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Tuesday, January 10, 2017

The Monster That Challenged The World (1957)

Starring Tim Holt, Audrey Dalton, Hans Conried, Barbara Darrow, Casey Adams
Directed by Arnold Laven
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

A Navy commander spearheads an investigation into the mysterious deaths of divers in California's Salton Sea, and discovers giant radioactive mollusk monsters are to blame.

Not a great movie, but a lot of fun, with horrific and convincing looking monsters, although they don't really resemble mollusks that closely, as a video presentation during the movie makes painfully clear.  Presumably giant puppets patterned after the ants in the 1954 classic Them!, the creatures unfortunately don't have much mobility which limits their effectiveness on screen, but they're so scary looking, and with Heinz Roemheld's foreboding music accompanying their attacks, they definitely make a creepy impact.  Star Tim Holt was on the downhill side of his career, and looks like he's carrying a bit of weight, but he's a fine enough choice for the picture, and although his scenes with Dalton as a widowed secretary pining for him are a bit clumsy, they came off for me all right.

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