|
|
|
Monster from the Ocean Floor: Special Edition
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Film Masters Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenask (8th April 2025). |
|
The Film
 In Mexico on holiday, advertising artist Julie Blair (Girls at Sea's Anne Kimbell) no sooner hears of a "devil in the cove" than she gets a fright from an encounter with a mini-submarine piloted by marine biologist Steve Dunning (Teenage Monster's Stuart Wade) who is assessing the cove as a possible sight for aqua-farming under Stanford professor Doctor Baldiwn (The Fast and the Furious' Dick Pinner). When they receive a distress call from abalone fisherman Joe (The Little Shop of Horrors' Jonathan Haze) that his diver brother's line has snapped while underwater, all they are able to recover is his suit which is empty despite having no tears or any other way he could have gotten out of it. While Steve and Baldwin move further up the coast, Julie starts investigating and learning from the locals – including drunk Pablo (director Wyott Ordung) and widow Tula (One Million B.C.'s Inez Palange) – that other people and animals have also disappeared on moonlit nights with strange tracks in the sand leading from and to the water. Steve dismisses Julie's belief in the possibility of a mutation dating from the Bikini Atoll atomic testing after the war when the legend first started circulating, but some of the locals believe it is an ancient god and that the only way to appease it may be to sacrifice a "fair one." Although quite modest in comparison to the fifties studio science fiction works and even a few of the similarly-themed low budget monster from the surf films that popped up in the sixties and the seventies, Monster from the Ocean Floor is not only novel for being the first legitimate Roger Corman production – Corman explained in an interview with Tom Weaver, who also provides a commentary track (see below), that he sold the script he wrote for Highway Dragnet to Allied Artists and offered to work for nothing for an associate producer credit as a means of learning the ropes and establishing himself simultaneously as a professional writer and producer – but even more impressive than some of his similarly low-budgeted but more conventionally-crewed The Filmgroup productions. Signs of the $12,000 twelve-day principal photography schedule are on display with heavy post-dubbing and several lengthy dialogue scenes staged seated either in a nicely-composed single take or simple over-the-shoulder back-and-forth coverage, and the underwater photography is pretty murky despite being shot after the initial shoot in Catalina for the clearer water (a step also taken by the makers of the Esperanto horror film Incubus a few years later). The monster is rather laughable as an optical superimposition above the water but much more impressively puppeteered underwater like the octopus from the 1916 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with the monster's ultimate fate seeming like a nod to Georges Méliès. The seaside Mexican setting is reasonably believable thanks to some well-chosen Malibu locations and the compositions of Oscar-winning cinematographer Floyd Crosby who would later lens Corman's sumptuously-colorful The Fall of the House of Usher in Cinemascope and The Pit and the Pendulum in Panavision. The chauvinism of Wade's marine biologist constantly teasing Kimbell's Julie for imagining things is not unexpected for the period, however, Corman's script makes Julie the protagonist driving the plot and Steve the love interest for the most part until the action climax. The film also refreshingly puts a nice twist on the "native superstitions" and "sacrificial offer" plot elements before the conventional ending. Corman would return to sea monsters a few more times throughout his career (although most of those would be remakes of Charles B. Griffith's script for Naked Paradise like Creature from the Haunted Sea and Demon of Paradise). 
Video
Released theatrically by Lippert Pictures – who once had the exclusive rights to Hammer's British imports (before Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures) and would later sign a production deal with Twentieth Century Fox – The Monster from the Ocean Floor was a television regular through the Medallion TV package but was not as widely available on home video as the uncopyrighted Filmgroup productions, seeing one of its few releases on DVD from Rhino who had licensed the Medallion television library. When VCI licensed the library, they also put out a it out in a Creepy Creature double feature with Serpent Island, but we have not seen either. We do not have any information about the specific source materials for Film Masters' transfer – the back cover does have a Medallion copyright – but it is one of their better restorations presumably because the materials were better-archived than the sources for their other Corman titles. The black and white image is nearly spotless with only the occasional coarser grain and higher contrast during optical transitions, and the difference in clarity between the shots of Kimbell flailing underwater and the shots of the miniature monster shot in puppeteer Bob Baker's home studio is very apparent. 
Audio
Film Masters' offer both lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 and Dolby Digital 2.0 mono tracks that sound pretty much the same owing entirely to the original recording and mixing. The use of post-synchronized dubbing is quite obvious and unconvincing throughout, as well as quite uneven as if the actors might have been recorded separately and then cut together. At the seventeen minute mark, an entire scene between Kimbell and Wade sounds off-pitch but this is how it has always been going by the older video master. Optional English SDH subtitles are included.
Extras
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by film historian Tom Weaver and The Weaver Players which also features excerpts from a television interview Weaver conducted with Corman for an earlier release of the film (presumably the VCI edition since the Rhino was barebones). It is a well-researched and informative track in which Weaver cites all of his sources for information he could not gather himself, as well as confessing his practice of eliciting information from subjects by mentioning "smack talk" about them from colleagues but revealing that Corman was too much of a gentleman to fall for this tactic with regard to director Ordung taking credit for writing, directing, and raising funds and claiming that all Corman did was "drive the truck" although Corman does suggest that Crosby's account of working with Ordung in which he claims the film was "without direction" was more accurate. Corman reveals that he raised nine thousand dollars from Highway Dragnet and college friends and let Ordung direct because he put up three thousand dollars more. Corman discusses his all-encompassing responsibilities behind the scenes, including "driving the truck" and promising the teamsters that he would never do it again. Weaver also provides background on Ordung who had an interesting but brief career as a screenwriter and meager credits as director and assistant director, as well as recollections of Kimbell, Haze, and Wade. Weaver had hoped to include Haze on the commentary track but he died two days before Weaver tried to telephone him for it. Weaver also discusses how Crosby became involved during a the period when television was becoming bigger and studios were laying off some of their technical crew who found work on television or low-budget films, as well as background on the Aerojet mini-submarine that Corman got to use in exchange for free publicity. "The Tom Weaver Plays" acting out these interview excerpts is jarring, but Weaver reciting a passage later on from another interview is less distracting and allows one to better focus on the content. "Bob Baker: From Monsters to Marionettes" (14:02) is a documentary by author Justin Humphreys in which Humphreys discusses the puppeteer's early credits in film and television, as well as animation, his work on Corman's film and his much more widely-seen if unacknowledged work on films for George Pal and Disney, along with his pivotal work for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. "Roger Corman: Becoming a B-Movie Maker" (8:43) is a new edit of an archival interview in which he discusses his early credits with only brief reference to the feature presentation, his early credits for American International, the reasons he founded The Filmgroup and his dislike at the time of handling distribution compared to when he founded New World Pictures. The disc also includes a stills gallery (2:12), a theatrical trailer (1:52) from 35mm and a re-cut 2025 trailer (1:54) using the 2K master for the feature presentation. 
Packaging
Housed with the disc is a 16-page illustrated collector's booklet with liner notes by Tom Weaver that overlaps with the commentary. 
Overall
With a twelve-day, $12,000 sci-fi sea monster pic Monster from the Ocean Floor, Roger Corman established himself from the start as an ambitious and economical producer capable of turning out enough sizzle that it did not matter if his films did not always deliver the steak.
|
|||||
|