Who
invented the Monster Movie? I don’t mean the creature in the pond, or some
hairy thing waiting for teens to go off looking for their missing friends. I’m
talking about monsters the size of a building, or ones that can pick up and
entire passenger train and then toss it to the side like I do with that can of
sardines that’s been in the pantry for the last few years. Are they like me,
just scavenging around looking for a snack?
I
asked Google and it told me to go away, but eventually I got an answer. As far
as the specific genre of the Creature Feature I was told the film The Beast from
20,000 Fathoms was the first film to have a monster that was created by
man’s pursuit of the nuclear age. We built the bomb, we used it, and nature is
striking back. The birth of an entire genre of B-Movies; nerd genesis.
Directors
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The Main Players
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Steve Karnes
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Prof. James Bickford
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John
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Jean Trevethan
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Synopsis:
Dumping radioactive waste in our
oceans serves as a wakeup call to a prehistoric beast that can shoot
electricity and radioactive beams of destruction, but stopping it with
conventional weapons might give us back all that waste we were trying to get
rid of.
Review:
Like the synopsis says, there is a
lot of dumping of waste into the oceans at the intro with a lot of attention to
making sure you realize it’s now the nuclear age. That’s right, the new age
where all of your problems can both be caused and cured by the invisible stuff
that makes the little machine click like crazy when you get near that monster
or where the monster has been. Our giant monster doesn’t waist any time and
heads to a small fishing village on the coast of England where it kills an old
fisherman as soon as his lovely daughter is out of range.
Eventually the monster sets its
sights at trying to cause problems all over. In fact we even have a scene where
it comes ashore going after a small country farmhouse. I was wondering if it
was going to slip into one of those old travelling salesmen jokes about having
to let it stay for the night and share a room with the daughter, but it killed
them all instead with more invisible radiation waves or whatever the hell it’s
supposed to be. All we get to see is something glowing strange and then waves
or energy like ripples in a pond radiating out towards the victims. We don’t
get much of a view of the actual creature for now, and that’s really a good
thing.
Eventually
the monster gets tired of the costal offerings and starts moving into the more
heavily populated area using the Thames as its private tour guide. There is a
lot of mayhem and panic around London and the Army is brought in to create some
strong holds with the hope of holding it off for a while. Of course their
attempts are useless with a lot of soldiers finding out the hard way. The
creature is estimated to be about 200 feet tall and they even identify which
type of dinosaur it is but I can’t spell that one, and I don’t even want to
look it up. Frankly, I thought it was a lot more interesting when you had to
imagine what it might look like.
In my imagination, I never thought
of it to look like a crappy little plastic model of dinosaur. The stop motion
isn’t bad. It’s what they are moving a bit at every frame that makes it hard to
take this movie. The only way to salvage this one would bet to return to a
simpler time. A time when most of us had like three or four channels to choose
from. When you’re eight or nine years old and you’ve got a choice between this
one and Hymn Sing or Meet the Press, you know where the dial is headed. Of
course that depends on weather you even know what a dial is (sort of a manual
remote attached to the T.V.). You sort of have to really enjoy suffering
through this kind of stuff like I do, or suffer any number of other mental
afflictions. I liked it, I just don’t know why.
Lessons
Learned:
- Radioactive sea monsters are very
coy.
- Fish are not supposed to glow in the
dark.
- Scientists love a good conference,
especially when there is a monster involved.
- Tower Bridge in London is a tourist
trap even for monsters.
- Sea monsters and submarines go
together just like fish and chips.
