Cardboard Science: Siri, How Many Fathoms Are In A League?

Year: 1953
Director: Eugène Lourié
Cast: Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway
Run Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

Happy Halloween, everybody! It's time for the final leg of the annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue, in which I task him with tackling three 1980s slasher reviews and in exchange he assigns me three 1950s/60s B-movies. Last time, we covered a film from Cardboard Science stalwart Bert I. Gordon. This time, we're tackling The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which brings us another legend of the genre, in the form of stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen. Also, it was directed by Eugène Lourié of The Colossus of New York, but I hope nobody will blame me for finding that fact a touch less exciting.

We've seen Harryhausen's work many times before as part of this project and others, in titles including Mysterious Island and It Came from Beneath the Sea. But you know what The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms has that they don't? The distinction of being a direct inspiration for a Cardboard Science Hall of Fame title, 1954's seminal Japanese masterwork Godzilla. 

Comparing The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms directly to Godzilla is a fool's errand, and we're gonna do it anyway. But first, the plot.

That is, if you really need a story hook other than "big monster go aargh."

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (which, for good measure, is based on the Ray Bradbury short story "The Fog Horn") follows Atomic Energy Commission physicist Tom Nesbitt (Paul Christian of The Day the Sky Exploded). After he witnesses a bomb test in the Arctic freeing an ancient, still-living Rhedosaurus from the ice, he tries desperately to get anyone to believe his story as a series of mysterious and deadly incidents take place along the Atlantic coast, heading south.

He, and eventually the lovely paleontologist Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond) and her mentor Professor Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and, more importantly, 1959's The Shaggy Dog), are the only ones who know that a giant monster is the reason for these attacks. That is, until the monster surfaces and stomps around in Manhattan for a bit.

Honestly, he's doing the neighborhood a favor. What's knocking over a couple buildings if it lowers the rent?

Let's cut right to the good stuff: the monster. Ray Harryhausen's work is a perfect encapsulation of the best of 1950s science fiction filmmaking. You're never at any point unaware that you're watching a stop-motion creature interacting with composited shots of humans running away screaming. However, at a certain point the magic of cinema takes over and you stop caring about any of the flaws (which include the fact that Lourié keeps trying to shoot the monster through ugly distorted lenses).

That's because, no matter how jerky the frames got, Harryhausen simply got how to breathe life into a stop-motion model. The second the Rhedosaurus stops hanging around and attacks, its muscular physicality is absolutely captivating. Your disbelief has gone weightless. No suspension is required.

I also think that there is one advantage to this being a dry run for Godzilla, which is that the monster is rather smaller than you might expect for a kaiju movie. He is not city-stomping size, which requires him to pummel buildings and rip them apart instead of merely squishing them beneath his sheer bulk. 

Another part of what makes this particular monster so convincing are the little touches. Its eyelids are blinking, and its tongue is flicking out, smelling the air. In addition to stomping around town, it is doing all of those little unconscious, barely noticeable things that living creatures need to do in order to stay that way.

Thanks to Harryhausen's delicacy and attention to detail, when his Rhedosaurus looks toward the camera, you feel like it can see you. And that makes every second spent with the monster absolutely worthwhile and dazzling. Alas, there is a larger number of monsterless seconds than just about anyone would prefer.

Oh yeah. Them.

I'm a seasoned veteran of Cardboard Science, so I knew not to expect 80 jam-packed minutes of monster mayhem. They simply couldn't have afforded that. We had to have a human plot in there somewhere. 

While The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms' human characters could certainly have been worse, they mostly just rattle around the frame, reenacting various sci-fi tropes until the screenplay can finally dispense with them in the third act. Yes, the movie itself clearly resents that it had to have people in it, too, to the point that it has the most perfunctory finale, both in terms of the conclusion of its romantic arc and its literal final frame.

That said, the bland human story does have its bright spots. Its requisite "stirring narration about the progress of science" opening sequence is a particularly good one, running through a roughly hourlong countdown in the space of just a few minutes to ratchet up the tension, and kicking around the movie's most dramatic lighting in the process.

None of the rest of the human plot can live up to those moments. Though Lee and Tom do parade around in some pretty nifty coats throughout the movie that prevented my attention from ebbing entirely.

But really, the most interesting way to watch The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is one that was not available to audiences at the time: comparing it to Godzilla. It was fascinating to see how differently a Japanese film handled the idea of a nuclear monster as opposed to an American movie (though with a Russian-French director and a Swiss lead, Beast is hardly the most flag-waving American motion picture there ever was).

It should be no surprise that Godzilla handles things better, tapping into its premise in a more potent and impactful way. Its nuclear monster is a stand-in for the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rather than The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms' approach involving a nation's fear of its own power growing too great (which, come to think of it, is also a thematic motif in Godzilla that is handled better). 

Beast is best represented by its final sequence, which takes place on a flaming roller coaster. It's meant to be a thrill ride that deposits you safely on the ground at the end. It's not its fault that Godzilla sought to be something more complex and interesting and devastating than that. And we should thank Beast for being one of the many reasons that Godzilla exists in the first place. But it's hard to completely admire The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms knowing what was soon to stomp its way through global cinemas just over a year after its release.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*The most fantastical moment of all in this monster movie was the fact that they expected us to believe Professor Elson could climb through a hatch in a diving bell that was clearly about half his size. You can't trick me with a judicious cut, editor Bernard W. Burton.
*Yes, the best place to store those barrels of flammable materials is at the base of the wooden roller coaster, why do you ask?
*I can't even come up with a joke that roasts the name of the top secret research project harder than just telling you what it is: "Operation Experiment."

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*About 25 minutes in, I noticed that Tom Nesbitt hadn't gotten a standard-issue sci-fi movie love interest, and I wondered out loud if he was going to just stay single the whole movie. The movie then answered my question by more or less immediately cutting to the door of the university's Paleontology department, which reads something like "Professor Thurgood Elson, Assistant: Ms. Lee Miller." They quite literally hung a sign on it.
*The duties of said Lee Miller would lead me to believe that she only minored in Paleontology while majoring in Making and Dispensing Coffee and Sandwiches.

Sensawunda:

*Seeing Times Square bedecked with posters for Clark Gable and Judy Garland movies is such a lovely time capsule.
*One less delightful time capsule is the absolutely arbitrary underwater sequence where a shark and an octopus fight to the death, presumably to entertain us without adding to the special effects budget. Boo.
*I must praise the Manhattan sequence for being unusually brutal for a sci-fi movie of its vintage. Sure, we see the monster munching on a person or two, but where the movie really kicks things up a notch is a harrowing sequence of a blind man being trampled as the people around him try to escape the destruction. This is a much more effective "the horror, the horror" moment than the knocked-over mailbox from The Spider.

TL;DR: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms rocks some excellent Ray Harryhausen effects, though the material that surrounds them is understandably a bit drab.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1479

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture 

2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

2022: Tarantula (1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

2023: Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)
2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

2025: X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) The Spider (1958) The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)

2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

2025: Superstition (1982) The Carpenter (1988) Visiting Hours (1982)

Cardboard Science: Prisoners Of The Wind

It's October, which means it's time for our annual crossover event between Popcorn Culture's Census Bloodbath and Kinemalogue's Cardboard Science! My good internet friend Hunter Allen has assigned me three more 50's sci-fi flicks and you should head over there later this month to catch his thoughts on my three 80's slasher picks!

Year: 1961

Director: Cy Endfield

Cast: Michael Craig, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

Evidently, the constraints of Cardboard Science are less strict than Census Bloodbath (I'd love to thoroughly break down more slashers outside of the 80's, but 400 titles don't need to be added to), because this month we're briefly slipping out of the 50's to tackle a movie that, one year after Psycho, just doesn't really feel "genre" anymore: It's Mysterious Island (the lack of a "the" is continuously confounding to me), based on the Jules Verne story that also gave us 2012 Dwayne Johnson vehicle Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. 

Perhaps I'd have been better off watching that one. Who can say?

In Mysterious Island, which is set midway through the Civil War, four Union prisoners - dashing Capt. Cyrus Harding (Michael Craig), loyal Cpl. Neb Nugent (Dan Jackson), cowardly Herbert Brown (Michael Callan), and newly captured war correspondent Gideon Spilitt (Gary Merrill) - escape in a hot air balloon with kidnapped Confederate soldier Sgt. Pencroft (Percy Herbert). When a storm blows them off course, they crash land on a lonely island in the Pacific, where they must work together to survive.

Of course, eventually two shipwrecked women - Lady Mary Fairchild (Joan Greenwood) and her niece Elena (Beth Rogan) - wash up, and of course the male servant they had with them died in the process. I can't think of a worse place for two women to be in the 60's than stranded with a bunch of male soldiers, but they seem to make it work and the ladies both find themselves suitable partners in Spilitt and Brown respectively. Oh, and eventually they discover another denizen of the island, a mysterious Captain Nemo (Herbert Lom). This isn't a spoiler because the opening credits proudly announce his presence, a good fifty minutes before he shows his face onscreen.

Oh, and also there's some giant monsters prowling around the island.

More on that later.

So, the opening credits. (Yes, this review is gonna get really granular.) You know credits, right? The part where the names of the people who worked on the film slide across the screen? Well, this movie doesn't seem to have ever seen a credits sequence before, because instead of politely arranging the names atop a crashing ocean backdrop like any other 60's island movie might have, we get a relentless cacophony of color. The ocean background is filtered into oblivion in a half dozen Day-Glo colors, with the credits in alternating stripes of different, equally obnoxious hues. When green over purple is the easiest combination to read, you know there's a problem. It's a hideous display that actively reduces the amount of information the audience is able to receive, which one would think would be the opposite of any movie's intention.

Nothing in the film is worse than this (how could it be?), but I think the credits speak to a deep problem with the entire project. Not a single ounce of forethought was put into the way they could make this appear as a coherent whole. If Mysterious Island is a Lego set, it was assembled by a blindfolded child with no instructions. Random plot points jut out from the center while others are elliptically rushed by without a passing glance, to the point that the monstrous contributions by Ray Freaking Harryhausen feel even less than an afterthought.

It's really obvious when Mysterious Island remembers that there are giant monsters roaming about, because about once every 25 minutes they chuck one in, to the shock of all the characters who have also forgotten there are giant monsters in the middle of their island survival adventure. We spend 75% of the film watching them fashion sexy Gilligan's Island cosplay and spruce up a cave, but not prepare to deal with the horde of monstrous and violent creatures they periodically have to defend themselves from. It's implied that the women have lived there for months and none of the men have even mentioned fighting a giant crab at one point. Plus, the monsters are provided by Ray Harryhausen, and while they're not his best, they're certainly a delight. Which makes their sidelining even more infuriating. And then, later on, the movie has the gall to assume we will be afraid of pirates showing up when there are literally giant bees like eight yards from their house.

Side note: for a supposedly deserted island, it certainly gets a lot of tourist traffic.

Mysterious Island is very concerned with the process of survival, so we get a lot of hunting for food, fashioning huts and primitive weapons, and exploring the terrain. This would probably be interesting if it was an adventure movie from the 40's before we'd already seen 8 million similar narratives. This movie has elements that make it stand out from the generic Robinson Crusoe model, but the fact that it seems to actively want to ignore them means it relies on a lot of truly boring material instead.

But that said, I will not complain about a bunch of shirtless men being friends on an island. Before (and even after) the women show up, it's an alluringly homoerotic tale of men being stubbly and barrel chested, struggling for dominance via gravelly voice-offs and intense stares. I'm not sweating, you're sweating. Unfortunately, neither monsters nor men are enough to unsink this film from the choppy waters of insipidity. I didn't hate watching it, but I wouldn't be so bold as to recommend it to anyone else.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• Instead of just telling the group his plan to raise a sunken ship, Captain Nemo has a whole diorama fashioned with a fish tank, because there's nothing a Cardboard Science flick loves more than explaining its bullshit science in excruciating detail.
• Literature from this period was really drawn to hot air balloons, but that is no excuse to setting a full 20 minutes of this movie about an island on a balloon.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• Elena decides to marry Herbert, who is clearly the least interesting or useful of the soldiers, because he is the only one who is young and white, and that's how these things are supposed to go.

Sensawunda: 

• There's a part where the men discover the skeleton of a man who hung himself, which is the closest to horror this film ever gets.
• In a very serious moment, Captain Nemo activates a very silly-looking Wonka-esque water pump that flaps wildly behind his head. It's hilarious.
• Captain Nemo also plays the "Phantom of the Opera" theme on an organ in his submarine. You know what, he may actually be the best comic character of the 60's.

TL;DR: Mysterious Island is a waste of Harryhausen, instead choosing to focus on a bunch of boring men doing "cool" survivalist stuff.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1201
Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

Cardboard Science: Tentacruel

Year: 1955

Director: Robert Gordon

Cast: Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue, Donald Curtis

Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

So, I guess I’m a fair weather friend. This third chapter in Cardboard Science, my crossover with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue, was supposed to be released in October… Whoops. Let’s just pretend I was trying to beat last year’s record (when I posted my final, belated review in December). Please be so kind as to check out his Census Bloodbath features on Terror Train, The House on Sorority Row, and Killer Party. I owe him that much for not e-mailing me anthrax.

But we’re here now, and that’s what matters. Previously on Cardboard Science, I covered the laughable body snatcher flick The Brain from Planet Arous and the surprisingly well-scripted cheesefest The Giant Claw. So far I’ve enjoyed every one of the five films he’s made me watch in the past two years (save the enervating, gee whiz Invaders from Mars), but I’ve yet to find one that truly resonated with me. But now, It Came from Beneath the Sea… Well, it’s not one of those either, but it’s the best of the bunch. Although it suffers from many of the pitfalls endemic to 50’s sci-fi, its strengths are much greater than I could have imagined.

A caveat before we jump in. Unfortunately, I was not able to view the film as originally intended. If, in fact, anybody was intended to watch these things at all. The copy I got my grubby hands on was colorized from the black-and-white original, which certainly has a number of subtle effects on the finished product, not the least of which is an unsolicited alteration of the effects provided by genius movie magician Ray Harryhausen. Fortunately, the colorization was actually quite skillfully achieved. In fact, save for a slight green tint on certain scenes, it was seamless. And I’m constantly in awe of what they were able to achieve when coloring shots of rippling ocean waves. All in all, the adverse effect is negligible but certainly worth mentioning.

It’s not like I needed to be reminded what color the freaking Golden Gate Bridge is.

In It Came from Beneath the Sea, nuclear submarine commander Pete Matthews (Kenneth Tobey) encounters a strange blip on the radar that knocks into his ship, leaving behind a huge chunk of organic, irradiated matter. Top marine biologists Dr. John Carter – not of Mars, unfortunately – (Donald Curtis) and Professor Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue) are called in to investigate, and discover that the culprit is a giant octopus. Thus begins a long period of sciencing, investigation, and tepid love triangling before the creature lays siege to San Francisco and the team must find a way to stop it.

Con: No more Golden Gate Bridge. Pro: A lifetime supply of calamari.

For the bulk of tis run time, It Came from beneath the Sea is your typical B-movie. More of a science procedural than a rollicking monster flick, you’ve got to earn that giant octopus by sitting through endless didactic scenes of researchers explaining their findings using as many smart-sounding words as the screenwriters could find while flipping through an encyclopedia. It’s charming in its retro, totally oblivious way (and its trendy obsession with the H-bomb and nuclear fallout), but it’s about as enlightening as attending a particle physics seminar hosted by Homer Simpson.

Usually, this is the part where we’re meant to engage with the characters the most. And while I enjoy the proto-feminist discussion prompted by the presence of a female scientist (which I do find remarkable, considering that these movies almost always feature a female scientist so it’s hardly unprecedented, though she’s usually only there for smooching purposes) as well as its anti-romantic ending, the wan love triangle just doesn’t rev my engine. In fact, it hardly revs theirs, because I’m not sure Dr. Carter is even aware that he’s in one. It feels so wrong to say this, but the characterization and dialogue hardly reaches the level of The Giant Claw. At least, in its first act.

To be fair, by any other comparison, It Came from Beneath the Sea makes The Giant Claw look like a crackerjack commercial.

Of course, there are still some unambiguously great moments in this portion of the film. A little bit of psychological espionage livens up the whole affair, and one flirtation in particular is the most hilariously blatant sexual metaphor I’ve ever seen. Professor Joyce fondles a particularly phallic graduated cylinder she has picked up from a lab table while talking to Pete. It’s downright naughty and I adore it.

So all this is decent, if a bit predictable. But then. Oh boy, the third act really kicks it into gear as the monstrous cephalopod goes on the warpath, taking a chunk out of the Golden Gate Bridge before rampaging around the Embarcadero district. And for a movie that couldn’t hire extras for a restaurant so it used shadows on the wall to imply a dance floor, these creature effects are top notch. Of course, Harryhausen is a household name for a reason, but his work here is particularly impressive.

The stop motion animation is a little jittery here and there, but in terms of organic, convincing design and large scale carnage, it crushes the giant ants from Them! under its boot. It boils the overgrown fowl of The Giant Claw and uses the bones to pick its teeth. The wisest brains from Planet Arous couldn’t even conceive this kind of material. Making up for its disappointingly infrequent appearances in the first hour, the octopus crushes cars, destroys buildings, and fells dozens of humans with one tentacular swoop in an unprecedented swath of destruction. The composite animation here is delectable, putting the creature in the frame with living breathing people and – with the exception of just one bum shot – looking pristine while doing it.

Suddenly, every single stiff, melodramatic frame of film you had to work through to get here is worth it. The finale of this film is the most fun I’ve had in any Cardboard Science feature, and though there have been films with stronger scripts, this is the first entry I would leap to recommend with eight sucker-covered thumbs up.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• Remember that lesson in science class where they taught you how to identify an unknown radioactive substance by moving fish from one tank to another, then peering into a microscope? Yeah, me neither.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• The navy men stop to have a frank conversation about Mac’s infertility fears in the middle of being attacked by a giant octopus. All hail the American Family!
• Professor Joyce is a new breed of woman who carves her own path in a man’s world and doesn’t take “no” for an answer. At least, according to Dr. John Carter, who explains this to us (because who would listen to a woman?) as she shrieks and crumples into a ball.

Sensawunda:

• Some B-roll footage shows a plane taking off while billowing voluminous plumes of smoke. Did those things run on f**king coal?
• Dr. Carter just happens to have a handy balloon in his pocket, in case he needs to explain cephalopod skull structures. Maybe he moonlights as a clown.

TL;DR: It Came From Beneath the Sea is a decent 50's B-flick until the grand finale, which is an out-and-out masterpiece of Harryhausen movie magic.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1249

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend Without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)