Word: frankenstein
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...overcame many laymen when they contemplated a new invention-the electronic computer. There was vague anxiety about machines that could think, a corner-of-the-eye vision of humanoid steel creatures winking out their possibly baleful computations. It was-and still is-modern man's version of the Frankenstein anxiety...
...same couple, this time in an American hotel, this time confronted with sleeping sickness and a crazy southern doctor, whose son turns out to be Jan Egleson, the Mexican maniac of the earlier act. The doctor attempts, not to cure his patient, but rather to turn him into a Frankenstein character, playing on the patient's own death wish. The patient runs into the audience, and when cornered by the doctor's son and his own wife, escapes by swinging from the top of the theatre on a rope, crashing through the scenery, and bringing the play to a close...
...exactly a Noble Savage, but it is impossible for Itard not to have had Rousseau in mind; the doctor many not be a poet, but he is inexorably caught up in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the birth of Romanticism. The film (like Pygmalion, or Frankenstein ) is deeply moving: in its story, one man turns an idea about humanity into flesh. And if the jump from idea to flesh, from symbol to image, constitutes the process of education, it also constitutes the process of cinema...
With it's ritual force. "Frankenstein" can stand as a basic experience in the scientific fantasy. But a movie of the special effects for special effects' sake has peculiar delights and revelations as well. The pseudo-myth Science Fiction epic "This Island Earth" concerns the second category of fear, fear of Alien Invasion. It Jeans very heavily on its 1956 milieu for inspiration, yet despite, or perhaps because of inanity, it reveals other immediate aspects of the mentality behind the race to the moon. While the flick is apparently a cartoon show of sheer escapism, the political situation somehow manages...
...mysterious do-it-your-self machine in the mail and despite the warnings of his square colleague builds the contraption which goes by the name of "interossiter." Through the ill-fitting costumes and wooden exclamations, the significant theme of machines taking on a life of their own, as did Frankenstein, drives the creaky plot forward. To make a long story short, a mysterious Alien appears on the screen of the interossiter and informs Rex that a mysterious plane will meet him at five o'clock the next morning. Sure enough, the scientist takes on the challenge and who should...