ALL SCI-FI

[The Spike]

Instant TERROR......just add water!

An earthquake out in the Salton Sea awakens the creeping dread, gigantic vampire water snails are on the loose and they are hungry for human fluid!

Just about the right side of good, The Monster Who Challenge The World holds up well because of the well constructed creatures and a bit of care and attention to the boffin discussions. Far too many 50s creature features just used a basic premise of creatures obliterating mankind because they were in an odd mood, but much like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, this picture at least takes time to give us a bit of a nature heartbeat to help us understand the methods of a mollusc, and that alone should be applauded, so we learn while we have fun so to speak. The cast ooze B-movie standards, and that is in no way a bad thing here, whilst the Catalina Island locale sequences are pretty nifty to help salt the beef as it were!

Good honest fun that isn't short on creepiness, and top marks to the makers for introducing a very ingenious creature to a truly wonderful genre. 6/10
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The quality of mercy is not strnen.

[Bud Brewster]

Even though this is a low-budget programmer, it does offer some interesting non-animated monsters. As in "Them", the monsters are full-sized, mobile mock-ups.

The story describes them as prehistoric sea slugs, but they look more like caterpillars, complete with huge insect eyes, pincher-mandibles, and a double row of caterpillar-like legs.

I think they should have called this movie Attack of the Killer Katerpillars!

Kute title, eh?



Tim Holt is the stalwart Naval officer who spearheads the investigation into the mysterious deaths of several fluid-drained victims. Mr. Holt was well-known in the 1940s as the star of a series of low-budget but highly enjoyable Westerns. Typically his character was intelligent and good-natured, working undercover to solve a crime which had been committed.



Audrey Dalton is the pretty widow he romances.





A laboratory mishap causes one of the eggs to hatch, and the creature corners Dalton and her daughter in the lab -- a pretty exciting scene, with our former Western hero trading in his six-shooter for a fire extinguisher! (Damn, this critter looks scary! )





This is from the censored scene, in which the Monster eats the little girl!



. . . Just kidding.

And yes, Miss Barbara Darrow was in the movie, too. Thank goodness.





The monster was certainly an affectionate little devil!

The first thing I thought of when I saw the picture above was that it would make a good reference photo for a painting. But artist Woody Welch beat me to it!



The publicity photo and Mr. Welch's painting cheat a little, because Mr. Monster and Miss Darrow were never formerly introduced.

But it really did eat her.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Krel]

What I love is that Tim Holt plays his character as very scared while battling the monster.

David.

[Bud Brewster]

Yeah, I loved the way he convinced us he was battling a monster — not just pointing a fire extinguisher at a movie prop.


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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I may have been mistaken when I said Miss Darrow and the monster never met on screen. This photo was posted by a member of CHFB, along with this comment.

[Brent Gair]

"Independent distributors Kino Lorber have confirmed that they will release on Blu-ray Arnold Laven's film The Monster That Challenged the World (1957), starring Tim Holt, Audrey Dalton, Hans Conried, Harlan Warde, and Max Showalter. The release is scheduled to arrive on the market in August."

[alltare]

Every time I watch this movie, I like it a little better. Tim Holt was good, and Audrey Dalton's eyebrows don't even bother me any more.

[Bud Brewster]

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Tim Holt's Western movies are wonderful. I have a box set of them, and there isn't a bad one in the bunch.

And Miss Dalton's credits include the 1951 Titanic, in which she survived the disaster in a lifeboat with Robert Wagner, instead of floating on a broken door!

A very sensible girl, Miss Dalton. With great eyebrows, too.




(Admittedly I had to fix them a little . . . )
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

[Bogmeister]

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_______ The Monster That Challenged the World


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This is the one that takes place around the Salton Sea - so it's monsters from the Salton Sea in CA. The U.S. Navy conducts top secret atomic experiments, and then there's an earthquake. Various Navy personnel, such as a parachutist who lands in the sea, begin to disappear.

A Naval Intelligence officer (Tim Holt) begins to look into this, and soon bodies are found, but the parachutist's body is all desiccated. There's also a mysterious white substance found. Autopsies reveal that the bodies have been drained of all fluids.



It turns out that the earthquake uncovered a long hidden cave, and the culprits are these giant mollusks.

Divers also find this huge radioactive egg, which is taken to the Navy lab. While Tim Holt romances a secretary played by Audrey Dalton who has a small daughter, he also coordinates efforts to seal up the caves with explosives.

Then there's that egg.

The daughter fiddles with the thermostat in the lab because she's worried about some rabbits. This causes the final threat and carnage in the lab for the climax.



When I first watched this many years ago as a kid, I didn't know Tim Holt, and I wondered why the filmmakers stuck this pudgy guy in as the lead.

Holt's career goes back to the early forties, and this was late in his work. He kind of grows on me nowadays in this part, lending a more 'real world' ambiance to this than is usual for this fare.

This was the first of 4 Grammercy pics, rewritten by secretary-turned-aspiring screenwriter Pat Fielder, who drew inspiration from a 1955 Life Magazine article about ancient shrimp eggs which had been reconstituted, resulting in live shrimp.



This one also had a larger-than-average budget for this kind of monster movie — $250,000 — and it shows. There's a slight polish to the look and quality of the overall picture that's impressive if one is expecting low budget tripe.

There's one scene that really stands out, when one of the monsters sneaks up behind a hapless maintenance man. Its approach was totally silent — something the audience is unprepared for from such a big, cumbersome creature.

BoG's Score: 6.5 out of 10

_KMR epi 2 - The Monster That Challenged The World


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BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus

[Bud Brewster]

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Bogmeister gave this one the full BoG treatment, alternating text and pictures, along with two Youtube videos, the second of which is a fan-made review with a narration which plays over scenes from the movie.

Bogmeister liked this movie a bit more than I do, so he praises it in these two paragraphs.

[Bud Brewster]

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As demonstrated above, caterpillars can be gorgeous. I Googled pictures of sea slugs and got a veritable art gallery of images. Here's a screen shot of the first six. Click on the image if you'd like to see more.

But, as I suspected, none of them look a damn bit like caterpillars! So, I'm still mighty curious about why anybody in Hollywood thought that "giant sea slugs" would make an interesting 1950s movie monsters.



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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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If Pow were to suggest that this movie should have used stop motion instead of the huge, cumbersome prop, I'd wholeheartedly agree!

Speaking of "animation", Miss Barbara Darrow has some nice moves in the film, and she was gorgeous in her brief roll.


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And she was even more lovely in Queen of Outer Space.


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Pow]

From Wikipedia:

The story was by David Duncan who later penned screenplays for the notable SF movies The Time Machine (1960), and Fantastic Voyage (1966.)

Earlier titles for the movie were: "The Jagged Edge," and "The Kraken."

The film was a sixteen-day shoot with the underwater scenes filmed at Catalina Island which is located off Los Angeles.
Additional shooting took place at the Salton Sea, Brawley and Barstow, California.

Tim Holt, born Charles John Holt (1919~1973), was the son of actor Jack Holt. Newspaper artist Chester Gould based his creation, Detective Dick Tracy, upon Jack Holt's granite-jawed profile.

Tim starred in the classic films The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948.)

Sidebar: Actor, writer, director, producer John Houseman once said that he felt that the Ambersons could have been a finer movie than Citizen Kane. Both films were produced and directed by the legendary Orson Welles.

Welles left for another production soon after finishing Ambersons which was a huge mistake according to Houseman. The studio edited the movie instead of Welles and their re-edits hurt the movie. .

Sidebar: I certainly am a fan of the esteemed John Houseman; he was marvelous as Law Professor Kingsfield in the movie The Paper Chase and the television series based upon the movie.

And maybe if the Ambersons had been edited by Welles it might have been a superior film to Kane.

However, having seen both films, I have to say that Kane remains my favorite...even if Bud is not a fan.

Tim Holt was a decorated World War II combat veteran. He flew in the Pacific Theater with the U.S. Army Air Forces as a B-29 bombardier. Tim won the Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart.

Sidebar: Tim was a real life hero and not just a celluloid one. I certainly greatly admire his war time service.

Tim was a popular western movie star having made forty-six B westerns for RKO Pictures.

Tim was also one of the real life fastest draws with a shootin'-iron. He learned to ride horses very well as a boy on his father's ranch.

Tim was inducted into The Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1991.

Tim was good friends with John Wayne when they appeared in the terrific western film by John Ford: Stagecoach.

Tim's father, Jack Holt, was one of the thirty-six founders of The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

Audrey Dalton said in an interview that Tim came out of retirement to do this film. She found him to be a quiet, very nice man---the most unactor actor she had ever worked with.

Sidebar: Beautiful Audrey Dalton was born and raised in Ireland. She would go on to make many appearances on TV.
One of her best remembered movies was Titanic starring Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb, this was a much better film than James Cameron's overrated version.

Dave Sindebar of Fantastic Film: Musings & Rumblings had this to say about this movie, "For some reason, this fifties monster movie doesn't get much respect, but I think it holds up extraordinarily well. For one thing, I think the characters are unusually well drawn for this type of movie, and they're given a dimension and a sense of realness that adds a lot to the proceedings."

Sidebar: The creature design is truly frightening and well done. Sure, Bud, some stop-motion animated scenes would have been welcome edited into the large practical prop.

[Pow]

Keep Watching the Skies! Author: Bill Warren.

This modest film is one of the better of the low-budget monster thrillers of the mid fifties.

Because there's a giant "insect" in the story, we can presume the film was another attempt to cash in on the success of Them!, but it has fewer derivative elements than almost any of the other big-bug films.

It benefits from slightly unusual settings, and the standard semi-documentary flavor. The lengthy title is also distinctive and has a certain lilt.

Director Arnold Laven ordinarily handled fairly major films; typical titles are The Rack (1956) with Paul Newman, and Sam Whiskey (1969) with Burt Reynolds. His pictures are generally intelligently handled, and The Monster That Challenged the World is no exception. Laven manages to generate maximum suspense and there are several eerie scenes involving the snails in the canal.

Patricia Fielder's script, from David Duncan's story, is burdened with some romantic folderol between a rather pudgy Tim Holt and Audrey Dalton, but she manages to pull off a last-minute shock sequence that is especially good.

Laven seems to have been pleased with the sequence, as it's the best scene in the film.

Radioactivity comes into the story as the means by which the eggs are initially hatched, but this lack of originality is partially offset by several intelligently conceived ideas.

The menace in the monsters lies in their unusualness: they are giant, man-eating molluscs, and are incredibly fecund.

If any escaped into the ocean, they would be very difficult to eradicate and could prove quite dangerous. However, they are believably dangerous; they are unusual, yes, but really no deadlier than a shark. They are also vulnerable to conventional weapons, though they're not easy to kill.

The monsters themselves were built by Augie Lohman. Lohman built an 11-foot-tall mollusc which, although a little hydraulic in its motions, is an impressively life-like creation.

All and all, the monster is one of the most effective low-budget menaces of the period, and one of the best full-sized models ever built.

Sidebar: Amen. It remains a frightening looking creature to this very day.

The picture was greeted with favorable reviews.

Variety said that although the film was routine, it's a technically well-made film...and neatly fits the groove for which it was obviously intended.

The Los Angeles Times said that the script was so admirably simple and so dovetailed with actual marine biology and therefore so real that it is nearly incredible. Director Arnold Laven never lets the tension slacken.

The cast is variable. Tim Holt tries hard and is pretty good, but the ineffectual efforts to hide his weight problem should have been forgone; he should have played the part as an overweight hero, made a few cracks about it, and the hell with any criticism. A fat hero might have been interesting.

Hans Conried plays the required knowledgeable scientist, and it is a good, understated performance from this very underrated actor.

Sidebar: Maybe it was a refreshing change of pace for "Uncle Tanoose" on Make Room For Daddy.

The Monster That Challenged the World is an exceptional example of a routine exploitation story enlivened by good direction and technical work. and a better-than-average script. It's a respectable little thriller.