I Watch Films: Behemoth The Sea Monster

 

Behemoth The Sea-Monster (1959)

In London American scientist Karnes gives a talk about the dangers of nuclear contamination of the sea. Afterwards Professor Bickford learns of strange incidents in Cornwall, a fisherman died saying the word “Behemoth,” and afterwards fish washed up dead on the shore. Karnes and Bickford go down, to discover what seem to be radiation burns on the dead man, but no radiation on the beach. Tests though reveal the fish have consumed radioactive material. Later Karnes goes out to a wrecked ship, all the people on board missing.

Karnes suspects from the word and the ship that there’s a big marine animal involved, possibly mutated by radioactivity. Soon afterwards a farm in Essex is attacked. A footprint left behind resembles that of a dinosaur, and specifically a dinosaur that palaeontologists think had an electric eel type of pulse. Karnes thinks this might transmit radioactivity.

The radioactivity is probably killing it slowly. Not slowly enough; they speculate that it will try to go upriver to shallow water where it was born/hatched, which means the Thames. They try to get the navy to close the Thames but they won’t, thinking radar will let them spot it. It turns out to be invisible to radar (or possibly just underwater) and uses it’s electrical pulse to knock out a radar equipped helicopter. In a final sequence it attacks London, and Karnes takes a mini-submarine to attack it.

The sea monster effects are not bad, but the film really shines when they are studying the monster’s trail of destruction. The investigators walking across a beach strewn with dead fish, the same beach that the fishing characters were on. It does a nice job of fleshing out these bit part characters that are then left behind when they leave Cornwall. The science gets increasingly off the wall as the film goes on, even as they get more detailed in processes and institutions that mobilise to deal with it.

Watch This: Brisk attempt at a serious monster film
Don’t Watch This: Dated science, bad science, unconvincing monster, also lots of dead fish wasted