Not every creature that assaulted the earth came from the inky depths of space suring the fifties; in fact, if you’ve read the title of this film, you’ve already guessed that a fair few of them came from beneath the sea. Oh, the insertion of the fear of nuclear power was still present and correct too, and in 1955, Ray Harryhausen was brought in to add some stop-motion pizzazz to the extravagantly titled It Came From Beneath The Sea. Treading in the familiar, vast footsteps of both 1953’s The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and 1954’s Godzilla, this example of marauding wildlife swapped out teeth for tentacles in the form of an enormous octopus as it took its frustrations out on the city of San Francisco.
But despite the presence of the certified cinematic legend that is Harryhausen, can the rest of this monster movie live up to his epic visuals or, like some creature features of the era, is it just a 50s version of just waiting patiently for the good bits?
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the crew of a nuclear submarine experiences some technical difficulties after getting a huge ping on their sonar. Suddenly finding his craft held in some sort of awesome, unseen grip, unflappable Captain Pete Matthews manages to hold fast until the submarine manages to free itself, but after returning to Pearl Harbour to dry dock, tissue from some sort of giant sea beast is found lodged in the workings. Obviously the Navy isn’t thrilled to be sharing the sea with a creature that can bear-hug entire submarines, so marine biologists Lesley Joyce and John Carter (of Harvard University – not Mars) are summoned to promptly decrypt this cryptid.
After toiling away in a lab, the egg-heads suggest that nuclear testing has caused a gargantuan octopus to be driven out of its home in the Mindanao Deep due to its now-radioactive mass alerting it’s prey. Rising from the depths to find more unsuspecting morsels to eat, the Navy keep a close look at any odd happenings or disappearances occurring at sea; but while Joyce struggles to understand this threat in the face of misogynistic superiors, Matthews struggles to understand a far more complex creature – the modern woman.
While we watch a sci-fi monster movie try to clumsily straddle the gender divide, the octopus thoughfully bales it out by surfacing in San Francisco and ripping the Golden Gate Bridge a new one. Mercifully spared from trying to figure out a woman who demands to make her own decisions and refuses to be coddled, Matthews instead hops in his submarine to shoot the octopus with a modified harpoon/missile in order to save the day. But first they have to get the sizable cephalopod back in the water to target it. Can the pluck of American troops armed with flamethrowers enough to help turn this aquatic terror into 2000 tons of fried calamari?
Like the majority of the movies made infinitely better by the input of certified cinematic magician, Ray Harryhausen, sometimes there’s something of a jump from the artistry he injects into the film, and the quality of the actual film itself. In some cases, his particular brand of stop-motion alchemy makes the film infinitely better, especially when such classic creatures as the Ymir, a skeleton army, or a roaring Cyclops are given such personality by his bewitching camera trickery. However, in others, there’s a sense that the movie is holding his creations back by not being able to match the vibrant performances of little, table-top models being moved frame by frame. For some of its running time, It Came From Beneath The Sea regrettably falls into the latter category as we find that it’s attentions fall onto some rather random subjects rather than the super-sized, threat.
Amusingly, large sections of the flick deal with Kenneth (The Thing From Another World) Tobey’s submarine captain try to wrap his brain around the concept of Faith (This Island Earth) Domergue’s modern woman and there’s a fair amount of dated chuckles to be gleaned from how awkwardly the film attempts to broach it. There’s a part of me that genuinely believes that director Robert Gordon has his heart in the right place as he tries to add a stronger, more willful woman to a genre renowned for shrieking damsels and fainting females, however, there’s numerous times where it tackles it so badly, I couldn’t help but wonder what the octopus was up to while Tobey is desperately trying to get laid. Having Joyce stand up to the military brass when trying to get her findings across is fairly forward thinking, but it’s soon deconstructed faster than the octopus taking apart the Golden Gate Bridge when we get scenes where Joyce’s male counterpart mansplains feminism to the horny submarine captain while she’s actually standing right there in the room…
Anyway, bungled attempts at women’s lib aside, simply far too much of It Came From Beneath The Sea remains frustratingly static thanks to endless scenes in laboratories, hospitals and offices as everyone chooses to talk about the problem rather than getting out there and sorting it out. A whole subplot about Joyce using her skills at flirting in order to draw out stories from the survivors of a freighter attack adds nothing to a movie about a giant octopus, and you soon start finding yourself getting fairly impatient. However, Harryhausen hasn’t let us down yet and once the octopus (or should that be sextopus, as Harry only gave it six tentacles to save on animating time) finally starts doing its thing, it proves to be a pretty spectacular show. Sure, there are limitations on stop motion compared to all the fancy, modern tech we all take for granted now, but even for a film made in the 50s, the sight of the immense sea beast peeling apart national monuments like a banana proves to be genuinely kick-ass. Be it smooshing fleeing civilians with a probing appendage or wrestling a ship to the bottom of the ocean, it’s interesting to see how many modern movie monsters (the Kraken from Pirates Of The Caribbean for example) actually take their cue from this slimy classic. However, for all of its impressive carnage and curious gender politics, It Came From Beneath The Sea still ends up being something of a poor man’s version of the very films it’s trying to emulate. After all, a giant octopus is cool and all, but it doesn’t have the personality of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and it certainly doesn’t have the sheer metaphor power of Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla.
While things eventually kick off in spectacular fashion, this 50s creature feature takes its sweet time to get there thanks to endless, talky meetings and a shaky, half-hearted determination to try and give stronger roles to women. It Came From Beneath The Sea does what it says on the tin, it’s just a shame it doesn’t come a hell of a lot sooner…
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