IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955) ** Properly enraged by nuclear testing an erstwhile pacifist octopus rises from the Mindanao trench and pursues brain surgery at the hands of a submarine commander. These many years later, several key questions remain. Does the octopus have only six legs due to a nuclear related mutation, or a low budget? Should such a creature, mis-classified among octopeds, be properly referred to as a hexopus or an octopus? Is it possible for a Harvard scientist to be a "real man," or is military membership a prerequisite? In any event the U.S. Navy is immediately recognizeable: they initiate the search for the beast with random esplosions across the ocean surface, turn off the speaker as soon as the guy they're bugging starts talking about what they're interested in, make impossibly clumsy efforts to spin the media, and confine civilians without charges. A film like this needs two things: spectacularly juvenile effects and a sternly pompous narrator. Ray Harryhausen has done better than this eyeball-octopus on occasion, but few others have. The narration is so brilliant as to make me wonder if the secret identity of the narrator is Ed Wood. Robert Gordon and Jerome Thoms edit in several excellent bits of stock footage-a San Francisco traffic jam from about 20 years earlier (but it doesn't destroy the plot, maybe everyone in that part of downtown was poor), and various naval bits. He also expertly (which here means "obviously") utilizes the old trick of having actors behave in a tormented manner on a stage with grainy film of dramatic events playing behind them. The scene of Kenneth Tobey on the Golden Gate Bridge, under attack from an enormous tentatcle is without the question the best of several deserving candidates. Still and all, it was the '50s, and the closing sequence correctly identifies Faith Domergue as the greatest threat to civilization as it was then known.
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