The 50s were the new golden age of classic monsters… and a lot of stinkers, cheesy drive-in stuffers, often made to profit off each other.
This is case for the when Universal created a new monster icon, the aquatic Gill Man, in 1954’s Creature From The Black Lagoon, and while it’s not the more revisited of the classic “50 monster pantheon”, it created an enduring depiction of the “fish man” monster.
Riding the success of the 1954 debut film for the Gill Man, Universal pumped out two sequels the following years, to mixed reception, but when you have a successful trilogy, you attract imitators.
This is the tale of its most infamous drive-in knock off, The Monster Of Piedras Blancas.
For funsies and profit, i did rewatch the original Creature From The Black Lagoon before tackling this one, which might seem cruel, but that wasn’t my intent, and yes, it’s still a fuckin classic, despite age having eroded most of its scary qualities, it’s still a classic monster movie and you can see why Guillermo Del Toro would reinvent its mythos with The Shape Of Water.
Kinda surprised it still holds up, because it is simple, indeed an archetipal monster movie.
The Monster Of Piedras Blancas is not that but it’s also not a production from big players like Universal, quite the opposite, even though it has as producer Jack Kevan, who did work on the Gill Man suit and the costumes for The Mole People, also an Universal production, and employed a lot of his associates during his days at Universal too for this independent production.
As to why, he was basically fed up that Universal never properly showcased or allowed make up artists or anyone doing “background work” to receive publicity, so he teamed up with director-producer Irvan Wanwick to form Warwick Productions, and Monster Of Piedras Blancas was the first film they made under this new banner, cashing into the aquatic monster craze of Creature From The Black Lagoon and the aforementioned sequels.
With Kevan having helped in making the iconic Gill Man suit in the first place, it does make poetic sense they would immediatly go this route, as a way to “stick it” to Universal and the likes.
The plot sees a very superstitious lighthouse keeper in the sleepy town of Piedras Blancas, California, worried about the safety of his daughter, Lucy. Why? But because he fears the food he offers to a sea monster living in a nearby cave will not be enough, and the local shopkeeper is also keen to believe in the legens, tries to warn the populace to no avail, until people show up dead on the beach, forcing the local authorites to do something about these mysterious deaths…
The local scientist gets to analyze a scale left on one of the bodies, and it belongs to a “diplovertebron”, a prehistoric amphibious reptile thought to be long extinct.
There’s no getting around how astondishingly cheap The Monster From Piedras Blancas is, and it’s not the fact it wasn’t shot in the actual real town of Piedras Blancas, more how for the monster suit is literally made from scraps, they repurposed from previous projects like the Metaluna alien feet from The Island Earth and the claw gloves from the aforementioned The Mole People.
To be honest, it’s not even that bad , it’s just indeed about what you’d expect, including how the monster doesn’t even show up until the last 15 minutes or so, the costume looks quite good, especially considering it being made with scraps of other films props… but the monster face is just fuckin ridiculous, its look more dopey than menacing, not quite Robot Monsters levels but close.
It could be like the “hot dog holding” mutant fishmen of Horror At Party Beach, so…
To be honest, the suits looks way better in photos than in motion, so it’s no wonder they don’t show it for most of the film, letting you get a glimpse of the monster at best, they knew.
As i was saying, the problem is that Monster Of Piedras Blancas – aside being cheap – it’s a drab, mostly boring-ish parade of pasty white people jibbering on in flatly lit interiors with mediocre acting, the plot is predictable, direction is downright lethargic, not that the script makes any actual sense if you stop to think about anything for 5 seconds.
On what did the monster fed itself before the lighthouse keeper started giving him food?
Why he rips offs heads, does he sent those to be graded for his collection?
I do know why after being unstoppable for the most of the movie, in the climax he’s a slow lumbering chump so easily disposed of, because we wanna get to that ending earlier, the movie is already over 60 minutes, and it’s not like this is debutting outside of a double feature presentation…
it gets bonus points for doing some stuff you simply didn’t in these movies back then, like killing the dog and actually showing not only a decapitated head, but the monster holding one in his hands in one scene, so there is some gore and it’s not just people talking over out-of-frame corpses on how their heads were cut off so cleanly… even if mostly is just that.
Again, it’s not utter shit, it’s just a mostly average Creature From The Black Lagoon knock off, a middling monster flick in a sea of them, and a classic example of a “cheapie” B-movie, distingued just by the surprisingly bits of gore more graphic than what people expected in mid to late 50s, and a decently interesting production history behind it.
The film debutted in the States as a double feature with a crime drama called Okefenokee (1959), and Warwick Productions would only make another film, The Street Is My Beat (1966), about a newlywed girl that finds out her husband is a pimp, how things spiral out of control and she eventually becomes one of his hoes. Of course.
Monster of Piedras Blancas was parodied by 2005’s The Naked Monster, but frankly i can’t imagine a more fitting legacy than the monster suit (made from scraps of other movie monster suits and props) was reused for an episode of the Flipper TV series, yeah, the dolphin one.
I knew Ecco was behind this all along.
