MonsterHunter

At first glance this movie seemed to have everything going for it. It was directed by Eugène Lourié, who unleashed the British giant monster movie Gorgo upon an unsuspecting world. It involved a brain transplant gone horribly awry. It even had a gigantic robot played by a seven foot two inch circus freak running amok in the Big Apple! Once I had seen it though, I was able to see that perhaps all the above-mentioned factors may actually have only been an indication of a deservedly semi-obscure mess that starred Ross Martin. Ross Martin? He was famous for being a sidekick to a short dude! (Admittedly, a short dude who would fight you if you knocked his battery of his shoulder, but short nonetheless.)

The Spensser family is the centerpiece of this film and they’re one of those families where the father is a brilliant brain surgeon, one son (Henry) is really good with electronics and the other son (Jeremy) is just an all around genius who works on stuff like frost-resistant crops so that the third world won’t go hungry. Since Jeremy is the one who is getting all the headlines for winning the International Peace Prize (I’m sure it’s much more prestigious than the Nobel since they’re recognizing a guy that’s going to eliminate one of man’s greatest foes - freezer burn), his daddy likes him best.

And since daddy likes him best, you know that he’s going to get run over by a truck and need his brain transplanted into a giant mechanical creation of his brother’s. It all goes down at the airport just like we planned. Jeremy comes back with his wife and kid (Billy - you’ll remember him as Buck Zorba from 13 Ghosts) from Stockholm where he collected his International Peace Prize, and Billy’s toy airplane blows into the road. At this point I was sort of hoping that Billy was going to get tattooed by a semi because it would be a lot more entertaining to have the brain of an eight year old brat in the body of a really big lug instead of the brain of a genius who would probably just end up on a rampage. At least with a kid’s brain the monster would do cool stuff like try to ride the merry-go-round or sit in a really small desk at his school, whereas you just knew that the genius monster would ramble on about the meaningless of life in a mechanical body. Well, boohoo. At least you can dunk now.

Alas, it is Jeremy who displays a startlingly lack of safety skills and runs pell mell into the street after Billy’s toy. In front of his moderately horrified family, Jeremy is run over, pronounced dead and immediately carted off to the family estate where dad can give him the once over in his secret basement lab. Later, Jeremy’s dad solemnly tells Jerry’s wife and his brother that there was nothing he could do and we shift to the scene of Jeremy’s funeral where Jeremy still has an open casket despite the top of his head being swaddled in a bunch of mysterious gauze, almost as if to cover up that his skull has opened and his brain vacuumed out. But that’s probably just the cop in me. We got a sixth sense about mad scientists.

Jeremy’s dad makes a scene at the funeral when a scientist buddy of Jerry’s starts babbling all that B.S. about how there must be a grand plan involved in having a man of Jerry’s stunning intellect run over by a truck. Jerry’s dad jumps to his feet to object and I was hoping his family would yank him back down and tell him that this is a funeral and not a wedding and that there’s nothing here to object to, old man! All of this leads to one of those scenes where the dad and the friend stand around jawing about whether it is only a man’s brain that makes him great or whether it is also body and soul and some divine spark from the Creator that gives him his abilities. Taste great! Less filling! Shut up and bring on the monster!

Later, dad (William) asks Henry to check out the cool project he has going on in the lab. This is one of those basement labs with a twelve foot tall steel door, lots of electrical equipment, and all sorts of space for housing a seven and half foot tall metal man. Right now though, it just sports a lot of stuff for keeping a pet brain alive. It turns out that Jeremy’s brain was sitting in a glass case of water hooked up to an EEG machine which led me to believe that they must have had some kind of clearance sale on set leftovers from Donovan’s Brain. William proves to Henry that the brain is still alive by making it solve math problems. William also mentions that with Henry’s expertise in electronics that maybe he could go ahead and build a real big metal robot to house Jerry’s brain in.

Before we go any further, maybe we should examine Henry’s situation to see if building a monster to put his brother’s brain in is in his best interests. First of all, Henry has always felt that his dad liked Jerry best. I’m pretty sure he was wondering whether dear old dad would go through this much trouble for him or whether it would just be a bunch of plastic flowers on his grave, chucked from a passing car once a year. Second of all, there’s the sexy widow to think of. And Henry is doing just that. Why, he’s been sucking up to that little brat Billy for all these months and if Jerry comes back to life, that will all go down the drain! And this doesn’t even count all the questions of morality and messing around with forces man wasn’t meant to mess with! So you can see that there’s no good reason for Henry to build this giant.

Well, Henry builds the giant. Frankly, I wasn’t that impressed with Henry’s work. Why would he build such a behemoth of a body for the brain? It was over seven feet tall, was about four feet wide, its voice squawked like a walkie-talkie, its eyes were a couple of flashing lights, and it wore big clunky orthopedic shoes. In fact, whenever the movie needed the monster to kind of move fast, they had to speed up the film! In Henry’s defense, he did at least build in one safety precaution in the unlikely event that Colossus (I wouldn’t be doing the movie any favors if I referred to this killer cyborg as Jerry) went into New York and started killing everyone at the United Nations. He’s put a on/off lever under one Colossus’ armpits that Colossus can’t reach. That’s great since that means you’ll practically be having to get to second base with Colossus just to get to it.

No sooner is Colossus brought on line than he’s whining about being brought to life. He’s got no family, he can’t live as a man anymore, and he’s never going to fit into those jeans he bought just before he got run over. His daddy tells him that that’s all for the best because now he’ll have all the time in the world to conquer all those worldwide problems he was working on before his death. And with his new and improved body, it won’t even matter if he doesn’t look both ways before crossing the street. Colossus, possessing a mind of superior intellect sees the wisdom in this words and agrees to do it on one condition: that no one must ever see him except his dad and Henry.

Well, Colossus breaks out of the lab and checks out his grave site which happens to be out in the backyard at about the same time as little Billy is out there. Billy and Colossus hang out and eventually Colossus’ wife and his brother see him, with the wife fainting and the brother running away all the way to New York! A frantic phone call to dad follows and Colossus uses his mind control powers to have his dad set Henry up so that Colossus can go put a colossal hurt on him.

Mind control powers? Well, yeah, you didn’t just think that this robot was just really smart and whiny did you? I wasn’t real sure how he got those powers, but there was a time when his dad was shining a flashlight off and on in his face and made a comment about “power hypnosis” but I was thinking he was using it on Colossus, not teaching it to him! It doesn’t really matter because the power I was most puzzled by was Colossus’s ESP.

ESP powers? Sure. It would just be stupid for a big robot to run amok without them, wouldn’t you say? No one is quite sure how Colossus acquired these powers - they just sort of appeared one day when he predicted a big shipwreck thousands of miles away. Somehow they claim that his ESP powers let him know exactly where Henry was in New York, but that was sort of pointless since he just used his mind control powers to force William to set Henry up for the kill! Of course, these two powers pale in comparison with the laser beams Colossus shoots out of his eyes!

Eye-mounted laser beams powers? Best power ever! This one just appears when he needs to kill people, and is never explained either, but you can let that slide because it leads to the grand finale when Colossus goes over the edge (declaring that he is no longer going to be working to save “human trash”) and stomps over to the United Nations, crashes through a big glass window and starts strafing everyone with his laser beams! That sucker must’ve killed twenty people before he told Billy to shut him down, because he couldn’t help himself. Best scene in the movie! (Other than Ross Martin getting creamed by that truck.)

Not a very good retelling of the Frankenstein story, what with Colossus developing powers whenever he needs them and the fact that Colossus also goes on a rampage for no real reason. The movie had no style and what with the film speeded up once in awhile to get the monster moving and the horrible piano-based score, I felt like I was watching a silent movie every now and again (except for Ross Martin screaming as that truck left tire marks on his butt). The sound effects are also distracting as there is this crackly, electrical sound coming from Colossus all the time. Memo to Henry: First order of business on the upgrade is a muffler!

The movie also suffered from a feeling of the story and the characters being completely underdeveloped. The father seemed pretty much nonplussed by everything that went on. The widow didn’t have much of a role (what sort of monster doesn’t end up taking the woman hostage?) and nobody cared at all when Henry was killed. There was also the scientist that argued with the father after the funeral. What was the point of his character? He appeared in about three scenes even though he seemed to be more of friend to the widow than Henry did. And one of his scenes was at the very end of the movie when after Colossus is lying in a heap amongst the corpse of all the people he just zapped, the father lamely tells this scientist “yep, looks like you were right all along. People do need souls after all.” Well, at least someone learned something from all this. You don’t need any of Colossus’s secret powers to tell you that this film could have benefited from its own brain transplant.

© 2008 MonsterHunter