It’s a monster movie with no monsters! There are, however, monoliths.
Tagline: “Mammoth skyscrapers of stone thundering across the Earth!”
WTF Factor: ***
Notable Quote:
Narrator: “From infinity they come. Meteors! …Another strange calling card from the limitless regions of space – its substance unknown, its secrets unexplored. The meteor lies dormant in the night – waiting!”
Synopsis: A narrator gives us a glorified description of meteors bombarding the earth’s surface. We see what looks like a flaming cotton ball on a stick strike the earth in an explosion. Roll credits.
A Department of the Interior car stops in a high desert landscape littered with small black rocks. The driver, Ben Gilbert (Phil Harvey), refills the radiator and takes a rock sample with him. Newspaperman Martin Cochrane (Les Tremayne) stops by Ben’s office and admires the rock, which geologist Ben cannot identify.
Science! Martin Cochrane: “The desert’s full of things that don’t belong. Take the salt here. Used to be an ocean bed. Now that ocean knew that the middle of a desert was a pretty silly place for it to be, so it just dried up and went away.”
That night the wind blows through the office and dumps a container of distilled water on the rock. Ben is awakened by the sound of breaking glass and goes to investigate. Meanwhile the rock is smoking and growing, with the sound of rustling leaves. We see Ben approach the rock and then everything fades to black.
The next morning, Ben’s partner, Dave Miller (Grant Williams), arrives at the office and calls to check on a Miss Barrett, who has taken her students on a field trip to the desert. He discovers that the lab is trashed, with black rocks everywhere. He sees Ben leaning against the wall and touches him, causing Ben to topple over.
Cathy Barrett (Lola Albright) turns her students loose to roam the desert with little supervision. One of the students, Ginny Simpson (Linda Scheley), picks up one of the black rocks, while dun-dun-duh music plays in the background. At home, she drops the rock in a tub of water to clean it. More dun-dun-duh as the rock starts to bubble.
Meanwhile, Police Chief Dan Corey (William Flaherty), Dave, Cathy, and Cochrane wait for Ben’s autopsy report. The doctor is baffled.
Doctor: “At first I thought it could be scleroderma, extreme hardening of the skin. But his entire body, organs, skin, muscle tissue, everything – he’s been welded into a solid mass.”
Cochrane wants to run a story in the newspaper but Corey convinces him it’s a bad idea. Dave is concerned about the state of the lab and wonders what the black rock has to do with it. Cathy remembers that Ginny took a similar rock home with her.
Dave decides to drive out to the Simpson place that night with Cathy and Corey. When they get there, the house is destroyed, with black rocks everywhere.
Cathy finds Ginny, who is in a deep state of shock. Her parents are dead and petrified.
Back in town, Dave studies the rock, which is made up almost entirely of silicates. The doctor calls and says Ginny is turning to stone and he wants to send her to a specialist [??] in Los Angeles, Dr. Steve Hendricks (Harry Jackson).
In L.A., Hendricks puts Ginny in an iron lung; the petrification process is progressing.
Cathy: “We’re asking you to save her life, doctor. That’s why we brought her here.”
Hendricks: “Miss Barrett, I can’t cope with something I don’t even understand.”
Dave takes the rock to an old professor of his, Arthur Flanders (Trevor Bardette). Flanders suggests that the rock might be part of a meteorite and he wants to find the parent rock. Cathy reports that Ginny might have eight hours to live, at best. Dave and Flanders head back home while Cathy stays with Ginny.
The police have ruled out an explosion at the Simpson place. Flanders discovers a discoloration of the sand around the rocks. It turns out that the discolored sand lacks silicates. He proposes that the black rock draws silica from everything in its vicinity, including people.
Dave and Flanders find the meteor crater.
Flanders: “Think of the knowledge buried down there.”
Dave: “There’s only one thing I want to know that. What makes it multiply?”
Flanders: “…It’s been gathering the secrets of time and space for billions of years.”
Meanwhile the doctor shoots Ginny up with an experimental serum containing silicon.
In the lab, Dave and Flanders try to figure out how to make the rock multiply, while a storm brews up. Rain fills the meteor crater.
A chip of rock falls in the sink during the testing and it begins to grow after Dave pours out the coffee [coffee is the answer to everything, of course]. The rock grows, shatters, and then the pieces grow as long as there is water present. Oh, shit. It’s raining.
They go out to see what the meteor is doing in the rain. Surprise! The pieces are huge and growing. Dave realizes that the pieces will fall downhill, right through the town. They tell Corey to evacuate the town, but agree to put everyone on alert instead. Meanwhile, Ginny is getting better. Cathy tries to call Dave but the lines are out, along with the electricity. Hendricks patches their call through the Highway Patrol so they can talk. Dave figures something in the experimental serum can control the rocks, but what?
A farmer drives up and says the rocks destroyed his farm. His wife is starting to petrify. The local doctor gets the treatment formula from Hendricks. The farmer points out that the rain stopped before the rocks destroyed his farm. Uh oh. How will they get the word out to evacuate?
Cochrane rounds up all the kids in town with bicycles and sends them out to warn people with an evacuation flyer. The governor is notified by the police and declares a state of emergency.
Dave watches the rocks crush some buildings and realizes that the ground is saturated with water. Flanders and Dave try all the ingredients of the serum on their sample and nothing stops the rocks. Then it occurs to them to test the saline base. It works!
Dave proposes dynamiting the local dam, which will travel through a salt bed and block the progress of the rocks. Corey notifies the governor for permission while Dave goes to set the dynamite.
Dave rounds up some help with the explosives. No one can find the governor, so Dave gives the unauthorized word to blow up the dam.
Dave: “Well, let’s hope the governor makes the right decision.” [But we don’t know if the plan works yet.]
The water rushes through the salt flats and heads toward the rocks.
All the rocks fall down and don’t get back up. The governor comes through with permission to destroy the dam if necessary. Everyone lives happily ever after, or at least until the next rain.
Thoughts: The Monolith Monsters has an unusual premise; the world is threatened by an invasion of non-sentient rocks. It’s part science fiction (with very bad science), part disaster movie, and part horror movie. Science-wise, lack of silicon in the human body should make it less rock-like, if we follow the film’s logic. If we accept the tissue “welding” premise, it shouldn’t be possible to save the petrified tissue, but no way was a Fifties movie going to casually kill off a child like that.
The director, John Sherwood, mostly worked as an assistant director. He was full director on three feature-length films, including The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) and this movie, which was his last as a director. He does a fine job of using the special effects for maximum impact and moving things along, which is good, because there’s a lot of dialogue. The movie falls down a bit with the characters, who are mostly two-dimensional and acted that way. Grant Williams is so good in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), but he is the definition of bland here. The one exception would be Les Tremayne as the newspaperman Cochrane, who does manage to infuse a bit of life into the picture.
Clifford Stine was in charge of the special effects, which are surprisingly good for a clearly low budget movie. Stine also did the effects for many other Universal science fiction movies such as This Island Earth (1955) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). The movie borrowed the meteor crash footage (with the flaming cotton ball) from It Came From Outer Space (1953), also done by Stine. No one seems to know how the rock crystal effects were made, although they are sometimes obviously being pushed up into view. The miniature work is surprisingly good for this type of movie; the only thing that doesn’t work is, of course, the rushing water effects, since you can’t downsize water droplets.
Despite its rarity, this is a pretty good B movie. The premise is somewhat better than the execution, but The Monolith Monsters doesn’t wear out its welcome. I recommend it, if you can find it.
Quick bits:
- The Monolith Monsters was briefly released as a double bill with Love Slaves of the Amazon. With a mismatch like that, no wonder the bill was unsuccessful.
- Ginny is taken to the “California Medical Research Institute” for treatment. This is the same fictional facility that treated Grant Williams’ title character in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957).
- Les Tremayne (Cochrane) was a well-known radio personality and did extensive voiceover work in a variety of movies, including Forbidden Planet (1956).
- The music for the movie was partially composed by an uncredited Henry Mancini, who went on to much bigger and better projects.
Suggested double feature: Suggested double feature featuring killer rocks: The Outer Limits (OG, 1963) episode Corpus Earthling, or Apollo 18 (2011).
Tagline for Coming Attraction: “The Living and the Dead Change Places in an Orgy of Terror…”
