MonsterHunter

If you’re like most of us, you’ve probably sat in front of the TV buried in Cheeto dust while watching some Godzilla flick or other and had one thought: How cool would it be to see Matchbox cars and model trains get destroyed not by Asian guys in rubber suits, but by some gigantic stop motion scorpion? And instead of a little Japanese kid named Kenny getting in the way of things, you had a little Mexican kid named Cornholio (or something like that) playing stowaway while the blonde hunk with the immovable hair, ably assisted by his ethnic sidekick, drops right down into the scorpion’s secret hideout to check things out while his sexy rancher girlfriend waits anxiously topside? You’d have monster bug action at its cookie cutter best!

Even though I had never seen The Black Scorpion before, I actually had. You see, the Earth has once again gone and shoved it up our collective bums by coughing up another mutant-sized pest. Luckily for us Americans, it was all happening down south of the border in Mexico where the only people who would get trampled and all stung up by these overgrown creepy crawlies would be those guys that stole all our jobs with NAFTA’s help. Thus, the only tension in this movie stems from whether little Cornholio will manage to stowaway on Blonde Hunky Geologist and Sexy Cattle Rancher in Tight Pants’ honeymoon.

Sure, this one smells like refried late 1950s monster movie, since we’ve already been invaded by a really big spider in Tarantula, infested with huge ants in Them!, and have also had grasshopper and praying mantis problems (Beginning Of The End and The Deadly Mantis respectively), but this one manages to throw in its own giant spider and a big scary worm! And besides, even though the sounds these scorpions make are exactly the same sounds that the ants made in Them!, a bunch of rampaging scorpions stinging and eating people is a lot neater than big ants nosing around for sugar.

Right from the get go, I knew I was in capable hands since the strident voice of a narrator boomed forth over footage over a volcano and its attendant destruction. As is per my policy, I didn’t listen to what was being said (I listened to my last lecture when I dropped out of seventh grade), but I think that it’s safe to assume he was dithering on about how mysterious nature is and how Man can not presume to be its master and that it was just about time for God to fire up his enlarging ray on some normally tiny pest. What I like about all these dire warnings that these narrator fools give us is that in the end we succeed anyway! So, it turns out that Man is the master of nature after all, smart guy!

And if you had any doubts as to whether the Black Scorpion was going to end up as a big black grease spot on the underside of our hero’s boot, they are immediately cast aside once you get a gander at precisely who the blonde geologist with a chin that is out-chiseled only by his unflappable hair is. Richard Denning plays Hank Scott (though I’m pretty sure they meant “Hunk”) and he’s only going to let this giant scorpion outbreak moderately interfere with trying to get into rancher Teresa Alverez’s gauchos.

Denning is as much as sure thing as you can get in these movies having tested his mettle against The Creature With The Atom Brain and Creature From The Black Lagoon. But he didn’t just whup up on murderous creatures. He also battled mutants after the apocalypse in Day The World Ended, faced robots in Target Earth, kicked dinosaur ass in Unknown Island and mixed it up with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake in The Glass Key, before finally getting elected governor of Hawaii for a twelve year stint by Hawaii Five-O. Surely he can handle a couple of surly arthropods all jacked up on lava roids.

Hunk is down in Mexico to check out this big volcano that just blew its top. His local contact is Dr. Ramos. They spend the first part of the movie cruising around the countryside running into lots of mysterious damage. As they make their way to the volcano, they come upon a smashed up police car, an abandoned baby (who Hunk laughingly points his gun at in the movie’s scariest scene), a busted up house, and a dead cop. Somewhere during all this carnage as Hunk and Ramos try to puzzle out the cause, Dr. Ramos helpfully suggests that it might have been a bull. Yeah, if the Earth had puked up one of those mutant-sized bulls with radioactive hooves. Still, it would have been neat to see Hunk dressed up as a matador in the final scene as he tried to maneuver the gigantic red blanket into place in an effort to draw the Devil Bull into the volcano.

No time to worry about what’s tearing up the countryside now though because Hunk has his binoculars out and is watching Teresa riding around on her horse. Suddenly, she gets thrown and Hunk goes to her aid, thus giving our hero a love interest to distract him from monster fighting. Hunk and Ramos accompany Teresa back to her estate where they enjoy a nice evening where Hunk expertly puts the moves on Teresa. It involves him saying something about how if they got rid of the scorpion that Ramos found inside a rock and that everyone thought was extinct, that then they’d really be alone. Yeah, that ugly bug is the only thing stopping you from using your cattle prod on that cow.

Obviously stirred up by Hunk’s boorish overtures, the scorpions decide that it’s time to start tearing the roof off the joint. They manhandle toy trucks, run through walls, chase people and sting one another to death. They aren’t a terribly disciplined army, but what they lack in organization they make up for in enthusiasm.

After the initial attack, Hunk and Ramos get hooked up with the military and a plan of action is devised to combat the scorpions. This is what is known in these kinds of movies as the “halfway plan” primarily because it’s always the plan they cook up at the halfway point of these films. That means that it’s engineered to fail and to result in a few fatalities to build up the monsters as bad guys. The Halfway Plan is sometimes known by its cruder name, the Half-Assed Plan.

As far as Half-Assed Plans go, it’s probably charitable to even give it that name. What they’ve decided to do is to try and find where the scorpions hang out during the day when they’re sleeping off last night’s rioting and then gas them. That seems reasonable, so why then am I watching Hunk and Ramos going down into a crevice alone while Hunk is loaded down with a gigantic camera equipped with a big flash bulb? And how in the world did Cornholio hide on their little elevator even though it was the size of a card table and held Hunk, Ramos, a cage of canaries, and cannisters of gas?

So, down into the cave lair of the scorpions we go with Hunk stopping and shooting pictures like he was on special assignment for National Geographic! Meanwhile, Cornholio gets off the elevator and starts wandering around the cave and gets chased by a giant spider! I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet that there was a split second where Hunk tried to gauge whether little Cornholio could last out there with the spider long enough so that he could get an action shot (can you say “Pulitzer”?), but with Ramos ready to tattle if it didn’t work out, he wisely decided to start shooting the spider with the gun instead of his Kodak.

At some point during all this, a scorpion shows up and eats their elevator and you can practically hear Hunk thinking, “Oh shoot! I knew I should have set my camera up over there!” Of course, this means that the business of gassing the scorpions is out (Hunk lamely explains that they lost gas down there once he’s been up on the surface), so they just decide to blow up the crevice, burying all those freaks below tons of rock. Plus it’ll make a great photo op.

It isn’t long before Hunk and Ramos are summoned to Mexico City where they are informed that their plan only succeeded in forcing the scorpions to leave their underground hideout via their back door which just happens to located nearby. Hunk knows that it’s about time for a final showdown and once the biggest scorpion of them all has killed all the others, the championship bout is set for the stadium in downtown Mexico City! Lured there by trucks carrying animal carcasses (the ickiest part of the movie and undoubtedly the smelliest if you were on set), the scorpion wrecks a bunch of military equipment before Hunk can fire the electrified cable into the vulnerable spot under the scorpion’s neck, ending the menace once and for all and enabling Hunk to get that photo of him mugging with a big dead bug. (A great gag picture for his Christmas card!)

Willis O’Brien provided the special effects on this one and the results are somewhat hit and miss with some interesting scenes (where the stop motion scorpions only interact with other stop motion creations) and some downright awful stuff (close-ups of the drooling face of the scorpion, anytime a scorpion is projected onto scenes with real people in them). O’Brien is most famous for inventing the stop motion technique seen in this movie and for his work on the original King Kong. Those of you used to bad computer generated effects will no doubt be put off by bad painstakingly done-by-hand effects and really, these kind of effects would work best if the whole movie was done that way. There just isn’t a good way to integrate these effects into movies with live actors (at least that I’ve ever seen).

In its favor, this movie moves at a decent enough clip and you do get a lot scorpion action, but the use of the hero in this movie is pretty strained and he comes off as being totally ancillary to things. He is a geologist, so he doesn’t have anything to offer on the scorpion problem that you or I couldn’t contribute. How is his ability to identify shale from sandstone going to stop these beasts? So, why does the Mexican military include him in all this and allow him to take the lead role in the operation? Why would you send him and Ramos down that hole the first time? That’s what Delta Force was practically invented for! Ultimately, your enjoyment of all this will be dictated by how much your desire to see big bugs beating up foreigners outweighs your aversion to dated special effects, gaping plot holes, an unconvincing romantic subplot, and that bratty little Cornholio pointlessly sticking his nose in everything. Tough call, tough call.

© 2008 MonsterHunter