1950s Sci-Fi Review Bundle (Part 1/?) · 6:58pm January 23rd

So recently because I'm a totally normal person with a totally refined sense of taste when it comes to fiction, I got on a binge of going through some of those good old 1950s (and some from the 60s) sci-fi movies, rewatching ones I hadn't seen in ages and getting around to watching ones I'd never seen before, either at all or only parts of, and I thought for the heck of it I'd share some little "mini-reviews" I've written up of some of the ones I've seen...also because it's been ages since I can remember doing personal movie reviews around here. There's a bit of a backlog here compared to what I'll post below and where I'm at now (I've just finished watching Forbidden Planet, for instance), but I'll post others and catch up in due time.

Tarantula (1955)

So, Tarantula...it's alright, it's a 50's monster movie and it's got almost all the trappings of one right down to the then-obligatory double take of "a lady scientist??". Actually the first half of the movie or so is more of a mad scientist story, it doesn't really turn into a monster movie about a giant spider until about 40 minutes in or so. And of course radiation is a component in the eponymous tarantula's mutation, though not from direct exposure to any nuclear testing, but rather from an isotope used in an experimental growth nutrient that a scientist is developing to solve world hunger, because of course you can solve it by just making bigger animals and more meat, and of course using a tarantula as one of the test subjects is a big brain move. I mean c'mon, you already had stuff like guinea pigs and rabbits, why not stick to those?

VFX are mostly okay, nothing special. For the most part the giant tarantula is depicted via superimposed image of a real spider, often rendered so dark it almost comes off as a spider-shaped silhouette, with a puppet being used for various close-up scenes at certain points. Frankly the scariest part of the movie doesn't have anything to do with the spider itself, it's actually what ends up happening to the scientist who unwittingly created it, Dr. Deemer, when he's injected by a maddened and mutated research assistant early on in the film, and seeing him get slowly more deformed over the course of the movie, with some pretty nasty body horror by 50's movie standards.

Oh, and an extra bit of trivia...friggin' Clint Eastwood is in this movie, in an unnamed role as a fighter pilot in the climax where the air force manages to napalm the spider to death.

6/10 overall. Not bad, but nothing particularly special.

The Monolith Monsters (1957)

Killer rocks from outer space. Yeah it sounds like a lame idea, but surprisingly, this movie actually takes the idea and does a darn good job of crafting a credible and dare I say even unique 1950s sci-fi threat.

The title is a complete misnomer. There are no monsters. There are no indications anywhere in the movie that the titular monoliths are living things in any respect, not even as the ever classic silicon-based lifeform idea. For all intents and purposes, the big threat of the movie is an exotic mineral brought to Earth from a meteor impact. Upon contact with water it begins to spread and expand outward, soaking up sillicates from whatever it comes into contact with...including people, essentially petrifying them. When a plot-convenient downpour drenches the crater and surrounding debris, the rocks' growth skyrockets...literally, as that is the point where they finally grow up into towering monoliths, in a cycle of growing, toppling, shattering, and forming new towers from the rubble that repeat the cycle all over again. "Each one that shatters will make a hundred more. When that hundred shatters there'll be ten thousand of them. Then the third cycle will create a million. Unless we can stop them they'll spread over the whole countryside."

The result is basically a disaster movie featuring a gray goo scenario given a naturalistic twist...and it's actually quite effective.

The writing overall is generally solid, and the threat is handled by the human characters sensibly and with very minimal idiot-ball grabbing to necesitate further casualties for thrills, if any at all. In fact, it is the rocks' initial seeming innocuous appearance that kind of makes them such an ingeniously simple but insidious threat. When it starts it's literally just fragments of shiny black rock lying around, it doesn't look any more sinister than that, a bit curious maybe, but nothing that immediately signifies danger. The assistant to the main character, a federal geologist working for the Department of the Interior brings a sample back to the office, a wind in the night blows over a vial of distilled water and he promptly becomes the rock's first victim. A little girl takes a piece home and runs water over it because that's just what you do when you bring a neat looking rock home, you clean it off. But there's no truly stupid decisions made to get the threat rolling, it's either accident or just genuinely not knowing any better because there's no reason to suspect it, and even the initial incidents don't hold a candle to what mother nature ultimately unleashes. The thing with the distilled water getting blown over is a little contrived maybe, but that's about it.

And credit where it's due, instead of shoehorning in a love story arc, the male and female leads of the movie are already clearly in a relationship with each other, or at least interested. It's not explored in-depth, sadly, but for a 1950s sci-fi movie it's a very refreshing twist that avoids one of the more annoying cliches of the genre.

All in all, The Monolith Monsters is a very pleasant surprise, with a rather creative execution of what most would write off as a dumb idea, and a story well written enough and a cast of characters likable enough to keep it serviceably engaging.

7/10.

The Deadly Mantis (1957)

This is one of those awkward cases of a movie where I liked it upon first viewing as a kid, but unfortunately I don't think is actually really all that good now that I look back on it. Praying mantises are an awesome candidate for giant bug monsters, and the mantis prop used in the movie is certainly pretty good for the most part (barring a conspicuous lack of antennae), and the scene of it almost killing the obligatory female lead even after death via autonomous reflex is admittedly rather creepy, but aside from that, in a way the thing actually feels almost underutilized as a monster, spending most of the movie flying around and evading jets without a lot of onscreen destruction or rampaging.

The rest of the plot is a very barebones 50's monster flick without much really going for it, complete with a shoehorned half-baked romance, and from how the opening prologue takes a ludicrously long time to highlight the USA's various northern radar networks and the Air Force throughout, I get the impression that the real intended audience the movie was out to horrify were any Soviet spies that might have been present in the audience.

Honestly the best way to sum up the movie is that it's (at least up until the ending with a battle with the mantis in a tunnel in NYC) mostly a bland Air Force showcase that happens to star a giant prehistoric praying mantis as its main antagonist.

It's a shame too, mantises deserve more love as big bug bads in cinema, and yet the biggest examples I can think of are either this movie or Kamacuras, who basically amounts to fodder in the Godzilla franchise...and I guess the giant ones that showed up in the Goosebumps movie and that one episode of Magic School Bus count too, but seriously, give mantises more respect already!

3/10. That being said, I managed to find the poster for this movie by pure luck years ago at an antique store, and despite my lack of enthusiasm for the movie on a current viewing, I'm still proud to have it hung up on my wall.

I think three's a good number to stop at for this bundle, so I'll save the others for a Part 2...whenever I can remember to do it.

In the meantime though...