The Monster from the Ocean Floor

 The Monster from the Ocean Floor is an ultra-low budget horror picture produced by Roger Corman in 1954.  The movie was directed by Wyott Ordung, a film maker who worked on several quicky sci-fi pictures in the fifties. (Ordung, who seems to have been biracial, also appears in these movies in supporting roles, presumably to cut costs.)  The Monster from the Ocean Floor cost $12,000 and is significant in film history as being Roger Corman's first production (he had earlier written a script for cop movie). Of course, Corman went on to direct fifty or sixty movies, some of them reasonably good, including a well-reviewed cycle of six pictures based on the works of Edgar Alan Poe that now have cult status.  Corman produced another hundred movies and his companies, including American International, were incubators for talent -- Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, and Jonathan Demme, among many others cut their teeth in the motion picture industry working for Corman.  Corman wrote a book boasting that he "made a hundred movies and never lost a dime."  Recently, I watched Corman's last Poe picture, The Tomb of Ligeia, made about ten years after The Monster from the Ocean Floor and an estimable, opulently designed horror movie.  On that DVD's commentary tract, one of the participants discussing the Poe movie (incidentally written by Chinatown's screenwriter, Robert Towne), noted that The Monster from the Ocean Floor is "like a movie written and directed by Thomas Pynchon."  This allusion was sufficient to persuade me to seek out the picture and watch it.  In fact, it's terrible and doesn't seem to me to redolent of anything about Pynchon, except for the fact that the picture is ridiculous, a little in the vein of some of Pynchon's more cartoonish parodies of genre movies in novels like Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day, a book that contains some very silly (and funny) pastiches of films, including a parody of a monster movie.  

True to form, Corman had the picture shot entirely on location -- thereby, sparing costs with respect to sets and sound stages.  Most of the picture takes place on a scenic stretch of beach and cove said to be in Mexico, but probably shot somewhere near LA.  The sound of the surf beating against the shore renders much of the dialogue unintelligible -- people's voices are recorded against a dull roar of waves.  (Much of the movie seems to have been post-synchronized.  An attractive blonde, Julie Blair, always clad in a bathing suit is vacationing on this Mexican beach.  We first see her sketching the picturesque sea-coast, indicating, however, that her profession is commercial art, drawing such things as toasters and refrigerators.  In the opening scene, a little Mexican boy tells her that his father was killed by a sea monster.  Julie asks if the man's dad was drunk at the time.  Julie, then, sheds her outer garments and dives into the waves.  In the surf, a  phallic-shaped one-man sub suggestively bumps up against her.  This sub, apparently operated by paddle power, is occupied by a handsome stiff, an oceanographer named Steve Dunning.  Steve, who is romantically interested in Julie, invites her aboard the oceanography ship where there is some dialogue with a scientist, the pipe-smoking Dr. Baldwin.  The characters discuss the wonders of the deep and how in the future the bottom of the sea will be farmed.  Julie mentions that there is supposed to be a monster living on the ocean floor, but Steve and Dr. Baldwin scoff at her.  She, then, dons scuba gear, swims to the bottom of the cove, and encounters a giant octopus that frightens her.  Back on shore, an elderly lady tells her about someone with a mysterious name who was dragged "from where he was chained" into the sea by a monster.  It turns out that his woman is discussing the mysterious disappearance of her pet dog.  (This character is played by the haggard Inez Palaya, an actress who acted the part of Scarface's Italian mama in Howard Hawks' 1932 gangster movie of that name.)  Julie, fetching in her tight-fitting wet-suit, goes diving again and has to fight off several aggressive sharks that attack her.  A diver goes missing, leaving at the bottom of the sea, the shell of his diving bell.  Julie probes the deep with a grappling hook and pulls some greasy tissue from something under her boat.  On the beach, Steve pulls out a guitar and serenades her with a folk song:  "My love is like a red, red rose."  Julie, then, goes out to sea diving again.  Meanwhile, she has sent a sample of the meat speared off the underwater beast to Dr. Baldwin and Steve -- this is weird, she sends them the sample by mail in a  box.  The two oceanographers study the tissue sample and conclude that it is part of giant amoeba, capable of dissolving human flesh in its digestive fluids.  They hurry out to sea to rescue Julie who is now facing the monster on the bottom of the sea.  The creatures is rubbery-looking octopoid beast with one huge cyclopean eye and a couple of writing tentacles around its base.  The critter can't really move and seems inert -- it simply sits on the bottom of the ocean with its one or two tentacles flailing.  Julie is trapped in a sea cave or some sort of hollow and, now and then, the monster makes a desultory effort to strangler her with its tentacles.  Julie is running out of oxygen in the scuba tank and passes out.  Steve deploys the one-man penis-shaped sub and drives the vessel right into the monster's giant, glaring eye.  Then, he rescues Julie, brings her to the surface where she revives.  He and Dr. Baldwin owe Julie an apology for doubting that there was a sea monster hiding underwater in the cove.  As they make the apology, Steve and Julie kiss and the ship sails away.  

The monster is said to be the result of atomic bomb testing at Bikini Atoll.  Dr. Baldwin has previously encountered a pterandon monster in South America, a sort of flying reptile who has laid a fifty pound egg dissected by the intrepid man of science.  He tells us that the monster lived during the stone age, a chronology that seems unlikely to me.  The Monster looks exactly like Kang and Kodos, the drooling space monsters who menace the earth from their satellite in the "Treehouse of Horror" episodes on The Simpson's.  I believe that I am the only person to have commented on this resemblance and, therefore, deserve credit for making this modest discovery.