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 A meteor crashes near a small desert town and unleashes rocks capable of growing and moving across the countryside. A geologist has to find a way to stop them. 1957, 77 minutes, VHS
Generally speaking, if you lived in a small, sleepy desert town in the mid to late 1950s, you could pretty much assume that at some point, your bucolic existence would be shattered by any variety of oversized ants, grasshoppers, snails, lizards, spiders, as well as the odd oversized human on a rampage. If you were lucky enough to escape these larger than life hassles, your trouble was likely going to emanate from the inky blackness of deep space where mysterious rocks with world-conquering intentions would come raining down on you with such regularity that you probably went ahead and just built a spare room for the pod person that was going to take your place to crash in, until you got sleepy.
I felt a calm sense of reassurance then when The Monolith Monsters opened up with a narrator whipping us into a frenzy about asteroids or comets or whatever space junk could fall on our heads without warning [insert scholarly sounding comments about post war paranoia and fear of the unknown here]. It wasn't until the movie actually switched to live action in the desert that I realized that the calm sense of reassurance I thought I had felt during the narration was really just me dozing off as I am want to do when some egghead is explaining why it would not only be entirely possible, but pretty much guaranteed that a comet could hit Earth and try to take over the world, notwithstanding the fact that comets have been smacking Earth upside her head for billions of years without too much ill effect (unless you're a dinosaur, but they were big and stupid, right?).
Once we finally get the preliminaries out of the way (these narrators never add much to the story since we usually have a main character who is a doctor or scientist more than capable of remembering his double-talk lines explaining whatever bogus concept the movie is built upon), we find ourselves outside of sleepy desert town of San Angelo deep in the desert. A local geologist who works for the Department of the Interior is out looking around and finds an odd looking black rock. He takes it back to the office with him not noticing that the water leaking from underneath his Packard caused a reaction with another, similar black rock that was directly in the water's path. What sort of reaction, you ask? It was smoking and sizzling and suddenly I had an urge for some BBQ!
Back in San Angelo, our local geologist (Ben?) meets up with the editor of the local paper, Martin Cochrane. Marty is pissing and moaning about how he doesn't belong in the desert and that the sleepy little town of San Angelo has no need for a newspaper because nothing ever happens, though that crazy black rock you brought back from the desert looks interesting, but it's probably nothing, because nothing ever happens in this crappy little sleepy desert town! Marty also manages to let us know that San Angelo is near some salt flats, so you can rest assured that at some point near the end of the movie some young stud scientist is going to figure out a way to save Mankind in a moment that will inevitably see him exclaim something to the effect of :"that's it! Don't you see? It's been staring at us right in the face the whole time! The old salt flats have all the salt we could ever need!"
Later that night, an ill-wind wind blows through San Angelo and causes one of those dang lab accidents that usually result in a caveman being thawed out or a guy getting infected with something so that it turns him into a human alligator or something. This time, the incident is frighteningly innocuous as a beaker of water gets tipped over and spilled onto Ben's pet rock! Ben hears the commotion in his lab and fearing that his pet rock has gotten loose, goes to investigate. Congratulations Ben! You have the honor of the being first victim of the murderously malevolent Monolith Monsters!
But what are they? Where do they come from? What do they want? What can stop their terrifying power? What is their terrifying power? Even though local geologist Ben has been turned to stone (or made really tough - like an old shoe or a cheap steak), the sleepy little desert town of San Angelo has a spare local geologist. That's right! The Department of the Interior was way overstaffed in the late fifties and thus San Angelo sports two scientists. I'm guessing that that was just some type of cold war backup plan. You never want your sleepy desert town to be without a geologist and thus be ripe for the Fifth Column's pinko picking!
Grant Williams plays geologist Dave Miller and he's no stranger to strange goings on. Grant was very good in the title role in the earlier The Incredible Shrinking Man and while I've not yet been able to see The Leech Woman, I'm sure that he's no sucker in that one either! In this movie though, Grant doesn't leave much of an impression since most of what passes for action in the film revolves around him sitting around the lab trying to figure out what do with all these killer rocks. There is a big "blowing up the dam" scene at the end of the film, but he has uncredited extra Troy Donahue and some other guys do that, while he's safely hanging around main street radioing the "blow it!" order.
In any case, Ben is dead and no one seems to know why. He's all hardened and fused together and even worse, the lab is a total wreck! Marty, the newspaper guy finally has his big story, but he can't print it because it would cause a panic. You know, the kind of panic we all go into when we here that a local geologist died in his lab during a freak rock accident. Meanwhile, Dave's schoolteacher girlfriend Cathy has a student that picked up a rock on a field trip and Dave and Cathy realize that she might be in danger and boogie over to her place, but it's too late!
The place has been reduced to rubble and there's lots of big black rocks everywhere. They also find her student and her arm is turning all dark and hard. Roadtrip to L.A. where the world's foremost expert on diagnosing victims of close encounters with killer space rocks reside. Just as we thought! The kid's had all her silicon drained out of her. That usually wouldn't be too big problem for most women in L.A. since they have high concentrations of silicon (or am I thinking of silicone?) in them, but for a little kid from a sleepy desert town, it could be deadly!
Once the kid is saved through an infusion of silicon (I checked my multivitamin and it contains a dose of the stuff, presumably to ward off killer rocks from beyond the stars and their ilk), it's up to geologist Dave to save the day. He gets the recipe that the L.A. doctor used to save the kid and declares that if that formula is a way to cure people then it must also somehow contain the answer of how to defeat the Monolith Monsters. That's obviously a retarded plan, but I don't live in San Angelo so I didn't sweat it as much as if I had been living next to a bunch of rampaging rocks trying to steal all the stuff inside of me that keeps my skin baby soft.
Finally, once geologist Dave tries everything he can think of, including throwing his pen in disgust, he has a breakthrough. The saline solution that the formula was suspended in when the L.A. doctor concocted it must be the answer! Why? Beats me, I'm no geologist. If it made any sense to us regular folks, then you wouldn't need a high school diploma to become a government geologist now would you? Besides, can you really argue with a plan that involves blowing up a dam to flood some salt flats? 
That Grant Williams (as well as everyone else in the movie) is such a non-entity here is more a problem the movie has than any particular actor does. The film follows that whole "1950s monster invasion movie" template so precisely that it fails to realize that some times the monster you're battling doesn't really lend itself well to that particular outline. Body snatcher type movies and movies with creatures that run around and kill you are just fine for the type of film where you have some scientists, a girlfriend, some monster rampages, and a last minute solution. Usually, this lends itself to some good action of the hero or someone else going one on one with whatever creature is currently wreaking model-destroying havoc. The Monolith Monsters though are just a bunch of crummy rocks. They have no personality and aren't particularly terrifying - they don't touch on some primal fear we have like with spiders or paranoia like with pod people. They're rocks. Is there anyone that walks by a rock and shudders thinking "thank goodness those things are so small or so immobile! I can't even imagine what would happen if the rocks came alive!"
Furthermore, if you're going to have a girlfriend in a movie like this I expect to see her kidnapped while wearing a conservative bathing suit by the monster and taken to its lair where it waits for her boyfriend to appear so they can rumble. The girlfriend in this movie, Cathy, didn't do anything except ride to Los Angeles with a sick student of hers and then ride back in time for the end of the movie. Sure, it would be hard to explain what she was doing wearing a bathing suit in the middle of the desert, but there must have been a slip or something she could have been parading around in while the rocks ogled her. I mean, how they could they resist that? Were they made of stone?
It is possible to do a story about the end of the world with such out-of-the-ordinary causes. J.G. Ballard's book The Crystal World succeeded with a more introspective and psychological bent when the world was slowly being crystallized. John Wyndham effectively used killer plants in The Day Of The Triffids, though the plants were able to be used in a more traditional monster style than you would have expected. In any case, The Monolith Monsters simply reuses all the monster movie cliches, but plugs in big crystal-shaped boulders instead. Sorry, but my idea of scary and/or entertaining isn't hanging out at the lab while Dave and his professor buddy babble endlessly about silica interspersed with shots of rocks just laying ominously around. There are shots of the rocks growing out of the ground, but they get only so tall, then collapse into little pieces and eventually start growing again. If I was geologist Dave, I would have just gotten out the Shop-Vac and sucked those little bastards up, but I'm probably just silicon deficient or something.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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