Are you ready to go in the water?

That’s the question asked by the 1954 film, Monster From The Ocean Floor.  Taking place in a Mexican fishing village and artist’s colony, Monster From The Ocean Floor features a lot of underwater action.  It also features a monster who lives on the ocean floor and who has been terrorizing fisherman, swimmers, and divers.  Unfortunately, despite being featured in the title, there’s not really much of the Monster in this film.  It takes a while for the Monster to even be acknowledged and, when the Monster finally does show up, it’s over all too quickly.  I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised by any of that, seeing as how this is a 1950s Roger Corman production that was apparently made on a budget of $20,000.  Producer Corman and director Wyott Ordung had to choose between devoting screen time to a potentially expensive monster or to a one-man submarine that they could use for free as long as they listed the submarine’s manufacturer in the opening and end credits.  They went with the submarine.

In fact, the submarine was apparently the main reason that Corman decided to make this film, his first as a producer.  He read an article about it in the Los Angeles Times and decided that it sounded like the perfect thing to feature in a movie.  In what would become typical Corman fashion, Corman got the submarine first and then built a movie around it.

As for the movie, it features Stuart Wade as Steve Dunning, the hunky Marine biologist who loves the ocean and frequently pilots the submarine.  When Steve and his submarine first emerge from the ocean, they briefly frighten Julie Blair (Anne Kimbell), an artist who is at the village in search for inspiration.  Later, when Julie actually does briefly see the monster rising from the ocean, Steve and Dr. Baldwin (Dick Pinner) theorize that the Monster From The Ocean Floor is actually a prehistoric creature that was in a Cthulhu-like slumber until it was reawakened by atomic bomb testing on the nearby Bikini Islands.

The people at the village don’t really care where the Monster came from or what the Monster might mean for the cause of science.  They just want the Monster go away so that they continue their lives in peace.  Pablo (played by the film’s director, Wyott Ordung) and Tula (Inez Palange) think that the solution might be a human sacrifice and they make plans to summon a shark to eat the diving Julie.  Agck!

As I mentioned earlier, this film was Roger Corman’s debut as a producer.  Corman was only 25 at the time and he didn’t direct the film but still, everything about Monster From The Ocean Floor — from the low budget to the casting of Jonathan Haze (and Corman himself!) in a small role — easily identifies this as being a Corman film.  It has its fun moments and, for a 1954 film, Anne Kimbell’s Julie Blair is a refreshingly independent and liberated character.  Unfortunately, the overall film is a bit slow and it does seem to take forever for the monster to actually show up.

Ultimately, Monster From The Ocean Floor‘s main importance is as a piece of B-movie history.  With this movie, the glorious filmmaking career of Roger Corman began.