"a lackluster Hollywood dud"

It is an unfortunate truth that oftentimes the ones we need the most in this life are the most cruel, and the things we love most are the things that turn on us, sometimes hurting us – yea, sometimes even deceiving us – leading us to believe that life is one glorious way, when in fact it is another, wholly dreadful way.

I direct you to Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland, the iconic monster magazine that ran from 1958 to 1983, a veritable bible for so many of us who grew up under the absolutely overpowering influence of horror and sci-fi movies in the far-off days of the 60s and 70s.

This was a monthly ritual, finding FM at our local drugstore, learning about new movies and being taught about old ones, and for those of us growing up in small towns long before the Internet or even home video, the pulpy pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, overflowing with crisp, black and white photos of mind-blowing creatures and thingies were like some crazy door opening into another dimension, a lifeline to a far more exciting world, with Forry as the teacher, we as the students, learning about movies that we’d perhaps distantly heard about from a friend of a relative, but had never seen, and weren’t convinced were actually real; that is, until we saw it in the pages of FM, and then our life’s ambition became, simply: SEEING THE MOVIE. This was far more difficult than it is today, what with our streaming video, Netflix, and all. No, back then, in the days of antiquity, before instant gratification, when you had to hunt your prey for weeks, sometimes months or years, when cable finally made its way to our backwater berg, we consulted our weekly TV Guide, flipping immediately to Friday and Saturday, checking the New York and Chicago stations that faithfully served up at least one old monster movie mid-day, or midnight.

And it is here that the Famous Monsters Paradox manifests itself, that this hallowed magazine, whilst teaching us the names of Chaney, Katzman, Arkoff/Nicholson, Karloff, Lugosi, Atwill, Lee, Cushing, Arnold, Lewton, et al, brought into our bedrooms in glorious black and white so much information about the men and women behind these movies, and so many photographs that drove our imaginations into the stratosphere, that there was no way – no WAY – when we finally saw the movies some time down the road, that they ever had any prayer of living up to the mythical work of art we’d already constructed in our heads.

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It always seemed like Forry and the FM contributors rarely met a movie they didn’t like. Or perhaps they were so determined to finally unearth these old movies for a new generation of youngins – movies deserving at least a little better than what they got in their own time – that hyperbolic, overblown text making even the worst movies sound like the best kept secret in history was entirely justified. (FM #89: “DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN is a must-see for FM readers and it is packed full of unusual horror oddities.” This is, of course, a movie Forry appeared in and served as “technical consultant,” but Forry also helped out with Steve Barkett’s The Aftermath, which doesn’t make that particular train wreck any better, either.)

At any rate, these movies FM brought home to you became as intimately familiar as your favorite t-shirt or Beatles record, even though you hadn’t seen ten seconds of them yet. Sam Raimi once wrote, “When I read (Famous Monsters), it was like watching all the best parts of the film all over again.”  That’s all well and good if you’re reading about a film you’ve seen before, but oftentimes I hadn’t even heard about the damn film yet, so I sat down and created, in my head, the greatest film ever: endless monsters, relentless action and not two seconds of boring exposition, all based on a couple of photographs from FM. A half-page shot of the alien from It Came from Outer Space mesmerized me; no way any movie with that thing in it is anything but balls-out action. How could it be anything but over-the-top crazed?

Here’s an example: Eric Ashton’s article Invaders From Outer Space ran in FM #139 from late 1977. Nothing at all to it – just Ashton ruminating if life beyond our solar system might look exactly like what we’ve been watching all along in our favorite sci-fi pictures. He runs through a couple dozen movies, writing ALL THEIR TITLES IN CAPS (an FM trademark), barely touching on each movie with the briefest of plot synopses. A whopping nine pages of silly, gratuitous filler with no discernible purpose from the latter days of FM, when Forry Ackerman often never even made it into the office, and publisher James Warren, in failing health, still reprinted articles from years ago whenever he needed to fill space.

But never did we mind, we devotees of FM, the very reason for our soft, middle-American existence, because the photographs were the thing. It never got old, running home from school, staring at the same pictures we’d already looked at for months, the magazine dog-eared by now. Here, in particular, Ashton’s article began with a picture of the alien from The Beast with a Million Eyes. And not just any token picture taking up one-fifth of the page; this was a splash, taking up two full pages, this crazy, evil-looking thing, with huge cat-eyes, antennae, fangs, a gruesome, oversized head not unlike Marvel Comics’ The Leader, and some funky outfit made of exotic space-age materials. (Curiously, he was also handcuffed.) Ashton’s text gave no indication of what the movie was actually about, instead simply name-dropping it, along with The Astounding She-Monster, Night of the Blood Beast, and Phantom From Space, all in one very long sentence.

But never did we mind. The movie's plot? A superfluous thing, at best. A mere distraction. We didn’t need to be sold on some high-concept sci-fi premise; we just wanted to watch the movie and SEE THE DAMN MONSTER. You already knew it had to be the most mind-blowing movie anywhere by virtue of the fact that it was in the damn magazine to begin with. And whenever you hit the jackpot, whenever a New York or Chicago station was showing old sci-fi movies, for two hours the horrible pain of being brought back down to reality commenced. It was painful discovering that in fact the first 45 minutes of many of these films were plodding (at least to a ten year-old), full of unsolved murders and endlessly blathering scientists before finally, finally, the monster made an appearance, the one thing you'd been waiting for, for days, weeks, months, sometimes years: that treasured photograph from FM coming to life and doing its thing.

In the event, the wait for The Beast with a Million Eyes was, sadly, not justified. It is a sadly amateurish movie, poorly written and slow-moving. The stock footage at the beginning and the end is grainy and obvious. The scenes of animals running amok and attacking people were clearly shot in a different location, probably on a different day from the rest of the cast, and spliced in during post-production with unpersuasive reaction shots from the actors, trying to make you believe they were somehow in mortal danger. The performances are painfully stilted. The space ship is wildly unimpressive. (American International Pictures producer Alex Gordon said it was made from a customized teakettle; AIP vice-president Samuel Z. Arkoff said it was a coffee percolator.) The last scene makes no sense whatsoever. And the Beast, who only appears briefly – and unconvincingly – with three minutes and 34 seconds to go before the end credits roll, has but two eyes.

Why, then, is Roger Corman’s The Beast with a Million Eyes worthy of your attention? Why should you, an upstanding citizen who already has enough to worry about, raising a family and working a job, earning money to barely pay the bills, take 75 minutes out of an evening and watch this movie?

Because Lorna Thayer, who will be remembered as long as humans walk this earth for tormenting Jack Nicholson and his sandwich order in Five Easy Pieces, appears here as Paul Birch’s long-suffering wife, exactly where you wouldn't expect to find her. Because even though he was well beyond his prime in 1955, former Keystone Kop Chester Conklin, a legend who worked with Chaplin and W.C. Fields, takes a final bow in one of the last movies he ever made, a little low-budget monster movie that never had any historic pretenses.

Because the name of Leonard Tarver, who only appeared in this and one other movie his whole life, would have been forgotten by history but is now remembered as “Him,” the mute WWII vet-cum-farmhand. Because the scene where Him leers out of the darkness of Deputy Brewster’s back seat is genuinely creepy. Because even the worst films are still fascinating as time capsules, capturing actors and locations at a point in their existence that we’ll never see again, like Dick Sargent, appearing here as Deputy Brewster, a pointless character if there ever was one, preserved for posterity at a ridiculously young and skinny 25 years of age, fourteen years before his turn as Darrin Stephens on Bewitched. Because even though producer David Kramarsky is credited as director, Roger Corman gave an invaluable assist, only the second time in the director’s seat for the man who went on to give us Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Hill and It Conquered the World.

Because the phantasmagorical-looking monster on the movie poster was the product of AIP co-founder James H. Nicholson’s fevered imagination, certainly not of anything in the real world in which AIP and everyone else operated, and he ordered it onto the poster before the actual monster had been designed – before, even, the movie began shooting – in an effort to lure potential exhibitors, which was extremely ballsy, or totally insane, or a little bit of both. Because this is where the brilliant Paul Blaisdell got his start, called in at the 11^th hour, the 12^th hour, really, directly after distributors who eagerly settled in to their seats for an advance screening of The Beast with a Million Eyes sat dumbfounded through the closing credits, jaws agape, having seen no monster at all, because there was no monster, feeling had by AIP’s aforementioned poster, screaming at Arkoff and Nicholson that the people paying to see this movie would openly revolt if there were no monster in the final reel, so Blaisdell constructed an 18” hand puppet of the Beast’s slave (the actual beast “was a mind with no substance, a being composed of pure energy”) that appeared in the final couple of minutes, the aforementioned alien with cat eyes and a funky space-age outfit, and it appeared with a huge eyeball superimposed over it and then dropped inexplicably dead for no apparent reason, but what the fuck, it was Blaisdell’s first paying job in the industry, and he went on to better things with Invasion of the Saucer Men, It! The Terror from Beyond Space and The She Creature.

Because these men and women, most of whom had no chits to play in Hollywood to begin with, threw the dice. They drove through the desert to Indio, California in crazy heat and almost no budget to make a movie. They could have played it safe and gotten jobs in the straight world, but instead they gambled. Maybe it was a rush, maybe they had no other choice. I don't know. I know, however, that it should be enough to earn your undying respect.

Because even though it may have been ineffectual in the movie, Blaisdell’s eighteen inch hand puppet crashed into my brain through the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland #139 like a tidal wave, leaving an impression that has lingered for a lifetime. Because a single image in FM could fire the imagination so. And in the final analysis, in a life where ignorance is championed and conformity encouraged, it’s enough to carry me through.