This independently produced monster-from-the-depths cheapie owes much to Universal’s Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and perhaps that’s no surprise – producer Jack Kevan had previously worked in the Universal make-up and costumes departments and had a hand in creating the gill-man suit. Tired of the way that Universal treated them, Kevan and former dialogue director Irvin Berwick left and set up Vanwick Productions, The Monster of Piedras Blancas (directed by Berwick) being the first of only two films the company would make, the other being the 1966 crime thriller The Street Is My Beat. They brought in several other disgruntled ex-Universal staffers as well as the feet from This Island Earth (1955)‘s Metaluna mutant, the hands from the monsters in The Mole-Men (1951) and various other body parts to help make their monster which, wisely, they keep hidden or only partially seen for a lot of the film.
In the quiet California coastal town of Piedras Blancas, lighthouse keeper Sturges (John Harmon) is unusually determined to keep visitors away from both the building and the beach it overlooks, particularly paranoid about the safety of his grown-up daughter (Jeanne Carmen). It turns out that he’s been secretly feeding a “diplovertebron”, a humanoid prehistoric monster that has emerged from the sea. Local shopkeeper Kochek (Frank Arvidson) issues dire warnings about a local legend concerning the monster but no-one believes him – until headless bodies start turning up.
Like a lot of B monster movies of the time, The Monster of Piedras Blancas is a drab and listless affair, flatly lit by director of photography Philip Lathrop and lethargically directed. The largely undistinguished cast does little to raise the film above the level of mediocrity, the monster suit looks great in stills but less so in motion and the only thing the film is notable for now is its reckless approach to violence. In horror, Hammer had upped the stakes with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958) but this sort of black and white monster film rarely got a chance to splash around the gore. The Monster of Piedras Blancas is more daring, the aftermath of the eponymous creature’s head-ripping rampages being unexpectedly bloody.
H. Haile Chace‘s script is complete nonsense. Why is the monster so keen to rip off heads – what’s it doing with them? What was it feeding on before the lighthouse keeper came along to look after it? And why, after causing chaos and terror wherever it went, is it so easy to dispose of at the climax? Chace offers no clues or answers. He went on to make the bizarre and enigmatic Paradisio (1962), a science fiction sex comedy of uncertain parentage (it’s either American, British, French or some combination of all three depending on who you believe) which which starred Leslie Howard’s less talented brother Arthur as a European traveller with x-ray spectacles.
Sadly whenever the monster isn’t around in The Monster of Piedras Blancas, we’re left with boring actors playing dreary characters who spout wads of dull dialogue. Les Tremayne and Forrest Lewis are perhaps the most recognisable faces (the former had been one of the leads in The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen (1958-1959) and had parts in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and Ib Melchior’s The Angry Red Planet (1959), the latter had form in this sort of thing turning up in The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958) as well as the Disney film The Shaggy Dog (1959) and lots of television crime dramas) but none of them are up to much really, not that anyone could have done anything with Chace‘s terrible script.
While The Monster of Piedras Blancas isn’t as awful as The Phantom from 10000 Leagues (1955) or The Horror of Party Beach (1964) (the monster here is tatty but nowhere near as dreadful as the beasts that stalked those films) it’s really nothing to write home about. It tries to play as a murder mystery but we know very early on that the monster is the culprit so it all feels like a colossal waste of time. There’s a decent bit of business with the monster menacing Sturges and Lucy on a spiral staircase but it’s scant reward for sitting through the rest of this turgid nonsense. The monster is too slow and lumbering to be really effective and the ending is a huge anti-climax.
Curiously, the team chose not to shoot at the real Piedras Blancas – which has the picturesque lighthouse and surroundings that the production needed – but instead made the film further down the coast at the Point Conception lighthouse near Lompoc. The lighthouse and the bay it overlooks seem attractive enough but it’s hard to tell – Berwick barely turns his camera on the surroundings only adding to its amateurish and artless feel. In the States The Monster of Piedras Blancas was released on a double bill with Roul Haig’s crime drama Okefenokee (1959), while in the UK it went out as part of arguably the most patience-testing double bill of all time, coupled with Barry Mahon’s dreadful zombie film The Dead One (1961).
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