#we already rifftracks while watching them every time

[not-another-robin]

The autistic urge to make a podcast with my family reviewing every episode of Batman the animated series

[mst3kproject]

The Hideous Sun Demon

Have you ever wondered what would be the exact opposite of a werewolf?  Apparently writer/star Robert Clarke did, and as his answer, he made The Hideous Sun Demon.  Nan Peterson from Girls Town is in it, and Patrick Whyte from Kitten with a Whip, and William White (no relation as far as I know) from The Human Duplicators.  There’s a Rifftrack available, too, so this one is officially more than qualified.

We hit the ground running, as a man is wheeled into an ambulance after a nuclear accident.  This guy turns out to be Dr. Gilbert McKenna, a scientist of some description, who lost consciousness after spilling a jar of radioactive isotopes.  A couple of days later, and he seems to be just fine – he’s feeling well enough to sexually harass the nurses – until he goes out in the sunshine.  Rather than just giving him a tan and a bracing dose of Vitamin D, the sun’s rays de-evolve him, transforming him into a lizard monster!  The condition reverses in darkness, so McKenna takes to sleeping during the day and only going out at night, but a secret like that can’t be kept forever – especially after his scaly alter-ego commits a murder.

Wow.  This movie is terrible.  The acting is awful, with everybody sounding like they’re reading their lines off cards.  Clarke is one of the better actors in the movie as long as he’s playing low-key. When he’s supposed to be freaking out and crying, he takes it way too far, right over the edge into comical.  The actors playing the other scientists always come across like they have no idea what the words they’re saying actually mean, and certainly don’t know how much of it is dead wrong.  A scene in which McKenna is beaten up by some thugs outside a bar is so badly choreographed, it’s laughable.

We don’t really know McKenna at all.  When we first meet him, he’s just been irradiated and is unconscious on a gurney.  We are told that he’s an alcoholic and we see him try to flirt with the nurse, but really we only ever see him as the depressed guy terrified of turning into a lizard.  If we knew more about him, we could sympathize with him better and feel his downward spiral more keenly.  The one quick piece of background we get actually undercuts his character arc – if he’s already an alcoholic, then we have no baseline for his drinking over the rest of the movie.  I think we’re supposed to believe it’s getting worse, but we don’t know.

The worst casualty of this lack of background is the nature of McKenna’s relationship with his colleague Anne Russell. We get the idea that Russell cares for McKenna very much – she worries about him constantly, and another character reminds her that she views him ‘through rose-coloured glasses’.  Are they romantically involved?  The first time I watched the movie I got that impression, and yet then he goes off to pursue Trudy the lounge singer.  Is Anne’s love supposed to be unrequited?  Are they awkward work exes?  Does he deliberately dump her so she won’t be burdened by his sauranthropy? The script never deals with any of this.

Since most of the movie is set at night, the lighting is terrible – darkness and dark filters make it difficult to tell what’s going on in the outdoor scenes, and the crappy film stock doesn’t help, either. In order to make sure we know this is all happening at night, the foley guys have dubbed in lots and lots of cricket noises… which brings us to the sound, which is so bad that it’s sometimes hard to tell what people are saying.  The music is often hauntingly familiar, consisting of public domain tracks we’ve heard in several of these old monster movies before – in particular I’m sure I’ve heard the song Strange Pursuit in another movie, but googling it turns up very few results.

The lizard-man is… not great.  The mask is about as good as anything from the fifties, and fairly elaborate, with lots of individual scales and teeth and extra makeup for Clarke’s chest and hands, so he can run around with his shirt open.  In other movies the cheese factor of the monster suit is minimized by a lot of lurking in the shadows, and the makers of The Hideous Sun Demon have handicapped themselves quite badly by having a creature that must appear in full sunlight.  We get a nice clear look at stuff like the seam where the costume head meets the chest, or the wrinkles where it bends at the elbows.

And yet… for all that… I kind of like this movie. The idea of a reverse werewolf, a creature that transforms and kills by daylight, tickles my sense of humour – but it’s an interesting concept on other levels, too.  It invites us, for example, to think about why night is the traditional time for monsters.  This is such a truism that it’s rarely even put into words.  Everybody knows that Evil People Only Come Out At Night, and when we do think about it, the reason why seems obvious: night-time is when things like wolves and sabre-tooth tigers used to come out and gnaw on the unwary among our ancestors.  We’re still here because the survivors passed on genes that made them afraid of the dark.

This means that a man who transforms into a monster by day is a very different creature from the traditional were-animal.  Werewolves, who change only under the moon, can lead a normal life while partially, or even wholly, unaware of their affliction.  Darkness is anonymity.  McKenna doesn’t get to be anonymous.  He literally has the full light of day on his problem.

Because darkness is anonymity, it is a time for monsters in another, only slightly less literal way: night-time is when an awful lot of crime happens, because there are less likely to be any witnesses. Again, this is very relevant to creatures like werewolves and vampires, creatures of the night – their activities can go unseen because of this lack of witnesses.  It’s also important for Gil, but in a different way.  He cannot be a creature of the day, because it brings out the monster in him.  He is therefore forced to be a creature of the night, and must keep company with other creatures of the night, such as Trudy and her gangster boyfriend.

Trudy is an interesting character, in that she represents both knowledge and innocence.  She hangs out with criminals and, rather astonishingly for a movie of this vintage, is presented quite frankly as sexually promiscuous.  McKenna takes her out to the beach and it is heavily implied that they had sex there before he ran off at sunrise so she wouldn’t see him transform, and later dialogue tells us that this is not her first such encounter with a near-stranger!  It’s not fully explicit, but it’s still perfectly clear, and this is possibly the one thing the movie does well.  At the same time, what McKenna finds attractive about her is that she doesn’t know his secret.  She’s innocent of the terrible truth and interacts with him on that level.

I still don’t know what the relationship between McKenna and Russell was supposed to be, but McKenna’s pursuit of Trudy makes sense on this level, even if we assume he and Russell were all but married. He can’t bear to be around Russell because she knows and that will colour how she treats him no matter how much she loves him.  Furthermore, every time he notices a difference between her behaviour before and her behaviour now, it will remind him of his condition, which he desperately wants to forget. Trudy’s ignorance is therefore one of the most attractive things about her.

After Lizard-McKenna kills her boyfriend, Trudy vanishes from the movie.  She was probably the one who called the police, but we never see her again or find out what she thought of the whole thing.  This is disappointing because Trudy’s feelings toward McKenna have changed several times over the course of the film – from infatuation to rage to pity and back to infatuation again.  I would have liked to see some sort of conclusion to this.  If Trudy’s innocence is the main thing McKenna sees in her, it would have been nice to see them interact again after that innocence is shattered, and what effect this change in her has on him.

Also unresolved is the effort to find a cure for McKenna’s condition.  A radiation expert, Dr. Hoffman, comes to see McKenna and examines him, and says he thinks he can at least treat this condition if not cure it entirely – but this goes nowhere.  The death of Glenn Manning in The Amazing Colossal Man is made extra-sad by the fact that they did have a cure, and that Glenn didn’t understand that they were trying to administer it.  It’s an extension of Glenn’s own story, in which the world has not yet given up on him, but he has given up on himself.  McKenna is just being chased by the cops, and sure enough, eventually they shoot him.  His death is supposed to be a tragedy, but there’s nothing to give it meaning.

So while I do kind of like the ideas in this movie, the execution of them leaves a lot to be desired.  I’d actually be interested to see a remake of The Hideous Sun Demon, made by somebody with a bit more talent at writing (and directing… and acting… and basically everything else).  There’s gotta be something you could do with a reverse werewolf that would be way cooler than this.