THE MONSTER OF PIEDRAS BLANCAS (1959)
Tagline: Man-Monster From The Slimy Deaths!
(Horror, Sci-fi, Giant Nose) [R]
Note – This movie did not originally have an MPAA rating, but I am pretty sure it would have been an R.
That’s the trouble with you, you are always telling people what you think.
In this one, we are taken to a small town by the beach where everything is just pretty awesome. That is until a sea monster that a lighthouse keeper had been feeding gets tired of his diet and decides that decapitating people and drinking their blood is much more its style. Now the town must band together to figure out how to kill this thing before they themselves end up on the menu.
First off there is a bit of a misnomer in some circles about the producer of this movie. The speculation is that it was produced by Jack Kevan who did the gill man suit for CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. While it’s true that Jack Kevan put this movie out independently, what’s not true is that he designed the suit from the CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. The gill man suit was actually designed by Milicent Patrick. Jack is probably also super talented, but the suit for the Monster of Piedras Blancas (a small town in California where the movie was actually filmed) actually used molds from the Metaluna Mutant (THIS ISLAND EARTH) and even THE MOLE PEOPLE. Having said that what we end up with is more of a budget gill man design with a bit of a pig's face.
Moving along at a brisk pace, this film is not afraid to show you the actual monster and also does not skimp on the gore. For the 1950’s sci-fi genre even in horror movies, there just were not a ton of beheadings going on where the monster is just carrying creepy realistic-looking heads around like a spaghetti squash. I hadn’t seen anything about this movie before watching it, so I was kind of caught off guard.
The acting I will throw into the “just okay” category, but we do get a good dose of Don Sullivan as Fred. I really liked Don as an actor and he is most famous for THE GIANT GILA MONSTER, but also appeared in the 2012 version of that movie simply titled GILA!. Jeanne Carmen is okay in this as Lucille Sturges the movie's main female character. She wasn’t in anything else I’ve seen to date. The movie also starred Les Tremayne who had a great career in Hollywood and was most famous for THE ANGRY RED PLANET and WAR OF THE WORLDS. He is also in CREATURE OF DESTRUCTION which also resembles both CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and the Monster of Piedras Blancas only less serious looking.
Overall I wasn’t super impressed with this one. For me even though we get to see the monster a lot, it just didn’t have the charm of some other 50’s films and really felt like an under-done attempt to remake CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON only on a more gory note with zero underwater sequences and a lacking script.
For me, this is a 3 out of 7 that I wish I liked more.
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