• Directed by Irvin Berwick
• Written by H. Haile Chace
• Starring
  • Les Tremayne
  • Forrest Lewis
  • John Harmon
  • Frank Arvidson
  • Jeanne Carmen
• Produced by Jack Kevan

Back when I was a wee tot, I hated ham sandwiches. I had no problem with ham as a mealtime foodstuff, but when slices of slimy sandwich ham had been sogging between two slices of bread for at least four hours by lunchtime… Ugh. Made my gorge rise. Once, preparing for a family outing, my mother made sandwiches for everyone. I was the only one who was planning on having a butter-and-honey sandwich instead of ham, and she forgot until she had mayonnaised all of the bread slices. That was the end of the last loaf of bread, so she tried to scrap back off as much mayo as possible before putting on the butter and honey. As you can imagine, I complained bitterly at lunchtime; the sandwich wasn’t unspeakably foul, but it was… off. Not right, in a way that was impossible to ignore.

I tell that story because The Monster of Piedras Blancas reminds me of that honey-and-mayo sandwich. It meant to be Republic Pictures’ drive-in version of The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), but ended up being… off. Not quite right, in a way that’s impossible to ignore, for just about every minute of the running time. It’s also quite possibly the only monster movie named after birdcrap.

As with so many other classic monster movies, this one begins with… a pot. An empty pot, even. And a clawed hand! Discovering that the pot is empty! Why is the pot empty? What was the clawed hand expecting? What does this portend? Hold on, I’m getting to all of that.

The pot is on a cliff. The cliff is on the ocean shore. The ocean shore is guarded by a lighthouse, and the lighthouse is tended by one Mr. Sturges (John Harmon), an irascible sort who shoos people away from the area and talks to his dog a lot. On the day in question, he also talks, though grudgingly, to the storekeeper in town, Mr. Kochek (Frank Arvidson), who, as proprietor of one of the village’s three commercial establishments, acts also as the main local news disseminator. The news today is that the bodies of the Renaldi brothers have been found drifting in their boat offshore — their heads clean severed off! Sturges is less concerned about that, though, than with the supplies he expects from Kochek, and especially with the fact that Kochek didn’t save his meat scraps for Sturges, as is his habit; he gave them to the local pig farmer instead. Sturges is upset about this. Very upset. In fact, he goes so far as to say, “You’ll be sorry for this!”

There. Less than four minutes into the movie, and we already have the entirety of the plot telegraphed to us. No reason to continue this review, is there?

Piedras Blancas panty raid!

Yeah, I know; I gotta make it at least long enough to justify the honey-and-mayo story. Sturges also stops by the Wings Cafe (second of the three businesses) to meet most of the rest of the cast. Minding the store is Sturges’ daughter Lucy (Jeanne Carmen), a bullet-bra’ed twenty-something who’s home for the summer from her high-falutin’ university. Also on hand is Constable Matson (Forrest Lewis), who also owns the cafe, because constabling in a town with a population of thirty-nine — excuse me, thirty-seven — doesn’t pay a lot. There’s also Dr. Jorgenson (Les Tremayne), the bowtied medical man of science, trying to determine whether the Renaldi brothers’ cause of death involved immortal Scotsmen. And there’s also Fred (Don Sullivan), who’s livelihood is never exactly pinned down. He likes to collect “specimens” along the shore; is he a marine biologist? A university student with Lucy? Someone with a fetish for crabs? Whatever else he is, he’s also the only eligible male in town, which is probably why he and Lucy find times for snugglies whenever possible.

The Constable’s main investigative thrust seems to be determining whether two heads can be cut off and the blood drained from the bodies by any simple accident. Kochek’s opinion, “Looks like the work of some inhuman beast!”, is not given credence. Possibly because they’re using Kocheck’s meat locker to store the bodies until the funeral. Roll ‘em right through the front door in a wheelbarrow.

From there, Lucy and Fred find time for a picnic and a romantic tryst on the shore. She also expositionalizes for him, with stories of how she and her father moved to town after Mom died, and then Dad shipped her off to boarding schools since she was nine. Sturges, meanwhile, nervously fills his little pot on the shore with fish. And the Constable threatens Kochek’s First Amendment rights for spreading around his “monster of Piedras Blancas” folklore, which dates back to when the town was mostly populated by people who share Kochek’s wherever-the-hell-it’s-from accent.

I know, it’s almost too much non-excitement to bear. So here’s a bone thrown to us: When Fred drives Lucy home at the end of her workday, she takes a little wander down by the shore, and goes skinny-dipping! No, you don’t get to see anything. This is 1959, remember? Just the notion was racy enough. And while she’s gracing the surf with her naked body, something with clawed hands wanders into the scene and paws her discarded clothes.

“I’m not ignoring you, Lucy. I’m just trying not to look at the patterns.”

What, that’s not enough for you? All right, try this: Something with clawed hands stumps down the main street of town after dark, throwing Nosferatu-style shadows on the buildings, until it stumbles into Kochek’s store, where Mr. Kochek is working late… and attacks him!

Next day, the funeral for the Renaldi brothers moves from the little church to the little cemetery with the entire town in tow. One little boy (Wayne Berwick, the director’s son) is set free from the graveside service by his mother, wanders into Kochek’s store, and discovers the headless corpse. Want to know how small the town is? It’s early afternoon, and the boy is the first person to find the body. Want more proof? The funeral’s being conducted by Dr. Jorgenson. He does take his extra-medical duties seriously, though; when the boy runs to the cemetery, screaming, “Mr. Kochek! He’s dead! He looks awful!”, the doctor dispatches the constable to take care of it, and makes the rest of the mourners stick around for the remainder of the service. Finish one funeral before you start another!

After guessing at the time of death, the doctor and constable pair bring Fred on board to help them investigate, especially when they find a large fish scale on the counter. Yeah, let’s not spend any time dusting for prints or any of those other “obvious” avenues of investigation, let’s get all hung up on a single fish scale. After hours of playing with their Junior Crimefighter Chemistry Set, Dr. Jorgenson and Fred determine that the scale resembles in structure that of a long-extinct amphibious reptile, the “diploverteron.” (Did they first compare it to every extant living species, before plumbing the depths of prehistory? And where the hell did they get the comparison slide for the diploverteron? Is that standard equipment in every smalltown G.P.’s office?)

Things eventually start happening, but paradoxically, the story refuses to really take off. I’ve got two more pages of notes, but there’s no reason to bore you with everything in excruciating detail, so let’s see if we can tick off the major events:

Lucy comes running to “the menfolk” (the doctor, the constable, and the boyfriend) for help, having discovered that her father fell over a cliff in the middle of the night, and is lying, bruised and semi-conscious, at the bottom. Seriously, doesn’t ANYBODY check their crap when they wake up around here? You could bleed to death and have your bodies picked clean by carrion crows before someone finally noticed your absence. Ah, idyllic small town life. While our three able-bodied gents are busy hauling Sturges back to the lighthouse (planning to examine him for injuries once they get him up there — did they invent that “don’t move an injured person” rule AFTER 1959?), trouble’s still a-brewin’ in town. The doctor and the constable leave Fred with Lucy and her dad, and get back to find there’s been yet another killing, this time of a little girl… whose body they bring into the cafe. Seriously, they’d better hope a health inspector doesn’t come through and find out where they store their cadavers around here.

“Oh, wait — you mean this wasn’t a ‘Bring Your Own Decapitated Head’ party?”

And when they go back to Kochek’s to check on Eddie (Pete Dunn), the poor fellow they left there to watch the store and the corpse, they find — THE MONSTER! And Eddie’s head! (Unexpectedly gruesome for the production era, I thought.) Note: Even though there’s a huge crowd of rubberneckers — well, huge for this town — and they all get to see the monster clearly, we, the viewing audience, do not. All we see are the familiar clawed hands, and legs covered with plating very reminiscent of the Creature from the Black Lagoon (with good reason, as producer Jack Kevan was part of the creature construction crew on that movie). Of note: By the time the creature escapes from the store, the rubberneckers have dispersed completely.

While the town’s two authority figures have been having all this fun, Fred’s been grilling Sturges about the origin of the legend of “the monster of Piedras Blancas.” Sturges dismisses it all as superstition; the rocks around the shore, white with seagull droppings, have always been a navigational hazard, and people invented the idea of a creature who haunts the shoreline. But Sturges gets distinctly hostile when Fred starts asking about several caves in the cliffs up the shore aways, stating that they’re on government property and no one’s allowed to go there. Suspicious, Fred sets out to explore there. He meets up with the constable and his seven-man posse, and they start exploring, only to find the severed head of an earlier victim in a cave. Oh, and the monster kills one of the other posse members off-screen. To which the constable reacts by stating that they’ll start the search again in the morning. In other words, giving us time for — more slow exposition!

On one side of the tracks, you’ve got the “men of science,” trying to determine whether the monster is a rational, thinking creature, or if it’s operating on pure instinct. Once they decide that it’s “a thinking monster,” they realize that they should have had ot write the script. No, wait, that’s not right. They decide to lure it with meat, since that’s what they assume it was looking for in Kochek’s meat locker, and trap it in a net, which they then procure at the local gas station (that would be commercial establishment #3).

On the other side, Sturges finally ponies up his past with the monster, in what may be the single longest continuous over-the-shoulder shot in all of movie history. (When Lucy flubs a line about eighteen minutes into it, you just know no one was willing to make Sturges start over.) Seems that, years ago, he thought he sensed something watching him in one of the caves, and the next day left out a pot of fish, which were taken. Over the years, as his fishing skills declined, he slowly switched over to meat scraps — and now the monster won’t accept fish! It wants red meat!

Um. That’s… convincing. No, really.

And that brings us toward the climax: The monster stumbles out of the dark toward the lighthouse, peeps through the window as Lucy changes her clothes, then bursts in! And we finally see it, head-on! And — boy, is it goofy! The men of science had earlier speculated that the monster found its prey through smell (they also speculated a lot of things that made no sense, like its being a reptile accounted for its drinking of blood), and boy, this poor monster’s got the schnozz to prove it. It looks like the Gill-Man was making time with the Great Dane next door. And proving that it’s a full-fledged member of Movie Monsters Local #219, it picks up Lucy and carries her away instead of decapitating her on the spot. Because that’s what monsters do. Only a well-thrown lantern bouncing off its cranium, courtesy of Sturges up in the lighthouse, distracts it, and it goes up after him instead. The science posse arrives just in the nick of time to see Sturges thrown from his own lighthouse to the rocks below; then Fred goes up for single combat, and knocks the monster down into the surf. The end. (Or not, really. I mean, it’s an aquatic animal. Knocking it into the water? Barely wins the round, much less the match. But at this point, it’s not like I’m going to insist that the movie go on even longer.)

So. I would think that, even in point form, the plot as relayed above gives the impression that this was not one of the immortal stories of a generation, or even a well-rendered drive-in B-movie. But I also realize that a story summary doesn’t really convey that sense of honey-and-mayo I cited. So here, I elucidate the ways in which the movie is just sorta off, even taking into account the plotline:

- The photography. The only sense of composition visible in this movie is the, um, “motif” of simply centering the object of attention in the middle of the screen. Every time. And whether night, day, or day-for-night, every shot is sodden with an overcast chill. Cinematographer Philip Lathrop shot this movie early in his four-decade career, but it’s always hard to tell how much blame belongs to the cinematographer and how much to the director. I’ll lean toward the director, Irvin Berwick, because…

- The editing. Similarly artless and lacking in any sort of rhyme, reason, or rhythm. Most edits seem to be those of necessity: “We’re done shooting in this room, so we need to shut off the camera.” And…

This is why monsters don’t go in for the hefty chicks.

- The acting. Performances ranged from respectable (Les Tremayne) to appalling (gee, why single out just one?), but every actor seemed to emote from the center of his or her comfort zone. The idea of a director actively eliciting a good performance from his actors seems lost on Irvin Berwick, who just went with whatever level of effort his cast felt like putting out that day. And…

- The script. What’s the plainest, most direct, most easily-typable manner in which a character could express him or herself? Good, we’ll use that. It’s not dumbed down, so much as extremely utilitarian. And finally…

- The monster. Just close enough to the Gill-Man to be on the losing end of the inevitable comparison, this creature suit simply screams “I’m a man encased in rubber!” Or maybe it’s the performance (by Pete Dunn, who also played Eddie), full of uncomfortable shuffling and generic arm-circles.

If I had to choose one word to describe the movie, it would be “artless.” It’s a production entirely devoid of any sort of flair or flavor, a tonedeaf rendition of monster-movies learned by rote but rehearsed without any attempt to make it at all engaging. It’s simply off.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 7, plus 1 dog
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • John Harmon (Sturges) played “Rodent” in the classic episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” and “Tepo” in the classic episode “A Piece of the Action”