The Black Scorpion has a generally poor reputation even amongst aficionados of 1950s monster movie, and yet I have a fondness for it. Sporting special effects work by legendary King Kong (1933) stop-motion animation pioneer Willis O’Brien, The Black Scorpion also has a rarefied quality in being a Hollywood film set in Mexico, giving a different slant to the familiar motifs of embodied destructive forces in the monster movie subgenre. Commencing with a volcanic eruption that stirs chaos and destruction somewhere in the Mexican interior (utilising stock footage of the eruption of Paracutin), the story quickly zeroes in on two geologists, Gringo Dr Hank Scott (Richard Dennings) and Mexican colleague Dr Arturo Ramos (Carlos Rivas). The geologists are trying to find their way towards the town of San Lorenzo, which neighbours the exploding mountain, traversing a landscape violently reshaped by the eruption’s force. Amidst the smoking and desolate landscape they find a homestead seemingly damaged and abandoned, with a badly damaged police car parked nearby, policeman mysteriously missing. Searching the area, they soon find a baby left inside the house, as well as the cop, who seemingly died from fright after shooting off all his bullets.
When they arrive in San Lorenzo, the two scientists find themselves at a loss to explicate their discoveries to the local priest Father Delgado (Pedro Galván) and the soldiers sent to keep order in the battered town, who explain in turn that something has been assaulting and decimating local cattle herds, and the local folklore about a “demon bull” that haunts the locale seems as good as any other explanation. The two men meet with a local scientist, Dr Delacruz (Pascual García Peña), who discerns the policeman was killed by some kind of venom. As they try to get closer to the volcano, Scott and Ramos encounter Teresa Alvarez (Mara Corday), a rancher they give gallant aid to after she falls from her horse, and Scott also befriends local waif Juanito (Mario Navarro), who fixes on Scott as a father figure. Ramos discovers a hunk of obsidian with what he thinks is a long-dead scorpion trapped inside, but when the stone is cut open the scorpion proves to be quite animated. Soon enough some colossal, prehistoric relatives turn up with properly primeval appetites. One giant scorpion attacks and kills telephone repairmen before turning on Teresa’s cattle, whilst another stalks the streets of San Lorenzo, driving the panicking population out and finishing what the earthquakes started.
The Black Scorpion has a mix-and-match aspect in combining elements from other recent successes in the sci-fi monster craze, borrowing Denning from Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954), Corday from Tarantula (1955), and the insectoid trilling sound effects from Them! (1954) to accompany the monsters’ appearances. The script was written David Duncan and Robert Blees, two accomplished screenwriters – Duncan knew his way around horror and sci-fi and would later pen The Time Machine(1960) and Fantastic Voyage (1966), whilst Blees had previously written high-class melodrama for Douglas Sirk and Robert Aldrich. Lustig, a Russian-born director, had been making movies in Hollywood since the early 1920s, and The Black Scorpion, which proved to be his second-last fature, has the same strongly atmospheric and well-made aspect as his Wake of the Red Witch (1949): both films sustain a sense, at least at the outset, of being thrust out into the protean edges of the world where dragons await. The nicely moody and suggestive opening as the two scientists uncover evidence of something truly strange and frightening at loose. The sound what they presume to be a rattlesnake proves to be the baby’s rattle inside a damaged house, whilst the cop’s body is found still upright and huddled into a corner hidden behind some debris: these touches weave a sense of dark threat for The Black Scorpion that its more prosaic and clumsy aspects don’t entirely dispel.
Said elements include Dennings’ grating, depthless lead performance. Where he was good playing the aggressive and egotistical foil in Creature From The Black Lagoon, he’s much less interesting playing a straightforward hero. “I’ve found something a lot more interesting,” he crows when he catches sight of Teresa riding the range, sounding like a bad travelogue voiceover trying to make Juarez sound sexy. Juanito might well test some patience too, one of those hero-worshipping ethnic kids who followed the Yankee heroes around in ‘50s movies, but he’s oddly believable as a proto-Spielbergian youngster whose desperate desire to get in on the action leads him into danger: Spielberg notably offered homage with Ian Malcolm’s daughter in The Lost World: Jurassic Park(1996). Corday comes off well on the other hand as a fairly unusual type of heroine in a movie of this kind, suggesting Blees was carrying over some fixations from his earlier project Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) as well as the heroine types out of the Women’s Picture melodramas he’d worked on, offering her equally at ease commanding ranch hands, stepping out in Mexico City nightlife in furs and black silk, and contending with a monstrous arachnid. Scott is so unflinchingly enthusiastic about romancing Teresa that Ramos eventually warns him: “This is Mexico, and when a man shows as much attention to a girl as you have, all of a sudden he’s in a cathedral and wondering how he got there.”
With O’Brien’s work limited certainly by the budget, a puppet is used for close-ups of the scorpions, and whilst it’s not too bad a creation, it doesn’t look much like O’Brien’s models, and the film cuts to its drooling, beady-eyed, serrated-mawed visage far too often. Elsewhere Lustig utilises silhouetted scorpion figures stalking across the screen in unconvincing manner. Such lapses are a pity because O’Brien’s stop-motion work, when showcased properly, helps elevate the monster scenes above the usual run of ‘50s sci-fi fare. The monsters are vivid and threatening, animated with a remarkable level of smoothness even O’Brien’s protégé Ray Harryhausen wasn’t approaching yet. O’Brien and Lustig generate minatory creepiness during the attack on the linesmen, the scorpion appearing from the shadows under a bridge in a dry arroyo and launching an assault on one man as he tries to flee in a truck: Teresa hears the sounds of terror over the telephone line as one of the repairmen was calling her to check the line repair when the attack began. Lionel Lindon’s surprisingly lush photography is both strongly noirish in the monster menace scenes whilst also grasping for a sense of weathered splendour in the Mexican locales, like Teresa’s ranch with its vaulted rooms and opulent paraphernalia, as if the film slipped sideways into one of Buñuel’s Mexican fantasies.
Most ‘50s monster movies dealt implicitly with the threat of modernity, manifested through the atomic bomb, other weapons of war, or unfettered scientific tinkering, crashing down upon civilisation, threatening to disrupt it with the same forces that had given rise to the new security and stability of that civilisation. The Black Scorpionoccupies different territory in this regard, because the giant scorpions are defined as primordial monsters that hatch out thanks to the volcanic eruption to assault the landscape of Mexico, a place the film sees as hovering in another socio-historical zone. Mexico City, with its grand public art murals laying rhetorical claim to the future, is at an evident remove from the classical way of life persisting out in the backcountry. There Teresa holds court in her grand, old-world hacienda, and the village with its church is churned to chaos by the twin disasters of the volcano and the emerging monsters. The Black Scorpion then holds it monsters up not as avatars for the dark side of modernity but as embodiments of ancient and pernicious forces, the vulnerability of communities before natural disasters and calamities, the primeval world red in tooth and claw. That the scorpions first attack policeman and the telephone repairmen trying to reconnect San Lorenzo with the outside world elucidates this idea.
Despite the generally forced tone of the acting there are some flashes of intelligence in the human drama, like the army commander who begs Scott and Ramos not to leave San Lorenzo in case they get in trouble and he has to waste men and time bailing them out, and a dash of wry if stereotyped humour as Delacruz readies test tubes containing reactive agents for experiments and a shot of tequila for recreation. The scientists, teaming up with reputed entomologist Dr Velasco (Carlos Múzquiz) and the Mexican army, soon deduce the scorpions are emerging from a colossal pit they discover near the volcano, the blasts having opened up the pit and the prehistoric monsters revived by the return of air. Scott and Ramos descend into the pit in a crane-fed lift and discover a nest of the huge scorpions, including one twice the size of the others coloured black, which maintains a brutal and murderous rivalry with the others, killing one in a fight over food. Meanwhile young Juanito, who snuck down hidden amongst oxygen cylinders in his boyish desire to help Scott, finds himself chased by a spider-like creature, whilst a huge, wriggling, worm-like creature provides a fight for one of the scorpions, and then a meal.
O’Brien’s work in this scene is tremendous, and the worm and spider have long tantalised fans of his work with the possibility they might have been leftover props from the cut canyon scene from King Kong. The sequence ends with a nicely tense bit as one of the scorpions wrecks the lift so the two heroes and Juanito have to lifted out of the abyss clinging onto the cable. The scientists eventually elect to have the army seal up the pit with explosives and trap the scorpions again, and for a time it seems this works, only for Scott and Ramos to be called by Velasco to Mexico City to be confronted with evidence the creatures might have escaped their tomb through a natural system of tunnels. This proves all too true in another excellently-done set-piece as the scorpions attack an express train heading to Mexico City, reminiscent of Kong’s train attack including a point-of-view shot as the train races towards one of the monsters astride the tracks like something out of deep phobic nightmare.
The scorpions begin eagerly devouring all the passengers trying to flee the wreck, until the big black scorpion arrives and, in a frenzy, kills the rest of its rivals, picking them up and slamming them down on the ground to deliver the coup-de-grace to their one vulnerable spot under the jaw. This scene is something of a zenith of O’Brien’s labours, even if the black-eyed, tough-shelled scorpions don’t allow him the kind of witty sense of liveliness O’Brien invested in his dinosaurs and giant apes in earlier films. There’s still a sense of relished technical challenge in bringing the scorpions to life and the sense of detail for things like the train’s headlamp reflecting off the scorpion’s body. Having the “granddaddy of them all” wipe out the other scorpions was probably a cost and labour-saving twist but it robs the end of the film of some zest as we’re left with just the one big monster. The climax is familiar as the scientists quickly whip up an electrified harpoon to try and plant it in the scorpion’s throat after luring it into a soccer stadium, although the excellent effects continue as the scorpion battles helicopters and tanks as the scientists try to line up their shot. Of course Scott lands the killing blow and heads off with Teresa towards the marital bed, having done their part to foster better US-Mexican relations and lay to rest the fiends of a third-world past.
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