The Monolith Monsters (1957)

i must have seen a different film!!

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I caught this as an after-school TV movie back in the early 1960s. I was captivated by the idea of these lifeless yet dynamic "invaders". Even today the special effects are still not at all bad and the concept of a rock being mindlessly malevolent is still intriguing.The hunky Grant Williams and stunning Lola Albright make a wonderful protagonist couple that still make me want to root for them even today. The older scientist and newspaper owner add some wisdom and innovation to the exigent problems to be addressed and there is some honest-to-gosh tension that is hard to find in some of these B-grade movies.I waited decades before this became available on VHS and was more than happy to shell out the money for it and have subsequently obtained the DVD as well. I get this out at least once a year on a slow Saturday afternoon and relive the kids matinée session of an era long past.Forget about the science, this is just a great time.

It is amazing that you can make a movie with so little and the movie could turn up decent. The movie has no great budget but the idea behind it it's so great and simple. Meteors that crushed to earth and they threaten it! Rocks that broke in thousands of small parts and they multiply with water! The quit life of a small graphic town want be the same again. People's bodies turn into rock and the only ones who can help is the geologists. The biggest enemy now is rain! Rain that gives life, now threatens this little town. Rain will help the rocks to grow and everything around the rock will seize to exist. In general this is pretty much a typical scifi movie. We have the girl, the scientist, love, a big threat by a strange unknown enemy and we are waiting for science to find a solution and save the day. The acting is OK and the scenario is great! The movie it's really entertaining and for those of you who love science fiction, I think you will enjoy it too.

Here is a novel premise: the whole paranoia of "watching the skies" gets a unique sci-fi spins when meteorites, crashing into a mountainous desert outside a little township, whose ingredients consist primarily of silicate materials, grows when water is applied, enlarging at an alarming rate, towering to great heights, falling and breaking apart onto land, buildings, and anything else that they come in contact with. Humans who contact the meteorite pieces, when water is a major factor, start to stiffen into silicate themselves and it is a race against time to discover how to stop the meteorites from spreading, destroying everything in their path. I love these sci-fi B-movies from the 50s, particularly the ones released by Universal Studios. Shot in a serious manner, with a scientific approach applied to analyzing and conquering the threat, whether it be man-made or from space, movies like "The Monolith Monsters" are like rock candy to me…I have a sweet tooth for these sci-fi chillers/creature features, and especially fond of those movies shot in rural towns with small local farming communities or blue collar areas outside the big cities. This movie's threat is certainly unique—rocks as tall as skyscrapers falling, "Timber!", like trees cut by lumberjacks, with our heroes looking on from afar, is quite a visual, even if atypical of the genre. But that, I think, sets this apart from the usual fair…not a funny-looking monster made from scraps or rubber, or a giant creature of some sort, this movie has meteorites as a global threat against mankind, using water, of all things, as the source of their growth. As usual, there's a miracle cure for how to stop the meteorites (which have inherited plenty of mysteries from space during their travels to the earth's surface), and we get the big finale where a dam is exploded and a saline solution might be the key ingredient in how to trigger a reverse in the growing pattern. Seeing meteorites grow on spot when water hits them and the knowledge that large silicate rock formations are your threats to mankind might be a bit too silly for some viewers, but I had some fun with this regardless. It is cotton candy to me, really, and doesn't overstay its welcome. Sure, it might be a bit corny, but I always appreciate the earnestness of the performances regardless of what "monsters" might threaten their characters' local communities within the plots of these disregarded studio B-movie cheapies. I always credit the no-name casts of these movies during this era for providing credible portraits of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances, with the fate of mankind possibly in their hands.

Since its initial release to theaters, "The Monolith Monsters" has drifted somewhat towards obscurity, despite being made by a major Hollywood studio. That's too bad, because this is a pretty fun little "giant monster" movie, in part because there are some elements here that seem fresh compared to other '50s giant monster movies. The threat isn't something with intelligence (animal or otherwise), so there is a feeling that the characters are really dealing with something unknown and unheard of before. The idea of humanity being threatened with rocks is also an original one. The script is fairly intelligent, with enough science to feel smart yet not alienate any members of the audience. And the tone is serious, not campy in any way. The only objections I found were that it's never shown just exactly how the giant rocks feed off their human victims, and that it takes a bit longer than usual for a feeling of panic and urgency to build up. But those are minor quibbles; as I said earlier, this is a fun movie.