Caltiki, the Immortal Monster Blu-ray Review
How do you say 'blob' in Italian?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, April 17, 2017
The Mayan civilization is one of the most fascinating in the entire history of Mankind, but one thing that has made it even more fascinating for some
researchers is the somewhat mysterious circumstances that attended its decline, which happened in a number of "waves" over the course of several
centuries. While there was a so-called Preclassic Maya Collapse in the second century, the
really mysterious one came several hundred
years
later, with seemingly inexplicable dissolutions of major population centers throughout the eighth through the tenth centuries. All sorts of hypotheses
have been proffered as to what caused this decline and fall, but perhaps none is more whimsical than the one put forth in
Caltiki The Immortal
Monster, a kind of goofily engaging Italian science fiction horror hybrid from 1959 that has attained a certain cult status due to the involvement
of Mario Bava (
Blood and Black Lace,
Diabolik).
Caltiki The Immortal Monster posits a (titular) Mayan Goddess
who's out for blood, or at least
flesh, and who manifests as a rather amorphously gooey lump that may remind some viewers of another
loopy 1950s horror opus,
The Blob. While neither of the
commentaries included on this new Blu-ray release mention any really overtly direct link between
The Blob and
Caltiki The Immortal
Monster, other than some obvious presentational similarities in terms of the films' titular entities, it's not hard to imagine that screenwriter
Filippo Sanjust may have seen the 1958 film with Steve McQueen and decided that a "silly putty" monster might be effective in a different setting.
That setting turns out to be Mexico, where a team of archaeologists unearth (actually un-submerge, but I digress) Caltiki from the depths of an
immense pool found in an already underground cavern. Of course mayhem ensues and the film plies an often patently ridiculous and florid ambience
that reeks of a low budget approach, an aspect which may actually only make the film more appealing to some viewers.
While Bava is credited with cinematography and special effects for
Caltiki The Immortal Monster, both commentators on the Blu-ray note
that he actually ended up directing at least part of the film, sharing duties with Riccardo Freda, who apparently was none too happy with the way
Bava
had been treated on their previous collaboration,
I Vampiri, which many experts consider the first horror film of the sound era in Italy's film
industry. (As some of the supplements included on this Blu-ray amply document, Italy didn't really indulge in horror and science fiction films until a
bit
after
Caltiki The Immortal Monster came along in 1959.) Bava's special effects work on the film is actually remarkably commendable, at
least considering the miniscule budget with which he was evidently working, and the film begins in fact with a rather nicely done assemblage of
matte
and glass painting work that evocatively establishes a Mesoamerican locale where pyramids and other statues reside in a lushly forested scene where
the foliage threatens to overtake the handiwork of the ancient Mayans.
A scientist named Nieto (Arturo Dominici) emerges from the morass of statuary and overgrowth and stumbles back to a camp, where he promptly
collapses. He had been with another explorer, who has now disappeared, and expedition leader Dr. John Fielding (John Merivale) recruits a team to
go
hunt for the missing member. When Nieto mutters "Caltiki!" repeatedly in his seemingly delusional state, the team aims to discover what happened.
After a kind of interesting interstitial development that finds the explorers finding lost "home movies" of a previous expedition that play out in a kind
of quasi-found footage ambience that presages such later efforts as
The Blair Witch Project, the explorers start poking around a cave that has a huge statue of the goddess, which in turn
leads to the discovery of an underground pool, where a brave diver discovers the remains of several
previous explorers at water's bottom, along with a rather vast fortune in jewels and gold. With dreams of untold riches in his mind, the
diver
insists on going back below to gather more booty, which is when the
real problems ensue, as a gigantic, well, blob emerges from the water
(after having dispatched with the diver, of course), threatening the entire expedition.
The film subverts some horror tropes by seeming to indicate the monster is destroyed after this initial interchange, but of course that turns out not
to be the case. The "science" supposedly underpinning the film involves that regular bugaboo of fifties' film efforts, radiation, although in this
instance that aspect also includes the appearance of a deadly comet. It's all Grade A ridiculousness, of course, and builds to an appropriately squishy
climax as the blob threatens Mrs. Fielding (Didi Perego, billed as Didi Sullivan). Sidebars include a number of weird elements, including a native
fertility dance and, just for good measure, an expedition member named Max Gunther (Gerard Haerter) under the sway of the evil Goddess, whose
girlfriend Linda (Daniela Rocco) also seems to be some kind of native.
While never all that scary, perhaps due to some not quite ready for prime time performances, the film is still quite effective in terms of some pretty
gruesome special effects once it's established that Caltiki is more or less a flesh eating bacterium (see screenshots 14 and 15 for two pretty grisly
examples). The film doesn't seem to have any cultural "subtext" going on like its American sibling
The Blob, despite its international flavor,
and while it's no lost masterpiece, it's consistently engaging in a typically silly fifties horror B-movie sort of way.
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