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The Monolith Monsters (1957)

This was better than it should have been. It should have been a stupid, horrible Class B movie – killer rocks threatening a town? – but it was quite interesting. It wasn’t frightening but it succeeded in keeping my interest, which was no mean feat considering the outrageous storyline.

I guess “pretty good” would be the best description of everything here: the acting, the characters, the special-effects and the story. One thing for sure: this certainly has a different premise. In a nutshell, rocks from a big meteorite that had crashed who-knows-when, suddenly begin growing when water hits them. As long as moisture touches them, they grow, multiple and crush everybody and everything around them. First a scientist loses his life, then a family loses the mother and day, the house, and almost their little girl. The girl is saved as they experiment and find out how to cure her. More experiments occur by the hour as the citizens in this small California desert town try to figure out what and why this is happening. An emergency erupts when a storm arrives and all the rain begins to cause those rocks (monoliths) to rise to huge proportions, fall, break up and then rise again and destroy everything in its path. It’s course, of course, is the town and the race is on to stop them before the town is destroyed.

For a ‘B’ film, it’s well-acted with Grant Williams, star of “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” in the lead and Lola Albright of Peter Gunn TV fame as his girlfriend. It’s always good to see the gorgeous Albright in her younger days: a classic beauty. The supporting actors in here were fine, too. Nobody sounded wooden. The monoliths – the special-effects – were well-done, too, for its day. They were interesting (not scary) and the sound-effects that went with them were effective.