The Monolith Monsters

Rocky Horror Show 

The Monolith Monsters
USA 1957
Directed by John Sherwood
Universal/Eureka Masters Of Cinema 
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Big, black crystalline spoilers toppling your way.

After directing the third and worst of the Creature From The Black Lagoon sequels, The Creature Walks Among Us (reviewed here) John Sherwood’s next feature was The Monolith Monsters. The last time I watched this one, as part of an American DVD set, I remember thinking that this was the most ridiculous premise for a so called ‘creature feature’ I’d ever seen, with probably the least menacing and dull threat to civilisation conceived for a 1950s Universal monster movie. If indeed a bunch of non-sentient rocks could be called a monster. But I also remember quite liking the film, partially because of its silliness and also because it’s a well made piece of hokum which completely fits in with what Universal were conjuring up for the monster crowd back then in terms of the gravitas mixed in with the pseudo-scientific explanations and the ultimate cure for the threat.

Revisiting it now as the second film presented in the Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray set Three Monster Tales Of Sci-Fi Terror... I’d have to say that my perception of the movie is in no way altered other than, I like it even more the second time around and, via the beautiful print and transfer job in this edition.

Okay, so this is one of a few films from around that era (probably many of them from Universal) that starts off with a shot of the planet Earth suspended in space (sans clouds because, nobody had thought about the Earth being covered in clouds until years later when man travelled into space) and with a voice over narrative leading the audience into the film. This time it’s talking to us all about the phenomenon of meteorites, as they have hit our planet and others since the beginning of time (apparently, who am I to argue with that time placement?). After an extended montage of landscapes of craters etc devoted to these celestial visitors, the music swells mysteriously and the titles roll. 

Then, after one half of a local geologist team picks up a sample of rock he stumbles across in the desert, he heads back to his sleepy town situated completely out of the way in that desert but, after he gets the rock sample wet... well, when his partner comes into the office the next day, Grant Williams as David Miller, he finds loads more of the rocks in a smashed up office and his partner standing there, his lifeless body more or less turned to stone.

Meanwhile, David’s school marm of a girlfriend, Cathy Barrett, played by Lola Albright, is taking some of her kids on a field trip. One of the kids takes a rock home but then washes it. Later, she is the only survivor discovered at her home and her body is also slowly beginning to turn to stone, so she’s taken to a local hospital and placed into an iron lung while the doctors and scientists can find a cure for her condition, hopefully within eight hours or so before she also dies. 

And then, a big thunderstorm starts and it’s raining overnight in the desert, just as David and his scientist friend Professor Arthur Flanders, played by Trevor Bardette, find out that it’s water that is causing the rocks to grow and suck all the silicon out of everything around them. They realise that the rainfall means the rocks in the desert will keep toppling down a slow slope towards town and then growing again until they completely destroy the town. They think they have some breathing space to find a way of combating these completely unaware, black crystalline rocks when the rain stops but, of course, the desert sand absorbs the water which the rocks inadvertently absorb to keep growing so, once they’ve been kick started by the storm... they now aren’t going to stop. Can David and his friends stop the progress of the deadly but docile mineral before it falls on the town and, perhaps, all of civilisation? Well yeah, of course they can but, things get intense for a while.

I still love this film. Everyone in it is playing it completely straight and working hard to pretend that the threat is something to be taken much less tongue in cheek than it seems it should. At more than one point, the people expounding these silly theories are deriding the ideas as nonsense or scientific gobbledy-gook, while simultaneously investing in them as the best answers and course of action. Even the score is playing it’s part here... some of which I think is probably tracked in or re-recorded cues from other films of the time such as Creature From The Black Lagoon (if my ears and memory aren’t failing me). So every time we see a bit of rock come into contact with a bit of water and it starts bubbling up, the music goes into a full blown, histrionic stinger of a cue that might be best reserved for some much more ostentatious looking form of life ending peril. Yeah, this music made me smile so much with its excessive attempts to convince you that... these rocks are out to get you!

And the special effects, I have to say, are amazing. We see the rocks grow before our very eyes, partially as a genuine chemical reaction (I presume) and it looks pretty amazing. There’s a wonderful moment where we see the townsfolk all watching and, above them, the tumbling, crashing rocks slowly approaching in a brilliant combination of live action and effects shot which, although I knew roughly where one part of the shot finished and the other part was joined, I really couldn’t detect in terms of matte lines or anything (and, yeah, even on this new blu ray, the shot looks absolutely brilliant). 

And there you have it. A completely non-traditional kind of ‘monster’ picture with, well, it has to be said, really no monsters in it at all except faster growing geological formations but, despite the unintentional comedy of such a concept, it’s still a satisfying film and I think The Monolith Monsters would make a great addition to any B-movie themed all nighters which saw fit to include it as part of a line up. Definitely a curio but one which I still like to revisit whenever I have the opportunity. Glad it’s finally on Blu Ray... I think this might even be the film’s first UK release on a home video format?

It Came From Beneath The Sea

Depth Collector

It Came From
Beneath The Sea
USA 1955 Directed by Robert Gordon
Columbia/Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

“The mind of man had thought of everything... except that which was beyond his comprehension...”
From opening monologue from It Came From Beneath The Sea

It Came From Beneath The Sea is the first movie presented in Indicator’s excellent, three movie Blu Ray set, The Wonderful Worlds Of Ray Harryhausen Volume One: 1955 - 1960. I’m pretty sure, like the next film also presented in this set, that I’ve never seen this one... so I’m grateful to the people at Indicator (aka Powerhouse Films) releasing this bundle. That being said, I think this is going to be one of my shorter reviews because, having just watched it, I wasn’t too much taken with it, to be honest. It didn’t help matters when I came to the menu screen after I hit play and it gave me an option to watch a ‘colourised’ version if I wanted. Okay folks... people who try and colour up old films which are lit for and therefore meant to be watched in black and white... are evil. That kind of dumb attitude is a crime against filmanity and this way of watching really shouldn’t be encouraged. I wasn’t happy to see this option on the disc... and when I say wasn’t happy I mean horrified/disturbed/foaming at the mouth in anger. For the record, I watched this in its proper monotone format, thank you very much.

However, I was very interested in it. Let me get the very simple plot out of the way first. Kenneth Tobey, from The Thing From Another World (reviewed here) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (reviewed here) plays ‘atom powered submarine’ captain, Pete Mathews. He and his crew encounter something which grabs a hold of their submarine and, after lots of wobbling of the camera and actors appearing to stumble around, they get free but with a huge piece of organic matter in their propellors. The Navy call in top notch Marine biologists Dr. John Carter (played by Donald Curtis) and Dr. Lesley Joyce (played by Faith Domergue). After over a week of study, which sees Joyce falling for the charms of both men (before settling on rugged hero Captain Mathews), they realise they are dealing with a radiation emitting giant octopus which is moving nearer and nearer to its food source (culminating in it wrecking the Golden Gate bridge). It’s up to the three, aided by the military, to kill the creature via its new jet propelled missile Joyce has invented, which burrows into the skin and can then be detonated later when it reaches the brain. And that’s enough of the plot... I’m sure you can work out what happens from here.

It’s actually an important film in some ways... because it brought together stop-motion-giant-in-the-making Ray Harryhausen with producer Charles H. Schneer. It’s a partnership which would stick and see each man working together for film after film until their joint last movie together, Clash Of The Titans in the 1980s. Harryhausen’s animation is pretty good here on the titular giant octopus, managing to hide the budgetary problems of only being able to afford six legs for the octopus but, I have to say, there aren’t that many minutes of the creature in this film. It’s mostly a dry film apart from when Kenneth Tobey and Faith Domergue get together for the romantic scenes... Domergue is smoking hot as a somewhat ‘atypical of the time’, temptress of a scientist. Of course, only one month before the release of this movie, Domergue played in the role she will be forever remembered for in the hearts and minds of science fiction afficionados everywhere... as Dr. Ruth Adams in the sci-fi classic This Island Earth (review coming, relatively soon). The tension in that film as she awakes and is released from a suspended animation tube a few minutes before the others, then chased around the alien craft by an iconic Metalunan Mutant, is something I’m sure nobody forgets.

And, being as this is a Harryhausen movie... I can’t help but assume that the name of the other doctor in this film, Dr. John Carter, is a deliberate homage (in name only) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ much loved Barsoomian explorer of the early 20th century. Another homage, perhaps, is that the titular creature has been swimming down from Japan after being hit by H bombs so, yeah, perhaps a little sly reference to Toho studios successful kaiju eiga from the previous year, Godzilla (reviewed here)?

All in all though... it’s not a great film. There’s a constant voice over narrative filling in between the main scenes and I can only assume it was intended to add a documentary feel to the whole proceedings because, frankly, it’s pretty unnecessary and could, perhaps, have been done in better ways within the main storyline. There are some odd choices in the movie too... with a jeep going around a sign in the middle of the road with a quick swerve but, once it’s speeding away from the giant octopus, instead of doing exactly the same thing, it opts to go through the sign instead... for no apparent reason, as far as I could see.

And that’s me done already with It Came From Beneath The Sea, I think. A nice one to see lumped in with a load of similar movies in a marathon screening event, perhaps but, as a stand alone watch I mostly found it cold... although the chemistry between Tobey and Domergue is definitely warming up the scenes they share together, for sure. I’m glad I saw it though and will end by quoting William Hurt’s character when watching this exact same film on a television in the great movie The Big Chill... “Sometimes you have to let art wash over you.”

Universal Terrors 1951-1955

Terror Forming

Universal Terrors 1951-1955
By Tom Weaver with David Schecter,
Robert J. Kiss and Steve Kronenberg
McFarland Books
ISBN 9780786436149

A quick shout out to a great book which is actually so dense in content and information that, with my lack of amount of free time these days, it took me a fair amount of time to read and absorb. Subtitled Eight Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Films, Tom Weaver’s Universal Terrors 1951 - 1955 is an exhaustive tome written by the same team (with one addition) behind The Creature Chronicles (reviewed by me here).

This one is pretty much a ‘making of’ style book about the production (plus pre and post) and making of eight specific movies, most of which I knew fairly well. These include three which I wouldn’t necessarily myself had counted as being typical of the films Universal were churning out to their horror fan base in the 50s... those being The Strange Door, The Black Castle and Cult Of The Cobra. The other five are all ones which I would instantly associate with that decade’s predilection for atomic aged monsters... either rediscovered, mutated or out of this world... namely It Came From Outer Space, Creature From The Black Lagoon, This Island Earth, Revenge Of The Creature and Tarantula.

The lion’s share of the volume is written by Weaver with his usual doses of humourous writing and the occasional judgemental eye at the behaviour and credibility of cast and crew, many of whom he has interviewed in his many years over his career as a film historian specialising in such B-movie gems... for instance, you can tell how he feels about director Jack Arnold and the stories he’d spun throughout his life (and perhaps he’s right to make that judgement call). Other writers also have their own specialist sections within the chapters, with the layout of the book being an introduction (including a great, hand drawn map of the Universal International front lot at the time) followed by eight big chapters with sub sections by Weaver, followed by the great David Schecter (who I have a lot of respect for in his coverage of the music, considering how many of those film scores he’s rerecorded and raised from the dead on his CD label Monstorus Movie Music), Robert J. Kiss and Steve Kronenberg.

Each chapter is split into sections being Full Credit Information, then Weaver’s big chunks following Production History, which includes sub sections on Synopsis, Cast Biographies, Production and Marginalia (with some wonderful doses of interesting trivia)... before going onto the other writers’ sections exploring The Release (including Critics Corner which quotes various quotes from reviews from the films’ initial releases), The Music Score (very detailed breakdowns including many notes on who wrote what and which bits were tracked in from other identified movies) and a final Analysis section.

And, yeah, it’s pretty thorough. If you want a blow by blow account of which actor or stuntman ‘so and so’ were doing on 3pm on a given day on the shoot, if that was of any interest... you are going to find it all in here. It gets very interesting when the notes from the day’s shooting doesn’t correspond to how people later remembered things from that day.

Among many nuggets which I learned for the first time (except from the two chapters on Creature From The Black Lagoon and Revenge Of The Creature, which are cut down versions of the chapters in the book on the trilogy of movies covered in the aforementioned The Creature Chronicles) are such gems as the fact that long standing Robin Hood actor Richard Greene was actually the grandson of motion picture pioneer William Friese-Greene. Or that Charles Drake (no, not Charlie) was sometimes a drunken mess and once assaulted an actress outside her home for publicity. And I also didn’t know that Jeff Morrow went on to become the face of Suntory Whisky in Japan for a while (just like director Akira Kurosawa was and, fictionally, Bill Murray’s character was in Lost In Translation... from what I remember). There’s also some criticism thrown into the mix on the extent of Ray Bradbury’s involvement on the screenplay for It Came From Out Of Space.

And, like I said, a short review and that’s all I’m going to say about Universal Terrors 1951 - 1955 other than to say that, if you were a ‘monster kid’ as many Americans are fond of labelling a certain kind of horror movie enthusiast (as I guess I was, to the extent that you could be in the UK) then you are probably going to love this book and should maybe try and grab a copy. It’s a long read with many facts and figures (and previously rarely seen photos from the productions) plus it’s entertainingly written and certainly an enlightening experience, for sure. Definitely worth the price of admission.