PROJECT X / CERT: UNRATED / DIRECTOR: WILLIAM CASTLE / SCREENPLAY: EDMUND MORRIS / STARRING: CHRISTOPHER GEORGE, GRETA BALDWIN, HENRY JONES / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
William Castle’s reputation as a genre icon and all-round horror maestro is unquestionable. Yet films like Project X call to mind a whole other element of Castle’s career: his innate ambition. Consider Castle’s theatre tricks – the skeletons on wires hurled through screenings of House on Haunted Hill, the electric shock-chairs for The Tingler – and you see a man mischievously passionate about that bang-for-buck filmmaking ethic. It makes sense then, that in one of his final directorial efforts, he would try for something truly special.
Christopher George stars as Hagan Arnold, a secret agent frozen after almost dying in a plane crash on the way home from his latest mission. Before crashing, Arnold messaged his superiors to inform them Sino Asia (an East Asian conglomerate constantly at war with the West) had a new deadly weapon. With time of the essence, a crack squad of scientists revive the agent and attempt to extract the information which has been buried deep in his subconscious.
1968 was one of the biggest years in sci-fi cinema history. Planet of the Apes shocked and enthralled audiences the world over, and Kubrick’s 2001 blew the doors off expectation of what a sci-fi film could be. While not nearly as accomplished as those films, Castle’s Project X is arguably the most ambitious, forward-thinking, daring piece of film he ever accomplished. It certainly didn’t deserve to be relegated to the B-side of a double bill with Barbarella.
One of the things that stands out is the amount of cool concepts at work. Cryogenics, false memory, artificial personalities… it’s crammed with intriguing ideas. Not least that in order to delicately retrieve Hagen’s memories, the scientists engineer a “Matrix” of the 60s (Hagen used to be a lecturer on 60s culture) in which to play out a ‘cops and robbers’ scenario they hope will help him discover the information himself. So it’s a snapshot of the 60s inside a snapshot of a future where crime and violence haven’t been seen for generations. In this way, Project X feels a lot deeper than many of Castle’s other films – it speaks to the times and does so scathingly. It’s also a nice contrast to the tongue-in-cheek spy films of the swinging 60s.
Aside from being a great sci-fi / crime caper, it’s a gorgeous cult experience. Whenever Hagen has a flashback to his ordeal in Sino Asia, the film takes a trippy turn. Psychedelics were hardly rare in the 60s, but the way in which Castle uses them to cover up the more ambitious or badly executed sci-fi landscapes is stunning. Cartoon titan Hanna-Barbera (the folks who gave us Scooby-Doo) were drafted in to create the psychedelic sequences and did a fantastic job. Luridly coloured, bizarre, trippy, extravagant, and frankly gorgeous, it’s sequences like these, along with the high-concept sci-fi, which make Project X a surprise treat from a master of the craft at the end of his life.
