Sorry, this movie sucks

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This gets off to a decent enough start as an American atomic submarine gets caught and held by ... something! We don't know what it is, they don't know what it is - but whatever it is, it's big! Eventually the sub escapes and reports what happened to the somewhat skeptical Navy brass, bringing with them a hunk of flesh that got trapped in the propellers. Experts are called in, and eventually it's determined that this thing is a giant octopus that has developed a taste for human flesh and appears to be wreaking devastation throughout the North Pacific.It's a 50's sci-fi flick, so you have to set your expectations accordingly. I appreciated the fact that there was a bit of a twist involved in this. While the giant octopus was radiated (presumably by US atomic tests) it wasn't a giant octopus because of the radiation. It was just a giant octopus that had been radiated. Apparently there might be lots of them down there. We're told that, in fact, there have been reports of such beasts going back hundreds of years. Go figure. I thought that made for a more interesting story than just a normal octopus who got radiated and grew huge as a result. And the special effects by the famous Ray Harryhausen were pretty good - by the standards of those pre-CGI days anyway - and the attack on San Francisco was pretty well portrayed. The creature's tentacles are moved by stop action work, and they're pretty effective. The cast was about as you'd expect it to be - not great, not awful. They played their parts.Some of the backdrop to the creature scenes are less than riveting. This being a part of the 50's radiated monster genre there has to be a romance, because a giant octopus should never stand in the way of romance. That was provided by Kenneth Tobey as the sub commander and Faith Domergue as one of the scientists. There's an attempt to portray Domergue's Dr. Joyce as a very liberated woman. She comes across well in that way sometimes. On the other hand, she sometimes stares wide- eyed as the men make various points, she falls for Cmdr. Matthews pretty easily and I thought it odd that a highly liberated woman and expert marine biologist would scream like a little girl every time the creature appears and throw herself into Matthews' arms for protection. I mean, I get that it's a giant octopus - but it's still an octopus and she's an expert marine biologist and ... Well, I guess in the 50's you could only take women's lib so far.It's not a disappointing movie and it fits well into the genre of which it was a part. But on the other hand it was a part of that genre - so don't set your expectations too high. (6/10)

I can't tell you how many times I tried to catch this flick over a span of years but was always stymied in the attempt. Chalk it up to bad timing, falling asleep or missing it in the cable listings. I might have blown this one too but thanks to DVR, even nodding off would have had a remedy.The first thing I noticed here was that the black and white transfer I viewed on Turner Classics was phenomenally crisp and offered a first rate viewing experience. Ray Harryhausen's monster effects and the film makers' stop motion wizardry really brought a level of sophistication to this otherwise B grade sci-fi/horror film. Granted, the action isn't what modern day viewers would expect given the prevalence of CGI, but for the mid-Fifties, this was pretty cool.But you know, the picture had it's share of goofs too, and it's the kind of stuff I live for with these old pictures. Remember when the airplane pilot spotted the pair of survivors in the rubber dinghy after the sailors abandoned ship during the first attack? When the scene transitions to the naval hospital, there are four men brought in! Then this next scene, I had to wonder whether it was intentional or not because it was just so ironic. In the lab where the scientists and Commander Pete Matthews (Kenneth Tobey) are working, there's a prominently displayed sign that says 'No Smoking', but the commander spends his entire time taking drags on his cigarette.But the one that really doubled me over was when Commander Matthews and Professor Joyce (Faith Domergue) are on the beach investigating the latest missing person headline, and the professor explains to the Admiral that the potential sea monster probably hasn't gone away from the area. Yet she and the commander are out in the ocean swimming!Well if you can take your sci-fi with a grain of sea salt, this is probably one of the better giant mutant due to atomic radiation flicks you're likely to come up with from the era. The octopus attack on the Golden Gate Bridge was a pretty creative affair, and if you're going to make a stand for humanity, you might as well have the movie heroes blow the monster all to hell with an explosive torpedo. It sure does rule out a sequel though.

Judy Garland once sang, "I never will forget Jeanette MacDonald standing in the middle of the rubble and singing". Who would have thought that 49 years after the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 that the city by the bay would be attacked by a giant octopus who was definitely much bigger than King Kong and equally as high as the Empire State Building. But this squid with the giant plunger like suckers on his tentacles (which left manhole sized marks on the sandy beaches of the Pacific Coast) could literally climb up out of the ocean, hugging the Embarcadero and reaching his tentacles far down Market Street to cause all sort of disaster. Considering that MacDonald's character might have been only in her early 80's when the event with the octopus occurred, she very well could have witnessed it, and as the rubble fell, screamed, "Oh no, not again!" This is a very enjoyable science fiction monster movie, a product of the nuclear age and a reminder of what real life science might be capable of. Faith Domergue, once the protégée of Howard Hughes during his executive years as head of RKO, is a very intelligent scientist working with the military on the obvious presence of something lurking under the sea. Kenneth Tobey is the Navy commander she strikes up a friendship with, and fortunately, the romantic element of the movie is underplayed as Domergue is seriously a 50's career woman, still beautiful and desirable, but determined to find a way to stop this beast with eight tentacles before she deals with the beast with two arms.She explains this isn't the first case of a giant octopus coming out of the sea, having found evidence of such creatures back in the 14th century off the coast of Denmark after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It's obvious that these creatures lie dormant in the outer reaches of the ocean floor, only rising when disturbed. This monster makes a dramatic entrance, taking down a raised submarine and pretty much killing the entire crew. Those who laugh at its possible existence end up regretting it (if they live to remember it), and those driving down California State Highway 480 will surely get a visual to remember, if they make it past Market Street.Excellent special effects make this one of the best of the nuclear age science fiction monster movies with decent performances and a brisk pace. It isn't nearly as good as "20 Million Miles to Earth" which humanized the monster, but it is still gripping. Who will ever forget the octopus coming out of the sea and revealing not only its tentacles but its huge head as it prepares to destroy a submarine, its sudden appearance on the beach and its efforts to take down the Golden Gate Bridge before it makes its way over to the Embarcadero. San Francisco has had many car chase movies and several films about its different shake-ups, but to see something of this size taking down some of the most famous west coast tourist attractions is a wonderful movie memory to cherish and to enthrall science fiction fans for decades to come.

A big budget is not one of the things required to produce a successful, entertaining monster picture. Of all the science-fiction spectacles to feature rampaging behemoths—and I've seen quite a few in my time—many of the best were the ones produced on limited budgets. The theories are many, but I personally believe it is because a lesser supply of funds forces the filmmakers to rely on their ingenuity and their art-driven passion. They make the movie they would want to see on the big screen. I have no doubt that Charles H. Schneer, the producer of It Came from Beneath the Sea, was very interested in seeing a movie where a giant octopus tore the Golden Gate Bridge to ribbons. However, his screenwriters and director seemed far less fascinated by the premise than he. As a result, the picture, despite some high moments, is nothing more than a passionless and unremarkable bore.One of the core problems with It Came from Beneath the Sea is a complete lack of dread. Even though the movie's plot revolves around a monstrous octopus using its tentacles to sink ships and tear apart harbors, the storytelling seems to regard this as a remarkably mundane event. The characters seem to have no real interest in contending with this monstrosity. This again returns to the faults of the screenplay: it also devotes much more time to the back-stories of the humans than necessary. How so? Because not one plot element—least of all the obligatory romance—has any spark of passion in it. The actors do what they can, but they never come across with enough energy to really serve a purpose for being on the screen for so long. And when it's all over—the climax, that is—there is no sense of a resolution. No reaction from the actors that would seem suitable considering their close encounter with a creature that had torn San Francisco's famous suspension bridge into pieces just earlier in the film. It's as if the events had faded from their memory.That's very much how It Came from Beneath the Sea fares as a monster picture. It drags, making its whole 79 minutes seem much longer than it is, and then evaporates in the mind just hours later. And the octopus, though well-animated by stop motion maestro Ray Harryhausen, is a rather uninteresting menace. We see very little of the creature and its sparse attacks on civilization are static. Even the film's most famous sequence, with the giant cephalopod wrapping its powerful arms around the Golden Gate Bridge, is inter-cut with too many "elsewhere-in the-city" moments, dragging out any sense of excitement from the sequence. And the big underwater payoff, which consists mostly of the beast just sitting on the ocean floor, is even more of a letdown. The most interesting moments consist of soldiers shooing the octopus's tentacles away with flame-throwers. There are plenty of really good vintage spectacles involving sea monsters; this is not one of them.