A late entry in the ‘50s creature-feature stakes features a villainous species that reveals how exhausted the repertory of potential monsters had become: are you ready for the soul-warping, intestine-wrangling terror of…giant prehistoric caterpillar-like molluscs? Yes, plural, not singular, and they really don’t challenge the world so much as a few random Californians and bewildered military personnel. These blood-sucking slugs are awakened from their long sleep in the earth underneath the Salton Sea by an earthquake and let loose to eat sundry military personnel and swim-suited bathers. A reasonably good screenplay by Pat Fielder emphasises interplay between the characters and sports some deliberate humour, including a neat Hitchcockian eccentric in the shape of Milton Parsons’ ultra-nerdy local history buff. Director Arnold Laven’s effective location filming in an interesting locale, makes this initially more engaging than a lot of the cheap cash-ins that followed the decade’s earlier, hallowed monster movies, like Them! and Tarantula. Some of its imagery might have had a ripple effect on Jaws (1975) and aspects of the plot also anticipate Piranha (1978), which likewise hinges around trying to halt the beasts’ progress along a waterway to the sea.
A middle-aged Tim Holt, looking rather pudgy and awkward (it was his first film in five years), leads an unusually competent cast, as a Naval Intelligence officer who romances widowed mother and secretary Audrey Dalton, and Hans Conried plays the oddly fey but energetic scientist who explains the plot to his amusingly unperturbed colleagues, as if in the movie’s universe such outbreaks were a familiar occurrence. There’s the compulsory teenaged female victim who’s obviously going to be a victim because she wears one of those neck-scarves used in such films to signal a tendency to trampiness, and an ill-fated sailor named, of course, Johnson. Otherwise Monster constantly emphasises the kind of communal effort and understanding that’s so often a theme of these flicks. Everyone’s exceptionally nice to one another whilst battling man-eating molluscs, once they get to know each-other, and there’s an effective moment in which the dead girl’s mother weeps for her misunderstood child. But the film is unfortunately also cheap and terribly limited in terms of giant bug action, failing to generate any tension thanks to some diffuse story development, so that, even at 83 minutes, it proves to be the movie that challenges one’s patience.
