#i love you rocket science yuri with aliens

[chiisana-lion]

really good yus

[mst3kproject]

The Cape Canaveral Monsters

This movie was written and directed by Phil Tucker, who did the same for MST3K classic Robot Monster, and stars Katherine ‘Batwoman’ Victor.  It was shot mostly in and around Bronson Canyon, because the desert rocks of California look exactly like the wetlands of Florida.  I haven’t even pressed ‘play’ yet and I already need a drink.

A couple are driving home from the beach when they get into a car accident, and their bodies are taken over by a pair of aliens named Haran and Naja.  Almost immediately, mysterious accidents start to plague rocket launches at Cape Canaveral.  While the scientists try to figure out why their shit is blowing up, a bunch of supposedly-young folks on a double-date pick up some weird interference on their car radios. When they go looking for the source of this, the aliens capture them and inform them that they will be beamed back to the home planet as frozen specimens – or used as spare parts to upgrade the aliens’ undead bodies, which are slowly falling apart!

The Cape Canaveral Monsters is a better movie than Robot Monster, but honestly… what isn’t?  Fuck’s sake, Battlefield Earth is a better movie than Robot Monster (though if I had to pick one to watch, I’d choose Robot Monster because it’s short).  There was really nowhere for Tucker to go but up.

Sadly, the very fact that it is (slightly) better also makes it less interesting than Robot Monster.  Robot Monster is a sixty-two minute parade of bad ideas, cheaply realized, so far off the deep end of terrible that it becomes mesmerizing.  Cape Canaveral Monsters doesn’t have anything nearly so weird as aliens in gorilla suits who communicate by bubble machine, or nearly so cheap as visible strings holding up their space stations. It’s got actual sets instead of being filmed in some rubble and a field, and an attempt is made at a couple of special effects.  There’s certainly nothing so jaw-droppingly incompetent as Ro-Man’s inept philosophizing, and there’s an identifiable hero in the form of Tom, the oldest and smartest of the four young people.

But that still leaves it a lot of latitude to suck, and Cape Canaveral Monsters sucks balls.  The photography is awful, with a lot of shots noticeably over-exposed and some terrible framing and composition.  The film stock was cheap to begin with and it doesn’t help at all that it was around fifty years old by the time somebody put it on DVD for 85¢. It’s nearly impossible to see anybody’s faces, although that’s kind of okay, because nobody here gives a performance worth watching.  When the best actor in your movie is Batwoman, that’s sad.

You may have noticed that I said an attempt was made at special effects – this attempt is in no way successful. When not occupying human bodies, the aliens are literal white spots bobbing around in front of the camera (man, remember the good old days when alien invasions were just two people who could be taken out by some plucky teenagers and one redneck with a gun?). Rocket launches are of course all stock footage, but since they’re unsuccessful launches at least we get to see something besides the same five shots all the other 50’s rocket movies use.  The aliens’ high tech lab consists mostly of dials and their communications antenna looks like it’s made out of lawn furniture.

My favourite bad effect in the film is any of the ones connected with Haran’s missing arm, which is sort of a running thing if not exactly a joke.  When the previous incumbent of his host body was killed in the car wreck, his left arm was severed – Naja goes back to collect it, saying she’ll sew it back on. The arm she retrieves from the back of the car is very clearly still attached to somebody, who is not very good at keeping still.  Later, a dog rips this arm back off and proudly presents it to the military types. It’s hard to judge how good this fake arm is because of the bad photography, but it is still in a sleeve – yet when we see Haran a moment later, his sleeve is bloodied but still very much intact. You can probably guess that the ‘missing’ arm is often clearly visible under the actor’s shirt.

Likewise, the sets.  Haran and Naja’s base is in a cave, which is almost definitely the same cave inhabited by Ro-Man and the Parrot-Bear from Night of the Blood Beast.  The inside of this cave is an empty room full of dials – the same dials, rearranged in the same empty room, form the NASA control room where the scientists are working. The Sheriff’s Office later in the film is literally a niche in a wall.  I actually kind of admire their determination.  It takes guts to try making a movie when you’ve got so little to work with.

The most interesting idea in the movie is one I don’t think it meant to include, and that is the inconvenient fact that the bodies the two aliens are occupying are dead.  The Cape Canaveral Monsters never makes much of this except for Haran repeatedly needing replacement arms (and at one point a chin).  We never go into whether they still need to do things like eat, sleep, and pee.  It’s kind of a shame, because there’s potential here for both horror and comedy. The aliens don’t appear to feel pain, so that Haran can lose his arm and only be mildly annoyed by it… this, and the repeatedly sewing new ones on, could have been funny if handled right (the bit where he awkwardly fires a giant ray gun using only one arm is kinda funny, but not on purpose).  If they’d met anybody the couple used to know, that could have been creepy. Sadly, the whole plot point is only present to keep the budget down, since they don’t need costumes for the aliens.

Another thing that could have been used to better effect is the tense relationship between the two aliens.  Haran and Naja don’t like one another, and spend a fair amount of time bickering like an unhappily married couple.  Naja seems to be in charge, while Haran is some kind of technician who resents her trying to micromanage him.  None of this, unfortunately, is ever explored.  The arguments are used to provide exposition. Why they don’t get along, and why they were sent on this mission together regardless, we never find out. You’d think their disagreements would be key to their defeat, but instead the scientists build a bomb out of salt, hydrogen, and everybody’s belt buckles.

(This is one of several stars The Cape Canaveral Monsters earns for bullshit Movie Science.  Not only do we have this bit, there’s also the part where Haran tells his captives that the bubbling liquid involved in beaming human specimens home is ‘like your hydrogen’ but with a ‘much greater’ atomic weight.  At least they got the chemical name of salt right, although I can’t imagine in what universe scientists actually ask their families to pass the sodium chloride at dinner.)

Besides obtaining specimens, the other reason Haran and Naja are on earth is to keep our space program stalled until the aliens’ invasion fleet arrives.  Exactly what good it would do us to be able to launch a capsule with one guy in it (which was what we were working up to at the time this movie was made) is not explained… maybe it’s gonna take hundreds of years for the rest of the aliens to get here and they’re afraid we’ll develop warp drives and photon torpedoes before they make it?  The pair identify themselves as Earth Expedition Two, which naturally makes the viewer wonder what happened to Earth Expedition One.  Are they in Russia, trying to keep Yuri Gagarin on the ground?  Or was 1 just a complete failure and now we’re on Plan 2 From Outer Space?

At the end, the humans have blown up the aliens’ cave and they leave laughing.  “I don’t think we’ll see them again!” Tom declares.  This seems overly optimistic, as there is at least that one other Earth Expedition, and sure enough, the ‘gotcha’ ending immediately proves him wrong.

Thinking about Robot Monster and The Cape Canaveral Monsters, it seems to me that Phil Tucker really wanted to do some epic storytelling.  In the former we have the tragic tale of an alien discovering human love and beauty, only to be destroyed before he can fully come to terms with them.  In the latter we have advance scouts preparing Earth for invasion, who seem to be easily defeated but actually have us right where they want us.  In both, all humanity’s efforts to resist come to naught and we are doomed to conquest or extinction.  This is hefty stuff, contrasting human arrogance with how insignificant we really are in the face of this vast, empty, hostile universe.  The ambition was certainly present.  The money and talent were not.

The Cape Canaveral Monsters is terrible. I don’t recommend it to anybody. It’s the kind of bad movie that you go into hoping it’ll be fun and then end up getting fed off and turning it off ten minutes in… and yet, I’m curious now.  As well as this, Robot Monster, and previous EtNW Dance Hall Racket, Phil Tucker wrote and directed a couple of other films in the 50’s and 60’s.  These have titles like Tijuana After Midnight and Broadway Jungle that sound like they’re probably softcore titty movies, but the masochist in me kind of wants to watch them.  When your career includes Robot Monster and The Cape Canaveral Monsters, can I really take it for granted that’s as bad as you could get?