The Wonders of "Stop - action" !

Ray Harryhausen's "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" is truely amazing! Made with almost "no" budget (even by 1950's standards) it's a wonder how it was made at all. The Ray Bradbury orginal plot outline (short story)is outstanding, although the screenplay has major problems with scientific facts and military logic. Considering the script Kenneth Tobey and the rest of the cast do an above average in making the unbelievable, believable. Special kudo's Cecil Kellaway as comic relief/paleontologist. Never the less the real star is Ray Harryhausen's stop-action Rhedosaurus and perhaps the excellent use of well known locations. The passage of years and the use of Black and White film has reduced the films impact but it is still a wonder to behold. In closing my only real compliant is the Rhedosaurus death scene while technically stunning it has never been really satisfying in my mind.

Will the First Radiation Spawned Montrosity Take a Bow?

Essential viewing for fans of dinosaurs that wreck cities, The Beast emerges as a result of atomic testing and wreaks havoc in NYC. The film is one of the first to provide a showcase for the carnage and fantasy of Ray Harryhausen, master animator and special effects wizard. Performances range from very good to somewhat wooden with a particularly nice performance by Cecil Kellaway as the doomed paleontologist. The print includes a couple of recently made shorts related to the film as well as the original trailer and the trailer for some other similar films. The print looks good. It is easy to tell when stock footage was inserted into the film by the sudden appearance of scratches and flaws. By now this is standard stuff but really this film has never been bested. As a side note, it is not the first dinosaur to thaw out of the ice and decimate a city. I think that honor goes to The Arctic Giant, one of the Fleischer Brothers' Superman cartoons released in 1942.

Visual Poetry!

Maybe it's reaching this strange point in the history of cinema where we can do anything and frequently give birth to mutant mice that makes one appreciate older films like this one, and "Them" and "The Thing" and "King Kong" and many lesser knowns. The art direction on these 50-year-old plus flicks is often stunning; the artists who worked on them were often old-school art school graduates trained in the finest of fine arts painterly techniques. I've seen background paintings and glass shots (a painting on glass that the camera shoots through) from films of this era (and older) that surpassed all the "artistry" found in a single modern flick. I've seen sci-fi design of earlier eras that beat out nearly anything today in terms of visual bravura. Directors of that era often knew how to milk all the horror and terror out of scenes that were merely suggestive (try the original "The Haunting" for a good example of that). Today we can show any horror in the greatest detail and its just sick and awful.

This movie is stuffed with visually striking moments--the monster's sillouetted attack on the lighthouse, the undersea search for the beast in the bathysphere, the street carnage with the iconic devouring of the police officer, the strikingly imaginative death of the monster. A lot went into this old dog and it still works great, especially in black and white. It provides the film with the needed dreamlike quality that color film seldom seems to achieve.

I write a fair number of reviews of movies of this era and I'm trying to gently steer people away from seeing them as merely camp or nostalgic, and instead appreciating them as minor, and sometimes major, works of visual art. Ray Harryhausen, who worked on this film, was a wonder with stop-motion effects but he was also a visual poet of the highest order who knew how to bring drama, wonder, and magic to the screen. Look, for just one example, at his work on "First Men in the Moon." I sensed that Spielberg, in his "War of the Worlds" paid endless tribute to the often astounding visual poetry of this era. Note how much horror and terror he was able to conjure up (some sort of record, I'd say) without being overtly graphic. There was a lot of depth and social commentary to that film that seemed to get missed.