Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And I'm Jill McCormick, and I regret to inform you right at the start here that the Weird House Cinema tour bus has broken down in Florida, so we are still stuck in the Sunshine State.
That's right. We're continuing our look at Florida movies from the nineteen seventies, movies filmed in Florida, and certainly in the case of today's film, and also nineteen seventy two's Frogs, which we covered previously set in Florida as well. They
capture a certain Florida nis, both real and imagined. And this week we're going to look at the Florida movie par excellence, nineteen seventy one's zat You might know it as the Blood Waters of Doctor Z. Some of you might even know it as Hydra Sickly, as we'll get into it had a number of various releases over the years under different titles, but for the most part, the one that's stuck is zat Z a a.
T This movie has some thematic overlap with other movies that we've looked at, including sort of like Nature strikes Back movies, though this is not exactly Nature strikes Back. This is more of a This is more of a sort of cheap body horror, mad science movie with some ecological themes to it, rather than just like animals attacking for revenge on humankind.
Yeah, it's I guess at heart, it's a creature feature, but like like a lot of films that you encounter like this certain like like the first big independent efforts from from the filmmakers.
It.
It tries to do a lot of things, so it's it's it's a creature feature, but it's also like a science team adventure. It's also you know, it also tries to be in the heat of the night a little bit. It also has this Nature strikes Back element to it. It's also a kind of a hippie folk musical, so it kind of bats itself around a lot, and depending on where you are in the film, you might get something that is tonally different from another portion of the film.
It also has a little bit of overlap with Boggy Creek two and the legend continues. We can talk about some of the similarities as we go on, but I appreciated the similar pompous voiceover narration, though in this case it is the voiceover of a of a crazed, spurned scientist who wants revenge on the world, whereas in Boggie Creek two it's just a kind of I don't know, like the town smart guy who wants to show off all his knowledge about the river.
Yeah. Yeah.
The voiceover narration in this is is sardonic to the max. Like if you took Vincent Price's voice and you were douced it overheat for a little bit until it was it was just extra icky and gooky. That's what you'd have in The Blood Waters of Doctor Z.
The voiceover narration whar's joker makeup?
Yeah?
Now, if you mentioned Boggy Creeker earlier. And I think this is a good point to mention that this film was riffed in a nineteen ninety nine episode of Mystery Science Theater three thousand under the title the Bloodwaters of Doctor Z. And if you're like me, that might be where you discovered the film. And that's a great MST episode. Don't want to take anything away from that, but as I would watch and rewatch that episode, I found that, like a lot of MST episodes that really called me,
there was something in the underlying film. There was an awkwardness to it, a kind of loneliness to it, and I've also grown to really appreciate the flora theness of it as well. So for this episode of Weird House Cinema, this was the first time I watched an unriffed version of ZA, which rented from Atlanta's Videodrome Video rental store.
And you know, ultimately I encourage fans of the MST episode to do the same because, like a lot of MST films, it was really edited, really cut down for time, and so there's there's a lot of stuff that you're missing out on, some really wonky and at times grotesque details and sometimes just ludicrous additions to the film.
This is not of the attack of the Crab Monster's School of Creature feature run time. You know, it's not your sixty three minute abs. This one, I think is oh god, it's actually getting close to two full hours, isn't it.
Yeah, I think it's the it's one hundred minutes long, it's a it's it's plus sized, this one. So you can. You have to set us out a little bit of time for it. And again, the pacing is is at times kind of weird but also hypnotic quelutic at times.
Uh huh.
Now we mentioned the MST episode. I think a lot of people did discover it through that, but the film has had a cult following outside of MST as well, despite only having a limited release in Jacksonville, Florida and New York's forty second Street back in nineteen seventy two.
You had the version we watched. It begins with a statement from the director where he's like people were coming up to be in saying don don You've got to release this movie.
Yes, so yeah, I think people really wanted some sort of a release for a long time, and luckily in recent years it has been available. But yeah, this film, like The Scorpion Fish and the Sargassum Fish, is it's been patient. It knew that it would one day conquer the universe. And it has its super fans, one of which is the Atlanta artist and Jacksonville native our Land, who I know we're both fans of. Have you seen any of our Lands zat pieces, Joe, Oh.
I don't know I've seen a lot of his stuff around town, a lot of you know, restaurants and coffee shops and stuff. We'll have our land pieces up on the walls. I think some of his work also, though I don't quite recall how, was featured in some adult swim shows. I could be wrong about that, but no, I don't know which the z That ones are. I know his piece that's like the divers with the spear guns. Is that z related?
That one might not be. I mean, he's he works Florida into a lot of his pieces, but he did. He did create a number of art pieces that actually feature Zat. He did a show as part of a two thousand and nine screening of the film at the Plaza here in Atlanta, and at least some of the pieces I assume from that show were they used to hang out over at Joe's Coffee in East Atlanta, and I would go there and bring my laptop and work, and I don't know, there may still be some pieces there.
I haven't been there in a spell, but there, you know, images of Zad and he had some spin offs over the years as well, like there was one that was like a real estate that says Za did it again, and then he recently did one at least online. That was a satur Day thing.
It was pretty amusing, very nice.
But yeah, he's apparently a Zat megafan, and you know a lot of people like him out there, you know where you see this maybe when you were younger, and something about about it sticks into your brain and you can't quite get it out.
All right, what's the elevator pitch?
On this film, a lonely mad scientist in Florida hatches a plan to raise an army of giant walking catfish and avenge himself over his colleagues, and also conquer the planet, perhaps the universe, and we're left to follow him and see how it works out.
Let's hear that trailer.
Audio and now coming to this theater. One of the most incredible stories of modern time, Zat Invasion of the Walking Catfish. A crazed scientist, doctor Leopald is convinced he can turn humans into fish. He proves it by transforming himself into a horrible, revengeful killer fish. Za tells it all. You won't want to miss Zat Positively no one admitted during the last fifteen minutes.
Okay, now, you would not have expected a movie like this to have major folk music themes. And I don't know if the trailer audio we just had the folk music in it. If not, maybe we should insert a clip right here, just because like you've got to have this in your head to understand everything that comes after.
Oh yeah, I mean, we can go straight to the music here if you like this. What we're about to hear is is a bit from a song titled World War two Boy, which is a very strange, strange title. But this is from Barry Hodgen and Jamie Defrates. They were the composers, and this is Jamie Defrates performing the song give Us all Right. That's just a clip, but this song is performed in its entirety at the top of the film and it's and I actually love it.
I listened to this song quite a bit, especially in the last couple of weeks leading up to this episode, because you can you can find this on Spotify and various other streaming places. If you just look up Zat Songs or Jamie Defrats, you will find it. There's a B side, and we'll get to the B side track in a bit. But these tracks are featured in the film in full no cuts.
Yeah, so it's almost it's almost a rock opera. I mean not quite, only a couple of songs in the movie, but like it has musical numbers.
Yeah, And I have to say, I mean we'll get into this a little bit when we start rolling through the plot. But yeah, the music. Music always elevates the film. If you have quality music, it can really create dimensions that would not be there otherwise. And I legitimately think that the music and Za, both the folk music and some of the other music will get to does a
great job of that. Like it takes this this sort of awkward, fumbling creature feature and elevates it to this level where it does legitimately get caught up in your brain.
Do you ever hear that story? It was by somebody who worked on Halloween with John Carpenter. It might have been Donald Pleasance who told the story about going to see a preview screening of the movie where the music had not been added in yet and thinking like, oh no, what a disaster, like I'm so embarrassed, and then seeing another cut later when the music had been finished and added in, and suddenly everybody thinks this is a horror masterpiece.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it really does. It can really elevate things to new levels. Though shocking that Donald Pleasance would find embarrassment in a film at that stage of his career, because it's not like this would have been the first the first bad movie he was in.
This come before or after Puma Man.
Oh, I don't recall.
Oh, but either way, there were definitely some Puma Man's
in there before Halloween. All right, Well, we'll come back to more about the music in a bit, but let's start with the screenwriter, or one of the screenwriters and the director, Don bart who lived nineteen thirty through twenty thirteen, so he was very much alive to see the renaissance of ZA, the resurgence of ZA, and in fact, the disc that we watched featured introductory commentary by Don Barton thanking everyone for their support of the creature.
Here.
Yeah, yeah, he shows up right at the top of the film. And I should point out this disc it like it's one of those that doesn't even have a menu in it. You just put it in and it just plays. The only option is play. But it starts with him talking and Don Barton says in nineteen seventy one, my film production company in Jacksonville, Florida, decided that the time was right to make a feature film, meaning this
was his first feature film. He'd only done one other movie before this, which we'll talk about in the second which was a short film. But he says he sat down with his staff to discuss ideas quote, and we decided that our first motion picture should be a creature feature. So this turned in to an idea I think talking with some writers and associates of his about a man catfish creature that terrorizes a small town in his quest for revenge. And then Don Barton says that the initial
theatrical release was very promising. He doesn't elaborate on what exactly that means, but he says that due to unspecified mishaps, the film had been unavailable for like thirty years at the time that it was re released. Though I wonder, I mean, there must have been some way people got it, because they must have gotten a tape of it for Mystery science theater. I'm not sure what.
Yeah, though I think even that there were some issues if I am to understand correctly, like there was there was a situation where a Sci Fi Channel I think at the time aired it, and then Barton's people got in touch with them and there was some back and forth about like the rights, but it eventually got worked out.
Okay, that makes sense. But man, when I was watching this preamble by Don Barton at the beginning of the movie, I kept thinking, who does this guy remind me of his Something about his voice and the way he talks, And then I realized, he reminds me of the TV news host Bill Moyers, who used to do like I think he worked for uh, he did his specials for PBS, and then I think he worked for CBS for a while.
But so like I got that feeling like, oh no, this is like Bill Moyer's introducing a PBS special on ZA that's going to feature interviews with Joseph Campbell.
Yeah, it does have that kind of vibe.
Now, Yeah, we mentioned Jacksonville already and we will mention Jacksonville some more. Bart Barton was Jacksonville based. He was a producer and director. This was his second and last directorial credit, following nineteen sixty nine's They're Out to Get You.
But he was apparently involved throughout his life in the Florida film industry, having co founded the Florida Motion Picture and Television Production Association, and he also produced documentaries, training films, TV commercials, et cetera.
And this is actually more the genre that They're out to Get You was, so they're out to get you. I was really looking for an online copy of it and I couldn't find anything. But if somebody out there has better sleuthing capabilities, please send this our way. This is not an entertainment film. They're out to Get You from nineteen sixty nine is an educational short that I
think was supposed to be shown to retail employees. So it's like one of those harassment or ethics training video workplace videos they show you on the first day at a new job, except it is about shoplifting, and the plot of it is that there's this young criminal, or at least this is the alleged plot. I had to
find a summary. Somebody wrote online there's a young criminal named Tony Alto who steals cars for a living, and he gets caught and sent to prison, and in prison, his cellmate turns out to be this I don't know, this smooth guy who's going to tell him no no, no stealing cars. You're doing it all wrong. Here's what's up shoplifting, and he explains to him why shoplifting is a much better way to make a living by stealing.
And so as you go through the narrative, I think it shows the tricks that shoplifters could be using in your store, or your store or yours.
So it also sounds like it's just in general, a shoplifting training video. Yes, for either side of the equation.
Well, it's kind of like how Dare was supposed to scare kids away from doing drugs, but instead it was just kind of like, here are all the different kinds of drugs you could do.
All right, Well, let's talk very briefly about the additional story credits ron Kivitt and Arnold Stevens and also Lee O LaRue. Not much to report here, though. Ron Kivitt was apparently an investigator on History Channels ancient aliens at one point. So what was he investigating aliens? I guess or pyramids? You know, one of the two. Probably that's the main creative force behind the picture that we're going
to discuss here. At the top, it's time to get into the cast and the film is initially concerned with only one human being and devotes a good twenty something minutes to just him, and that is our signature character, our main character, doctor Kurt Leopold, played by Marshall Grower. Now this is his one and only film role, and for a long time I assumed that he only did
the physical performance that we're seeing. Marshall Grower and somebody else is providing that just overly sardonic voiceover that we were talking about that again is just like Vincent Price turned up to eleven Vincent Price without any humanity left in it at all, you know, the voice of just an overacting demon. But he apparently did the narration as well.
Leopold the character, the human character never speaks camera, not a single time, but we have just this voiceover at length describing what he's planning to do, what he's doing, what you know, his ultimate aspirations are. It's a lot of fun. But I would say Marshall Grower is just delightful in this film because the voiceover is just so rich,
it's just so overdone. And then physically he has this weird combo of sinister awkwardness and this kind of outsider sadness, which when you throw in the sort of film quality of Zat, it feels like you're watching a window into someone's personal hell.
You know, doctor Leopold is a human with the personality of a car that's having maintenance problems. He's having trouble accelerating, he's releasing dark, foul smelling exhaust like he needs to get his catalytic converter replaced. But also the thing that I realized about him, there's a scene early in the film where he's walking along a beach, but he's not
dressed for the beach. He's wearing long slacks and a shirt tucked in, and his head's hanging down in this kind of like sad like puppy dog way, except he's he's a little he's more drab than a puppy dog. And you know, there's this acoustic guitar strumming in the background, and he's just this beacon of shabbiness. In some shots he's giving off strong Harry Dean Stanton fumes.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good comparison that kind of drawn Haggard appearance.
Yeah, but on the other hand, he has a haircut that doesn't quite match because I don't know how to describe as his haircut. It's very strange. It's kind of messy and moppy in the front, but also to make it weirder. So it's a haircut that I think I've basically only seen on women before. It's a cut style that kind of puffy up in the back and raises up toward the back or the crown of the head, and then goes flat down toward the front. Do you know what I'm talking about.
I'm having a hard time picturing his hair in my head. All I picture is that face and then later that bod.
Which we'll get too.
Well. Anyway, he's a profound screen presence.
IMDb does not list birth and death dates for Grower, but I was looking around and I think I found him as being listed. Is buried in a cemetery in Jacksonville, and he lived nineteen twenty two through nineteen ninety one. And if I have the right guy here, and I'm I'm pretty sure I do, he was pretty active in the Jacksonville theater so and I would not be surprised if that's where Ultimately a number of these actors come from. Actors that in many cases have no other movie credits listed to them.
Thinking about this guy being active in Jacksonville theater got me off on a tangent that I actually think about a good when we're watching these B movies, especially locally produced B movies, movies that are, you know, not a product of la but you know, come out of Florida or somewhere else in the country. And it got me thinking about how acting talent translates across from stage to screen and the disconnect that can occur when somebody spans
these two worlds. Because I was thinking about a story where a longtime close friend of mine, he used to do some local theater directing in Tennessee, and he was at one point directing. This was years ago, but at one point he was directing an adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, I think, and he ended up working with this actor, who, according to him, was just magical on stage, you know, one of the best actors he had ever
worked with, and was spellbinding. But we found out this guy had also been in a few movies and I don't recall the exact titles, but they were just like Z grade horror movies, you know, Chupacabra Rampage nine or something like that, And so we watched these and this amazing local theater actor was, you know, just not especially
impressive in a direct video horror context. And I remember having a kind of revelation at that point that like, oh, you know, stage talent and screen talent are not always interchangeable,
and context really matters. Like somebody who can be a very good actor when they've got good material to work with, Like a lot of the people who do these Z grade horror movies are probably a lot of times doing Shakespeare or something, you know, in local theater, or they're or they're they're doing Tennessee Williams plays or something like that. But then when you put them in in a catfish monster movie, the whatever talents they've developed for those other
acting contexts just don't really translate. But there's a good chance in any given B movie that there are plenty of members of the cast who are no names in the film world, but they're like the best actor in their local theater group and their use to doing Shakespeare or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, I guess there are so many different ways you can cut it. I mean, on one hand, it's the difference between the stage and being told by a director, Yeah, we're filming this next scene in the basement of this building. Or just walk on the beach for a little bit. Yeah, now, I don't know what your motivation is, just you know, just just walk on the beach and we'll fill you in a bit. We're still writing that part, you know, stuff like you can
imagine the distance between the two projects. On top of just how you know, colossal and undertaking any level of film is not to take anything away from a stage production, which of course is also a colossal undertaking in so many regards. But but yeah, yeah, the tools that aide you in one dimension might not aide you as well without some tinkering in the other.
Yeah, certainly true. But I mean, just I think it's important that people should always keep in mind if you are a fan of z grade horror movies and the kind of stuff we talk about on this show, should always remember that whenever you're watching one of these films, there's a good chance that the actor who is completely failing in front of you right now is actually great in some other context.
Yeah, Now, Leopold will eventually turn into a monster and will detail that at length. But when he is a monster, he is played by someone else. The monster is played by Wade Popwell, who lived nineteen forty eight through two thousand and six. This was his only film role, and he apparently answered a newspaper call for tall actors who were also experienced scuba divers.
Oh yeah, this was a funny thing I read as one of the mini trivia facts claimed about this movie. I guess I'll cite several of these throughout the episode. There are a number of interesting facts that are claimed on the IMDb page for this movie that are unsourced, so I can't verify them, but at least the claim
is that he was recruited through a newspaper ad. Like you say, it was basically like, we need a really tall person who's going to play monster, and they got like tons of responses, like people were Florida was into this.
All right. The next acting credit to highlight here, Gerald Cruz played marine biologist Rex. He doesn't have a last name as far as I know. This was his only film role, which ultimately surprised me because I thought he had a nice screen presence in this as the African American Marine biologist who is the first to realize that something is wrong.
Yeah, this movie does something that a lot of these creature feature nature strikes back type movies do, which is there's somebody who's like the voice of reason, you know, the cooler head who's putting together the evidence while everybody else around them is just sort of like reacting erratically
and emotionally. And he plays the cool head in this movie, like he's the person who's out there saying like, oh, there's pollution in the water, and oh, here's this report of a catfish and this wound on the victim looks like a giant catfish claw mark. I think he at one point concludes, I'm not sure that lines up with reality, but like that's the role he plays in the movie,
and he's set opposite. For example, this sort of like redneck sheriff who's always got a piece of straw hanging out of his mouth or I guess a piece of hay, and he's always like, well, I don't believe in monsters.
Yep, yep.
And that is Sheriff lou Krantz played by Paul Galloway who lived nineteen twenty three through twenty fifteen. Like everybody in this wasn't in tremendous much else. But he played garage man, which I assume is a bit part in the in JD's Revenge from nineteen seventy six in New Orleans crime drama starring Glenn Turman and Lewis Gossip Junior. In this film, however, yeah, he plays the small town
sheriff who is lazy and largely incompetent. Yeah, but in the later portions of the film shows a little bit of hustle, but not quite enough.
He's one of those characters who is not the antagonist of the film. He's not a bad guy, but he's just sort of a he's a roadblock. He's just sort of getting in the way of what needs to happen happening.
Yeah.
Now, another thing I should point out is that this is one of those movies where you see a few repeats during the credits. For example, Paul Galloway here, who plays the sheriff, he was in the cast, but he
was also a unit manager. And then I saw in the credits that Ron Kivett, who was one of the writers of the film, was also the technical director and did some of the costuming, And I think there were a few others like this, so it's not all the way to Neil Breen or Coleman Francis Tire where the directors also getting credits for catering and event security and stuff. But there is some repetition going on, all right.
A couple of other actors that we'll mention. Sannah Ringhaer plays Agent Martha Walsh. Dave Dickerson plays Agent Walker Stevens. Both of these actors these were their only film roles, but these two will come back to them. There are Moulder and Scully and that they work for a shadowy organization known as in Pit.
Yeah, they get called in by Rex, the marine biologist. I could not have told you these characters' names for me. They were just Inpit Agent one and Inpit Agent two.
Yeah.
Now another character that the character's barely worth mentioning him. There's a deputy sheriff in this, but it's played by an actor by the name of Rich Valerie, who lived fifty two through twenty eighteen. Was only in eight films, but they included small roles in Jaws three, The Road to Welville, and Knight of the Hunter.
Well, he was in Knight of the Hunter.
Wait that Night of the Hunter Joe, the nineteen ninety one made for tv Knight of the Hunter starring Richard Chamberlain and featuring Burgess Meredith and Ray McKinnon in a small role.
Okay, that would make sense. Now for him to have been in the original Night of the Hunter, he would have to have been I guess three years old when he starred in it. The original Night of the Hunter is a scary movie, man, talk about spellbinding actors. That that is one of the all time greats for me in terms of a screen presence that you cannot take your eyes off of. Robert Mitcham in that movie is scary as hell.
Yeah, But what if we remade it in the early nineties with Richard Chamberlain in the role? Okay, that's supposedly awful. Okay, Now that's enough with the cast. That's enough with the humans and the monsters. We need to talk just a little bit about the music and then the next few people of note are responsible for the music of that. And the music of that is pretty great, even if it's a bit all over the place as well, which
is kind of suitable. It encompasses more traditional late sixties early seventies film score work, which some of that I suspect is stock music, but then it also has like folk rock, it has ambient synth in there. Yeah, there's some uncredited stock music in there, per IMDb by Trevor Duncan. So it's kind of all over the place, but there's some some really interesting stuff in there.
I was not really won over by the electronic music in this one, which mostly just took the form of like kind of painful, high pitch noises and screeching.
Oh really, I I ultimately really liked that, That's what I recall. Yeah, well, it is like that. It is kind of noisy at times. It kind of gets into that Doctor X territory where you know we discussed in that film there are these these these scenes that have ambient mad science noises in the background. It sounds a lot like it is some manner of like modern post industrial electronic score, and so Za definitely has that vibe going on. But I actually really liked it. It's in
my opinion, I thought it was pretty effective. It's cynthy kind of noise ambient and the electronic music like this in the film, and I suspect some of the background.
Electronic Weirdness is the work of Jack Tamil, a Floridian synth musician, and if you look him up on Spotify and other digital platforms like that, you'll find some rather haunting nature ambient recordings that he's done, such as Voices of the Everglades of Everglades State Park and Gator Bellows in the Everglades, both the collaborations.
With James T.
Miller.
Okay, but he also put out some excellent space music in the nineteen eighties and nineties, including The Referee Has Vanished from nineteen eighty six, Meditative Massage from nineteen ninety two, Cynthist I think it is from nineteen eighty two, and.
Then well that's a religious affiliation. Honestly, I am a synthist.
And then there's a nineteen eighty album he put out titled Electroacoustic like Electro Slash Acoustic, which was released on Spectrum Records. I couldn't find any of these available in the normal places online, but I did find a YouTube upload that consists of Electroacoustic The Referee Has Vanished and sounds from Zat's audio, and you can also looks like you can still pick up electroacoustic used on vinyl. I was listening to it. It's pretty good. I enjoyed it.
Also not surprising the number one YouTube comment on that track that I mentioned. It's our land chiming in and saying yeah, thank you for putting this.
Comment with his real name. Yeah.
If you know another Jack Tamil track you can look up on band camp. There's a comp titled Escape from the Cage Volume two Into the Underworld, originally released by Oracle Music in nineteen ninety. If you look that up, he has a track on there. It's called Imber Days, and I thought it was rather nice. Anyway, that's Jack Tamil. That's the electro you know, synth noise background that you hear. But again, uh, the the folk music that comes to us from Barry Hodgen and Jamie Defrates and and their
story is kind of interesting as well. According to the blog Bill Ectric's Place, Bill is an ocala based writer and blogger in Florida. Defrates lived in Jacksonville at the time, and he was a traveling musician, having supposedly opened for the likes of Willie Nelson, janis Ian Little River Band, you Know, et c. Various people that were making the rounds in those days. And he ran a recording studio in Jacksonville and is still active.
I looked him up.
He has or had a website. Some of these guys, their websites kind of come in and out. But yeah, Jamie defrates. You can look him up on on Spotify and you can find the music from ZA. It's pretty, it's pretty nice.
Interesting. Well, Rob, I regret having having yucked your your your delicious synth music, or maybe I should give it another shot. I just recall when I was watching it, there was frequently like a just a high pitched noise that was starting to kind of make me feel a little woozy.
Well, but then again, you have to remember, like that's kind of what the music is supposed to do in a film like this. It's to build that sense of unease and an alienation and Floridian weirdness.
Well, I'm there, Seth.
Give us just a little taste of some of that Jack Tamil music before we move on to the plot. All right, Joe, let's get into the plot of this baby.
Yes, let us tell the story of a man who dreamed he was a catfish or was he a catfish dreaming he was a man.
A true tale of metamorphosis of mythic proportions.
Absolutely so the movie starts, of course, the version we watched has that great intro from Don Barton again with the Bill Moyer's energy for me. But then it gets right into the film with stock footage. I doubt this was shot for the film. It looks like something from a nature documentary where it's showing off sargassum seaweed as we have just discussed on the core episode from yesterday, and a real nice prickly looking fish, and we get
voiceover that at first I thought was a poem. It really sounded like he was reciting a poem because he says, sargassum the weed of deceit, sargassum fish, mighty hunter of the deep. Okay, so that's almost like a close and near rhyme there, so you think he's developing a poem. But then the stuff he starts saying after that doesn't
really fit. He starts saying, what an inspiration you have been in my plot, your life of hiding, waiting, stalking your prey at just the right moment attack, I love you?
What are you?
The poetry police, Joe, you're saying this isn't poetry.
Oh, I don't know. I mean what I was trying to figure out was whether the movie thought it was a poem or right, I was just talking. I mean, yeah, anything, anything's a poem.
If you say it is, it is.
It is such a startling start to this picture, because again it's clearly stock footage, and the voiceover is just amazing. And I do love the idea of somebody on early nineteen seventies forty second Street in New York City walking into this picture, you know, thinking they're getting some sort of a sleazy monster movie, and they're hit with documentary footage right off.
The bat, and just the guy who sounds kind of like Vincent Price telling this fish that he loves it.
Yes, I love you, and then he goes on to admire various other species for minutes at a time. You know, the shark, I admire you. Soon I'll swim with you. They'll be afraid.
Yeah, very good. And the scorpion fish an objectively ugly, beautiful fish, like a fish that is beautiful in how ugly it is. And he's like, you are gorgeous. They think I'm insane, they're the ones who are insane.
Yeah, it's pretty tremendous.
Another thing that's cool, though, is that actually the stock footage they select, I don't know what it's originally from, but whatever nature documentary it is, they got some cool footage because monster Science moment. Here, they catch a sargassum fish eating another fish whole, like just spreading its mouth wide and clamping down over this fish's body, and the fish that it eats is almost as big as the sargassm fish itself.
This reminds me that in the actual science episode we recorded yesterday about this organism, I neglected to mention that apparently, sometimes when it eats another fish, since you can actually see the prey inside of it through its am I translucent skin.
Oh yeah, so yeah, I've seen that.
Yeah, so that's so wonderful.
I love it. I don't want to be it like doctor Leopold here, but I do like it a lot.
Oh. I don't know if we mentioned that's how he follows up. So he's looking at the sargasm fish and he's saying I love you, but then he says, I hope I'll be a good imitator.
Yes, Basically he begins to lay this out through you know, ultimately like twenty minutes of narration, that he is going to draw inspiration perhaps behavioral, but also genetic inspiration from these organisms as part of his master plan.
I think you already mentioned this, but we should stress it's like twenty three minutes into this movie before you see a human being who is not a mad scientist. Right up until up until then, it is exclusively doctor Leopold looking like Harry Dean Stanton, shuffling around on the beach and through the ruins of a marine and like stock footage of animals from the sea, and then a monster just sort of rambling around.
Yeah.
Most films, you know, they'd probably start off with like a teenage couple meeting they're relatable, and then they're killed by a monster or something like that. Not this film. No, it's just it's doctor Leopold and stock footage of fish from the get go.
We do get a teenage couple fooling around. Later in the movie, when the monster is on a rampage, there's this this young couple that are like on a porch swing and they're making out and the guy's like, I don't believe in monsters. And then, of course it's a good.
Hour and a half into the picture you get what is probably an opening segment in most films.
Yeah, but yeah, how to describe that there is a powerful emotional resonance to the opening of this film when you first see doctor Leopold wandering around. I mean, I guess we've already tried to describe it nine different ways. But yeah, it's it's Harry Dean stanton Ish, it's it's shabby, it's drab, it's it's lonely. He is failing, and he is going to do science to fix it. Oh and of course we should mention that while we see him wandering on the beach, this is when the World War
two Boy song is playing. And one of the lines in the song that is just a kiss on the top of the head from the Sun God. It's the part where he says Sachet, sachet through the sargasm.
Yes, I could go on and on about just how wonderful that song is, because the lyrics at once, the lyrics sound like lyrics that were composed after half watching part of the film, you know, just sort of like trying to loosely figure out what the plot is like it refers to your your calendar research, which seems like a strange description of what appears to be going on
in the in the motion picture. But also it ultimately, like I don't know, it ends up giving Leopold more depth because he's talking about you know, you know about you know, how he's wanting to change himself outside you change yourself to be inside what you already see you know, which I guess is kind of.
Like you know, which is a catfish.
Yeah, he's already a giant catfish.
I don't know.
It ends up working for some weird reason. It just works very well.
The true catfish was inside you all along.
Yeah. Uh no.
So I've got a question about how a filming location here matches up with reality. I don't know if you have any insight on this, but I'm wondering. So, after we see Harry Dean Stanton here wandering through this desolate beach landscape while the World War two boy plays, he wanders into a place that looks to me like the ruins of an off brand sea world, like if a marine world type attraction was abandoned for years and just
you know, things collected all over it. As the seasons came and went, that's what we'd be seeing that he walks through. I know that part of this movie was filmed at Marine Land of Florida, but from what I can tell, I think it was actually in operation at this time, not like an abandoned ruin. So I'm not sure exactly what we're seeing.
Yeah, Like there's a scene where he's walking around or through what looks like what's previously a tank of some sort and now it's just empty and as leaves and clutter in it. I guess my thinking is twofold on this. First of all, just because Marine World was up and running didn't mean there were parts of it that maybe had fallen into disuse or weren't being used, you know,
the outskirts of the facility, that sort of thing. Like I think if you go to any play, you go to your local zoo or botanical garden, there's going to be a part of the property where you could probably film a scene for a monster movie, you know. Yeah, on the other hand.
It could just be off season. I mean, maybe it looks that bad just as the winter.
Well that's the other thing, Like we have to remember that Florida is Florida, and it is a jungle, so you know, we're talking about just like a few months without anybody paying attention to the maintenance of a place, and it'll look like absolute ruin, you know, which I think is one of the appeals of certain Florida movies as well, the Florida Ruins.
Yeah, okay, so I'm gonna guess that this is actually part of Marine Land, Florida, which is a place that is operated off and on and I think was also a filming location for Revenge of the Creature, a very strange, a very strange Florida movie. Indeed.
Yeah, probably the best Creature from the Black Lagoon movie, if one can say such a thing about Creature from the Black Lagoon.
It's the sequel to Creature from the Black Lagoon, and I think it's the one where the creators have realized that, like, oh, in the original Creature, the humans were definitely the bad guys, right, Like, the creature didn't do anything, it was just living in its own place, and then humans showed up and they were like, let's shoot at it. And we're supposed to think that the humans are good for just going to a place where a monster lives and killing it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean the Creature was the character that we we all relate to and associate with, and I think a certain similar thing is going on in this film as well. I mean the creature from the Black Lagoon, or that they are both literally fish out of water. You know, they're they're they're they're they're literally outsiders, and you know that's that's the sort of thing you often relate to in a film like this.
Though, I will say I will make a strong distinction, which is that I fully side with the creature because he's just hanging out in his place and they come there and start attacking him. Right, that is the aggressor that that is trying to work out scores in a way that is not productive. He could have, like, if he was mad at his former coworkers, coworkers, he could have written them a letter saying like, here's what I
think are our unresolved issues. Instead, he's like, no, I'll turn myself into a catfish critter and and come to your house and kill you.
Right.
He's very clear on this. It's not just I want to restore ecological balance, No, No, he wants to basically all but wipe out the human race, hunt the remaining humans for sport, and to proclaim himself ruler of not merely the Earth, but the universe. So he has some grandiose plans here.
Doctor Leopold, you are asking for more than as your do. Yes, But of course, so we see doctor Leopold still in human form at the beginning. He goes back to his lab, which I think are probably some some places at Marine Land of Florida. I'm not sure, but there are places with like hooses attached to the ceiling and stuff like that kind of equipment that you would imagine might be in an actual marine biology lab or I don't know, an animal marine veterinary clinic or something.
Yeah, And I think they cobble together a lot of stuff too, like there's a black light, some black light stuff back not black light darkroom equipment in the back, and went at one point, you know, so clearly you know, they took some initial clutter, they filled it up with some other technological stuff, but it ends up looking good. I felt like it. I feel like this is an adequately lonesome and mad scigence.
And see layer, Yes it is. It is very dingy. It is very damp. It is very dank. It is a it doesn't look like a place you'd want to sleep. And of course we get some classic mad scientist dialogue while he's fiddling around with his equipment. He he says, the formula. They all laughed at my little gym zat and we find out that Z is a. It's like a formula. It's like Z sub a A sub t.
I think, yes, yeah, I believe so.
Okay, So it's like a. It's a. It's a mathematical or chemical formula of some kind. But he tells the through the voiceover. He says, it's very powerful. They'll have fish the size they've never seen before, walking fish who like human flesh.
Okay.
So he wanders around the labs a lot. He stops to tickle an octopus, which I liked. He just reaches into the tank and kind of like touches it a little bit, and then he starts doing voiceover about this one species of catfish, the walking catfish, which according to this is another one of those claims that was listed on IMDb unsourced. But according to the claims of the Kivott, one of the writers, he got the idea for this movie by reading an article about this species of catfish,
the so called walking catfish, or Clarius betracus. But anyway, this voiceover about the catfish, I wondered if this was actually written for the film, because it sounds like he is reading from an encyclopedia or a field guide entry, and I was wondering if somebody could find the text. But I was googling sections of what he says in quotes, and I came up with nothing. But I wonder maybe I'm just not looking for it quite the right way.
But then he goes on, I rant about how there's a problem with the walking catfish, which is that it is too small, and he tells it that you are not ready to battle humans. But then he says, soon the whole world will know and respect us. And so I'm a little confused about his plan because he's he's going on about how all the humans will be killed, but then he also says that they will finally respect him. So I don't know, Maybe it's that they'll respect him before they are killed.
Yeah, I guess at the very least. But also, you know, he does allude to the fact later on that some humans will be alive, possibly so maybe those are the ones who will respect him.
All right, Well, no more screwing around. It's just time to inject myself with the giant needle. And that's what he does. He grabs this needle that is huge. It's like a you know, it's like a feather duster sized handle, you know, So it looks like it was designed for saltwater crocodiles, and it's full of some kind of green gatorade looking liquid and he just jams it straight into his arm.
But that's just phase one of the transformation. First is the injection.
Yeah.
Next comes the kind of a baptism.
Yeah. Yeah.
He's got to get into a tank. So he gets undressed. He's wearing these huge blue box or shorts with his butt kind of hanging out and that's funny. And then there's this pool of water, and I think there is some blood mixed in with the water. And then there are these Geiger counter sound effects in the background. So I think, suppose something is supposed to be radioactive this pool of water may be it could be that it's
supposed to be heavy water. Because later on some characters talk about how his laboratory, doctor Leopold's laboratory used to do heavy water experiments.
Ties right into previous episodes of Stuff to Bout Your Mind.
Yeah, I mean, as we discussed in that episode, as soon as you get into a pool of heavy water, you turn into a catfish creature. So the science checks out. But then he gets himself into this kind of winch gurny thing. I don't know how best to explain this. It's like it looks like a device that would be used for airlifting comatose dolphins.
Yeah. Yeah, it's fittingly awkward and ritualistic. It's an unsettling scene because he doesn't just climb in. Yeah, he lowers himself into.
It this thing.
Yeah, so he gets in the gurney, he lowers himself into the water with a rope, and then we get electronic beeps and Geiger counter clicks and then finally he emerges and he is the creature, and then we will never want We will never again the rest of the movie. See the actor who plays Leopold, he's just gone.
That's right. All we have is this this fabulous monster.
So it's not like a ware catfish movie where he's changing back and forth. He's just he's just this creature permanently.
Yeah, And I think this is one of the things I always that always capture my imagination imagination about the film is that instantly we look at this and we're like, oh, sweetie, you have you have really done it?
Now?
This is this is not good. But he has different thoughts about it.
Oh yeah, So as soon as he gets out of the water, he looks at himself in a mirror and he you think for a second he's upset, but but no, he turns it around. He says nothing at all like a catfish, but it's utiful. And what is he talking about? Well, I would say that he looks like a cross between Greedo and Alf, except he's got a sort of like dirtier texture than either one of them. So it's like if you cross Greedo and Alf, but then have that creature fall into a puddle of mud and dead leaves
that get stuck to him. And then he's also got green fur around certain parts of his upper body. I think it's the parts where the sort of shirt part of his suit comes together, because it's similar to the white fluffy parts of a Sanda suit.
Yeah, he looks a little bit like the Grinch at times, you know, and he has kind of like Grinch physique.
Yes, he does. That's a very good comparison. I didn't think of that. Some parts of his body have a kind of peter pan garment shingled leaf texture, or maybe the Green Giant has some clothes that look like this, the shins in particular. But also he has a snout that ends in a leech mouth. Well, it's kind of like a leech mouth. It's like a red circle with teeth in the middle, but they're not those circular leech like teeth. They're more just kind of like a dog's teeth with canines.
It is not even remotely articulated though.
Like no no, no, painted on teeth basically, and according to the writer Ron Kivett, this is another one of those IMDb trivias. The monster has this mouth that looks kind of like a leech's mouth because in an earlier version of the script, he was supposed to suck blood out of his victim, so he was going to be a vampire catfish monster. But I think they scrapped the
sucking blood, but the costume was already made, I suppose. Okay, so he's transformed and then we get to a part that a legitimate laugh out loud part of the movie, which is when he goes to his big to do list on the wall. He's got this wall, it's like this giant disc shaped wall calendar that he's got his upcoming tasks written on. And we see him go up to the cell on this calendar labeled self transformation and he crosses it off, like oh, there's one thing off
my to do list. And then the next item on the list is another instance of the word transformation, but it is next to a drawing of the outline of the state of Florida, and this drawing is labeled fla period, which is the correct AP styling of abbreviation of Florida. Which makes me think we may have a journalist decorating this set, because I don't know if you remember, I mean that we used to have to know AP style when we were writing for How Stuff Works.
And yeah, yeah, I still, I mean it's hard to shake.
Yeah, everybody just uses the postal abbreviations now, or maybe they didn't have the postal abbreviations in nineteen seventy one. I don't actually know.
We at any rate, this is the calendar research that Jamie defraits was referring to. Yes, And I don't know, Joe. I think this is just how you had to do things before modern project management software, right, have to keep track.
You just had to have a.
Giant circular calendar chart on the wall taking up enormous real estate in your mad science layer.
Yeah, and you had to.
Draw pictures of the state that you're going to transform. So he draws Florida transformation. I guess of Florida. Another hilarious thing about this is that next to the drawing of Florida, there's a label of the ocean, and it's just labeled Atlantic Ocean. But like, who was going to be confused? Wasn't he just making this for himself?
Well maybe he wasn't sure. You know, after the transformation, you know, his brain might be a little foggy.
He needs lots of visual that's a good point. Yeah, Like he couldn't predict his future mental state, so he's like, maybe I will be confused and I will need to relearn geography.
At any rate. It looks, it looks weird, and I like it. I actually made a Christmas tree ornament based on it. At one point.
Oh, that's good. So the Leopold catfish monster goes out on the town. He goes out equipped with a spray bottle and just starts spraying nature, I think with the ZAT formula. So the sprays snakes and frogs, and he sprays reads. At the water's edge. He goes swimming and then uses the spray bottle underwater to spray an octopus and a crab. You see him literally with the spray bottle like under the water, squeezing it.
And now, yeah, so we have some underwater photography going on in this sequence and then in some sequences to come.
And I don't know if you noticed, Joe, but we have some very clear underwater sequences here, and I believe that's because they were filming in the various springs of Florida, which even today they're not as clear as they used to be due to environmental reasons and runoff and so forth, which is depressing, but even now, very clear waters and back in seventy one, yeah, perfect place to shoot your monster movie, even if you were doing so on a budget.
Oh okay, yeah, I should have noted that they really did not look like the cloudy, stagnant pond water I would imagine in most of North Florida.
Yeah.
So, yeah, we are twenty three minutes into the film before we finally introduced non leopold humans and actual dialogue one keric human character talking to another human character.
Unbelievable. So here we.
Introduce the sheriff and Rex, the marine biologist. And if it's not clear at this point, it becomes clear that they were sort of going for in the heat of the night thing here. This is based on a novel. Nineteen sixty seven movie directed by Norman Jewison. I saw a small town southern sheriff played by Rod Steiger teaming up with an African American homicide detective from up north played by Sidney Poitier. And yeah, that is nowhere near in the Heat of the Night in terms of serious
drama and cultural commentary. But it seems to be like that's what they were going for here. They were thinking, Hey, what if it was like in the Heat of the night, except there was also a giant catfish.
Yeah, this is something we've seen in a number of these other ecological monster movies from the seventies. They also seem to try to inject some social commentary in there. It's often kind of light and not super deep. But yeah, I think that is probably what they're attempting. Is Rex the marine biologist also supposed to be from out of town. I don't recall if that was the case, but.
I don't remember if it's expressly stated, but it feels implied that he's not from around here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's a general suggestion that there's this rigid, parochial, local white conservative infrastructure that does not process the introduction of knowledge about pollution causing monster attacks, being it does not incorporate that information well, and it sort of requires the expertise of somebody who provides a
different perspective. And so it's got in this case, an African American scientist who may or may not be from out of town, but at least has reacted to that way. And of course, as we said earlier, the redneck sheriff and this is literally chewing on a hay stalk when we first meet him, and generally seems to be derisive of the concept of science and expertise.
Yeah yeah, he's kind of a Floridian wigum from the Simpsons.
Yeah yeah. In fact, the sheriff there are a lot of people in this movie that the sheriff shows he does not respect, and that includes hippies, the press. At one point we have a reporter who's trying to cover the issue, but the Sheriff's just like somebody ought to smash you flat. And then of course he's not fond of out of towners scientists. I think he represents southern cultural rigidity.
But that's enough human stuff. Then we come back to Leopold once more.
That's right, Leopold. He comes back to the lab after he's been out there spraying stuff, and he goes up to another thing on his big wall calendar and he says, mats in your days are numbered again. I think this is voiceover, and we have no idea who Matson is. But I think the point is he's got a grudge against some scientists who he worked with who told him that his theories were too extreme. I think this other scientist told him he was taking it too personal and
he didn't like that. So he's going to get his revenge.
Yeah, and this is where you begin to I mean, it's already been an awkward transformation. We've watched him move around za the month. I mean its name's not Zat sometimes I think of him as that, though again Za refers to the chemical, not the monster. The monsters just Leopold, Yeah, the giant fish. But he moves around so awkwardly, certainly on land. It's really hard for me to buy that
this is better than your human form. And in the water, Okay, I guess he's marginally better in the water than a human would be, but it's already I mean to going kind of rocky. And then he's like, you know what, I also, revenge is part of my plan. And then it's like, so he's not only going to attempt to unbalance the ecosystem and bring upon a new age of fish, he also has some petty revenge agendas in there. He also needs to commit murder crimes.
Oh, he's got several. He gets sidetracked on a lot of stuff. So, yeah, he's got revenge murders. And then at some at some point later on, I think he becomes lonely and he wants he wants a fish wife.
Yeah, he goes the classic of Frankenstein's monster route, and yeah, he wants a companion. And so that's addition, you know, it's just the budget on this plan is just getting blown out of proportion, right.
He decides he needs to at the last minute add in a bride of catfish action item, and that that's how things really go off the rails. But so at first we just see him creeping around on various people. He creeps on Rex, the marine biologist, while Rex is out taking samples of nature. He creeps on a woman who's painting beside the lake. He creeps on a family while they're fishing, and then he ambushes them, sort of flips over their boat, and I think kills the dude.
And I think the dude who was fishing was one of the scientists who doubted him.
Yeah, yeah, that seems to be the case. One of the problems is that we get less and less narration from Leopold as we go, Yes, And I don't know if that's by design, like he's becoming less and less human so there's less of that voice in there, or if they just ran out of time. I don't know, But we're increasingly on our own to figure out what he's doing and why he's doing and even if he's doing something successful.
Yeah, and so at some point Leopold attacks another one of the scientists who doubted him. But he attacks him in his house, not in the water. And I was just noticing at this point, like, wait, a minute, does Leopold even really have any catfish powers? I mean, I guess you were sort of alluding to that a minute ago, but like, this murder could have just been done by a big human. He just attacks a guy in his house and chokes him.
I think, Yeah, the only possible answer I can think of there is that human Leopold does look kind of shambly and puny. I'm not sure if he could have pulled this off, So I guess arguably monster form is better, okay.
But also at some point here evidence starts mounting that something weird is going on with pollution in the water, and the Leopold attacks, and Rex is on the case. Rex starts putting the pieces together. One point, he's out collecting data with a net and Leopold is swimming in the water underneath his boat, and he tears up the net, and Leopold's like, nets are harmful to fish, We will use them for humans if any survive.
Yeah, it's like, let's not get ahead of ourselves, Leopold.
Yeah, but Rex ends up summoning these people we talked about before, the INPIT agents. In PIT I think is an acronym. I don't know what it stands for. I tried to look it up, and there is something called INPIT, but I don't think it is what is being referenced here, So I really don't know what it is. What would you say, is the deal.
With them international Nature Police Information Technologies?
I'm not sure.
I guess they're kind of like they feel like they've arrived from a TV show, Like there's a TV show where they investigate strange nature happenings. They have their own van, they have jumpsuits.
By god, it's like the A team is here.
Yeah, they're the professionals. They're here to get stuff done. But it does feel like they're coming from an entirely different television show. And indeed they may feel like this if you're watching it unriffed for the first time, because a lot of the end pit stuff was cut from the Blood Waters of Doctor Z edition on MST three.
Kh Okay. Now, yeah, they arrive in this big camper like RV basically, and they are dressed in these red uniform jumpsuits, so they look kind of like they stepped out of Flash Gordon or something. Yeah, and they compare notes with Rex and they talk about all the pollution he's found and how this might be affecting the mutant marine life attacks, and so they start putting the pieces together along with Rex. Now we mentioned that unfortunately Leopold
gets distracted from his transform everybody into fish. Well, I don't know if that's what he's ultimately, whatever it is he's doing, he gets distracted by deciding that he must make a bride of catfish. So he goes back to the lady who's painting by the lake, who's still there it seems like maybe days later, and he kidnaps her and takes her back to the lab to turn her into bride of catfish. And it doesn't work.
Yeah, it is a lonesome and disastrous episode in the Ascent of Doctor Leopold here where yeah, she dies half transform still in the baptism cage thing. And then afterwards he has to get rid of her body. And this is another this is another sequence that was cut from the MST version. What does he do to get rid of her body? Does he feater to fishes or anything like that?
Nope.
He dissolves her in a big old vat of Hollywood.
Acid, our old friend.
Yeah, it's a great sequence. All while we have some like weird you know, the weird Tamil electronic music going on in the background.
And we see him test the acid on a fish. He dips the fish in the acid and it eats away half of it.
This film is not concerned with wasting anybody's time. We're gonna do some an acid scene and we're going to spend about fifteen minutes doing it.
We've got to make sure that our catfish monster is doing quality assurance on his acid. Yeah. So we see Rex in the inpit agents set up traps for the monster. I guess at this point they suspect there's a giant catfish monster somehow, and they set up traps and then they chill in a camper. And this part also reminded me of Boggy Creek too. And the legend continues where they will set up traps in the woods and then
chill in an RV. But eventually the catfish monster attacks them and they somehow scare it away I think with a camera flash, and they end up getting photos of it and.
It's a really good photo. If this is another place, where is that? I mean, doctor Leopold is just really messing up, like, oh my goodness, now you're you've come been completely photographed and it's crystal clear.
Yeah.
Yeah, So they get perfectly good photos of him. And there's one part somewhere in here where Leopold is I think, sad and defeated. And he goes back to his lab and you see that he is sad. I think about the fact that he failed to successfully turn the woman he kidnapped into into bride of Catfish, and so he starts drawing her. But the picture he draws of her does not look like the woman that he kidnapped. It
looks like Elvira. Maybe he was supposed to be drawing somebody else, and did he have like a long lost love? Is that implied in the movie.
I don't think that's even implied, Okay, but you know, we're left to figure out a lot of this on our own, So maybe it is. Or maybe he just was like, this is my this was my one shot at romantic happiness, and the kidnapping and forced transformation did not work, So I've got to do this alone.
Maybe it was Elvira, or I guess at this time, maybe it was Vampira. He was like, oh, Vampira, Yes she could have she could have been my companion in the fish world.
But alas, at any rate, the main experiment continues.
Right, so Rex and the inpit agents they end up making the connection to Leopold. One of the inpit agents, I guess agent Walls. She figures out that Leopold was working on a lab that was conducting secret experiments with heavy water, and he is attacking his former co workers from the lab he worked at, and so they asked the sheriff to check on those researchers. And then then so I guess they're doing that. But then we spend a long time with the monster going out for a walk,
just wandering around the streets at night. His posture as he walks, You've mentioned that his posture is awkward, and it's amusing in a way that it's difficult to describe. He's kind of like a drunk guy trying to walk through the sand and flip flops, you know, or it's like hard to get solid footing and you got things
coming off your feet. So it's that kind of walk But another thing about this movie is that it does not follow the Jaws rule, you know, the rule that you should not show too much of your monster until the final act. This movie, the monster is on screen constantly full view, bright lights. You see the whole thing for minutes at a time. It's just alf Grido front and center, wandering through the empty streets at night. You see him break into a drug store to get some
kind of medicine. He smashes a bunch of stuff, I think.
Because yeah, that's because he's yeah, well he's He becomes injured at one point. So so not only does the experiment seem to be failing, he becomes perhaps mortally wounded or at least like heavily wounded to where he's having to break into a pharmacy and wreck the play and steal some drugs and so like, the whole plan seems to just be going completely off the rails at this point. Now one of my favorite scenes, and this one I
laughed out loud at this one. This is a scene that was cut from the MST treatment of the film, and it's ultimately a lost because it's hilarious. There would have probably been a lot of fun riffing on this one, but it's what I think of as the hippie parade.
So the sheriff here, he goes to check on folks in town and finds the youth enjoying a little folk music clearly in like some sort of abandoned building, and they're hanging out with none other than the the actual real life Jamie Defrates, who is performing a song the B side to World War Two boy Running Don't Make You Free. And so anyway, the sheriff, you know, he comes under in the midst of this. He sets down and he listens for a spell, you know, perhaps proving that he can hang you know, and.
He's like he's enjoying the music.
Yeah, it looks like he's enjoying. It's like, yeah, this is good. I can I'm see and I to eye with the young folk now.
But quickly. Another thing that made me laugh in the scene is that for just a moment, Leopold arrives and is watching through the window the monster and he's also ambiguously kind of grooving, but then he just moves on.
It's almost like it was meant to be a music video for this song, you know. Yeah, because again these songs are featured in their entirety, nothing is cut. So the sheriff, you know, he enjoys it for a bit, but he's there with a purpose. He has to he has to protect these hippies. So the sheriff, uh you know, gets up and leads the hippies all mid song on a police escorted parade through town with with the with Jamie de Frate's playing the guitar the whole time and singing.
And then so they have this procession through the small Florida town and then right into the sheriff's office and then right into a jail cell. And it's then explained that this is to keep them safe and that the hippies seem okay with it, but it's not clear for a moment, and I found it kind of perversely humorous.
It's like.
The old sheriff. You think he's, you know, see an eyed eye with the young folk and he's looking after them. Now he's just arresting all of them, so.
They don't seem bothered by it. Like they all just go into the jail cell and they're just like cool.
Man, yeah, yeah, pretty much, and they're locked up and you never see them in the film again.
Yeah, so a lot of the rest of the movie is just Leopold stalking around looking at things and menacing people, and then Rex and the Inpit agents trying to track him down. They're on his trail at this point and they're trying to find him, but at one point Leopold. A lot of what Leopold does is like look through the windows at people and spy on them, And at one point he observes the two in Pit agents kissing.
He spies on them through a window, and I guess he gets jealous, so he decides at this point to kidnap Agent Walsh, one of the two in Pit agents, and create another of Catfish Bride of Catfish two point zero.
Right, So again really veering off schedule here with the whole plan because he's again heavily injured at this point, having to self medicate with stolen pharmacy drugs. But then he's like, I'm gonna try it again. I'm going to try and transform this woman who is hunting me into my bride.
Yes, So he kidnaps her from her house, takes her back to the lab, and then Rex Walker and the cops. Walker is the other Inpit agent. They figure out what's going on and they're chasing the monster down that they split up to chase him and the other in Pit agent Walker uses this hilarious looking amphibious vehicle that looks kind of like a power wheel. It's very small.
It's very cool, I assume from the non existent in Pit television series that I'm imagining in my head.
Yeah, and coming up as a scene where you see this Inpit agent sort of wading through a swamp and he gets bitten by a snake. And this is another one of those IMDb trivia claims. It claims is that the snake bite was not scripted. It was just something The guy actually got bitten by a snake while they were filming the scene and they just left it in the movie. Well, I don't know, I feel doubtful, but it looks kind of real.
It looks it looks realistic. But I also really like the way it plays into the ending of the picture. So yeah, for a bit here we have this kind of double chase where where one agent is trying to chase down the monster and then we have Rex, the marine biologists and the sheriff. They are going to check out the laboratory to see what's up, see what old Doc Leopold was up to. And then of course we also have Agent Walsh who has been kidnapped.
Right, so they go to the monster's layer. The sheriff fights the monster and loses and is strangled, so bye bye Sheriff. And then Rex he comes across Leopold's notes and he, I think, wants to understand them so we can understand what was going on here. You wonder if it's like that scene in the movie where one scientist discovers what the mad scientist is doing, like the good scientist is momentarily tempted. It's the last temptation of the good scientist, and it's like, oh, it's genius.
Yeah, But of course that shows up and violence ensues. He ultimately tries to save Agent Walsh, and I guess to a certain degree succeeds, because what Zach tries to do is he puts her in the cage as well. He forced he injects her with the green stuff, and then he's going to lower her into the za baptismal font but Rex disrupts that and then Rex is injured, possibly killed by the monster, and the monster players off.
Yeah, so I wonder do all the main characters die, because we have this chase at the end where Rex tries to save Walsh. You see him get injured and then fall down, but I guess you never see him after that. A similar thing happens to the other Inpit Agent. He sort of it's injured and falls down, and at the end of the movie, I think we see him not moving, but it's not clear if he's dead or alive, and you think, well, at least Agent Walsh has been saved.
She did not get turned into a catfish, but something bad happened to her. I don't know exactly what it is. She is not upgraded to fish level, but she is sort of turned into a zombie human.
Yeah, so I think she got half the treatment right. She's injected with the ZAT, but then she's not actually lowered into the ZAT baptismal font to transform her body. And so yeah, the ending of this film I think
is actually pretty effective. It's haunting and kind of pitch perfect because throughout the whole film, we've watched Leopold stumble awkwardly around his grandiose dreams and voiceover so mismatched with his new body, his actual abilities, his focus, his mixed results, but in the end, against all odds, he achieves his goal. For the most part, he struggles and stumbles into the
ocean with his zat formula, like two tanks of it. Meanwhile, one of the male agent that was snake that is like shooting at him with a rifle and seems to at least wing him, possibly kill him, but he gets that za into the ocean. And then meanwhile, even though he's unable to completely transform Agent Walsh into his catfish princess,
she does. She wakes in the zombified state. She wanders out onto the beach, and the other agent tries to call to He's like, oh, thank goodness, you're all right, but she just wanders into the water, just like a zombie. And yeah, we're left to pieces together because then we kind of zoom out and some haunting music plays. So we just don't know, like, did she enough, Is she transformed enough that she'll survive in the water, or is
she about to drown? Did enough Zach get into the ocean to bring about this new age of giant fish and bring down humanity? I don't know, but it seems like that might be the case, so it seems like, you know, despite everything, doctor Leopold has won. Yeah.
I think the implication is that all the human characters die and he succeeds in throwing his formula into the ocean to create a race of atomic superfish that will conquer the world.
Yeah, it's quite an ending. It ends on a really good note where where you kind of forget some of the awkwardness and weirdness and mismatched tonal choices.
Now, another one of the many claims about this movie online is that apparently the movie was originally supposed to end with, or at least include I think this would be at the ending, giant fish attacks, like a giant catfish that was like rampaging around and destroying the town. And apparently they filmed some versions of this, I think with miniature models of the town, but then they realized, oh, this does not look good, so they cut that part
out of the movie. But one shot from the sequence allegedly made it into the film, Yeah, which is where a catfish, like a little catfish, is squirming next to a fence.
Yes, I saw this when I did my recent viewing of zat uncut, And yeah, like, suddenly, there's this brief sequence that looks like like poor effects test footage of a walking catfish flopping around on a model of some landscape. So yeah, that seems to match up with what we're seeing here, but there's no context for it. When it actually shows up in the film, you're just going like, what what was that?
So I guess we mentioned the fact that when Doctor Leopold first transforms and looks at himself in a mirror, he says, ah, nothing like a catfish, but it's beautiful. And I wonder was it intended that he would look nothing like a catfish even though he is half man half catfish, or did they just get whatever costume they could get and then they're like, oh, we better add a line and here sort of acknowledging this doesn't look like a catfish.
Yeah, maybe that's how it went down, or maybe that's what they told themselves. You know, they're like, no, this isn't quite what we went for, but it is beautiful. Let's devote oodles of screen time to it.
So weirdly, this is not the only Killer Catfish movie that I've ever seen. It's been many years now, so I've forgotten a lot of the details about it, but I'm pretty sure that I watched a killer catfish movie about six or seven years ago called Beneath that's about people trapped on a boat who are being stalked on a lake by a killer catfish, and I recall it having a really good, subtle sense of humor. I think it might have been a Larry Fessenden movie.
But oh yeah, I just looked it up and it is. Larry Fessenden. Quite a filmmaker. He's made some very interesting genre pictures.
The main moment of this movie that stuck with me is there's one point where I think one of them has just been attacked by catfish, and the people remaining alive on the boat one of them gets up and yells in the direction of the catfish, what do you want from us?
Well, clearly it's muck. They're here for the muck.
Yeah, catfish want Now why would catfish want to eat humans? They just sort of like suck up mud? And I don't know it. Should have looked up something about catfish feeding behaviors before I open my mouth on that. But it's not a sequel to that, not that I can tell. Okay, no, it's just like it doesn't look anything like the Grito alf. It is just a gigantic Google eyed catfish.
Well, in the end, there's nothing else quite like it.
It is.
It is quite an impressive film, all the everything, and it comes together awkwardly but kind of perfectly. You know, it's like it's the monster itself as film. Now you might be wondering where can I watch that? Well, that has been out on DVD and Blu Ray for years, but it sadly looks like it's out of stock everywhere at this moment as we're recording this. Hopefully that'll change in the future. It's also been available i think on Amazon Prime in the recent past, but it's not there
right now. But you can watch the MST version Bloodwaters of Doctor Z. You can digitally obtain that most places, including Amazon Prime. For our copy, again, we rented our copy from Atlanta's own Video Drome, and if you're in Atlanta, you can go there and rent various DVDs and Blu rays or buy some cool merch And you can also check them out online at videodrome dot tv and you can buy stuff and they'll ship.
It to you, which is pretty cool.
They should make Doctor Leopold head motorcycle helmets. So you know, it's the Zat monster, but it goes on for the bike ride. In fact, you could do the whole thing, like the leather jacket is a Zat jacket.
Yeah.
Oh well, you know, speaking of that, because that sounds like exactly the kind of thing that our Land would potentially do. If you're listening to this and you don't know the art of our Land, you can go to our Land art dot com and you can check out some of the stuff that he creates. All right, So there you have it. That's episode two and what may be a Florida movie trilogy. We'll see. I'm not sure if we'll be back next week with another Florida movie
or the week after that. It kind of depends on Joe's tolerance for all the Florida nests of these motion pictures.
Oh, you know, I'm generally game.
All right, we'll see, you know, sometimes it's nice to have a palette cleanser sometimes between films. So I don't know, we'll see, we'll figure it out in the meantime. If you'd like to check out other episodes of Weird House, Cinema. We publish this every Friday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed We're primarily a science podcast, and so our primary episodes on scientific topics like the sargassum, seaweed, the organism, and the end of the environment those published
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We publish listener mail on Mondays, and the listener mail covers like everything Weird House cinema, but also Stuff to Blow your Mind. And then on Wednesdays we publish the artifact a short form bit a particular artifacts in moments in time, etc. So check all that out. Wherever you get your podcasts, you can find us and we just ask the you rate, review and subscribe if the website allows you to do that.
Huge thanks as always to our wonderful audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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