The subterranean’s enlarged pupils are super-sensitive to light, making Bentley’s torch both an effective weapon, and ‘the fire of Ishtar’ that provides proof of their supposed divinity. Oddly, there are Egyptian wall-murals too, a fantasy exotic dancer, and three sacrificial maidens who walk naked into the execution chamber to be microwaved to a crisp, to appease Ishtar’s anger. Then there’s the city’s pale albino’s who control the mole-people with whips.
These are the buggy-eyed warty-domed ‘beasts of the dark’. As they try to sleep, something nasty scrabbles its way up out of the shingle, hoods them with its mole-hands, and drags them down into a cave of misshapen skeletons. Enough people back then still took that Old Testicle hoopla seriously, enough people maybe to get them onside by drawing that into the film’s mythic stew? But when the character says ‘there must be some rational scientific explanation to this’, there’s the memory of Dr Baxter in his book-lined study chiding ‘this is science fiction of course, it’s a fiction, it’s a fable beyond fiction’. There’s some talk about the Epic of Gilgamesh, tied in with the 5,000-year-old ‘great flood level’ left by Noah’s inundation. Once deciphered the tablet shatters in a convenient earth-tremor. There’s an Indiana Jones opener with archaeologists somewhere in a mountainous Himalayan dig unearthing a stone tablet bearing cuneiform script, then an engraved oil-lamp inscribed with pictograms of the ‘Sumerian version of the Ark’. The credits-list even dramatically ascends from a seething volcanic crater. He’s right, retro-devotees of the old ‘Flash Gordon’ cine-matinee cliff-hangers will get off on this. It takes place in a subterranean city of lost Sumerians, unfortunately found by a hero-scientist, and abounds with mutants, despots, high priests, sacrificial maidens and all the ingredients that made great serials…’ (in ‘Nebula no.19’, December 1956). So does all this learned dissertation add credence to ‘The Mole People’? Naw, it’s still just enjoyable hokum!Īs Forrest J Ackerman wrote on the occasion of its original release, this is a film ‘about an underground movement. Others, including prominent Nazis, have mounted Arctic expeditions hunting the polar openings to a hidden inner Hollow World. But as he tells us, there’s generations of cranks and weirdoes from Dante, to people with names like John Cleves Symmes Jr or Cyrus Reed Teed who’ve imagined the world to be constructed like some kind of Russian Doll made up of a system of concentric spheres, each inhabited by races of people who consider theirs to be the true ‘surface’.
The consensus seems to be he was genuine, if deluded. There’s subsequently been much film-buff fun derived from debating whether the Doctor is a studio invention, or a genuine academic hoodwinked, or bribed into delivering his to-camera seminary. In fact a certain Dr Frank C Baxter, supposedly a Professor of English at the University of Southern California, is dragged onto the set of ‘The Mole People’ to contribute a pre-credit framing sequence outlining the historical evidence for such unorthodox ideas. Oddly, there’s also a considerable body of fringe theoretical work that strives to validate such fiction.
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