“The sea rules us, Mister Baxter”—Dr. King in PHANTOM
These two films, though separated
by a couple of decades, both deal with marine monsters, both of which are
called “sea serpents” during their respective stories, even though neither one
looks like the least bit like the traditional monster. Both, like 1954’s CREATURE OF THE BLACK
LAGOON, offer their audiences a “close encounter” with a nonhuman life-form,
and as such fall under the Campbellian function of the cosmological.
PHANTOM is not an easy film to
watch. Though it sports an interesting Lou Rusoff script, Dan Milner’s direction
is listless, hardly ever varying from a standard mid-level shot. It’s perhaps best seen as a collection of
themes that Rusoff would explore to better effect a year later with Edward Cahn
on SHE CREATURE.
First we see a classic shaggy-dog
joke, played for pathos: a fisherman goes fishing and gets caught and killed by
a “fish”—the “phantom” of the title, who looks like a man with a
dragon’s-head. The fisherman and his
boat, both showing evidence of burns that should be impossible at sea, both
wash ashore. They’re not the first such
casualties, which prompts government agent Grant to arrive on the beachside
scene. While examining the evidence,
Grant meets two suspicious individuals: young George, who works for the nearby
oceanographic institute, and a man who initially calls himself Stevens. His real name is later revealed as “Ted
Baxter”—which name had no special connotations in those pre-MARY TYLER MOORE
days—and that he too is an oceanographic expert. Agent Grant eventually discovers that the
government sent Baxter as an unofficial covert agent, because Baxter has become
notorious for an experiment which Grant describes as a potential “death ray,”
though its main application was using radiation on marine life.
Shortly thereafter the audience
meets Dr. King, the obsessed-seeming supervisor of the institute, and his
daughter Lois, first seen complaining about how he’s been “neglecting” her for
his work. King has his own complaints,
for he suspects that both his employee George and his secretary Ethel are
spying on him. Later he’s proven right,
though Ethel is spying for the U.S. government (because her son was one of the
victims of the monster) while George has been suborned into a life of espionage
by foreign spy Wanda.
And King has good reason to fear
being exposed: like a sea-happy Doctor Frankenstein, he’s activated a deposit
of uranium on the nearby ocean floor, which casts forth a gleaming “shaft of
light” and which is guarded by the Phantom.
The reasons behind the monster’s actions are never explored: one
presumes that it’s pleased with its mutation and so guards the source of it,
though the trope evoked feels more like the notion of the dragon guarding his
gold.
It also comes out that King derived
his out-of-control experiment from Baxter’s research, giving Baxter a strong
motivation to uncover King’s secret.
Unlike many similar mad-scientist films, King is not the least bit
hostile toward Baxter’s investigations, and seems to encourage Baxter’s
attentions toward Lois. Oddly, at one
point he invites Baxter to come calling at King’s house. Baxter walks in on Lois when she’s coming out
of the shower. “Your father told me to
open the door and come in,” explains Baxter in a line rife with Freudian
potential. Lois gets mad at her father
but not at Baxter, another odd turn on the usual courting-tropes.
Grant and Baxter team up to
investigate the monster, but since the Phantom’s confined to the ocean,
Rusoff’s script brings in George as a secondary menace, for he tries to kill
Grant with a spear-gun and both men with poison capsules while trying to get
access to King’s research. He does
succeed in killing Ethel but is eventually taken prisoner. King, finally overcome with remorse for the
monster’s killings, uses a bomb to destroy himself, the deposit and his
blasphemous creation.
The espionage-angle makes PHANTOM
an odd entry in the 1950s monster sweepstakes, establishing an odd parallel
between the way civilians are seduced by the spy life, with Grant making use of
Ethel much the same way Wanda makes use of George—though Wanda’s methods
include literal seduction. The female
principle gets rather unusual handling in the script. Though Lois is fairly colorless, Wanda is described
as a mixture of “beauty and poison,” Ethel is threatened twice with a spear-gun
(once by George, once by King) before George uses that weapon to kill her, and
King describes science as a “devouring mistress.” As with many earlier mad-scientist movies,
the implication seems to be that only individual scientists are responsible for
reckless tamperings with nature, and that only the government can control such
matters.
OCTAMAN literally revisits the
storyline of CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, being an uncredited quasi-remake
of CREATURE by its original scripter Harry Essex, who also directed. In the wilds of an unnamed Latin American
country, a troupe of scientists, funded by a money-hungry promoter, search
through a inland series of lakes, looking for a so-called “sea serpent”—though
it’s really the “Octaman,” a humanoid being with the features and extra arms of
an octopus.
Essex blamed the failure of the
film on the risible costume, and it’s true that it’s a bad one, given a design
that only modern CGI might make impressive.
But Essex’s direction is just adequate—OK with actors, not that good
with scenery—and his script also fails to evoke even a tenth of the mystery
found in CREATURE, or for that matter, KING KONG. The promoter directly references KONG,
apparently with the notion that he can capture the Octaman and exhibit
him—meaning that he must not have seen the end of the picture.
Essex’s script is also murky about
the Octaman’s powers of reproduction.
Unlike the denizen of the Black Lagoon, the Octaman has apparently
fathered a mini-octopoid, for it’s seen at the film’s beginning when Octaman
rescues it from a fisherman. But it’s
never seen again, and it’s not clear if the creature has any ardent feelings
toward the crew’s female member (Pier Angeli).
Only at the end does Angeli do one thing that Fay Wray didn’t do: to
distract the creature from her lover, she offers herself to the Octaman. He carries her away, presumably to experiment
with hybrid vigor, only to be blasted down by the menfolk. Thankfully no one quotes the final line from
KONG.
To paraphase Dino deLaurentis, “Nobody cry when Octaman die.”
