The Monolith Monsters (1957), dir. John Sherwood, Universal-International
Heading into the last roundup for Universal. Yes, the house that horror built had, at this point, regulated the much-vaunted monsters to the B-side; that is when they weren't making high camp of them.
The opening is a bit standard at this point, even by 1957's standards. A meteorite crashes just outside the quaint desert town of San Angelo (California, not Texas). Geologist Ben Gilbert (Phil Harvey) checks out the now massive hole, noticing the large amount of black rocks that seem to be scattered around the area. He and local reporter Martin Cochrane (Les Tremayne) are puzzled but not overly so.
That night, a water container is tipped over onto the rocks which begin to sizzle...
Ben's supervisor, Dave Miller (Grant Williams) returns to the office to find it utterly wrecked and Ben dead. Dead as in turned into a solid statue.
Local teacher Cathy Barrett (Lola Albright) is taking her kids on a field trip and where do they go? Yup, the new hole in the desert. One of the kids takes a sizable black rock with her when they finish for the day.
As Dave tries to figure out how Ben died, Cathy happens by and recognizes that particular rock as the same kind her students played with; a hasty trip to the girl's family farm finds the parents both dead and the young girl slowly turning into stone.
The monsters? The rocks! Silly but as the film shows, the rocks grow and stay solid until they reach such a height and break, the broken pieces growing into an individual tower before it too breaks.
Can our heroes figure out how to stop this strange threat?
Interesting. The characters are pretty basic and nothing we haven't seen before, but you add a frighteningly original monster? A darn good combo. The Universal Monsters were fading away but they wouldn't go out on a whimper.
No comments:
Post a Comment