Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959)

[kooshmeister]

"And the Lord said, 'Behold, thou, the Behemoth!'"

American scientist Steve Karnes is giving a lecture about radioactive pollution in the ocean to a bunch of strawmen--I mean esteemed British scientists in what I take to be London. He warns that fallout from atomic bomb testing could potentially poison the world's supply of fish. The attending smartypants don't believe him, however one, Professor James Bickford, does stick up for Karnes, and the two form a bond that, due to the lack of a female lead for Steve to neck with, could be interpreted in a number of ways. Especially when Dr. Karnes is seen staying at Bickford's house in lieu of a hotel later! I know that lack of a female love interest and two dudes staying in the same hoes doesn't automatically mean they're gay, but don't ruin my slash fic fantasies!

Meanwhile, in Cornwall, a seaside town's fishing industry has been hit pretty bad by an unknown disaster. The fishing boats just haven't been catching very much. However Tom Trevethan, already possessing something of a reputation amongst the locals as being the best fisherman in town, has managed to catch a boatload of fish nonetheless, ably assisted by his plucky daughter, Jean. As they come ashore, Tom tells Jean to go ahead without him, as he wants to stay behind for... some reason. Considering that all he ends up doing is cleaning one of the fish he caught off in the surf I guess he just has a few last-minute fisherman related duties to take care of.

However after his daughter has departed and Tom is in the surf cleaning off his catch, he hears a very bizarre sound. A kind of high-pitched whirring sound (not unlike the kind that would later be made by the aliens in Night of the Big Heat). Then he reacts to something offscreen as a weird spiral effect fills the screen, followed by a blinding white light which envelopes Tom. Anyone watching this film without knowing the title would likely come to the conclusion that Mr. Trevethan is experimenting with some kind of mind-expanding narcotic, a year before the 1960s officially began.

Sometime later, night (or day-for-night) has fallen. In an admittedly creepy and ominous moment, the Trevethans' front door, presumably left unlocked by Jean for her father, slowly bangs open and closed repeatedly as it's blown in a gentle wind. This awakens Jean who was sleeping and who upon noticing her dad's absence naturally heads out looking for him. This being a 50s monster movie, there's stereotypes aplenty as the first place Jean thinks to search for her father is the local pub, but none of the patrons have seen him. Visibly worried, Jean manages to convince one barfly to accompany her to search for dear dad.

The two wander down to the shore where they find Tom's boat still moored where Jean last saw it. Then the barfly notices something opposite a large cluster of rocks and reacts with visible horror. In a nice touch, he attempts to prevent Jean from going over (because it's too horrible and she's, like, a girl and stuff) but she just shoves past him to discover her father laying on the ground covered in what is meant to be third-degree radiation burns but which just kind of looks like oatmeal.

Jean is understandably hysterical over what has befallen Tom, who by the way is still (barely) alive, but manages to compose herself enough to inquire about what happened. Now considering that the title menace of this film winds up being a kind of irradiated dinosaur, and it attacked Tom in broad daylight, it's pretty plain that he got a good look at the thing.

However this being so early in the film, Tom's last words to his daughter have to be cryptic. So instead of saying, for example, "I was attacked by a big sea monster that burned me with some kind of blinding white light!", all that Tom manages to blurt out before expiring is, "From the sea! Burning, like fire!" And when Jean asks for some clarification, he dad simply says, "Behemoth!" and then, his cryptic plot point delivered, croaks. One funeral later, Jean and the barfly (named John, incidentally) go walking down on the beach where they found her father, and find "thousands upon thousands" of dead fish washed ashore, dead from some unknown malady. As they walk among the corpses the beached fish, they find a bizarre, luminescent glob of glop, which, of course, John immediately touches. I guess that's why he spends his time boozing it up in the pub instead of doing anything productive. Whatever the stuff is, it burns the holy hell out of John's hand, leaving a nasty wound...

Back in London, having been (I assume) laughed off the stage by those fools, those damned fools!, Steve Karnes is in the lobby of his hotel preparing to catch a taxi to the airport so he can return to the good old US of A, when the TV placed in the lobby just happens to play the most convenient news cast in the universe: a news report about all the dead fish in Cornwall. Deciding the hell with his flight, Karnes rushes to Professor Bickford's office and starts gushing about mountains of dead fish and how it ties into his theories about radioactive pollution. Bickford, despite his earlier support of the American, is a little skeptical, but ultimately his scientific curiosity is aroused and so the two catch the first boat (or train or whatever) off to the Cornish coast!

When they arrive, they're treated a little coolly by the locals, including John, who's got his hand bandaged. No sign of Jean, and in fact she never appears again. When the usual assortment of rural townsfolk bemused at them edu-ma-cated city folk are unable to offer them much help, the two ask if there's a local man of science, and there isn't, so John takes them to the next best thing, the pipe-smoking general practitioner Dr. Maurice. Maurice tells them about Tom and how he was all burned up, but, weirdly, he seems really disinterested in figuring out what in the holy hell caused such horrible burns. Seriously, he's the least thorough and curious physician I've ever seen in a movie. "He was horribly burned!" "How?" "Don't know, don't care!" That's really paraphrasing it, but that is the gist of the conversation this pipe-chomping idiot has with our two heroes.

When asked for a description of the burns, though, he does show them John's hand for comparison. Karnes recognizes it as a radiation burn and Bickford is forced to concur and start listening to him. John tells them how he got the burn by touching the ooze on the beach, which he describes as "having a kind of shine." But when the three men go down there with a Geiger counter, not only is the ooze and all of the dead fish gone, but there's utterly no trace of radioactivity. Not even at he spot where John fervently insists he found the sludge. Karnes is mystified. How can there be radiation burns without radioactivity...?

And that is a question the movie never really answers. Because it's about here that it begins losing focus and leaving a lot of dangling threads. But that's for next time.

[kooshmeister]

Oops, turns out Jean does appear again. She turns up on the beach long enough to tell the scientists about how her dad died. Karnes learns of Tom's last words and his curiosity is piqued. Back in Maurice's office, Bickford pooh-poohs the whole thing but Karnes insists the dying man saw something, perhaps a "strange marine animal of some sort." His opinion is that whatever Tom saw, it might have been a regular ocean-dwelling critter that was mutated by radiation. Talk turns to the gunk John touched. Karnes says he doesn't think it was radioactive, because "radiation doesn't shine. " "Now, now," Bickford interjects, "we've no proof that there was any radiation here."

That's what he just said, you doofus! And, wait, no proof?! The burns! Yeah, like I said, the movie never quite gets around to explaining it, but we're left to assume that the reason there's no radioactivity is because the behemoth absorbs it like a sponge absorbs dirty mop water. Nevertheless, Bickford's skepticism here is riotous. If there's no radiation, Professor, what turned Tom Trevethan into human charbroil? And burned John the barfly's hand?

Karnes insists the burn on John's hand is a radiation burn, but Bickford says he'll wait to hear the report from the clinic in London. Oh, yeah, they sent John there to get his hand looked at. Anyway, an exasperated Karnes asks Bickford to have his research team collect samples of seawater, algae (which he pronounces "al-gee"), fish and other such ocean type stuff for analysis. Despite his skeptical nature, Bickford agrees. "I'm never against checking."

"One thing is for sure," Karnes opines ominously, going to the window to look out at the sea. "Something is happening here that isn't in the book." What book? Oh, that book. The scientist's handbook of what's normal and what's freakishly terrifying. "Something came out of the ocean... and now has bone back into it." This declaration is accompanied by blaring dramatic trumpets on the soundtrack, but the impact is lessened by the goofy face Bickford pulls - tight-lipped and trying not to laugh at his colleague's needlessly vague and ominous wording as he leaves the room.

Back in London, at Bickford's lab, Karnes is dissecting flounder collected by his British colleague's team as per his request. His idea is to slice the fish into sections, photograph them using a special kind of light, and then look for any traces of glow or phosphorous properties in the developed pictures, which come out on enormous glass slides and are viewed on one of those backlit machines doctors use for examining x-rays. Incidentally, why he's looking for a glow when he just said in the previous scene that radiation doesn't do that, is beyond me. But I guess the photographic process does it to indicate and identify the irradiated bits. Anyway, this sequence is long and tedious and the most interesting thing in it, besides watching flounder get sliced up by scalpels, is that Karnes and Bickford are assisted by a guy who is a dead ringer for a young Roddy McDowell.

Almost all of the photographic plates turn up zilch - except the last one, which has what looks like a weird smudge on it. Roddy McDowell Guy suggests it's a flaw in the film. Karnes is concerned light got into the darkroom and ruined all the exposures, so he orders the lights turned off to see if there's anywhere light is getting in from. In so doing, they notice that the specimen the plate came from has a huge glowing radioactive tumor in it! Jesus, how did they miss that?! And so much for my theory that it's the photographing process that creates the glow...

They look at some of the glowing stuff under a microscope and a contrite Bickford demands that someone get him the Department of Fisheries on the phone, toot sweet.

Also, although Bickford's first name is given as James, his name given on the pamphlet at the conference at the beginning is "Professor C. Bickford." I didn't know James actually started with a C!

[pulphack]

Ah, missed this before and didn't realise you'd actually written the review. And I'm still not convinced, though you have made me want to watch it again, just to see. It sounds from the way you describe it as almost like Konga with a sea monster instead of a gorilla (though Konga is a chimp when he's small, and becomes a gorilla when he grows - presumably there were no man-sized chimp suits available?), which makes it appealing. I love Konga and Horrors Of The Black Museum, even though (probably because) they are basically the same film, just the 'monster' is changed.

I've become bemused as to why I loathe Behemoth so much, though I suspect it may be just that I hate sea monster movies (even though I now want to see that Larry Buchanan Loch Ness movie, thanks to you!!!!). What that reveals about my psyche is another matter entirely...