Sunday, July 31, 2016

Review 2016-02 The Giant Behemoth 1959

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
The Main Players

Steve Karnes
Prof. James Bickford
John
Jean Trevethan

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.

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