Who payed the critics

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

I've heard of many of the classic monster movies from the 1950s, this was one of those, I knew the monster featuring and some of what to expect, I just hoped for a good film. Basically a nuclear submarine captained by Commander Pete Mathews (The Thing from Another World's Kenneth Tobey) is caught by something strange beneath the sea, but it is able to escape and return to Pearl Harbor. Tissue from an unknown sea creature is discovered in the submarine's dive planes, prominent marine scientific biologists Professor Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue) and Dr. John Carter (Donald Curtis) are brought in to investigate. They conclude that the submarine was attacked by a gigantic radioactive octopus, mutated by bombing tests in the Pacific Ocean, the military authorities dismiss this explanation, but then other ships are being pulled down and sunk by the giant octopus. Navy Command realise there really is a menace in the ocean, so Mathews teams up with Carter and Joyce to find a way to stop the monster, during this time Mathews starts a love affair with Joyce. Soon the monster reappears, coming out of the waters and attacking San Francisco, after the Golden Gate Bridge is abandoned, flame throwers force the creature back into the open water, then a torpedo is fired and detonated, completely destroying the giant cephalopod. Also starring Ian Keith as Admiral Burns, Dean Maddox Jr. as Admiral Adam Norman, Chuck Griffiths as Lieutenant Griff, Harry Lauter as Deputy Bill Nash and Richard W. Peterson as Captain Stacy. It was common in those days to have films about careless atomic testing creating mutant monsters, you ignore any little love story going on in the background, the main focus is the giant tentacles rampaging cities, the octopus effects are the work of the genius stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, it is camp and a little silly, but it is a fairly fun classic science-fiction giant monster B-movie. Worth watching!

A US atomic submarine has an underwater encounter with a giant octopus. Commander Mathews manages to get the boat back to Pearl Harbor. Marine biologists Lesley Joyce and John Carter are called in. They propose the creature is radioactive and driven out of its home by the underwater nuclear testing. Ships are attacked and the scientists investigate. The creature then attacks the Oregon coast and approaches San Francisco.This is strictly a B-horror movie. The acting is stiff. The most interesting thing is the stop-motion animated octopus by Ray Harryhausen. It's the only worthwhile thing in the whole movie but even there, the studio limits Harryhausen to six tentacles. The movie is only 79 minutes and I would still cut out most of the non-creature scenes. Those are excruciating. The creature feature part is cool but the tentacles move too slowly. Harryhausen does a good job to give the tentacles power but it needs more speed. Overall this is a movie only for Harryhausen fans.

I have to give some credit to where credit is due, Ray Harryhausen truly made this movie watchable. I'm not saying the Director Robert Gordon and others did a horrible job. I'm just saying besides the visuals in the film, there is nothing worth saying about the film. It was just another Sci-fi B-movie with a simple plot. It had a lot to say about what the nuclear tests and waste products of the day could do to living things. Like other Sci-Fi films at the time, without really looking into the science books, or watching old films that show that being expose to radiation or radioactive material would cause sickness or death. The movie has a make-believe field day by saying that Atom-Bomb cause things to get larger. Throughout the 1950's, you had a number of these types of clichés film. Example of objects in movies getting larger by being expose by radiation are ants, reptiles, and now octopuses! This film had an atomic size octopus from the deepest realms of the Pacific threatens the world's oceans wrecking and shipping anything that touches the water. Navy Captain Pete Mathews (Kenneth Tobey) and two expert marine-biologists, John Carter (Donald Curtis) and Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue), work around the clock to find a way to stop the creature. The highlight of the film in my opinion, is where the creature create havoc on San Francisco Bay looking for some food supplies. The octopus's food supply have their own internal Geiger Counter to dying off the radiation was never explained, and doesn't make any real scientific sense. Anyways it's driven off, and found the Bay Area to being yummy! It wraps its tentacles around Golden Gate Bridge is amazing stop-moment action even if it's missing two. Ray trying to save money gave the Octopus only six tentacles than eight. I love the scene where the creature attacked the Ferry Building. It's kinda funny that cars are still passing by the Embarcadero while the creature was attacking. I think the movie makers forgot to cut the cars from that shot. There is a shot of the Octopus attacking the submarine that was pretty worthy that might pay tribute to Jules Verne or trying to rip his idea of a Giant Octopus attacking the submarine off. While I think it's pretty good, I have to say the Octopus that was attacking the Nautilus in Disney's 20000 Leagues under the Sea (1954) was better visual than this. Plus, this film didn't have Captain Nemo that would make the film, even better. Although this movie plot is little more than a rehash of earlier Atomic Age horrors movies like The Beast from 20,000 (1953), another Ray Harryhausen movie. The romantic sub plot is annoying to the point, it ruins the movie. There was a scene where they were testing the nuclear radiation. Three scientists are wearing protective suits while examining the specimen. Dr. Joyce stupidly removes her radiation suit, and Pete Matthews falls in love with her, rather than caring about her just being expose to radiation just then. Dr. Lesley is the worst scientist in the world. Rather than doing her job that could have save hundreds of Americans lives, she falls in love with a sea captain and spent more time with wooing him than solving this case. This story is presented as a documentary, as there is a narrator narrating pointless dilogue that isn't needed. Show, don't tell, movie. There are two versions of this film. One in color in newer DVDs while the older has it in black and white. In my opinion, I think it is best to leave the B&W movies in their original form. Overall: the film pace is slow, is filled with stereotypes, and despairingly old fashioned. Still: it's a lot of cheesy fun. Columbia booked this as a double bill with Creature with the Atom Brain all across the US. I wish it came with it. I would had love that. This is the film that brought together producer Charles H. Schneer and special effects legend Ray Harryhausen. Their professional relationship would last until Clash of the Titans, the final feature for both men. I deeply saddened by the loss of special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen, whose stop-motion animation skills brought ancient gods and monsters to life for several generations of moviegoers. He will be miss.

A big budget is not one of the things required to produce a successful, entertaining monster picture. Of all the science-fiction spectacles to feature rampaging behemoths—and I've seen quite a few in my time—many of the best were the ones produced on limited budgets. The theories are many, but I personally believe it is because a lesser supply of funds forces the filmmakers to rely on their ingenuity and their art-driven passion. They make the movie they would want to see on the big screen. I have no doubt that Charles H. Schneer, the producer of It Came from Beneath the Sea, was very interested in seeing a movie where a giant octopus tore the Golden Gate Bridge to ribbons. However, his screenwriters and director seemed far less fascinated by the premise than he. As a result, the picture, despite some high moments, is nothing more than a passionless and unremarkable bore.One of the core problems with It Came from Beneath the Sea is a complete lack of dread. Even though the movie's plot revolves around a monstrous octopus using its tentacles to sink ships and tear apart harbors, the storytelling seems to regard this as a remarkably mundane event. The characters seem to have no real interest in contending with this monstrosity. This again returns to the faults of the screenplay: it also devotes much more time to the back-stories of the humans than necessary. How so? Because not one plot element—least of all the obligatory romance—has any spark of passion in it. The actors do what they can, but they never come across with enough energy to really serve a purpose for being on the screen for so long. And when it's all over—the climax, that is—there is no sense of a resolution. No reaction from the actors that would seem suitable considering their close encounter with a creature that had torn San Francisco's famous suspension bridge into pieces just earlier in the film. It's as if the events had faded from their memory.That's very much how It Came from Beneath the Sea fares as a monster picture. It drags, making its whole 79 minutes seem much longer than it is, and then evaporates in the mind just hours later. And the octopus, though well-animated by stop motion maestro Ray Harryhausen, is a rather uninteresting menace. We see very little of the creature and its sparse attacks on civilization are static. Even the film's most famous sequence, with the giant cephalopod wrapping its powerful arms around the Golden Gate Bridge, is inter-cut with too many "elsewhere-in the-city" moments, dragging out any sense of excitement from the sequence. And the big underwater payoff, which consists mostly of the beast just sitting on the ocean floor, is even more of a letdown. The most interesting moments consist of soldiers shooing the octopus's tentacles away with flame-throwers. There are plenty of really good vintage spectacles involving sea monsters; this is not one of them.