Terror is a Man, aka Blood Creature

Right, so... I posted a bit about The Island of Dr. Moreau not too long ago; as I mentioned, I recently read the novel and have been quietly watching adaptations, as a kind of morbid amusement relating to my own fairly recent experiences of surgery (I've quipped at times that with my new voice, hairy tongue, and surgical scars, I feel like an escapee off the island, myself). Haven't gotten to Dr. Moreau's  House of Pain yet, which comes and goes off Tubi (at present being on the site, punctuated by a few odd commercials), but besides the official adaptations (Laughton-Lancaster-Brando), I attempted a 1921 German version, Island of the Lost, an extra on the three disc version of Lost Soul. Was finding that slow and clunky and ultimately set it aside, though I hadn't gotten to the beast-men yet, which may lure me back...

...But I finally caught up with the artful 1959 film Terror is a Man, aka Blood Creature, again via Severin, today, and I must say, it's an unexpected treat, well worth the investment of time. If your standards are low, you can actually see the film in what looks to be its entirety (minus an opening title,  more on which below) on Youtube, but that is a highly degraded print. By contrast, the movie looks gorgeous on the Severin disc - a "fine grain" 4K scan of a print discovered in the UCLA archive - so I would advise seeing their version of it if you can). It's subtlety and craft are actually kind of surprising, especially by comparison to the later native-made Filipino horror I've been exposed to, only one film of which I've watched to completion, Brides of Blood. (I know it must seem like I'm just shilling for Severin, here, but it's entirely an accident that they also distribute that; I had first encountered  it years ago on DVD, enjoyed the discussion of it in Machete Maidens Unleashed, and sought out a blu-ray of it, only noting after I found it at Sunrise that it was Severin, again. They just seem to hit my sweet spot with the films they release - I might even consider the recently announced Ray Dennis Steckler box set, though I'll have to think carefully about that...). 

Anyhow, I don't mean to diss Brides of Blood, which is interesting and entertaining in a way a lot of schlock cinema isn't, but it's got  cheesy low-budget effects - the "plant tentacles" in particular flop about randomly like a rubber bat in a Hammer film - and a fairly low-level of esteem for its audience, whom it apparently doesn't trust to keep watching unless they include plenty of tits, salacious dialogue, and gore, which - based on what I've seen of the Corman films shot in the Philippines - is what I kind of expected of it. It IS an interesting watch, but you have to be prepared to rise above the sleaze  (or revel in it, if that's your thing). You really do get the feeling with Brides that the people making the film are primarily interested in money, not ideas - and while that keeps it briskly-paced and entertaining, to the extent that there are ideas in the film, like an anti-colonial subtext, you feel they're not the point or even necessarily present by design. 

And, I mean, just compare monsters; the Brides of Blood monster is one of the ugliest, most amateurish-looking creations I've seen in a horror movie, looking like it was crafted out of green clay, moss, and dollar-store fangs by drunks at a tiki lounge:

...whereas the creature designs in Terror is a Man are actually pretty fantastic - a realization, harkening back to the uncredited source text, of the puma-creature in Wells, who - while female - is described running about in bandages, much like you see here:

The film is also beautifully shot and edited. It has the look and pacing of a classic film noir, with a level of professionalism and restraint that I simply didn't expect, based on the later Brides (which was made about ten years later by the same two people, Gerry De Leon and Eddie Romero, though in different roles). There is a bit of salaciousness - I gather from one of the extras that love triangles are a commonplace in Romero's screenplays - but it's relatively restrained, compared to the striking vulgarity of Brides. There are actually some at least plausible discussions of the science behind the transformation, which (as I mentioned in the previous piece I wrote) is something that can sometimes take me out of a text, if it gets the science too obviously wrong. At some point the protagonist observes to the doctor (not named Moreau, since the film is is a plagiarism) that evolution moves by natural selection, not conscious control or design, and I was impressed that screenwriter Romero actually seemed to understand how evolution works, which is definitely not a given in genre cinema of this sort or of this era. There's also a discussion of increasing animals' cranial capacity as a necessary adjunct to humanizing them that occurs in no other Moreau adaptation that I've seen, and an almost Frankenstein-ish level of pathos generated for the beast-creature, whose rampages you don't really begrudge it, given the two-year-long experiment that it's been subject to. You also get an interesting level of moral complexity in the way the doctor is framed; he's not a sadist (like Laughton), not a colonial overseer (like Lancaster and Brando) and gains a bit of sympathy in that the "hero" (a shipwreck survivor) is actually soon cuckolding him with his dissatisfied wife (...not a catwoman, but an actual human, whose desires and frustration with being stuck on this island for two years are presented quite sympathetically, as well). If Brides of Blood feels pretty misanthropic at times, Terror is a Man is almost humanistic. 

There are huge portions of Wells text that are not included - there is only one beast-creature, no "law," no "House of Pain," and almost no words spoken by the creature to convey its plight - Frankenstein's monster says more. There is one silly, William-Castle-like gimmick in the film by which they announce at the beginning of the film that at one point something so shocking will be shown on screen that they will sound a bell...

And indeed, there is a pretty startling bit of gore at this point in the film. I can only show it to you as a screengrab from the Youtube clip, so know that it's a lot more vivid if you see the film on blu. Sam Sherman explains in a featurette (an outtake from Machete Maidens Unleashed, in fact) that the effect was achieved by shaving a (presumably dead) pig and cutting into its flesh, this occurring just after the 55 minute mark:

Since the Youtube version lacks the opening title, if you watch the film that way, you might not even understand what the "bell" signifies, but in point of fact, though I was waiting with some curiosity for the scene to come, I was also expecting a sort of ting-a-ling sound, something that might actually be described as the ringing of a bell. What the filmmakers do instead is insert a buzzer sound, which might be taken for the ringing of an office phone, more of a "blat" than a "ting-a-ling," so I didn't actually clue in that we had arrived at the scene in question; when the "blat" sounded, I thought, instead, that a phone in the lab was ringing, and got confused that no one onscreen paused the surgery to answer it. When the end of the film came, my initial reaction was, "so where was the bell? Did I nap through it?" Only then did I remember the unanswered phone, and realize my misunderstanding; so not only is it a cheesy gimmick, unworthy of the otherwise high level of respect the film has for its audience, it didn't even work (unlike the surgery scene itself, which is pretty damned effective). 

The only other observation here I must make is about the Severin extras. I've been trained in recent years to think of Severin as having the most knock-'em-out-of-the-park extras around; I'm not even generally attuned to extras, but I really enjoyed the tone and content of their featurettes on Grizzly, Day of the Animals, The Changeling, and indeed, on Lost Soul itself - which is also seeable for free on Tubi, but well-worth the investment in the Severin blu, since even the one-disc version has a ton of interesting bonus material. Unlike those discs, the extras for Terror is a Man are actually a wee bit disappointing; there are a few brief outtakes from Machete Maidens Unleashed - one clip of which, an Eddie Romero interview, feels very similar to what's on the better-equipped Brides of Blood disc, and may even duplicate moments (I haven't checked); there's also a trailer, a stills gallery, and, well, not much else! There's no commentary, no Severin-made featurettes, and most strikingly, nothing from Richard Stanley, who would have been a natural to involve. I don't fully understand what went wrong, since - having made the Lost Soul film themselves, Severin obviously has a larger-than-average investment (as do I at the moment) in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Maybe they just burned out on it, or didn't figure there was enough interest in this particular title to warrant the extra expense? Maybe other discs on their now OOP Blood Island collection were more extra-rich, so they skimped on this one? Dunno.

But even if the extras are a little thin by comparison to other Severin releases, this is a great little film. Terror is a Man plays much more like a classic Universal monster movie than it does a low-budget Filipino-made exploitationer, and leaves me wanting to revisit some of that later Creature from the Black Lagoon movie where the creature has been surgically altered to almost pass for human, if you don't look too closely (The Creature Walks Among Us was made only three years prior to Terror is a Man, so who knows, maybe it actually was a direct influence?). With Cronenberg's new surgery-themed horror film en route, it feels like a thread worth continuing to follow. I mean, I'm not all that wild about my own new flesh, but I recall there being a fair bit of pathos in this film, too, and I suspect I'll be able to identify with the creature at least a little, since I spent two weeks in hospital feeling like this guy. Some days I still do!