EroticMadScience.com

No, that’s not a spelling error.  Or at least, that’s not my spelling error.  And I’ve got the screenshot to prove it:

A real movie, it turns out (made in 1972).   Now the Jekyll and Hyde (ahem) story would seem almost tailor-made for erotic mad science exploitation:  there’s dangerous self-testing of a chemical formula, transformation, liberation of repressed selves, and so forth, all boiling up from the original Robert Louis Stevenson story.

Now if you, dear reader, were making an adult version of the Jekyll and Hyde story, you might try any number of things.  Perhaps Jekyll could be a timid individual transformed into bold, sexy one.  Or perhaps you could play games with sexual orientation — straight to gay, say, or vanilla to polymorphously perverted.  Or you could do it as a gender-bender.  This movie opts for the last one.  But it’s a fail because in spite of being a basically a soft-core porn film, a sort of shocking sex-negativity runs through the whole movie.

To put things another way, the Jekyll and Hyde story doesn’t have to be a good vs. evil story to work.  But it doesn’t really work as an evil vs. evil story.  It’s possible to make Dr. Jekyll a schlub, but for the story to have much of a point he would have to be a basically decent, perhaps even somewhat likable schlub.

The central character just fails, pretty much, because as both Jekyll and Hyde he’s despicable.  As a Jekyll figure — a “Dr. Chris Leeder,” the movie opens with his cheating on his fiancée.  When he’s dragged rather reluctantly on an antique-shopping detour by the same fiancée later that same day, he discovers the notebook of the “historical” Dr. Jekyll, describing his experiments.   Leeder becomes obsessed with the book.  When the shopkeeper later refuses to sell it, Leeder stone cold strangles the poor man.  So much for the good, sociable Dr. Jekyll figure in this movie.

Leeder reads the book, fascinated with the adventures of Hide.  The story is told in flashbacks, and at this point I had the curious feeling of watching something that resembled less a early 70s softcore movie and something more like an 80s slasher flick with an unusual amount of nudity.  In the repellent values system of this fictional world, sexuality courts violent death:  Hide rapes and murders two women:  one a prostitute who offers him her services, another a a masturbating woman he spies through a window.

Back in the 1970s, Leeder recreates Jekyll’s formula and uses it on himself.

It induces agonizing transformation…

..into a beautiful woman.

Yep.  A woman.  I should note that while the Jekyll-derived transformation potion does not provide a female wardrobe, it does at least do hair, makeup and nails.

(If you’re hoping for a transformation effect here — which I was, irrationally — you’ll be disappointed.  Actor Jack Buddliner as Dr. Leeder drinks potion, falls on bed, does lots of excruciating histrionics, cut, camera pans to his shoes, cut, new scene with actress Jane Louise as Miss Hide in Leeder’s clothes, which she at least has the decency to remove completely.  What a wasted opportunity.)

Of course, Miss Hide is not just a lesbian, for watching her I had the feeling that I was now watching one of those 1960s sexploitation flicks that have their own ugly value system:  lesbian = psycho.  A girl fight and the gratuitous castration of a sailor picked up in a bar happen along the way.

What a disappointment for thaumatophiles.  If you really must, it’s available from Something Weird Video.  But personally, I’m hoping someone will do better in the future.  Which shouldn’t be very hard, in all honesty.

One cinematic experience which I can’t say I’m too proud to have had, but which as a thaumatophile I guess I can’t quite ignore, is a lame sci-fi sex (but not too much of that) farce made in 1968 by Herschell Gordon Lewis called How to Make a Doll.

Now HGL does deserve a place of sorts in the cinematic pantheon as a gore pioneer, beginning in 1963 with Blood Feast, and he had earlier made some distinguished in the nudie-cutie/sexplotation field, for example with The Adventures of Lucky Pierre in 1961.  But I’m sorry to say he was off his game when he came up with this one.   (As to what he was on I hesitate to speculate, except to note that it was 1968.)

I am aware that I am at risk of brain bleeds trying even to think about the plot of this one, but here goes:  ultra-nerd Dr. Corly can’t figure out women, but luckily for him he connects with horny elderly mad scientist Dr. West (hmm) who’s finally figured how to program a computer to do wish fulfillment that takes the form of producing “dream girls.”  They aren’t lacking in the pretty department, but they seem rather dim in higher cognitive functions.  Does anyone care?  Not the people who made this movie, obviously.  A lengthy and tediously chaste laboratory-floor make-out session follows, further followed by one of the very few actually interesting moments in the movie, when Dr. West decides to upload his consciousness into the computer, along with two dreamgirls, via a cheesy special effect.

Cue animated gif, naturally.

It would all be forgettable, save for one thing, which is that I think that this no-budget scene might be one of the very first instances of the concept of mind-uploading to be depicted cinematically.  TV Tropes suggests one that is just a little earlier — March 1968 as opposed to the November 1968 release date for How to Make a Doll — in the original series Star Trek episode “The Ultimate Computer,” which had a computer the programming of which was based on the mental patterns of its human creator, but I’m not sure if that really counts — the creator didn’t transfer his consciousness somehow into the machine.

Anyway, even though Dr. West has managed to solve the really hard problem of duplicating his consciousness in a machine, he’s neglected to provide himself any synthetic means of interacting with the world outside the machine or a virtual reality playground within it (a pretty glaring oversight, I should think).   So instead he arranges to live vicariously through Dr. Corly, whom he transforms into “one of the world’s great lovers.”  In the context of this movie, being one of “the world’s great lovers” means having a bunch of brief necking sessions with a string of bikini-clad tootsies before running back to the lab to allow the disembodied Dr. Corly to participate in your recorded experiences.

Wouldn’t you know it, this squad of bikini-clad tootsies ends up being instantiated as real-world simulacra, all dim and robotic to the girl.  Fortunately Dr. West discovers that you can banish them to nothingness them simply by tearing up the cardboard punch card on which each girl’s data is stored.  (Since typical punch cards in 1968 stored 960 bits of data tops, perhaps it’s not surprising the simulacra were a little lacking in the personality department.) This is so damn weird it merits an animated gif of its own.

Perhaps TV Tropes needs a category called You Fail Metaphysics Forever just to deal with this.

I’ve shown you the sixty or so frames of this movie that count, but if you really, really must Something Weird Video does put out an edition of it.

 

An early and probably malign influence from my childhood UHF TV-watching days was a 1964 movie called either Monstrosity or The Atomic Brain.  It had mad science, brain swaps, three lovely girls in terrible peril, the mind of a cat in a woman’s body, and the unholy quest for immortality by one of the most unpleasant old-lady characters to grace the grade-Z screen.

Despite all these pluses it feels overlong even at 65 minutes.  But oh, it does have its moments.

Such as an early cinematic naked girl-in-a-tube.  Two of  them, within the first ten minutes.  The people who made this might not have been great writers, but they sure knew about getting sexploitative early.  Here is the second of them:

The poor naked thing is a corpse, stolen froma nearby graveyard.  The man in the radiation suit is our anti-heroic mad scientist, attempting to revive her tissues (by means of “atomic fission, produced in the cyclotron,” according to the narrator), so that he can then implant an animal’s brain (!) in her.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work so well, and she ends up merely as a zombie.

Maybe this movie isn’t quite so bad after all.  Is it available at the Internet Archive?  But of course!

Enjoy if you can. (And if you can’t just a little, why are you here?)

Well, I hope you all enjoyed — or at least could tolerate — thirteen consecutive posts on teuthology.  Normally I wouldn’t want to run with such a solid chunk, but putting them in sequence like that did make it possible for me to go on my first vacation in almost two years.   That having been done, back to mad science of a different variety.

In particular this curious 1942 Bela Lugosi vehicle.

An ultra-cheapie put out by ultra prolific producer Sam Katzman. it gets right down to business with its premise.  Beautiful young brides are collapsing and (apparently) dying at the altar.

And then being stolen by a series of clever subterfuges.

The police are baffled, naturally.  We are informed of this fact by a montage of headlines.

The montage is a reminder that there must have been a time when “headlines against a backdrop of rolling presses” was not a cliché.  Though I suspect that time might have been earlier even than this movie.

What’s going on here?  Well, it turns out that a mad scientist (played by Bela, naturally) is extracting valuable hormones from the brains of his the brides, whom he has reduced to a sort of cataleptic state by the delivery of fatal orchids that they smell on their wedding days.

And the point of this is….the rejuvenation of his eccentric wife, the “Countess.”  It’s the movies, so it works — temporarily.  I’ve put together a before-and-after montage for your edification.

Unfortunately for mad science, an ambitious lady reporter tracks the clues of the poisoned orchids to the mad scientist’s house (here she is, depicted with her eventual love interest).

Mad Scientist Bela and his countess don’t begin to exhaust the weird in his household.  There’s also a disfigured and retarded servant who regards the cataleptic brides as convenient fondle-fodder.

And an insane housekeeper and a dwarf butler played by actor Angelo Rossito (who also famously appeared in Tod Browning’s Freaks).  Some of this stuff you just have to see for yourself.

There’s good mad-lab stuff here, especially the scene in which our lady reporter discovers the mausoleum-like part of the laboratory where the brides are kept.

Lugosi is perhaps mid-way down the long career slide from Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) to appearances in films created by Ed Wood.  He’s in good form here.

In the end, heroic lady reporter is imperiled (briefly) before being rescued by her doctor-fiancé.  A disappointing ending, but what did you expect in a movie made in 1942?

The fate of the cateleptic brides is left as a loose end.  Were they revived?  Or is it too much to hope that they might have been part of someone else’s experiments?

An element of eros that occurred to me about this was, why brides? Why not waitresses?  Or taxi dancers?  It would seem like a lot of trouble to focus on brides.  One possible (and boring) explanation would be that it just looks a lot less suspicious to deliver a poisoned orchid to a wedding, where there are lots of flowers around anyway.  But perhaps a more intriguing idea would be that the blushing bride might have her hormones up, in a useful way, if you catch my drift.

An interesting premise that I shall have to try to remember to exploit further someday.

As with so many other cheapie old movies of this sort, it’s available for download and viewing at the Internet Archive.

Enjoy!

Having enjoyed myself writing a tale of a woman who turns into a giant arachnid, I thought it fitting to watch a movie about arachnids turned into women.  Is there such?  Of course there is!  Probably there are many, but one of the most readily accessible is a 1953 oddity called Mesa of the Lost Women.

Told largely in flashback, the core story of on Leland J. Masterson, World Famous Specialist (in what exactly it isn’t clear) who answers a summons of the mysterious but brilliant Dr. Aranya, who’s running a laboratory inside a mesa in a Mexican desert.

A mad-lab, it turns out.  Dr. Aranya has figured out a way to transform tarantulas into beautiful women.  There are a few seconds of half-way decent mad-lab footage.

Dr. Aranya is the gentleman on the left in the white lab-coat.  Do you recognize the actor?  Neither did I.  But a little digging turned up that he was someone genuinely Hollywood famous:

Yes, Jackie Coogan.  “The Kid” in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid.  He would go on to play Uncle Fester in the 1960s Addams Family television series.   Possibly he did not look back on this movie as the high point of his career.

Masterson, upstanding Pillar of the Establishment he is, throws an absolute fit when he finds out what Aranya is up to.  I really don’t understand what Aranya’s problem is:  it looks like Aranya’s work is succeding brilliantly.  His creations are intelligent enough to help him with his scientific research, can communicate telepathically, can regenerate lost limbs (although we don’t see them do this), and recover in minutes from what would be fatal bullet wounds (we do se this).

Oh, and did I mention that some of the female ones are smokin’ hot?  The most successful in this regard is “Tarantella,” played by Tandra Quinn.  She treats us to a dance in  a cantina, which doesn’t really do much to advance the thin plot, but which at least provides a few more minutes of watchable footage.

Since Masterson (played by Harmon Stevens) refuses to help Aranya, Tarantella gives Masterson an injection which turns Materson (temporarily) into an idiot.  In this condition, he looks eerily like a prototype for Peter Sellers’s role of Chance the Gardener in Being There (1979).

I mean, maybe it’s just the power of hats, but the resemblance is sometimes sort of eerie to me.   There are even moments in which the speech mannerisms in Stevens’s performance seem to prefigure those in Sellers’s.

This movie clocks in at 67 minutes and feels overlong.  Such an interesting premise, so little done with it.  Most of the movie has to do with a bunch of very unlikeable characters trying to survive attacks from Dr. Aranya’s characters.  A useless and intrusive narrator appears at the beginning and the end of the movie to warn us that mankind is outclassed by the insects (tarantulas are arachnids, not insects) and “the hexapods” (tarantulas have eight legs, not six).  It features one of the most headache-inducing musical scores to hit my eardrums ever.

Oh, and even if you can pardon the patronizing way this movie treats Mexican people, we get Wu, an Asian valet right out of Stereotype Central:  fatalistic, servile, and prone to communicate primarily in cornball pseudo-Confucian aphorisms.

There are things that I do genuinely miss about old movies, but characters like Wu are not one of them.

Still, I should think this is worth mining for a few minutes of footage for the mad science completist.  It’s public domain and available at the Internet Archive.

Link here in case the embedding doesn’t work.

Bert I. Gordon (look at the initials) is best remembered, perhaps, as the creator of movies like The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), but he also gives us at least one decent thaumatophile moment in what is otherwise a real stinker of a movie called Village of the Giants (1965).

The movie does feature a Mad Scientist of sorts — an annoying Boy Genius imaginatively called “Genius.” He invents some sort of wonder substance that causes biological organisms to grow to colossal size (a theme dear to B.I.G.’s heart, obviously).  A crew of dim, overaged teenagers steal of of the substance and camp out in an abandoned theater, and consume some.

And while this movie is stupid on all sorts of levels (it was riffed on but good by the MST3K crew), B.I.G. does manage to get one thing right, which is that he takes account of the fact that a wonder substance that blows you up to several times your natural size won’t necessarily blow up the clothes you are wearing, and that’s a result that B.I.G. rightly exploits for some decent sexploitation, at least for 1965.

I’ve done part of the result as animated GIFs for your edification.  Since they’re sort of big (hmm…) and since some people find them annoying I’ve tucked them beneath the fold.  Click at your own risk!

Continue Reading »

One of the twin crises that have Aloysius running back and forth late in Progress in Research is an attempt at breast augmentation that runs way out of control.

Well, maybe I’m just being immature to notice such things, but even this odd little theme has a history.  One example (which I only vaguely remembered from video-store box art until I finally got hold of and watched a copy, just for your benefit, dear readers) is the 1982 comedy Jekyll and Hyde…Together Again.  I’ll never have those 87 minutes of my life back, but I can report that there is a scene in which a plastic surgeon named Dr. Knute Lanyon gets distracted in the course of a procedure that “injects collagen behind the soft tissue of the breast” or one Mrs. Simpson.  This inflation goes on and on.  Mrs. Simpson actually seems rather pleased with the unplanned result.

As she admonishes Dr. Lanyon “don’t you dare touch a thing…Bernie’s going to love these.”

A better example of this sort of thing can be found in Vittorio Giardino’s Little Ego (1985).  This is an erotic tribute (Wikipedia suggests “parody,” but I think tribute might be better) to Windsor McCay’s extraordinary Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905 to 1914).  Nightly, Little Ego has dreams in which all sorts of absurd and wrong and yet highly erotic things happen.  (There is an extended “abduction into a harem” sequence which doubtless influenced the “Odalisque” segment of Study Abroad.)    It is an exquisite piece of work that belongs in the library of any serious collector of comic-book erotica.

In one of Ego’s dreams, she stands before a mirror, wishing she had bigger breasts.  By the merest chance she finds before her a jar of cream the label of which proclaims “increases and firms breasts in minutes.”  “Why not?” asks Ego, trying it out.  And before you know it…

The dream ends with Ego in a rather unusual modeling career.  For a Vittorio Giradino site look here.

Okay, a break for a while from all the heavy stuff, to say the solipsism of writing about my own writing.  Here:

In all candor I must say I sort of miss old-style sexploitation, a genre of movies that seems to have flourished between the mid-1960s, when people got tired of the nudie-cuties and mid-1970s, after which time when moviemaking seems to have fissioned into mass market movies, which due to their mass-market character reach for a lowest common denominator with respect to erotic content (meaning, not much) and outright porn.  I have nothing against outright porn, mind you, it’s just that as a thaumatophile I sort of like people who worked a bit, even at absurd pretenses, to get pretty girls out of their clothes and into peril, peril which often included mad science and its consequences.  I guess I’ll always just get more out of Invasion of the Bee Girls than a lot of other movies that have more explicit sexual content.   Oh where are the drive-ins and grindhouses of yesteryear?

Which is why I sort of have a soft spot for Fred Olen Ray, (personal site here) who seems to be busy keeping the sexploitation flame burning bright, sometimes even with mad-science overtones.  His movies might be utterly goofy, but they can be mined profitably for entertainment.  (Ray has made lots and lots of movies, including Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Bikini Drive-In, Bikini Hoe-Down, and the Bikini Escort Company.  We’re talking commitment here, people.) Here’s an example, from Ghost in a Teeny Bikini.

Christine Nguyen here plays “Muffin Baker,” who in turn is playing a character in a movie within the movie (which we will later learn is called Missing in Acting).  And she’s in trouble, tied to a table in the half-convincing-looking mad lab of a “Dr. Sin,” who I think I vaguely remember from graduate school.

Happily for our unnamed heroine she is soon rescued by a character named Bardo, sent straight from Central Casting’s “Weightlifter with a Machine Gun” division.  Bardo is played by Nick Manning, the most relevant fact about whom I could find is that as of this writing he has 460 acting credits to his name in IMDB, which include Anal Ballerinas and My Teacher is a MILF.

After a bit of sub-Homeric narration by Bardo of his travails in rescuing the girl, we are treated to this bit of sparkling dialog

Muffin

How much time do you think we have until they blow us all up?

Bardo

Let’s not talk about killing. We only might have thirty minutes left until we ourselves are killed by those who we seek to kill.

Now you or I, dear reader, might have a variety of reactions to this interesting revelation, among which might be

• Professionalism.  Get busy killing those whom you seek to kill and who seek to kill you.  A job is a job, damnit!
• Self-preservation.  Excuse me, but you didn’t happen to say “blown up,” did you?  You did?  In that case, would you excuse me for a moment?  I need to slip into a comfortable pair of running shoes.

But you or I, dear reader, clearly would not be following the cinematic logic of the situation.  Fred Olen Ray understands it however.

Muffin

Makes me melt when you touch me like that. Make love to me, Bardo.

Bardo

If we are to die, then let it be in each other’s arms.

Yep.  Makes perfect sense.

And I know that all dedicated readers of this blog will doubtless look at that last image and think:

That dingus over there in the far right-hand side of the image.  Is that the lab’s main power supply?  What is it running?  What is the experiment?  Please tells us, Mr. Ray!

But unfortunately we never learn, because at that point Muffin’s director-boyfriend yells “Cut!” ending the scene and getting on with the main, and even sillier, movie.

Oh well.  At least I understand that Fred Olen Ray has Bikini Frankenstein coming out, so maybe there’s something for us thaumatophiles to hope for.

Welcome to all and sundry.   I am your host; kindly call me Dr. Faustus.

Do cheesy science fiction movies do something for you?   Would you go (or have you ever gone) to see a midnight performance of Invasion of the Bee Girls? Have you ever shared the monster’s point of view in Creature from the Black Lagoon?  Did you find it at least mildly titillating Virginia Bruce was (theoretically) running around without any clothes on in the 1940 film The Invisible Woman?  Have you ever thought perhaps that H.P. Lovecraft might even cooler if he weren’t so damn sex-negative?  Do you infer a line of artistic influence from Katsushika Hokusai to Toshio Maeda?  Do you think it would be sexier to be Victor Frankenstein than Elvis?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then perhaps this site is for you.

This is the formal opening post at EroticMadScience.com, a site which I am intially opening as an experiment in the self-publication of some of my own fiction and my musings on a peculiar topic, to wit the topos of  “mad science” or the “Mad Scientist”

as a source of kink.

If you want a detailed account of what this is and why I am doing it, I invite you to look at The Thaumatophile Manifesto, which I lay all this out in detail.  And if you just want to jump in and see the kink in action, take a look at The Apsinthion Protocol, which is the first of seven long stories in my “Gnosis College” mad science series.  It is written as a screenplay, because that’s the way things play out in my head.

More things will be coming here in the future:  I’ll try to explain the various literary (?) antecedents of my fiction as well as provide people who find the erotic mad science thing appealing suggestions for future reading and viewing.  In the future, I hope to offer a forum for people interested in what is going on here.

I feel great excitement at starting this site.  As I was planning it, an aphorism of Nietzsche’s from Beyond Good and Evil came to mind.

 

Die grossen Epochen unsres Lebens liegen dort, wo wir den Muthgewinnen, unser Böses als unser Bestes umzutaufen.

Jenseits von Gut und Böse, #116

The great epochs in our lives come when we find the courage to rebaptize our our evil (this being Nietzsche, perhaps that should be implicitly read as our “evil”)  as what is best in us.  I guess today is just one of those days.

Comments on this an other posts will be welcome, subject of course to moderation (see the Manifesto for more detail on what might or might not be appropriate here).

So perhaps I shouldn’t say just welcome to all and sundry.  Instead, welcome friends.