Filmic Friday 211: The Beast from 20000 Fathoms

If you've ever talked to me about old movies, you'll know I'm obsessed with stop motion animation. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and The Nightmare Before Christmas and the AT-ATs in Star Wars, and when I got older and discovered the joys of Willis O'Brien & Ray Harryhausen, all was lost. I became obsessed. My favorite book, October Dark, by David Herter, surrounds stop motion and all its glory.

So of course I'm going to love a movie that involves both Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury. The two went together like peanut butter & jelly, in my opinion.

This is that movie

Now, this being an early atomic-age monster movie, of course the eponymous Beast awakens from its millions-of-years slumber due to a bunch of morons doing nuclear tests in the arctic. The movie opens with an eternal countdown to the moment of the test, complete with obnoxious voiceover. If you've ever wondered what Ed Wood was doing using Criswell so often, movies like this are to blame.

Regardless, the Beast (a "rhedosaurus") wakes up and begins to wreak havoc. Slowly. First we have to put up with a bunch of character scenes that are impossibly boring. The filmmakers didn't realize yet that no one shows up to a monster movie for the character development or plot.

We watch them for big latex & wire iguanas mauling lighthouses!

Eventually, the Beast reaches New York and goes on a rampage, and here's where any internal logic in the movie falls apart, but who cares? Giant lizard carnage!

Why does the logic fall apart?

Well, see, being millions of years old, the rhedosaurus has bacteria & viruses in it that we've never encountered before, so every time it bleeds, everyone around it gets deathly ill. They explicitly state that they cannot keep shooting it or the blood will kill everyone, but they also cannot burn it because its blood will do what poison ivy does when it burns - the smoke would carry the disease to everyone.

So what do they do to kill it?

They use a grenade launching rifle to fire a pellet of deadly radioactive material into its throat and let it burn with Coney Island...

I mean, it's an epic ending, but... kinda misses its own point.

Of course, not only is the death-cloud of peril now hovering over NYC, but the idiots who just handled some truly heinous radioactive material throw off their protective suits and go straight for the hugs & kisses.

So there you have it.

The human race is accidentally eradicated at the end of The Beast from 20000 Fathoms.

Lol.

Anyway, I saw this at a free showing at my local library, so if you're interested in things like this, I'd strongly suggest checking to see if your own local library has events like this! At the very least, you should check out your library to see if they have a copy of the movie!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC