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"Earth, water, and a few land crabs," all Roger Corman needs for his potent tale. A Genesis quote welcomes the bunch of specialists to the South Pacific island, a sailor becomes the first victim. (He stumbles off the boat, a crustacean eye opens underwater, the body is fished out sans head.) The effects of radioactive fallout, physicist (Leslie Bradley), biologists (Richard Garland and Pamela Duncan) and botanist (Mel Welles) are on the case. "Something in the air... is wrong." The handyman (Russell Johnson) provides the civilian's perspective among brainiacs, the previous researcher's journal describes an oversized worm before cutting off mid-sentence. The mutant exists "far from the normal scheme of things," a ravenous entity of molecular fluidity that engulfs people and leaves their dead voices vibrating off metal objects. "I transmit so I must be received," it's likened to liquid mercury and looks like an unfinished parade float, "bullets pass through it just like x-rays." Plenty of conceptual sharpness in Charles B. Griffith's screenplay, telepathic leviathans and shifting topographies and disembodied vocals in the night turned into threadbare poesy by Corman's aesthetics of hunger. A pit with subterranean caves evokes an eroding isle as well as an excursion into Griffith Park in Los Angeles, the laboratory is patently the living room in the filmmaker's house until an enormous claw suddenly intrudes into the frame. "No, thank you. I have no ambition toward becoming a mad scientist." The hero collapses a seaside broadcast tower to quell the creature at the close, a climax reworked verbatim ten years later in Baker's Quatermass and the Pit. With Richard H. Cutting, Beach Dickerson, Tony Miller, and Ed Nelson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |