Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Night of Terror #1: 'The Phantom Creeps' - "The Menacing Power"


I guess I'm already stretching my "no movies" rule by doing my first entry of the month on an episode of a chapter serial, but this was so good that I feel I'd be doing a disservice to everyone by not writing it up. The Phantom Creeps is a 12-part serial that (presumably, I've only seen the first chapter) follows the diabolical scheming of a Dr. Zorka, played by Bela Lugosi.

Lugosi's status as a pop culture icon is fully cemented so I probably don't need to wax hyperbolic about how good he is - but I also don't need to do a daily Halloween blog for a month every year, so what the hell: Bela Lugosi is awesome. There's a great scene in Tim Burton's Ed Wood that has Martin Landau's Lugosi delivering one of Ed's incoherent monologues, but with such conviction that the film score rises up to his level and what was just a goofy bunch of nonsense on the page is elevated to real drama. I sort of used to think that was just a cinematic device to illustrate how Wood's movies seemed to him while he was making them, but I've recently become convinced that it's an accurate picture of how Lugosi works. This is a great example of that dynamic in action - Lugosi commits to his ridiculous mad scientist character so passionately that absurdity becomes poetry. When he looks skyward and intones to some mysterious entity, "they must never know about you - the source of all my power," it feels like an episode of genuine religious fervor, rather than a mad scientist alluding to his mechanical creatures and invisibility belt.

Dr. Zorka would already be in the Mad Scientist Hall of Fame just by virtue of the way Lugosi plays him, but there's another fun detail to his character that I really enjoy. Most mad scientists are work-focused bachelors at best, if they're not going on dates with dead bodies in the morgue. But Zorka would appear to be at least somewhat happily married. It made me think that The Phantom Creeps might be ripe for a remake as a basic cable antihero drama. Call it ...

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Breaking Mad.

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I don't know how much of the rest of The Phantom Creeps I'll be writing up in this space, but I do know I'm excited to watch it. In just this first episode there's a giant robot, artificial spiders, an invisible Bela Lugosi doing the titular creeping, a car explosion, and a plane crash. I just hope the whole thing doesn't end with Zorka being apprehended or killed, that would really be a bummer.

2 comments:

  1. A lot of first-season MST3K episodes include Phantom Creeps installments before the feature, but I've never watched them in order so they're kind of a mishmash for me. I can't imagine I wouldn't dig them in their proper format.

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  2. I know you're a Lugosiac, so this is flat-out essential viewing.

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