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A nuclear blast awakens a Paleolithic behemoth in Baffin Bay, where explorers might trigger "a new Genesis" and a certain poetry is to be appreciated by Herzog's woolly seekers in Encounters at the End of the World. Ray Bradbury provides the foundation, Ray Harryhausen the painstaking stop-motion expressiveness—the Rhedosaurus sports a dragon's stare and a toddling gait, it rides an arctic current through Nova Scotia and Maine for a riotous New York sojourn. The rampage accommodates a romance between future (Paul Hubschmid's atomic professor) and past (Paula Raymond's paleontology graduate), the pragmatic Army colonel (Kenneth Tobey) adduces a note from Hawks' The Thing from Another World. (Bringing Up Baby's paraphernalia is similarly visible.) "Oh, death and politics. The comics page is the only thing that makes sense anymore." Eugène Lourié brings the dry wonder the tale calls for: The creature turns up to tear into a lighthouse like a candlestick, though not before a pair of lonesome salts shoot the breeze about their favorite ballads. The fuddy-duddy professor (Cecil Kellaway) packs into a diving bell and ventures into the depths ("I feel I am leaving a world of untold tomorrows for a world of countless yesterdays"), he's duly intrigued by a tussle between shark and octopus but so stupefied by the dinosaur that he's gobbled up while describing it. From Wall Street to Manhattan Beach for the scaly bundle of Eisenhower anxieties, cornered behind a roller-coaster until a radioactive bullet fired by none other than Lee Van Cleef sends it tumbling into the bonfire. Scarface informs King Kong, White Heat here points the way to Godzilla and beyond. With Donald Woods, Jack Pennick, and Steve Brodie. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |