 Starring: Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway
Director: Eugene Lourie
Year Of Release: 1953
Plot: Following a nuclear test in the Antarctic, a ferocious dinosaur wakes from its 100 million year slumber. Although Professor Tom Nesbitt sees it, no one believes him. While he tries to prove there really is an enormous killer lizard out there somewhere, reports come in that ships are being sunk in the Atlantic. However Tom may isn’t able to convince anyone until the dino is about to make it to New York! |
When people say that modern movies are stupid, I think they ought to watch a few more 1950s monster movies, many of which are stunningly stupid and proves that silliness is not something that only happened in movies in the last 20 years. The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms is great fun, with immensely entertaining Ray Harryhausen stop-motion special effects, but it’s immensely dumb. Even if you can get over the fact that for some reason all you need to do bring a 100 million-year-old dinosaur back to life is to thaw it out, or that like all monsters, it can’t help itself but head for a giant city, but it’s difficult to work out why this obviously land-based animal spends the vast majority of the movie in the sea (other than the title would be rather meaningless otherwise).
However despite its silliness, these sorts of movies just show how grateful we should be as species. Despite the likes of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Godzilla, as far as I’m aware, no nuclear test has ever resulted in a giant lizard attacking one of the world’s major metropolitan centres. For that matter, I’ve never heard about one trampling all over a small village either, so we really got lucky there. The reason it’s particularly worth talking about atomic bombs being responsible for the release of giant killer creatures in connection with The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, is that it was the first film that ever connected the two – although it was far from the last.
But it’s not just giant radiation lizards. I’ve seen everything from Independence Day to War Of The Worlds, yet not once have I ever had to run screaming because a large spaceship is hovering overhead and alien invaders are trying to blow up every building in site. It’s a bit of shame really, as it would certainly make an interesting anecdote at dinner parties.
Likewise, we’ve never had to worry about vampires, zombie plagues or werewolves, which resolutely refuse to live up to their movie reputation as bloodthirsty killers (in real life they’re too busy hugging puppies to murder anyone, but the prejudice in Hollywood is just hideous).
If we go back to older films, despite premonitions of giant ants, tarantulas and even 50ft tall women (not to suggest women are invertebrates), all of these things have stayed relatively normal-sized, no matter how much we irradiate them. In fact despite over 60 years of trying, it’s bloody annoying that pretty much every time you blast any creature with a lot of radiation, its main response is to die – which is really bad news for my plans to become a superhero.
Even cockroaches, which have the reputation for being the only things that would survive a nuclear war, are actually just as likely to expire as everything else, so it seems we really don’t have to worry about super-sized creatures destroying cities – and I include in that King Kong, because despite the fact he wasn’t the result of nuclear bombs, aliens or anything else, I think if there were 100ft-tall gorillas out there, we’d have found them by now.
No, while there’s a lot of crap that goes on in the world, I think we should all be grateful at just how few of these disasters that are so beloved by movies, have happened in real life. In fact we probably ought to have an annual day to celebrate the fact.
Thinking about it though, it is slightly peculiar that people seem to enjoy the massive scale destruction these films offer. What is it about disasters and people being killed by enormous creatures, aliens and various other things that we enjoy so much? But as long as it doesn’t get too close to reality, we lap it up (it’s one of the reasons most of these films are so silly, because the fantastical element keeps at arm’s length the fact that its dealing with large scale death).
And while I’m talking about The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (well, sort of, anyway), it’s worth clearing up a misnomer about the terms b-movie, which is what the movie is normally referred to as. Nowadays when we talk about 1950s creature features, we tend to refer to them generically as b-movies. However, with many of them this strictly isn’t true.
In case you’re not old enough to remember the days when the whole world was in black and white, in ye olden days, going to the cinema didn’t just involve watching a single film. There’d normally be two movies, a longer main feature, which normally had bigger stars and better production values, and a shorter b-movie, that was normally cheaper and had unknowns in it. You’d also get a newsreel, cartoon and possibly other things as well. While many cheap 1950s sci-fi movies were indeed originally made as b-movies, designed to back up something bigger and better, it’s certainly not true of all of them.
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was originally designed as a b-movie, but was released as the main feature and made millions. Them!, the 1954 movie about giant killer ants, was Warner Bros. highest grossing movie of the year.
These movies all get lumped together now under the term b-movie as a way to denigrate them, and ignore the fact that these films weren’t just a little bit of fun after people had viewed a more serious movie – they were big business. The fact is, audiences in the 1950s weren’t much difference to us, it’s just the films didn’t have the computer effects we do. We may like to talk about how each film that Roland Emmerich releases, from Independence Day to the recent 2012, is evidence of quite how far movies have fallen, and that audiences will now just take any old crap thrown at them, but the main difference between modern ‘b-movies’ and most of the sci-fi and creature features of the 50s, is the effects.
Back then moviegoers flocked to watch these silly but entertaining films just as they do now, but as always with film history, the bits that suggest films and audiences weren’t any better in the past tend to get airbrushed out, so that it’s easier to bemoan how awful cinema is today.
These ‘b-movies’ films, whether old or modern, may be stupid, but they’re fun, and afterwards we can always be grateful for the lack of giant radiation lizards attacking our cities, and that while there may be an awful lot of problems in the world, at least that isn’t one of them.
TIM ISAAC
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