THE MONSTER FROM GREEN HELL (1957)
Tagline - The mammoth monster that terrified the Earth! Too awesome to describe! Too terrifying to escape! Too powerful to stop!
Oh man…these are the types of movies I love, so we are going to get right into it. In this one, scientists are launching animals into space as per freakin usual. The idea is to test radiation's effect on living things, but one of the vessels goes missing and bam…now we have giant wasps attacking central Africa. Green Hell refers to an area where the scientists go to look for the wasps.
Of course when science blows it, which is pretty much all the time in horror movies, they have to go try to fix things. I will say the “wasps” in this movie hardly even looks like a wasps. They are more like a thrown together hodge-podge nonsense creature that looks like a mix of some other bugs. Anyway, it’s mutated, so maybe that's what's happening here? I am just pointing that out because they are calling them wasps.
The storyline in this damn thing is just off-the-hook simplistic and a lot of the movie features stock footage from other flicks. While that is not uncommon for 50’s sci-fi, it doesn’t make it any less lazy. Jim Davis (who was probably most famous for the TV show Dallas) does a pretty good job in this movie as Dr. Quent Brady, but my favorite character was the Arobi (played by Joel Fluellen – Gemini Man). One other tidbit, Barbara Turner who plays Lorna, was actually one of the writers on the movie version of Stephen King's CUJO.
Overall this is not the roughest 50’s sci-fi movie I have seen (it’s not even close, in fact, it’s not even the worst movie from this director), but I really wish they had not used so much stock footage and actually taken time to show the wasp’s attacking people more. That is kinda the whole reason you watch these things. Instead all but maybe 2 shots are from far away or just show the head of the wasps. The wings on these things are also pretty weak.
What is great about this movie is a pretty short scene where a giant snake attacks one of the giant wasps and the whole scene is shot in stop motion. It is very rare to see two of any creature taking on each other in a low-budget flick like this, so at the very least they put that together and I give that some credit. So overall even with the lazy stock footage, I think this thing was at least as good as ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS so, it’s getting a 4 out of 7.
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