Tasked with putting out a follow-up to Creature From the Black Lagoonjust over a year later, producer William Alland, director Jack Arnold, and screenwriter Martin Berkeley (who also co-wrote the Arnold-directed Tarantula) took what was probably the most logical path: if the the first Creature film seemed directly inspired by the voyage to a prehistoric world as seen in King Kong, then a second one should take cues from the New York climax. In Revenge of the Creature, the once dominant life form in a secluded natural habitat is forcibly transplanted to our modern world—rather than a film about entering an unreal world of evolutionary alternatives, it’s about the unreal entrapped by more recognizable surroundings. By itself, this storytelling decision de-mystifies the monster by taking him out of his element and making it a lone aberration interrupting normalcy—but, intentionally or not, the rest of the movie degrades and diminishes it to such a degree that it may be an even more pitiable figure than in the first movie.
I write about monster apes as a crucial part of the monster enterprise, but the contradiction at the heart of that is that apes are not monsters—they are us. Once upon a time, pointing out the striking similarities between humans and the great apes was a shocking but intriguing idea, a source of merriment and thought experiments…and then it simply became incontrovertible that humans aren’t just similar to the great apes. To some people, this realization has been a source of enlightenment, a recognition of the interconnected nature of all living things on this planet. To others, however, from the earliest days of evolutionary theory to now, it only creates this grotesque mirror, a backwards mockery of human exceptionalism and civilization in animal form. Those two approaches is where the central complication of “apes-as-monster” comes together: we see ourselves in these animals, and sometimes that makes us want to sympathize with them (maybe that’s why ape movies have their own distinct following), and other times, it makes us fear them. In both cases, it’s because of what their very existence says about us.
Carl Linnaeus was the first to suggest that humans were directly related to other primates in the eighteenth century, and as great apes like chimpanzees and orangutans became more well-known in the western world in the subsequent years, the connection was increasingly a central fascination among fantasists. While many early depictions of apes in fiction were meant to play their relationship with humanity for satire, among the most famous early stories about an ape was Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The story is probably more well-known as the first true detective story, portraying a genius private citizen using deductive reasoning (Poe called it “ratiocination”) to solve a seemingly impossible crime, much to the astonishment of the bumbling local police—but it is also a likely inspiration for the apes-as-monster stories that would follow, the one that showed how an ape could be a figure of fear. Sure, it’s “only” an orangutan—normal-sized, no kung-fu skills—but to the people reading it in 1841, an orangutan was something unusual, something they’d probably never seen before (even if they read about it), something that didn’t sound real. In the twentieth century, ape fiction was still trying to maintain that mysterious and unsettling air, but since we knew more about them then, they started exaggerating them in different ways. In any case, Poe used the limited public exposure of apes like orangutans to make something memorably gruesome.
This movie poses a real conundrum: does something have to be alive to be considered a monster? In this case, the filmmakers obviously don’t think so, because they put “monster” in the title—but make no mistake, the titular Monolith Monsters are simply space rocks whose reign of terror is caused by chemical reactions, an inanimate cycle of cause-and-effect. In that way, they’re probably closer to a natural disaster than a monster. Still, it was 1957, and I imagine that in the minds of the bigwigs at Universal (because yes, The Monolith Monsters should technically be part of the same Universal Monsters canon as Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the fifties Sci-Fi inflected counterparts like The Creature From The Black Lagoon) it was a lot easier to sell a movie with “monster” in the title to the kids who went to see Tarantula and The Deadly Mantis than if it were “just” a science fiction disaster movie. So, these rocks became monsters.
Part of the reason I started writing these reviews in the first place was to highlight creature features that fell outside the norm, so this that is about giant rocks fits right into it. How the rocks operate and how the story progresses is really not that different from the movies featuring flesh-and-blood (or mechanical, I guess) monsters, and applying those tropes to something outside the usual alien invader scenario does provide some interesting new ways to look at them. For example: the space-themed paranoia that is a constant in so many of these genre movies in the fifties being projected onto something as seemingly simple as minerals from a meteorite indicates to us that anything that comes from outside our planet, be it animal, vegetable, or mineral, is potentially a world-ending intruder. This is so pessimistic as to be outright existential, imagining a universe so hostile that even rocks are to be feared, and so The Monolith Monsters intentionally or unintentionally brings that particular recurring Cold War era theme to its peak intensity.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 