Reptilicus (1962)

Early 1961 saw an unusual uptick in European-made giant monster movies: over two months, Gorgo and Konga premiered in Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, while the Danish-made Reptilicus debuted in its home country. This represented a rather singular mad rush to cash in on the success of Godzilla and other Japanese-made monster movies, but it sputtered out as soon as it began, leaving us with only a few very odd attempts to recreate the kaiju film with different sensibilities. The rest of the world got their chance to partake in Denmark’s only giant monster movie after a year-long delay, as instead of simply dubbing the existing movie, our old pals Sidney W. Pink (acting as director and producer) and Danish expat Ib Melchior (as co-writer) essentially remade the movie, originally directed by Poul Bang, with most of the cast returning. The final product became rather infamous, ending up a modern Mystery Science Theatre 3000 punching bag and finding its way onto “Worst Movies of All Time” lists—by my estimation, it’s not even the worst Sid Pink & Ib Melchior movie I’ve watched, but there are definitely some issues that may be worth formally addressing.

The Twilight Zone – “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”

While a TV anthology series like The Outer Limits gives me enough classic monster-based material to be featured in an entire series of posts, its more famous contemporaneous counterpart, The Twilight Zone, did not dip into that well frequently enough to justify a similar treatment. However, among the few times Rod Serling’s influential fantasy vehicle did feature a monster story, it ended up being one of the most famous monster stories of recent memory, remade, parodied, and referenced endlessly for decades. That seems like a fair trade-off.

Originally airing on October 11^th, 1963 (less than two weeks after The Outer Limits’ “The Architects of Fear”) as part of the series’ fifth and final season, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is one of those stories that ingeniously finds a way to make a monster attuned to the terrors of modern life—not just in its choice of setting, but in the anxieties that the setting provokes in people. That’s not as easy as it sounds, and one of the reasons you know that this one succeeded, tapping into something truly universal, is that its story is still completely understandable, if not relatable, sixty years later. While lots of little things about the miraculous and terrifying reality of commercial air travel have changed significantly over the years, in the end there’s still the stark reality that we’re stuck in a claustrophobic tube with no exits, and there is only a few layers of glass and metal that separates you from an unfathomable height. It doesn’t take much for a traveller to remember all the things that can go wrong there, realizing that technology can be as fragile as the frayed psyches entrusting their lives to it.

Gorgo (1961)

While the giant monster movie genre originated in America, it was the productions by Japanese studios like Toho that really gave the genre its own topoi. When studios outside of Toho tackled the subject from the late fifties and into the sixties, it was always in the shadow of Godzilla and its successors, and it’s interesting to see how they responded. Surprisingly few of them really attempted to utilize the tokusatsu kaiju style, instead attempting to keep the stop motion tradition of King Kong alive—Gorgo is one of the few examples of a non-Japanese studio tackling suitmation.

You could call Gorgo a British homage to Godzilla, with “homage” being quite generous—on the other hand, Godzilla itself was a “homage” to The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, so you know, turnabout is fair play. Who is the director of this? Why, it’s Eugène Lourié, director of (the non-Ray Harryhausen parts) of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, “homaging” the “homage” to his own movie! It was also the third time he directed a light variation of “giant marine reptile attacks a city”, with the other two being The Beast and1959’s The Giant Behemoth, the latter featuring stop motion by King Kong‘s Willis O’Brien ( Lourié also directed previous site subject The Colossus of New York between those two.) Two years after Behemoth and yet another lizard from millions of years ago is battering London—but despite the clear attempt to ape from Godzilla (and despite it featuring no apes), one of the ways it differentiates itself is by eschewing the nuclear radiation fears that animated both Toho’s and Lourié’s own movies and going back to ape the plot, and sympathetic monster(s), of King Kong (which does feature apes.) Coming out in the same year as Toho’s Mothra, which also has a Kong-esque plot, there seemed to have been a convergent sense of nostalgia in the giant monster genre at the time.

Konga (1961)

In order to better understand the essence of the classic Giant Ape Movie, I’ve sought the many riffs on King Kong that have improbably filled movie theatres over multiple decades, and I think I may have finally seen all the most notable examples—which is really not saying much. Konga is one of the only ones that was released well before the banana gold rush of big apes that occurred around the release of the 1976 Kong remake, and so has a unique late fifties/early sixties B-movie vibe when compared to the others—I can imagine it was at least partially made because of the successful theatrical re-releases of the original Kong throughout the fifties, which really raised that movie’s cultural stock. But despite being from an entirely different era of movies, it still ultimately falls in line with the brazen schlock that came to define the giant gorilla genre, setting a standard for the films that followed, and not a particularly high one.

Creature From the Haunted Sea (1961)

By the early sixties, much of the movie industry had moved on from creature features, and Roger Corman was no different—he had already started the Poe cycle (with The Pit and the Pendulum premiering just two months after this post’s subject), which are the more highly-regarded among his directorial efforts. Still, while in this transition period, Corman was experimenting with his horror movies, and starting with 1959’s A Bucket of Blood, we started to see them become out and out comedies with a ghoulish or monstrous twist. Creature From the Haunted Sea is the last of these horror-comedies, and the one that is the most like a parody of his own low budget B-movies from the fifties, which could probably be chalked up to the fact that it more or less reuses the story from the 1959 movie Beast From Haunted Cave, which he produced (and itself was more or less recycled from a non-monster movie Naked Paradise—all three variations written by Attack of the Crab Monsters‘ Charles B. Griffith), with a different setting, monster, and with added comedy. Also, like most of Corman’s movies, it had a low budget, was filmed extremely quickly (five days!), and was made basically because they had extra time during their Puerto Rico location shoots for two other movies. Although mostly an underground phenomenon since its release, you may recognize this movie and the titular googly-eyed monster from its cameo appearance in the opening of Malcolm in the Middle. But as goofy-looking as the monster is, the movie is pretty consistently funny even when it’s not around, showcasing a dialogue-based absurdity that overcomes the obvious budgetary limitations.