ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Here’s a Jim Dandy idea! A cool team of crack scientists are sent to investigate shocking new scientific anomalies which appear anywhere in the world!

One mission involves the investigation of giant sea slugs that appear in Salton Sea in CA.

Another mission takes them to Antarctica, where subterranean volcanic hit creates a hidden valley where prehistoric animals still exist!

And a third mission brings them face-to-face with a gigantic alien robot which was sent to Earth to drain all our power!

Well, until somebody produces a series like that we’ll have to be satisfied with the movies below.
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The Monster that Challenged the World (1957)

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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
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The Land Unknown (1957)

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_____________________ The Land Unknown


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A semi-classic. As far as dinosaurs and lost lands go, you can't really beat this for concepts.

I do believe writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a lot of stuff similar to this premise (memory is fogging over). By using the continent of Antartica, a writer has the ability to create a huge landscape — the lost land may be as big as the USA, for example. The landscape starts out as mist covered, so we don't see any details at first, then there's a big reveal.

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The film actually utilized both the T-Rex costume AND blown-up (enlarged) lizards (a la The Lost World 1960), which I'd forgotten about. But the lizards are integrated quite well into the sets.

Over at Marvel Comics, their version of a hidden land in this same area was called “The Savage Land”, introduced in 1965 with the character of Ka-Zar, a Tarzan-like hero who dwelled there with his sabretooth tiger, Zabu. They also fought dinosaurs, as well as apemen and the like.

Speaking of Tarzan, lead Jock Mahoney, after playing the baddie in the Tarzan movie Tarzan the Magnificent (1960), went on to play Tarzan in a couple of features, Tarzan Goes to India and Tarzan's Three Challenges.

In the next decade, Marvel Comics published a short-lived (8 issues) series titled Skull the Slayer, which also had a very similar premise — modern humans accidentally ending up in a lost land of dinosaurs, though this happened in the Bermuda Triangle and involved time travel.

The Land Unknown is a bit tricky when trying to appraise it fairly, at least for some of us. There are the added factors of nostalgia, childhood memories and so on. But if we put aside all those, it comes down to “concept and execution”.

For me, the concept is just terrific. I mentioned my own fondness for Edgar Rice Burroughs and even some Marvel Comics stories which utilized this concept: the lost land, the hidden jungle, the large creatures.

In a way, it's kind of hard to mess something like that up. In the execution department, The Land Unknown does OK, maybe even just so-so, probably better than some other films in the fifties with the same concept (Lost Continent) with lower budgets.



The Land That Time Forgot (1975) is at about the same level, with the advantage of color and 18 years of fine-tuning some fake (if still sloppy) dinosaur FX.

But again, I'm a bit more fond of The Land Unknown. Why? Better pace & story? Or more nostalgia?

I myself probably make too many allowances for the sometimes sloppy looking/moving T-Rex. Even when I was much younger and first watched this, something about that T-Rex didn't seem right to me. I also got this sense of a soundstage when I watched The Land Unknown years ago.

BoG's Score: 5.5 out of 10


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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Kronos (1957)

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____________________ Kronos movie trailer


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This is the one with a huge square-shaped robot-thing threatening Earth — different from the standard monsters or aliens which usually threaten us in these kinds of films.

It begins with a 5-mile asteroid hurtling towards Earth. and it ends in the ocean off Mexico — but doesn't cause the devastation we might expect.

At the same time, a man in a pickup truck driving through the dessert is possessed by a ball of electricity — an alien we assume — which then transfer to a scientist, who then is obviously possessed.

The main characters include Jeff Morrow from This Island Earth as a scientist. Barbara Lawrence is his girlfriend, and George O'Hanlon is a fellow scientist. They go to Mexico to see what's what, and (the next morning) see that a 100-foot high cube-like robot has appeared on shore.

For the rest of the film, we see this thing marching across the Mexican landscape on four pistons which function like legs, even though they move up and down.

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Visually and conceptually this is an unusual idea for a film of this sort — it's a trip to watch this thing move across the landscape, and the idea is that it's here to absorb all our energy. It reaches a power plant, for example, and extracts all the energy. The highlight is when the military try an atom bomb against this thing.

But, for some reason, the resulting execution of all these ideas is not that exciting. Maybe it's just that monsters and/or aliens are just more exciting than this type of contraption. It's a widescreen picture and looks bigger budgeted than the norm for these sci-fi pics, but it's almost as if Kronos also absorbed some energy out of the film itself. There's too much screen time for the parallel plot of the possessed scientist.

BoG's Score: 5.5 out of 10


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