Stuart Wade | Through the Shattered Lens

The 1958 film Teenage Monster opens in the late 1800s. Gold prospector Jim Cannon (Jim McCullough) has got a nice little home with his wife, Ruth (Anne Gwynne) and their young son, Charlie. One day, Jim and Charlie are out looking for gold when a meteor falls from the sky and crashes right in front of them. Jim is killed, which I guess is an occupational hazard for anyone who works outside.

(Seriously, you never know when a meteor might crash on top of you. There might be one about to slam into your home right this minute. Read quickly.)

Charlie survives the meteor crash but he’s still bathed in radiation. Ruth takes Charlie home and she keeps him locked up in a back room for his own safety. Seven years pass and Charlie (Gilbert Perkins) is now a teenager. Unfortunately, he’s a very old-looking teenager. Standing nearly seven feet tall, he has long hair and a full beard and he can’t really speak beyond a few grunts. Occasionally, Charlie manages to get out of the back room and Ruth has to look for him. She understands that the 19th Century is no place for a radioactive mutant boy.

When Ruth discovers gold, she’s able to buy a house in town. Unfortunately, living in town means that Charlie notices a young woman named Kathy North (Gloria Castillo). Smitten with her, Charlie kills her jerk of a boyfriend and decides to bring her home. Ruth pays Kathy to keep silent about Charlie but it turns out that Kathy has other plans. Realizing that Charlie is in love with her and will do anything that she commands, she tells him to start killing people around town.

Teenage Monster may seem like an odd title for a western about a boy who gets mutated by a radioactive space rock. Charlie is technically a teenager but he looks like he’s nearly 60. The film uses the radiation as an excuse for Charlie’s rapid aging and his grown spurt. Randomly blaming everything on radiation is one thing that B-movies of the 50s and the 60s definitely all had in common. I suppose if space radiation could have brought the dead back to life in Night of the Living Dead, it could have also transformed Charlie into a teenage monster. As far as B-movies were concerned, J. Robert Oppenheimer had a lot to answer for. Of course, if this movie were made today, Charlie’s transformation would have somehow been due to climate change.

As for the film itself, it’s short and that’s definitely a good thing. The idea of combining B-horror and the old west is an intriguing one but the movie doesn’t really do that much with it. Yes, there are gunmen and deputies but they could have just as easily been modern-era outlaws and lawmen without really changing much about the film. Director Jacques Marquette was a former cinematographer who went into directing so it’s a bit odd that the film has a flat, rather bland look to it. On the plus side, Anne Gwynne gives a better performance than the material deserved.

Keep your kids away from radiation, everyone. Other than cheap, clean energy and countless advances in medicine and science, nothing good ever seems to come from it.

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.