Monster From the Ocean Floor (1954)

Two movie posts in one week? Yes, I had so many things I wanted to write about that I’m starting my double features a bit early this summer. In June, you’ll be getting a new millennium subject early in the week, and something more vintage on Thursdays.

I was already planning on writing about this movie at some point, but the passing of Roger Corman (a few weeks ago as of this posting) made it a top priority, and I’m hoping to cover more of his movies in the near future. Of course, Corman had a big impact on the entirety of Hollywood film with his prolific filmography, general eye for talent, and, let’s say, economical methods, but the many monster movies he either directed (I’ve written about a few of them) or produced do have a special place in that vast filmography—with all their B-movie qualities, there were a few that offered genuine innovation in the category, or at the very least were uniquely bizarre and entertaining. There are also the times where he provided a starting point for filmmakers who would go on to become some of the biggest creative forces in monster movie history, including Joe Dante’s big break with Piranha. In a career that spanned everything from Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to women in prison movies and eccentric comedies, the monster movies are a crucial part of his legacy—beginning with Corman’s first-ever film as a producer.

As the story goes, Corman was irritated after seeing a script he wrote altered by the studio, so he decided to start his own production company to have complete control of the movies he worked on. Monster From the Ocean Floor was the first film he produced, and its six-day, cost-saving-whenever-possible production (the budget is somewhere between $12,000 and $35,000 depending on who you ask) was the beginning of the patented Corman method that would serve him for the rest of his career. The money he received up front from Lippert Pictures for Monster was used to fund his next movie, something called The Fast and the Furious(!), which was the first movie he worked on with distributors Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, the founders of his longtime distributor American International Pictures.

On a pure film history level, Monster From the Ocean Floor is actually significant, even if it is rather unassuming as a low budget fifties monster movie that could be best described as “quaint.” I would also argue that it, in its unassuming way, it’s also a fairly forward-looking piece of fifties creature feature history—released between more famous big studio fare, specifically Creature From the Black Lagoon and Them!, it gets into some of the major themes of the era early, signalling the specific form of nuclear paranoia that haunts a large number of these movies. Corman and his crew were not establishing their own distinct brand of monster movie, but developing the entire genre as a whole without really trying—and that’s a very Corman thing to do.

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.

Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

Where the previous Roger Corman movie I wrote about benefited from a more character-based approach that made up for a fitful distribution of monster scenes, its follow-up goes in the complete opposite direction, intentionally paring the script down to primarily scenes about the monster at its centre and simplifying characters so they are defined only by their jobs, genders, or accents (hilariously, screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, a frequent Corman collaborator who will be showing up in future posts, explained that “[Corman] said it was an experiment. ‘I want suspense or action in every scene. No kind of scene without suspense or action.’ His trick was saying it was an experiment, which it wasn’t. He just didn’t want to bother cutting out the other scenes, which he would do.”) At around 63 minutes, Attack of the Crab Monsters barely makes feature length (but is even more perfect as part of a double feature), and while maintaining much of the feel of a fifties creature feature, its maniacal pace and devotion to “suspense and action” makes itself felt off the hop—we get a decapitation within the first five minutes, after all. Even aside from that, what would seemingly be a typical example of one of the fundamental types of narrative conflict—man against man, man against self, man against giant radioactive crab—is complicated by said giant radioactive crabs acquiring some truly bizarre characteristics, giving them an unexpected presence throughout the movie. This is a case of something appearing routine on the surface but having a truly peculiar imagination when you peer into the tidal pool.

Incident at Loch Ness (2004)

Incident at Loch Ness is a postmodern film to the extreme, a mockumentary that jumps from tone to tone and exploits preconceptions about certain filmmakers and genres—a film about the making of a film, with a separate documentary crew filming someone else making a different documentary. Despite starring legendary director Werner Herzog, it is not actually one of his movies, and honestly doesn’t even really try to replicate the feeling of his documentaries despite clearly playing off his ideas of “fact vs reality”/ecstatic truth and his reputation as a rogue filmmaker. Really, it feels much more Hollywood, which is also one of the central jokes here, but at times goes far beyond self-parody—this is the kind of movie where Jeff Goldblum and Crispin Glover can show up for cameos, and where all the featured players are film industry people playing themselves, including screenwriter Zak Penn (he of such films as X2: X-Men United and Behind Enemy Lines, and the actual director of this movie) playing the ultimate pathetic movie hack. All of that gets centred around the Loch Ness Monster, which makes total sense for a film about what is or isn’t real.