The 24th Day of Horror: Alien from the Abyss (1989)

 

Alien From The Abyss (1989)

Easily set in the category of  "entertainingly bad" and also a movie from when I was still a teenager, I am simultaneously shocked I had never seen it before, and also not shocked at all because my love of really bad vintage films is a more recent thing for me; I generally didn't like wasting my time on garbage like this when I was in my late teens and twenties (ah, the irony). I mean....the first time I saw Tetsuo The Iron Man in my twenties on VHS I thought it was garbage; now I have that director's entire filmography on my shelf. The more things change.....!

Alien From The Abyss is another low budget "filmed somewhere in the Philippines where SAG-AFTRA can't find them" type of films, directed by Italian hack/auteur Antonio Margheriti (I mean that in the best possible way), Alien from the Abyss is a lovely case of how to make a big budget concept come to life on a shoestring budget, and it actually does an entertaining (if not good) job of it. The story revolves around a reporter and her cameraman, who sneak on to a remote island with an active volcano to find evidence of corporate malfeasance. Specifically, the corporation is disposing of nuclear and toxic waste by dumping it into a volcano. 

A tangent! The volcano is a lovely set piece. They have a miniature, filmed from one very specific angle, and any time they want to show the volcano they have someone pick up a pair of binoculars to look at it....always from that same angle, no matter where they are on the island. 

So our lead character and her cameraman quickly get into trouble as private goons try to catch them, and meanwhile we have a mad scientist and the corporate bad guy up to no good, then there's a secondary protagonist introduced in the form of a skeevy snake harvester on the island, and somewhere around the halfway point in the movie something happens, and the eponymous Alien from the Abyss awakens in a lake, melting and clawing everything in its path. We also have lots of miniature shots establishing various facilities to be destroyed later, in some glorious miniature set pieces that any fan of Godzilla movies will admire.

The creature is, for most of its run primarily just a long black claw that snakes around causing all sorts of problems. The mad scientist (hammed up by the actor, making for one of the more memorable characters in this movie) has a way of injuring it, but he's ultimately just a delivery mechanism for the protagonists to nab the weapon when he gets mildly bumped and dies. The last sequence in the film grants us full view of the immense alien, which stands twenty or so feet tall and is held up by a crane, a sort of floppy kaiju sized mannequin. Even despite this, the special effect is surprisingly good for the kind of movie this is; it's well worth a watch for this effect alone.

Alien from the Abyss is a bit of a mess, as most movies of this caliber are, but its got plenty of memorable moments and set pieces, and the actors really do give it their all. I watched the Severin Films UHD release of the restored version and have to say it was worth my time. As with all such films, it rests in the category of a solid B! If you are ranking it against actually good movies I'd probably call it a D+, though. But if you want to watch something you might have stumbled across on Saturday late night TV at midnight? B for sure.

Vintage Film Restorations - the Allure of Vinegar Syndrome and Others

The Rabbit Hole of Collecting Vintage Film Restorations

In 2023 I discovered Vinegar Syndrome at a local ComicCon (the first I had ever been to!) and was exposed to the world of vintage film restoration focused on all of the weird, schlocky, forgotten films of the 90's and earlier. At the time I snagged a nice remaster of Beastmaster (a film I loved back when it came out, even as cheesy as it was compared to Conan the Barbarian) and a nice retro-themed print of Censor, one of my favorite horror movies of the last decade, which focuses on the late 70's and 80's era of "video nasties" in which the story essentially turns in to one--great movie, and its focus is why I think Vinegar Syndrome sponsored a special edition. 

I have since ordered quite a few weird vintage movies from Vinegar Syndrome, and also discovered Arrow Video, Severin Films and of course we have the ubiquitous Criterion Collection where you can find high priced but (for the most part) extremely worth it re-releases on blu-ray and UHD. I've managed to snag several of my favorite japanese films from Criterion, including some of the best of Akira Kurosawa.

The interesting thing about this corner of physical media collecting is that it's potentially successful only because the current market is trying so hard to shift away from physical media entirely. Streamers want to stream, and "sellers" like Vudu want to sell, even as Sony removes content from purchasers as a reminder that a "buy to watch" option online is never the same as ownership. In the midst of this, specialist retailers who focus on re-releasing videos (Gruv, for example) may find they are the best and only source of physical media over time. 

But this is not quite what Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow Video and Severin are doing. They aren't producing (mostly) mass market appeal films and rereleasing them for people still into physical copies of content. No, what they are doing is finding the weird, obscure, unusual and most importantly "not popular" in any conventional sense and restoring them, sometimes for posterity (to keep the movie from disappearing) and sometimes because the film either has or deserves a cult following, and this is the only way its going to happen is if the film remains available. Sometimes these aren't really good films by any stretch (not even in a so bad its good way), they're just films of note that help catalog the history of film in general. In fact, many of the actual publishers of these films are smaller groups who are then represented on Vinegar Syndrome's site, and the actual content is often incredibly obscure, films which no one likely has ever heard of, often done on zero budget, by film makers who may or may not have gone on to build bigger and better careers. 

The reason I got sucked in to it was initially just the novelty of high quality restorations of some films I loved, but I rapidly descended into a rabbit hole of fascinating and obscure filmes, many foreign, which I had never heard of before. For example: Alexandr Ptushko's films (such as Sampo and the Tale of Tsar Tsaltan) are works I have never even heard of before featuring Finnish and Russian epics from the late fifties of incredible production value for the time. Piotr Szulkin's Apocalypse Tetralogy is a masterpiece in weird cold war era scifi from behind the Iron Curtain. Other remasters are more down to home, representing unusual films such as Through the Fire, a low budget first film that manages to come just short of being a genuinely good spooky detective horror story, or Creature, an obscure Alien knock-off I remember seeing in the 80's on HBO, featuring Klaus Kinski in one of those roles where he chews the scenery with his trademark weirdness. More familiar films can be found as well, such as Road House, From Beyond, and if you go over to Arrow Films you can see bigger films get special re-treatments. Conan the Barbarian and its sequel are getting a very nice UHD collector's set I'm not crazy enough to buy for the price, but it's cool that such a thing can exist.

Anyway, this is a corner of my interests I have not written about much, but which has consumed a bit of my time. I might consider a regular blog series on this, with a twist. One of the movies I picked up was The Incredible Melting Man (which was much scarier when I was 8 years old, and much less so at 52) and my son and I both concocted a much better plot using this movie as the springboard for a scenario for Call of Cthulhu or Mothership. This could be done with quite a few other movies, and leans in to a scenario technique I experimented with a few years ago when I took the core conceits of Conan the Barbarian and turned it in to a Starfinder campaign. So...I might watch and discuss some of these movies from a gamer's context, identifying what sort of fun ideas and scenario content (and for what games) might be derived from some of these movies. We will see!