Oh Turner Classic Movies, you complete me. I just watched the classic 1955 feature - IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA.
This black and white gem was one of the first films that legendary effects man Ray Harryhausen worked on. What makes it such a classic? The villain of the piece is a HUGE RADIOACTIVE OCTOPUS!! or 'Sexopus'. Due to budget restrictions Ray could only give his beast six arms instead of the customary eight? How tight is a movie budget when you gotta cut two arms from your octopus just to come in under budget?
This movie has everything I love...
The brave citizen's running for their lives (which they do for most of the movie).
The brave soldiers and sailors who give their lives to protect the city.
A 'modern' woman with her own crazy ideas about living in a man's world.
That one lone tentacle that seems to be the only working arm to reach and probe and destroy the dockside buildings.
Guys stripping in the tight confines of a submarine's control room before going out of the escape hatch (located ON TOP of the sub mind you) to put harpoons into the eye and body of the great and terrible beast.
The destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge and a general freaking out of San Francisco.
Tickle fights! (I made that one up - but wouldn't it have been cool if they did have a scene like that?)
%20(002).jpg)
.jpg)
3 comments:
all right let me try this again...
When I was a pre-schooler one of the four tv channels we got was KVOS from Bellingham, Washington. Every day at 5:30 they would broadcast "the Big Show," an old movie over the dinner hour, and sometimes my mom would put it on, on our tiny little black and white TV (this was somewhere around the late Pleistoceine period), to watch while we ate.
So one day she served, as I recall, chicken and turned on the Big Show, saying "you'll like this one."
I recall feeling a deep indignation that she would consider me so predictable and that she would presume to pre-judge what I might or might not "like" and was in the process of telling her this when the music rose and we saw our first tentacle. Suddenly I was like "silence, woman! I have to watch this!"
The Harryhausen animation was, of course, more real than real life, and the incredible kicker was when the giant octopus was mentioned in the movie as being off the coast of Vancouver! Immediately, of course, I was wedged in behind the couch, chicken drumstick in one hand, stuffed Tigger in the other, desperately peeking out the living room window for the inevitable giant tentacles coming up Frances Street.
It was always a movie that I would stay up for on latenight tv through the years, until I finally got my own vhs copy.
Ray Harryhausen is right up there with Jack Kirby, Harpo Marx, and John Lennon in my personal pantheon of most-loved artists.
Now that is an awesome childhood memory. I have a couple of similar such experiences but they all happed late night before the age of infomericals when they actually showed movies after midnight. Cool story. Thank for telling it.
Did we, like, just bond or something?
Yeah, that was one of the better movies of it's kind..
Do you remember Harry Lauter? He was also a regular character in a million tv shows...
Post a Comment