Why are movies so weird? Well, I suppose because people made them that way. With movies like The Intruder I can get back into the psychosis of trash cinema--the strange neural lapses, the personality tics, that made people make these...things. The Intruder is a screwed-up little movie, a possible relic of that bizarre, magical era where filmmakers didn't really know the new medium they were working with, leading to clunky mismatches of genre that leave the whole affair just downright odd. Trying all at once to be a zany comedy, a mystery movie, and a horror thriller, The Intruder ends up being both implicitly and explicitly disturbing, hard to put into words and yet all the while, shockingly mundane.
We open in the middle of a Godzilla movie, by which I mean we open with a hilariously fake-looking toy ship that looks like it belongs, at best, in the third Blind Dead film, The Ghost Galleon. This ship is the titular Intruder, and not only is there a man aboard with half a million dollars in stolen diamonds, but a murder has been committed as well. It seems like an ordinary stagey '30s mystery, with the detective lining up and interrogating the suspects...and then the weirdness happens. A fire breaks out on the ship and the passengers are lost at sea. Here, they end up on a desert island (?) where they are threatened by a gorilla who makes horrible screeching noises (!) and a wild man with a Tarzan yodel (!!!). (The actual shipwreck scene is surprisingly harrowing, with dozens shown drowning, despite the apparent plethora of lifeboats.) Said wildman lives in a ruined cabin with the bones of his (wife? girlfriend? victim?) "Mary" and "Joe," the man who apparently stood between them. This movie features a wild man wrestling with an inanimate skeleton, screaming angrily. This is all treated very casually up until they get off the island and wrap up the murder/theft.
I'm sure the reasons behind this movie are much more ordinary than I'm imagining. I suspect that this began life as an ordinary mystery B-programmer, but a studio mandate told director Ray to throw in a jungle segment, with a wild man and a guy in a gorilla suit, and so that just had to happen. It all worked to Ray's benefit anyway, as the lengthy divergences we delve into on the island help pad out what would otherwise be a duller-than-cardboard mystery film. It still ends up just under 54 minutes. With the release of Ingagi two years prior, gorilla films and jungle films in general started their vogue. My Gods, this movie was probably trying to cash in on an exploitation movie that said that Africans have children with gorillas.
It was also still pretty popular at the time to have comedy be part of your mystery, and to cross over into horror wasn't unexpected either. That's why we get things like the comic relief drunk uncle, because alcoholism is so fucking funny. This is also why there are lines like, "Now I know why Robinson Crusoe called his Man Friday--they ate fish everyday," in the same context as a murderous caveman and a shitton of people fucking drowning. (Gotta love the shots of the people drowning intercut with several of our main characters standing on the most spacious lifeboat ever. Seriously, you could fit at least four more people into that thing!) This is where another old friend comes out to play: the fact that They Just Didn't Care.
Let's talk about our murderous caveman for a bit. There are several possibilities present in his little story, each more disturbing than the last. It seems pretty obvious that he murdered "Joe," but we don't know Joe's role in things. He could have threatened the Wild Man and "Mary," or maybe Mary originally dated Joe and the Wild Man wanted a different arrangement. The review for this movie on Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings puts forth the possibility that if the Wild Man still stabs Joe's skeleton like he's alive, what does he do with Mary's remains...? Ewww! Add in the fact that we don't know if Mary herself died a natural death and you have an entire secret horror movie packed away on this island.
I just really don't know what to say about this one. Aside from the sheer oddity of how far the script diverges from its original premise, there isn't much to write home about--it's clunky and stage-like, as I said, and the actor's voices sometimes barely rise above the set's sound effects due to the cheap, primitive recording equipment. It never perfectly holds my attention and really likes spinning its wheels, when already most of it is padding. But it's so unique and peerless even beyond its native era by sheer concept alone that it's worth at least one watch. At 53 minutes, how can you refuse?
If you liked this review and would like to see more like it, please consider supporting the site on Patreon. You can also like the A-List on Facebook to get updates!
No comments:
Post a Comment