Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959)

Sadly Over-hyped

Good concept, poorly executed.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

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.

I'd never heard of this one until yesterday, and now I find out that Mario Bava was involved too. That's nice, seeing as I've just watched Baron Blood. This is a proper creature feature, and the creature featured is one of my favourites – a man-eating blob!This one is called Caltiki and our very white scientists discover him while mooching around some Mayan ruins looking for some cool jewellery to pawn at the local Cash Converters. We begin with one scientist staggering back to the camp, howling about Caltiki and how his mate has gone missing. Our other scientists (one is our square-jawed, married hero and the other a snivelling snidey guy who's hitting on our hero's wife) go looking for the missing guy and find some camera footage, which makes the film turn in Cannibal Holocaust for a couple of minutes.The film shows the two guys finding a cave revealed by a recent volcanic eruption which leads to a temple to Caltiki. Suddenly, they are attacked by some unknown creature, which prompts the rest of the expedition to head down there and instantly forget about finding the missing guy after they find a huge stash of gold at the bottom of an underground lake. Dismissing the many, many skeletons lying around, a diver goes for the gold, gets attacked, and comes back to the surface minus his face. As the huge blob Caltiki attacks the rest of them, the snidey guy tries to get the gold and gets all the skin from his arm dissolved. Our hero is having none of it and drives a truck full of gas into the cave, cooking Caltiki and saving the day. However, this is only fifteen minutes into the film, so maybe everyone should start worrying about that small piece of blob stuck to that guy's melted arm…and the fact that the guy's going nuts…and the radioactive comet that's passing by Earth (don't dwell too much on that plot point or you'll go nuts).I wasn't expecting too much from a horror film made in 1959, but I was wrong. Freda (or Bava, depending who actually made it) knew that if you have a giant blob, you've got to have it eat people, fight the military, and destroy things, so that's what they have Caltiki do here. The special effects are quite well done (using tripe…very Roman!) and there's a lot of miniature effects on display too. There's the added bonus of the film only being seventy-five minutes long.Giacomo Rossi-Stuart appears as a professors assistant who is dubbed with a rather camp voice and is there mainly to explain the strange comet sub-plot which barely makes any sense. Talking about not making any sense, I'm not sure quite what forced the professor to swerve off a cliff (unless it really was because he was thinking too much about the blob), and I'm also not sure why the military were dispatched before the hero could convince the cops there was such a thing as a giant man- eating blob.Nice!

On the heels of "The Blob" comes Caltiki, the vindictive mass of an ancient Mayan god who literally swallows and disintegrated its victims, many of whom it had driven crazy beforehand. Unlike the American blob, this one is in black and white and thus not as gory. However, the attacks are certainly quite frightening.Italian made but badly dubbed, this is a mixed bag of horror and mythology. The voice of the litter girl sounds like something you'd hear on Rocky and Bullwinkle, and other voices don't match, either. Still interesting and quite graphic, there are a few moments where you might turn your head away.The special effects are by Mario Brava, who would find immortality with directing "Black Sunday". One ugly moment has one of the psychotic characters being shown inside Caltiki. practically dissolving into a skeleton before your eyes. A survivor of Caltiki literally has their arm chewed off. This isn't going to be for everybody. But I can see why it has a cult following.

This is a classic. How can we request it move to DVD format? This is one of the early creatures that diverged from the usual Man in Costume genre of the 50's and prior. The unique shape and the manner in which it killed was far different from the standard chase and grab. Akin to the Blob, it has a more eerie setting being in the Mayan ruins. Another film around the same time had a similar mode of elimination in the movie :The Creeping Inknown with Brian Donlevy, another movie I would like to see on DVD. Both of these films were part of my childhood Fright Night movie viewing. There were several New England TV stations that showed horror on Friday and Saturday nights: "Chiller" had a skeleton hand with a candle and Feep was a miniature space alien that hosted the commercial breaks during "Creature Feature".

Yes, this is the movie we ran out of ... my younger sister crying and the rest of us equally scared out of our pants. For years on end we have remembered this movie but never been able to find it. Finally I got a copy on DVD and enjoyed watching the rest of the movie... a great 50s Blob movie and one that brings back memories of that day when me and my brothers and sisters went to the Saturday matinée and were scared out of our wits... having to leave soon after the greedy scientist loses his hand to the Blob after he goes back for the bag of gold jewels. This review has to be longer so without giving away the ending I will just say that the only disappointing part of the movie is that the Blob is kinda slow... and needs radioactivity to grow and move. I would have like for him to cause more death and destruction before the end of the movie. There are some cool graphic death scenes and plenty of comic relief from the dated but entertaining acting and even a tribal belly dance. Plenty of greedy evil crazed scientists too.