It Came from Beneath the Sea *** (1955, Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue, Donald Curtis) – Classic Movie Review 2442

Director Robert Gordon’s 1955 horror monster movie features an enormous octopus, or more properly actually a ‘sexopus’, whose job description is to cause havoc, chaos and destruction. It rises from out of the primordial Mindanao Deep in the depths of the Pacific Ocean to terrorise the California Coast and flatten half of San Francisco while looking for people to gobble up.

As with Godzilla, it’s all that radiation’s fault again. It turns out that the feeding habits of the Giant Octopus have been most unfortunately affected by radiation from H-Bomb tests.

[Spoiler alert] What can nuclear submarine captain Commander Pete Mathews (Kenneth Tobey, who famously faced The Thing from Another World in 1952) and formidable Professor Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue) do? Endless mayhem is on the agenda before an atom-tipped torpedo finally gets the ‘sexopus’.

The monster is quite properly the star of this amusing, well done and still quite good fun sci-fi chiller, greatly invigorated by special effects legend Ray Harryhausen’s entertaining, if now charmingly a little quaint-seeing special effects, in his first film with his long-term producer partner Charles H Schneer. Their partnership lasted until Clash of the Titans (1981), the final feature for both.

The script by George Worthing Yates and Hal Smith is not too bad, and nor is Henry Freulich’s black and white photography.

Harryhausen was working on a budget so low that he had to save money by building his octopus model with six rather than eight tentacle, and tried to pose the creature so the number of tentacles wasn’t too apparent. Harryhausen bought the model for the ship the octopus sinks from a five and dime store. Also to save money Robert Gordon shot most of the scenes in a single take. The submarine scenes were shot in a real submarine in Long Beach, California.

Also in the cast are Donald Curtis, Ian Keith, Dean Maddox and Harry Lauter.

It was released in a double bill with Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) in the US.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2442

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