I saw this movie only a couple weeks after first seeing "Them!" and noticed quite a few similarities. Perhaps it's only a coincidence but I feel the makers of this film were trying to cash in to the success of the (in my opinion) far superior "Them!". Anyone else notice this?
An innocent little girl, running to a priest...she is not for you! -- Faust (1926)
Well, it's been quite a while since I saw either of these films. I remember thinking Them was quite entertaining and that It Came From Beneath the Sea was quite boring. Care to list some similarities??
shareI didn't notice your response until recently...
It's been a few weeks, so my memory of the movie(s) isn't as good as it was, but these are the similarities I can remember:
1. Both feature an attractive female scientist involved in the investigations.
2. Knowledge of the creature is withheld from the public as they try to confine it to a small area. They are unable to do so.
3. They lose the creature in both films and eventually find it by listening for unusual public reports.
4. The final battles take place in/near a large city.
5. The creatures in both films are attacked with flame throwers towards the end.
There may be more, but this is all I can recall.
An innocent little girl, running to a priest...she is not for you! -- Faust (1926)
Well, in all honestly you could say the same things about Twenty Million Miles to Earth as well (except for the flamethrowers). For that matter, your comments apply to The Deadly Mantis as well, including flamethrowers! In the end, I think Them set a formula that most giant monster movies followed.
shareActually, there are flamethrowers in 20 Million Miles to Earth. I'm sure about this since I saw the movie about a week ago. Overall, I think that you may be right. It worked for "Them!", so the others followed the same blueprint.
An innocent little girl, running to a priest...she is not for you! -- Faust (1926)
It's been a while since I saw 20 Million Miles to Earth, so I didn't recall the scene with flamethrowers.
shareBack in the 50's, men were so chauvinistic, they only let hot women be scientists.
I wanna buy your carbon offsets.
You've basically described the whole horde of '50s giant monster movies which almost always follow that same exact pattern. Atomic radiation, the female, scientists, military attacks, and some new weapon to destroy it. It's all so very familiar, but still immensely enjoyable.
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I agree with you,Them! is one of the great sf classic films from the '50s.It is a personal favorite of mine.I also have to admit that the giant mechanical ant props from the movie date poorly & come off looking badly.I realize that this was the 1950s & they did as well as they could with the technology available at that time.It Came From Beneath The Sea is an inferior movie from the script standpoint,the scenes with the giant octopus,as done by the legendary stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen,remain magnificent to this day though.I wish that the producers of Them! would have utilized the stop-motion process for the ants.Still,if I was to create a list of the Top Ten 1950s sf movies,Them! would most assuredly be on it.
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The only noticable theme I thought was important was the radiation. In Them!, the radiation caused the mutations. In It Came, the octopus became radiactive and it's natural food source detected the radiation and moved on. They implied that the octopus was in it's natural size. It just left it's home in the trenches of the Mindanao Deep following sources of food.
One of the many things I love about the 1958 version of The Blob is that they didn't have all the weaponry at hand to fight it. They pretty much only had guns as would be the case in a small town.