Monsters

Monsters are an old thing but they are still around. Just this past week Boston's Centre Theatre premiered one of the lastest monster movies, The Bride of the Monster.

The mad scientist is Dr. Erich Varnoff. Exiled by a "foreign power," Varnoff decides to rule the world. As he puts it, "I will perfect my own race of people." Varnoff sets up a monster-making establishment in an old dilapidated mansion, the old Willows Place, which is hidden deep in an old secluded swamp. "This swamp," one of the characters later reveals, "is a monument to death."

Operating from these quarters, Varnoff sends his best monster to fetch prospects. The monster's name is Lobo and he is of Tibetan origin. But the trouble comes when Lobo falls in love with an Occidental girl, a hard-hitting reporteress named Miss Laughton. Lobo, who is really a gentle soul, cannot stand to see Miss Laughton undergo the invariably fatal process of reracination. Lobo turns on his master. The results are catastrophic.

Though his name is Varnoff and he wears the traditional clothes, Varnoff is a new kind of monster-maker. He makes his supermen with "the atom elements." His story also seems influenced by the development of Psychotherapy ("Here in this forsaken jungle hell I have come to prove myself alright."), though it is not known whether there was an analyst for this swamp.

For all his modernity, there is a suggestion that Varnoff may be past his prime. His most successful scenes are those in which he looks back on his past with a resigned stoicism. "Home," he says wistfully, "I have no home." Lobo, too, is troubled. Though he starts as a noble savage, soon his soft-heartedness gets the best of him. Troubled by his feelings toward Miss Laughton, he can never be fierce as a monster should. Further encumbered (in a way reminiscent of French classical tragedy) by class prejudices that stifle his love for Miss Laughton, Lobo makes a poor rival for such monsters as King Kong and Mighty Joe Young.

Another innovation, octopi and reptiles replace the old paper mache monsters of former horror movies. Varnoff's swamp is inhabited by a large collection of crocodiles and poisonous snakes. Unimpressed by these horrors, one skeptical moviegoer commented, "See ya later alligator."

His enraged departure is a sign. Perhaps movie makers are becoming too obsessed with modernizing their monsters. Or perhaps they are not going far enough, and should throw aside all the hackneyed romantic trappings (wire-filled laboratories, flowing black gowns, and evil sayings) to create a really new monster.

Dr. Calgari, the Mummy, and even Frankenstein are gone. In their place are The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Thing, and Lobo. In The Bride of the Monster, one of Bela Lugosi's last movies, the virile fiend of Dracula has become a rather prosaic old alchemist. It is as if Lugosi, like Varnoff, had at last capitulated to the modern emphasis on drawing the blood from healthy vampires.