The Monster and the Girl (Stuart Heisler, 1941)

Probably the only courtroom drama/film noir/mad scientist sci-fi/ape-running-amok horror movie/revenge thriller, The Monster and the Girl is a wild surprise, a schizophrenically genre-switching, narratively berserk, but tonally consistent little gem with strong performances, great character actor faces, and real feeling. It's definitely shooting to the top of my ape-running-amok list, and not just because it was withdrawn from theaters in Milwaukee by the city's film commission (for its depiction of "white slavery" and its implied criticism of the justice system).

The Monster and the Girl begins, after a fog-drenched, expressionist intro directed straight at the audience, in a courtroom, where Scot Webster (Phillip Terry) is being tried for the  murder of a man in a downtown hotel. (The movie never mentions what city we're in, but the sets look an awful lot like a Hollywoodized version of Manhattan.) Scot maintains his innocence but has no proof or witnesses, he's hesitant to say much of anything about why he was in the hotel or what he was up to, and he was discovered kneeling over the dead man and holding the gun. Scot's sister Susan (Ellen Drew) shows up and demands to be heard as a witness, much to everyone's surprise. The judge allows it despite the defense attorney's objections. Meanwhile, the camera picks out several shady characters sitting in the courtroom who take great interest in the case and keep sending not-so-subtle signals to each other.

The film's first half alternates the courtroom drama with flashback sequences tied to Scot's and Susan's testimonies, which tell a darkly tragic crime story in classic film noir style with classic film noir faces. Those faces belong to actors who are not top-of-marquee names, but if you're a classic Hollywood fan, you've seen them do excellent work in lots of memorable roles. Besides the aforementioned Drew (Preston Sturges' Christmas in July, Sam Fuller's The Baron of Arizona, Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown, and Andre de Toth's Man in the Saddle) and Terry (Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend and Robert Wise's Born to Kill), we get Joseph Calleia (W.S. Van Dyke's After the Thin Man, Allan Dwan's The Gorilla, Heisler's The Glass Key, Charles Vidor's Gilda, Douglas Sirk's Lured, Nicholas Ray's Hot Blood, and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil), Marc Lawrence (Frank Tuttle's This Gun for Hire, William A. Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident, John Huston's Key Largo and The Asphalt Jungle, John Hayes' Dream No Evil, John Schlesinger's Marathon Man, Jim McBride's The Big Easy, Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn, and Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action), Gerald Mohr (Vidor's Gilda, William Wyler's Detective Story, Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper, and Jerry Lewis' The Family Jewels), George Zucco (Van Dyke's After the Thin Man, William Dieterle's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Elliott Nugent's The Cat and the Canary, Christy Cabanne's The Mummy's Hand, Sirk's Lured, and Vincente Minnelli's The Pirate), and Rod Cameron (Sturges' Christmas in July, Edward Ludwig's The Gun Hawk, and Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie). Sorry, I went credits-crazy there.

Back to the flashbacks. Scot and Susan are very close (it's implied that their parents are long gone and that they took care of each other), but while Scot is happy in the small town working at the post office and playing organ in the church, Susan has bigger dreams that only the Big City can fulfill. Bored and stifled in the small town, she gets her big brother's blessing to strike out on her own. In the movie's only bit of (restrained) moralizing, Susan finds out the city is no place for a young, single woman. She struggles to find work, and, after meeting a seemingly kind man named Larry Reed (Robert Paige) at the unemployment office, falling in love, and quickly getting married, she wakes up to a living nightmare. The relationship and marriage ceremony were both scams, designed to trap her (and presumably plenty of other naive young women on their own) in the permanent servitude of a gangster/sex-trafficker pimp (that part is heavily implied but never spelled out in any dialogue because it's post-Code Hollywood) named W. S. Bruhl (Paul Lukas) and his henchmen Deacon (Calleia), Sleeper (Lawrence), Munn (Mohr), and fake husband Larry. These guys all have such menacing, character-filled faces.

When Scot finds out what happened to his sister, he hits the big city looking for revenge. The gangsters frame him for murder, corrupt district attorney McMasters (Onslow Stevens) prosecutes him, and the possibly tampered-with jury convicts, despite Susan's testimony. Scot is sentenced to death. Susan is devastated and hopeless. The only person who believes her and Scot is newspaper reporter Sam Daniels (Cameron).

This is where the movie turns on a dime and gets crazy as hell. An eccentric scientist, Dr. Parry (Zucco), visits Scot on Death Row and asks him if he can use his brain after he's executed. A defeated Scot laughs crazily and gives him permission. After the execution, Parry takes the freshly deceased Scot to his lab and transplants the brain into the body of an ape. You know, for science. Ape-Scot busts out of the lab, hits the streets, and begins a program of retribution against the gangster and his crew, beginning with the corrupt DA and ending with the jerk who pretended to fall in love with his sister. Along the way, he also re-befriends his and his sister's beloved dog Skipper, who recognizes the Scot-soul inside the ape and assists Scot in evading the police like some kind of revenge-loving Lassie. I love to see an ape with a human brain and a cute dog teaming up to kill gangster-pimps and avenge the honor of a woman wronged. This is cinema, baby. (Oddly, the last 1940s movie I reviewed on this site, Man Made Monster, also involved a cute dog recognizing his old buddy in monster form and rekindling the bond.)

If you've followed this site for any length of time, you've probably read one of my reviews about an ape-running-amok movie. This was a major craze in the '20s and early '30s, but the genre never quite died out completely. Usually, the movie involves a caged ape getting loose and tearing shit up or a guy in a gorilla suit killing people or scaring people off as part of some kind of money grift or inheritance scam. Most of these movies are not that great, and some of the gorilla suits are pretty damn unconvincing (though I hold a special place in my heart for cheap fx).

The Monster and the Girl, on the other hand, spends half the movie delivering a gripping courtroom drama and a classic film noir before throwing in the crazy mad scientist brain swap-eroo and ape rampage. You really care about these characters, you're hooked on the proceedings, and you can't wait to see these gangster/trafficker creeps get smushed. The ape-with-human-brain is a real character you're invested in, not just some goofball jumping around in a costume. And boy howdy, this production spent money on its ape suit, I tell you what. This thing looks convincing and has a real presence and a range of motion in the eyes and facial features.

Director Stuart Heisler was a film editor for many years before making the jump to directing, and you can see his understanding of structure, build, and juxtaposition in The Monster and the Girl. This could have easily been a schlocky b-movie lazily slapped together (which, let's be honest, I probably would have enjoyed), but so much care has been applied to putting this thing together, and everyone in front of and behind the camera is doing high quality work. It's such an odd movie, attempting such an odd thing, and it works ridiculously well. I loved it.

Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)

It's time we all moved on from the age-old question, "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?" For the record, I reject the question's enforced binary. If you celebrate Christmas, any movie you watch on Christmas could be a Christmas movie. More specifically, Die Hard takes place on Christmas Eve and the soundtrack is jam-packed with Christmas songs, but it was released in theaters in the summer of '88, it takes place in sunshiny, snow-free (and curiously empty of much Christmas decoration) Los Angeles, and the vast majority of the plot mechanics have nothing to do with Christmas. My answer: Die Hard is the Schrodinger's cat of action movies. It's a Christmas movie, and it isn't a Christmas movie. I'm not copping out with my answer. I'm subverting the dominant paradigm of what Christmas is and what it isn't, son. It's always Christmas. It's never Christmas. Grow up.

I propose a new question. Is Die Hard a slasher movie, and, by extension, are most action movies slasher movie subgenres? Think about how many action movies (like slasher movies) involve an aggrieved fella skulking around in elevator shafts, bushes, closets, etc., picking off his enemies one-by-one. Action movies are reverse slasher movies, where the baddies are the ones meeting their gruesome ends courtesy of an everyman hero. The action hero is also the testosterone-flipped equivalent of the slasher movie's final girl, a regular person pushed into heroics through circumstances beyond that person's control. Okay, maybe it's a stretch, but think about it. The slasher movie and the action movie are at least cousins.

"But why are you writing about Die Hard on a horror movie blog?" I hear some of you asking. Hey, simmer down and reread the first two paragraphs, buddy. If you're new to the site, allow me to digress and go over the history of why I've been doing this for so long. Nearly 20 damn years ago, I found a very cheap used copy of a book written by the Fangoria magazine staff called Fangoria's 101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen. Growing up, I was a horror-obsessed kid who could not get enough of the stuff. I was a big movie fan in general, but horror got the most of my attention by a huge margin. By the time I got to college, I'd massively expanded my cinematic interests, and horror was just something I'd dip into occasionally. I became just as obsessed with classic Hollywood, indies, world cinema, comedies, westerns, cult and underground films, drive-in exploitation movies, experimental film, art films, '70s New Hollywood, and on and on. You can get that side of me in my other movie blog, Almost Not Crazy, at moviebot.blogspot.com.

Picking up the Fangoria book in my late twenties gave me the urge to reconnect with my childhood and early teenage horror fandom, and I thought it would be fun to watch all 101 movies and write about them on a separate blog. This was back in the day when people wrote and read blogs, before tech oligarchs turbofucked every aspect of our lives and before social media turned the beautifully varied Internet into the barely functioning, AI-poisoned, three-app social media hellhole it is today. To my surprise, my rough-drafty, fun little horror project drew a decent readership, and when the Fangoria project ended, I decided to keep the site going. A reader suggested a similar list from Rue Morgue magazine, and I finished that one, too. When that project ended, I bought three books, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia of Horror, which is chronological (alphabetical by year), and The Official Splatter Film Guide Vols. I and II, which are alphabetical. I alternate movies from each book. My readership is much smaller now, but I can't be stopped. I should be stopped, but that's another story.

Long stories slightly shorter, this is how we get to Die Hard. While the Overlook Film Encyclopedia sticks to horror (though its parameters for horror are pretty expansive), the Splatter Film Guide covers any movie it considers a splatter movie. Horror gets the majority of entries, but the roughly 20 percent of nonhorror splatter films in the two volumes include action movies, westerns, gross-out comedies, crime thrillers, and underground cult movies. I have no problem with this.

Speaking of horror, Die Hard was director John McTiernan's third feature, following two films that could definitely fit within the parameters of horror. His debut, Nomads, was an anthropologist versus supernatural nomadic demons horror-thriller with some major flaws (including Pierce Brosnan's French accent) but great atmosphere and ambition. The movie was a box office flop and received mixed but mostly negative reviews (I reviewed it back in 2009 and thought it was pretty damn interesting despite its weaknesses), but Arnold Schwarzenegger loved it and asked McTiernan to direct Predator, the hit sci-fi/action/horror movie with the most gubernatorial cast ever assembled (future California governor Schwarzenegger, future Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, and future candidate for Kentucky governor Sonny Landham; the predator's nephew later became the governor of the jungle biome of Yautja Prime). Predator's massive success led to McTiernan getting an even bigger budget and larger canvas for his third time in charge.

I won't waste anyone's time with a plot description of Die Hard. We've all either seen it or absorbed it through pop culture osmosis. It's probably (alongside Lethal Weapon) the quintessential Hollywood action movie of the late '80s-mid '90s era, expanding and one-upping what came before it while setting up a template and audience expectations for what would follow. Bruce Willis, in the role that turned him from TV star to movie star, is a charming, sarcastic presence who is much more relatable as an everyman than the superhuman muscleheads, martial arts virtuosos, and mentally disturbed Bronson-style vengeance-seekers dominating the then-contemporary action landscape. The much-missed Alan Rickman makes a great villain with a great villain name (Hans Gruber), but, again, his sarcastic humor and greed-based motivation make him a much more human presence than many of his contemporaries. His crew of accomplices and underlings are pretty damn entertaining, too, despite the movie not letting you get to know many of them in any detail. You can play a fun game with yourself and whoever you're watching Die Hard with by deciding who the baddies look like. I spotted Eurotrash Jeffrey Dahmer, Evil Huey Lewis, and at least one of each member of "Final Countdown" hair-metal hitmakers Europe. "Oh man, Bruce just shot Evil Joey Tempest!"

We also get charming (yes, I keep using the word charming, but, this is a charming fuckin' movie) performances from Reginald VelJohnson as a policeman who gets caught up in the chaos, De'voreaux White as the go-getting young limo driver Argyle (Wanna feel old? White is 60 now. Fuckin' Argyle is fuckin' 60??? Fuuuuuuuuuck!), and Robert Davi and Grand L. Bush as goofball FBI agents (both named Johnson) who think they're unbelievable badasses, and quintessentially smarmy performances from Paul Gleason as an arrogant police lieutenant (in a variation on his arrogant vice principal character in The Breakfast Club), William Atherton as an unethical TV news reporter, and Hart Bochner as a coked-up corporate sleaze. Sure, these are all familiar movie types, but there's genuine pleasure in seeing the old standbys done well.

For all its pop-culture and cable TV ubiquity, Die Hard still feels fresh and vital. It's smart where it needs to be smart and stupid where it needs to be stupid. The action sequences remain thrilling and white-knuckle suspenseful, most of the jokes still land, and McTiernan has such a great feel for both the big and small moments, complex action set-pieces, and atmosphere. And through it all, John McClane is there in the shadows, sneaking around in elevator shafts, stairwells, empty floors under construction, rooftops, and darkened corridors, uttering Krueger-esque quips like "yippee ki-yay, motherfucker," waiting to dole out blood-soaked revenge on his next victim. Sorry, just bringing it back to the slasher thing.

McTiernan has done a lot of good work in a filmography full of enormous hits and big flops, though strange personal events killed his Hollywood career in the mid-2000s. He followed Die Hard with another big action hit, The Hunt for Red October, and the less successful romance/adventure Medicine Man, but he flopped hard with the hugely ambitious meta-commentary on blockbusters Last Action Hero, a movie I find fascinating and underrated despite, and sometimes because of, its flaws. He rebounded with two more big hits, third Die Hard movie Die Hard: With a Vengeance and a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, but hit a rough patch with three movies that didn't do so well, Viking action/fantasy The 13th Warrior (which has since gained a decent cult following), a remake of Rollerball, and the military mystery-thriller Basic, which reunited John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson and is purported to have an absurd number of twist endings, though I haven't seen it.

That trio of flops didn't help McTiernan in Hollywood when he got into some serious legal trouble for allegedly hiring a private investigator to tap the phones of one of the Rollerball producers he had been fighting with about the film's creative direction (hilarious, fuck producers) and also allegedly tapping his ex-wife's phone during their divorce proceedings (yikes on that one). The full story is convoluted as hell, but that's the simplified version. He was sentenced to a year in prison in 2014 for perjury and making false statements to the FBI. He served roughly half the sentence in a white-collar prison and the other half on house arrest at his ranch in Wyoming. He later declared bankruptcy. Blackballed in Hollywood, his filmography since Basic consists of a few short films advertising video games and an unreleased documentary about his legal trouble that attributes it to a conspiracy leading all the way up to Karl Rove (it sometimes leaks to YouTube), but he told a crowd at a retrospective of his work last year that he has four films he's ready to shoot if and when he can get financing, including a science fiction movie, a western, and a love story. Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker, to all, and to all a good night.