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 Scientists find a lost race of people living underground. These people have enslaved a group of Mole Men that also live underground. 1956, 77 minutes, VHS
First time director Virgil Vogel mixes up traditional 1950s monsters with one of those lost civilizations populated by rulers and priests in cheap looking robes and stringy kung fu beards from 1930s cliffhangers like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and ends up with a painlessly stupid effort highlighted by people getting pulled down through what looks like kitty litter by stuntmen in bump-ridden bug-eyed masks. I wasn't sure whether to be impressed or distressed when I learned that Virgil had done all of this over the course of 17 days with about $200,000 of Universal's money, but the presence of television's favorite dad, Hugh Beaumont (Ward Cleaver of Leave It To Beaver for the heathens in the audience) always provides reassurance, even in a role that sees him knee deep in ancient Sumerian legends and crazy albinos instead of advising Beaver on the morality of being friends with Larry Mondello even though he's a fat loser with cooties.
This was still a year before he made the switch from dead end genre movies to sitcom immortality, so the movie actually claims that John Agar is the star of this one, but when you get a gander at how Hugh is rappelling into the bowels of the Earth and has to wrap a rope around his crotch, you'll know who the real headliner is. I'll just chalk up the unfortunate episode where Hugh ingested a bunch of poisoned mushrooms near the end of the film as something that John Agar's agent demanded be put in to steal some of Hugh's heat. That's also probably why John's character was the one that hooked up with the only non-albino in the underground lost city though it was never going to last since she was so mentally stunted that during a big cave in, she actually ran back to the cave in and got buried. Such was the madness of...The Mole People!
Truth be told, there wasn't all that much madness to the mole people themselves, other than the fact that they were a big bunch of wussies. Before I watched this, I was under the impression from the publicity stills and loose talk around the MonsterHunter campus that these mole folks were probably terrorizing an isolated desert town, university campus (no doubt conducting some sort of atomic testing in the old haunted caves over by Fraternity Row), or the L.A. subway system. It turns out that these blind freaks lived all the way over in Asia and had never even thought of crashing a homecoming game! In fact, not only were these guys half way around the world, they were enslaved by that race of uppity albinos with the Ming the Merciless wardrobe!
Since these guys are safely (except for all the whipping and starving they have to endure at the hands of Whitey) ensconced beneath a bunch of Asian mountains, how in the world do they ever become a threat to the safety of the future Mr. Cleaver? It turns out that before Ward settled down to his quiet and predictable life in small town America with his vague office job, he was a globe trotting archeologist who palled around with genre legends like John Agar. He and John are on a site pulling stone tablets out of the rocks that have all sorts of back story about Sumerians and how they were flooded and had to take an ark to some place not so wet and I was thinking that Ward and John could have just gone to the local library and checked out a Bible or something to find the same thing out, but then they wouldn't have gotten to camp out in tents and play scientist would they?
An unfortunate side effect of them learning this is that it causes an earthquake. Okay, I'm not sure the two events are related, but I think there was a warning label on one of the stone tablets that you shouldn't go messing around with this or that or some serious smackdownage would occur. I think we've all seen enough of these types of movies to simultaneously pooh-pooh those warnings while surreptitiously eyeing a sturdy hiding place and grabbing our hard hat for the big voodoo curse that is undoubtedly being unleashed even as we laugh nervously about how silly those old superstitions are. In this case, the earthquake not only wrecks the camp, it also manages to unearth an artifact that leads our boys to a big hole in the earth that leads down to a couple of piss poor matte paintings.
One of Ward and John's co-workers accidentally locates this hole by falling down it. Ward and John and a third guy (the designated casualty for later in the movie) go climbing down this gaping chasm and we are treated to hours and hours of shots of these guys pounding in metal clamps, knotting ropes, lowering themselves, and sweating it out while the ropes strain under Ward's meaty buttocks, all the while descending down what looks like a few prop rocks in front of a black curtain. The longer these guys took to get down to the bottom, the less hope I was having for the dude that took the header down there in the first place. By the time they finally hit bottom and note that their pal is in fact a goner, I was already on the phone to his widow trying to arrange a blind date.
After wandering around the caverns for awhile, they decide to sack out for the night. Third Guy (does his name really matter?) whines that he thinks he hears something. Agar, who has battled the Creature From The Black Lagoon, a giant tarantula, and been shrunken down to a little itty-bitty John Agar in the shrinking man movie that wasn't The Incredible Shrinking Man (Attack Of The Puppet People), tells him to quit his moronic babbling and to get some sleep. If a pro like Agar says it's nothing, then what have you got to worry about, right? So, the Mole People come up from the ground, put bags on Ward, John and Third Guy's heads and pull them beneath the ground to certain doom!
And by certain doom, I mean of course, to a lost city ruled by Sumerians who have set up a bizarre society where the mole people are used to harvest big mushrooms and herd sheep or goats or whatever it was that they kept down there. They also believe that the light infused surface world is heaven and it doesn't take long for Ward and John to claim that they are gods sent by Ishtar to just check up on how thinks are going down there. In the meantime, Third Guy has gotten himself killed by a mole man, so Ward and John briefly mention that Third Guy had pressing business back in heaven and went on ahead of them. I would add at this point that the chief reason that everyone believes they are gods is because of John's flashlight.
Having established the flashlight as the ultimate weapon keeping John and Ward alive, the movie is then forced into trying wring suspense out of scenes where one of the albinos tries to steal it while Ward and John are shooting the breeze about maybe staying down there and living as man and wife (uh, that is that John and the only blonde woman down there would be man and wife, while Ward would be their best friend or something. And how come all the albino women are dark haired except the "normal" one?) as well as a particularly silly scene that has John attempting to hold back the various underground bad guys with his flashlight only to squeal "the button's jammed!" "The button's jammed?" What kind of flashlight is that? Dead batteries I understand. Burnt out bulb I get. Ward putting the batteries in backwards I would expect. But a jammed button?
It isn't a busted flashlight that causes the downfall of our heroes however (thank God), but those poisoned mushrooms that John's new blonde girlfriend unwittingly serves him. This sets them up for some good old fashioned human sacrifice. We are "treated" to this ceremony ahead of time when the ruler has three broads sent through a door with a bright light on the other side to their deaths. The real torment though was suffered by the viewer as there is a pre-sacrifice dance number performed by a gal who looked slightly like one of those carnival pinheads and jumped around with the dexterity of one of the humpbacked mole people. Like every dance scene in all lost civilization movies, it's long, boring, and totally unnecessary. And like P.E. in high school, it's mandatory.
If you think some bad 'shrooms are going to keep our boys down, then you don't know much about the mettle of American archeologists, because not only do they manage to avoid getting sacrificed, but they also find time to instigate a revolt amongst the mole people against the albinos! The mole people rampage all over those albino freaks and bust their way through the doorway to the place of light where the sacrifices were sent. John goes on in and it turns out to be an exit to the surface world. Ward, John, and John's old lady get out and that's when it all caves in and John's old lady decides to un-escape, thus sealing her fate and ending the picture on what would have been a bittersweet moment, but for the grudge you already hold against her for her awful playing on her underground banjo earlier in the film.
This is the sort of nineteen fifties monster movie that is required viewing for any self-respecting fan. Whereas a film like The Monolith Monsters is purely optional since it strictly adheres to the form without any real memorable moments, The Mole People has guys in mole suits and Hugh Beaumont! The scenes where people get pulled underground by the mole people are very good and if you've got a fetish for guys with humpedbacks and wearing rubber monster masks getting whipped, you won't go away unsatisfied. Sure, the movie treads precariously close to imbecilic territory when it posits a world where people can domesticate and raise farm animals underground, weave burlap there, and smelt metal in the same cave system, as well as using captured mole people to hunt mushrooms (I could use me some of those suckers during morel season!), but while the human brain can become irritated with one dumb idea (underground albinos, mole people, Hugh Beaumont as an archeologist), it becomes drunk with giddiness when presented with an entire cheese platter full of them. There's even an opening lecture by an English professor about theories of what lies underneath the Earth that's the best (i.e. hilarious in its academic self-importance) opening narration you're likely to see in one of these movies. Wholeheartedly recommended. (Though albinos may want to give it a skip.)
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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