It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

(On Cable TV, December 2020) Many low-budget creature features were made in the 1950s and not many of them are worth watching today as anything more than examples of the Cold War obsessions of the time. It Came from Beneath the Sea would, at first glance, seem to belong to that category: a low-budget monster film taking what’s become a bit of a cliché (radioactivity creates a monstrous life-form!) and running with it until the spectacular climax. But there are at least two things that make it worth a look. First, a quasi-documentary approach in the first half of the film that gives it a nice 1950s techno-thriller feel: it’s not entirely silly, and the film’s cooperation with the military ensures at least a patina of realism on the result. The second reason becomes more obvious once the tentacle monster reaches San Francisco in time for the climax: Ray Harryhausen’s spectacular stop-motion work, doing its best with an “octopus” limited to six arms due to a limited budget. Taken together, those two advantages take an already adequate film to something worth watching if you’re looking in the corpus of the 1950s creature features.