THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953) ** The tone is set early when the huskily melodramatic narrator informs us of a group of brilliant scientists "far north of the Arctic Circle" waiting for a plane and ensuring that their "instruments" are working properly (at which moment the camera strategically cuts to a guy with a pencil and compass). You're either in at that point, or you're not. The rhedosaurus gets all unfrozen and astounds one of the scientists so much that he becomes spontaneously fatigued. Like most visitors from the Mesozoic Era it (the dinosaur) heads for the bright lights and good times of New York, but becomes outraged when refused senior citizen fare for an all-day ticket at Coney Island and thereinafter becomes main course in an unservable barbeque. Ray Harryhausen's work on the 'saurus, and shots of it alternately eating a lighthouse, going through a wall, and eating a roller coaster, are all tremendous, but maybe played a little too straight. I mean this is a movie where the military guy says "thank you," and hangs up in mid-conversation upon being informed by a scientist that the entire city is in danger from airborne blood particles (no follow up questions?), where they drop an ancient biologist into a random spot in the north Atlantic in a bathyspere that just happens to damn near hit the elusive dinosaur in the head, where...where it's up to Lee Van Cleef to save the day. I've heard that in Heaven they have film festivals of Harryhausen/Ed Wood collaborations. Tom Nesbitt, with his Swiss accent that gives him strange and inexplicable lunar and vocalized associations with Joe Namath, would have worked even better in the lead if they'd mixed some Leslie Nielsen elements into his character.
back to Brilliant Observations on 2120 Films page, or Index
go back home, or send me email
Reviews won't do it any more! I need sustained brilliance! I want to buy your exciting new terrorist novel!
I've already read both of your novels. Thank you, they're amazing. Now I want to check out your weekly blog on everything