By Hank Reineke

The term “legendary,” never mind what parameters one accepts as conferment of “legend” status, is now pretty much moot. The term has so often applied to so many popular culture figures that approbation has been rendered meaningless. Have you visited a record store lately? If so, you can’t help but notice racks brimming with warmed-over oeuvre albums by obscure, passed-over and/or forgotten – and, yes, mostly dead – “legendary” artists – singers and musicians that few have ever heard or been introduced to. Similarly, there’s now a never-ending stream of Blu-ray box sets, all colorfully packaged and dressed, celebrating the cinematic art of (often) grindhouse era filmmakers. These film artists too are all now believed “legends,” even if not celebrated as such in their own time.

Personally, I’ve no problem with it. Through such revivals, I have certainly been introduced to worthwhile music and films I would otherwise have not been acquainted. On the other hand, there’s plenty of “lost” music and cinema I’ve been introduced to – often at wallet-emptying expense – that compels me to rethink the value of such blind buys. Yes, there are proverbial gold needles to be found in sorting through this ever-heaping pop-culture haystack. But, let’s face it, there’s plenty of splinters as well. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is proving a never-ending, occasionally frustrating, challenge.

To my knowledge, the combined fantastic cinema works of filmmaker Bert I. Gordon hasn’t yet been allotted a proper box set. I wouldn’t expect one anytime soon. For starters, Gordon’s name – whether having served as writer, director, producer, special effects artist etc. – is attached to as many as twenty-three feature films (1954-1990). And these films were financed, bought and sold through an assortment of varying distributors and studios. Any attempt to equitably divvy up royalties amongst various rights-holders would make such a project a financial non-starter and accounting nightmare.

To his oldest fans (ahem, me), Gordon’s science-fiction and fantasy films of the 1950s and 1960s will forever be thought of as his best and best remembered work. Though he mostly worked as an independent and rarely had much of a budget at his disposal, Gordon’s found a niche in his creation of fantastic cinema camera trickery and an obsession with gigantism. From the beginning, Gordon’s frightening titanic mutations would tower over and threaten the natural order of things. Forest J. Ackerman of Famous Monsters of Filmland fame, is usually credited with giving Gordon the appropriate nickname of “Mr. B.I.G,” wordplay of the director’s initials.

Bert I. Gordon’s career in film began modestly. He was experimenting with trick photography techniques in his teens, later producing and directing television commercials and industrial films in his home state of Minnesota. But he had eyes on a career in Hollywood and in the early 1950s went west to pursue his dream. Upon arrival he wasn’t welcomed with open arms, even by those working in the lowest-level industry positions of Tinseltown. He was told, not untruthfully, that Hollywood was a closed shop, where one mostly gained entry into the business though nepotism. Unless his father was a “Hollywood mogul,” he was advised it would be best to return to Minnesota. Gordon persevered despite such discouragement, garnering his first industry credit as screenwriter of Tom Gries’ tantalizingly titled Serpent Island (1954).

Unfortunately for monster movie lovers like myself, Serpent Island was a mere run-of-the-mill jungle island adventure film – albeit one with a dash of voodoo and a menacing boa constrictor. Things took a brighter turn when Gordon was chosen to multi-task as director, co-producer and co-writer of King Dinosaur (1955). Though in their review of September 1955 Variety deemed the film slow-moving, they also pronounced the “mild science-fiction yarn okay for smaller double-billing.” The trade also noted that due to the movie’s absence of a star player, the film’s potential audience draw was completely dependent on the “exploitational value” of the King Dinosaur itself. It wasn’t a rave review, but the film’s modest budget allowed a modest success. It was enough to establish Gordon’s reputation as a financially viable independent filmmaker.

King Dinosaur was the first of Gordon’s “big” monster movies, even if that film’s titular Tyrannous Rex was simply an ordinary iguana in ill-masquerade. The film would set the course of the director’s career for the decade or two following. An assortment of other giant monster flicks would follow in the wake of King Dinosaur, several now regarded as bona fide cult classics of Silver Age sci-fi. In short order, matinee audiences would be trampled by any number of Gordon’s creations: The Cyclops (1955) featured a radiation-birthed gigantic man, lizards and insects; a plutonium bomb infected The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) (who would return to wreak havoc in War of the Colossal Beast (1958). Then there were the giant grasshoppers of the Beginning of the End (1957), the giant arachnoid in Earth vs. the Spider (1957), the shrunken victims of a mad puppeteer in the Attack of the Puppet People (1958) and – seamlessly slipping into the psychedelic 1960s - the drug-induced cabal of gargantuan teenagers in Village of the Giants (1965).

Though it was these “giant monster” drive-in flicks that would secure, nay immortalize, his reputation as a filmmaker of gargantuan ambition, Gordon would branch out in the 1960s as a director no longer exclusive in interest to presenting giantism. Regardless, most of these movies were still firmly tethered to the realm of fantasy and the macabre: Tormented (1960), The Boy and the Pirates (1960), The Magic Sword (1962), and Picture Mommy Dead (1966).

By the 1970s, Gordon’s career seemed to cast about. His earliest films remained almost entirely exploitative in creation, inspired by popular titles of the times. It had always been that way. Even his gigantism films were simply reversals of Universal-International’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). So, when Russ Meyer’s sex-films were doing good business on modest budgets, Gordon would follow suit… well, perhaps “un-suited” as it were. His first film of the ‘70s was How to Succeed with Sex (1970), an X-rated soft-core sex comedy. Perhaps an experiment with “gigantism” of a different sort? Surprisingly, New York’s Independent Film Journal thought the juvenile-minded film, “a pleasant, if innocuous little sex flick, even though its sense of humor is a bit retarded.” Variety thought the film worthwhile entertainment for fans of “bouncing-breasted nudies,” suggesting “How to Succeed with Sex has the carefree air of Bikini Beach Party without the bikinis.”

Even the staid New York Times proffered that Gordon’s present romp, “Parodies pornography consciously and with a civilized wickedness.” To help promote the film, Gordon chose to publish a “Cinemabook” tie-in novel with the amended title of How to Succeed with the Opposite Sex (Holloway House, 1970). The book offered, of course, no shortage of softcore-porn photos between its covers to help sales along. (Later, in the early 1980s, Gordon would add two additional teen sex comedies to far less critical acclaim: the Porky’s-inspired near direct-to-video knock-offs Let’s Do It! (1982) and The Big Bet (1985).

When stories of Satanism were selling well, Gordon delivered such films as Necromancy (aka The Witching, 1970) featuring, of all people, Orson Welles as a frustrated resurrectionist of the dead. The production of Necromancy, under its provisional title of The Toy Factory, was fraught with very ugly production and legal issues. For starters, the film had reportedly gone over 400% over budget, a frightening figure in itself. This resulted in quite a bit of legal wrangling. Gordon subsequently lost creative and editing control of the film, an investment company awarded all worldwide distribution rights. It was the first sign that Gordon might be better off not messing with the Devil. Both Gordon’s Salem witchcraft opus The Coming (aka Burned at the Stake, 1981) and his Satan’s Princess (Paramount, 1990) (the latter offered “plenty of nude scenes [to] keep the viewer awake” as one review would note) were issued as damage-control cable-TV and/or direct-to-video releases.

Gordon’s piggybacking on contemporary film trends continued unabated. In 1973 when gritty, urban-crime dramas were in vogue, Gordon jumped onboard the violent-action bandwagon with The Mad Bomber (aka The Police Connection, 1972). Gordon seemed to have lost his interest in the sort of fantastic cinema that made him famous to a generation of Monster Kids. Or was it that the audience itself had lost interest? “I don’t believe the majority of people go to the theatre anymore for entertainment,” Gordon offered this bit of unfortunate psycho-hokum to Variety in the spring of 1973. “People in the old days used to go to a theatre to see a film for fantasy. I believe that people now live a great percentage of their lives vicariously. I therefore believe it’s healthy for these people to live-out in a theatre such fantasies to be a killer or rapist – at least it’s a controlled situation where they’re not threatening anyone. If the people didn’t have this release, they would become a threat to society.” He concluded this was not so different than how horror pictures, including his own, presumably, had earlier served as “a healthy release for young people.”

Regardless of his wonky psychological musings, it’s Gordon’s catalog of “fantastic” films that live on. Over the last several years Kino Lorber has released a number of Gordon’s films on Blu-ray, a trio arguably thought the best of the director’s 1960’s output: Picture Mommy Dead, The Magic Sword and Village of the Giants. Over the last several years Kino has taken up the torch of MGM’s magnificent Midnight Movies DVD library Y2K series of classic – and, on occasion, not so classic – “drive-in” film sets. This summer Kino now offers two of the best – and best recalled – of Gordon’s films of the 1970s in stunning Blu ray transfers: his adaptation of two of H.G. Wells’ sci-fi classics Food of the Gods (1976) and Empire of the Ants (1977).

Gordon would wear many hats on the production of Food of the Gods: he would serve as director, producer, visual effects and screenwriter. His scenario mostly abandons Well’s more erudite musings on the unintended consequences of human scientific and ecological misuse. (In Gordon’s defense, his film scenario is credited as having only been “based upon a portion” of Wells’s novel). Gordon also chose to move the original story from England to the wilds on British Columbia. It was on a reported budget of $900,000, that location shooting commenced on November 10, 1975 and continued for thirty-two days on Bowen Island off the Vancouver coast. It was a challenging time of year to shoot in BC, and the crew was plagued by passing episodes of freezing temperatures, mild earthquakes, sudden squalls and rainstorms. The film’s photography adequately captures the atmospheric dreariness of the season: cloudy mists, dank woods, dampness and gray skies. Special effects production would primarily take place in Montreal that same November.

The film’s story revolves around a desolate cabin and modest tract of farmland where an aging couple, the Skinners, reside. A mysterious spring of a milky white fluid has been bubbling from beneath the soil on the couple’s property. The Skinner’s (John McLiam and Ida Lupino) have discovered that mixing the fluid with ordinary chicken feed has alarmingly allowed members of the roost to grow to gargantuan size. Believing the strange spring a gift from God, the religious couple contact food-industry executive Jack Bensington (Ralph Meeker), to capitalize and perhaps financially benefit from their discovery. Unfortunately for all involved, other animal and insect species have also been drinking from the run-off of the milky food source.

The result is the woodlands have run amuck with roaming teams of angry and carnivorous giant rats, wasps, grub worms, and chickens. The Skinner’s retirement plan has not rolled out as easily as they might have hoped. Things take a turn for the worse when folks visiting the island are being viciously mauled by the giant rodents and other mutated species. Like most religious zealots, Mrs. Skinner tries to have it both ways, accepting recent developments as her faith allows – that is it’s not her fault. She initially accepts the powers of the milky spring as a “gift from God.” Following a few deadly attacks, she accepts what’s going on as a form of punishment from the very same deity, an obvious result of their sins “against nature.”

The film’s dubious “hero,” Morgan (Marjoe Gortner) is a pro football player and amateur sportsman who reluctantly gets sucked into the melee when, near the film’s beginning, a hunting friend is attacked and killed by a squadron of angry, giant wasps. In retrospect, Morgan is someone who should not have been looked upon to take charge and bark out orders. He’s pretty much responsible for the untimely ends of several characters due to hot-headed, impulsive decision making. There are other tangential characters written into the script, but one suspects they’re mostly there as victim-fodder. Though others suggest otherwise, I think Gordon’s special effects are pretty good, all-in-all, for their time. Certainly the rodent attacks are viciously grim and disturbing. It must be said that equally disturbing are real-life images of rodents being shot and bloodied close-up. Though PETA wouldn’t form until 1980, there’s no doubt members would have been protested outside any cinema where Food of the Gods was being screened.

Though Gordon’s two 1970s eco-horrors remain favorites of fan-cultists, critics mostly offered negative or begrudging reviews of Food of the Gods. Variety coldly dismissed Gordon’s latest adventure of gigantism as “a tax shelter pic,” “a good idea shot down by bad story.” They also decried Gordon’s scripting as “atrocious,” a charge – to be sure - often levied against his abilities as screenwriter. To be certain, some of the dialogue is cringe-worthy. The suggestion by Meeker’s assistant Lorna (Pamela Franklin) that she wants to “make love” to Morgan when an army of giant rats are poised to descend is particularly and groaningly ill-timed. Screen International described Food of the Gods as “engaging nonsense acted with suitable solemnity by a cast that nobly keeps its collective gravity even when the situations and dialogue are overly contrived and ridiculous.” Box Office also noted that Gordon’s characters as written, “tend to be less than believable.” These criticisms are not unfair.

Though the bad reviews continued unabated, executive producer Samuel J. Arkoff had plenty of reasons to ignore them and celebrate. Food of the Gods proved to be one of A.I.P.’s biggest money-generating pictures of 1976. So,the production of a more-of-the-same sort of picture was soon green-lighted. For his follow-up to Food of the Gods, Gordon would again plumb the rights-free work of H.G. Wells. This screenplay, by Jack Turley (from a “screen story” of Gordon’s), for Empire of the Ants is very loosely based on a dystopian short story by H.G. Wells first published in December 1905.