THE NAVY VS. THE NIGHT MONSTERS (1966)

THE NAVY VS. THE NIGHT MONSTERS (1966)

Tagline: A nightmare comes alive...terrifying acid bleeding monsters multiply by the millions...ready to cremate the human race!!

(Sci-Fi, Horror, The Navy) [PG]

Note – This movie did not originally have an MPAA rating, but I think it would land at a PG.

Not carnivorous. Omnivorous. All-devouring. Our bogey has no class at all. He'll eat anything, even other trees.

In this one scientists are doing some exploring in Antarctica and of course like in many sci-fi movies, they decide the best thing to do is bring some plant specimens back to the United States. Because why not? It doesn’t take long before it’s discovered that a few of the plants are actually monsters that will rip your freakin arms off in the middle of the night. To make things even worse, they are loose on a Navy base and have an acid defense mechanism that can melt you alive. Can the Navy destroy these creatures that are starting to multiply and ruin everyone’s night? 

First off, the cheese level in this film is absolutely glorious. The only unfortunate thing is that we barely see the actual “night monsters”. This is another one of those sci-fi flicks that just ends with zero wrap-up and no real closing scene. Apparently, this is another Roger Corman-produced film who is known for getting as much as he can out of a shoestring budget, but he was uncredited. 

Acting-wise Mamie Van Doren stars as Nora Hall and does a better job in this than she did in VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF THE PREHISTORIC WOMEN. Anthony Eisley carries a lot of the load dialog-wise as Lt. Charles Brown (literally Charlie Brown), and is solid in this. He is most famous for THE WASP WOMAN. We also get a pretty decent performance out of Billy Gray who plays CPO Fred Twining. Gray is best known for the sci-fi juggernaut, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Kaye Elhardt also stands out as “Diane” and actually does better than a majority of the cast. She was probably most famous for the TV series “Perry Mason”, playing several different characters. 

The writer for the script for this movie got $10,000 for it, which was a good amount the time, and I don’t think that was the issue here. The biggest issue is the lighting and overall lack of scale as well as a few weird choices by the characters, like leaving out critical information that might have saved everyone’s lives and just running right up to the monsters to get killed. I am guessing it also didn’t help that the creatures themselves were just pretty goofy looking, but watching this now, I kind of love that. I also didn’t mind the Navy “in action” shots, it’s cool to see “real” explosions vs a lot of the b-movie CGI-generated fire we get these days. 

This thing is pretty similar to the premise of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, but I liked this one better. The DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS creatures were almost too over the top. I do think this movie would have been better in black and white. 

Overall though this just isn’t the engaging of a movie and it also lacks heart. For me, it lands at a 4 out of 7. With a name like that, I was hoping for more, but it’s still a pretty fun cheesy movie. Just needed more of the actual monsters.
 

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