By
Hank Reineke
Fans
of silver-age horror and sci-fi are likely rejoicing that 1958’s The Monster of Piedras Blancas has, at
long last, crossed over to the digital realm. The film’s first and only previous commercial issue was a much
sought-after out-of-print 1990 VHS release on Republic Pictures Home
Video. This new Blu-Ray version from the
folks at Olive Films has made this film, long desired by collectors, available once
again – this time in a stunningly beautiful and virtually flawless monochrome
transfer.
Unfairly
dismissed as a second rate low-budget reimagining of Universal’s Studio’s Creature from the Black Lagoon – this Vanwick
Productions film, reportedly made at a cost of a mere $30,000 – is an
unassuming little gem. There’s plenty to
enjoy here if you’re a buff of 1950s science-fiction, with its cheesecake damsels-in-distress
and loathsome rubber-suited monsters. Directed by Irvin Berwick, a freshman helmsman with no résumé in this
capacity, The Monster of Piedras Blancas
is an unpretentious good old-fashioned creature feature ripe for rediscovery.
The
black and white film is set in the sleepy seaside village of Piedras Blancas,
where the bodies of two headless, blood-drained fishermen are found on
shore. (For you sticklers, while there
is an actual Piedras Blancas on the Golden State coast, the film was primarily
photographed at a lighthouse near Point Conception and around the town of
Cayucus, both in northern California). With
no town morgue to speak of, the town constable George (Forrest Lewis) and Dr.
Samuel Jorgensen (Les Tremayne) arrange to have the bodies stored – against both
the health code and good sense, I would think - in the ice room of Kochek’s
Meat and Groceries market. This was
probably a poor decision as the storekeeper, the doom-saying villager Mr.
Kochek (Frank Arvidson), has already mocked the police department’s contention that
the fishermen were killed when their boat went into the rocks during a wild
squall. The wary storekeeper doesn’t buy
this official ruling for a moment and – much to the anger of town officials – continues
to scare his already frightened customers when he mysteriously advises they
need only “look up the history of this village†to discern what the real cause of the recent trouble is.
Kochek
is at particular loggerheads with the wiry Mr. Sturges (John Harmon), the
curmudgeonly keeper of the village lighthouse. Sturges is an isolated-by-choice, painfully secretive loner who only
visits town to collect groceries and, more oddly, gather meat scraps for an
undisclosed purpose. This week the meat
scraps Kochek usually saves for him were given to another customer to feed
their dogs. This revelation causes the prickly
relationship between the two already grumpy old men to completely sour. Though Kochek possesses few admirable
qualities, the self-contained Sturges might exhibit even fewer. In the presence of Lucy (Jeanne Carmen), Sturges’
comely daughter, even the town sheriff sighs that the grim and combative lighthouse
keeper is “the most unfriendly man I ever knew.â€
He’s
also the most mysterious. Following the unexplained
death of his wife ten years earlier, we learn Sturges sent young Lucy away to
boarding school, fearful of her traipsing along the sand and rocky beachside
cliffs of Piedras Blancas. Now back in
town while on summer break from college, the girl has taken a counter-person
position at a local luncheonette. She’s
relatively happy now as she’s managed to attract a handsome beau Fred (Don
Sullivan), who is visiting Piedras Blancas on an oceanographic research mission.
Though the two would share a passionate From
Here to Eternity clinch in the rough surf early in the movie, I would
imagine it was to Fred’s disappointment that he was not present when the
shapely Lucy chose to shed all of her clothes for a solo skinny dip near dusk. While enjoying her nude swim an articulated reptilian
arm steals an article of her clothing from the rocks. Her father is – as is his custom – not
particularly pleased to learn of his daughter’s unsanctioned paddle near the restricted
cliffs. He had earlier cautioned that the
eerie acreage surrounding the lighthouse is “a lonely place to get to after
dark.†Upon hearing his daughter express
concern that she sensed someone – or something – had been watching her during
her naked frolic in the cove, the father would scold – as any reasonable Dad would,
I guess – “I don’t know what they teach you in college these days, but it’s not
modesty.â€
Of
course Lucy’s free-spirited ways are a less pressing problem to villagers than
the fact that the tally of headless and bloodless bodies has been spiraling
upward in recent days. Something
resembling a fish gill is found on one corpse, causing Fred and Dr. Jorgensen
to suspect that if a sea-monster is terrifying the village, it’s likely an
evolutionary aberration; perhaps a diplo-vertebrate,
a presumed “mutation of the reptilian family.†(As an aside, I Googled the term
“diplo-vertebrate†thinking it was a simply a pseudo-science invention of Piedras Blancas screenwriter C. Haile
Chace. Surprisingly, there was a single
reference to this term found in an 1891 geological treatise, “structures… not made clear as yet their
precise relation to modern Amphibia and Reptilia.â€).
In
any event, science eventually intersects with superstition and suddenly the
villager’s long whispered “Legend of the White Rocks†monster seems plausible
to all involved. Apparently, beachside corpses
sprinkled about aren’t anything new in Piedras Blancas: this has been going on
for years and years, and this grim tide has helped foster the belief that a
sea-monster exists within the cave fissures dotting the coastline. What follows is what you might expect: a climactic battle between man and beast atop
the tower of the imposing lighthouse. The
always most obvious suspect in the film finally admits collusion with the
creature, even reasonably offering it was probably “stupid†of him to
unintentionally wean The Monster of
Piedras Blancas from an all-seafood to an all-meat diet. Well, you can’t argue with that.
This
is a Saturday night popcorn movie, presented here in a 1:78:1 aspect ratio and
mono sound. The movie sports a pretty
good cast, good production values (for its low-budget) and competent direction
by a first-timer. The film’s screenplay,
while formulaic and unsurprising, is neither terrible nor groan- inducing. The monster’s scaly rubber suit – the design
usually credited to Piedras Blancas
producer Jack Kevan, who had earlier helped construct the iconic Black Lagoon
creature for Universal – is pretty impressive, with actor Sullivan later recalling
it being scarier in person than seen on film.
Olive
Films should be commended for rescuing this and other such dimly-recalled 1950s
sci-fi rarities. In recent years the
label has given respectful white-glove treatments to such desirable titles as Fire Maidens of Outer Space (1956), The Colossus of New York (1958), The Invisible Monster (1950), Flying Disc Man from Mars (1950), and She Devil (1957). Could we have soldiered on with our lives
without these mostly forgotten titles not having appeared on home video in HD and
on Blu-Ray? Of course we could have…
though our lives would surely be far emptier without them.
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