Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

Attack of the Crab Monsters (USA, 1957) 62 min B&W DIR-PROD: Roger Corman. SCR: Charles B. Griffith. MUSIC: Ronald Stein. DOP: Floyd Crosby. CAST: Richard Garland, Pamela Duncan, Russell Johnson, Leslie Bradley, Mel Welles, Beach Dickerson. (Allied Artists)

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Proof positive that “you are what you eat”, this daft epic centers on a bunch of intelligent, mutated giant crabs that eat people, whose voices are still heard in booming echo. Or something like that. In another chiller revolving around atomic fallout, a group of scientists show up at an island where the previous crew has mysteriously vanished. They soon realize that they fell prey to the title monsters, and will share their fate. 

This scruffy little picture is short on character development, and is so cheap that it was relentlessly padded with stock footage, and the underwater scenes were obviously shot in a tank at Marineland. Yet this must stand as one of Charles B. Griffith’s most outrageous screenplays. This apocalyptic work is actually quite ingenious on paper- more an allegory on the afterlife than Armageddon. It has much to do with the “Man created it, God destroyed it” adage of The Day the World Ended. 

People with defects or missing limbs come back to the survivors in booming voices after they are killed by the monsters, saying that they are now free of physical pain. Thus, these monsters are really a metaphor of the great unknown that people nonetheless must face at the end of one’s life, and these beings are to deliver people to the hereafter at the end of the world. Although one is uncertain whether Griffith is playing this for laughs (it is a rather interesting precursor to Griffith’s Little Shop of Horrors with a similar monster), Corman has nonetheless made a humourless movie out of scraps.

The movie opens in an unbelievably long sequence, with a narrator reading from the Bible, echoing God’s voice about sending forth a flood, and endless stock footage of mushroom clouds and miniatures of houses and boats being demolished by water. But this tinny sense of menace isn’t helped when we finally get a look at the monsters, for all the papier-mâché creations that they are. Suddenly they don’t appear like sophisticated enough beings to be able to dismantle radios and send people to the hereafter. But still, perhaps they are more intelligent than the characters in this movie. Naturally, people are dumb enough to listen to voices of dead people when they coax them to come to the pit where the monsters lie.

The cast is noteworthy for Russell Johnson (yes, the professor on Gilligan’s Island), helping to save the world, and Mel Welles (soon to be immortalized as Gravis Mushnik in Little Shop) in a supporting role as a French scientist who gets attacked by a giant plastic claw from offscreen.

Attack of the Crab Monsters was unavailable on any home video format, until the 2011 Shout! Factory DVD release of the Roger Corman’s Cult Classics set, which included this with War of the Satellites and Not of this Earth, two other films also making their home video debuts. The version I saw for this review was actually a transfer of the TV version, in which the aforementioned lengthy prologue was added for broadcast. Several 1950s science-fiction horror films from Allied Artists, including The Cyclops, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Wasp Woman, Not of this Earth, The Disembodied, and Macabre, were expanded for television release (as many of these films barely extended an hour), either with lengthy crawls of “scientific explanations”, or a later segment duplicated and added as a pre-credits teaser, or in some cases, newly shot wraparound footage.

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Updated from a review originally published in The Roger Corman Scrapbook.