Amazing Colossal Man, The (1957)

... aka: Amazing Nth Man, The
... aka: Der Koloss (The Colossus)
... aka: El asombroso hombre creciente (The Amazing Growing Man)
... aka: El gigante ataca (The Giant Attacks)
... aka: I giganti invadono la Terra (Giants Invade the Earth)
... aka: Monstret från Nevada (Monster from Nevada)

Directed by:
Bert I. Gordon

In Desert Rock, Nevada, a plutonium bomb is about to be detonated to see the effects on a small group of soldiers under simulated combat conditions. The soldiers are placed in a shallow bunker and given protective eye wear i.e sunglasses (what great protections!) but, after the countdown finishes, the bomb doesn't go off right away as the chain reaction hasn't completed its cycle as previously calculated. While the soldiers wait, a civilian airplane goes down in the test area. No one can figure out whether the pilot and crew have survived the impact or not. Despite being warned not to leave their position and to keep their glasses on, Col. Glenn Manning (Glenn Langan) both leaves the bunker and removes his glasses. As he's running toward the plane, the bomb finally detonates. Glenn is covered with radiation, suffers third degree burns on nearly 100 percent of his body and falls into a coma.

At the hospital, doctors do what they can with penicillin, cortisone and bandages, but they predict he won't make it through the night due to infection and shock. Dr. Paul Linstrom (William Hudson) must then break the news to Glenn's devastated fiancee, Carol Forrest (Cathy Downs). However, the following morning Glenn seems to have made a miraculous recovery. He has somehow grown new tissue that shows no scarring at all. In fact, there's no sign whatsoever that he was even burned to begin with. Dr. Linstrom immediately calls in key members of the military to see if there could possibility be some kind of regenerative, healing quality to plutonium (ha!) that he's unaware of.

Next thing Carol knows, an officer is showing up at her home and telling her she's forbidden from seeing Glenn by military order. She sneaks over to the hospital only to learn that he's been moved somewhere else and no one at the hospital seems to know where. Snooping through papers on the receptionist's desk, she gets a clue that she should go to the Army Rehabilitation and Research Center. The guard there tells her the center no longer houses patients and hasn't since the last war. Still, a sergeant agrees to talk with her, which gets her inside the facility. She snoops around some more and finally finds Glenn. Only he's now about 20 feet tall! Carol learns that he's now growing at the rate of 8 to 10 feet per day. Why? Well, it has something to do with rapid cellular growth. Or something. You're best off not thinking about it too much.

Glenn eventually snaps out of his coma (after having a Korean War flashback where he shoots an enemy soldier in the face) and outgrows his room, so they have to bring a circus tent in from Florida and move him outside. As for food, they bring in 25 sides of beef at a time and serve up whole turkeys as a snack. Linstrom and his colleague, Dr. Eric Coulter (Larry Thor), hope to come up with a cure to halt the growing. Actually, they have to, and quickly, or else Glenn will die. His heart isn't keeping pace with the rest of the growth and will explode if nothing is done. The heart issue and the resulting chest pains, labored breathing and lack of circulation to the brain that come along with it, are also taking a psychological toll as Glenn becomes increasingly more angry, bitter and insane as the minutes tick by.

After experiments work on miniaturizing an elephant and a camel, an antidote is created but by that point the moody Glenn has taken off. And if you thought spotting a 60-foot-tall, 18,000 pound giant would be easy... well, you're right, it probably should be... you haven't met these bozos yet. Somehow it takes a long time to track Glenn down and, by that point, he's already visited / terrorized Las Vegas and is on his way toward the Boulder (Hoover) Dam. Our heroes hop aboard a helicopter and try to hunt down the giant so they can administer the antidote via giant syringe.

While certainly good for some undemanding fun and the occasional chuckle, Colossal Man is one of those movies where you go in pretty much knowing what to expect and get precisely that... but nothing more. There are plenty of cheap fx and some fun props but it's mostly just stilted actors delivering leaden dialogue on cheap sets. The shoddy science is never an issue for me as I don't really care (it was the 50s after all!), but my biggest issue was them not giving the giant enough to do. Most disappointingly, he only spends a couple of minutes in Las Vegas, where his "rampage" involves peaking in a window, destroying a couple of signs and picking up and throwing a car and a palm tree before he's on his not-so-merry way. He does eventually get to impale someone with the giant needle and snatch up the leading lady King Kong-style, so at least that was kind of fun.

The best thing here is probably Langan's animated acting and his (sometimes hilariously) moody / anguished facial expressions, which really stand out in comparison to his mostly wooden co-stars. A miscast Russ Bender shows up briefly as the genius who created the plutonium bomb yet thinks there's nothing out of the ordinary about a man with a full body burn completely healing in less than 24 hours. The woman surprised in the bubble bath is Jean Moorhead, a 1955 Playboy Playmate, who had starred in the (very funny) Ed Wood-scripted juvenile delinquent film The Violent Years (1956). The cast also includes James Seay as a colonel and Scott Peters. Interestingly, Hudson would also star in the gender switch alternate ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN (1958) the following year.

This AIP release, "presented by" uncredited executive producers James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, was made to cash in on the success of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and was released on a double bill with Cat Girl (1957). Gordon also co-wrote the screenplay (with Mark Hanna), produced and did the fx (assisted by his wife, Flora M. Gordon). The basis for the movie was a 1928 novel called The Nth Man by Homer Eon Flint, who receives no screen credit. This became a minor hit and was followed by the sequel WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST (1958).

★★

Chi sei? (1974)

... aka: Behind the Door
... aka: Beyond the Door
... aka: Demon Beyond the Door, A
... aka: Devil Within Her, The
... aka: Diabolica
... aka: Espírito Maligno (Evil Spirit)
... aka: La cosa è tra noi (Chi sei?)
... aka: Seytan
... aka: Who?
... aka: Who Are You?

Directed by:
"O. Hellman" (Ovidio G. Assonitis)
"R. Barrett" (Roberto D'Ettore Piazzoli)

This is thought to be the most profitable of the glut of Euro Exorcist rip-offs that emerged immediately after the release of Friedkin's film. Unlike with most of the other copycats, Warner Brothers actually stood up and took notice this time, slapping the makers of Chi sei? (titled Beyond the Door for U.S. release and distributed as The Devil Within Her in the UK) with a copyright infringement / plagiarism lawsuit. In the case "Warner Bros., Inc. v. Film Ventures International," filed in October 1975, Warner did not allege that Beyond ripped off the plot of their film per se but had issue with both its depiction of the act of possession itself and its use of similar advertising materials.

According to the lawsuit, "plaintiffs [Warner] claim that the infringement is of the character of Regan and of the cinematic effects used in "The Exorcist" as a means of story expression. These effects include distinctive sounds, special lighting effects, levitation of Regan's body and the bed she is confined to, the spinning of the girl's head 360° and the rolling back of her eyes with pupils covered." The court filing also shows objections to drawers opening and closing, the use of a deep male voice, the head spin (with Beyond's "approximately 180°, or half the spin effected by Regan") and the shared vomiting and adds that the makers of Beyond had "appropriated the manifestations, visual and aural presentation and special effects which, acting together, blend to create the essence of the motion picture 'The Exorcist.'"

Screenings for both films were arranged to determine whether or not cinematic elements (sound and makeup fx, lighting, etc.) had been copied and the courts ended up siding with Warner. As a result, the producers of Beyond had to shell over some money, but the film remained in theaters, where it reputedly raked in a load of money. Just how much? Well, some sources claim as much as 15 million in the U.S. alone (40 million worldwide), which would make this one of the highest grossing horror films of 1975, only behind Jaws and (if you count it) The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The same fate didn't befall William Girdler's possession film Abby (1974), which was also sued by Warner and got yanked from theaters after just a month in release. As a result, it was unseen for decades.

You can't talk about this movie without first mentioning that it contains perhaps one of the least likable families in film history. The husband / father is cocky asshole music producer Robert Barrett (Gabriele Lavia), who doesn't make the best first impression by chewing out a band in his studio and telling them their new single "Bargain with the Devil" has "as much balls as a castrated jellyfish" and "sounds like a jerk off session in the bathroom." Robert is obsessed with fish and fish reproduction (?), refers to his kids as "monsters" (in fact, he seems to hate children in general) and casually tells his wife she's lucky to have him because "I'm an artist, I could be screwing every girl in San Francisco." When she responds sarcastically about how irresistible he fancies himself to be, he tells her if that were the case "I certainly wouldn't be married to you. I could do a lot better." Gee. I think this was intended as playful loving couple banter but, yeah, resounding fail there.

Daughter Gail (Barbara Fiorini) is about ten years old and carries around a dozen copies of "Love Story" with her everywhere she goes. In an effort to make her seem precocious, they make her use hippie lingo ("You gotta stop that or it's gonna blown my mind. Man, if you don't quit cryin' you're gonna have a real bad trip!") when she's isn't cursing up a storm. Younger son Ken (David Colin Jr.) also has a foul mouth ("Asshole!") thanks to the influence of Gail and is so obsessed with pea soup that he drinks it right out of a Campbell's can with a straw (!?) And that leaves us with homemaker / wife / mother Jessica (Juliet Mills), who probably already thinks her life is hell dealing with these freaks but is about to experience even worse.

Right before their son's birthday party, Jessica breaks the news to Robert that she's pregnant with their third child despite religiously taking her birth control. But this will be no ordinary pregnancy. She keeps waking up in the middle of the night, vomits blood, hears male breathing and laughing, becomes angry and violent to the point of destroying hubby's beloved fish tank and slapping her daughter in the face and is sometimes struck with debilitating pain, as if the baby is trying to suffocate her to death. A visit to her doctor friend George (Nino Segurini) reveals that she's three months pregnant even though she was still having her period only 7 weeks earlier. The development of the fetus continues to grow at an accelerated rate while Jessica's behavior becomes more and more troubling. It appears that Paramount, Polanski, Ira Levin and William Castle could have thrown their hats in the ring on that lawsuit as well.

Jessica leaves a trail of mud and worms behind as she floats out of bed and takes a moment out of shopping to pick a discarded banana peel up off the sidewalk and eat it. Dolls attack her kids and when her daughter goes to her for help, her head spins around. She plays with her own puke (throwing it at people and eating it), gets dry scabby lips and red spots all over her face and must be confined to her bedroom in a straight jacket where she screams and rants ("Get out of here, you piece of shit!") in a deep male voice. The kids are shipped off to stay with George's wife, Barbara (Elisabeth Turner), while the doctor and Robert try to find some way to help Jessica.

While all of the possession stuff is going on, a mysterious man named Dimitri (Richard Johnson) is lurking around. He's not only been showing up in some of Jessica's visions but has also been stalking the husband, eventually demanding that "The child must be born!" Dimitri, one of Jessica's former lovers who was supposedly killed in a car accident years earlier, has been allowed by Satan to remain on Earth but only if he sees to it that Jessica give birth to the demonic child she's carrying. Well, actually, he's instructed to rip the fetus out of her, but you catch my drift. If he complies, Satan will possibly allow him to stay on Earth for a few more years. If not, back to hell for eternal torture. He is basically the film's tormented / conflicted Father Karras character.

Though the first hour or so contains some mildly creepy horror imagery and plenty of unintentional laughs and thus isn't completely worthless (though hardly "good"), the final 45 minutes where Jessica is confined to her bedroom is a slow, excruciating, derivative bore that pretty much wipes one's memory clean of some of the funnier stuff that came before. If you must watch, see if you can make any sense out of the three-minute-long sequence where Robert is hassled by a funk band while walking down the street and some guy plays a flute with his nose (?!)

No less than SEVEN writers are credited, including both directors (Piazzoli was also the DOP) and Incredible Melting Man star Alex Rebar. It was filmed in both Italy and San Francisco on a budget of around 350,000 dollars. Due to the film's box office success it was followed by two bogus "sequels," which aren't sequels at all. Mario Bava's (far superior) Shock was released in many markets as Beyond the Door II in 1977. Then, over a decade later, a 1989 Italian / Yugoslavian production filmed as The Train (and aka Amok Train) was released as Beyond the Door III. Beyond itself was released under a gazillion different titles (see below), with many different cuts in existence; some of which contain different footage not featured in other versions. The full running time far as I can tell is 109 minutes.

Code Red handled both the DVD release in 2007 and then the Blu-ray release in 2017. Both contain commentary tracks plus interviews with Mills, Johnson, Assonitis and Rebar in the 20-minute documentary short Beyond the Door, 35 Years Later (2009).

★1/2