One of the joys of watching bad 1950s sci fi movies is mocking the hokey monsters, and I have compiled s list of Least Convincing Movie Monsters. On July 16 and 17, Turner Classic Movies is playing four of the top ten movies on this list:
- The Killer Shrews (1959): Dogs in fright masks. Yes, dogs. As you can see from the above photo, the filmmakers have also applied shaggy patches to the sides of the dogs and ropy rat tails to their backs. When humans escaped from their island, the killer shrews died of overpopulation.
- The Black Scorpion (1957): This was an apparently gray (not black) giant scorpion that mutated in the core of a Mexican volcano. The scorpion (bottom center) looked a lot like a plastic toy bug from a cereal box, except that it is constantly drooling. Lured into a Mexican soccer stadium, it was dispatched by electrocution.
- Wasp Woman (1960): This was a slender, attractive woman wearing an insect mask (bottom left). The owner of a cosmetics manufacturer became worried that she was aging out of her looks and injected some wasp material from her R&D lab. Once carbolic acid was thrown in her face, the Wasp Woman was pushed to her death off a skyscraper.
- It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958): “It” was a guy who appeared to be wearing a gorilla suit modified with a pig snout and hands that are webbed and clawed (bottom right). He met his end when deprived of oxygen. It! is a nice time capsule of the Mad Men days: the male astronauts sat around a table at their Mars space station and were served coffee by their female colleagues. They also thought nothing of smoking cigarettes and shooting off pistol rounds inside the spaceship.
To see the two movies with even less credible monsters, check out Least Convincing Movie Monsters.
