Directors: Riccardo Freda, Mario Bava
Stars: John Merivale, Didi Sullivan, Gerard Herter
Snack Report: Utz Cheese Balls (one more time)
In the Horror/Sci-Fi genre, monster fashions come, and monster fashions go.
In the late 1950s/ early 1960s, movies featuring giant carnivorous piles of radioactive goo reached their peak popularity. Blobs were all the rage at that time, from Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) to the quintessential blob movie (The Blob (1958), naturally). But none had quite the panache of the pulsating blob of a Mexican/Italian/American schlock masterpiece called Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (or as I like to call it, Night of the Living Pot Roast).
What really sets Caltiki apart from the other blob movies (and most B horror movies of that era) is the breathtaking cinematography and ahead-of-their-time special effects, courtesy of Mario Bava. Yes, THE Mario Bava. His friend, credited director Riccardo Freda, unofficially withdrew halfway through the project, pushing Bava, his protégé, to take on the director’s role. Bava directed all the action and effects sequences, which gave him the boost he needed to become a legendary director in his own right – the Godfather of Giallo.
In fact, Bava’s fingerprints are all over this movie, in a manner of speaking. Though his later works are famous for their use of intense color, he uses the black and white medium very effectively. The cinematography is especially artful for a movie of its kind (and budget). There’s also more explicit gore than typically was allowed in the late 50s, especially the scene where… well, you’ll see.
The parts of the movie directed by Bava are pretty tight… unfortunately, the rest of it isn’t.
Caltiki can’t seem to make up its mind about what kind of movie it is… it starts out as a bizarre melodrama with the archeologists and their significant others, and it ends up as a special effects explosionfest with stock-footage military maneuvers, tanks, and flamethrowers. There’s even an erotic dance sequence that you won’t want to miss.
So this team of scientists/archeologists is in the Mexican jungle, trying to find out what caused the demise of the Mayan civilization. It’s another case of scientists messing around with things they don’t understand, which as you know, never ends well.
Dr. John Fielding (John Merivale ) has brought his new bride along on the expedition, and Max (Gerard Herter) has also invited his Mexican girlfriend, because of course they would love to sweat it out in a bug-ridden jungle tent while the boys do science. John’s wife Ellen is pretty pissed off about having to spend her honeymoon here, but Max’s girlfriend Linda is such a doormat, she doesn’t complain… much.
Then there’s that gratuitious erotic dance sequence. Perhaps it was included to break up the pseudoscientific monotony. And it provides an opportunity for skeezy Max to hit on his colleague’s wife.
When one of the scientists returns to camp after exploring a volcano, he’s terrified, delirious, and raving about Caltiki, a Mayan deity. Plus, his partner is missing. John, Max, and Bob (the designated red-shirt guy) go searching for him and find his camera sitting next to a sacrificial pool inside the volcano… watched over by a statue of the vengeful goddess, Caltiki.
This seems like a good time to mention the legend that the goddess will return to destroy the world “when there’s fire in the sky.” And wouldn’t you know it, a comet is due to pass close to earth soon… and it just so happens it’s the same comet that had a close encounter with the Earth… at the exact time the Mayans disappeared!!! (Could it also be the same comet that brought back Baron Vitelius in The Brainiac?)
So anyway, after much stock footage of scuba diving, Bob returns to the surface. There are hundreds of skeletons – sacrifices to Caltiki – scattered about the bottom of the pool with a fortune in gold and silver jewelry. Bob can’t wait to dive back down and scoop up as much as he can carry.
Which of course, is a big mistake, and leads to the best scare effect of the entire film. Something has grabbed Bob, and by the time they can pull him back up to the surface, they remove his diving helmet to find this:
AAARRGGGHHH! Whatever it is has consumed the flesh right off his bones! And here it comes, slithering out of the lake, ready to attack the surviving scientists. It’s hard to describe the blob itself. It looks like a sentient pot roast in a bag, kind of shiny and meaty and jiggly.
The smart thing to do, of course, is get the hell out of there. But greedy Max goes back to grab some treasure, and the monster engulfs his arm. John rescues him and crashes a truck into the entrance to the cave, burning up the blob.
So upon studying the piece of blob attached to Max’s arm, turns out it’s like 20 million years old and feeds on radiation. And as if Max wasn’t enough of a dick to start with, the poison from the monster will soon reach his brain and render him totally insane.
So of course he busts out of the hospital and heads straight for his colleague’s house with the plan to rape his wife. Meanwhile, the monster pieces at the lab and in John’s house are absorbing comet radiation and growing gigantic and bursting out of their confines, breaking up furniture, walls, and consuming everything in sight.
Will John get home in time to stop Max? Will the Pot Roast of Death destroy the world? All I know is that the entire stock footage Mexican army, local law enforcement, and scientists are on it!
Again, the parts of the movie that Bava had control over – cinematography and special effects – are really quite good, but as you’ve probably figured out by now, the rest of it is pretty bad.
The acting is predictably awful, especially Max, the scenery-chewing villain (you know he’s bad because he has an accent). And don’t get me started on the writing. Maybe it has something to do with the multilingual nature of the production. But someone had to approve those painful lines of indecipherable dialogue.
There’s also an insane amount of mockable pseudoscience in Caltiki. The computer (referred to as an “electric brain”) is the size of an entire room. It’s clearly an achievement in flashing light technology. And the scientists are constantly spouting sciency-sounding non sequiturs about radiation and what have you.
Still, I’ll admit this movie scared the pants off of me when I was about 8. Especially the part with the skull in the diving helmet. And I do appreciate the strong Lovecraftian vibe to this movie… a cosmic malignant force that will destroy mankind, inadvertently unleashed.
For all its various shortcomings, Caltiki, the Immortal Monster is a fun way to spend an hour and a half, at the very least to see the work of a young Mario Bava. Or if you’re planning an MST3K type experience, it fills the bill nicely.
Only one trivia fact today: I found out that the blob monsters were made out of tripe. Ugh.