Watching the Astounding She Monster to Eric Dolphy
This is The Astounding She-Monster, 1957. As you study the photo and read these words, try playing at low volume Eric Dolphy’s “The Baron."
We see the actor Robert Clarke and co-stars Marilyn Harvey and Shirley Kilpatrick (as the She-monster on the floor). Clark plays a geologist living alone in a cabin. The woman is a kidnapped heiress. The kidnappers have stumbled onto the cabin after their car is run off the road by the she-monster. She glows in the dark. Later the gang is killed by the monster’s touch. The kitchen of the cabin is the only set in the film. Some reviewer called it “the sad cabin.” The movie was filmed in four days.
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Try staying with the photo. Try playing Eric Dolphy’s “Serene”
When the She-Monster’s touch kills, the gangster’s flee into the woods and wander. They return to the cabin. Her touch kills more. They flee into the woods and wander. They return to the cabin. Her touch kills more. They flee into the woods and wander.
She is on the floor. She is dead. She returned to the cabin and Robert Clarke threw a special acid on her. He mixed it up in his sad cabin lab in seconds. He knew what kind of mixture would work! He saw the flames of her spaceship as it hit the atmosphere. He could tell what would kill her from the color of the flame. He determined it was platinum. Of course! She’s a platinum blond! She has a protective coating of radioactive platinum! He makes an acid that burns through radioactive platinum! When he threw it on her she clutched her chest. She dropped to the floor and rolled on her back. Her sharp Kim Novak-Vertigo eyebrows are crossed as in a switchblade rumble. Her body has a dwarf star density in a silver leotard with showgirl sandals, filmed in an out of focus shimmer to convey extra alien-ness. Her body is like a woman in an early Cezanne pastoral. Cezanne struggled for neo-classical grace in the female form. Obsessively, over and over. His women have the bodies of hard amazon totems, like his apples and and pears are cannonballs. His will weighed a ton. Another kind of alien-ness. Apples and women and pears, denser and denser, over and over. Each time the She-Monster leaves a scene she walks backwards, facing the camera and receding slowly into the dark. This is a very effective, original touch in an otherwise blandly filmed movie. Only later do production notes explain this was done because early in the filming her costume split open in the back, and they had no money or time to mend the material.
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Eric Dolphy’s “The Eclipse.”
In the photo, the actors stand over her. It seems to say to us, we have always been stuck here in the sad cabin. We have always tried to understand why we are here, why she is here, what she is, what this moment is. Our cabin, our bodies, our clothes, our postures, the She on the floor that has the bluntness of a Wee Gee forensic photo. She draws you back. She draws you in. Others have written exhaustively (and exhaustedly) about the actors’ badness, the movie’s badness, its bleak tedium. A maddening, nearly unbearable monotony. Robert Clarke said Shirley Kilpatrick’s work was only a big butt and big breasts, but we remember when she clutches her chest in agony and falls to the floor, careful not to expose the tear in her shitty costume. Kilpatrick appeared in two other films and was remembered for her warm personality. She was a beauty pageant queen and a model and a stripper. She wanted to act. Other notes say she joked with the director about giving the she- monster dialog. What would she say? Joe McCarthy died the year Astounding was released in driveway double-bills with Viking Women and the Sea Serpent. Back to the sad cabin, again and again. The sad tawdry of demagogues. A dullness in Astounding throttled by an overwrought, Teutonic music score by German emigre Guenther Kauer, described by film writer W.B. Kelso as “a demented car race between Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ swapping paint with Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets.’” Composer Kauer was drafted into the German army in 1937 but rescued from combat duty by a commander who reassigned him to a band for the Nazi’s entertainment, later coming to the U.S. as a male war bride. He worked in a Hollywood piano bar before scoring films like The Astounding She-Monster, The Cape Canaveral Monsters, The Atomic Brain and the proto-snuff Faces of Death. Astounding has a strange tone and stance of apartness from anything relatable or relevant. Of a time yet having seemingly nothing to say about that time. Except perhaps the message of the photo: wait. What? An absence of any redemption. Calling it a “cult” movie, a classic of badness, “so bad that it is good” seems entirely misplaced, inappropriate. Long after the movie is reviled or celebrated, the characters will still stand over the Astounding She, ever urgently apart. They, and you, think, Wait.
Repeat “The Eclipse."
Stand in the sad cabin. Many others stand in the sad cabin: Joseph Ziemba writes on his film site Bleeding Skull about the “gutter noir” of the under-budgeted, under or over-lit, under or over- acted, with special appreciation for Ronald Ashcraft, writer and director of The Astounding She-Monster. For the relentlessness of his ambition, innocent of ability or resources. There is something of a monstrous Fitzcarraldo drive, an Ed Wood obliviousness, (Wood was “technical consultant on Astounding), a failure engine churning out a stuporous carbon monoxide drear. Ziemba writes of Astounding: “Even when things slow down, we are always displaced by the mood.”
Let’s look again. Try Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy’s Fables of Faubus. Look and listen.
I look into this screen. I look away. Around my room. Out the window. I imagine the world. Everywhere a sense of the gutter noir. A cry out of the dark.
I grew up around my older sister and her friends and have always preferred the company of women. (I cheered inside when writer Luc Sante transitioned to Lucy in 2021 and said her idea of hell was being in a room full of men). I’m not a woman inside, or bi-sexual, or asexual. I’m inbetween-inbetween, somewhere among the 97 and counting sexualities or genders out there. A word from the Mexican indigenous language Nahautl strikes a chord inside: “nepantla”: a place inside and out that is there and not there, never quite arriving, here and gone. Claimed by artists and refugees and many others as home.
Someone once told me I drag my history around like a drop cloth piled with stuff from the past. I hope it’s not true but know that in addition to women much of that load is about sitting alone in the dark of movie theaters (or crouched in front of movies on late night TV). It is no surprise that working with refugees at a literacy center staffed almost entirely by women has felt right and true for decades and that trying to narrate my day to day takes me to the school, the office, the refugees, languages, and the movies.
Today my colleagues practice self-defense moves. Bring his fingers down. Yes. You’ll hear a crunch. Break them. Break them. Outside, The neighborhood ice cream truck approaches. Ice Cream Tony pauses. Movies permeate my every day. Now it is Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory.
Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (1963) was an Austrian-Italian production filmed at Cinecitta Studios in Rome. It was Federico Fellini’s favorite studio. Active Shooter training is today.
European-American, Latina, Iranian and African-American women. I’m an older European-American man. The cop shows us how to disarm the shooter. My colleague wants a slushy.
Cinecitta was built in 1936 by Mussolini to support the Fascist film industry. After the war it was a relocation camp for 3000 refugee Italians, Yugoslavs, Poles, Egyptians and Chinese.
At the active shooter training the black male cop and the black female colleague grapple with an orange toy semiautomatic handgun. My colleague says, I want a slushy. Why did you send him away?
Made in a polyglot spell of 1960’s financing and distribution, multi-national productions like Werewolf were filmed without sound recording, dubbed into different languages. This introduced an air of artifice and unreality. All the characters sound brain damaged as they wander through the floridly appointed Cinecitta sets of Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory.
Ice Cream Tony, a white European-American, slows under my window, and stops.
Critic Scott Ashlin described its “dense tangle of unworkable and self-contradictory dialog” in a “talky, inelegant murder mystery.” Two of my colleagues are practicing self-defense moves.
Ashlin cited the title, the common practice of pervasive anglicizing in credits, and the American rock and roll theme song, “The Ghoul in School” as indicators of its most “serious handicap.”
Playing a teacher under attack, the cop grips the top of the orange plastic gun, stopping the action of the slide.
My refugee students are from Afghanistan, Bhutan, Iraq. I slide the window open.
Werewolf’s handicap was “unmet expectations... Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory sounds like a randy, silly monster romp... really, though, it’s something altogether different.”
Another critic, Chav MacLeod, locates Werewolf in the pantheon of “title first, then poster, then movie” productions. American International Pictures was notorious for the method, was a standard practice of B movie studios decades before. (Val Lewton’s understated and quiet horror films of the 1940’s had lurid beginnings in titles like I Walked with a Zombie, Ghost Ship, and Curse of the Cat People).
First, a producer comes up with a hot catchy title. Then a lurid poster promises lurid thrills. Then a script is whipped up, and a movie made. Within weeks is The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955).
I hear the neighborhood ice cream truck drive past very slowly, playing “The Entertainer” over a wobbly megaphone. Ice Cream Tony leans out of the van window and our eyes meet.
I am fascinated by analysis of lurid films. There is a quivering mystery at the delta between “sounds like a randy, silly romp...” and, “really, though, it’s something altogether different.”
Werewolf is supposed to be set at a school for wayward girls. In Vermont. It looks like Italy. It is. The girls are blond women in their twenties in gray work shirts, straight black skirts and pumps, like my sister and her friends that made me blush and sweat.
I wave and Tony waves back and he has interpreted my greeting as interest in buying ice cream. No thank you, I’m sorry. It is done in slow motion several times.
This dubbing introduced artifice and unreality. She has done cage fighting, My colleague says, I wanted a slushy. The werewolf in Werewolf looks like a hairy man with bad teeth and drool.
Refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Congo.
The delta between what you expect and what you get is not just unmet expectations or disappointment, but a rich alluvial mush of disorientation, and possibility.
The wayward girl-women have a distinctly Eastern European flavor of sexual-political repression/suppression. One of the bad girls is having a scandalous affair with an older man.
I slide the window open and call out, No, no thank you! He scowls, rolls up his window and leaves. From another cubicle, C, who has done cage fighting, comes to my cubicle.
This blocks the discharge of the empty cartridge, thus preventing the gun from firing. It is done in slow motion several times. Wide loops would allow the belts to be whipped free of the pants.
Critic Ashlin says, “As a consequence, WGD is apt to face audiences who are ill-disposed to forgive its intrinsic faults or detect any of its merits at all.” These reviews fill sleepless nights.
Playing a teacher under attack, the cop grips the top of the orange plastic gun, stopping the action of the slide. My colleague says, why did you send him away? I wanted a slushy.
Now, after the training, I am scoping out everyone’s belts. I want to see which ones, in addition to my own, would work best to secure the outward-swinging classroom doors.
The cop says that the door handle could be held shut from the side with everyone’s belts. They would be linked together into one long strap. I am studying not only belts, but whether they are pushed through nice wide loops for ease of whipping removal from pants.
Wide loops allow the belts to be whipped free and off in one fast jerk from the pants. Different styles of belts would wrap and hook together, in case you wanted a longer length of belt. This would be gripped from the side, safe from shots sent through the door.
Nicaragua, Honduras, Togo.
Covid arrives the next year. Refugees sit in a socially-distanced circle in the parking lot. While I teach Simple Past I see the famous scene in the 1951 version of The Thing: scientists and soldiers at an antearctic base discover a crashed spaceship under the ice. They take up positions to mark the site, and form a gigantic circle: a flying saucer. Our circle is in the sun and our shadows make a sundial. Ice Cream Tony turns the corner. We break for ice cream and line up, six feet apart.
Sudan, Syria, Ukraine.
Our next training is role-playing an ICE raid. Playing a teacher impeding ICE entry, then submitting non-violently to arrest. I imagine the prison sequences in the 1985 film of Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman: William Hurt is a gay man thrown into political prison with straight revolutionary Raoul Julia. Hurt narrates a mishmash of bad movies mixed with the story of his life to help them endure. Maybe more than endure.
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Gregg Williard is a writer and visual artist in Madison Wisconsin. His website is williardart.com.