Monster of the Day #3514

Updated on May 17, 2024 By Ken Begg 7 Comments

So here we get Corman’s take on a giant monster movie. As you might expect from a Corman cheapie, the script is extremely weird. This is mostly remembered, of course, for Paul Blaisdell’s fantastic giant crab prop.

Happy Friday, everyone. Watch something stupid this weekend. Also, Watch Party tonight. Wheeee!

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  • Beckoning Chasm

    There were so many weird aspects to this movie…the fact that the crabs could absorb others’ minds (and turn them evil), that they could communicate by vibrating metal objects, that they were made out of electricity…nowadays, they’d make three movies out of that.

  • Wade Harrell

    The scene with the talking gun is an especially surreal moment!

  • NathanShumate

    Yup. Radiation turned the crabs to free-floating, disconnected atoms with a negative charge… Yeah, that was really an addition that didn’t help things. Just stick with the “intelligence from brain-eating” part and be done!

  • Gamera977

    Yeah, the hard SF section of my brain was hurting there…

  • Eric Hinkle

    I seem to recall hearing a theory that this was based on a very obscure Robert E. Howard story titled “People of the Black Coast” that has a man and woman get shipwrecked on an island inhabited by giant super-intelligent crabs. It’s a Howard story, so it ends badly for the woman and man, though he goes down killing as many of the crabs as he can.

    And that picture above reminds me of some film footage I saw a while ago of an Australian family picnicking on a beach, while surrounded by hundreds of hungry coconut crabs snatching all the food they can. The people were foolish enough to hold some of those horrors like they were pets!

  • Beckoning Chasm

    So, for Saturday, we finished the Jonny Quest series. Brilliant, and well worth owning on physical media, because when the PC police get ahold of this, the entire series will be about ten minutes long. In the spirit of Friday’s watch party, “Terror Island” had giant crabs, though they didn’t eat brains and couldn’t talk through metal.

    Jade made her second appearance. She was cool.

    The best monster is still the Invisible Monster. Honestly, this episode terrified me when I was a kid. Watching it now, I’m struck by the creature’s expression when it gets entangled in Dr. Quest’s electrodes. It honestly looks distraught. It looks like it’s being betrayed. “I’m only a few days old, and you’re killing me! I wish this was Star Trek The Next Generation, when my preservation would be number 1 on the agenda!”

    Next Night Gallery. Night Gallery has easily the most frightening opening credits EVER.

  • Dorothy Cobb

    I vote for Tales From the Darkside as having the scariest opening credits.