It came from where? From hell. What did? A wild, undead creature of vengeance. Like what, a demon goat with nine legs, shooting fireballs from it's six eyes? Ok, not that wild. Then what is it? A stiff, lumbering kind of tree thing with a face. Oh. From Dan Milner, editor of "Bozo the Clown" amongst many other thing's, co-written and produced by his sound engineer brother Jack, "From Hell It Came" is an uber fifties tour de schlock.
Nothing sucks you into a film like front loading it with lots of expository background dialogue, and, man, do you get a whole bunch here. Kimo (Gregg Palmer) is tied to the ground, about to be sacrificed as punishment for the death of his father, the former chief of the tribe. He is accused of allowing his father to die from American "devil dust", radiation poisoning from a nuclear bomb accidentally dropped nearby due to a typhoon throwing off calculations. In actuality the chief was poisoned as part of a conspiracy between Kimo's brother, Tano (Robert Swan), the new chief Maranka (Baynes Barron), and Kimo's wife, Korey, played by Suzanne Ridgeway, who had perhaps the greatest run of uncredited roles ever, including appearances in "Citizen Kane", "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Gone With the Wind". The tribe seems mostly populated by guy's who look like Teamsters. These exotic natives must hail from the forbidden jungles of Paramus, NJ. Kimo is eventually sacrificed by a knife through the heart, but not before vowing, "I promise you all. I shall come back from hell, and make you pay for your crimes."
Dr. Bill Arnold (Tod Andrews) and the booze swilling, toothy, brillcremed and bekerchiefed Prof. Clark (John McNamara) are living nearby in the jungle as part of an effort to clean up and study the effects of the wrongly dropped nuke. Their horny, middle aged, widowed neighbor, Mrs. Kilgore (Linda Watkins), ends up at their place after spying on the sacrifice and being chased by a tribesman. She speaks with an unidentifiably loose accent best described as "Cocknailian". Only in the picture as some sort of an attempt at humor, she's a completely unnecessary and extraneous character who disappears for most of the movie only to return for the end.
Mrs. Kilgore is an awkward, clunky element in a screenplay made up of almost nothing but. There's a weird abundance of expository detail given throughout the whole film that serves no purpose, including the parentage and backstory of the servant girl, Orchid (Grace Mathews). Everything about the writing feels like a first draft, including the need for a thesaurus. In a couple scenes there's a jarring repetition of word's, and it's the first time a movie has made me actively aware of it's limited vocabulary.
In order to maintain a thematic cohesiveness, the entire cast deliver performances as wooden as the monster who is an actual tree. When combined with the entertainingly awful dialogue ("Sometimes, I could kick her beautiful teeth in.") they have to deliver, to which they add pauses and cadences filed with about as much rhythm as an Ornette Coleman record, what we get is a nonstop parade of gloriously awkward exchanges. When Dr. Bill romances Dr. Mason (Tina Carver), specialist "in dermatology, and the removal of excess scar tissue", during an extended flute scored sequence, he drops this line on her, "I'm gonna fill your head every morning with jungle flower's." Huh? What? His ham handed wooing comes to a close with the perverse and hilarious reveal that they've been next to the tribal burial ground the whole time. It's an awesome moment, too effective to be accidental, and the part of the movie where you see the editorial mind of Milner taking full advantage of the power of juxtaposition.
They discover a stump growing out of Kimo's grave, which eventually grows a face (the stump, not the grave). What follows are scenes of psychotronic perfection as the team investigates the growth, checking it's heartbeat with a stethoscope and- in what must be the sole instance of this in cinema- giving the tree an IV in an attempt to save it after digging it up.
The creature- called "Tabonga"- escapes the laboratory and makes his grand entrance during a fight between Kory and the chief's new lady, Naomi (Tani Marsh). It's an all out, knock down, drag out wrasslin' match that would make the Fabulous Moolah proud. Tabonga looks like a Tree Ent from LOTR if Peter Jackson had made those film's in his backyard when he was 12 (I kinda wish he had). Basically, it's a guy stomping around slowly in a big, blank eyed rubber suit trying not to fall down or bump into anything. He grabs Kory and tosses her into the nearby quicksand, thereby winning this movie the tree monster, catfight, quicksand Triple Crown as well as being the best moment in cinema I've seen all month (granted, we're only a week in). His two timing old lady taken care of, Tabonga heads to the village to wreak his undead, arboreal vengeance on the others who betrayed him.
With it's combination of bad acting, awesome theremin laced score, awful dialogue, atom age science, silly rubber suit monster, restless island natives, girl on girl violence and quicksand, "From Hell It Came" is the Platonic ideal of a fifties B-movie. Pictures like this transcend "good" or "bad" and need to be appreciated as utterly unpretentious fun. If entertainment is the most important goal of cinema, then guys like Dan Milner and other filmmakers from the midnight country of the Late, Late Movie are auteur's of the highest order.
