Roger Corman’s customary penny pinching ways leaves Attack of the Crab Monsters – one of no fewer than nine feature films he directed that were released in 1957, easily his most prolific year – stranded without its eponymous nasties for the bulk of its brief 62 minute running time. After a fleeting glimpse of one of them lurking beneath the sea in the opening moments, the crab monsters disappear from the plot until the last twenty minutes and we’re left instead in the company of some not very interesting scientists and sailors.
Said scientists and sailors, led by led by Dr Karl Weigand (Leslie Bradley), are stranded in a remote Pacific island while looking for traces of a previous expedition that has vanished. They also try to continue their observations of the after effects of the nearby Bikini Atoll nuclear tests on the island’s wildlife. As the island is ravaged by violent earth tremors that are opening up huge pits and reducing the coastline, the team are haunted by the voices of their missing colleagues and eventually realise that the previous expedition has fallen prey to a pair of giant mutant crabs (it’s the tail end of the 50s so nuclear radiation is the culprit, as ever) that absorb the personalities of their victims and use them to communicate telepathically and which are slowly tearing the island apart with their constant tunnelling. They manage to kill one of the creatures but the other, a pregnant female, has to be stopped before she can reach the mainland and start absorbing the minds of thousands of others.
Attack of the Crab Monsters has its legion of admirers but really it’s far from Corman at his best. His direction is at best pedestrian and uninspired and the script by Charles B. Griffith (who also appears as one of the sailors) is largely lacking in his usual wit and humour. It’s all terribly po-faced (it opens with one of those stentorian voice-overs quoting from the Bible) when a dash of humour was desperately needed. Stock footage runs riot, the main location is an unremarkable stretch of California beach and much of the action takes place off camera, the cast left to tell us what they’re looking at because the budget wouldn’t run to showing us.
The giant crab model, built by an uncredited Ed Nelson and operated by one of its co-stars, Beach Dickerson, has been much derided in some quarters but in truth it’s not all that bad. There are certainly worse monster models from the period and to be fair, it’s among the least of the film’s problems. OK, so it’s a bit immobile and its fixed expression may seem a little odd (but then real crabs are hardly known for their facial expressiveness) but it does the job and there are one or two shots that are actually rather impressive. The giant crabs make a belated appearance but their unseen presence is signalled throughout the film by an eerie clicking sound that is economically effective.
You certainly can’t fault Attack of the Crab Monsters for its ideas, utterly mad though they might be. The simple notion of the crab monsters absorbing their victims’ personalities into a hive-mind gestalt ensures that the creatures are more than just a rampaging menace and allow Corman to cut a few more financial corners by suggesting their presence using disembodied voices. But the film never even stood a chance of delivering on its trailer’s promise of “a tidal wave of terror” and although Corman could often work magic with the most meagre of budgets, this time he can find little to do than follow his cast (which also includes Richard Garland, Pamela Duncan, Russell Johnson, Leslie Bradley and Mel Welles) up and down a beach as they occasionally wobble from side to side to suggest another earth tremor.
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