Director: Dan Milner
Year: 1955
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
After a strange series of deaths around the water, a team's investigation into a possible clue in the area reveals a strange radioactive deposit created by a local scientist’s experiments that has grown a vicious radioactive sea creature, and they must find a way of curtailing both.
Review:
This is a fairly enjoyable if somewhat problematic creature feature. One of the better elements here is the fact that the relatively simple plot manages to keep things on line to the point of extremely efficient storytelling where there are no real unnecessary ventures. Whether or not they're enjoyable pieces is another matter, but the fact that it's so streamlined and straightforward keeps this from really going off into pointless territories like it easily could've gone. The film centers on the discovery of the strange radioactive substance in the cove and how the discovery is tied to the institute nearby, where the professor’s secretive nature about his experiments makes it all seem curious enough that the drive to find out makes this move along quite well as the mystery slowly comes into focus.
This series of investigations into the existence of the creature, from the revelation about the trace amounts of radioactive material at the scene of the crimes to the idea about what the professor is working on involving the need to constantly dive into the creature’s habitat, leads nicely into the other enjoyable factor here regarding the creature attacks themselves. Despite how the creature looks, the cheesiness of the creature's appearance underwater and chasing after its target, from the opening ambush on the unsuspecting fisherman to the later scenes of it following the investigator and his girlfriend on their dive, or the final confrontation with the creature involving the big battle to get to the undersea lair in time to pull off their mission before it returns, are all cheesy enough to be worthwhile and give this enough to like overall.
After that, not much here really works well. Most of these issues are based on the immensely underwhelming and just plain dull pace featured here that drains the energy from this one rather quickly. Despite staying focused for the duration of time regarding the investigation, this doesn't really produce a lot of interesting facets due to the enlarged amount of time spent on the extraneous facets of the investigation and the different red herrings throughout the story that go nowhere, seeming only to provide enough time to turn this into a feature-length affair. A series of scenes focusing on the romance between the professor and one of the locals, a race to get the proof required for a nefarious benefactor, or the quest to find the buried radioactive material underwater, just make the pace here feel like it takes forever to do anything.
What makes those even worse is that these all pretty much come off as if compensating for the atrocious special effects. Those really are that bad, with a laughable monster, utterly ridiculous make-up effects on the victims, and a rather clumsy nature to the attack scenes. The clumsy, fumbling nature of the creature almost standing up on the ocean floor trying to feebly wrestle with the victim really makes for a confusing time, with the stiff, immovable costume never making it seem like there's something to fear in the creature, which really takes a lot out of the movie considering the few times it's on-screen, there's not much worth to it. Since it features so infrequently in the action, it makes it all the more obvious when it appears, as these elements all conspire to keep this down somewhat.
Overview: **.5/5
A watchable but heavily flawed drive-in monster film, this manages to be a cheesy enough take on the genre while being let down by enough factors to not be anything more than that. This really ends up being for those who enjoy this era or style of genre fare, as most others out there should heed extreme caution with this one.
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