MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR
1954
Directed by Wyott Ordung
Written by Roger Corman and Bill Danch
We have already treated with the directorial debut of Roger Corman in 1955's Five Guns West, but of course his roots in filmmaking go back further, from his days as a script reader to selling his own first story (for Highway Dragnet); but the genesis of "Roger Corman," as a genuine force in low-budget independent cinema in the 1950s, can be located pretty precisely in 1954's Monster From the Ocean Floor. And there's a pleasing quality to that, since Monster From the Ocean Floor is more in line with one of the things we remember and celebrate Corman for today, his cheap, goofball sci-fi/horror B-movies, and not so much his Western programmers. There's something of the iconically Cormanesque to it: a monster, specifically a sea monster, rendered more as an offscreen force, for reasons that are pretty obvious once it does make its way onscreen; an obviously abbreviated shooting schedule, reflected in the performances and visuals alike, combined with a penchant for inexpensive Southern California location shooting; noticeable padding, even at its slim runtime; a blunt pitch of a title that, I believe with some measure of intentionality (though in all cases it's riffing on 1953's The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms), shares the exact pattern as the title of two of Corman's follow-ups, Beast From Haunted Cave and Creature From the Haunted Sea. It's charming stuff. It's not very good, but you can see good from here.
Corman had angled for a producer position on Highway Dragnet, but when he was unsuccessful at this, he did the next best thing: he set out to make his own movie. Drafting the basic scenario before handing that off to Bill Danch to fill out, the financing involved some desperation, including around $4,000 brought to the table by an assistant director and actor, Wyott Ordung, who essentially paid Corman to get the job of directing Corman's movie; meanwhile, numerous other aspects of the production were secured on the basis of deferred payment, including the lab processing fees and even the wages of big-deal cinematographer Floyd Crosby, inaugurating the long and fruitful collaboration between Corman and the DP; 25 year-old Corman also went downstairs to the kitchen to ask his parents for their investment, to which they replied, "oh, son, we love you, but absolutely not," though his dad did accede to keeping the production's books for free; Corman naturally pitched in with various services to his production, and despite some efforts to keep his movie's name and details out of the trades (his story was that it was called The Sea Demon and it was being shot where it was set, in Mexico), he came to the attention of the Hollywood unions anyway, though to his surprise they smiled upon his scrappiness; even the centerpiece prop of Monster From the Ocean Floor, a pedal-driven submarine, he acquired from its constructor, Aerojet General, as a form of free publicity for them, without giving them a dime. Things almost met with disaster: the sound recording was screwed up throughout the movie, but sound editor Jack Milner salvaged it with a laborious word-by-word fix, earning for Milner the declaration from Ordung that he was "the hero of that picture, one of the most beautiful men God ever created."
And so, in the end, Corman had put together a largely functional creature-feature for $12,000 cash, with additional debts accruing to about $18,000—still almost nothing—and before it ever hit a screen he'd made a profit: he sold it to Robert Lippert for $110,000, which Corman chivalrously agreed to reduce to $60,000 when Lippert realized he'd sort of been had. It's very much a straight line to where he'd be only a few years later, the acknowledged king of low-budget filmmaking, but it also established his reputation as one of that form's more honorable practicioners: in the end, everybody got paid (and Lippert made a good profit, depending on which number you believe a huge profit), and everybody was pleased, to the extent Ordung spent the next couple of decades trying to take credit for all of it, and you can tell Corman doesn't want to say, outright, "Ordung was completely out of his depth, and Floyd Crosby directed this movie for him," though Crosby did, in fact, say almost exactly this. (Ordung's other greatest claim to fame, or infamy, is as the credited screenwriter of Robot Monster. He did not eagerly court credit for that.)
It's more of a satisfying underdog story that led to better movies than it is a satisfying movie in its own right, of course; you wouldn't expect anything else. It's more of a pity than that sounds, however, because this doesn't entirely seem the case for about half of its svelte 64 minutes. These are sub-professional in their B-minus-movie way (the most overtly-professional and just-plain-best formal element of the movie is undeniably Andre Brummer's very typical, bombastic 50s monster movie score), but they do actually manage to be pretty investing, before the film just sort of runs out of story that it can realize on its budget, and sees the need to swerve into a complete blind alley for a good long while instead, marking time till the climax where the monster finally does something. Not that I want to overstate how good the first thirty-odd minutes have been, but in any case, we begin with the curious gesture of a narrator (an uncredited one) who not only situates this as a story being told, but, explicitly, a moving picture being shown, intimating that it is only in the most recent years that the systematic scientific study of the oceans has even begun, and to the Pacific in particular "the white man is a newcomer," so there is much that we do not know about what lies beneath the water. Julie Blair (Anne Kimball), a commercial illustrator whose aspirations to do real art have been stymied, knows very little indeed, but the Pacific has drawn her down here to Malibu, Mexico, anyway, to paint its waves and shores.
Speaking with a young local lad, she learns that his father died in a nearby cove not so long ago, allegedly a victim of one of the Pacific's unknown creatures; she's obviously skeptical that it was an out-and-out sea monster, though by the end of the day she'll be convinced. For she next makes the acquaintance of Dr. Steve Dunning (Stuart Wade), a Stanford man (like a certain producer on this film, hence "Palo Alto Productions"), whose mode of transportation she briefly mistakes for that selfsame sea monster when he kind of plows his rad submersible right into her while she's going for a dip. He laughs, because you gotta, but is apologetic, and she's more receptive than I think is likely to his impulse for infodumping completely irrelevant facts about the ocean he loves, but it's not uncute and they wind up spending the day together, which unfortunately puts her in a position to witness the retrieval of another local, or rather that local's diving suit, but not his body, which they can only assume was literally sucked out through his broken faceplate. Steve doesn't imagine that this is the work of that fabled sea monster, but Julie sure does, and she spends the rest of the movie hunting for evidence of it while Steve moseys off to do "real" research, so inevitably when she does find that evidence, it's conclusive in the sense that she's put herself into a position where a giant slime mold with a giant glowing red eye is going to try to eat her, and Steve belatedly realizes his girlfriend was probably right.
This is enormously stilted, but if you're tuned to the vibes of cheap 50s sci-fi, not necessarily in any kind of film-killing way. Once past her very awkward introduction such as indicates this was likely shot in script order, or at least the first scene was, Kimball is a decent anchor for this story, pursuing Julie's pet obsession as a matter of conviction without tipping over into mania—she plays the creeps she gets from hearing the monster described by local lore pretty well, while making her arrogance about tracking it down solo seem almost reasonable, given that her rationalist worldview and rationalist boyfriend both say the monster can't exist at all—and I think I also enjoy the way she plays her rushed romance (hey, we ain't got time here) more as the polite interest one expresses in the hobbyhorses of a person one would like to have sex with, while still willing to acknowledge that the subject is interesting (and Steve trots out some fun futurist notions). If that's bending over backwards to excuse incomplete screen acting, she also has a face that's just been perfectly formed to express shocked fright despite the obscuring factor of a scuba mask. (And the fact is that all the best imagery in the movie arrives by way of its underwater photography courtesy Alfred Hanson, not its Oscar-winning actual cinematographer, which is true even on down to "lighting," where Hanson is getting striking silhouettes out of kelp forests and boats, and that's before considering the content of these shots, like Hanson's wife standing in for Kimball in the redundant action scene with a shark, or the enchanting quaintness of watching Aerojet General's submersible zip about underneath the waves. Crosby, on the other hand, is getting the footage, mostly in slab-like compositions and uninspiring two-shots, albeit with a few exceptions; whereas the day-for-night is so dubious that Ordung or Corman or editor Edward Sampson deemed it necessary to intercut stock footage of the moon in a black sky to show you that it is nighttime, which, sadly, only makes it all the more painfully obvious that it is not.)
Still, there's just a nice sense of B-movie mystery-horror here, interspersed with enough human and visual interest, that doesn't seem like it should need the monster as an onscreen threat, given its brevity. It even has a sense of humor about it: on one of her moonlit excursions to the shore, Julie gets herself good and terrified at the obscured sight of a cow, and while she pouts herself into a nap upon the realization that she's gotten scared of nothing, that's when the monster makes its first brief cameo, so that when Julie returns to the same spot she gets the unsettling jolt of finding only the cow's bell and no remaining cow at all. So it's a bummer that it doesn't have quite enough material to make it through its 64 minutes, not even a sufficiently large cast to serve as victims, so Danch slaps together a new threat arising from the locals, specifically Pablo (Ordung doing double-duty; Corman's also briefly in the film), who has been convinced by village elder Tula (Inez Palange) to reinstitute the custom of human sacrifice to this dark old god, with Julie as the intended offering. Heretofore, the movie's taken the Lovecraftian tack of being condescending to its indigenes while, sub rosa, conceding that they were right about everything as the dummy white rationalists obliviously traipse into the eldritch horror the locals knew about all along—at the same time, admittedly, it's been incredibly (almost productively) confused about whether this is a monster as old as time or as new as the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, the latter theory forwarded by the dummy white rationalists—and now it decides that its mode is actual native horror, except its heart isn't even slightly in it. What we actually get is Pablo (explicitly!) half-assing his several attempts to "murder" Julie, and since they in fact mostly amount to nothing besides modestly inconveniencing Julie, we get the worst of both worlds. For almost the whole back half of Ocean Floor, it's just almost completely inert as drama.
Things do pick up for the finale, where we see the monster in flagrante for the first time, with someone (probably Crosby, since he'd have had the skills) treating Bob Baker's monster model with cool "underwater" distortion effects as it does battle with a tiny sub (given the screengrab above, I suppose you'll have to take my word for it), but it is, as ever, a sequence you can only call "charming" if you already like that sort of thing, and I'm not sure it's exciting, especially because they don't have any tools besides "blunt editing" and Kimball's biggest eyes to make it seem like Julie is ever in any danger from the entity. It's one only the historian or the 50s sci-fi fanboy is likely to appreciate, ultimately, though when the usual outcome for inexperienced filmmakers dicking around with twelve grand hoping to hit the jackpot on the drive-in circuit is unwatchable trash that nobody besides the historian or the fanboy would even tolerate, you have to accord it the status of "success."
Score: 5/10
That which is indistinguishable from magic:
- The model is pretty neat and all, though every description of the monster's biological function has insisted upon it as an enormous unicellular life form like unto an amoeba, that dissolves its prey inside its cytoplasm and all that, so it's actually a little disorienting to see that the physical rendering of it onscreen is a cycloptic cephalopod with differentiated organs and a very stable form, that's also not as impressive as other 50s sci-fi monsters of its breed.
- But gosh that sub looks fun. I want one.
- The closest Pablo gets to closing the deal on Julie's sacrifice is the most incredible thing in the movie, when we're supposed to buy that Pablo allowing himself to shed a little blood into the surf attracted a shark to Julie several hundred feet away underwater.
The morality of the past, in the future!:
- The redundant shark attack sequence that Pablo's perfidy results in seems pretty mean-spirited too, insofar as what Hanson did here was lure the shark so his wife could menace it with a knife.
- Clearly, "Quetzalcoatl" was just the one Mesoamerican god that Danch could remember the name of.
Sensawunda:
- There's always some sensation of venturing into the unknown in a story about the undersea realm of this vintage, when it really was more of an undiscovered country.
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