By now I’ve made it clear that I’m a fan of those 1950s science fiction/horror “B” movies, aka “creature features.” A particular favorite is The Monster that Challenged the World (1957). It doesn’t hurt that the setting for this film is practically in my neighborhood.
WHOSE FAULT IS IT?
The landlocked, shallow Salton Sea is a highly saline lake that straddles parts of Riverside and Imperial Counties in Southern California. It also has the dubious distinction of sitting atop the notorious San Andreas Fault, so it makes perfect sense that, in the film, an earthquake is what starts the ball rolling. Here is a brief overview of The Monster that Challenged the World.
“Can we go back now?”
When the aforementioned earthquake widens an underwater crevice, a few enormous, prehistoric mollusks are released into the Salton Sea. The carnage begins almost immediately when a parachutist on a training mission, and the sailors in a patrol boat sent out to pick him up, are victims of close encounters with the beasties.
Enter Lt. Commander “Twill” Twillinger (Tim Holt), who leads a rescue party to investigate what happened to the missing men. They find the patrol boat covered in icky slime, and the remains of the parachutist—totally drained of all bodily fluids. He takes a slime sample back to the base lab, where he meets recently widowed Gail MacKenzie (Audrey Dalton) and her young daughter, Sandy. (You gotta have a love interest in a creature feature, right?) Mother and daughter will have a critical role in later scenes.
THE CARNAGE CONTINUES
“Look, mommy, the egg hatched!”
A young couple, enjoying a swim in the moonlight, become late-night snacks for the mollusks. Then, one of the divers that Twill sends down to find out what is going on. Twill manages to fight off one of the beasties as they retrieve an egg, which he takes back to the lab for study. Uh-oh, a recipe for disaster?
As the mollusks find their way into an irrigation canal system, where livestock and more people become victims, I shall wrap up this brief overview. The Monster that Challenged the World earned some positive reviews as one of the better films of that era. It didn’t hurt that the special effects “monster” was life-sized, and it also had plenty of screen time. No holding back here.