My gray market DVD of this film kindly offers up two cuts, the theatrical and TV versions of the film. I’m not sure what the differences are, but I elected for the latter because it’s probably a bit longer. Made in the ’50s, it’s doubtful the theatrical cut contained anything too objectionable for TV,* so instead it was probably padded out a bit to fit the needs for some standard time slot length.
[*Actually, as we’ll see, this is arguably not true. It may explain why the film didn’t play on TV a lot, which is why I’d never seen it.]
In theaters and drive-ins (probably mostly the latter), the film ran a not entirely taut 65* minutes. However, it was presumably featured as part of a double or even triple bill, perhaps with Gordon’s first film, King Dinosaur. Meanwhile, TV back in those days ran far fewer commercials, which is why episodes of I Love Lucy, for instance, ran 26 minutes in a thirty minute slot. Today, a ‘half hour’ show minus commercials and credits might run about 18 minutes.
[Actually, the IMBD lists its running time as 75 minutes. However, my DVD-R version runs 65 minutes, with the ‘TV version’ but a couple of minutes longer. Considering how attenuated the action already seems at that length, I can’t imagine the film was ever ten minutes longer. If it were, I can’t imagine I’m missing much.]
Still, the very opening of the TV version suggests my thinking is correct, in that it features a time-wasting, not to mention predictably ridiculous, text crawl to set the eeriness of the scene. (Indeed, the matched crawls that bracket the film seem to account entirely for the slightly increased running time.) In going with the ocular theme, Gordon appears to have dug up thirty-year old background art featuring floating eyes with laser beams or some damn thing coming out of them.
Well, this isn’t a good sign.
Before this, though, we get the credits, which are accompanied by a rather unsuitably bombastic score by Gordon’s house composer Albert Glasser. The opening theme, all pounding percussion and blaring horns, writes a check the movie can’t remotely hope to cash. Still, it probably struck the proper note for the manically hopped-up-on-sugar kiddie audiences who saw this on a weekend double feature matinee.
Several of the names in the credits will be familiar to hardcore genre buffs, but two jumped out at me. Lon Chaney Jr., of course, needs no introduction, even if his career was already largely on the skids by this point. For what it’s worth, this is during the period where he’d dropped the “Jr.”
Meanwhile, Paul Frees actually gets a “special voice effects,” credit, perhaps in lieu of an even smaller than usual paycheck. ’50s sci-fi fans will find Frees’ stentorian tones more than recognizable, given the slew of such films he lent his pipes too, often in the role of offscreen radio announcer or suchlike. Given his specific credit here, though, I imagine that his contributions will largely consist of the titular beastie’s groans and grunts.
Meanwhile, you have to like a film that boasts a credit for “Snake Fight Supervision…Ralph D. Helfer Nature’s Haven.” Hopefully, just in case Liz Kingsley gets around to watching this, if nothing else, this means the indicated reptile was not in fact harmed in the making of this sequence.
Meanwhile, Gordon’s one man show credentials are typically burnished with a “Written, Produced and Directed by…” credit, as well as one for “Technical Effects Created by…” (Although given the limitation he worked under, “technically” effects might be closer to the mark.) Meanwhile, Bert wife Flora gets one of her standard Associate Producer credits. It’s easy to make fun of Gordon’s work at times—as I’m about to prove—but there is something endearing about the idea of a guy and his wife making movies together.
Also, it should never be forgotten that making a film in an epic under any conditions, much less the sorts of economic constraints people like Bert I. Gordon worked under. Laughable or not, I’d rather have the option of seeing stuff like Gordon’s in theaters these days than quite a lot of what Hollywood currently churns out for hundreds of millions of dollars. His ambitions may have far outstripped his technical and fiscal grasp to realize them, but hell, from a certain light that only serves to make his films more impressive. (Hopefully) good-natured mocking aside, the fact is the guy created a body of work that helped define a generation of nerds,* and continues to entertain all these decades later.
[*If nothing else, there’s little doubt that Stan Lee lifted the Incredible Hulk’s origin directly from Gordon’s The Amazing Colossal Man. Gordon didn’t seem too pleased by the pilfering the one time I spoke to him (and he was also particularly unamused by the mockery the MST3K boys and sites like, well, this one have given his work), but the fact remains that he had an inadvertent hand in creating one of the 20th century’s most familiar icons.]
Credits dispatches, we now get the aforementioned text crawl. This is worth reproducing in its entirety:
“Truth may be stranger than
fiction but SCIENCE-FICTION
takes you beyond the realm
of truth…into the shadow
world that lies outside the
area of the believable.
Beyond these boundaries of
fact and fiction we now take
you…deep into long
hidden recesses of human
imagination…a strange
and dangerous journey on
which no living man has
ever before dared to venture.
We all know people who
are anxious to accept the
challenge of the unknown…
people that thrive on the
excitement and hazards
created by their imagination
and events…even if it
leads to death!
You will never see a more
frightening monster…and
you will remember this
picture the longest day you
live!”
Huh? “You will remember this picture the longest day you live”? Uhm, do you mean you will remember the picture as long as you live? Something more like that? OK, so the whole spiel is more The Hitchhiker than The Twilight Zone…BUT THAT’S JUST THE WAY WE LIKES IT!
And so, having eaten up a minute or two of that increased running time, we now cut back to the movie.
Our story opens in the picaresque and rural, not to mention fictional and stock footage, village of Guayjorm, Mexico. Here we meet our Americano heroine, Susan Winter (Gloria Talbot). She’s meeting with the regional Governor. It’s pretty clear this is actually taking place in Mexico, because his office sports a large crucifix hanging prominently on one wall.
Given how he asks her plot-specific questions to which he must already know the answers, the Governor is also presumably the local representative of La Oficina de Trama Exposición. In aid of this, the Governor luckily has a years-old yet unwrinkled newspaper (“El Heraldo de Guayjorm”) on hand, one with a headline screaming, “Aeroplano Americano Desaparece / Bruce Barton Perdido en Tarahumare Montanas.”)
From their conversation we glean the backstory: Susan is the fiancée of said Bruce Barton (shades of Bruce Banner), who three years ago disappeared in those remote, desolate Tarahumare Mountains.* She’s obsessively been keeping up the hunt all this time, well after everyone else has given Barton up for dead. Now, she’s managed to scrape together a small expedition to hunt for him. Unfortunately, the Governor’s higher-ups want to squash it.
[*There are in fact Tarahumara—a, not e—Indians in Mexico, but no mountain range by that name.]Again, the Governor proves quite handy in establishing who everyone is, by running down a list of individuals he is clearly already conversant with:
1) Lee Brand, a down on his luck pilot. Unsurprisingly, he’s to fly the group to their destination.
2) Russ Bradford, an old friend of Barton’s and, like him, a scientist. He is, in fact, “a bacteriologist from the New York Institute of Toxicology.”
3) And the real fly in the ointment, Marty Melville (Lon Chaney, Jr.). Melville is an operator with an extremely shady past in stock manipulation, and the Mexican government thinks he’s out to…I don’t know, exploit, in some fashion…suspected uranium deposits in the area where Barton disappeared. He’s bankrolling the search, which raises such suspicions.
This is especially true because Melville has brought along a “position scintillator.” This is, we are told, “a very powerful instrument that can detect uranium deposits, even from the air.” Were I a betting man, I’d say will impressive device will prove to look pretty much like an ordinary Geiger counter.
As to Melville himself, Gordon clearly miscast this part. There’s a reason Chaney Jr. generally, eventually occasionally excelled at, playing either ordinary joes or even mentally challenged characters, like Lenny from Of Mice and Men. He frankly just doesn’t project great intelligence or even slyness at all ably, and having him play this sort of part is a misstep. If anything, it’s worse than when he stiltedly attempted to play an arrogant, aristocratic Count Dracula in Son of Dracula. Indeed, Chaney assays the role with his trademark surly, befuddled vocal delivery and facials expressions. It really doesn’t suit at all.*
[*It goes without saying, of course, that Chaney remains immortal for having played Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man. I’m certainly not trying to beat on him just for the fun of it. Still, nobody’s going to mistake him for Olivier. The fact us that Chaney had a pretty narrow range, and this role lies well outside of it.]During this scene, it should be noted, Melville is downing both Mexican food and (undoubtedly real) beer with gusto. Usually actors hate eating scenes, because retakes mean they have to keep eating food over and over, usually spitting it into a bucket between takes, and also because it’s a continuity nightmare in the making. Chaney exhibits few apparent qualms on either score, however, presumably because a) Gordon wasn’t one for shooting a whole lot of takes, and b) he enjoyed eating and drinking, and here he got to do it on somebody else’s dime.
Anyway, the government is adamant that nobody, especially these folks, head up into those mountains. Suspecting that Susan will not give up so easily, the Governor assigns a local police officer to accompany them as they leave the region. As a result, that means one of the four would-be expedition members will have to stay behind, as Brand’s plane only seats four. This seems less like an intentional plot point than something whipped up on the spot when Gordon realized the plane he had access to in fact wouldn’t accommodate five characters. To be fair, at least he thought of it and attempted to deal with the issue.
A highly dissatisfied Susan takes her leaves, whereupon we cut to the rest of the party. We first spot Bradford. He’s wearing heavy horn rimmed glasses to confirm that he’s a scientist, since walking around the village in a lab coat would be a bit much even for a ’50s sci-fi flick.
Bradford standing before a grocery pagoda, attempting to buy a copy of the American (!) periodical “Sports Afield.” (Call me suspicious, but I’m not sure that was a real magazine.) Since the clerk there doesn’t speak English, he keeps explaining that he wants an American sports magazine. Because Mexicans are apparently kinda dumb, she still doesn’t figure out what he means even after he says it numerous times. This whimsical scene is such a stitch that it goes on for several hours. Er, minutes. The eventual punch line is that she has an American magazine (?), but it’s a lady’s periodical, not a sports one. Waaa-waaa-waaa.
“I’d like an American sports magazine. Oh, you don’t speak English? No problem: I’D LIKE AN AMERICAN SPORTS MAGAZINE!!!“
Wryly cheerful in defeat, Bradford buys the magazine and joins Brand and Melville at a nearby café. I don’t know if a position scintillator can detect scintillating dialogue, but if so it would go downright crazy here:
Bradford, jocularly displaying his purchase: “‘Sports Afield’! You know, I’m going to study Spanish when I get home!”
Brand, jesting in response: “I don’t think you will!”
Ha, ha! Good one. Sadly, Gordon was never nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar.
The guys sit around and yak a bit, establishing, for instance, that they all assume Barton is in fact dead. Susan is the only one keeping the faith. “Love has changed its aspect in her case,” Bradford explains. “There’s a clinical name for it…mania.” Uhm, are we supposed to think Bradford’s kind of a dick? Because I kinda do.
Meanwhile, James Craig, the guy playing Bradford, keeps throwing me. When he’s not wearing his glasses he looks pretty much exactly like Robert Goulet. I kept expecting him to break out and start singing…uh, whatever song Robert Goulet is associated with. In any case, his presence despite thinking that Barton is dead (not to mention his broad, manly frame) announces that he’ll be the film’s romantic replacement for Susan.
At this point Susan comes along, and she angrily informs them of the bad news. They all in pretty blasé fashion decide to continue on without permission, until Susan informs them of their police escort. Brand (who drinks an awful lot for a guy who’s expecting to being piloting a plane soon) shrugs this off, too. Cut to the airfield—well, actually, it’s just a field—where the plane sits. The group, including the cop, exits their car. Sure enough, a quick uppercut from Melville and Bob’s your uncle.
The scene: Hollywood, California. A man, heretofore bored, sits in a darkened theater. Suddenly gazing raptly at the screen, the man realizes his life will never be the same. His name? Coleman Francis.
They get a transmission from the ‘tower’ (unseen, of course—again, the plane was just sitting in a field), telling them to return. Aside from legalities, he warns of dangerous winds around the mountains. Needless to say, they ignore the man. This might be because of their determination to continue, although I suspect it may also be due to the fellow’s, shall we say, not entirely credible Mexican accent. Indeed, Speedy Gonzales would find it a bit suspect. In any case, the Rubicon has been crossed.
Some chatting occurs, such as Bradford indicating his feelings for Susan (just in case we’ve never, ever seen a movie before). Susan reiterates her unshakeable belief that Barton is still alive. Meanwhile, Melville explains his scheme to Brand. Since the government will never license the removal of the uranium deposits, he will instead just file a claim on it (wouldn’t they just, you know, deny it?). Then he’ll sell stock on the holdings, knowing they can’t actually be exploited. To be completely fair, this is actually a plausible scheme, if you assume Melville can get the claim rights. On the other hand, he’s pretty free and easy with the details of this plan and in bragging about gulling the “suckers.”
Some flying footage follows, and then Susan says, “What’s that down there?!” Uhm, generic flyover stock footage of mountains? “It looked like an animal, as big as an elephant!” she elaborates. “There’re no elephants in Mexico!” Bradford laughs. Yes, very helpful, especially since she didn’t claim they were elephants. (Dick.)
They fly on. After a while, the scintillator starts “going crazy.” Man, that thing must be pretty sensitive, what with them flying way up in the air like this. Either that, or nobody in the plane should worry about having kids or bother about long term dental insurance. Indeed, it registers at the top of the scale even on the second, less sensitive setting. Bradford laughs in response. To be fair, though, as a scientist from the New York Institute of Toxicology, he’d have no idea that this could potentially be bad.
Suddenly the plane begins to buck, either because of the aforementioned winds, or the uranium (sure, why not?) or simple plot contrivance. Brand begins to descend, noting that “according to my computations, we’re right near the spot we’re looking for.” Presumably, he means where Barton disappeared. I’m not sure how they would know where exactly that was in this vast area, but anyway.
They continue to be buffeted by the winds, though, and Melville begins to freak out and demand that Brand land. When he doesn’t immediately comply, Melville decides the best option is to slug the guy piloting the plane and try to land it himself, despite the fact that he has no apparent experience flying. Bradford is so impressed with this logic that he leans up from behind and begins to choke Melville with a neck lock.
The plane plummets, longer than you’d think considering how low they just seemed to be. After about thirty seconds of this Susan thinks to try to rouse Brand. At this he snaps alert almost instantly and pulls them out of their tailspin just one second before they crash right into the stock footage front projection. Whew! On the other hand, they indeed land, so I guess Melville’s plan worked. Punching a guy in the face. Is there anything it can’t do?
They exit the plane, as Melville complains (!) about Bradford choking him. “You hurt my back!” he grouses. “Keep your hands off the controls,” Bradford snarls back. And, oh yeah, you might not want to slug the pilot of the already unstable light aircraft you’re in, either. Perhaps that should be mentioned. It’s not, however, even by Brand. Apparently not one to hold a grudge, he already seems to have forgotten about the entire incident.
They look around, each in their own thoughts. Apparently deciding it’s still not the time and place for a lab coat, Bradford instead confirms his scientist cred by lighting up a pipe. Melville begins wandering around with what appears to be a gussied up, chromed out hair dryer. This presumably represents an even smaller, handheld example of one of those magical scintillators. Brand is wondering how they’re going to get the plane out, as the mountains are so close they’ll be hard to lift the plane over them. Only Susan looks genuinely pleased, as her three year ordeal finally seems to be nearing a conclusion.
Things take a turn for the Gordonesque when Bradford suddenly spots a bus-sized lizard nearby. He just kind of stands there and gawps at it, and is even inspired to pull his pipe from his mouth. Then, rather than fleeing (the thing appears to be about thirty feet away from him), he instead calls Brand and Susan over for a look. I’m not sure why they wouldn’t be seeing it, too, since they’re sitting right in the same area.
In any case, by the time they span the several yards over to Bradford’s position, the massive beastie has beat an amazingly hasty retreat. Bradford shrugs, doesn’t bother mentioning the lizard, and decides it was his imagination. (!!) Maybe he’s smoking something other than tobacco in that pipe of his.
Next it’s Melville’s turn to call for the others. His scintillator is going nuts, indicating that nearly ever single rock around them is pure uranium. Even the one he’s holding in his hand. Yes, that has to be a good idea.
That night Susan and Bradford make their plans. Bruce’s last known position (again, how could they possibly know this?) is but a day’s hike away. They’ll set out on the morrow. Melville, however, petulantly refuses. Having found what he was looking in the first half hour of the expedition, he now wants to head home and get his file claimed. Again, I can’t believe that this would be acknowledged, especially with all the legal issues hanging over their heads, including Melville having slugged a government security agent. Anyway, Melville is insistent on leaving, and pissed that Susan actually wants to go off looking for Barton.
Oh, and they hear mysterious roars in the mountains. Bum bum bum.
The next day Susan and Bradford head out. Brand will stay with the plane and try to figure out the best way to maybe actually get the plane off the ground. (By the way, what if they did find Barton alive? Again, the plane only holds four people. Who would stay behind?) Meanwhile, Melville continues to obsess about getting back to file their claim. He even tries to talk Brand into leaving the others behind and coming back later, although one gets the idea that he thinks the first part of that plan more important than the latter part. Brand doesn’t bite, though.
“Well, yeah, sure. You usually do write the script before you shoot the movie. Bert thought it would be faster to write it as we go along, though. And really, what could go wrong?”
Bradford and Susan are seen hiking through the wilderness, as the film suddenly shifts into King Dinosaur territory. Talking scenes might be cheap, but walking scenes are even cheaper, since you don’t have to waste time learning lines before shooting them. With roughly the first third of the film out of the way, we now get to the good stuff. From here on out the film largely consists of ‘walk around, occasionally pause to chat, resume walking, oh hey look there’s a monster over there.’
During one pause, they hear a loud flapping sound. Then they see in a clearing up ahead a dog-sized “rodent of some size,” as Bradford labels it. Yes, dude, it’s a mouse. I mean, it’s gigantic, but c’mon, you can’t recognize a mouse? Then the flapping is explained when a proportionally monstrous hawk lands and eats the mouse. Modern viewers will probably just be freaked out about watching the obviously live mouse get killed, although it’s probably what they fed the hawk anyway.
The special effects here are fairly decent, because the human characters are on a segregated part of the screen, and the mouse and hawk are matted in on another. Gordon’s f/x techniques generally only scraped the bottom of the barrel when the actors had to appear in the same area. Gordon’s ability to composite separate footage on top of each other was highly primitive. The result was generally the transparency of his giant monsters his films, especially The Amazing Colossal Man, are known for. However, matting two discrete shots onto separate portions of the screen wasn’t nearly as difficult.
And so Bradford and Susan stand all of ten yards off from the behemoth raptor as it rends its roughly man-sized prey, gazing on in a surprisingly calm fashion. I mean, yes, maybe running away would draw attention to you, but there’s a tree right next to them that they could hide behind, but don’t. Oh, well, what could go wrong? The show over, though, they do take their leave.
“Why are they so large?” Susan asks. “I don’t know, but I intend to find out!” Bradford responds. He’s a scientist, you know. I’m just a layman, but I’m thinking maybe the uranium has something to do with it. In any case, in order to keep peace in the ranks, Bradford suggests they don’t tell the others about all the giant monsters that appear to be running around. And hey, what business is it of theirs, and anyway?
However, things keep lively when they hear the sound of the plane’s engines. Luckily they appear to have explored all of about two hundred feet from the landing location, and get back there right quick. Sure enough, they find Brand and Melville in the plane, with the engine running. However, Brand turns the motor off; I guess when he sees the others. He explains that he was just testing the engine, but Bradford isn’t sure. He takes the keys and says he’ll keep them. Man, the others sure would be screwed if he got et by a giant predator along the way.
Then they decide to head back out, maybe going even further than a light trotting distance from camp. Brand decides to join them, and a grousing Melville doesn’t want to be left alone. (Sure hope that giant lizard doesn’t show up and smash their super-light aircraft to bits. Of course, Brand isn’t worried about that, since neither Susan nor Bradford elects to fill them in on the giant monsters thing.)
Now the film’s fully in King Dinosaur mode, as the characters stroll around overgrown fields, make camp and occasionally stumble across a monster. Eventually they hear more growling in the distance. When Brand wants to go hunting for meat, Susan and Bradford reluctantly come clean on the whole giant animals thing. Brand, pretty believably, takes this with a grain of salt, and wants to check things out with his own eyes. Only Melville is uninterested in the source of the roars, and stays behind.
The others continue onward, walking around (of course) until they stumble upon a badly composited transparent tarantula. And I do mean stumble across. When they finally notice it, the SUV-sized arachnid is about five feet away from them. Well, it’s not like it stands out or anything. It makes a goofy cartoonish buzzing sound, rather like the fly from, well, The Fly. To be fair, though, it doesn’t say “help me!”
“OH MY GOSH! LOOK!”
“What?”
“ABOUT FIVE FEET IN FRONT OF US! THE GIANT SPIDER!”
“Oh, yeah! I see it now!”
They begin to back away, but then a partially transparent giant iguana appears right behind them. Boy, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. Susan freaks, because she’s a girl, I guess, and runs off. Bradford follows her, and the iguana follows Bradford. Bradford calls for Brand to shoot the lizard, because, I guess, that’s not the sort of thing you’d think of on your own.
The bullets don’t (of course) have much effect, but luckily a similarly huge Gila monster shows up. Naturally, the two lizards set to fighting. Or, rather, are set to fighting by the film-makers, since the iguana is clearly literally thrown upon the Gila monster. Although I think the actual fighting, such as it is, was accomplished with stuffed lizards, not the live ones. Even so, I think Liz Kingsley can scratch this one off her list.
Oh, and I guess the tarantula just wandered off.
Back to camp. Melville uses the whole ‘nearly got killed by giant monsters’ thing to again argue for leaving. And although he’s meant to be cowardly and greedy, well, it’s not like he doesn’t have a point. Brand wants to leave, too. However, he has a contract with Susan and there’s, you know, The Pilot’s Code. Actually, by this point Susan and Bradford are kind of looking like assholes for making the others stay around. I guess that’s just them being ‘determined,’ though.
Bradford decides to distract Melville by explaining that the beasts aren’t prehistoric animals. He instead suggests that they are regular animals made gigantic through some mysterious agency. Anyway, Bradford is now a scientist with a bone to chew. At this point he’s as obsessed with carrying forward as Susan is.
The next morning, and back to hiking. Yeesh. They return to the clearing from yesterday, and find the iguana messed up and close to dying. Not to mention transparent. “There’s no danger now,” Bradford declares, and walks over to cut a hunk of ‘skin tissue’ from the beast. That wouldn’t be my tack, but I’m not a scientist. It should be noted that the compositing work to get both the actor and the iguana in the shot is somewhat short of flawless, although at least Gordon cuts away just before Bradford wanders behind one of the creature’s see-through sections.
Apparently that ate up the entire day, since we cut to another campfire scene. Bradford is examining the lizard’s skin sample under his microscope. Yes, he brought a microscope with him. Why? Shut up, that’s why. “The cells seem to multiply, like bacteria,” he avers. “They split every 22 seconds!” (!!!!!) “It means there’s no limit to the potential size of the animal.” Well, no, actually, it doesn’t mean that. Although operating in a universe without a square-cube law certainly helps.
As noted, talking scenes are pretty cheap, so this one goes on for a while. Brand helps by asking leading questions. If you guessed the pituitary gland comes up, congrats, you’ve seen films like this before. (Just like in a movie with living dinosaurs, you’ve got to mention the coelacanth.) Then, in a stroke of scientific inspiration, Bradford cuts to the heart of the matter. “There must be something here that stimulates them!”
You think?
Bradford has a theory about what might be causing the phenomenon: “Some radioactive substance” is his guess. Gee, what could it be, though? It’s a puzzler, all right. (I don’t want to blow the whole movie for you, but it turns out the culprit is probably the uranium they’ve mentioned like several dozen times by now. I know, it’s quite a twist.)
However, it’s Melville that puts all the pieces together. “If what you say is true,” he whines, “we might grow bigger and bigger!” Rather than being portrayed as a valid concern, however, it is basically played as another sign of Melville’s cowardice. Worry not, however, for Bradford performs some impromptu spitball estimating. “There’s no danger…the body can absorb about five millirankens within a period of one week before it reaches a critical stage.” Well, that proves it.
Suddenly Bradford decides they should leave too. He says they’ll leave at daybreak, but Melville cravenly whines about leaving now. Then we get a shock cut (sorta) to a blurry POV shot from some distance up. This is heralded with a big blare of music, just so we get it. Anyway, it’s amazing that to think that nearly every monster movie made today still uses the ‘weird vision’ POV shot. At least when Gordon did it hadn’t been used several zillion times. Several dozen times, maybe, but not literally hundreds and hundreds of times. Anyhoo, only Susan perceives something, because women be all intuitive and stuff.
Cut to the next morning. The camera pans to three of their tents being occupied, while the fourth *gasp* is not. Needless to say, it’s Susan who has set out alone, because she’s a girl and they’re not very logical. I mean, you know, she had a feeling, and so has to investigate it. Luckily, she manages to find some plane wreckage just a few minutes from camp. Tender music plays, so either she really likes planes, or this is debris from Bruce’s craft.
Then we get another BLURRY POV SHOT FROM ABOVE. Given the angle of this, the possessor of this line of sight looks to be standing about twelve feet directly in front of Susan, but she doesn’t seem to notice anything. Well, until the POV shot starts moving towards her, and then she finally does look up and begins to scream.
