The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959) – Review

What would a version of The Creature from the Black Lagoon look like if the filmmakers had no money? It was the lack of proper funds that faced producer Jack Kevan and director Irvin Berwick back in 1959 when they made their independently produced creature feature, one that showcased a monster of a rather dubious parentage in a film that could best be described as “Amateur Hour at the Black Lagoon” but that’s not to say this film didn’t try really hard make its case.

When it comes to monster attacks nothing is more attractive to the average aquatic creature than a small coastal town and that is the setting for Irvin Berwick’s The Monster of Piedras Blancas, a story that pits a small community against a ravenous beast. The film starts off with a bit of a mystery, two boys are found decapitated and drained of blood but there are no real clues as to how this happened. With useless Constable George Matson (Forest Lewis) in charge of the investigation things don’t look good, especially with the local grocer, Kochek (Frank Arvidson), spreading rumours all over town that a legendary monster is behind these horrible deaths. With Doc Jorgenson (Les Tremayne) and local science nerd Fred (Don Sullivan) on the case there’s a slim chance they will uncover the truth, that is if Fred can take time away from hanging out with his sweetheart Lucille Sturgess (Jeanne Carmen) long enough for them to do some actual science.

I’m sure their love will last from here to eternity.

The big question here has to do with Lucille’s father, Sturges (John Harmon), who is the town’s lighthouse keeper and is the one man who seems to know something about these killings.  Most of the townsfolk don’t like Sturges, which is easy to understand as he’s kind of crotchety and a little too solitary even for a lighthouse keeper, but what is odd is that with people dropping like flies Sturges seems more concerned about is his daughter Lucille hanging out with good ole Fred and whether or not she is swimming at night. Which to be fair, isn’t something you should do on a rocky coastline. Well, it turns out that people have a right to be suspicious of him because he’s been secretly feeding a monster that lives in a cave down below his lighthouse and he’s been doing this for years.  And what possible reason could have have for doing such a thing? Turns out that it makes him feel less lonely.  While his justification for keeping this a secret is a bit thin, and also a little strange, what isn’t thin is the fact that his failure to mention said creature to the populace does make him rather culpable in the deaths of his fellow citizens.

My Pet Monster.

Stray Observations:

• I know this town is small but dragging two corpses through the grocery store to put them in the cooler seems a little unsanitary even for a hick town like this. Wouldn’t it have been better to take them straight to the doctor’s or the local funeral parlour?
• I can sort of respect a monster that rips people’s heads off but a heavy breather who steals women’s clothing, while they’re skinny dipping even, that’s going too far.
• Fred and Doc Jorgenson come to the conclusion that the creature’s blood lust stems from its reptilian nature.  This is an interesting theory but I don’t know of any reptile that completely drains its victims of blood. I’m starting to doubt their scientific credentials.
• The creature in this film is quite the “Frankenstein Monster” as it has the feet and lower torso from the “Metaluna Mutant” in This Island Earth and the claws from the creatures in The Mole People.
• Fred comes up with the brilliant idea of capturing the creature alive, using a ten-foot-wide rope net, but that doesn’t seem all that plausible for catching a monster with razor-like claws and immense strength. Fred from the Scooby-Doo franchise has thought up better traps than this on his worst day.
• The abilities of the monster are never made very clear, after the first kill one of the townsfolk comments “Never seen anything like it in my life, heads ripped clean off” but later Doc Jorgenson compares the wounds to those made by a guillotine and later it is said that the killer is removing the heads with surgical precision.

Does this look like someone who is practising surgery?

Some people will be a little disappointed that the title creature doesn’t make an appearance until the 50-minute mark, which isn’t great when you consider the fact that the film is barely over 70 minutes long, but I do give the filmmakers credit for giving us a particularly brutal monster movie, one with some surprisingly graphic moments that were not too common in films of this era – seeing decapitated heads was far from the norm at this point in time – and while the monster itself is a bit of a weird hybrid of other cinematic creatures it’s still an effective threat to this town of wholly unprepared people. That said, one story element I found to be a bit off was that throughout the film the monster has been ripping off heads and draining bodies of all of their blood, presumably because Sturges missed one day of feeding, but when it meets Lucille it strangely instigates the standard 50s monster trope of running off with the girl, instead of just eating her on the spot, like he did with everyone else.

Was this his idea of take-out?

Watching this film it’s hard to believe it was produced with a budget of under $30,000 as it looks quite good and the cast of actors they wrangled together, if not top-tier, were all more than capable of pulling off their respective jobs. The black and white cinematography by Philip Lathrop nicely captured this quaint seaside town and the cobbled-together monster suit by Jack Kevan, who had worked under Bud Westmore on The Creature from the Black Lagoon, may not have a lot of screen time but it was still quite serviceable as any monster of that type. The film’s biggest failing is in the script by H. Haile Chace, as not only does it fail to explain just where the monster originated from or its motivations, which are dubious at best aside from an obvious need for wanton murder.  We do get Fred and the Doc theorizing about it being a mutation of the extinct diplovertebron but why it’s ripping off heads, chugging blood and then leaving the rest of the body behind is anyone’s guess. While this genre is often overburdened with scientists spouting off reams exposition it would have been nice to get a little clarification as to what the hell was going on.

“Sir, what we have here is a piece of the missing script.”

For a film with this low of a budget, and we are talking about an amount that what would be pocket change for a major studio, the end product was better than to be expected. The monster was kind of cool if a bit borrowed and if the script had been a little more fleshed out this could have been another 50s classic monster movie, sadly, what we got was a solid attempt that didn’t quite make it to the finish line.