ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS: Imagination Vs. Resources On The Island Of Low Budget Quickies

Now there’s a title that a schlock fan can get behind.  It promises excite­ment, mon­sters and the kind of dead­pan sur­re­al­ism that one can only get from a vin­tage cheapie made before the advent of ironic humor in genre fare.  However, a vet­eran genre fan knows that it is vir­tu­ally guar­an­teed that a low-budget quickie from the 1950’s won’t be able to deliver the kind of spec­ta­cle and car­nage that the title suggests.

The best one can hope for is that the film will deliver enough straight-faced absur­dity to deliver on the “dead­pan sur­re­al­ism” front.  If you get a few inter­est­ing ideas or some traces of per­son­al­ity along the way, it’s a nice bonus.  Thankfully, Attack Of The Crab Monsters is able to deliver the afore­men­tioned mod­est plea­sures.  This early exam­ple of the cre­ative part­ner­ship between direc­tor Roger Corman and screen­writer Charles B. Griffith shows the two doing their best to be inven­tive when work­ing in poverty-row circumstances.

The plot begins with a ship of sci­ence types vis­it­ing an atoll to find out what hap­pened to a prior expe­di­tion team that has gone miss­ing.  The group includes scientist/sweetheart duo Dale (Richard Garland) and Martha (Pamela Duncan), the adventurous-minded Dr. Weigand (Leslie Bradley), botanist Jules (Mel Welles) and tech­ni­cian Hank (Russell Johnson).  They’re in trou­ble from the moment they land: a sailor gets decap­i­tated by some­thing unseen beneath the waves and the plane that dropped them off explodes before it can sail off the waters.

That night, they hear click­ing noises in the dark and the voices of their miss­ing cohorts call­ing after them.  When they begin to explore the island, they dis­cover that it is rapidly crum­bling and shift­ing under them.  The rea­son for all these mys­te­ri­ous occur­rences is revealed to be giant-sized crabs that were mutated by the atomic test­ing in the area.  Not only do they have tremen­dous destruc­tive abil­i­ties, they are super-intelligent, tele­pathic and have the abil­ity to assume the per­sonas of the peo­ple they devour by pro­ject­ing out thoughts using their “voices”.

If you want to poke fun at Attack Of The Crab Monsters it’s pretty easy.  The haste with which it was made leads to incon­sis­ten­cies between what we hear and what we see: for instance, Dale is attacked in brightly lit room by a giant crab claw and then tells Martha it was too dark to see what attacked him when he escapes.  Moments like this pile up as the film bar­rels through its 62 minute run­ning time and the straight-faced approach used by both Corman and his actors gives it a campy feel (this was right before Corman and Griffith learned that it helped to add a bit of hip, self-knowing humor to off­set the rough edges of their endeavors).

That said, Attack Of The Crab Monsters is a com­pelling view for fans of vin­tage genre fare despite its ragged edges.  For starters, it is fiercely imag­i­na­tive and tries to off­set its lim­ited bud­get with a con­stant stream of off­beat ideas.  Griffith adds in all manner of inter­est­ing wrin­kles to keep the view­ers intrigued: exam­ples include the con­stantly shift­ing topog­ra­phy of the island, the method the mon­sters use to “throw” their voices to com­mu­ni­cate with the humans and the fun pseudo-science that explains why the mon­sters are imper­vi­ous to con­ven­tional weapons.

The film also ben­e­fits from Corman’s brisk direc­tion.  He sum­mons up a decent atmos­phere — Floyd Crosby’s styl­ish black-and-white cin­e­matog­ra­phy plays a big role in cre­at­ing this atmos­phere — and man­ages some gen­uinely creepy set­pieces, the best being the moments where the “voices” of the fallen com­rades call out to the explor­ers in the dead of night.  He gets solid per­for­mances from his cast, with Johnson (best known to most view­ers as the Professor from Gilligan’s Island) offer­ing an impres­sive turn as the low-key, resource­ful tech who is as brave as his cohorts are brilliant.

In short, Attack Of The Crab Monsters might be a hum­ble entry in Roger Corman’s fil­mog­ra­phy  but it offers plenty of imag­i­na­tion along­side the expected cheap­ness.  He was still work­ing out the kinks in his low-budget for­mula but this film shows the abil­ity to be ambi­tious within lim­ited means that would soon make him a success.

Sci-Fi Classics [Triple Feature] Attack of the Crab Monsters: A group of sci­en­tists are trapped on a remote island inhab­ited by atom­i­cally mutated giant crabs. War of the Satellites: An “unknown force” declares war against Earth when the United Nations dis­obeys warn­ings to cease and desist in its attempts at assem­bling the first satel­lite in the atmos­phere. Not of this Earth: A humanoid alien from outer space is sent to earth to bring back human blood to his home planet for trans­fu­sion purposes.