TV Cream's A-Z of films (original) (raw)

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UNDER LABORATORY CONDITIONS
"Frying tonight!"

Sherry-quaffing aesthetes that we are, we've long pondered the most chilling, unnerving environment in which to set a film. What kind of location has the most powerful associations of terror and foreboding? All the vintage horror staples have weathered less than well. The trad old dark house brings to mind meddling kids. Fogbound forests don't really cut it either. The moors at midnight? Bound to be a Wetherspoons within hiking distance. The most forbidding habitats tend overwhelmingly to be man-made, claustrophobic and, above all, sterile. Laboratories, in other words, whether research establishments, operating theatres, or torture chambers, are the places that yield silent menace in spades. After all, the lab has been the staple of horror since almost day one, but it's not the castle-bound, lightning-powered sort of lab featured in FRANKENSTEIN we're on about here, which is more comical than scary, possibly due to the presence of so many parodies, which lest we forget began with the high camp of the film's own sequel, the deranged BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, which in turn begat the Victorian oak-pannelled lab dotted with various brass 'n' glass contraptions, with the feverish waistcoated doctor jotting down experimental results in many a Hammer period endeavour (for possibly the prime example, see the serum-testing antics in the much-parodied THE CREEPING FLESH). No, these are too much the stuff of cliche, being inextricably linked with parody, even if it's top notch parody like CARRY ON SCREAMINGor YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (which used a lot of the original film's lab equipment on set).

It's contemporary science we're after here, though definitions of "contemporary" are constantly changing, so serious science can turn into quaint silliness in short order. Let's open our textbooks at Planet's ISLAND OF TERROR, a taut little tale of radioactive cancer research on a remote Hebridean island giving rise to bone- sucking "sillicates" - slug-like creatures made from solid minerals. Cue extensive nuclear lab research from Peter Cushing and companion, donning distinctly condom-like full-body radiation suits before laboriously unlocking vaults full of Plutonium samples. Hasn't exactly translated well down the decades, that sort of stuff, and it's not helped by the director filming the suiting-up scene in one long, looong continuous take, with no cutaways, giving the ostensibly serious Brave Men of Science scene a comic ponderousness. We do have a great affection for this pioneering era of lab set design (show us something more visually evocative than the huge Bakelite dials that populate Dana Andrews' thermo-volcanic power plant in A CRACK IN THE WORLD and we'll give you a shilling) but intimidating it ain't, and for one reason. Immediately post-WWII, science was still, H-bombs notwithstanding, our much misunderstood friend. Thus labs tended to crop up more in comic situations, tended by a lovable, if slightly zany, hero, be it Jerry Lewis' NUTTY PROFESSOR or Alec Guinness' MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT, who of course pored over his massed racks of bubbling test tubes and round- bottomed flasks full of dry ice to the instantly recogniseable soundtrack of rhythmic comedy burblings used to denote "funny science" for decades.

Genuinely sinister scientists, beyond all yer monobrowed KING OF THE ROCKET MEN serial villains, were hard to come by, although Kenneth Williams again scores high in our estimation as he leads a team of accidentally laughing gas-addled patients in a rebel operation on Leslie Phillips' foot in CARRY ON NURSE. There's nothing more sinister, surely, than the black-and-white close-up of a maniacal Williams, peering dementedly over his surgical mask while he sharpens the steel ("We'll have to amputate your leg!") Certainly not the colourfully-garbed twin Jeremy Ironses wielding their baroque gynecological implements in Cronenberg's DEAD RINGERS. Medicine's far more distressing when the director doesn't go over the top - we'd take the scene where Bowie's alien inventor has his eyes "done" by high-up heavies in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH over any Kensington Gore-fuelled bloodbath, for instance. It's not about the guts, it's the clinical stillness of the places that does it for us, no more so than in Michael Crichton chiller COMA, where a chance encounter with a secret panel (and we surely don't have to stress how much we love secret panels) leads to the discovery of a vast hangar filled with naked patients in suspended animation in more ways than one - we don't think the makers ever revealed how they made it look as if the serried ranks of bodies (another rule - serried ranks of just about anything stretching out into the distance are always winningly intimidating) really were hung up by hooks in the flesh, but it's pretty unbeatable as a creepy (not gory) medical scene. For a creepy *and* gory medical scene, we recommend the point in AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON where nurse Jenny Agutter claims she's got "just the thing" for nightmares.

Nurse Aggers notwithstanding, British medical research, as portrayed in films, is largely hampered by the comical whipping boy status of the NHS. We've mentioned BRITANNIA HOSPITAL, that high-camp SATIRE of the nation as a crumbling NHS ward, elsewhere, but we have to mention here Graham Crowden's deranged, brain-liquidising private researcher, who may have proved our rule about gore not being scary in the intentionally silly destruction of a Frankenstein patchwork monster with the finger-biting head of Malcolm MacDowell, but their previous run-in in prequel O LUCKY MAN!, in which MacDowell pulls back the blankets of a squealing patient in Crowden's ward to find he's been given the body of a pig, is, for all its ridiculousness, a genuine blood-freezing moment.

Of course, the rest of the hospital is falling apart, and shabby chic can be just as effective as ultra-clean high gloss in sinister terms, especially when wielded by a mysterious private organisation such as the one which promises luckless bankrupts and failures a completely new physical identity in the brilliantly bleak SECONDS. John Randolph, ageing and penniless, gets wind of the place through a friend, and, after a trip via a laundry service and the back of a white van, finally locates their morbid offices, staffed by a variety of nutty eccentrics, including an over-eager salesman who orders a "last meal" for Randolph, then, when it's refused, gleefully scoffs it himself while discussing procurement of the corpse that is to stand in for Randolph's body when his death is faked, and the owner of the establishment, a KFC-esque avuncular Southern colonel type, all smiles and encouragement. Entrusting his new life to these nutballs, Randolph undergoes all-over plastic surgery - cue labcoats, swabs and acres of bandage - to re-emerge as Rock Hudson, followed by a weird debreifing from a moustachoied greaseball who for some sinister reason can't stop giggling. Job done! Although it all goes wrong of course, neatly spiralling to a harrowing, unexpected but neatly circular end. On top of all that, there's John Frankenheimer's delirious camerawork - wide angles, fisheyes, PoV shots (with camera physically attached to Randolph as he meanders down the corridors) and that much-loved PoV-of-trolley- bound-patient-staring-up-at-corridor-lights shot, which may well have made its debut here, and certainly became a well-worn signifier of the "sinister lab" setup (see JACOB'S LADDER, which consists of little else). Similar face-changing shenanigans occur in Elliot Gould thriller WHO?, with scientist "My name is" Lucas Martino, supposedly injured after a car crash in Russia, revived by Russian medics and fitted with a new, metal, face, and sent home to the US. But is he Martino or a spy? The opening scenes, where Martino finds out the hard way about his new visage, and the subsequent interrogation back home, are anything but big budget, but the claustrophobia and dank lighting still give great atmos.

Going a step up the ladder of sinister signifiers, shady governmental institutions, BRAZIL is a veritable catalogue of institutional set design, from the clattering '30s-style postrooms and Art Deco lobbies (again, shabby chic is in - the technology frequently doesn't work, but this incompetence only adds to the menace), to the white-tiled torture chamber Michael Palin uses (with tiny daughter in tow, of course) with the tell-tale single drop of blood on the floor - look closely and you can see the cardboard spacers the set builders stuck between the tiles still sticking out, in a classic Gilliam piece of "let's leave it in!' improvisation. In another bit of last-minute changeabout, the final torture chamber in which Jonathan Pryce finally loses it was going to be, in a logical progression, an all-white cube, but the discovery of a dormant cooling tower changed everything, and for the better. Of course, why anyone would use a giant cooling tower for such high- level "reprogramming" work remains a sore point with internet logic- hounds, which is partly why it's such a great choice. Add to that a rickety torture chair far more evocative in its poor design than contemporary film 1984's facial rat cages, and you've got a link back to the tyranny of medicine again (think MARATHON MAN rather than DENTIST ON THE JOB).

Psychological chair-based torture (remember Mastermind's interrogatory trademarks were derived from espionage techniques) is pared down to just chair, subject (Warren Beatty) and disembodied voice in the 'Parallax test' scene of THE PARALLAX VIEW, a high-'70s conspiracy yarn that peaks with this bizarre bit of subliminal propaganda - over a queasy mixture of flag-waving US anthems and psychedelia, Beatty is subjected to a kaleidoscopic word association slide show which may be rather clumsy SATIRE but is a memorably audacious way to fill several minutes of screen time. James Coburn was subjected to a more homely propaganda cartoon screening courtesy the sinister Telephone Company while trapped in a phone box in THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST, a raucous conspiracy comedy that also gets good milage out of cheesy-grinning robotic salesmen (who plug into the mains via their right heels) seen in the closing shots in - yep - sinister serried ranks. The best government lab, though, is the multi-checkpoint underground desert installation used to get to the bottom of the viral crisis in THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN. Yep, it's Crichton again. In a scene that's astonishingly overlong, pointless and dull unless you're a big fan of elaborate depictions of underground labs (bit like this article, then), three top doctors descend, level by level, into a secret government chamber, detoxed progressively more harshly and humiliatingly at each stage (our favourite is the mysterious "white hot" room which burns the outer layer of skin from their bodies, after they've donned a face-saving fencing mask). Yes, it's silent and ponderous, but that's atmosphere you can feel building up, and for creeping sterility it certainly beats rival virus flick THE SATAN BUG, which goes for all-out action and condenses its lab to a glass-walled annexe with a few tape spools and one of those big faux-radar maps. No contest.

The ultimate in hermetically-sealed environments has to be, of course, in space. But here our pet theory,as these things so often do, begins to break down. It all starts off well enough with the Bakelite doom-mongering of FORBIDDEN PLANET and the like, and we'll give 2001 credit for its moments of silent brooding (but not for anything else, and we still say SOLARIS does all that stuff far better). And of course the first ALIEN film gets up to unforgettable medical hi-jinks in that all-white mess room. For the most part though, the horror fails to emerge. You have soya farms in the likes of SATURN 3, wherein Farrah Fawcett's gossamer tracksuits vie with Martin Amis' leaden dialogue to detract from Harvey Keitel's lumbering, top-heavy robot. Ditto the enviro-preachy overtones that cripple SILENT RUNNING - with those cutesy stumpy robots, always more a tear-jerker than a chiller. Elsewhere, DARK STAR milked that faintly humming silence for comic pauses. At least the rubbishMOONRAKER had the saving grace of Ken Adam's ludicrously grandiose "far too many monitors" operations room.

Into the '80s, that uniform sci-fi look - blue/purple backlighting, stainless steel glinting in the darkness, nightclub neon and - yes! - the return of dry ice - turned the claustrophobic lab setting back to its origins. In Cronenberg's THE FLY, for instance, Goldblum's basement lab has more in common with Frankenstein than anything more recent. Still, at least Croney still took time out to create an atmosphere, when just about everything else - think the potentially disturbing memory lab (another Seconds-like shady institute) inTOTAL RECALL - dropped the suspense for the no-nonsense action ticket. And that's what's more or less killed off the sterile suspense in all genres of late - why spend 10 minutes in a brooding, humming lab and risk mass walkouts from Orlando Bloom fans? These days any suspense-building that lasts more than two minutes seems to be considered slack, which means sharper editing techniques and camerawork - fair enough. But the sense of place, of exploring an environment and being taken there, completely, suffers along with all that, and we sorely miss it. Bring back silence in the cinema, bring back stillness, and let's go back to the lab!

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