Pere Ubu Meets X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes | Cinema Sojourns

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I thought it was some kind of avant-garde prank when I first saw a poster advertising a special showing of Roger Corman’s X, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) accompanied by the legendary Cleveland, Ohio band Pere Ubu performing a live score. It sounded too good to be true but how would it work? Would the audio be turned off so that the movie would essentially be treated as a silent film with a new score? Would the band perform a spontaneous live remix of Les Baxter’s score while riding the volume levels? Would the film’s dialogue be heard at all in this presentation? All of my questions were answered on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at Atlanta’s Plaza Theater when I attended the Pere Ubu show.

*This is an archival reprint of an article that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies (the blog was discontinued in the Fall of 2018 and is no longer available).

Pere Ubu, the avant-garde rock band from Cleveland, Ohio, in the late 1970s/early 1980s fronted by singer David Thomas (at microphone)

For those unfamiliar with Pere Ubu, they were pioneers in the underground music movement of the early eighties and remained resolutely independent in the commercial music world by their own choice (They disbanded as an active touring band after the death of lead singer David Thomas in April 2025). Their early music was a dissonant and dense sounding collision of garage rock and industrial music that was distinguished by lead singer David Thomas’s commanding stage presence, whether he was howling in some strange language or riffing playfully absurd lyrics. The Trouser Press Record Guide wrote "Pere Ubu is to Devo what Arnold Schoenberg was to Irving Berlin." I was introduced to them by a friend who gave me a tape of their Enigma-Mercury recording “The Tenement Year” in 1988 but it wasn’t until I saw them later that year or the next on the short-lived but incredibly eclectic “Night Music” program on NBC (hosted by David Sanborn and Jools Holland, formerly of Squeeze) that I really became a fan. On that program they performed selections from their “Cloudland” album which was the closest they ever came to making a melodic pop album…well, sort of. It was like Dada art in musical form and irresistible but I digress. You don’t have to know anything about Pere Ubu to enjoy their improvisational approach to X . They are not performing as the band Pere Ubu in this infrequent traveling event but as a mini-orchestra, supplying a live, organic soundtrack to a remarkably eccentric drive-in movie from the sixties.

X aka X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes was made during Corman’s most creative period in the early sixties when he was experimenting with literary adaptations (Edgar Allan Poe) or tackling controversial material (racism in The Intruder aka Shame aka I Hate Your Guts! with William Shatner as a white supremacist). X has a fascinating premise (courtesy of screenwriters Robert Dillion and Ray Russell): a doctor studying human eyesight develops a formula that increases the capacity of the human eye to see beyond its normal limits and uses himself as the guinea pig. What Corman lacked in budget and special effects, he made up for with his idiosyncratic direction and the casting of Ray Milland as the obsessive, ill-fated Dr. Xavier and Don Rickles as a sideshow hawker who briefly exploits Xavier’s newly acquired powers of being able to see through anything. Diana Van Der Viis and John Hoyt (Attack of the Puppet People) play medical colleagues of Dr. Xavier and you can spot B-movie favorite Morris Ankrum (The Giant Claw, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers) and Corman character actors like Dick Miller (A Bucket of Blood), Jonathan Haze (The Little Shop of Horrors) and Barboura Morris (The Wasp Woman) in bit parts.

Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze (on right, blue collar) were part of director Roger Corman’s regular acting ensemble and pop in a bit parts in X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES, 1963.

At the time, many critics praised this low-budget effort, seeing a grim morality tale given a sense of tragic grandeur by Milland’s world weary performance. The obviously fake, threadbare sets induce a sense of claustrophobia which seems intentional as Dr. Xavier becomes a wanted man. And what once drew snickers and jeers – Xavier looking through human skin to see the internal organs beneath which are clearly medical illustrations from books – now looks like a tongue-in-cheek homage to underground filmmakers on the order of Mike and George Kuchar. Seen today, however, Corman’s movie might seem curiously inert and s-l-o-w to post-MTV audiences. Yet seeing X with Pere Ubu’s transformative aural enhancement breathes new life and excitement into it.

Diane Van Der Viis and Ray Milland admire the expensive art direction of Roger Corman’s X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963).

According to band leader David Thomas, no two...