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 | A mad scientist transforms himself into an aquatic killer. also known as The Blood Waters of Dr. Z or Hydra, is a 1975 cult movie that gained significant exposure when it was used in an episode of movie-mocking television series Mystery Science Theater 3000 in May 1999. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| BeginningThe film begins with Nazi mad scientist Dr. Kurt Leopold (it is revealed later in the film that he graduated cum laude from MIT in 1934) in his lab, where he has lived alone for about twenty years. He is contemplating about his former colleagues' laughter at his formula (described as " RevengeLeopold decides to kill the colleagues that laughed at his work. In his lab, he has a zodiac wheel, which he uses to symbolically record events. On it, he places a picture of one colleague, Maxson, noting that Maxson's days are numbered. In a lake where Maxson is fishing, Leopold swims under Maxson's boat, overturns it. He proceeds to kill Maxson and Maxson's son. Maxson's wife escapes, although she is in shock from the attack. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| PursuitAfter killing Maxson, Leopold discovers a girl who is camping out alone on the shore of the lake. He approaches her, only to be deterred by her barking dog. Leopold is not afraid of the dog, however he doesn't wish the girl to be alerted to his presence. The girl carries on with her business, unconcerned about the barking dog. Leopold retreats. He knows that he cannot sneak ashore, and he will need to attempt to meet her some other time. Leopold never comments on what he wants with her. Leopold has a grudge with another colleague, Ewing. He fastens Ewing's picture on the zodiac wheel, and proceeds to kill Ewing at night in his own house. His two colleagues now deceased, Leopold returns to the lake where the girl is still camping. He waits for an opportunity to abduct her. His perseverance pays off when she strips down to a yellow bikini to go swimming. She dives into the lake, swimming carefree until suddenly Leopold catches her underwater. He grabs her ankle, but she manages to struggle loose and desperately tries to reach the surface, with Leopold close behind. Although she manages to reach the surface and scream, her signal for help is futile and short-lived. Leopold knows that she is camping alone, and there is no one near to help. He simply comes up behind her and clamps his massive hand over her mouth. This silences her, and he then pulls her underwater. There he has the advantage because he can breathe underwater, and she cannot. He swims with her to his lab, even as she struggles in vain to escape. At the lab, the bikini-clad girl is lying strapped down in a basket next to the large tank of Zaat. She is unconscious, and Leopold is at a bench drawing a sketch of her face. He puts the sketch on the zodiac wheel next to a sketch of him to show that she is to be his mate. Leopold stands over her with a syringe full of Zaat. She wakes up screaming. Leopold clamps his clawed hand over her face to silence her and injects the Zaat into her neck. The girl passes out. Leopold finalizes the arrangements to make the girl his mate. As the basket is hoisted above the Zaat tank, the girl wakes up and is dunked into the tank while kicking and screaming. She continues to struggle under the surface. An alarm sounds, and the girl stops struggling. The basket is hauled out of the tank. Her body, partially transformed, lies still, and she stares ahead with dead, empty eyes. Leopold smashes some equipment in a fit of rage. Having calmed down, Leopold goes to the zodiac wheel, and disgustedly snatches her picture off it. He crumples it up, and tosses it into a vat of acid, thus dissolving it. He then removes the girl's now pitiful outstretched frame lying inert in death and, carrying her body like a rag doll, places it in the vat of acid, where it is totally dissolved. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | InterludeThe movie strangely diverts from the storyline for approximately 10–15 minutes to show a lingering scene of the town sheriff Lou, watching a small group of youth playing religious folk music. After one of the youth (an acoutistic guitarist) finishes leading the group in a song, the sheriff places them all in the town's jail, presumably for their own protection. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | FinaleLeopold attempts to kidnap another mate: his choice is Martha Walsh, the lovely female member of a scientific team sent to investigate the weird happenings in the town (caused by Dr. Leopold). He draws a sketch of her and puts it next to his on the wheel. Leopold grabs her after her male counterparts leave her alone. Leopold takes her to his lab, but two of her companions are waiting there, and Leopold kills them (including the town's sheriff Lou) violently. He injects her with Zaat, readies her to be dunked into the tank, and makes his getaway, with canisters of Zaat. Martha's transformation does not go as planned, she gets saved by one of her dying male companions from getting dunked in the tank as Leopold flees toward the ocean. Despite being saved from the transformation, she immediately follows Leopold trance-like into the sea. Her boyfriend tries to stop her, but she pays no heed to his pleas for her to stay. The movie ends ambiguously, with Leopold seen shot but not killed. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The story of Zaat
(1972) is the story of a monster movie Lost and Found. It was a micro-budgeted, regionally-produced independent film that suffered obscurity and neglect as many such projects do, but one that has been reclaimed in recent years by its maker and by a small band of fans with fond memories of its original theatrical run. In 1970, an industrial filmmaker named Don Barton based in Jacksonville, Florida decided to use the resources at his disposal to make a low-budget monster movie. Barton Films was a full time production company with a staff of seven people, producing primarily documentaries, training films and TV commercials. In 1958 they had produced an unsold pilot for network television called Seminole, a sheriff drama set in Northeast Florida featuring chases on boats instead of horses. Barton and his team wanted to see if they might be able to successfully produce a feature film, again utilizing both the studio and ideal locations in Northeast Florida. An article in National Geographic magazine described the hybrid “walking catfish,” which were increasing in number in Florida, so Ron Kivett, head of “Creative Concepts” for Barton Films, proposed a story treatment where a mad scientist turns himself into a catfish monster. Barton had set a realistic production goal for the film, using contacts to shoot in locations at the famous Marineland park where other films had been made (including a previous monster movie, Universal’s Revenge of the Creature in 1955), and by utilizing local talent for much of his cast and crew.
The story devised for Zaat is straightforward in the tradition of many Creature Features from the 1950s. Mad scientist Dr. Kurt Leopold (Marshall Grauer) has been working for twenty years to discover a new radioactive element: ZsubA, AsubT (ZaAt), with which he can transform a man into a man-catfish hybrid. Admiring the walking catfish, he thinks to himself, “We’re going to have to do something about your size. You can’t battle people being just two feet long.” In his Florida lab, he injects himself to alter his internal functions to an amphibious mode, then he submerges himself into a solution-filled tank to change his body. He emerges as a monster mutation (Wade Popwell) – a man-sized fish that walks upright. Leopold consults his 7-Year Plan, a circular chart which plots his acts of revenge against those who mocked him and his scheme for creating a female hybrid to mate with. Local town sheriff Lou Krantz (Paul Galloway) and visiting marine biologist Rex (Gerald Cruse) make for an unlikely alliance in the initial investigation of local killings. As the news of a mysterious creature reaches higher levels of government, agents from the Inter-Nations Phenomenon Investigations Team (INPIT) arrive in town, wearing jumpsuits and armed with swamp buggies and a van equipped with scientific equipment, to take over the investigation. Agent Martha Walsh (Sanna Ringhaver) is kidnapped by the catfish-Leopold monster after he picks her to become his mate. The budget for Zaat was $50,000 with a shooting schedule of 30 days, and Barton assembled a cast and crew mostly made up of newcomers to feature films. Among them was Miami-based cinematographer Jack McGowan, who would go on to shoot the low-budget horror films Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1973), Dead of Night (aka Deathdream), and Deranged (both 1974). For the key role of the monster, Barton simply ran a small classified ad in the local newspaper which read, “WANTED: 6’5” or taller male to play role of Monster in Horror movie. Must be experienced swimmer, scuba diver. ACTING ABILITY not required.” There were ten respondents, but Wade Popwell not only fit the main requirements, he also had local acting experience. Barton said at the time, “During auditions, when I told him to attack an imaginary victim, Wade did it with such realism there was no doubt in my mind he was the man for the job.” The monster suit is seen throughout the film and often in bright light. It was primarily designed and built by Kivett, who told Ed Tucker in Scary Monsters magazine, “I liked the idea of the monster having a leech-like face rather than a dinosaur or alligator-like jaw. Originally the monster was supposed to attack people and suck the blood out of them with this leech-like mouth. We found out that the leech teeth didn’t look so good, so we decided to go with a fang look to it.” The staff at Florida’s Marineland proved to be very helpful and most of the interiors and exteriors of Dr. Leopold’s laboratory were filmed there. The underwater shots of subjects being lowered by gurney into the tank of radioactive material were filmed at the largest freshwater tank at the park, which contained porpoises, manatees, and according to underwater cinematographer Kivett, “the largest alligator snapping turtle in the world.” The turtle could not be corralled to an opposite section of the tank, and Kivett and the cast members were none too keen to be near it. Other shooting took place in the nearby small towns of Switzerland and Green Cove Springs. Barton emphasized the neighboring cooperation, saying "the city of Green Cove Springs, 20 miles south of us, laid out the red carpet for us. The folks at the First Baptist Church prepared our meals, both for lunch and for the evening shoots. The folks at Marineland were fabulous. We were so fortunate that they had a portion of their facility that was not in use and to which they gave us free reign. This was a major undertaking for us and all elements went right on schedule." The original script at one point called for a scene in which a giant walking catfish, a mutation from Dr. Leopold’s experiments, scuttles across the landscape and destroys everything in its path. Kivett constructed a miniature set with farm houses, roads, and fences, and after great effort a walking catfish was found (they proved to be more uncommon than National Geographic indicated), but the creature proved to be uncooperative. “It wouldn’t do anything,” according to Kivett. “We put it on the set and it said, ‘yeah, right! If you think I’m going to walk across this you’re crazy!’” (The final print seems to include one of the miniature shots, rather randomly inserted, as a catfish flounders along a miniature fence on a hilltop set).Zaat completed filming in 1971, meeting its schedule and budget. An additional expense was to strike fifteen 35mm prints of the movie at $1,000 each. At that time Jacksonville-based Clark Films was a principle distributor of low budget features in the Southeast, and they handled bookings for the finished film. From the beginning Barton had included Harry Clark in the development of the script, because, as Barton later said, "he was thoroughly versed in the exploitation value of various stories." At many Florida engagements, Wade Popwell again donned the monster suit and was put on display at the local theater in a cage on the back of a flatbed truck. On one occasion, the suit was found to have several BB pellets imbedded in it, after local teenagers took potshots at the monster! The personal appearances, along with an intense print ad campaign, ensured that the film did brisk box-office in local territories, some theaters reporting that the film outgrossed such Hollywood fare as The Poseidon Adventure (1972). The distribution set up by the Clark brothers even extended to other parts of the country; as Barton told TCM, "we had approximately 350 bookings, primarily in the Southeastern states, but as far west as Texas and Oklahoma and as far north as Pennsylvania." Barton sought out a television deal, but this proved to be problematic. "After its initial distribution, we attempted to find a legitimate TV distributor, unfortunately our sample [tapes] sent to them ended up, unbeknownst to me, at individual stations. I was to find this out when a call would come in from a friend or fan who said it was shown on a certain station on a certain day." Barton also sought out national theater distribution and signed with Capitol Films, who gave the movie a new title, The Blood Waters of Dr. Z, and came up with a new ad campaign. The company soon filed for bankruptcy, however, and not only did the producers see no revenue, they also lost at least twelve film prints and the resulting legal problems tied up Barton’s film for many years. In legal limbo, Zaat became a "lost" film. Fortunately, at roughly the same time that kids who had seen the film in theaters or television in the 1970s grew up to seek out their nostalgic memory, Barton was able to retrieve both the copyright and the original negative of Zaat.
| Verbod op seks met dieren niet naar Griekse kalender verschuiven! |
| "Ik ben zwaar ontgoocheld in mijn collega’s in de Senaat, die wel de mond vol hebben over dierenwelzijn, maar als puntje bij paaltje komt blijkbaar andere belangen verdedigen". Zo vat sp.a-senator Ludwig Vandenhove de zitting van de Senaatscommissie Sociale Zaken samen. “En,” voegt hij er strijdlustig aan toe, “anders dan mijn collega’s hoef ik niet koste wat het kost een wet op mijn naam te krijgen, maar blijf ik vechten voor het principe: een duidelijk verbod op seks met dieren.” Ludwig Vandenhove en Kamerlid Magda De Meyer (sp.a) hebben nu afgesproken om de tekst onmiddellijk in de Kamer in te dienen. “Alle partijen moeten dan maar kleur bekennen!”
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