Of Giant Crabs With Plastic Eyelids

Roger Corman never failed to impress in one way or another, and schlock seemed tailor-made for him, one example of which is 1957’s Attack of the Crab Monsters, which is every bit as bad as it sounds, yet so much better than anyone could have predicted.

It all opens with a small group of scientists and Navy men landing on an island somewhere in the South Pacific. They’re there to find out what happened to their colleagues who mysteriously vanished, and things go wrong from the start. When one of the sailors clowns around too much as they bring supplies to shore, one of them falls overboard and when his fellows haul him back in, his head is gone. Worse, the group’s Navy escorts take off in their seaplane and it explodes, leaving the group stranded.

They’re a pretty standard science-y bunch. Dale (Richard Garland), Martha (Pamela Duncan), and Jules (Mel Welles) are all biologists. James (Richard H. Cutting) is a geologist. Hank (Russell Johnson) is the handyman and resident MacGyver.

Our group makes their way to Dr. McLaren’s house, who was the leader of the expedition, thinking they can find out what they need to know from his journal. This house, which is a marvel of midcentury decor and technology on a supposedly deserted island, is a great place to wait out the earthquakes and try sending distress messages to the Navy.

Yeah, earthquakes. At first it’s enough for the group to cling to a tree and look worried, but soon they start to see parts of the island disappear. A mountain is suddenly gone. A pit is suddenly where a pit wasn’t before.

Even worse than the island slowly disappearing from under our intrepid group of scientists is what’s causing it. Martha wakes up one night thinking Dr. McLaren is calling her, and she stumbles out of her prettily feminine bedroom to follow the voice. This happens more than once, with Jules and Hank also hearing the mysterious voice. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that McLaren being dead precludes him talking to anyone, but out these people go anyway. Following disembodied voices doesn’t work out well for anyone not named Samuel and apprenticed to a high priest named Eli at the temple in Jerusalem, but I digress.

Fortunately for Martha, she and Hank snap each other back to reality. Jules on the other hand, gets mauled by a giant crab claw and dies. And that’s after a fall into the giant pit takes his hand off. Poor guy.

Did I mention the giant crabs? No, I didn’t. Simply put, they’re what’s making the island disappear. These crabs are the direct result of atomic energy fallout wreaking havoc, as the radiation made these crustaceans grow freakishly big and angry. Any humans they kill become crabs themselves and are able to talk to their fellow humans from beyond the grave. Or something like that. It’s like Godzilla meets Dracula meets the ants from Them!. 

Naturally, our heroes start dropping like crab bait, and one of the crabs smashes through wall of the radio room at McLaren’s house. Also naturally, Hank the Handyman has a possible solution: If the crabs mutated because of energy, maybe they can be destroyed by it, too. Will it work? I won’t give it away. Even a movie like Attack of the Crab Monsters deserves a modicum of diginity and mystery.

The crabs, on the other hand don’t get much dignity or mystery. Plenty of film buffs talk about how legs and wheels are clearly visible underneath these outsized crustaceans, but I’ve yet to see someone mention what happens when this thing wakes up from a nap. A literal hook pulls the very saggy plastic eyelid open and the crab looks somewhat awake, albeit, hungover as all get-out.

Seat-of-the-pants storytelling seemed to be Corman’s byword, and Crab Monsters is no different, at least in terms of the special effects. In addition to the drunk crab, the pit the crabs supposedly just created has grass and tree roots growing out of it. Things must grow fast on that island, I guess, not to mention Corman deserves points for creativity. Other than that, the direction seems pretty blah, almost as if Corman was afraid to mess up a take in case something went wrong with the special effects.

Dicey effects aside, this movie is all over the place. On one hand, it’s a kitsch-fest. On the other, it’s philisophically sloppy and trying to earn substance in a really cheap way, namely when the film starts out with the narrator quoting Genesis 6:7 (KJV), which is what God said when He planned the Great Flood:

And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

Context matters, though. Genesis 9:8-17 says several times in several different ways that God won’t destroy the earth with a flood ever again and we have the rainbow to prove it. So no, Corman and Company, atomic weapons aren’t God’s backhanded way of taking out the human race. That a contextless Bible verse has any connection to a movie about talking crabs with lazy plastic eyelids is almost too ludicrous. Stick to the kitsch, guys.

To be honest, it’s to be hoped Corman learned something between this movie and Little Shop of Horrors, because in that case Seymour tries to play God and ends up paying for it. What does Attack of the Crab Monsters teach us? Besides “Don’t mess with giant crustaceans”? Errrr…I have no idea.

A couple more posts are on the way tomorrow. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you then…

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