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Kafka's "intolerable hissing of the father" is promptly heard during the opening credits, the buzzing that interrupts a lush score also oddly anticipates Au Hasard Balthazar. The housewife (Patricia Owens) has presently squashed her husband in a hydraulic press, serene madness ("euphoria") is the tone of the tale that is told, "not a confession" but a story of marital dedication and flies in the ointment. The scientist (Al Hedison) craves infinite knowledge, his major breakthrough—a transporter of matter—tests his limits once the experiment splits him in two: One half is a desperate man stuck with insectoid head and limb (a black towel cloaks the offending parts from family members), the other is an elusive housefly with a miniaturized human face crying into the mandibles of a ravenous spider. Why this obsession with insects, asks the suspect's brother-in-law (Vincent Price), as if finally waking up to the Buñuelian air around him. "It's perhaps symbolic of something deep in her subconscious," weakly suggests the police inspector (Herbert Marshall), "no science-fiction enthusiast." Squishy gore on industrial machinery, interiors out of Dial M for Murder, the disintegrated cat's spectral meowing, absurdities offered by Kurt Neumann with such calm as to turn hallucinatory. The Phantom of the Opera serves the bland Montreal household with a lab-dungeon in its bowels, the Strangelove hand is visible. (The climactic unveiling, with the heroine's screaming face fragmented and multiplied by a compound eye, is practically a Warhol silkscreen.) The comedy of images atomically diffused and scrambled in subtle CinemaScope jibes at television, the tragedy of a researcher battling his own clutching arm while scrawling "love" on a blackboard. "It'd be funny if life weren't so sacred." With Charles Herbert, Kathleen Freeman, and Betty Lou Gerson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |