This is one I originally saw as part of the "Don't Watch Alone" season of Friday night horror films on STV. Those of you familiar with my rambling rabbits will remember that I saw this one on December 15, 1972. It was brilliant then. The image of dead fish on a beach haunted me for forty-eight years. Until I saw it again last week.
And the image of the dead fish on the beach still haunted me! It's been haunting me since last week, or maybe that's my subconscious at play, and I'm remembering being haunted in 1972. We'll never know. Your guess. Is as good. As mine.
Y'know what? It's a bloody decent little film! Essentially THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS set in England (and from the same director, whose initial idea was apparently changed here), it benefits from "good" Willis O'Brien special effects (low budget, plasticeny, but effective for the monster scenes), but above all a surprisingly "unfunny" tone. Sober as a judge and all the better for it. Andre Morell adds a real touch of class as always, and... there's no love interest! Hallelujah! No bimbo labgirls falling for him or any other crusty old male! Just a few monster scenes (nice to see British tenements falling down - I lived in one), very nice location shooting (south coast Blighty?), some SF "warning" calls, and a pervading sense of unease, with disturbingly radiation-burnt fisherman - or one fisherman (whose daughter looks like she will be the "romantic sublot" but thankfully just disappears).
Jolly good show.
Good one, mal, about the Quatermass influence. It makes certain post-Beeb TV Quatermass SF films kind of grimy and "realistic". And these places shown on film - sometimes just a muddy field, or a quarry, or a village - were the kind of places we grew up in. So Doctors Freud and Seuss say that's significant. As a kid I used to make the sweeping statement that the Brits were better at horror and the Yanks better at SF, but I was probably sweepingly comparing Hammer films to the expensive hardware and special effects of stuff like WAR OF THE WORLDS etc.
I'm not a fan of all those Japanese giant monster movies but I do enjoy this British one. You're right that the absence of a love story helps and Morell is great as always. I think it might be the Quatermass influence that helps make many British SF horrors superior to their international counterparts.