Director: Roger Corman
Cast: Richard Garland, Pamela Duncan, Russell Johnson
Run Time: 1 hour 3 minutes
Happy Halloween, y'all!
We have reached my final contribution to our annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen at Kinemalogue. Because it's our 13th year doing this, in addition to me assigning him three 1980s slasher movies from Census Bloodbath and him giving me three titles from his 1950s sci-fi project Cardboard Science, we have selected notable sub-subgenres. In my case, it was the holiday/special occasion slasher, and in his it was killer arthropods.
How he managed to find movies about three different types of arthropod that all came out in 1957, I'll never know. But now that we've covered The Giant Mantis and The Black Scorpion, we've hit Attack of the Crab Monsters. After kicking off this month with a Nathan Juran joint, we're coming full circle with another repeat Cardboard Science offender: cult film legend Roger Corman. The notorious low-budget director and producer was just transitioning from cheap Westerns to cheap sci-fi movies in the mid-1950s, and we catch him between two previous titles, this having come out after It Conquered the World but before X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.
You really never know what you're gonna get with Corman, other than a great behind-the-scenes story about how he turned two dimes and a dream into a movie. His quick turnarounds and shoestring budgets sometimes led to works of genius, but other times... Well, I'm sorry to say it, but other times, they led to Attack of the Crab Monsters.
The movie follows a group of scientists (who are mostly interchangeable, but one of whom is played by Mel Welles, who would go on to play Mr. Mushnik in Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors) and sailors (one of whom is played by Ed Nelson of Invasion of the Saucer Men) who have arrived on a remote island to try and solve the disappearance of the previous crew that was studying there. Dale Brewer (Richard Garland, who possesses a chin so clefted that he must have needed a Q-Tip to clean it) and Martha Hunter (Pamela Duncan), the biologists who study land and sea respectively, are the only characters who stand out, mostly because she's the one woman and he's dating her.
I will say that the opening of Attack of the Crab Monsters gave me no particular reason to worry. It effectively wielded cheap filmmaking techniques to make something dynamic. The animated opening credits sequence gives way into an ominous voiceover playing over a cloudy sky, and all in all I felt like I was in safe hands.
Those hands then loosened their grip and dropped me into the middle of infinite scenes of endless blather. I know enough not to expect that the titular monster(s) in a movie like this will be onscreen for more than five minutes, but there is so little driving these characters. They just kind of mill about for a good long while. Watching them uselessly speculate about what could possibly be wrong (personally, I got a big clue from reading the title) was hardly thrilling.
At a certain point it seems like a plot might break out via a love triangle with handyman Hank Chapman (Russell Johnson of This Island Earth and It Came from Outer Space), but that goes absolutely nowhere. And there you have the majority of Attack of the Crab Monsters. That and some sorta neat scuba diving sequences where the stunt divers are swimming around with some very real, very enormous fish.
However, like many sci-fi movies of its era, it's mostly just about people running into and out of caves.
Although you'll spend about 40 minutes begging for the crabs to show up, you'll fervently regret that wish once it's granted. That's not entirely because the crabs look awful, though they do.
Hoo boy, do they look dumb. The weird thing is that I assume they used real crabs at some point in production during forced-perspective shots. Or at the very least, they clearly used photographs when building the monsters. So when they were gluing those big stupid, squinty, suspicious eyes onto the creatures' shells, you'd think at some point they might have noticed that crab eyes don't look like that.
Yes, crabs do have eyes. But not human-style eyes. And certainly not ones that, when they open up, look like somebody is peeling the foreskin back from a beach ball.
The crab monsters also talk, which was a surprise. Not a good one. The reason for this is stupid (they can absorb the minds and memories of their victims) and the execution, while sometimes effectively eerie (the actors playing the dead characters voice the crabs, with flat, echoey intonations that do often accurately reflect a monster attempting to mimic humanity), is mostly just embarrassingly hokey. Why make the crabs talk? They can't be reasoned with. They're dispatched in the same way that any old 1950s monster might be. It just plain doesn't work.
That said, I'm glad we finally got around to a radioactive monster this month! I was surprised that neither the mantis nor the scorpion became giant and evil because of humanity tampering in God's domain.
So alas, we must end this year's Switcheroo with a whimper rather than a bang. But I had fun, and I hope you did too! Now we return to our regularly scheduled programming of non-stop slasher movies.
That which is indistinguishable from magic:
*This movie is weirdly obsessed with using metal as a conductor for ghosts and/or crabs. I don't really understand what they were going for, but I'm fascinated that 2003's Dreamcatcher is somehow not the first movie in which a handgun is used as a telephone.
*I'm aware that there is such a thing as a "land crab," but it drove me nuts that everyone kept saying "land crab" instead of just "crab." I'm sure the Land Crab Council was grateful for their efforts.
The morality of the past, in the future!:
*Even though Martha is ostensibly on hand to do science, nobody else is nursing people's wounds or doing the cooking.
*One of the sailors says that the crabs sound like a kid dragging a stick across a picket fence, which felt so deliciously 1950s to me. Stephen King probably fainted with delight when he heard that line.
Sensawunda:
*I'm in love with the production logo that opens the film, which I have to assume is not a joke? Somehow?
*Somebody actually says the following line out loud: "I hope that man's death is not an omen of things to come." Honestly, I'm inclined to blame him for everyone's deaths more than the crab monsters. He jinxed the hell out of them!
TL;DR: Attack of the Crab Monsters is cheap, and often not charmingly so.
Rating: 5/10
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)
2026: The Deadly Mantis (1957) The Black Scorpion (1957) Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)
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)
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