Not of This Earth was an inventive and creepy vampire-from-outer-space tale, and was the second feature on the bill. The top-line feature, Attack of the Crab Monsters, was also written by Charles B. Griffith, and was bursting with intriguing ideas in fact, it probably contained enough interesting ideas for five movies. As the film opens, a Navy seaplane arrives on a small atoll in the Pacific. Ensign Quinlan (Ed Nelson) has brought a team of scientists to study the effects of radiation on the sea and animal life. This is the second group to arrive following nuclear testing nearby the first group, the McLean expedition, has mysteriously disappeared. The new group consists of nuclear physicist Dr. Karl Weigand (Leslie Bradley), land biologist Dale Drewer (Richard Garland), marine biologist Martha Hunter (Pamela Duncan), botanist Prof. Jules Deveroux (Mel Welles), geologist Dr. James Carson (Richard H. Cutting), and technician Hank Chapman (Russell Johnson). As the group travels inland to search for the McLean party's encampment, Quinlan watches as shipmates arrive on a supply raft. Seaman Tate (Charles B. Griffith) loses balance and falls overboard. He has an encounter with an oversized crab, but his crewmates Ron Fellows (Beach Dickerson) and Sam Sommers (Tony Miller) don't realize that; but when they pull Tate up, his head is missing! The expedition gathers to watch the Navy seaplane take off, and react in horror as it explodes in mid-air. The scientists continue their work; McLean's journal tells of a mutated earthworm he discovered, while constant low rumbling quakes seem to be chipping away at the land mass of the island. One night, Martha is awakened by the voice of McLean calling her to a large pit that connects with caves. At the pit, Martha encounters Jim, who says that he heard McLean calling his name also. The expedition comes to realize that the tremors are rapidly causing the island to crumble into the sea, and that the source is coming from below. They cannot call for help because their radio has been sabotaged, and the party begins to be picked off one by one. The culprits, as the survivors discover to their horror, are a pair of oversized mutated crabs who absorb the minds of the people they devour and communicate telepathically with the living!
Writing in Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, Bill Warren had high praise for the inventiveness of this menace: "The explanation is bizarre but not irrational. It's science fantasy, not science fiction, but it holds together and is remarkably intelligent for such a low-budget film. ...The crabs are composed of matter made of free atoms. We see that knives and bullets pass through the crabs without harming them at all, or even leaving holes. ...There are only two crabs, but they each have as many minds as they have devoured. One crab consists mostly of the minds of the previous expedition to the island, the other (the female) mostly those who have vanished since the start of the film. Each crab began only as a crab; now they are essentially group intellects acting with crab-like purpose."
The film achieves a bizarre dream-like quality, although that was almost certainly unintended by Griffith and Corman. The setting itself is uncertain since the island is unstable and constantly crumbling; this sense of isolation and dread is greatly enhanced by an effective score by Ronald Stein, with a prominent trumpet theme, accented by strings and organ. The film also includes some bizarre, unsettling visuals there are quick shots of gore, including a severed hand, and nothing can quite prepare the viewer for close-ups of "talking" guns and ashtrays metal conduits for the crabs' telepathic communications.
The crab props themselves are odd looking, to say the least. In his script, Griffith refers to them as black, yet the final props are bright, almost white a strange choice for a menace to be filmed against rocks and sand. Griffith also intended for his crabs to have eyes on stalks, yet the monster makers here didn't make them that way. As Warren observes, the builder "...seems to have been seduced by the plot idea that the crabs have the minds of people, and the entire front of the crabs wound up as a caricature of the human face. The eyes have lids, for god's sake, and are mounted partway up the shell where no self-respecting crab has ever had eyes. There's a suggestion of a nose, and a straight, expressionless mouth just beneath the lip of the shell."
Actress Pamela Duncan had some resistance to shooting the underwater sequences in the film (at the theme park Marineland of the Pacific), especially where sharks were concerned. As she told Tom Weaver (for Marty Baumann's The Astounding B Monster), "They said 'Don't worry about it. The sharks won't attack you.' I said, 'You tell that to the sharks! I'm not about to go swimming with sharks!'" Duncan had further trouble with the scuba gear: "It was men's equipment too big for me, and I couldn't reach the valve. So I went shooting back up to the surface, and that was the scene! Roger said, 'Go down! Go down! I need the shot!' And I had the courage to say, 'You just got it!' Corman had me taken to a swimming pool to try on the underwater gear. I couldn't handle it, even in a swimming pool!"
Mel Welles (interviewed by Tom Weaver in Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes) didn't have too many kind words about the film, saying "That, in my opinion, is one of the worst pictures ever made." He pointed out that the movie became an almost instant reference in the pop culture, however: "I think the only thing that saved that picture was the title comedians all over the country began to crack jokes about it, and it really became a pop-art kind of cartoon." Welles went on to admit that "the making of Attack of the Crab Monsters was nothing but fun. Fun and absurdity." As with almost every other crew member interviewed about the film, Welles remembers the monster mock-up in particular: "When they made Them! (1954), I think they spent about twelve or fourteen thousand dollars for each of those giant ants. Roger spent a few hundred dollars building that crab...They discovered that the crab was made out of Styrofoam, and so it wouldn't sink. They tried winching it under the water, and it exploded there were all kinds of fun things that happened. There were problems, but they were problems you could giggle about."
Roger Corman was seldom noted for being an "actor's director" his discussions with players was usually nonexistent as he was too busy rushing the technical aspects to meet his self-imposed shooting schedules. Ed Nelson remembered one bit of direction he was given by Corman, however: "That's one example I always give of one of the most impossible lines I ever had to say in my life. We were shooting a scene on the beach at Malibu where one of my men was killed falling out of a motorboat. And Roger had me yell to the other guys in the boat, over the surf, with emotion (because the dead guy was supposedly a friend of mine), 'Bury him!' I mean, the boat was sixty feet away and the surf was pounding, and Roger wanted me to holler, 'Bury him!' with emotion! How the hell..." Nelson's actual line was "Cover him," but the point is taken nonetheless.
Attack of the Crab Monsters cost a mere $70,000 to produce, but it took in over $1 million at the box-office, making it Corman's most profitable picture up to that date. As Corman told Ed Naha (in The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget), "This was the most successful of all the early low budget horror movies. I think its success had something to do with the wildness of the title which, even I admit, is pretty off-the-wall. However, I do think a lot of its popularity had to do with the construction of the plotline. I've always believed that, in horror and science fiction films, too much time is usually spent explaining the characters in depth and developing various subplots. Genre audiences really come to these movies for their science fiction elements or their shock value. Of course they want to understand the characters and want to empathize with them all in order to share the emotions present. But they don't wish to do that at the expense of the other aspects of the picture. I talked to Chuck Griffith about this. Chuck and I worked out a general storyline before he went to work on the script. I told him, 'I don't want any scene in this picture that doesn't either end with a shock or the suspicion that a shocking event is about to take place.' And that's how the finished script read. You always had the feeling when watching the movie that something, anything was about to happen. I think this construction, plus the fact that the creature was big and ugly, won audiences."
Producer: Roger Corman, Charles B. Griffith
Director: Roger Corman
Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith
Cinematography: Floyd Crosby
Film Editing: Charles Gross
Art Direction: Karl Brainard
Music: Ronald Stein
Cast: Richard Garland (Dale Drewer), Pamela Duncan (Martha Hunter), Russell Johnson (Hank Chapman), Leslie Bradley (Dr. Karl Weigand), Mel Welles (Jules Deveroux), Richard H. Cutting (Dr. James Carson).
BW-62m.
by John M. Miller
