The Film Detective announced this past week that a new 4K film restoration of director Kenneth G. Crane’s 1957 creature-feature classic, Monster from Green Hell, will be available on Mar. 8 as both Blu-ray and DVD editions.
It is the space age meets the world of giant creatures … science run amok. Professor Deemer (Leo G. Carroll) had all of the best intentions when he grew lab animals to an extraordinary size, including the deadly Tarantula in the 1955 film of the same name, Tarantula! Things just didn’t work out as planned.
Such is the case with Monster from Green Hell. Scientists, Dr. Quent Brady (Jim Davis — Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Dracula vs. Frankenstein, The Day Time Ended … and Emmy-nominated for his portrayal of Jock Ewing on the Dallas television series) and Dan Morgan (Robert Griffin — I was a Teenage Werewolf) load wasps into a test rocket and blast it into space in order to see how they do with space travel. All this as testing for a future man flight.
Things go awry and the rocket crashes somewhere in far-away Africa … so much for those little guys.
Soon, the father and daughter medical team in far-away Africa, Dr. Lorentz (Vladimir Sokoloff) and Lorna (played by Barbara Turner in a rare film appearance, she used the nom de plume Lauren Currier as a screenwriter, adapting Stephen King’s Cujo for the screen and later wrote Georgia — starring her daughter, Jennifer Jason Leigh — and Pollock) have a mystery on their hands. One of the locals has died of a massive dose of some sort of mysterious venom!!
Dr. Lorentz’s assistant, Arobi (Joel Fluellen — A Raisin in the Sun, The Chase, The Learning Tree), informs him that the locals are talking about a “monster” that is causing havoc in the area. It lives in area that the locals call “Green Hell.”
Months pass and Dr. Brady reads about the mysterious goings-on in far-away Africa and connects the dots … this must have something to do with his missing wasp rocket!!
A safari is launched with Brady and Morgan in order to reach Dr. Lorentz’s off-the-beaten path medical facility, where they discover that their worst nightmares have come true. Giant wasps are multiplying rapidly and could soon over-run all of Africa (think: director Gordon Douglas’ 1954 film, Them, starring James Whitmore and the giant ants!!).
Monster from Green Hell is a swiftly-paced sci-fi thriller that is both entertaining (on many levels) and a great example of how a film production can be made with a modest budget — borrowing footage and with miniatures — that delivers the goods, especially for the intended audience of the time.
Bonus features include commentary from author Stephen R. Bissette and the featurette titled “Missouri Born: The Films of Jim Davis.” There are also two viewing options, the original theatrical aspect ratio of 16:9 and a 4:3 full-frame transfer.
No comments:
Post a Comment