Chapter 29
From The Thing from Another World to Journey to the Center of the Earth, ’50s fantasy movies were crammed with noteworthy incidents, incidents that firmly lodged themselves into the public psyche, to be recalled years later with fond remembrance. Agreat many top-class features didn’t only contain one great sequence; they contained as many as half a dozen. Even the grade Z quickies had at least one moment of pure brilliance that rose above the dross. The following 50 sequences can be classed as either pivotal sequences, memorable scenes or typical ’50s scenes — or a mix of all three! They don’t all automatically appear in big-budget efforts either; a few from muchhumbler origins sum up the tacky spirit of the times exquisitely. I make no apologies for mentioning a handful of scenes that were included in You’re Not Old Enough Son. In the realm of horror cinema, some sequences in a particular movie simply cannot be bettered!
The Amazing Colossal Man
Sixty-foot giant Glenn Langan pulls a mighty big syringe out of his leg. Bert I. Gordon’s inept process work sums up the decade’s cheapskate ethos perfectly — but back then, audiences weren’t all that bothered anyway!
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
Ray Harryhausen’s Rhedosaurus scrambles onto the Manhattan dockyards, raises its head and roars, causing widespread panic, heralding the arrival of the atomic bombactivated monster movie. And let’s applaud David Buttolph’s overlooked, full-blooded score, boosting the dynamics involved to perfection.
The Black Scorpion
Richard Denning and the military versus Willis O’Brien’s gargantuan animated arachnid in a Mexican stadium. This becomes an explosive climax to a very dark ’50s monster fest.
Blood Is My Heritage
Sandra Harrison turning into an X- rated co-ed vampire among the bushes, guaranteed to put the wind up all those underage British kids who sneaked in to see the movie in the early 1960s.
Blood of the Vampire
Victor Maddern as Carl, Donald Wolfit’s one-eyed, hunchback assistant, captivates in every scene that he’s in. This is a much-undervalued ’50s horror character that deserves recognition; Maddern never turned in a better career performance.
Creature from the Black Lagoon
The gill-man’s scaly forearm and claw rakes the riverbank to the sound of Hans J. Salter’s bombastic music, giving birth to the ’50s creature-feature.
The Creature Walks Among Us
The genetically altered gill-man seeks retribution, pursuing his hated enemy, Jeff Morrow, and trashing his house in the process. This movie contains one of Universal’s most riveting, underrated climaxes.
The Curse of Frankenstein
Christopher Lee rips the bandages from his face, Terence Fisher zooms in to capture those ghastly features in Eastmancolor and scores of females faint in British cinemas. The modern-day horror film starts right here.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Iconic, seven-foot minimalist robot Gort materializes silently from the flying saucer following the shooting of his master, Michael Rennie, unleashing his awesome alien power and reducing military hardware to ashes.
Devil Girl from Mars
Haughty Martian female Patricia Laffan, arched eyebrows and flawless complexion, steps into a Scottish inn, dressed from head to foot in black, shiny PVC, an S&M dream come true.
Dracula
Cushing and Lee’s final showdown in Castle Dracula is horror cinema at its finest. Director Terence Fisher, composer James Bernard and the two actors fashioned, over the course of a few minutes, one of horror cinema’s greatest climaxes, a head-to-head to beat them all!
The Emperor’s Baker
The 12-foot Golem, a full-sized mechanical model, smoke billowing from red glowing eyes, stomps after a terrified crowd in Prague Castle. An amazing creation for the year (1951) it was made.
Eyes Without a Face
Minus her doll-like mask, Edith Scob’s ruined features are seen in blurred focus as she backs away from her screaming skin donor. Georges Franju’s masterpiece hikes up the tension, reaching new heights in surgical horror.
Fiend Without a Face
The animated flying brains climax, unique in late ’50s British sci-fi and probably eating up 90% of the film’s budget, becomes unforgettable.
The Fly
David Hedison reveals his fly-features to startled audiences, in CinemaScope and color to boot, leading to yet another welter of fainting fits in the United Kingdom.
Forbidden Planet
The roaring Id monster (created by Disney studios) sheds its cloak of invisibility in a canyon on Altair 1V as Leslie Nielsen and crew bombard it with ray guns.
Frankenstein 1970
Boris Karloff’s blundering, bandaged, blind creation loiters in the castle vaults, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting body-part donors. England’s hordes of underage horror addicts lapped up this CinemaScope movie, and this particular Frankenstein Monster, for years, ignoring its more obvious shortcomings.
From Hell It Came
The first sight of the lumbering tree-monster as it waddles after its enemies still sticks in the memory. Only the ’50s could come up with something as risible as this and still entertain the public!
Godzilla
Godzilla’s 14-minute trashing of Tokyo counts as one of monsterdom’s greatest scenes of mass destruction, filmed in nightmarish, X-rated tones that are quite unknown in today’s family-friendly fantasy climate.
Grip of the Strangler
With virtually no make-up, King Karloff’s features hideously twist into the insane strangler from whose grave he has plucked an incriminating knife. Not bad going for a 70-year-old!
The Hideous Sun Demon
Robert Clarke as the lizard-man bursts in upon startled girlfriend and doctors, proving that even B movies could come up with the goods on occasions and cause a stir among audiences.
House of Wax
Mad, disfigured Vincent Price, in cloak and hat, scuttling through foggy, gaslit streets after intended victim Phyllis Kirk. American Gothic par excellence !
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
Salivating werewolf Michael Landon approaches his co-ed victim, viewed upside down by the horrified girl in the gym. The ’50s teenage horror cycle kicks off here.
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Miniature Grant Williams fights to the death with a tarantula on a bench top over who gets a bite of the stale cake, superbly orchestrated by Jack Arnold and effects ace Clifford Stine.
Indestructible Man
Lon Chaney scrambles out of the sewers and onto a gantry, exposing his flayed, scarred features, Albert Glasser’s vibrant score upping the excitement level.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The classic greenhouse sequence: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter and friends face their worst nightmares as the pods from outer space spew forth blank human replicas.
It Conquered the World
Paul Blaisdell’s Venusian being trundles out of its cave to confront Lee Van Cleef, the fool who unwisely brought the thing to Earth in the first place. Hilariously conceived but the film produces archetypal ’50s monster thrills.
It! The Terror from Beyond Space
Ray Corrigan’s Martian monster bursts out of the grilled hatch in a cloud of grenade smoke, blindly crashing into cabinets as Marshall Thompson and his crew listen nervously on the ship’s intercom.
Journey to a Primeval Age
Four boys on their raft, drifting slowly toward the dense, silent Carboniferous forests, becomes an evocative sequence capturing a lost world that vanished over 300 million years ago.
Journey to the Center of the Earth
James Mason and fellow explorers gaze in awe at the glittering crystal grotto miles beneath the Earth’s surface, a scene of pure wonder underlined by Bernard Herrmann’s vivid score.
Kronos
The 100-foot-tall robot poised above a power station, flashing, beeping and whirring as it prepares to drain the plant of electrical energy. This becomes an amazing scene born out of the decade’s Atomic Age.
The Land Unknown
As the mists clear, Jock Mahoney and colleagues catch their first glimpse of the primeval landscape inside the crater. Imaginative set design created on relatively low finances by monster specialists Universal International impresses, and it’s photographed in Cinema-Scope.
The Monolith Monsters
The wall of towering black crystals, toppling then rising up, approaches the small desert community as Grant Williams tries desperately to halt them in their tracks. The film features tremendous effects from Clifford Stine and his technicians.
The Monster that Challenged the World
The prolonged, edge-of-the-seat climax occurs as Audrey Dalton and her young daughter are cornered in a laboratory by the room-sized mollusk.
The Mummy (1959)
George Pastell, reading the Scroll of Life and watching with a mixture of reverence and fear, watches as mud-encrusted Christopher Lee rises shakily from Hammer’s Technicolor swamp. A crowning moment from Terence Fisher, photographer Jack Asher and composer Frank Reizenstein is realized.
Night of the Demon
As Maurice Denham attempts to escape, a giant medieval demon materializes out of the night sky to slay him, summoned by devil cult leader Niall MacGinnis. Jacques Tourneur’s long opening sequence sets the tone of things to come, mirroring the film’s climax in which MacGinnis meets his end.
The Quatermass Experiment
Richard Wordsworth exposes his fungoid arm to the horrified chemist. Dozens of female patrons fainted in British cinemas circa 1955/1956 at this one sequence alone.
Quatermass 2
The too-inquisitive minister, plastered in steaming, corrosive slime, slides down the dome’s stairway to his death as Brian Donlevy looks on in revulsion.
The Red Balloon
Albert Lamorisse’s lyrical journey into a child’s repressed existence climaxes with the boy (Pascal Lamorisse) hoisted over the Parisian rooftops by dozens of different colored balloons, his only companions in an unfriendly, uncaring world. Unforgettable.
The Revenge of Frankenstein
Savagely beaten to within an inch of his life by a brutal janitor, handsome Michael Gwynn reverts to his previous deformed state, his dribbling face contorting with rage as he strangles his tormentor.
Rodan
Kenji Sahara stares in disbelief and terror as a colossal egg, nestling among boulders, splits open, revealing a monstrous prehistoric chick that fills the underground cavern with ear-shattering squawks. Toho’s superb art direction ensured that, in Japanese monsterdom, this scene, along with Godzilla’s wrecking of Tokyo, was the one that fans remembered for a long time.
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
Ray Harryhausen’s fabulous cloven-hoofed Cyclops strides from a cave entrance in full view of a flabbergasted Kerwin Mathews, introducing audiences to a new type of fantastic visual never before experienced.
Tarantula
Leo G. Carroll’s colossal spider crushes to splinters the house from which it was created. X-certified monster pandemonium from Universal’s second golden age when horror movies laid it on the line.
Target Earth
In front of a startled Richard Denning and friends, a Venusian robot crashes through the hotel window in all of its cardboard glory.
Them!
The final blazing confrontation in the Los Angeles storm drains between military and giant mutant ants never fails to impress.
The Thing from Another World
Kenneth Tobey and colleagues trudge through snowdrifts in a howling gale to view the flying saucer embedded under the Arctic ice, Dimitri Tiomkin’s soundtrack an ominous aural backdrop. The aliens have arrived in ’50s sci-fi cinema.
The Thing That Couldn’t Die
The headless body of Robin Hughes scrambles out of its coffin, a startling “let’s jolt them out of their seats” moment livens up one of Universal’s lesser efforts.
20 Million Miles to Earth
The baby Ymir hatches on the tabletop, proving that long before computers came along, Ray Harryhausen invested his fantastic models with depth, character and, in the eyes of his legion of devoted fans, longevity. His Venusian creature, an alien victim trapped in Earth’s hostile environment, is arguably the special effect magician’s greatest stop-motion achievement.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The giant squid’s attack on Captain Nemo’s Nautilus becomes an immortal action sequence from the Disney studios that held a generation of schoolchildren in its thrall.
The War of the Worlds
The first confrontation between U.S. military and Martian war machines, a spectacular shoot-’em-up that had never been experienced before at the time of the film’s release. Sixty years later, this all-guns-blazing sequence can still galvanize the senses and hold its head above water, despite the progress made by computers in the field of special effects.
Almost made it…
The Alligator People
Richard Crane runs through the Louisiana swamps sporting the head of an alligator. Filmmakers could never get away with it nowadays!