So this month at the Alamo Drafthouse, my lovely place of employment, our programming is geared towards a singular genre, that is Beasts vs. Bots. An entire month devoted to monster, kaiju, robots and all things kick ass will be the focus of our month of July programming in anticipation of Pacific Rim. Showing at the Drafthouse today was one of the early classics of a young Harryhausen, It Came From Beneath The Sea. Let the stop-motion animation octopus attack begin!
It Came From Beneath the Sea was the first of several fruitful collaborations between producer Charles H. Schneer and special-effects wizard Ray Harryhausen. “It” is a giant, six-tentacled octopus, which is galvanized into action by an H-bomb test. Worse still, the monster is highly radioactive, rendering useless the normal means of defense against it. Scientists Donald Curtis and Faith Domergue team with atomic-submarine commander Kenneth Tobey to halt the creature’s progress before it begins to attack major coastal cities. Alas, the monster manages to reach San Francisco, wreaking havoc on the Golden Gate Bridge, the Ferry Building, and Market Street before Tobey figures out a way to destroy it. The stop-motion animation utilized by Harryhausen in It Came From Beneath Sea is convincingly frightening, but before long he’d top this achievement with such superb projects as Earth vs. Flying Saucers and Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Not admittedly one of the finest Harryhausen movies out there, but this is some of the earliest works of maestro that will soon be the name in creature feature animation. It Came From Beneath is definitely a B-movie with some big creature effects that certainly wow me even to this day. Yeah I said it wow’d me, but in all honestly, for a low budget movie made in the 1950s, this is fucking impressive. I am always amazed time and time again at the technique and skill it takes to integrate the models with the actors on-screen. For their time, this was a technological feat and even now you have to admire what people like Harryhausen were capable of doing with the medium.
While I would love to take about Harryhausen, I guess I should talk a little about the movie, which is pure b-movie cinema. This is by no means anything spectacular, but it certainly is a fun movie to watch with this monstrous octopus, which I believe has 6 legs for some reason, terrorize the seaboard cities. The main reason to even watch the movie is for the monster which has only a limited time on screen in the 80 minute movie. The rest of the film is just filled with suedo-wack science, lots of military stock footage and dialog that is about as on par with a Sy-Fy original. The premise centers around the supposed danger of radioactivity with the use of atomic weapons and the mutations of animals. Hmmmmm, this seems similar for some reason. I mean the whole atomic weapons causes beastly growth and yada yada yada. Godzilla maybe? Meh, this is no man in a rubber suit folks, this is Ray Harryhausen creating movie magic.
I would really only recommend this movie if you are a diehard Harryhausen fan. This is certainly where he hits his best in terms of perfecting the stop motion animation, but it certainly shows you the early inklings of what will become one of the best effects guy in the business. The beast from beneath is certainly a bit frightening when you watch those tentacles rise above the water and wrap around buildings and bridges, even swatting at humans who are fleeing the scene. The campy nature of the movies makes for a lighthearted viewing, but it shouldn’t detract from the main course of the movie which is Harryhausen’s creation.
