The Monolith Monsters (1957)

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This movie has MONSTER in the title, yet there is no such thing. If you consider charcoal that grows, gives up and falls down, which brings more charcoal, which does the same thing, a monster, then you find watching grass grow as pretty monstrous.Since there's so much charcoal about, people end up touching it and just like when there's too much garbage around, the inevitable is that some people will get sick and die. The movie is no more exciting than that. Well, at least growing grass can't kill you. Bar-B-Que anyone? BTW, just like with real charcoal, you kill it by depriving it of water. My, my, my. I at least expect a stupid rubber suit with these B-movies which have the word MONSTERS in them, but not here. The charcoal don't raise their arms and walk slowly towards you (they fall slowly in all directions), they don't let out blood curdling yells (they don't even whisper), they don't have blood on the face (if they had a face), and you will never see them in a Monster Mash movie.

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.

John Sherwood directed this surprisingly good science fiction story set in the Southwestern desert community of San Angelo, where a meteor shower of rocks turn some people to stone upon contact, but even worse, when they come into contact with water, start to grow into the title menace, which threaten to destroy the town, then engulf the world. Grant Williams and Lola Albright play the romantic leads. Well-directed and imaginative, with a most original and unusual threat working quite well here. The monolith rocks are both imposing and striking, and the model work used to bring them to "life" is excellent. A little-known thriller awaiting rediscovery.

Yes, it's another sci-fi flick from the '50s. "The Monolith Monsters" is about a meteor that crashes in the California desert, and pieces of it get exposed to water and grow to the size of buildings, threatening a nearby town. The characters in "2001: A Space Odyssey" never had to deal with these sorts of monoliths!* As is pretty much always the case with '50s sci-fi flicks, the whole thing is very enjoyable, although I did occasionally take the time to throw out the kinds of comments that the characters on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" make. An interesting thing about this movie is that there's a family named Simpson, and a character named Flanders.Anyway, good times.*Once while taking a course about Stanley Kubrick's movies, I thought of something: the word monolith in Greek means "one stone", which is also what Einstein means.