“… and leave only footprints.” Dammit, someone forgot their head!
The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959) is a morality tale, detailing the disasters you court when you, well, feed the monsters. (Or show off the pretty lady’s attributes, as we sometimes say.) Who’s the feeder? Lighthouse keeper and widower Sturges, whose grief and guilt over the death of his wife in the midst of a storm which required his attendance at an earlier lighthouse has driven him into reclusion at his new posting. He leaves daily rations out for his pet monster.
Those rations have been growing.
And now his daughter, Lucy, long exiled at a boarding school, is home for a bit, romancing a local biologist, no-last-name Fred, and working at the bar. She’s the one at risk, along with the boyfriend, the family dog, and, yeah, the entire local village.
And, getting no rations one day, the marine monster starts to pick off the townspeople. It turns out he – or she, for after all the female of most species often has the more discriminating palate – has a taste for brains. “Slurp them down yum!” it yells after each one. Kidding!
Soon, the guy in the rubber suit has shown his peculiar sense of humor, hiding out in the walk-in freezer of the local butcher, which works until the sheriff walks in on it in mid-delectation. Then the limbs fly and we’re off on the hunt.
Does this end well? The top of the lighthouse is, of course – of course! – the end of the journey, but little thought is devoted to exactly how various parties, guilty or not, meet their end. The monster itself appears to be cartwheeling wildly, but then the actor willing to put on that costume deserves the cruelly silly end that it came to.
Perhaps I’m too harsh. The acting was actually not half bad, except for Mr. Monster, who evidently imbibed too much Scotch between takes, but, minus the Les Tremayne fans out there, the whole thing seemed pointless. Unless, of course, the audience (you!) has a habit of feeding monsters.
Do you?
Perhaps the first scene will look familiar to you.
