) and Georgia (1995), which was a vehicle for her daughter.

Crane (who worked mostly as an editor) is best known for the delightful Japanese / American co-production THE MANSTER (1959), which is wrongly written off as "bad" when it's simply weird and fun! He also made Half Human (1958), which was the "Americanization" of the Japanese film BEAST MAN SNOW MAN (1955) featuring new scenes shot in the U.S. that frequently played on a double bill with Green Hell. In 1990, Rhino released this on VHS but accidentally put the credits and plot description for DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS (1954) on the back of the box! This has been included in numerous cheap bootleg DVD sets over the years but the "official" DVD release came in 2012 from Image Entertainment.

★1/2

Dead, The (2010)

Directed by:
Howard J. Ford
Jonathan Ford

I remember just how striking it was seeing zombies shuffling across the African sand dunes, cast in silhouette by the orange light of dusk, in the Euro-trash cheapie OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES (1981). These solitary images stood out in what was otherwise a pretty useless, inept film. It seems the sibling filmmakers responsible for this one also saw that and knew there was a good film in there somewhere that could utilize those same memorable images to greater effect and put them to work in a better film, and that's exactly what we have here. As the film begins, we're in the midst of a worldwide zombie epidemic as an airplane carrying military and their families is heading across Africa and crashes into the ocean. American army flight engineer Lt. Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman) manages to get out of the wreck alive... but he's one of the few. Brian floats to shore on a crate and before he even has a chance to take a breath he spots zombies heading toward him from over the horizon. Two other survivors turn up; one seriously injured and the other, who's armed but runs off to save his own skin, but aren't of any help. Brian manages to break open the crate with a rock, gets his hands on a gun and then runs off into the dusty, thinly-forested mainland.

Meanwhile, local soldier Sgt. Daniel Dembele (Prince David Oseia) returns to his village only to discover his wife has been killed, his son has been whisked away somewhere by soldiers and that the sole remaining villager left behind is a dying old woman who will soon have to be down herself. Brian - an engineer and mechanic by trade - makes his way to the same village shortly after Daniel leaves. He fixes up an old, beat pickup truck while he's there and then hits the road. When he gets hung up in some rocks and finds himself surrounded by a horde of zombies, Daniel shows up save him. The two men then strike up a bargain. Brian wants to get to an airport, fix up a plane and leave Africa. Seeing how it's nearly impossible to survive on foot and he has to go all the way to a military base across the country to reunite with his son, Daniel wants the truck. Brian offers to give it to him if he'll lead him to the nearest airport. And thus the main plot thrust; a road trip of sorts across dangerous, desolate terrain amid a rather hopeless and grim situation with dwindling supplies (water, ammunition, etc.), is set in motion.

I won't go into a full-fledged slow zombies vs. fast zombies debate here, but I will say that slow zombies can be used particularly well as tools to generate tension and suspense for isolated scenes as well as for casting a unique, unrelentingly dangerous mood over the proceedings. Always in their quiet, lurching, never-ending pursuit of human flesh, slow zombies can frequently be present in the background and do not necessarily pose an immediate threat to the protagonists; at least in small numbers. In other words, they can be placed anywhere within frame without immediately sending the film's characters into Rambo-mode. There's that constant, ever-present, depressingly solemn reminder that these things are never going to go away. You can kill one easily enough, but there are always countless more nearby to take its place. We need things like food, water, rest, sleep. They never do... and they never stop searching... The makers of The Dead fully understand all of this. Unlike so many others making these kind of films nowadays, they actually get what is special about the slow zombie and know exactly how to effectively use them.

This is all clearly done with very-knowing reverence to what has come before it, particularly to the Romero series of films that began with the classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) and was expanded upon brilliantly a decade later with his equally good follow-up DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978). Aside from carrying over the mythology and utilizing the dead in the same fashion to evoke a similar mood and many of the same emotions from viewers, this also sidesteps actually explaining the origins of the zombie epidemic. The best the characters have are their own theories and there's a sequence here set around a campfire where a village leader discusses what may have happened that's in clear tribute to the famous "When there's no more room in hell..." scene from Dawn. With its stuffily hot locations and native zombies, The Dead also recalls ZOMBI 2 (1979) to a degree, but it far surpasses what Fulci did when it comes to utilizing the natural landscapes; going from a beach to inland, where the dead lurk in huts, abandoned buildings and overgrown fields of high, dead corn stalks, to some really amazing looking high rock formations by the finale.

Though I quite enjoyed and appreciated the film overall and it falls soundly onto the "good" side of the flesh-eater spectrum, it doesn't have quite the depth, originality or inventiveness to elevate it to greatness. Though the acting isn't terrible, it's also not great. Only so much time is set aside to develop its characters and each of the two leads are given a standard push-along to be reunited with their families. The action becomes a wee bit repetitive in the middle, but thankfully things pick up again toward the end. The makeups are rather simple (slight undead pallor, some blood, blue contact lenses) but work well enough. The photography is rather nice throughout and though there's some use of shakycam, it's not overdone. All in all, they did a nice job here on a limited budget. Several production problems (camera equipment delivery delays, the lead actor contracting malaria while on location, etc.) ended up doubling the intended 6 week shooting schedule. It was filmed primarily in Ghana and Burkina Faso.

After debuting at FrightFest in the UK, The Dead played a limited theatrical run in the U.S. in 2011 before receiving a DVD release from Anchor Bay. The same filmmakers completed The Dead 2: India in 2013, which has also been acquired for distribution by Anchor Bay and will be out later this year.

★★★