IT Came from the Drive-IN Previews!

Shield your eyes before it's too late!


Too late - now that same unspeakable horror will haunt your dreams too - or maybe not so much. I was surfing the web for really bad old movies the other day. Don't ask me why I suddenly had the urge. That's what happens when I have time on my hands waiting for a test program to run its course. I figured that you can never go wrong including Roger Corman in the search criteria and there it was! The very image that terrorized my dreams when I was 7. Man to confront that dreadful suppressed memory - no not the ones about the parish priest, the one armed acrobat and the wheel barrow. Though he wore all black and kind of waddled too, no try to stay focused for a change.

I remember going to the drive in with my folks. We all piled into the station wagon with the grocery bags of popcorn we'd made at home (we were so poor I couldn't pay attention...) and headed to the edge of town where the drive In theater stood waiting for the sun to set. I don't remember what movies we actually went to see but I remember the previews. "The Creature from the Haunted Sea" and "the Diary of a Madman" with Vincent Price (turned out that all the scary parts of that film were shown in the previews...) were both previewed. They showed the above clip and I about jumped out of my skin. I was thinking 'oh my gosh (I was a good Catholic boy at the time - well, I was Catholic - well I attended Catholic school at least...) how can they show such horrors when little kids can see it! Maybe adults or even high school kids could handle it but surely not the very young such as myself could stomach it without being traumatized for life. Especially a kid with such a vivid imagination. For some reason (which escapes me all these years later seeing how cheap the costume was to the point that you can see the guys wrists.) that image really stuck with me and scared the bejeesus out of me.



In reality it wasn't that image that I recalled exactly. What I remembered was sort of a mental mutation of this mutant. A kind of addled Gumby. My version had the same creepy buggy eyes and rounded head but was smooth skinned like a seal. My version didn't have claws but instead he had flippers. Yeah that's right he had flippers. I don't exactly know how I expected him to terrorize people with flippers and no claws- maybe he would just have slapped the shit out of them or some such. Though with flippers for feet as well, he wouldn't get too many licks in before anyone outside of a nursing home would make their escape. But you could never be sure about those clever flipper-pawed sea monsters. No matter. Flippers or no he was one ugly mother. Though now when I think of the image I had of this diabolical monstrosity it does look something like Opus or Woodsy Owl with no beak. You have to admit that Woodsy Owl was pretty creepy in his own right. As you can surmise from my rendition above, my version was much scarier than Corman's. Come to think of it, tall, foreboding, nasty, crazy gaze, it looked just like the Mother Superior at our school. Now that is chilling. Maybe that helps explain the response. Plus if the monsters were related (nuns and the flipper beast) then I suppose he could extended his own lethality by using their weapon of choice - the meter rule! Definitely would make him more of a threat than simple flipper slapping. I always suspected that the Catholic Church's early recognition of the metric system had nothing to do with science and everything to do with gaining three more inches in reach...

Matters only get worse...

The whole sea creature monster thing really bothered me growing up. I lived about 200 yrds from a nice lake and spent a lot of time there. But I have to admit that for a year I kept a sharp eye peeled for that sly bastard and never turned my back on the water lest he try to sneak up on me. Oh with time I kind of forgot the flipper beast but it wasn't because I was no longer concerned with such threats but because he had been surplanted by a far more menacing foe - THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON! I saw that dread monster in an Ad for some late night showing and it was terror at first sight. No flipper boy was he - he had long green legs to swim and run fast, long sharp claws and big red lips surrounding his long teeth. Hold on - the movie was in black and white so what's with the red lips? I don't know but that's how he always appeared in my nightmares - those big Mick Jagger lips right before I'd get scared and wake up. Only the monster snorkel saved me from oblivion on many a night while he no doubt waited patiently for the smallest sliver of skin to lose the protective aegis of the blanket of invincibility which had some how been passed down to me from Perseus and every other kid I knew. But alas he was always disappointed by morning light since I had mastered the art of complete coverage better than any mussel. Summers were more of a challenge as, lacking air conditioning, I had to settle for the sheet of near invincibility and being cold blooded, he was more active in the summer as well.

Now one could argue that having all those glue-crusted Aurora monster models on my bedside table might not have helped but it always payed to know your enemy. Of course my Gillman model had blood red lips.

For a few years I had a number of nightmares that starred the Gillman. These were always some variation of being at home alone with all the neighbors gone. Then I'd see him slowly rising out of the lake on his way to get me. In his slow southern fishy drawl (yes he talked, duh!) he would promise, "I'm gonna get you!". Not terribly erudite was he but it was scary all the same.

The Loaf by the Ears

I remember one particularly unusual scenario. He was chasing me around the house but couldn't catch me. I had perfected the broken field running technique of a gazelle in order to escape my older brother's clutches when he would, for no reason at all I assure you, decide that he needed to pound me in response to some completely fabricated infraction. He was much more fleet of foot than any web-footed amphibian so old fish face was having a hard time trying to grab me. Then I saw my escape. There was a large piece of wonder bread on the ground (no joke and no drugs were involved). It was about 5 feet square and had two control levers in its midsection as in the detailed design specification shown above. One has to wonder how that particular assortment of neurons fired at the same time to create such an unconventional mode of transport but fire they did. I jumped on, instinctively knowing that the levers controlled the aerodynamic responses of said bread, and was able to coax it up to an altitude of about 12 feet. But that was all she could give me. The Gillman was leaping up trying to grab on to the aerobatic bread slice but he just couldn't quite reach. Nor could I gain a safe altitude despite my great frustration and best efforts. No manual of operations was available and to this day I don't know if I was missing some critical factor that would have allowed me to speed away. I suppose in retrospect I should have been grateful that the bread defied gravity to the mere extent it did and that it wasn't one of those nasty whole wheat slices my mom always tried to feed me as the added weight would no doubt have limited its service ceiling to a level where the creature could have grabbed me before I could wake up. Any slip up at all and I would have been toast for sure. In case you are wondering that was my only flight experience with baked goods of any kind. I always thought it would have made a great wonder bread Ad. Certainly better than the other use I had for it - wadding it up into a hard little ball and bouncing it off my brother's head - always provoked I assure you.

High Noon at the Psychic Corral

Finally one day I confronted my fears and watched the movie. I was pissed beyond belief. To think that this movie had haunted my dreams was now unthinkable. A lame guy in a rubber suit with a visible seam! And NO JAGGER LIPS! The shame was intense. A few months later I had another Gillman dream that pretty much ran like all the rest before it - except for one tiny detail. The creature was chasing me around the house when I caught a glimpse of something on the ground. Recognizing it straight away I picked it up and cracked its breech open to check it out. It was my father's double barreled shotgun and finding it lying around unattended was the first clue that this was all a dream. The second and third clues were the two fresh shells loaded into the breech, again something never encountered outside of fantasy land... One thing I liked about the movie was the fact that the creature wasn't bullet proof like most monsters. He certainly wasn't in my dream... Just before I woke up I remember standing over my former foe and letting fly a rebel yell of triumph while the smoke cleared. My mom came in to check on me because she heard a yell. She asked me if I was ok or had I had a nightmare. "Nope', no nightmare just a very good dream." And that was it. No sequels ever. I was glad that the Second Amendment had been extended to my dreams.

I never had too many bad dreams after that. There never were any really good monsters worthy of dreaming about. At least until that rotten Ridley Scott movie opened...

Memories, memories. NO NOT THAT! Now I have that damn song stuck in my head - No! Now I have Barbara Streisand stuck in my head! Someone make it stop!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!

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The link below will take you to the climax of one of the worst monster movies of all times:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZOmMFOvoLg

Creature from the haunted sea, is now in the public domain. You can torture yourself through the entire film if you dare.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4426462542243860597