Category Archives: Television

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Banned Japan: From Tsuburaya Productions With Love

Given the very nature of the sort of cinema I gravitate towards its an unavoidable fact that every now and again I stumble onto something that’s banned somewhere, but this may be the first time I’ve ever crossed paths with a banned episode of a television series. The now-infamous episode 12 of Tusburaya Productions’ excellent Ultra-sequel Ultra Seven ran afoul of the same cultural sensitivities that would land Toho’s Prophecies of Nostradamus: Catastrophe 1999 in the hot seat just a few years hence, the result being that it has not been seen (officially) in its native Japan in decades. Those of us elsewhere have proven luckier. While Tsuburaya Productions have pulled the episode domestically and now (according to the interwebs) refuse to so much as acknowledge its existence, Yusei yori Ai o Komete (From Another Planet With Love) was marketed in foreign territories none-the-less. Those fond of Cinar’s mid-80s English adaptation of the series may remember it as the modestly spelling-challenged Crystalized (sic) Corpuscles.

The fuss in this case is all to do with Cristalized Corpuscles‘ requisite villains, a race of chortling backroom baddies from the nuke-ravaged planet Spellia who are out to fill their irradiated veins with delicious Earth blood (“This planet gives good blood!”). For a television show produced in a nation in which A-bomb survivor lobbyists are still counterbalanced against lingering stigma and discrimination the concept of bomb-happy galaxy-trotting vampires gleefully bleeding Earth-men dry is already treading on very thin ice. While likely more than enough on its own to incite an uproar among victims’ rights groups, Crystalized Corpuscles takes the issue one step further in its physical depiction of the Spell Aliens in their native form:

In retrospect it’s easy to see why the appearance of the Spell Alien – a gargantuan pallid figure with a sinister, expressionless face, covered in glowing keloid scars (lingered upon in close-up, no less) and raving about his desire for the blood of children – proved offensive. Even with my Western sensibilities firmly intact I find the presentation a bit tasteless, though it’s done nothing to lessen my innate personal revulsion to censorship, self-inflicted or otherwise. To that end I’m not entirely positive that the word “banned” is even appropriate to this case. Tsuburaya Productions have certainly pulled the episode from domestic circulation, but that appears to have been of their own volition – an effort made, no doubt, to avoid or mitigate a possible scandal. Crystalized Corpuscles was still made available to foreign markets, and well after the domestic moratorium went into effect. And moratorium be damned, even the original Japanese version is but a few clicks away anymore.

With words like “infamous” and “banned” weighing so heavily upon it, it’s easy to neglect the episode itself, which is second to none as an example of the heady ambition and audacious absurdity that mark the best of classic tokusatsu television. The premise is as ludicrous as they come, concerning a nefarious alien scheme to harvest the blood of women and children with wrist watches, but director Akio Jissoji (Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis) delivers not just a rollicking pulp actioner, but an oddball satire of romantic cinematic convention as well! Even the compulsory episode-ending Ultra-fight is handled with unexpected artistry, the battle cast in rich sunset color and depicted in a bizarre freeze-frame style complete with audible shutter clicks. It’s as surprising a 24 minutes as has ever been produced for Japanese genre television, and with an intriguing cultural significance as well. One only wishes it were more officially available…

 

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Production and Decay of Strange Particles

dir. Leslie Stevens
1964 / United Artists Television / 51′
written by Leslie Stevens
director of phogoraphy Kenneth Peach
music by Dominique Frontiere
starring George Macready, Signe Hasso, Allyson Aimes, Rudy Solari and Leonard Nimoy
available on DVD from MGM, or for free viewing on Hulu and Youtube

Executive producer and sometimes writer and director Leslie Stevens (Incubus) was in something of a fix towards the end production on the first season of The Outer Limits, and in desperate need of a show to please the bean counters – an episode that would come in on time and under budget, and put the books back in order. Every bit as ridiculous as its bloated title would suggest, Production and Decay of Strange Particles was Stevens’ answer, a stripped down bottle episode that covers its budgetary shortcomings with lots of (literal) flash and reams of impenetrable pseudo-scientific exposition. Particles never really makes much sense, even by the suitably bizarre standards set forth by earlier episodes, but the tremendous pace and unremitting oddity of the thing help to make it one of my favorites just the same.

Limited almost exclusively in setting to the various corridors and chambers of the Broadridge nuclear plant, a fictional isolated desert reactor site in which atomic research is ongoing, Production and Decay of Strange Particles begins with the creation of an intensely radioactive and nigh uncontrollable new isotope in the plant’s cyclotron. As plant workers strive desperately to prevent a potentially devastating chain reaction elder on-site scientist Dr. Marshall ponders the isotope’s significance. Created from the smashing together of a known isotope and heavy cosmic particles gathered from a quasi-stellar radio source (quasar for you hip young’uns) the resulting substance is ferociously active, defeating all attempts by the plant staff to contain them. But there’s more…

As workers protective gear comes into contact with the isotope its particles seep inside, destroying the human structure within and replacing it with a fiendish, electrified malignence. Soon the furnace room is overrun by a horde of devilish atomic zombies, who work slowly and steadily in unison to expand their territory and numbers. Dr. Marshall theorizes that the isotope is the Earthly manifestation of some dreadful intelligence pouring forth from another dimension of time and space. Unless the gateway through which it is entering our own dimension is closed it’s only a matter of time before the entire planet, and more, is engulfed.

Unlike The Children of Spider County, an episode whose various ambitions were squashed by excessive rewrites and a complicated production, Production and Decay of Strange Particles began its life with the express purpose of being as swift and cheap to produce as possible. It fares all the better for the difference. Stevens’ narrative is appropriately slim, with monsters at one end of a plant doing god-knows-what and men at the other end trying to stop them. His script is loaded for bare with technical gibberish and allusions to actual science (cyclotrons, quasars, chain reactions, etc.) but offers very little in the way of story development beyond this, that, or the other running into the energy monsters and being summarily absorbed into the collective.

 
 

Thankfully, Stevens proves better than most at scripting such ungainly mouthfuls of science-ese, and better yet, he knows how to direct it as well. It’s impossible to really understand what’s being said here even if you can parse out the legitimate science in the rough, but Stevens’ direction ensures that it all at least sounds important. An early bit of conversation from plant worker Griffin (Rudy Solari, who would co-star in the second season’s The Invisible Enemy) is indicative of the rest, but is delivered with such immediacy that you can’t help but believe it. When asked the suspicious isotope’s atomic weight he glibly explains, “Somewhere over two-five-six. It’s a freak reaction. Marshall said some cosmic particles penetrated the shield, the gold foil disappeared and the lambda process set in.” It’s impossible for me to believe that Solari knew any better than anyone else what he was saying, but, like the rest of the cast, he manages to get away with it all the same.

Just as the drama is constrained in scope, the special effects budget for Production and Decay of Strange Particles is kept to a bare minimum, not that it really shows now nearly fifty years after the fact. The majority of it seems to have been spent on some simple composite work, as the Broadridge nuclear plant becomes increasingly alive with arcs of electricity. Otherwise it’s all smoke and mirrors (and one briefly-glimpsed disco ball), with brilliant white blooming out of reactor windows and what looks to be a clump of plastic wrap with a few lights stuck inside substituting for the mysterious isotope at the heart of the mess. It’s a no-budget mix that’s astonishingly effective in context, with even the blatant stock footage (a montage of atomic test films, negative printed and run both forward and in reverse) feeling less offensive than it really should.

And then there are the monsters, a uniform collective of crackling energy-stuffed radiation suits who rank among my favorite threats of the entire series. The oddball concept is put into practice with the same no-frills simplicity that marks the rest of the show. In far shots the creatures are just men in suits with brilliant lights shoved into their helmets (barring that, they just walk with their backs turned!), while a handful of close-ups are expanded with a bit of flickering The Man With the Power-esque composite work. Stevens imbues the rabble with a palpable sense of purpose (dubiously explained though that purpose may be) as they creep steadily from one corridor to the next, nuking leaden doorways with glowing flasks of atomic whatsit. There’s just something creepy about them, a creepiness bolstered by the decidedly darker tone of the episode as a whole. Contrary to the norm for the series Production and Decay of Strange Particles is quite brutal at times (in so much as 60s television could be), with the energy-men burning hapless plant workers with their radioactive gazes or smashing them outright under sheets of lead shielding.

Production and Decay of Strange Particles will never be confused for the sort of substance-rich gothic science fiction that most people rightly associate with the series, but it is a suitably diverting hour of television that manages to be more than the sum of its admittedly silly parts. The most noteworthy aspect of the production may be its fine cast, headed by veteran actor George Macready. Recognizable from classics like Paths of Glory and The Big Clock and the earlier series episode The Invisibles, Macready takes to the material with admirable conviction, even if he’s obviously at a loss for how to deliver some of the show’s more ludicrous lines. Signe Hasso (The House on 92nd Street) fits neatly into the role of Macready’s wife and conscience, while Leonard Nimoy (just two years from his iconic turn in Star Trek) makes the most he can of a bit part as an ill-fated plant technician.

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The Duplicate Man

dir. Gerd Oswald
1964 / United Artists Television / 51′
written by Robert C. Dennies
from the story by Clifford D. Simak
 director of phogoraphy Kenneth Peach
original music by Harry Lubin
starring Ron Randall, Constance Towers, Mike Lane, Steven Geray and Konstantin Shayne
available on DVD from MGM, or for free viewing on Hulu and Youtube

There is no shortage of promise to be found in the truncated and too often disappointing second season of The Outer Limits, but Gerd Oswald’s late-run effort The Duplicate Man offers more in the way of it than most. Adapted from the Clifford D. Simak story Goodnight, Mr. James (published in the March 1951 issue of Galaxy for those interested – it’s an excellent read!) and ambitiously set in the future of 2011 The Duplicate Man never really transcends its limitations of time and budget, each of which was in ever shorter supply at this point in the series’ history (the episode was produced shortly before ABC let it known that the show was to be cancelled all together), but at least it tries.

The story concerns one Henderson James (Ron Randell), a noted astrobiologist who, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, has been secretly studying a deathly dangerous space creature known as the Megasoid in his estate. Fearful of their superior intelligence, telepathic abilities and murderous inclinations, the governments of Earth outlawed the importation of Megasoids in 1986, leaving James in quite a pickle when his own smuggled specimen escapes. Too much a coward to hunt down the creature himself, James turns to a drunken has-been with connections to the Federal Duplication Bureau, an institution that clones human beings in an extensively regulated manner, for help.

Shortly thereafter Henderson James awakens near a natural history museum, and finds himself armed with a handgun and driven by a singular purpose – kill the Megasoid, which has taken to hiding in one of the museum’s displays. The intervention of a museum security guard leads James to suddenly remember more about himself, his address, his job, and so on, facts that confuse his purpose and lead him to explore more about who exactly he is. When James eventually encounters the Megasoid things become even more complicated. The creature reveals that James is not James at all, but an exact duplicate of the real James manufactured for the express purpose of doing his dirty work. Though wounded in their encounter the Megasoid escapes, putting James mark II on the hunt for both the creature and existential enlightenment.

Robert C. Dennies’ penultimate contribution to The Outer Limits complicates the more straight-forward Simak source story in any number of ways, as in its focus on both James instead of just the clone and in the addition of a troubled marriage to the mix, but is most destructive in its expansion of the story’s relatively minor kill-the-alien opener into a full-fledged subplot (a move made to sate ABC’s demand for monsters). The more interesting human drama of The Duplicate Man is interrupted early and often, either by the appearance of the Megasoid itself or by the constant need to include it in the considerable conversation (like many of the second season episodes The Duplicate Man is talky stuff).

It’s a shortcoming that would be easier to overlook were the monster not such a dire creation, an ungainly gorilla-sloth-thing that adds to Second Chance‘s convincing Empyrian mask a ridiculously overstated forehead and a beak of hysterical proportion. Director Gerd Oswald is forced to cut the critter far too often, as it stalks endlessly about James’ property to fulfill its bloated narrative obligations, and unfortunate gaffs (like the appearance of actor Mike Lane’s shirt between the neck and body of the suit in some shots) only result in further embarrassment.

Otherwise The Duplicate Man‘s greatest failing is to be found in its two central performances. Co-stars Constance Towers (Shock Corridor), Steven Geray (Spellbound) and Sean McClory (appearing from beneath a ludicrous and ill-fitting leather head piece meant to cover unseen scars from a Megasoid attack) all do well enough in their respective, but relatively minor, roles. Star of the show Ron Randell (The She-Creature), as both Henderson James and James mark II, doesn’t fair nearly so well. Randell’s performance is leaden throughout, and serves only to detract from what should be the episode’s most appealing moments – like James mark II’s discovery of the simple pleasures of water fountains and greenery or Henderson’s eventual reconciliation with his wife. I’ve only seen Randall otherwise in the dreadful 40s sci-fi throwback The Most Dangerous Man Alive from 1961, and he made no better impression there.

On the brighter side of things The Duplicate Man‘s ambitious aesthetic often belies the paucity of its budget, and Oswald and his crew manage some creative futuristic flourishes through intelligible location scouting and the modification of everyday objects. The Chemosphere house in Los Angeles adeptly doubles for the residence of Sean McClory’s scarred smuggler, while James encounters plenty of familiar items with a modern twist (a public water fountain activated by a beam of light, a touch tone telephone decked out with a video display). My favorite touches have to do with the clothing, which is delightfully strange. The upscale suits the two James spend their time in are lacking any kind of lapels, while their collared button-up undershirts are punctuated with slim knotless ties. Nevermind that these changes could have been accomplished by any costume designer with a couple of minutes and a pair of scissors to spare, as the minimal effort pays off wonderfully in expanding the episode’s future setting.

It’s undeniable that there’s a lot wrong with The Duplicate Man, which too often undermines its big-idea aspirations (a rare enough thing in a second season episode) with silly pulp trappings – that monster is nigh unforgivable. But it certainly strives to be better than it is, with even the capably mundane director of photography Kenneth Peach putting in extra effort to give the show some much-needed visual oomph. All in all The Duplicate Man is one of the last really interesting things to come out of The Outer Limits before ABC kicked it off the air in favor of a low-cost variety show, and worth a watch if for that reason alone.

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The Children of Spider County

dir. Leonard Horn
1964 / United Artists Television / 51′
written by Anthony Lawrence
 director of phogoraphy Kenneth Peach
original music by Dominic Frontiere
starring Lee Kinsolving, Kent Smith, John Milford, Crahan Denton, Bennye Gatteys and Dabs Greer
available on DVD from MGM, or for free viewing on Hulu and Youtube

A set of mysterious disappearances has the United States Space Agency worried. Four of the nation’s top minds have vanished into thin air, and all on the same day. More curious still, an investigation into the four men’s backgrounds reveals that all were born, prematurely, within a month of one another in rural Spider County, and that each share the same strange middle name – Eros. While the Pentagon is content to believe that the Soviets are responsible, snatching up our brilliant minds as part of a Cold War power grab, the US Space Agency is convinced something more troubling is afoot, something extraterrestrial. With a fifth super-human imprisoned in Spider County on a bogus murder charge the Agency sees an opportunity to solve the mystery once and for all, and sends one of its agents in to investigate.

Dubbed a ‘witch-boy’ and a ‘no-good dreamer’ by the superstitious locals, young Ethan Wechsler (Lee Kinsolving) is that fifth super-human, a fatherless mind-reading oddity for whom Spider County’s ire has finally reached a tipping point. The victim of a modern-day witch hunt, Ethan finds himself framed for a murder he didn’t commit and destined to die for being different, but a stranger in town has other plans for him. Quietly sinister and decked out in a snazzy business suit, the strange Aabel (Kent Smith) arrives on the scene and aids Ethan in escaping. It is soon revealed that Aabel, who hides a ghoulish insectine face and a set of death-ray eyes beneath his proper, human facade, is Ethan’s long-lost father, one of several emissaries from the dying civilization of the planet Eros who fathered children on Earth in hopes of securing the future of their race. Aabel wants to take Ethan home, away from vengeful humanity, but when his own cold and inhuman shortcomings (like a penchant for obliterating townsfolk) are revealed Ethan begins to have second thoughts…

By virtue of those involved alone The Children of Spider County should have been a classic of the generally fantastic first season of The Outer Limits. Writer Anthony Lawrence had previously contributed the terrific teleplay for the episode The Man Who Was Never Born, while director Leonard Horn had proven himself through his work on both that episode and the indelible The Zanti Misfits. Veteran performer Kent Smith, perhaps best known for his roles in Cat People and Curse of the Cat People and co-star of series episode It Crawled Out of the Woodwork, was on board, as was up-and-coming young actor Lee Kinsolving (The Explosive Generation). Unfortunately the pedigree of the talent involved wasn’t enough to overcome the difficulties that plagued the episode’s production, resulting in The Children of Spider County becoming one the series’ first and most lamentable failures.

The problems with Children‘s production were many, as enumerated in David J. Schow and Jeffrey Frentzen’s official companion guide, not the least of them being that producer Joseph Stefano, along with ace cinematographer Conrad Hall (In Cold Blood) and the KTTV soundstages where the series was usually filmed, were pre-occupied with the production of the pilot for The Unknown - eventually to become The Outer Limits episode The Form of Things Unknown. The Children of Spider County was left to fend for itself with a single day of scheduled studio time at Samual Goldwyn Studio, and time wasted with confusion over drafts on the part of assistant director Wilson Shyer (in his only series outing) left director Leonard Horn with no recourse but to repurpose much of the episode’s material for exterior photography on-the-fly. Worse yet was the state of Anthony Lawrence’s teleplay itself, which had suffered greatly through a lengthy series of re-writes.

The end product is a potentially promising concept lost in fifty-one minutes of dense and clumsy exposition and shoddy monster-on-the-loose action. For a series that so regularly excelled beyond its shoe-string production values the limitations here are far too obvious, from the rough-and-tumble camera setups to the blatant re-use of episode footage and a few outright gaffs. Director of photography Kenneth Peach, tasked with photographing every series episode from this point forward, was rarely so inspired as fellow DP’s Conrad Hall and John Nickolaus, but he was still a more than capable industry veteran. His work here is uncharacteristically rough, and rife with issues of focusing and stability – further evidence of the oppressive time constraints under which The Children of Spider County was produced. Even Wah Chang’s creature design seems rushed and bland, little more than a generic bug-eyed alien (played by The Galaxy Being himself William Douglas), memorable though the sight of that monstrous head poking out of a smart business suit may be.

All of that is lamentable, but the most unfortunate victim of all is the storytelling itself, long a strong point of the series, which here takes a backseat to just getting as much of the script as possible on film. As with so much of The Outer Limits there’s a germ of greatness lurking within The Children of Spider County - a grand, tragic story of an alien race that, having lost itself at home, is searching for the better part of itself beyond; a warning against allowing the cold and the cruel to overtake imagination in our own world. More’s the pity, then, that circumstance so prevented its development. As such The Children of Spider County is all shaky images and death-ray eyes, with very little to show for itself beyond a B-monster in a suit.