A 50s monster movie generally denies the logic of the real world, even in scenes unrelated to latter-day dinosaurs or mutant praying mantes. A smiling man points a gun at a baby - no, he's not a killer, he's the hero. A Mexican policeman radios instructions in English, mysteriously using the voice of the NAKED CITY dispatcher - no, it's not surreal political commentary, it's just a Richard Denning picture.
In Toho's monster movies, the Japanese go out of their way to bizarro-land, featuring monkeys from outer space and flying miniature torch singers and human-cyborg-mutant love triangles. This is because the theft of all normal assumptions is an acknowledged part of the ride in a country that's suffered two atomic attacks. But the price we pay for a few minutes' giant monster footage in an American picture is an hour's garden variety idiocy. It is a steep price, but I watch a great many of these movies anyway, because I used to smoke a lot of marijuana and probably have brain damage. Kids, don't let this happen to you. Keep playing video games; you're probably not wasting nearly as much time on Halo 3 as I have done wishing Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien had gotten a bigger share of the budget on any number of bad movies.
But I watch them for the monsters, and O'Brien earned his money on this one. The beasts are horrific and various. The titular arachnids are numerous, cannibalistic, multiple-sized and scary - bad enough in stop-motion long shots and even worse in close-up puppet mode, slimy, sporting angry tufts of fur and spurting hungry saliva from their fanged (!) jaws - but wait, there's more. On an eventful spelunking excursion, you also get segmented, pincer-clawed wormy things and trap-door crab monsters left over from KING KONG. As far as time-wasting is concerned, this is hours ahead of any GODZILLA effort - BLACK SCORPION's exposed frames contain a higher percentage of creature images than most monster movies. However, most of them are reused many, many times, and the urban scenes' process shots are among the most transparent and least convincing in the entire genre.
Edward Ludwig sounds like a Hammer Dracula character, but he's actually the closest thing to a name director a giant monster movie ever got in the pre-Spielberg era. (Possible exceptions are Hal Roach, who only made one, and Ernest Schoedsack and Ishiro Honda, both of whom only got really popular after the giant monster thing.) Ludwig directed a bunch of pictures with real stars like Randolph Scott, George Sanders and John Wayne (including the superior FIGHTING SEABEES), plus about 75 Universal silents. So he should have known better than to allow Richard Denning, who clearly did not know better, to point a .38 at that kid. But that's not the greatest of this movie's Z-grade laugh-riot moments.
Scientists drink tequila in the lab, a behavior explained away as local color. A Mexican vulcanologist displays unfamiliarity with the volcano system around D.F. Civilized people hammer open a slab of lava on a fine felt billiards table. A search convoy of vehicles and horsemen halts in the middle of nowhere so somebody can say, "I don't see a thing, Doctor... might as well go on" - and they go on, having stopped, one supposes, to be heard over the blaring stupidity of lines like, "Throw some rocks under that crane" and "I know this country like the palm of my hand" and this priceless telephone exchange:
"Mendoza's dead. We just saw a worm thirty feet long."
"Please come up!"
"Naw, we wanna look around a little more first."
I guess that's my excuse. No matter how many of these terrible films I watch, no matter how many disappointments I suffer, after years of sobriety I still want to see more.
Drugs can make nothing happen to you, too.
In Toho's monster movies, the Japanese go out of their way to bizarro-land, featuring monkeys from outer space and flying miniature torch singers and human-cyborg-mutant love triangles. This is because the theft of all normal assumptions is an acknowledged part of the ride in a country that's suffered two atomic attacks. But the price we pay for a few minutes' giant monster footage in an American picture is an hour's garden variety idiocy. It is a steep price, but I watch a great many of these movies anyway, because I used to smoke a lot of marijuana and probably have brain damage. Kids, don't let this happen to you. Keep playing video games; you're probably not wasting nearly as much time on Halo 3 as I have done wishing Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien had gotten a bigger share of the budget on any number of bad movies.
But I watch them for the monsters, and O'Brien earned his money on this one. The beasts are horrific and various. The titular arachnids are numerous, cannibalistic, multiple-sized and scary - bad enough in stop-motion long shots and even worse in close-up puppet mode, slimy, sporting angry tufts of fur and spurting hungry saliva from their fanged (!) jaws - but wait, there's more. On an eventful spelunking excursion, you also get segmented, pincer-clawed wormy things and trap-door crab monsters left over from KING KONG. As far as time-wasting is concerned, this is hours ahead of any GODZILLA effort - BLACK SCORPION's exposed frames contain a higher percentage of creature images than most monster movies. However, most of them are reused many, many times, and the urban scenes' process shots are among the most transparent and least convincing in the entire genre.
Edward Ludwig sounds like a Hammer Dracula character, but he's actually the closest thing to a name director a giant monster movie ever got in the pre-Spielberg era. (Possible exceptions are Hal Roach, who only made one, and Ernest Schoedsack and Ishiro Honda, both of whom only got really popular after the giant monster thing.) Ludwig directed a bunch of pictures with real stars like Randolph Scott, George Sanders and John Wayne (including the superior FIGHTING SEABEES), plus about 75 Universal silents. So he should have known better than to allow Richard Denning, who clearly did not know better, to point a .38 at that kid. But that's not the greatest of this movie's Z-grade laugh-riot moments.
Scientists drink tequila in the lab, a behavior explained away as local color. A Mexican vulcanologist displays unfamiliarity with the volcano system around D.F. Civilized people hammer open a slab of lava on a fine felt billiards table. A search convoy of vehicles and horsemen halts in the middle of nowhere so somebody can say, "I don't see a thing, Doctor... might as well go on" - and they go on, having stopped, one supposes, to be heard over the blaring stupidity of lines like, "Throw some rocks under that crane" and "I know this country like the palm of my hand" and this priceless telephone exchange:
"Mendoza's dead. We just saw a worm thirty feet long."
"Please come up!"
"Naw, we wanna look around a little more first."
I guess that's my excuse. No matter how many of these terrible films I watch, no matter how many disappointments I suffer, after years of sobriety I still want to see more.
Drugs can make nothing happen to you, too.