by Flack » Thu Apr 07, 2022 11:43 pm
The thing I like most about monster movies from the 1950s is that you can usually sum them up with a single sentence. In Monster from Green Hell, a bunch of gigantic radioactive wasps start stinging African natives until a volcano erupts and wipes them out.
Man didn't reach outer space until the early sixties, and so the fifties are filled with speculative stories like this one. In Monster from Green Hell animals and insects are being launched on rockets into outer space to see what effect it has one them. One of the rockets is exposed to radiation, and it (along with a group of onboard wasps) crash lands in Africa. Arriving scientists overhear chatter of the monster in the jungle, and become believes when one of their own dies and is discovered with a hilariously large stinger embedded in his shoulder.
The use of deus ex machina is frowned upon today, although it was heavily used in older stories. Modern audiences don't want Jaws to get randomly struck by lightning, or Luke to escape from Darth Vader because the Dark Lord of the Sith forgot to put gas in his TIE fighter. Modern audiences want to see protagonists earn their victories. In Monster from Green Hell, after the scientists' plan of killing the wasps with grenades fails, a volcano erupts and wipes them out. "Nature did what we could not do," says one of the men. Perhaps the crew ran out of money, or script, or the will to continue. Or all three.
Monster from Green Hell clocks in at an hour and nine minutes (with credits), and while it feels incredibly short, nothing really happens. The film is padded with lots of stock footage from other films (I read about 40% of the film is borrowed footage), so the entire plot appears in the remaining 60% and still there's a lot of dead time.
The coolest thing about Monster from Green Hell is the title. Everything else is downhill from there.
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRtBJSuckRE[/media]
The thing I like most about monster movies from the 1950s is that you can usually sum them up with a single sentence. In [i]Monster from Green Hell[/i], a bunch of gigantic radioactive wasps start stinging African natives until a volcano erupts and wipes them out.
Man didn't reach outer space until the early sixties, and so the fifties are filled with speculative stories like this one. In [i]Monster from Green Hell[/i] animals and insects are being launched on rockets into outer space to see what effect it has one them. One of the rockets is exposed to radiation, and it (along with a group of onboard wasps) crash lands in Africa. Arriving scientists overhear chatter of the monster in the jungle, and become believes when one of their own dies and is discovered with a hilariously large stinger embedded in his shoulder.
The use of [i]deus ex machina[/i] is frowned upon today, although it was heavily used in older stories. Modern audiences don't want Jaws to get randomly struck by lightning, or Luke to escape from Darth Vader because the Dark Lord of the Sith forgot to put gas in his TIE fighter. Modern audiences want to see protagonists earn their victories. In [i]Monster from Green Hell[/i], after the scientists' plan of killing the wasps with grenades fails, a volcano erupts and wipes them out. "Nature did what we could not do," says one of the men. Perhaps the crew ran out of money, or script, or the will to continue. Or all three.
[i]Monster from Green Hell[/i] clocks in at an hour and nine minutes (with credits), and while it feels incredibly short, nothing really happens. The film is padded with lots of stock footage from other films (I read about 40% of the film is borrowed footage), so the entire plot appears in the remaining 60% and still there's a lot of dead time.
The coolest thing about [i]Monster from Green Hell[/i] is the title. Everything else is downhill from there.