Time to
continue the Friday tradition here at Crappy Movie Reviews and hit you guys up
with another Fab Fifties movie review. This time around I decided to cover
another entry into the giant bug subgenre with Monster from Green Hell. We have
already had a giant mantis and giant ants so why not giant wasps?
Things
kick off with a matte painting of a rocket base. The action moves inside, and
we see science guys doing science stuff. Here that means shooting animals into
space so that they can be exposed to cosmic radiation for forty seconds. One of
the rockets gets away from them and ends up in the radiation for forty minutes.
It crashes into the Congo and the scientists move on. Six months later they
hear stories about monsters terrorizing the natives and decide to check it out.
That means landing in Africa and walking a long way. A very long way…
Eventually they find and destroy giant wasps.
The movie
starts off with a bang and I don’t mean a rocket crashing in the jungle. We get
some shots of the giant wasp attacking within ten minutes of the movie
starting. Then everything comes grinding to a halt. Nothing happens for most of
the next forty minutes as our scientists decide that they need to walk halfway
across Africa to get to the jungle! We get natives attacking, elephant
stampedes, poisoned water holes, and a desert crossing that has them running
out of water. What the heck is this doing in my monster movie?
I actually
have a good answer to the above question. Reused footage and lots of it. They “borrowed”
tons of footage from a movie made twenty years earlier, Stanley and
Livingstone, to establish the setting and provide the “action” sequences. They
do make an effort to do this as seamlessly as possible, including dressing the
lead of this movie, Jim Davis, in a conspicuously absurd costume so the new
footage matches. This is why much of the movie feels like a strange adventure
flick, because it is one! I do a bone to pick with how they connect the new and
old scenes together. It is all done with a voice over as our lead is telling us
what happens over the new footage. This is lazy and annoying.
 |
| I do like the creature(s) |
Things
pick up again towards the end when they finally reach their destination, and
this again becomes a monster movie. We get giant wasp heads menacing the cast
and some fun stop motion tossed in as well. There is even a fight between a
wasp and a giant snake, so that is cool. Overall the creature work is decent
and would fit right in with most of the “B” movies from the decade in both
quality and quantity, though this only counts for the new footage. Because of
the middle being a totally different story I didn’t get nearly enough creature
fun.
I wished
they had cut the reused footage out and found a way to stretch the rest of the
story to make it a full-length movie. As it stands currently this feels like a
half-realized concept that gets bogged down with the nonsense of an “epic”
journey across Africa. This is not what I signed up for when I sat down to
watch Monster from Green Hell. I can’t recommend the movie but will say if you
love the giant bug genre then one watch is probably okay. Just be prepared with
some caffeine to get you thru the middle.
© Copyright 2019 John Shatzer
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