Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) Review

 Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) Review 

So if Them! is an example of a B-movie premise that exceeds expectations, Attack of the Crab Monsters is an example of a B-movie premise that shoots for intended B-movie quality and still falls short, but amid the era of horror movies about animals turned monsters via nuclear radiation, I think it continues to stand as a schlock classic.

The plot concerns a group of scientists travelling to a remote island to study the effects of nuclear fallout, and to figure out what happened to the first group of scientists that mysteriously disappeared before them. This movie doesn’t waste any time. Only a couple minutes after the opening credits a guy falls off the boat and gets attacked by one of the giant mutant crabs, and when they pull him out of the surf, they find he’s been decapitated! Nothing else quite that exciting happens for a while, but the whole movie is surprisingly fast-paced and not bogged down in crappy exposition or filler. There’s an amazing bit of dialogue where a character rattles off the names and roles of every member of the scientific team to another character, but clearly it’s just to inform the audience in the fastest way possible.

Audiences going into films like Godzilla or Them! for the first time didn’t really know what to expect in terms of the horror they were going to see. All they had to go on was what the poster showed and perhaps a trailer, but often both of those sources of marketing were inaccurate to what was eventually seen on-screen. Based on just the title, you wouldn’t know Them! is about giant killer ants at first. In the case of Attack of the Crab Monsters, though, the title gives it away before the opening credits even conclude, so audiences know exactly what kind of monster to expect. This makes the first half a little tedious, because it’s largely made up of scenes of the characters trying to figure out what exactly is terrorizing this little island in the middle of the ocean. They even keep commenting that there’s nothing around other than land crabs, so what could it possibly be? Gee whiz, I just don’t know.

The budget was a paltry 70,000, and it was directed by Roger Corman, who is famous for having directed tons of low-budget genre films. This one is actually among the better ones of his that I’ve seen. Obviously it’s very dated, silly, and cheap, but it doesn’t try to be more than it is. The acting isn’t great, the characters are generic, and the sci-fi tropes are all in place, but the monsters are entertaining, and there are a few reasonably interesting ideas. The crab’s presence is suggested rather than shown with the use of a clacking sound effect: a sound that’s simple and perfect and surprisingly unnerving. The suspense builds well and things even get a little frightening by the end. If it weren’t for a few things holding it back (for instance: the characters lacking any kind of real human reactions to the deaths of everyone around them, the budget being so low that hardly anything is shown but rather suggested through dialogue and characters observing things off-screen) this could have been a truly classic monster movie.

The first major crab attack occurs in the cabin where the crew is staying, but not much of the crab is shown, just the giant pincer. It also has a goofy animalistic roar, which came as quite a surprise, but what was really surprising was the notable twist with these crabs. For much of the movie, the voices of the presumably deceased crew—both from the current expedition and the previous one—are heard by the other characters, and no one can quite figure it out at first. Well, it turns out the crabs ate them, and absorbed their brains, so now the crabs have their voices and memories, but they are subservient to the crab’s agenda: eat everyone, propagate, and take over the world. 

Once the crabs are shown more and this revelation comes to light, things get really hilarious. The effects for the crabs look like something from a high school play, but there’s one detail about them that’s decidedly un-crab-like: instead of eyes on stocks, they have big goofy human eyes with heavy eyelids that look like they were made of garbage bags. The sight of this giant dopey-eyed crab scuttling toward a victim while talking is quite something. The crabs actually blow up the entire island by the end, battling the final survivors on a rocky outcrop in an extremely brief conclusion.     

Attack of the Crab Monsters is a fun, cheap 1950’s monster movie. It’s streamlined, running just over an hour, and packs enough laughs and entertainment in to be worthwhile. I found it reminiscent of The Killer Shrews, released two years later (and reviewed in year one of Creepy Cinema, link here: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-killer-shrews-1959-review.html) but not quite as bad or bogged down in boring scenes. As an early entry in the natural horror genre and yet another entry in the 50’s atomic monsters craze, it has more entertainment value than you might expect.