Yoshifumi Tajima, born August 4, 1918 in Kobe, Japan, appeared in many Godzilla and Toho Company films. His first kaiju film was Rodan in 1956. He went on to star in Mothra (1961), King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962), Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964), Ghidora, the Three-headed Monster (1964), Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965), Destroy All Monsters (1968), and The Return of Godzilla (1984).
He passed away in 2009.
I’m a big sucker for the black and white 50’s science
fiction horror movies and get excited when I find one that I haven’t seen
before. While searching for something to
watch, I happened upon Monster from Green Hell, and BONUS, it’s a giant bug
movie! This one featured huge wasps, so
I’m thinking Them! (giant ants), The Deadly Mantis (a giant praying mantis),
Earth vs. the Spider (a giant tarantula), Black Scorpion (giant scorpions,
duh), The Beginning of the End (giant grasshoppers), and the queen of giant
bugs, Mothra.
Monster from Green Hell, released May 17, 1957, was directed
by Kenneth Crane, in his directorial debut, and produced by Al Zimbalist. Jim Davis, who would go on to play Jock Ewing
in the Dallas saga, played the lead Dr. Quent Brady and Robert Griffin stars as
Dan Morgan.
The movie opens with an unnamed space agency sending animals
and insects into space to see how they react to solar radiation. A rocket carrying wasps goes off course and
goes down somewhere off the coast of Africa.
Could you be a little more vague?
Plot point!
An African native is killed by paralysis of the nervous
system. Dr. Lorentz (Vladimir Sokoloff)
states there isn’t an animal that could deliver the amount of poison found in
the body.
Then the audience gets to see the monster, which really does
not look like a wasp.
A giant wasp(?)
The image is superimposed onto stock footage of animals and
people running away. Supposedly, in an
effort to instill fear and emphasize the size of the wasps, the producers
employed an effect used by the Toho Company a few years before in Godzilla,
where the creature appears over a hill crest, frightening natives below.
Who did it better?
Six months later, Brady and Morgan read about monsters in
Africa in the newspapers and wonder if they could be connected to their lost
rocket. Just then Brady reveals that
exposure to cosmic radiation causes organisms to increase in size.
Look at the size of those crab legs! Why wasn’t Morgan thinking
about sea food?
Just now? It took him
six months to figure this out?
Brady and Morgan travel to Africa and are directed to the
village of Mongwa, where the first victim was found and diagnosed by Dr. Lorentz.
It takes a week and a half to get an expedition to travel
the 400 miles on foot to Mongwa. They
expect to make the journey in 27 days. Couldn’t
they have gotten a little closer or hired a plane?
Along the way, the expedition is attacked by an angry African
tribe, which causes a delay. The attack
has nothing to do with the giant wasps.
It seems to be included only to lengthen the movie which runs at a
whopping 71 minutes. The ambush causes
them to add 75 miles to the trek to avoid any more run-ins with the locals.
Running out of water, they come across a creek, but discover
it is poisoned. Mahri (Eduardo Ciannelli) know it is poisoned because he finds
a dead lion. No explanation. No idea how he can take one glance at a dead
lion and know it has been poisoned.
After more days without water and at the point of death by
dehydration, a monsoon relieves them of their thirst, but causes them even more
delays.
The expedition finally reaches Dr. Lorentz’s clinic, but are
informed that the doctor has been killed by the monster in an area the natives
call Green Hell.
Before they can continue into Green Hell, their expedition members abandon them. Brady, Morgan, Lorna (Dr. Lorentz’s daughter played by Barbara Turner) and Arobi (Joel Fluellen) travel to a nearby village to recruit more men but find everyone dead. The only clues are giant wasp footprints.
The nearby volcano begins to steam and spout smoke. Hmmm…
They camp for the night at the base of the volcano and Brady
explains to the group how the wasp hive forms around the queen, so they must
destroy her or else the hive will expand and take over the world. This is followed by more walking and more
buzzing noises.
An hour into the movie with only ten minutes left, Brady
finds the colony. They lob grenades into
the hive, but the explosions only serve to make them mad as hornets.
One of the giant wasps chases them into a cave. Although it cannot reach them, Brady
detonates the rest of their stash of grenades and collapses the mouth of the
cave. Why? They were safe inside the cave.
Why stand within reach when you have
a huge cave to retreat into?
Good thing they found another way out! Maybe Brady should have searched for another
exit before destroying the only one they knew?
As soon as they emerge, the volcano erupts, and lava
destroys the nest.
The closing line: Nature
has a way of correcting its own mistakes – Dan Morgan
No, Morgan. Nature
corrected YOUR mistake!
The movie was not well received upon release and has a
rating of 3.5 on imdb.com. One of many
things that probably doomed the film was about 40% of the movie uses stock
footage from Stanley and Livingston released in 1939, which contributed to
inconsistencies in the scenes involving the expedition to Mongwa.
Other things that do not make sense.
The rocket crashes off the African coast. Brady, Morgan and company do not seem to
worry about it. Shouldn’t they contact
someone in Africa to alert them? Was
their technology so primitive that they could not narrow down the spot where
the rocket crashed?
It is only when monsters appear in Africa that Brady and
Morgan remember their lost rocket from six months before. Still, no warning or heads-up.
Throughout the movie, there is the fear that the wasps will
expand their territory and destroy civilization. But after eight months, the wasps haven’t
ventured beyond Green Hell. And there is
only a handful of them. Has the solar
radiation sterilized them?
As far as good ‘bad’ movies go, it’s worth a watch but
doesn’t hold up to other 1950s, B&W, sci-fi monster movies.
