1204. Attack Of The Crab Monsters (1957)

Starring: Richard Garland, Pamela Duncan, Russell Johnson

Director: Roger Corman

Running Time: 62 mins

Attack Of The Crab Monsters is an American film about a a team of scientists who find themselves under attack from some highly intelligent giant crabs on a rapidly shrinking island.

To be honest, I don’t know what more I expected from a film called Attack Of The Crab Monsters, but I was irritatingly disappointed with this prime example of the 50s B-movie. Failing to entertain in any way, shape or form, this is a seriously boring film, made worse by awful acting, special effects, and so-called story.

The most surprising thing about this film is that, despite having such a short running time, at just over an hour, it’s insufferably slow-paced. A silly B-movie like this shouldn’t be so preoccupied with a fully developed plot, we just want scares and fun from a crazy sci-fi story.

Unfortunately, we don’t get that at all here. It takes nearly half an hour to get a glimpse of one of the crab monsters, and even then it’s only a papier mâché claw. Before that, it’s constant tedium as four or five people randomly meander around a set attempting to explain the background to the whole story, but instead making a real mess of it.

I didn’t understand what was going on in this film at all. Unlike films like the original Godzilla, which had a simple and still intriguing back story, there was nothing about the mysterious island where the crab monsters live that I cared about, and every time they tried to make some degree of mystery, it was immediately predictable, so I couldn’t get any fun or excitement out of the story.

As with all these films, the special effects are pretty laughable, but that’s never really a good enough case to completely write off the movie. What is, however, is a complete inability to use any other cinematic techniques to create tension or drama.

The film tries to make the crab monsters a little scarier by rarely showing them on screen, until the ridiculous finale when it just becomes stupid, but ruins that with some random plot point that means they can communicate telepathically with the humans by using the voices of the people they have killed… Yep.

All in all, Attack Of The Crab Monsters was an inevitably terrible film, but it’s so boring that I couldn’t even laugh at how bad it was, it’s just a movie that runs for a short time that feels like hours, and never delivers on what could have been a fun, silly premise, and that’s why it gets a 2.9 from me.