"I'll make you the most powerful thing on the universe! (sic)
Move over Kenne Duncan, James Craig is on his way to the podium and he's in a shoving mood. Ignored far too long due to its twilight identity (it wound up with the wrong credits, leading one to think it was an Eddie Romero Filipino "Blood" movie), the Craig-starring, Wood-scripted Revenge of Dr. X (aka Body of the Prey, aka Venus Flytrap) has been rediscovered via Wood scholars and correctly attributed to him on imdb and elsewhere. All you have to do is count the number of thunderstorms and a hear a few minutes of dialogue and you know the truth. The climax finds a crazed rocket scientist-cum-botanist cradling a baby goat in his arms, and shouting "Insectovarus!" while looking down on a volcano. This may be filmed in Japan, but we're in Woodland USA.
Dr. Bragan (Craig) is a Cape Kennedy rocket scientist with a lot of stress-related issues; this mainly consists of berating other scientists about the importance of accurate calculations ("Could-be's I cannot use! I need facts! Facts, do you hear?" and appearing superimposed over some NASA stock footage. His Japanese (male) assistant convinces Bragan to take the summer off: "Japan is very beautiful... this time of the year." Soon he's driving up the coast (in case he finds some "interesting flora and fauna along the way") before catching the plane to Tokyo, to 'relax' while his space capsule or whatever is heading off to Venus.
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| real life Ama |
After stopping at the gas station of a muddy-faced snake handler (Al Ricketts) after car trouble, Bragan realizes instantly he's found just the right subject to bring to Japan, right there in the middle of the snake cages (unseen): the Venus Flytrap! He digs one up, keeps it in a little box and gives it a seat on the plane. He's smitten with this thing. Apparently, Darwin wrote about it being the most evolved of plants, so Bragan figures he can turn it human, kind of.
His assistant's cousin "Noriko (Atsuko Rome) meets Bragan at the airport with orders to be his assistant. She takes him to a bar to get sake. This film was shot with live sound and English is clearly not her first language, but then again, this really isn't English as you are I speak it. This is Wood wording, so it sounds even more unnatural and uncanny. But she will be a good assistant but get on his nerves by forevder trying to get him to take a nap or eat breakfast; he has no time! He cares only for his project. This is supposed to be a vacation but he's madder than ever, but not always. There's time for picnincs and long drives.
Their days click by in a delirious montage set to kooky but soothing and jubilant organ music that sounds like Raymond Scott's "Music for Baby" crossed with Candace Hilligoss's Carnival of Souls score; the hunchback caretaker of Bragan's remote Osaka greenhouse laboratory plays Bach's Toccata Fugue (over and over) on the organ, raises a brood of ever-yapping puppies, and he too keeps what looks like big smears of mud on his face (like Rickets at the gas station!). Noriko and Bragan drive to Tokyo to buy lab supplies; Noriko and Bragan drink sake. They pull over to admire the view. They get to know one another. They drive up the side of the volcano and are almost crushed by falling rocks. But we don't care, because the music and dialogue are so weird. Maybe the director and producers didn't understand English enough to make script changes, and the actors weren't much for improvising, so we get an English language (not dubbed) film shot in Japan, written by Ed Wood, so like all the best worlds.
And that crazy score never relents: nouncing oboes, sudden military snare rolls, and xylophones running through scales accompany his Florida drives and when Bragan lands in Japan the bouncing lute and bent-ling chimes start up. The soundscape contains a sound effects record worth of noises: thunder, sea gulls, crashing surf, crows caws, cock crows, puppies whining, the whirring of electrical appliances (with animated electric current!); long strange whistles, wind whipping the willows, all topped off a glistening organ so full of roller rink jubilation it seems at times to not know what kind of the film it's in. The beach scenes underwater and by the ocean are dreamy with a blend of church organ, rolling surf, swirling lute, chimes, skittering xylophone and a never-ending stream of bubbles. The soundscape you hope to hear while getting your Ativan shot at the mental hospital and swooning into a pleasurable coma.
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| "now you bring the red to my face," |
Bragan is at the beach to find a sample of the "Venus" Vesiculosa' - an underwater version of the flytrap which he finds with the help of some topless local Japanese Amas (upper left) he and Noriko recruit on the beach. He wants to splice the two together and so they are soon wiling away the hours in her family's remote volcanic greenhouse. He also doing a lot of skulking around at night through yon stormy graveyard, which Noriko watches from her bedroom, in a negligee; she would be amenable, no doubt, but he only has eyes for his creature - "Insectovarus" who he as Nietzscheanly as James Mason does his son in Bigger than Life. ("You can move, I'll make you move!") He reasons to be more human it will need human blood: "If it takes the blood of a human heart to prove my theory, you will have the blood of a human heart!" (it never occurs to him he could just do a transfusion or go to the blood bank and that blood is the same all through the body - 'blood from a human heart' is almost redundant; yet he has to sneak into a hospital and withdraw it from a sleeping topless female patient. Ed Wood writes scientific inquiry with the zeal of a twelve year-old kid bluffing his way through a science project ("the human element").
Still, he would never quit splicing in the Lugosi gothic style to the 50s atomic age overreach and for that he should get the Nobel Prize. Frankenstein of course is the ultimate sci-fi gothic. And Wood pays homage to it all over the place. Most especially he draws on Son of Frankenstein with Lugosi's Ygot talking about "your mother was the lightning" given three attempts by a drunk Bragan. First:
"You can think. You can reason. You must be part-human. But like all humans you're weak! I'll find a way. Mark my words, I'll find a way. make you the most powerful thing on this universe (sic). Your mother was the soil... perhaps.... the lightning will become your father!"
Later he tries again: "your father will be the rain! Your mother was the soil, maybe your father will be the lightning!" But then he even gives a second variation later on: "Your father will be the rain! your powers are lightnings!" and later he drives it home while drinking and staring at Insectovarus with growing cranky aggression and love: "I do love wild things! Your mother was the earth! The rain your blood! The lightning your power! Ahahahahaha! (at which point he passes out and the plant finally starts moving around.
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| "as human as the human element itself" |
Insectovarus grows up quickly, standing and looking around waving his arms, with fanged pink cather's mitt-style flytrap hands and feet and a radish sprout head and an upside down flower petal frill, and big empty eye sockets. It seems to talk and cry in a pitch-shifted baby voice, and when it moves we hear those weird string pull sounds most of us associate with fleas jumping on dogs' backs in Warner Brothers cartoons. Noriko wants it destroyed ("I wish that thing had died!" and for Bragan to take better care of himself ("you should eat!") She's very obsessed with rest and nutrition, reflecting no doubt Ed's cagey worship/resentment towards the maternal. He barks at her ("Stop harping!"), sheepishly apologizes, and comes in for breakfast. As Joseph Ziemba says the film has a "beautiful warmth.
Insectovarus needs to eat too. And there are lots of dogs around... for awhile.
