The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

 Year of Release: 1953

Director:  Eugène Lourié

Screenplay:  Fred Freiberger, Eugène Lourié, Louis Morheim and Robert Smith, based on the short story "The Fog Horn" by Ray Bradbury

Starring:  Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey

Running Time:  80 minutes

Genre:  Science-fiction

A nuclear bomb test in the Arctic awakens a prehistoric monster called a Rhedosaur which begins making it's way down the coast of North America.  Professor Thomas Nesbitt (Christian) who witnesses the creature desperately tries to convince a sceptical world of the danger, before the creature can destroy New York City.

When the film was in pre-production, special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen brought the producer's attention to Ray Bradbury's short story "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (now more commonly published as "The Fog Horn") in an issue of The Saturday Evening Post, particularly an illustration of the creature attacking a lighthouse.  The finished film bears very little resemblance to Bradbury's story though.  The film has aged badly, filled with hoary old cliches, flat direction and some questionable performances, but it has a lot of retro charm, and was a smash hit in it's day.  The movie was the first of the "Giant Monster Created by Radiation" movies that were churned out in the fifties, most notably Godzilla (1954) which was strongly influenced by this film, and most of the cliches really started with this one.  The Beast of the title is a fictional dinosaur called a Rhedosaur and is brought to stop-motion life by Ray Harryhausen. While the special effects may not have aged well, but they have a strange life to them, and the film has some impressive images and scenes, such as the creature attacking the lighthouse silhouetted against the evening sky, the creatures rampage through New York (during which it gobbles up a cop), and the climax at the roller coaster is exciting.  The first hour or so of the film, which basically has the scientist trying to convince everyone that the monster is real is quite sedate, and then the pace picks up in the last twenty minutes, building to a very abrupt conclusion.  It's certainly worth watching, even if it's not a great film, it is a good one, and it does have a lot of innocent charm.

The Rhedosaur in New York, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms