The Giant Behemoth

When it comes to this film, some people love it, while others despise it. There seems to be no middle ground. Actually, BEHEMOTH, THE SEA MONSTER (aka THE GIANT BEHEMOTH) is not a bad giant monster on the loose flick. I enjoyed it when was a kid and I have this film on video and I still enjoy viewing it today. The special effects are pretty good for a quickly made low budget picture, the cast including Gene Evans turn in solid performances and Eugene Lourie's direction is quite good. The radiation scarred victims of the behemoth's radioactive aura (?) shocked me as a kid.

However, the main problem with this film is that we have seen it all before. The film is almost a remake of Lourie's BEAST FROM TWENTY THOUSAND FATHOMS. The original script for this film was about an invisible radioactive monster that dwelled in the ocean. The backers of this film turned the script down, saying they didn't like the idea of an invisible monster. So Lourie went with a radioactive dinosaur and simply rewrote BEAST FROM TWENTY THOUSAND FATHOMS.

The special effects are pretty good. The stop motion effects by Willis O'Brien and Pete Peterson look pretty good for a low budget picture. The main problem is that O'Brien and Peterson had done much more impressive work elsewhere. The effects are not bad, but the effects here are not up to the work O'Brien and Peterson did in KING KONG or even THE BLACK SCORPION. The mechanical and pyro-technical effects by Jack Rabin and Irving Block are pretty ambitious for a picture of this nature.

BEHEMOTH, THE SEA MONSTER is a decent late fifties monster on the loose picture. It is just that we have seen this before and the people who made this film had done better work elsewhere.