No one has ever made a creature feature quite like the original King Kong.
Well, except perhaps the silent version of The Lost World.
Legendary stop-motion animator, Willis O’Brien, used a method for Kong that has never been used in any film since. And there is a reason for that.
He created miniature sets for his creatures, with multiple layers of matte paintings to create a sense of depth. The results are amazing, but required incredible amounts of work and a relatively large crew.
While he tried to launch a few equally large projects, including War Eagles, a film which would have ended with a battle between modern aircraft and men riding on the backs of giant eagles, he couldn’t get anyone to back him.
The end result is that he ended up working on some rather minor films — one might almost say, increasingly minor — with the final indignity being Irwin Allen’s 1960 version of The Lost World, where his proposals were rejected in favor of lizards with fins glued on them!
But, despite the often threadbare nature of the films they were in, his animation work is always remarkable.
And despite being rather late in his career, this is one of his better films, thanks to a lot of quite impressive animation and to a very solid Fifties creature feature backing them up.
This one is set in Mexico, with an impressive collection of Hispanic talent onscreen, and Richard Denning as the expected American scientist making a field study of a newly emerged volcano.
One does wonder how we would have survived the aliens and giant monsters of the Fifties if we hadn’t had him.
What most people watching this probably don’t realize is that this volcano is based on a real volcano which opened up one day in 1943 in a farmer’s field near Paracutin.
As is all too often the case with these films, it starts out with a carefully built up mystery, as Richard and his fellow professor, Dr. Ramos (Carlos Rivas) stumble across a series of sinister incidents apparently caused by some monstrous creature. Of course, we’ve known since we saw the title of the film exactly what sort of creature it is.
Particularly if we looked at the poster on our way in to theater.
But we expect that in this sort of film, and while it takes a while before we get our first glimpse of them, The giant scorpions are wonderfully animated: they move fluidly and look remarkably lifelike — only no amount of wrangling could ever get a herd of real scorpions to give such dramatic and perfectly staged performances.
The other equally nasty beasts — a wormlike thing with clawed arms and what appears to be a pseudoscorpion — which show up in the scorpions’ underground lair were in fact “borrowed” from the Spider pit sequence he was forced to cut from King Kong.
Mind you, someone else inserted a series of close-up shots of the face of a drooling scorpion puppet that just does not look anything like the realistic animated critters. But I don’t blame O’B for this one and it happened a lot in these Fifties films. You think they’d at least borrow his sketches so they could make something that looked like his monster.
Sadly, though there is one major place where O’B’s work falls down, and those are the scenes where the scorpions get loose in the city. The scorpions seem to turn transparent in those shots, or are so dark that they seem little more than silhouettes. Ray Harryhausen figured out how to seamlessly integrate his miniatures with live action and real backgrounds (his so called “Dynamation” technique) but it doesn’t look like Willis ever figured that one out.
This is one of the best of the Fifties giant monster movies. True, it has its absurdities, like that scorpion they find alive, sealed in a piece of obsidian. But then, after that hint that we’re about to be besieged by giant scorpions, it goes more or less unmentioned for the rest of the film.
Which is better than you can say for that Conquistador taking a 500-year dirt nap in Giant from the Unknown (1958).
And which giant monster film of the Fifties didn’t have such moments?
So, if you love Fifties SF or giant monster movies, you should like this one. After all, they don’t come much better — and this one will be even better if you add lots of popcorn and a friend or two, and maybe an equally worthy second feature, like It Came Beneath the Sea or Tarantula.
Just make sure you shake out your shoes before you put them on. That’s where the scorpions hide.
rivets on the poster 
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