Monster from the Ocean Floor

‘Terror strikes… from beneath the sea!’

Monster from the Ocean Floor (original title: It Stalked the Ocean Floor) is a 1954 low budget science fiction horror film about a sea monster that terrorizes a cove in Mexico. The film was directed by Wyott Ordung (screenwriter on Target Earth; First Man into Space and director of Walk the Dark Street). It starred Anne Kimbell and Stuart Wade. Wade also starred in other low-budget films during the decade including Tarantula (1955), and Teenage Monster (1958). Producer Roger Corman also appeared in a cameo in the film; it was the first film that he solo-produced.

“The monster was actually a puppet shot behind a cloudy fish tank. I certainly had no money for process shots, where the action is rear-projected onto a screen and the actors play to it onstage.” Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime

Plot teaser:

Julie Blair (Kimbell) is an American vacationing at a sea-side village in Mexico. She hears stories about a man-eating creature dwelling in the cove. She meets Dr. Baldwin (Dick Pinner), a marine biologist, and they fall for one another. The mysterious death of a diver interests Julie in investigating, but Baldwin is very skeptical. She sees a giant amoeba rising from the ocean…

Reviews:

“Monster from the Ocean Floor isn’t just low budget, it’s minuscule budget, yet the use of so much location footage adds a real edge of verisimilitude. At just over an hour it’s watchable and generally entertaining, despite its unforgivable depiction of Mexicans as hysterical drunkands. The monster is a cheap yet oddly amusing creation and his demise – stabbed in the eye with a mini sub – is brilliantly bad. Pseudo-scientific dialogue also adds an air of authenticity that is missing from some of the bigger budgeted 50s monster movies. Low rent and a portend of Corman’s aquatic horrors to come… ” Adrian J Smith, Horrorpedia

“Roger Corman was absolutely right. A sufficiently careful producer could make a modestly entertaining and effective movie on Monster from the Ocean Floor’s pocket-change budget, and Corman in fact did so here. It’s true that the 64-minute running time helps a lot, and that another half-hour this heavily freighted with placid scuba-diving footage would have been straight-up lethal. It’s true again that Jonathan Haze and Wyott Ordung make Speedy Gonzalez look like a paragon of ethnic sensitivity with their impersonations of Mexican watermen, and that it is impossible to square the appearance of the utterly adorable monster puppet…” 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

“This, then, is Monster from the Ocean Floor, a film with, I would contend, a few virtues – just a few – even aside from the purely historical: a nice lead performance; good use of its locations, and attractively moody photography (so it ought to be: this film was shot by Floyd Crosby – only two years after High Noon!); some interesting character touches; the first appearance of a future Corman stock player, Jonathan Haze (who hides behind an aggressively “Mexican” moustache)….” And You Call Yourself a Scientist!

“Wyott Ordung’s direction is dull and prosaic. Not much happens and even less that is exciting. There are some particularly bad performances from the actors playing the Mexicans, who are all caricatured like movie cliches of American Indians, speaking without any articles. The production has been mounted with the characteristic penny-pinching economy that Roger Corman became famous for. To this extent, we only ever see a single shot of the monster – a glowing, single-eyed octopus emerging out of the ocean (and even then only ever in long distance).” Moria