The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966)

Good start, but then it gets ruined

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Fantastic!

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

This science fiction/horror film doesn't even rate a high mark on a camp scale. It is truly one of the most boring attempts to give some unintentional laughs with acting that isn't even funny bad, just simply bad. If you thought Bobby Van was over the top singing and dancing in strange Llamasary clothing in "Lost Horizon", see him here as he faces a tree monster which only comes out in the dark so the photographers don't have to worry about the audience really not being scared. How can you be scared when you can't see it? At least the producers of "From Hell it Came" (with an ancient curse turning a murdered Amazonian prince into a tree with a skeleton dagger stuck in what used to be a human heart) allowed the creature to do its evil during the day, and that one is a 10 on the camp scale, even if a 2-3 on a film rating scale.Mamie Van Doren doesn't so much act badly as pretty much non-act, never even managing to crack a smile as a nurse with nil a personality. The premise isn't bad, in fact, it's rather intelligent, but for very little which comes out of it, that drops the rating way, way down. It appears that explorers of Antarctica have found frozen cactus under the Southern ice and decide to bring them back along with some poor penguins which either get eaten or dissolved by these tree monsters that ooze acidic liquid off their bark. A poor dog, barking at the bark (or the crawling little spider like critter that looks like something the tree poop'd, gets turned into tree chow, while brave men scream like little girls when they see whatever is approaching them approach. This has a handsome likable hero in Anthony Eisley who has absolutely a zero chemistry quotient with Ms. Van Doren. So if you would like something to put you right to sleep, watch this one. After 30 minutes of some interesting science fiction documentary of what supposedly lives under the cape of the South Pole, there's still another 20 minutes until a full visual of these darkly lit acidic shrubberies.

Navy vs. the Night Monsters, The (1966) * 1/2 (out of 4) This now legendary cult movie has the reputation of being one of the worst ever made but I wouldn't go that far. The film has a pretty simple storyline as a Navy base has a plane land where only the pilot is alive and the rest of the crew have mysteriously disappeared. The only strange thing is this acid material that is all over the place. While the doctors try to figure out what's going on, more deaths happen and sure enough it's because of those killer trees brought back from Antarctica. The killer tree genre didn't deliver too many movies and you just need to watch this one to understand why. Again, this is no where near the worst movie ever made but at the same time I will call it one of the most disappointing because it really isn't as bad as what you've heard. I think the biggest problem with the film is that it really doesn't do anything with its silly and stupid plot. Yes, the plot is incredibly dumb but so were the majority of stories that were used for our sci-fi and horror favorites. The filmmakers want us to believe that trees have come to life and can attack people. Fine, do something with it. The first hour of the film pretty much has everyone talking about terrifying these creatures are yet it takes forever to get to see them in action. Once they do go into action we get a few nice laughs because of how silly they look. The low-budget is obvious with the special effects and especially one scene where a man gets his arm pulled off. An even stranger thing is why this movie was made to begin with. Outside it being shot in color the thing really looks and feels like something made ten or fifteen years earlier. When you think of what was going on in the film world by 1966 it's as if the filmmakers of this thing were in a coma and didn't realize how out-of-date their movie was. The performances, as you'd expect, are all rather wooden and this includes cult favorite Mamie Van Doren who plays the head nurse. She's suppose to be playing this brilliant mind but I think you know how that turned out. At least the directors were smart enough to keep her in tight shirts. At 88-minutes this comes off as one of those films where you keep watching and keep yourself entertained hoping that something good eventually happens but in the end there's not enough there to make it worth the effort. THE NAVY VS. THE NIGHT MONSTERS isn't a good movie but sadly it isn't bad enough to be fully entertaining.

When I was a little kid this film gave me the creeps, but now its just a cure for insomnia. The only thing that makes this film watchable is Mamie Van Doren in a blouse that looks like its about two or three sizes too small and shows the thing (or should I say things) that made her one of the icons of B-movies. This film will always hold a special place in the hearts of fans of Ms. Van Doren.

The Navy Vs. The Night Monsters is basically The Thing From Another World Meets Day of the Triffids. If you like either of those movies, you might like this one...or you might hate it even more for stealing plot elements from both those movies and executing them badly. A plane carrying a load of specimens from the Antarctic crashed on a South Seas naval base and a horde of long-dormant killer plants is released.My biggest complaint is that this movie would have been better in black and white. The monsters are basically a dark black color anyway, and a lack of color has never hidden Mamie Van Doren's...umm...charms...before. I think black and white would have improved whatever atmospheric quality the director was reaching for as well. The way it stands, the film reminds me of something Sid Pink directed.The movie has all the standard and rather-cliched characters you would normally find in a 1950's monster movie. Unfortunately, this film was made in 1966. No explanation or reasoning is ever given for the homicidal and suicidal fits that the pilot is prone to...he spends most of the movie laying in a hospital bed or choking people.