Do you feel like stopping for breakfast?

[moon_custafer]

Watched a copy of the Monster that Challenged the World on YouTube, after seeing it get some recommendations from sovay. It's a fairly generic but above-average 1950s monster movie. It is difficult to make snails really frightening, even if they are giant man-eating ones, but Hans Conreid tries hard and the special FX aren't bad.

Where the movie earns points is the little details that make the naval base and surrounding area seem like a believable community rather than a list of plot devices: the base commander's secretary, perpetually on the phone to her mother; the pregnant wife of one of the officers, who babysits the little daughter of the scientist's assistant; the awkward curator of the local museum, who takes a while to find an important historical map because, as he keeps pointing out, the proposition to fund a document room was rejected. Tim Holt, as Lt. Commander "Twill" Twillinger, is heroic but not especially square-jawed, and at first his junior officers see him as a petty martinet. Widowed Audrey Dalton, on the other hand, likes him even before he rescues her and her kid from a giant sea snail in the last ten minutes. Their romance has been fairly underplayed, but the last shot is of the three of them walking together.

Comments

Evil Snails

[donald hutton (from livejournal.com)]

I suppose they could be scary if they backed you into a corner or cunningly laid down slime trails to slide you to your doom.

Just saw a great kid's book "Bug Wars" which highlights many interesting small scale creature battles. One of these is "Slug vs. Snail" which gives me an idea of how to revive this franchise. You could have a good giant monster snail who the children all love, a lá Gamera, vs. evil giant invertebrates such as slugs, worms, jellyfish and perhaps even the invulnerable tardigrade!

Jurassic kaiju has had its day; time for some Ordovician smack-downs!