The Hideous Sun Demon (1959)

We open en media klaxon as alarm bells blare at an atomic research lab, where something has gone horribly, horribly wrong judging by the current cacophony. 

And it’s about to get much worse, too, for one Dr. Gilbert McKenna, whom we first see being hustled out on a stretcher by a couple of medico attendants, buttoned up into an ambulance, and rushed off to the hospital after being exposed to a huge dose of lethal radiation.

Thus, we can understand why the hospital staff is slightly confused by McKenna’s condition upon arrival, who shows no ill-effects or signs of acute radiation poisoning. 

In fact, McKenna (Clarke) appears to be right as rain when by all accounts he should be at death’s door -- if not dead already -- considering how many roentgens his body just absorbed.

And so, in his efforts to crack this puzzling medical conundrum, the head physician on this case, Dr. Sterns (Garry), consults with a couple of McKenna’s co-workers: Dr. Frederick Bickell, chief scientist at Atomic Research Inc., and Ann Lansing, who served as McKenna’s lab assistant. All in an effort to find out what exactly happened and what his patient was specifically working on, hoping it holds a clue.

Apparently, McKenna was tinkering with some kind of experimental isotopes in pursuit of quantifying a new form of cosmic ray he’d recently discovered, which emanated from the sun. The accident then occurred, according to Ann, while McKenna was transferring the dangerous material out of its protective lead shielding. Total exposure time was around ten minutes before they could mount a protective-geared rescue. Beyond that, they can’t offer much else.

Once Sterns returns to his patient, with all signs pointing to user error, Ann (Manning) swears to Bickell (Whyte) that McKenna was following proper protocol while dealing with the isotopes. It was just an accident, she contends. But Bickell, who knows full well Ann has a thing for McKenna, isn’t so sure. No, he’s leaning more toward gross negligence.

For while Ann admits the victim had been complaining of a terrible headache that morning, which might have contributed to this disaster, Bickell suspects the cause of said headache was a hangover. And judging by his laser-guided delivery of that assumption, it wasn’t the first time McKenna had ever come to work suffering from the Brown Bag Flu. Top that off with Ann’s acquiescent reaction to said accusation, this all but confirms that McKenna has a bit of a drinking problem. Or as Bickell puts it, “I’ve warned him for the last time, whiskey and soda mix -- not whiskey and science.”

Meanwhile, McKenna’s miraculous recovery continues over the next few weeks. (Behold! The Power of Booze!) And when not hitting on the nurses, Mr. Smarmy McSmarmo wants to know when he can go home, having gone a little stir crazy being cooped up in his hospital bed for so long. 

But Sterns isn’t ready to release him just yet. However, he does prescribe his patient some fresh air. And to those ends, McKenna is moved to a convalescing area on the roof of the hospital to get some sun with a half-dozen other patients.

Here, McKenna helps an elderly patient sort out a magazine to read before dozing off under a bright, blazing sun. But it isn’t long before the patient startles awake as his body, apparently, starts to rebel on him. Writhing in pain, and sweating profusely, McKenna then starts to … change, as his personal biology redefines itself.  

Then, the elderly patient screams about his face, causing him to flee before we can see what she’s talking about.

McKenna then retreats back to his room, where we first see his hand, which has transformed, the epidermis now covered in scales, lizard-like. The patient then looks in a mirror and we see a reflection of a hideous visage to match, all scales and fangs. This, he quickly smashes with his fist, creating a crazy patchwork of smaller images of what he has transformed into.

But just what, exactly, has McKenna transformed into? Glad you asked!

First, we find out his condition rectifies itself once he gets out of the sun and returns to normal. So there's that at least. Then, Dr. Sterns starts theorizing to a worried Ann and Bickell on the cause of his patient’s unique malediction. And fair warning: a lot of outrageous quackery follows in the ensuing plot dump.

Technically, according to Sterns, McKenna didn’t transform but devolved. He then shows a layout of the gestation phases of a human fetus, zeroing in on the prenatal stage of development where it looks almost like a lizard. His theory is that direct exposure to sunlight triggered something in his patient’s irradiated cells, turning him into some kind of throwback prehistoric creature from the Devonian age. As proof, he presents a rather ludicrous slide-show on the before and after consequences of exposing certain insects with radiation.

Alas, there is no cure for this kind of thing, but Sterns promises they will keep trying. On the, heh, bright side, artificial light doesn’t appear to trigger the change. Thus, until they find some way to reverse his condition, Dr. McKenna will be just fine as long as he stays inside and avoids direct contact with any sunlight.

I mean, What could possibly go wrong, right? How hard could it be? All he has to do is stay inside. Spoiler alert: He doesn’t, and everything continues to go terribly, terribly wrong for our boy Gilbert… 

As one digs into the film career of Robert Clarke, one can’t help but notice that he’s kind of a proto-Forrest Gump when it comes to genre films of the 1940s and ‘50s, meaning he’s always showing up in the damndest of places of historical significance. But it almost didn’t happen.

A native of Oklahoma since June 1, 1920, Robert Irby Clarke had notions of an acting career at a very young age. “My dad wanted to be an actor,” Clarke told Anthony Petkovich in an interview for Psychotronic Magazine (No. 17, Winter, 1994). “He would’ve been a pretty good actor, too, but his health was too frail. So, when I decided that I wanted to be an actor, he was 100-percent for it and always encouraged me to pursue it.”

Robert Clarke. 

When he graduated high school, Clarke enrolled at Kemper Military College in Missouri, where he planned to major in economics. But the acting bug soon had him transferring to the University of Oklahoma for his sophomore year to pursue this dream despite some crippling stage fright. Then another transfer to the University of Wisconsin, so he could study under Gertrude Johnson, who once taught a young Fredric March, one of Clarke’s acting idols.

After graduating from college, Clarke was drafted in 1943; but his chronic asthma qualified him as a 4F, excluding him from active service during World War II due to health issues. Then, after serving for a year as a civilian in the Signal Corps in Chicago, the aspiring actor hitched a ride to Hollywood in 1944, where his handsome features and chiseled chin resulted in screen tests at 20th Century Fox, Columbia, and RKO Pictures, where he was signed on as a contract player at the latter for $100 a week, which, technically, made him a glorified extra hoping to breakout.

His first feature was The Falcon in Hollywood (1944), the 10th of 15 installments of the crime-solving series featuring either George Sanders or Tom Conway as the titular sleuth. Said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994), “They were B pictures, programmers. It was like the Thin Man series, only not so good … It was kind of a whodunit, set in tinseltown and I was cast as an assistant director. I was in and out of it, had, oh, half a dozen scenes, but they were brief.”

After that it was more of the same in mostly uncredited roles or bit parts, though admittedly there were a lot of them, in things ranging from Wanderer of the Wasteland (1945) to Ding Dong Williams (1946) to San Quentin (1946), where he co-starred with an equally young Lawrence Tierney and Raymond Burr. And in 1948 he appeared in Ladies of the Chorus (1948), a tale of burlesque dancers that featured Marilyn Monroe.

However, Clarke did appear in two of Val Lewton’s storied cerebral horror films / psychodramas at RKO before his contract expired in 1947: The Body Snatcher (1945) and Bedlam (1946). “Val Lewton was such a thoughtful type of individual and he had great capacity for kindness,” Clarke told noted genre film historian Tom Weaver (Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes, 2000). “He had very high ideals, and of course his artistic endeavors were far above those of most horror film producers.”

When asked what it was like working with Boris Karloff, Clarke said (ibid), “He was just delightful. Karloff was such the antithesis of what he portrayed on the screen: He had a very gentlemanly attitude, and in working in a scene with him he never tried to upstage your or to get the best of the scene. He was awfully kind, and his dressing room door was always open to anyone who wanted to say hello or chat with him. I never worked with any man that I had more admiration for.”

But Clarke couldn’t say the same for fellow co-star Henry Daniell, whose character, Doctor MacFarlane, was in cahoots with Karloff’s John Gray, who dubiously procured dead bodies for him to further his medical research and didn’t really care where Gray got them -- or made them.

“He was smooth and a very professional actor,” said Clarke (ibid), who played one of MacFarlane’s students. “I was a bit overwhelmed … because [Daniell] was a bit condescending in his attitude. The scene that we were involved in mostly -- he was showing us how to perform the operation on the little girl. I had one line -- ‘Bravo!’ -- and when I missed my cue, he went right by my line in his dialogue.

“But [the director] Robert Wise spoke up and stopped him, and said, ‘Waitaminute -- Bobby Clarke has a line there. Now lets go back and try again, and let Bob get his line in.’ Unlike Karloff, Daniell was not the type to have empathy for young actors; aloof, I guess, would be the best word to describe him. It was his scene, we were just window-dressing, and he couldn’t care less whether we were there or not.”

Luckily, Wise was there to rein him in. “Wise was a craftsman who wanted the very best end product,” said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994). “So he wanted everybody to be the very best they could be, including those who had small parts, like myself.” Clarke would make two more pictures with Wise: A Game of Death (1945), a remake of The Most Dangerous Game (1932); and Criminal Court (1946). Wise, of course, would go on to direct the genre classics The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Haunting (1963).

Clarke would actually appear in three films with Bela Lugosi. First was Zombies on Broadway (1945), which was more of a comedy, where two bumbling press agents -- played by RKO’s poor man’s Abbott and Costello, Wally Brown and Alan Carney -- have to track down an authentic zombie to star in a nightclub act for … reasons; Clarke, Brown, Carney and Lugosi would return for more of the same, with less zombies, in the screwball comedy Genius at Work (1946); and then, The Body Snatcher, with Karloff and Lugosi.

Said Clarke (Weaver, 2000), “Karloff used to call him ‘Poor Bela.’ And Poor Bela had such terrible problems with his back, and he was on drugs because of it. During the time I was involved on The Body Snatcher, he hardly came out of his dressing room unless the assistant director called him. They had a daybed in there, and he was flat on his back on that couch nearly all the time. He talked very little to anyone, and obviously he wasn’t well at all. It was very difficult for him to perform.”

Now, Clarke would co-star with Karloff again in Bedlam, where he had a more substantial role as Dan the Dog, one of the patients / inmates at Karloff’s Master Sims’ squalid mental asylum. To help get into character, “I talked to one of the psychiatrists on duty at one of the mental hospitals here in LA and did some observations of the inmates,” said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994). “Of course, at the time the picture takes place, the insane were not treated very humanely.”

Unfortunately, due to an oversight, Clarke was accidentally left off the credits on Bedlam, which he both deserved and resulted in a personal letter of apology from Lewton. Still, Clarke was very pleased with his efforts:

“I must give credit to [director] Mark Robson for making my role in Bedlam more than it could have been; Robson gave me the kind of direction that brought out the best in me,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000). “I’ve had a couple of occasions in my career where the director would sit back near the camera and holler at you. A marvelous man, Robson worked so carefully with us as actors. It’s been over 40 years, but I’ll never forget how careful and meticulous he was.”

Clarke would also appear, rather briefly, in Desperate (1947), a classic film noir by Anthony Mann, but found himself mostly out on the range in a ton of westerns. Most were headlined by Tim Holt, like Thunder Mountain (1947) and Riders of the Range (1950). “All I can say about those pictures is, I got a big thrill out of them,” offered Clarke (Petkovich, 1994). “I was usually cast as the renegade son who was either gambling or boozing or whatever -- the bad boy of the story. It was kind of fun being the heavy.”

One of the last pictures Clarke did for RKO was another oater, Return of the Bad Men (1948). Co-starring Randolph Scott and Robert Ryan, this wild western featured outlaws Billy the Kid, the Sundance Kid, the Younger Brothers, and the Dalton Gang. Clarke played none of them, but he did learn how to shoot a rifle through Gabby Hayes. “Squeeze the trigger just a weeeeeeee bit.”

After that, Clarke went freelance as an actor, which netted him a few more, blink and you’ll miss ‘em roles in things like Beyond Glory (1948) and as the star of a movie within the movie in the truly hilarious Champagne for Caesar (1950), co-starring Vincent Price. But aside from a few meatier roles in the likes of A Modern Marriage (1950), things might’ve continued on this lackluster course until the actor got on Ida Lupino’s radar.

As the legend goes, after starring in films like They Drive By Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941) while under contract at Warner Bros, at some point Lupino staunchly refused to star in any more vehicles that had been rejected by Bette Davis, which usually resulted in some head-butting and a resulting suspension courtesy of studio boss Jack Warner.

“For about eighteen months back in the mid-40s I could not get a job in pictures as an actress [because] I was on suspension,” said Lupino (-- quoted from Sense of Cinema, April, 2009). “When you turned down something you were suspended.”

Ida Lupino. 

Thus, with ample time on her hands Lupino spent it observing all aspects of filmmaking: screenwriting, camerawork, editing, but was drawn mostly to directing. She would later describe how bored she was on set “while someone else seemed to be doing all the interesting stuff behind the camera, not in front of it.”

Lupino’s first stint as a director was on the film Not Wanted (1949), a psychological thriller about a woman who gave up her illegitimate baby, but is so consumed by guilt over this she kidnaps another. Lupino co-wrote the script with Paul Jarrico and Malvin Wald, and stepped into the director’s slot to finish the film when the original director, Elmer Clifton, suffered a fatal heart attack but would take no credit for it.

The Zanesville Signal (August 29, 1949). 

Said Lupino of the experience (-- quoted from The Guardian, November, 2024), “It’s so much more fun. Creating it yourself, not just parading in front of the camera.” And she was ready to do it again, too. "I feel that it's about time the screen got rid of some old faces, including mine," Lupino told columnist Hedda Hopper (The Blade, September 4, 1949). "I intend to give up acting altogether eventually and devote my time to other phases of picture-making."

But since the studios weren’t exactly bending over backwards to let a woman direct anything at the time, Lupino, her then husband and screenwriter Collier Young, and fellow screenwriter Wald formed their own company, The Filmakers [sic] Inc, with the express purpose of producing, directing, and writing low-budget, issue-oriented films.

Thus, her first credited feature as a director was the semi-autobiographical Never Fear (1950), whose protagonist, like Lupino, overcame a devastating bout with polio. Their next socially conscious feature would also be their most controversial: Outrage (1950), which sees a recently engaged woman’s life fall apart after she is sexually assaulted and the resulting shame spiral.

“Credit Ida Lupino and her associates in The Filmakers with restraint and a modicum of courage in jousting with another social problem in Outrage,” said an anonymous critic for The New York Times (October 16, 1950). “As in last year’s Not Wanted, when Miss Lupino tackled the doleful case of unwed mothers, the co-scenarist and director is equally forthright in her approach to rape and its tragic aftermath.

"The shock of her harrowing experience, as well as [the victim’s] reaction to her family, friends and townspeople is, like the events leading up to the assault, given sharp and effective treatment. However, the depiction of subsequent events as she seeks sanctuary in escape from her surroundings is less than inspired. Its preachment is indeed honorable, but its execution lacks punch and conviction.”

According to a press release (-- quoted from The Harrisburg Evening News, April 5, 1950), Lupino interviewed over 200 young women before selecting Mala Powers to star in Outrage. The same article claimed she spotted Clarke in a Broadway production of The Play’s the Thing and cast him in the role of Powers’ fiance.

The Blade (April 16, 1950).

Said Lupino (ibid), “Each has had several years of splendid stage training, a thing too often lacking in newcomers to Hollywood. We need new talent here. But it must be talent that is honestly talented. New players who have that genuine talent can carry the weight of a top role the first time they step before a camera. That always has been my belief, always will be my belief.”

As a director, Lupino really found her footing with The Hitch-Hiker (1953), one of the tensest, most white-knuckle films I’ve ever seen; and The Bigamist (1953), a film that had a lot more heart and understanding than expected given the subject matter and the time it was made. She also co-wrote Private Hell 36 (1954), which was directed by Don Siegel. As Lupino later joked about her transition (-- quoted from the IMDB), “As an actress, I was the poor man’s Bette Davis. Now, as a director, I’ve become the poor man’s Don Siegel.”

Not quite a poor man’s Farley Granger, Clarke would return in one more Lupino directed feature, Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951), which sort of echoed the same themes of domineering mothers in the earlier Lupino vehicle The Hard Way (1943), a role Davis actually regretted turning down. Here, Clarke played the boyfriend of Sally Forrest, whose mother, Claire Trevor, tries to break them up so her daughter can focus on a career as a tennis pro and make her, the mother, rich and famous.

But perhaps most importantly of all, especially to genre fans, it was his relationship with The Filmakers that led to Clarke being cast in The Man from Planet X (1951), one of the first science fiction films unleashed in the 1950s. Said Clarke (Weaver, 2000), “Malvin Wald, a screenwriter and a partner in Filmakers, told me that the writer-producer team of Jack Pollexfen and Aubrey Wisbert were looking for both male and female leads for that picture.”

"Howard Hawks big science fiction movie, The Thing, which may have to acquire a new title because of the Phil Harris song hit, was slated to be the first man from another planet film," said Hollywood columnist Erskine Johnson (The Grand Island Independent, January 4, 1951). "But a couple of smart film writers turned producers, Jack Pollexfen and Aubrey Wisberg, are beating them to the box-office punch with The Man from Planet X, starring Robert Clarke. The film just wound up after six shooting days and a $50,000 budget."

"It's a nervous A," Pollexfen explained to Johnson. "With a million exploitation angles." Johnson then added how the film carefully avoided any mention of the distance traveled by the strange visitor from Planet X. "We did that on purpose," said Pollexfen. "If we had mentioned the distance some 12-year old with a slide rule would prove we were bums."

The Dunn Daily Record (August 29, 1951).

“The Man from Planet X was the first film ever released about an invader from another planet,” confirmed Clarke (Petkovich, 1994). “We were in production after Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World (1951), and that, of course, was a big budget film. But they were waiting for the snow to fall. Ken Tobey [who played the hero in The Thing, later] told me that they waited for two or three months! In the meantime, Wisberg and Pollexfen started making Planet X.”

After auditioning, Clarke would get the role of the square jaw and Margaret Field, mother of Sally Field, and his co-star in A Modern Marriage, was cast as the heroine. “Margaret and I were two of over a hundred actors and actresses that they interviewed,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000). “She and I were both interviewed -- I think together, as a matter of fact -- and we were hired for the job.”

Robert Clarke and Margaret Field. 

In the film, a British astronomer (Raymond Bond) discovers a rogue planet entering our solar system. Calculating that it will pass closest to Earth over a remote Scottish island, the astronomer and his daughter (Field) set up shop there to study it further, not realizing an advanced scout from what he has dubbed Planet X has already landed in the nearby moors.

Meanwhile, sniffing out a scoop, an American reporter (Clarke) arrives on scene, too. And as they try to deduce whether the alien visitor is friend of foe (-- spoiler alert, he came to conquer, allegedly), things get complicated when the astronomer's sketchy assistant (Bill Schallart) goes off his nut once he resolves the language barrier with the use of different tones (-- an idea Spielberg would later shamelessly confiscate for 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Convinced the secrets of the alien technology will make him rich, he then moves to unlock them by any means necessary, leaving it to Clarke to rescue the girl and save the day.

Shot on an extremely low budget, a short six-day shooting schedule, and recycled sets from Joan of Arc (1948), director Edgar G. Ulmer was no stranger to stretching budgets in films like Girls in Chains (1943) and Detour (1945). And here, he once again successfully crafted a film that was long on mood albeit short on action. Thus, The Man from Planet X kinda comes off as a quaint Country Cottage Mystery that also happened to contain a mind-controlling alien invader out to conquer the world. Allegedly.

Said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994), “Edgar was originally a set designer. As a matter of fact, he did the glass paintings of the castle in the film. Painted them himself. Edgar never gave less than 150-percent. I’ve had people ask me, ‘What was it like to go to Scotland to do a picture?’ (laughs) We were in production at the Hal Roach Studios on one sound stage with only a couple of shots that were done exteriorly.”

Edgar G. Ulmer. 

As for Ulmer the director, “Edgar and I worked very, very well together,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000). “He was never given the kind of opportunities he really deserved because he could make pictures so inexpensively that was about all he ever got to do! He was so talented, in so many different areas.”

And, “Considering that we only had six days to shoot, the resulting camera moves gave such a wonderful, big feel to the production,” added Clarke (Petkovich, 1994). “He just had an enormous amount of input. Another director could have just made a flat B-picture. He gave an artistic feel to it.”

As Clarke stated, Ulmer pitched in on the production design gratis, realizing the moon, the spaceship, and castle through a series of matte paintings to help keep the costs down. He also did an uncredited rewrite to cut down on the film’s laborious dialogue. (One can only imagine how verbose it was before and shudder.)

Yeah, cursed with a lot of telling and very little showing, and what little we got to see was enshrouded in a perpetual fog, Clarke eventually swoops in and saves the day by asphyxiating the alien by sabotaging its pressure suit, which successfully thwarts the (alleged) invasion. Said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994), “The set was filled with that simulated fog all day long. The crew’s eyes would be watery and bloodshot, their throats were sore. We, as actors, could [at least] go outside once in a while.”

Still, the alien’s design was pretty cool and well realized given the budget, and Ulmer’s efforts are effectively eerie. Tasked with wearing the costume was Pat Goldin, who could barely breathe while wearing the mask under the dome. “He didn’t like the suit,” recalled Clarke (Weaver, 2000). “He had the right to complain, and he did -- a lot. The mask was hot and very uncomfortable.

“It was very, very hard work,” remembered Clarke, for everybody. “We worked from 6:30 in the morning till eight or nine at night every day, six days straight. But it was exciting because to us -- to Margaret and me, especially -- it was an opportunity that we thought might be our first step on the road to stardom. The Man from Planet X has certainly found a place in the annals of the science fiction genre, and I think it’s one of the best films that I was in, especially when you take into consideration the budget and so on.”

Clarke would star in three more pictures for Wisberg and Pollexfen: Captive Women (1952), a post-apocalyptic tale of rival factions battling for supremacy in the atomic wasteland -- which also broke in a young associate producer named Albert Zugsmith; and Sword of Venus (1953), where he played the son of Monte Cristo framed for murder. “I never could figure out what the title of the film meant,” recalled a stumped Clarke (Petkovich, 1994). “They never explain to you what the Sword of Venus is.”

Lastly was Captain John Smith and Pocahontas (1953), which an IMDB user described as “a lean, sketchy, less inspired treatment of the story than many other versions [of the familiar tale] that followed.” Clarke played John Rolfe, who, historically, was the one who wound up with the girl anyway.

After that, Clarke basically split his time between independent features and television for the next few years. One of particular note was Miss Body Beautiful (1953), sort of a proto-Nudie Cutie from Max Nossek, who officially started the Nudie-boom of the late 1950s with Garden of Eden (1954), which won a landmark case that struck down many obscenity laws. (More on that short-lived subgenre here in our review of 1962’s House of Bare Mountain and 1964's Kiss Me Quick.)

And the actor would complete his classic Universal Monster Triad Bingo Card co-starring with Lon Chaney Jr. in The Black Pirates (1954) for Robert Lippert. “He referred to himself as the son of the good actor -- and then proceeded to have a big belt of booze,” Clarke told Weaver. “But Lon was a fun-type man.”

The Omaha World Herald (February 4, 1955).

The film was shot in San Salvador, where bad weather extended the three week shoot to six weeks." And to make matters worse, “I got amoebic dysentery, I really got very sick,” recalled Clark (Petkovich, 1994). According to another Johnson column (-- dated October 10, 1954), Clarke wound up in a hospital in Pasadena, where he was treated by a specialist in such things. “It was a grueling experience because it rained every day at noon. So we had to quit filming and go inside. Very dull. I tell ya, making pictures is slow, hard, tedious work and most actors who are honest will tell you that.”

In 1956, Clarke would marry Alyce King, a member of the vocal group The King Sisters. He also started a side gig selling insurance to help make ends meet. Said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994), “At the time, I’d just married my wife, who was a widow with two sons from her previous marriage. And we had a son together." So producers would ask him, "You want 500 or $700 to do one of these little pictures?” And so, needing the money, sure, “You’d do it.”

Now, in the early 1950s, Clarke would lend his voice to the National Screen Service, narrating trailers. And it was in this capacity that he first met Ronnie Ashcroft while cutting together the trailer for Lippert’s Rocketship X-M (1950), which beat everybody, including The Man from Planet X, to the sci-fi punch.

Thus, in 1957, Clarke would sign a three picture deal with Ashcroft, who, following Roger Corman’s blueprint, decided to try his hand at producing low-budget features -- just not as successfully.

Thus, Clark would start his no-budget odyssey with producer Ashcroft on Outlaw Queen (1957), which was written by none other than Edward D. Wood Jr. Alas, during the production the film blew its meager budget and then subsequently tanked at the box office, which pretty much bankrupted Ashcroft after only one film.

Undaunted, Ashcroft was determined to try again. And since his western had failed miserably, he decided to take a shot at the other popular film trend of the era and make himself a creature feature: The Astounding She-Monster (1957), which he would write, produce and direct. “Ron Ashcroft planned to make that feature in a week’s time and I think we ended up making it in five days,” said Clarke (ibid) “That was the astounding part of that picture.”

We took a pretty deep dive into the production of The Astounding She-Monster a few months back for those who really want to get into the nuts and bolts of cheap, Z-grade filmmaking. I recommend it because, as usual, the making of this type of picture usually proved far more entertaining than the actual (and rather tedious) picture itself.

“Ronnie went so cheap,” said Clarke (Ibid). “He edited the film in his living room! It was so miserable. It's a lot of fun to laugh at [today]. It’s gotten sort of a cult following.”

Taking the profits he received from selling The Astounding She-Monster to American International for distribution -- the picture cost a grand total of $18,000 and was sold for $60,000, Ashcroft would then produce Girl with an Itch (1958), a sultry tale of a gold digger (Kathy Marlowe) looking to cash in with the proprietors of a lucrative fruit farm, either the father (Robert Armstrong) or the son (Clarke).

According to co-star Marlowe, Clarke got a little too method in his acting on this one, claiming Clarke didn’t think he could act drunk; and so, he actually got drunk before filming the scene. As Marlowe tells it, they had to do several retakes because the inebriated Clarke couldn’t remember his lines.

Alas, the film didn’t do very well, and pretty much washed-up Ashcroft’s career as a producer / director. But it wasn’t all for naught. Remember those profits from The Astounding She-Monster I mentioned? Well, some of that money actually trickled down to Clarke.

“Ronnie gave me $500 to do She-Monster,” said Clarke (Petkovich, 1994). “He had a great title, the poster art (by Albert Kallis) was good and it attracted people. It made money!" And more importantly, "He promised me four-percent of the producer’s net, and I thought, hey, that’s a nice gesture but I’ll never see a nickel -- because the distributors steal so much. But Ronnie was wise enough to get an attorney who was a cousin of Sam Arkoff’s of AIP named Abe Lourie. Turns out, I made more off that than I did off my salary. Ronnie kept sending me checks. [And] over a period of a year and a half or so, I made $3000."

Now, it was his experiences with Ashcroft that inspired Clarke to make his own feature, The Hideous Sun Demon (1959), figuring if he couldn’t do any better, he sure as hell couldn’t make anything worse. “I felt that Ronnie did pretty well with a picture made on a low budget and that I could do something as well or better,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000). “Ronnie liked to make films fast, and he did make them acceptable enough so that they would play, but I wanted to make something with a little more quality.”

As for what he would film, he once again looked to his collaborative filmography for inspiration and found Val Lewton. “What did he do? Lewton went to a public domain story that was a 100-percent winner -- Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher,” recalled Clarke (Petkovich, 1994). “Great story. Start with that.

“My idea was to take a great story -- Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde -- and make some changes. In the story, the scientist takes the potion deliberately. In [my scenario], it’s accidental. I thought exposing the protagonist to fissionable material or isotopes brought it up to date; the isotopes change the chromosome structure; the balance. I remember going down to the library of USC, the biology section, and finding out that a fetus, in going through the nine month process, literally resembles a fish at one point, then a frog. And we had a sequence where the reversal takes place, the scientist goes back to this primordial state. And that’s where we got the idea for the scaly monster, using the sun as the catalyst agent which triggered his change.” 

Thus, Clarke’s film would be a little different in that while most monsters prowled at night in the shadowy darkness, triggered by a full moon, his were-reptile would rampage in the bright light of day until the sun set.

To expand on these notions, Clarke turned to Phil Hiner, whom he’d met while serving in the Signal Corps. Said Clarke (Weaver, 2000), “Phil and I wrote a treatment and he did a first draft screenplay called Saurus, which in Latin means reptile.” According to Bill Warren, author of Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (2009), the original draft took place in Guatemala, where a hunt for uranium deposits sees the expedition stalked by a man who has been mutated by radiation experiments conducted by his father, turning him into a reptile-that-walks-like-a-man whenever exposed to the sun.

During this phase, the production picked up a lot of steam when Clarke enrolled in a screenwriting class at USC taught by his old friend Malvin Wald. There to punch up his script even further, Clarke realized he was sitting amongst some eager-beaver film students he could recruit to help realize his vision. “I met several young fellows who were going to school there in the cinema department: Tom Bouttross became my film editor and co-director, Robin Kirkman was associate producer, and Val Lapenieks the cinematographer.

“I told them about the idea that I had of wanting to do a feature production. Kirkman, very, very fortuitously, said that he would like to invest. The two of us formed a partnership and the company was called Clarke-King Enterprises.” Clarke would put up $5000 and Kirkman would match it, giving them enough to start. “Though he took credit as associate producer, Kirkman really functioned more as a co-producer, and was a great help toward finishing the picture. As many pictures do, we ran out of money, and he was able to fund the finishing of the picture.”

Kirkman also brought in fellow student E.S. Seeley to hammer out another draft of the Saurus screenplay. It was Seeley who abandoned the uranium expedition, most likely for cost considerations, and set the basic template for what actually wound up on film. “Very erratic and quite a difficult fellow -- a real character,” remembered Clarke of Seeley (Weaver, 2000). "He did the final draft, and then we had it written again by Doane Hoag, a man who worked in industrial films quite a bit. He did a good job of polishing up the dialogue.”

Like Clarke, Burt Topper skipped the apple barrel and went straight to the non-union tree to make his low-budget war film, Hell Squad (1958), which went into production at the same time. “When I was doing Hell Squad, Bob Clarke was making a monster picture the same kind of way, with a crew from USC,” Hopper told Weaver (-- quoted from The Classic Horror Film Board, April 5, 2007).

“Clarke thought that science fiction was the thing that was selling, and yeah, actually, they were right; but I didn't know anything about science fiction," said Hopper. "Anyway, that's how Bob and I became friends, when he did his sci-fi picture and I did the war story.”

“We were non-union,” said Clarke (Weaver, 2000). “These kids from USC were all students, and they were paid something like $25 a day, and were delighted to be doing it.” In fact, Topper and Clarke would share a lot of the same amateur crew while filming their features, and both would use the same trick on their camera rentals.

“We shot on weekends. [Once] we’d have a spot picked out for filming that weekend, we rented our camera, lighting, sound equipment on a Friday afternoon and we actually got two days of shooting for one day’s rental. We thought that was pretty clever."

Clarke, meanwhile, would take on the role of producer, director and lead in Saurous, which, obviously, would eventually see release as The Hideous Sun Demon. Would his efforts prove better than Ashcroft’s as he so ominously boasted? 

Well, while that might not sound very hard, given the evidence of Ashcroft’s film, you’ll have to tune into Part Two of our Two Part Retrospective of The Hideous Sun Demon to see if Clarke found the thrill of over-compensating victory, or the agony of low-budget defeat. Stay tuned, Boils and Ghouls. And until then, remember to stay out of the sun. 

Originally posted on 10/241/2026 at Confirmed, Alan_01.  

The Hideous Sun Demon (1959) Clarke-King Enterprises :: Pacific International Releasing / P: Robert Clarke / AP: Robin C. Kirkman / D: Robert Clarke, Tom Boutross / W: E.S. Seeley Jr., Doane R. Hoag (additional dialogue), Robert Clarke (story), Phil Hiner (story) / C: Stan Follis, Vilis Lapenieks, John Arthur Morrill / E: Tom Boutross / M: John Seely / S: Robert Clarke, Patricia Manning, Nan Peterson, Patrick Whyte, Fred La Porta, Peter Similuk, William White, Robert Garry, Donna King, Xandra Conkling, Richard Cassarino.