Watched Caltiki, the Immortal Monster last night. I hadn’t seen it i9n years. You can buy it on DVD, but it’s ridiculously expensive. I came across a used copy recently for a fraction of that price. I hadn’t seen this since I was a kid.
Caltiki looks like a bad Mexican monster movie badly dubbed into English, but it’s actually a bad Italian/French movie badly dubbed into English. It’s just set in Mexico. I was surprised to see that Italian horror director Mario Bava was credited with directing it. I knew him (fie to Famous Monsters magazine) as the director of Black Sunday and Planet of Vampires (one of the inspirations for Ridley Scott’s Alien) and the spoof Danger Diabolik, but hadn’t realized he did this. Except, according to Wikipedia, there’s some controversy about who directed it, with Riccardo Freda being the other candidate. I never heard of him, but he’s evidently also a Legendary Italian Horror Film Director. Be that as it may, Caltiki isn’t legendary.
Blob monster started out in literature, but none were really memorable. Arguably the first one to break into the public consciousness was on the radio, in the Chicken Heart episode of Arch Oboler’s Lights Out (1937). He recreated it for a record album of Lights Out shows circa 1960 (the original recording being destroyed), and other people have done it since. The first blob onscreen I know of is sort-of the one in Nigel Kneale’s THe Quatermass Experiment (AKA The Creeping Unknown in the US) (1955, based on a 1953 TV serial). The sequel, Quatermass 2 (“Enemy from Space” in the US) (1957, based on an early BBC TV sewrial) featured evil alien blobs. The British X – the Unknown (1956) featured radioactive blobs from underground, and the movie that became Behemoth – The Sea Monster (The Giant Behemoth in the US) (1959) was also originally supposed to “star” a giant radioactive blob (one actually does appear near the beginning), until the Powers Tat Be decided they wanted a more traditional dinosaur-like menace.
All of these were from the UK, but the US showed that they could do blob monsters, too, with, of course, The Blob (1958). Japan did, too, in The H-Man (also 1958).
So Italy was kinda late to the show with Caltiki in 1959. As with another cheap 1950s monster flick I reviewed here, The Curse of the Faceless Man, this one, too, seems to draw its inspiration from archaeology (which puts it a step tonier than the other blob monsters). In this case, it’s the well of Chichen Itza, where Mayans threw in lots of treasure and sacrifices. In this flick, it’s a pool in an underground cavern that was recently opened by volcanic action. Inside is the statue of the goddess Caltiki, who demanded human sacrifices and, it was said, would destroy the world. The statue is very un-Mayan-looking, as is the legend, but give them points for trying.
The film begins with a man hyperdramatically scrambling over a rock and running toward the camera. He gets back to the camp, where archaeologist Dr. John Fielding (John Merivale), and his wife Ellen (Didi Perigo) are on a second honeymoon. German doctor Max Gunther (Gerard Herter) is along for the ride. Fielding has a huge square chin worthy of Robert Vaughn or Kyle McLaughlin. Whoever dubs Max’s English dialogue is a lousy fit – there’s no way that voice should come from that face. Ellen is cute and looks as if she’s good at screaming, which is mainly what she’s called upon to do.
Professor Rodriguz, the running man, collapses when he arrives and is unable to tell what he has seen, but his two companions didn’t return with him. John, Max, the cubby Nieto (who’s a photographer and a diver) and a lot of native guides go to the opened site to see what became of the missing guys. They don’t find them, but they find the movie camera they were bringing.
Back at camp, they develop the film while the guides and Linda, who seems to be a friend of Ellen and Max’, start drumming and dancing to appease Caltiki. At least until they spot Nieto trying to photograph them. At least the choreography is better than She Demons.
The film reveals that everything was fine until Dr. Rodriguez starts showing some jewelry he found. Then something attacks the cameraman , Rodriguez shoots at whatever, and runs off…
The next day they go back, nieto bringing his diving gear. Going ito the pool (which, TARDIS-like, seems a helluva lot bigger underwater than the miserable little pond appears to be on the surface. He seems lots of skeletons and statues and jewelry, one of which be brings up. He tells the others what he found, and he and Max talk about the fortune that’s down there. Going back down, he simply scoops things up into the bag he’s got. Careful, noting where everything is archaeology this ain’t. And they’re going to sell it? Mexico ought to be possed.
Anyway, evident Caltiki isn’t too happy about it, either, because she (it?) attacks dving Nieto. When they pull the body up and remove the mask, his face has been dissolved, leaving only the eyeballs intact.
They don’t have long to wait before Caltiki heaves her blobby bulk out of the water and goes for the team. They shoot guns at it, which is ineffictive, then intelligently run away. But Max sees the Bag o’Loot that Nietio still had clamped in his hand, and goes to retrieve it. He trips and falls against CAltiki, whi starts digesting him. He can’t pull his arm out, but John grabs a hatchet and chops off a bit of Caltiki with Max’s arm. They run for the surface. John commandeers a truck full of gasoline and drives it at Caltiki, jumping out before it hits. This being the movies, the truck naturally explodes. The end of Caltiki.
In a hospital we see them peeling the Caltiki bit off Max’ arm, revealing only skeleton underneath.They amputate the arm. Max has facial wounds from his encounter, too, and he’s got Caltiki poisoning, or something.
A word about the appearance of Caltiki – this blob monster is unusually textured. They apparently used a mixture of fabric and tripe to create the monster, which explains its “organic” appearance as they peel it off Max. It also reportedly made the set stink – hot stage lights and unrefrigerated tripe would do that, I guess. I’m sure it made it easier for the actors to react to the horror. The scene with the arm reminds me strongly of another 1959 film featuring a blob monster – Ib Melchior and Normal Maurer’s The Angry Red PLanet , in which one astronaut gets his arm thrust into a giant Space Amoeba, and when they withdraw it, there’s a piece of amoeba on it, still alive and eating the arm. In that movie, though, they saved the arm in a surprisingly good piece of science fiction speculation that didn’t belong in a film that cheap. Too bad they weren’t around for Max.
Well, it turns out that Caltiki grows when exposed to intense radiation. And – wouldn’t you know it – an intensely radioactive comet is due to pass close to the earth really soon. Add to this that they’ve got the various bts of Caltiki salvaged from Max’ arm stored in containers that are even less secure than Tupperware and you have a disaster in the making.
Well, at a college they expose one of the bits to an X-ray machine or something, and it begins to grow catastrophically. They destroy it with fire, and they warn everybody else about the poential. The comet comes near, and you’d think that an intensely radioactive comet would be a disaster all by its lonesome. But apparently the only ill effect it has is to affect the chuck of Caltiki in John’s house, where it begins to enlarge (apparently extra input mass isn’t important. All you need is radiation). It busts out of the room it’s in, falling on Max, who has gone nbuts and shot Linda. Max dissolves in Caltiki’s embrace, his skull emerging briefly to apparently scream. Ellen races upstairs with her daughter (I forgot to mention her), and there’s a lot of tension as she tries to get away, walking on house ledges, and John tries to race to her, is detained by police, and busts out of jail. He manages to get them out of the Caltiki-filled house with a ladder, just as the military arrives with flame-throwing tanks. These look amazinly like odels of tanks. They burn the house and random bits of Caltiki. I imagine the stench, both on set and in the reality of the movie, must have been like broiling rotten tripe.
The End, or “Fine”, as my copy has it.
