Attack of the Crab Monsters (

1957

) ½

There is a recurring theme in Corman’s early sci-fi movies of individual consciousness being absorbed into or dominated by some manner of malevolent over-mind (usually an alien invader). It shows up most prominently in The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955) where the alien monster bends all manner of men and animals to its will and in The Night of the Blood Beast (1958) where the alien visitor devours human beings to gain access to their memories and personalities. Today’s film takes this theme in an even stranger direction, being essentially a film about a giant crab that kills people and incorporates their personalities into its hive-mind. The personalities of the victims are basically unchanged, other than gaining an unfailing loyalty to the crab-based hive mind which they now belong to. Obviously, these monsters are a stand-in for a Soviet boogieman, a common enough sight in mid-century American sci-fi (see The Thing from Another World (1951), The Blob (1958) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) for the best-known instances) but Corman here takes the idea to its logical extreme. Not just forced collectivization of physical society but also of consciousness. Bad enough the Bolsheviks want to steal your property, now they’re after your mind to boot! Putting all the enslaved minds into a single crustacean body makes this a scary and innovative concept. Sure, it’s not exactly subtle, but I bet you’ve never seen anything like it.

Like Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Attack of the Crab Monsters also begins with a quotation from the bible, but this one is about the destruction of the world rather than its creation. Just like in the early film, the spiritual segues neatly into the scientific with a barrage of stock footage from the H-bomb tests in the Equatorial Pacific. It’s a fitting scene, as the looming threat of not just another war, but a war that could potentially end all human life was one of the driving forces behind the religious awakening of the 1950s. People living on the edge of the apocalypse draw comfort from knowing there is some divine plan behind the events unfolding around them. Either you imagine that there is a higher power watching out for mankind and guiding us through our trials, or at the very least that there is another life waiting for us when this planet is reduced to irradiated cinders. In either case, you can give yourself some small comfort. A purely material assessment of the situation is too horrible for most people to bear, so consequently, they do not allow themselves to even conceive it.

Now, in real life, the H-bomb tests were conducted in such remote locations that aside from one phenomenally unlucky Japanese fishing boat (indeed unlucky to a point that higher-ups in US military believed it was a Russian plot; in American politics, some things never change) there was almost no collateral damage resulting from the blasts. However, you need radiation to produce monsters, as every 1950s monster movie knows quite well, so Attack of the Crab Monsters will eventually inform us that an island was close enough to the blast that it was bathed in radioactive fallout.

When the film starts, we join a military/scientific expedition to this island, aimed at studying the results of the atomic blast on the local wildlife, and determining what happened to the last expedition to the island that mysteriously dropped out of contact. Leading the mission is physicist Karl Weigand; he’s accompanied by a geologist, James Carson, a botanist, and comic French stereotype, Jules Deveroux, and two biologists Martha Hunter and Dale Drewer in addition to a company of navy sailors and support staff. On the way to the island their ship is wrecked and they are forced ashore but in the process of disembarking from their life raft, one of the sailors is mysteriously decapitated. The fact that this somehow happened in what looks like only six or seven feet of water makes the event all the more inexplicable. To make matters worse, an incoming storm prevents the island from establishing any contact with the outside world, meaning that they are all stuck on the island for the duration. This is not much of a concern since the scientists are able to live in the facilities built by the original expedition, and were able to salvage sufficient supplies from the wreak that they don’t need to worry about food and water for some time.

There is something off about the island though, it is wracked by frequent earthquakes and seemingly empty of all animal life save for seagulls. Corman should be commended for his work on the film’s intro, normally filmmakers of this time would stuff this section full of boring filler and call it “building tension” before the monsters show up. Corman gives his audience a mystery to puzzle over while they’re waiting for the monster to make its appearance. Indeed, the mystery is not only involving but becomes very satisfying once the true nature of the crab monsters and their plans for their human prey are made clear. During the production Corman purportedly claimed, “I want suspense or action in every scene. No kind of scene without suspense or action.” And while I’m not sure he completely succeeded in his lofty goal, he certainly did better than most filmmakers working on his budget have. Indeed, the atmosphere of mystery and horror is so thick on the island that it hardly seems out of place when Deveroux jokes about it being infested with ghosts. Naturally, this being foreshadowing and all, he isn’t far off.

That night, Martha and few other members of the expedition hear a voice calling out to them in the dark, the voice of Dr. MacLean, the presumed dead leader of the last expedition. MacLean’s disembodied voice tries to lure them into a recently opened fissure in the island’s surface. Weigand and the cooler heads decide it will be safer to check out the pit in daylight and approach it from the stable caves near the beach. Carson, probably upset that a physicist is daring to lecture a geologist, about rock formations descends into the pit and promptly gets trapped in there. When the rest of scientists go in after him the next day, they discover the true fate of MacLean and the rest of his expedition: A giant mutated crab has eaten them and their personalities have somehow been incorporated into the creature. Naturally, this is all the consequence of nuclear radiation that has transformed the crab monster, through a surprisingly clearly described process, into a personality absorbing abomination. The crab isn’t content with its present stock of souls though, it wants to add all the staff from the second expedition to its collection.

Now, I love rubber-suited monsters as much as the next guy, but for my money gigantic puppets al la Them! (1954) and The Deadly Mantis (1957) are always a better option for cinematic monsters. With rubber suits, you’re stuck with something that is still vaguely humanoid, and the further you try to push it to make it seem genuinely alien or monstrous, the more slow and awkward the thing is going to move. Just look at the titular monster from The Creeping Terror (1964) or the rock-monsters from Missile to the Moon (1958). The poor guys in those suits can do little more than waddle about at a glacial pace; not exactly intimidating for anyone capable of a brisk walk. Puppet-based monsters, on the other hand, can look truly demented with no loss of mobility, well at least if the puppet is a high-quality one. Unfortunately, Corman wasn’t exactly known for operating on a lavish budget, so the crab puppet on display here is barely mobile. On the plus side, it looks genuinely frightening, if only because of its strange, human-like, eyes. Give me a mammalian or even reptilian monster with the appearance of human intelligence and passions and I’ll scoff it off like it were nothing, but there is something deeply disconcerting about seeing the glimmer of a soul in the gaze of a crustacean. Sure, the crab is just one giant papier-mâché project, but Corman deploys it strategically and effectively throughout the film. The only questionable choice is the director’s tendency to have the monster attack from off-camera with a sudden swat of its deadly claws. While sound in principle, and a good way to get around the monster’s cumbersome form, I find it difficult to believe that a crab the size of Volkswagen could take so many people by surprise.

In addition, Attack of the Crab Monsters earns my accolades for being the first 1950s monster movie I’ve seen that actually acknowledges, in dialogue, how clumsy and slow its creature is. At one point, the human survivors actually reason that so long as they keep moving they should be able to avoid the creature. To counter this, the crab is gradually chipping away at the landmass of the island, causing the frequent earthquakes and gradually sinking the island into the sea. This gives its prey less and less room to hide and evade it. It’s a wonderful compromise that makes the monster seem like a genuine threat, while not turning its prey into hair-brained morons incapable of running away from an obviously sluggish attack. The sinking island also builds tension in-and-of-itself; crabs can swim (albeit very awkwardly) but the people won’t last long once all the land is gone. Honestly, I’m surprised that more films of this vintage don’t use a similar technique to increase the menace posed by their lumbering monstrosities.

Attack of the Crab Monsters is not without its shortcomings, mostly in the way of a few questionable decisions about what constitutes thrilling entertainment. As a rule, any film that includes an underwater scuba sequence is probably not using its budget as effectively as it could. Sure, there are a few films that make underwater photography exciting and even thrilling (Jaws (1975) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) to name the best-known instances), but for the most part, you’re paying a lot of money for your audience to be very board. I suppose it’s as good a reason as any though to put your lead actress in a swimsuit. Cheap-thrills were evidently a good deal easier to come by in 1957. Still, I’m sure a mind as depraved and as Roger Corman’s could come up with dozens of less expensive methods.