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Attack of the Crab MonstersEven from the beach I could
sense it -- at this radio, each tube neatly
like fate and I wanted to say,
"Don't you see? into caves, and you're out nothing's left except this my voice. I'm not used to all
these why each man tries to kill
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As sci-fi schlock, Roger Corman's 1957 hard-shelled Attack Of The Crab Monsters is well regarded. That's because the film is a fun mixture of...
By KAREN LUISE The first time I saw Attack Of The Crab Monsters was as a first-grader in the early Sixties. My brother and I would steal and eat coffee grounds to try and stay up late enough to watch scary movies on TV. As a forty-somethinger, all I could recall about the movie, specifically, was the death of one particular character by a giant crab claw. But a feeling of spookiness remained through the years when I'd recall this movie.
After Renfield at HORROR-WOOD identified it for me, I was recently able to view Attack Of The Crab Monsters again, from a slightly more mature perspective. First, during the credits, I liked the weird art in the background. It resembles what our grade school science books depicted Mars to look like. Next we're shown lengthy, real-life footage of mushroom clouds and atomic bombs going off. After that though, it didn't take long to see how this movie would have been unsettling to a little kid, since a sailor gets mysteriously decapitated less than ten minutes into the story. The plot is pretty cool though. Radiation from H-bomb tests sets things off, as in many old movies from that time period. (But, in the Fifties, they were quite the item.) These subsequently formed mutated, giant crabs that had eaten a scientific team on a remote island, and absorbed their knowledge, voices, and personalities to use to their advantage. Not only are these crabs intelligent, they're sarcastic! After one giant crab gets his claw cut off, he smirks, "I can grow a new claw in a day, are you going to be able to grow new lives after I've absorbed yours?" A second scientific team gets sent to find out what happened to the first one, and immediately they start getting picked off one by one. No one knows what's happening, because the crabs are able to use the voices of previous victims to lure the others to them. Finally the scientists start to figure out the voices aren't genuine.
Some of the dialog could have been improved, as my teenage son mentioned several times. The characters also make some unrealistically stupid choices. But I liked the movie overall. And these crabs, when you finally get to see more than just a giant claw, are actually pretty cute in a giant, man-eating monster kind of way. They have almost human eyes on their bodies, and I thought the creators did a good job on them. Even my son commented that they were "better than the monsters on the Dr. Who series, at least." The one scene I recalled from seeing this the first time, the character getting killed by a giant crab claw, was definitely the most riveting, still to me now. The character was this French professor Devereaux, played by Mel Welles. Prof. Devereaux had just gotten his hand amputated by a crab-caused rock slide. That night he gets lured to the edge of this cliff by the voice of a recently crab-eaten person, claiming to have found one of the missing scientists.
There is just something so pathetic about this guy, kind of stumbling there, holding his bloody arm stump, calling to his scientist buddy, when this giant crab claw suddenly grabs him in a death grip. No wonder this scene left an image with me through the decades! I also liked the fact that the characters looked like regular people, not models, or athletes. It was interesting how some of the scenes came back to me as I watched them, and others seemed only vaguely familiar. Then there were those that I had lost completely! It was like seeing them for the first time. One was the decapitation near the beginning, for instance. I'm guessing my child-psyche didn't want to recall that event. Apparently I also didn't like the way the movie ended, since I didn't recall that at all either. Attack Of The Crab Monsters was the first scary movie I had seen besides the original Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. I loved the science involved, and it made the movie more realistic. It just seemed more likely to happen, than getting attacked by Dracula or the Mummy. I think that's why it was more frightening to me at the time. ( I'm not trying to cut down the classic monsters--I love those !) Even now though, giant mutations seem more possible to happen. It was eerie hearing Eniwetok mentioned in Crab Monsters as being the nearest base, since I only heard recently that was the first place the hydrogen bomb was tested, and became a center for U.S. atomic bomb experiments.
The location the where the filming took place is realistic, and the underwater photography excellent, even if in black and white. The musical score was good enough to add to the tension. Plus when the giant crabs get near, they make a "clicking" sound, pinching their claws together, "like a kid dragging a stick across a picket fence" as a sailor describes it, shortly before being "absorbed." The instant I heard that clicking sound I recognized it, and it sent a shiver of déjà vu through my stomach. But I never would have remembered it if I hadn't seen this movie again. Actually, I watched Attack Of The Crab Monsters a second time (or third, if you count the time when I was six) with my sixteen year old daughter. When I asked her what she thought of it, she said she found it "disturbing." This is a kid who watched movies like Poltergeist and Dawn Of The Dead before she could talk. She said, "The crabs really creeped me out, the way they'd use the victims' voices after they ate 'em and stuff." Aside from some stilted dialog, and a few unrealistically stupid choices made by characters at times, I liked this movie. I think it set a certain precedent for me as a child, even though I could barely remember it consciously. I found Attack Of The Crab Monsters to include some basic elements that I need for a movie to be scary. These would include: science, impending physical danger, some gore, and realism in that "I could imagine this happening to me," and such events taking place!
I've found the last two mentioned are often lacking in today's so-called horror movies. I'll also mention the hint of romantic intrigue. And I do mean "hint." Still, the point came across so strongly, without any direct discussion or physical contact between characters, my daughter blurted out--"what a slut!" (as if the guys had nothing to do with it). Anyway, the filmmakers of the time accomplished so much with so little, it's amazing to me, especially compared to the high budget movies of today. At the beginning of Attack Of The Crab Monsters, the word "atoll" is used a couple of times when referring to the island the story took place on. That word is seldom heard anymore. I mentioned to my mom that my daughter had asked me what "atoll" meant. She immediately said "oh yeah--those islands in the South Pacific, they used to do all that atomic testing on in the Fifties." This, to me, was disturbing. I remember civil defense drills in school when we'd have to "duck and cover" under our desks, practicing for a nuclear attack. We didn't know what a joke that was at the time.
Attack Of The Crab Monsters brought back many memories for me. Some of them quite real. After sitting through contemporary horror/sci-fi films that have been very disappointing, re-watching Attack Of The Crab Monsters thirty-six years after the first time, was a treat. I'm astounded that this was made more than forty years ago, and is still so good. I congratulate anyone with anything to do with making this film, especially Roger Corman. Thanks again to HORROR-WOOD for identifying Attack Of The Crab Monsters for me! And thanks to you, Karen, for sharing this crab-movie memory with us! Speaking of realism...don't crabs walk sideways? Must have been all that fallout! Cheers! Article copyright Karen Luise |
