|
Synopsis:
Vacationing in a small Mexican town on the Pacific coast, illustrator
Julie Blair (Anne Kimbell) chats to a young local boy while she
sketches. Learning of the death of the boy’s father, Julie is taken
aback when told that he did not drown, but was killed by a strange
creature living in a nearby cove. Julie points out gently that such a
thing is impossible; further, that she has been swimming in the cove
every day since her arrival, and has seen nothing strange. Hurt and
offended, the boy runs away. Despite the boy’s tale, Julie again swims
in the cove, only to recoil in fear as a strange object looms up out of
the water. It is not, however, a sea monster, but a one-man
mini-submarine piloted by marine biologist Steve Dunning (Stuart Wade).
Steve follows Julie to shore, apologising for frightening her and
praising her sketches, which he says show a real love for the sea.
Softened, Julie agrees to visit the research vessel on which Steve
works. Steve tows Julie out to the boat with his mini-sub, and
introduces her to his colleague, Dr Baldwin (Dick Pinner). The two men
explain to Julie their ideas for cultivating the sea as a food source
for the world’s growing population. As the three talk, another boat
speeds across the water towards them. Its operator, Joe (Jonathan Haze),
shouts hysterically that his partner, Sanchez, an abalone diver, has
gone missing in the cove. Steve immediately re-enters his mini-sub to
search for the man. He finds, not Sanchez, but Sanchez’s diving-suit,
intact except for the faceplate and completely empty…. Julie and Steve
dine together. Julie confesses that she cannot get Sanchez’s mysterious
fate out of her mind. She repeats to Steve what the boy on the beach
told her about his father, adding that she has since spoken to other
villagers who tell similar tales. Steve scoffs at the notion of a “sea
serpent”. Julie, while conceding the improbability of such a thing,
insists that there is a mystery in the waters that must be investigated.
Steve makes her promise that she will take no unnecessary risks. The two
continue to spend time together, and Julie persuades Steve to accompany
her on a search of the cove. Her dive is cut short, however, by an
encounter with an oversized octopus. Later, Julie talks to Joe, who
tells her that there have been stories about something strange living in
the cove since just after the war. He sends her to speak to Pablo (Wyott
Ordung), a fisherman who lives alone in a run-down shack at the back of
the cove. From Pablo, Julie hears of strange tracks left on the beach at
the height of the full moon; of a huge, formless sea creature with a
single glowing red eye….
Comments:
It is, I confess, a bit of a cheat to choose Monster From The Ocean
Floor for a Beach Party-themed Roundtable, being as it is
conspicuous for its absence of pretty much everything that defines the
beach party movie, such as sex-obsessed teenagers, disapproving adults
who just don’t understand, and incessant booty shaking to the strains of
light pop music masquerading as hot rock ‘n’ roll. On the other hand,
the film is set during a summer holiday; it fills in much of its
running-time by letting its camera ogle a pretty girl in a fairly (for
1954) hot series of swimsuits; it features – God help us! – a truly
appalling musical interlude; and at one point it manages to assemble on
a beach a cow, a hideous gelatinous blob, and Wyott Ordung. If that
doesn’t just scream PAR-TEY, well, I don’t know what does.
The importance of
Monster From The Ocean Floor lies not, of course, in its somewhat
meagre cinematic virtues – of which, no doubt, I shall subsequently make
far, far too much – but in the story behind its production; for
it was with this film that a certain former engineer, naval recruit,
literature graduate, screenwriter, script analyst and studio gofer
managed to parlay the proceeds from his (much re-written) screenplay and
associate producer’s credit for a film called Highway Dragnet
into the setting up of a small independent production company, and
subsequently to make history by unleashing upon the world the very first
– Roger Corman Production.
A moment’s awed hush, if
you please.
While it may be true that,
by this point in the game, the Corman legend has entirely overwhelmed
the Corman reality, it is nevertheless also true that one can hardly
overestimate the man’s importance in the realm of the latter-day B-film.
Those of us who can sit bored and irritated while a hundred million
dollars’ worth of explosions and CGI effects play themselves out across
the screen, yet be reduced to a state of idiotic glee by the sight of a
movie “monster” that consists of a thoroughly unconvincing hand-puppet
wobbling about in a household aquarium, will always keep a special place
in our hearts for the man. This is not to say, of course, that Corman
invented this kind of all-hands-on-deck, make-do, micro-budgeted
film-making; he merely raised it to an art form.
One should take care,
however, before using the words “art” and “Monster From The Ocean
Floor” in the same sentence. With a lacklustre script, a monster it
wisely declines to show for more than two brief scenes, and about a
quarter of its “action” consisting of footage of its heroine
scuba-diving, it is really only the film’s brief running-time that keeps
it from wearing out its welcome. And yet, a tolerant viewer might find
that Monster From The Ocean Floor is not entirely without a
certain minimalist charm, even if it does lie primarily in seeing what
would later become Roger Corman trademarks in their most embryonic form.
Some things we recognise instantly, not least the fact that the film as
a whole looks like it was produced on a budget of what Uncle Roger found
down the back of the couch when he was vacuuming his house one Saturday
morning. (Well….perhaps that’s a bit harsh. The film was,
however, produced for an extraordinarily low sum, something between
$10,000 and $18,000, depending on who you ask. Corman himself puts it at
$12,000, so we’re probably safe in assuming it was a bit more than
that.) Then there’s that wonderful “come-on” title (which, hilariously,
was changed by the film’s distributor from its shooting title on the
grounds that It Stalked The Ocean Floor was “too cerebral”), the
outrageously inaccurate advertising art, and the shaping of the entire
script around the availability of a prop, in this case the
mini-submarine that the Aerojet General Company was convinced to lend
the production for free, in return for – ahem – all the publicity its
use in this blockbuster would generate.
(Optimistic – not to say
naive – on Aerojet’s part, yes; but how much you wanna bet that many an
enthused eight-year-old left a screening of Monster From The Ocean
Floor wailing, “I want one! I want one!”?)
In terms of the completed
film, the most thoroughly Corman-esque aspect of Monster From The
Ocean Floor is the fact that its story centres upon a strong and
independently-minded young woman, the first but by no means the last of
such characters to grace various Corman productions over the years.
Julie Blair is, perhaps, not as memorable as some of later cinematic
sisters, but this is not the fault of actress Anne Kimbell, who gives a
warm and naturalistic performance that is very likeable. The script is
the letdown here (hardly surprising, legend having it that it was
cranked out in a single night), leaving us with a heroine who is
ultimately more interesting in her backstory than in her actuality.
Julie is a working girl, a commercial illustrator with aspirations of
being an artist. She is untroubled about holidaying alone, comfortable
in the society of the local villagers, unafraid to walk and swim and
dive by herself, and while happy to have male companionship, certainly
not desperate for it. The most successful aspect of Monster From The
Ocean Floor – no, it’s not the monster: aren’t you
astonished? – is probably the sequence of scenes in which Julie
persuades some of the villagers to confide their stories of “the thing
in the cove” to her, winning their confidence with her grave and
distinctly non-condescending manner. Unfortunately, rather too much of
Julie’s dialogue throughout the film is confined to variations upon the
theme of, “I’m going to prove to you there’s something down
there!”, while her solo diving expeditions, which are certainly intended
to demonstrate to the viewer her courage and self-sufficiency, strike us
even at the outset as foolhardy, and finally – after she has
found physical evidence of the monster’s existence, that is! – as
suicidally dangerous. Moreover, there is too much inconsistency in her
overall characterisation, as if Roger Corman’s taste for a stronger
breed of heroine clashed with William Danch’s more conventional vision.
It is nothing short of painful when Julie reacts to the unexpected
presence on a moonlit beach of a young cow by screaming, running away
and tripping over. (Absurdity upon absurdity, she subsequently faints,
too! Whether this is meant to be from “shock”, after she glimpses the
monster emerging from the surf, or whether it is simply a contrived way
of stopping her from glimpsing it, is most unclear.) And it is almost as
bad when Julie – depicted as an experienced diver – is thrown into a
state of panic by the sight of a large octopus. Still, these “feminine
weaknesses” do seem to make her more appealing to this movie’s
hero….
Ah, yes, that “hero”. If
Julie is a rather unconventional heroine for this point in cinema
history, Steve Dunning is a textbook example of one of the era’s most
familiar genre figures: the Smug, Superior, Know-It-All, Patronising
Male, whose character is entirely summed up in the moment when, after
Julie has declared her intention of investigating the mystery of the
cove, he asks why she has to “stick your pretty little chin out”. (How
the viewer reacts to this is an individual thing, I suppose. On the
other hand, it’s hard to imagine Steve endearing himself to anyone with
his response to Julie’s fretting over the danger posed to the locals by
“the thing in the cove”, which – not to put too fine a point upon it –
is essentially to demand why anyone should give a crap.) Alas, the
apogee of the relationship between Julie and Steve occurs in its opening
moments, when a swimming Julie is almost impaled by Steve’s mini-sub. A
more thoroughly phallic cute-meet you never will see. After that,
we must all of us suffer through yet another example of surely the most
unbearable of all romantic conventions, the bickering couple who
nevertheless fall in love. She does nothing but insist upon the
existence of the monster, he does nothing but declare her to be
mistaken/misguided/delusional/certifiable; the audience is left shaking
its collective head and wondering what the hell the two of them see in
each other.
(Oh, all right, we know
what he sees in her: in her series of convention-bucking
black one-piece swimsuits, Julie is simply adorable; but that still
leaves the other half of the mystery unsolved.)
To be fair, if Anne Kimbell
was ill-served by the screenplay for Monster From The Ocean Floor,
poor Stuart Wade was almost crucified by it. About nine-tenths of his
dialogue consists of Steve either sneering and jeering at Julie about
“monster-hunting”, or – as he phrases it himself – “making noises like a
biologist”. That’s right: Steve’s a scientist. If we ever doubted
it, Steve has no sooner simultaneously transfixed Julie’s abdomen and
her heart than he sweeps her out to the boat on which he works, where
sits – a microscope. Right there on deck. Steve has already brought out
the big guns, attacking Julie with every marine biologist’s favourite
pick-up line – “Did you know that over 70% of the earth’s surface is
covered with water?” – and he proceeds to complete his conquest of her
by blinding her with science: “One female cod alone lays almost eight
million eggs!”
(Julie’s trip out to the
boat leads to a wonderful, and a wonderfully prescient, moment, at least
for the cognoscenti, when she is introduced to Tommy the boat-hand.
Tommy, you see, is played by a startlingly young Roger Corman – who is
described by Dr Baldwin as “our one-man crew”. Ain’t it the truth?)
Yes, indeed. Steve’s a
scientist, all right. He is also this film’s hero, a good guy, which
means that unlike any of the mad scientists who populate films of this
era, each and every one of whom is perfectly capable of believing eight
impossible things before breakfast, he will prove so stodgily
unimaginative that we’ll spend most of the film wanting to slap him –
especially at moments like that in which he reacts to the discovery of
Sanchez’s mysteriously empty diving-suit by, in essence, shutting his
eyes, clamping his hands over his ears, and chanting, “LA! LA! LA! LA! I
AM NOT LISTENING!”
But patronising his
girlfriend, not giving a crap about his fellow man, and refusing to look
facts in the face are not Steve’s only talents. Oh, my, no. He also
takes advantage of a moonlit night on the beach with Julie to whip out
his guitar and offer up a show-stopping – and I mean show-stopping
– rendition of My Luve Is Like A Red, Red Rose. Julie herself may
be like a melodie, that’s sweetly play’d in tune, but….
Look – I don’t know what
Stuart Wade and Anne Kimbell were paid for appearing in Monster From
The Ocean Floor; peanuts, certainly; or possibly in peanuts;
but as far as I’m concerned, the pair of them deserve medals for their
heroic efforts in getting through this scene without cracking up.
Actually, I may be giving Anne Kimbell too much credit here: she’s shot
from behind for most of it. But in any event, I can only say again –
poor Stuart Wade.
By now you might be saying
– hmm, moonlight serenades? pointless trips out to a boat? endless
scuba-diving sequences? scientific blather? Sounds like Monster From
The Ocean Floor features….rather a lot of padding. And you’d
be quite right. The film is hardly in the realm of, say, The
Astounding She-Monster when it comes to nothing actually
happening, but it does have considerable trouble making it even so
far as its sixty-four minute mark, and is forced to go off on several
tangents in order to do so. In later years, these non sequitur
diversions would often prove to be some of the most enjoyable sections
of various Roger Corman productions; here, you can feel the
effort. (In other words – it’s kind of like this review….) The biggest
and most bizarre side-road in Monster From The Ocean Floor
involves two of the locals deciding that the thing in the cove is
actually the incarnation of a long-standing legend, and that it must be
appeased by a sacrifice. And just who do you suppose fits that
bill? Why, none other than “the fairest”, the “young
Americana….”
Like many films of this
era, Monster From The Ocean Floor produces an odd double-play, on
one hand blaming everything on “radiation” – fallout from the Bikini
tests, specifically – while on the other insisting upon the creature
being a not-so-legendary ancient monster. It is Tula, one of the locals
whom Julie questions about the creature, who decides that it is the
visitor’s destiny to become monster bait. (Tula has lost her dog to the
beast, and is understandably pissed; although you might argue that
responding to a lost dog with a human sacrifice is going just a
teensy bit over the top.) She attempts to bring this about by
poisoning the mind of Pablo, the fisherman that Julie befriends in her
quest for information. (Pablo, by the way, is played by director Wyott
Ordung. Strange things the mind does sometimes. The first time I ever
saw Monster From The Ocean Floor, I remember being very startled
by the discovery that Wyott Ordung was a short, stocky, dark-haired
individual. For some reason, heaven alone knows why, I’d always mentally
pictured him as looking rather like Dudley Manlove.) Reluctant but
convinced, Pablo makes three attempts on Julie’s life, first
deliberately cutting his hand and bleeding into the water while Julie is
diving, in order to draw a pack of sharks to her. At least, this is what
we deduce that the rather awkwardly cut-together stock footage is meant
to convey. In any case, Julie suddenly produces a hitherto unseen knife
and manages to ward off her savage attacker/s (the only shark we see her
make contact with – she pokes it in the butt with her knife! – is all of
eighteen inches long). Subsequently, Pablo tampers with Julie’s
scuba-tank. This, too, failing, he then – cutting to the chase, as it
were – draws his own knife. But of course, he cannot go through with it.
He confesses his sins to Julie, she forgives him, and that’s the end of
that little detour. And while, despite our admiration of Julie’s
generosity and compassion, we might consider her casual waving away of
three attempts at murder as taking things a tad too far, this
scene does provide us with one of the film’s comic highlights, as Pablo
explains all about how sacrificing “the fair one” will induce the
monster “to leave in peace”. “Why, that’s ridiculous!” exclaims
the young woman who has spent this entire film in a determined effort to
prove the existence of a man-eating sea monster. “Certainly you don’t
believe a thing like that!?” Poor Pablo--- What can he do but
shrug?
Earlier, while messing
about in a boat, Julie managed to snag something unidentified with a
grappling hook. She pops it into a jar and ships it off to Steve, who
with Dr Baldwin has conveniently withdrawn “down the coast” for a few
days. Steve scoffs, of course, upon being informed that the jar contains
a piece of the monster, but is stopped in his sneering, jeering tracks
upon realising that whatever is the jar, it doesn’t look like “the flesh
of any fish I’ve ever seen!” And then it’s time for – SCIENCE!! –
as Steve puts a blob of the goop – where else? – under the
microscope. He doesn’t section it. He doesn’t mount it. Hell, I
don’t think he even puts it on a slide! He just shoves it holus-bolus
under the good ol’ 40x objective. After some simply delicious
gobbledygook between Steve and Dr Baldwin (preserved for the ages in
Immortal Dialogue), the scientists decide that the monster is a mutated
(I’ll say!) amoeba. Steve then has one of those flashes of inspiration
that, well, that make a scientist a scientist: he drops a small piece of
“canned meat” into the jar, the contents of which begin to fizz and
bubble. “Why – it’s disintegrating!” gasps Steve, while Dr Baldwin
pronounces solemnly, “Intercellular absorption!” Gasp!
And this, embarrassingly
enough, is the moment from Monster From The Ocean Floor that
always stays with me. I know, I know…. It’s absurd, it’s juvenile,
it’s….oh, for crissake, it’s two grown men staring down in abject horror
at what is undoubtedly the dissolution of an Alka Seltzer tablet! And
yet there’s something about that bubbling jar….something that
makes you think of the missing dog, and the disappearing cow, and poor
Sanchez, and pay this moment, involuntarily perhaps, the tribute of
saying….ewww.
A few more moments’
reflection (“It could absorb a man! Or – a woman….”), and the
scientists are speeding back to the deadly cove. (Well, when I say
“speeding”…. Remember that padding we were talking about?) And this is
the cue for everyone, the viewers of the film and the readers of this
review alike, to cry, ABOUT FREAKING TIME!! Because if the rushing to
the rescue of an entirely ineffectual hero who to date has contributed
absolutely bugger all to the proceedings means anything at all, then it
is surely that the time for the final big showdown between man and
monster has finally arrived.
(Well – when I say “big”….)
And yes,
my dear readers, we are indeed about to get our second look at our
titular monster. Our first demonstrated that it was vaguely octopoid,
certainly tentacled. This time, as it looms up out of the darkness, we
can see that it does in fact have a single glowing red eye; or perhaps
one gigantic iridescent nipple; it’s kind of hard to tell.
These days, the most
appealing thing about this beastie is its unmistakable resemblance to
Kang and Kodos of The Simpsons fame. (It bears a rather
suspicious resemblance to the creature that would menace the crew of
The Atomic Submarine five years later, too.) And rather sweet as
this creature is, nevertheless we mourn for what might have been.
This monster, you see, is not the one originally created for the
movie; no; which explains all those puzzling references to “protozoa”
and “amoeba” and “something formless”. That monster survived only
a single preview screening of the film to a few privileged souls, who
unkindly laughed it off the screen. An unwontedly thin-skinned Roger
Corman – yes, he was very young – immediately ordered its scenes
cut, and a new monster constructed and photographed. And so the monster
from the ocean floor became a uni-ocular cephalopod, rather than---
B-movie fans are familiar
with the man-eating genitalia that enliven the final section of
Battle Beyond The Sun.
Almost ten years after Monster From The Ocean Floor, a
battle-hardened Roger Corman didn’t hesitate to unleash those
monsters upon the paying public. What a shame, then, that his younger
self could not bring himself to put into general release a monster that,
if the tales told be true, resembled nothing so much as – a giant
diaphragm….
But I digress.
The perpetually
scuba-diving Julie finally pushes her luck too far, becoming trapped by
the monster and running out of air before she can make it to the
surface. As she sinks to the bottom of the cove, Steve comes to the
rescue – in his submarine, naturally. He feints once, narrowly avoiding
a tentacle, retreats to get a good run up, and speeds down again to
plunge the sub deep into the creature’s ni--- I mean, eye.
I say again – ewww.
Steve then carries the
unconscious Julie up to surface. Now, I’ve been mighty hard on Steve
Dunning in this review, but it’s time to give the devil his due, and I’m
pleased to report that Steve is last seen apologising to Julie for being
such a dickwad. (Oh, okay. He doesn’t phrase it quite like that.)
This, in my book, ranks him several degrees higher than many of his
contemporaries, who behave just as much like a dickwad, but without ever
seeming to recognise the fact; John Agar’s Dr Steve March in The
Brain From Planet Arous, for instance, who reacts to his
girlfriend’s stories of evil giant space brains with a smug cry of, “Ha,
ha, ha, ha! You and your imagination!” – even though at the time he must
be literally up to his ankles in macerated grey matter. Dickwad. So, in
parting, a big thumbs-up to you, Dr Steve Dunning.
This, then, is Monster
From The Ocean Floor, a film with, I would contend, a few virtues –
just a few – even aside from the purely historical: a nice lead
performance; good use of its locations, and attractively moody
photography (so it ought to be: this film was shot by Floyd Crosby –
only two years after High Noon!); some interesting character
touches; the first appearance of a future Corman stock player, Jonathan
Haze (who hides behind an aggressively “Mexican” moustache); an eerily
empty diving-suit; a fizzing jar of God-knows-what…. Sold to Lippert
Releasing, Monster From The Ocean Floor took in over ten times
its production costs, and Roger Corman had his formula. He took his cut
of the proceeds – leaving everyone else, doubtless, to scramble for the
crumbs – and the lessons learned, and moved on to---well, if not
necessarily bigger, at least generally better things.…
Click
here
for some Immortal Dialogue.
|
Director: