How can such a tiny production be so noteworthy?  Roger Corman’s cleverly-assembled monster romp has simplicity and sincerity going for it, not to mention Floyd Crosby’s handsome cinematography and a winning leading lady in Anne Kimbell. It’s a producer’s picture, made on a shoestring just as the studios’ domination of the industry was on the wane. Much more than a curio, and quite satisfying in its own way. Tom Weaver’s commentary features great input from producer Corman.

Monster from the Ocean Floor
Blu-ray
Film Masters
1954 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 64 min. / Street Date February 4, 2025 / It Stalked the Ocean Floor, Sea Demon / Available from / 24.95
Starring: Anne Kimbell, Stuart Wade, Dick Pinner, Wyott Ordung, Inez Palange, Jonathan (Jack) Haze, David Garcia, Roger Corman.
Cinematography: Floyd Crosby
Production Designer: Ben Hayne
Special effects miniatures: Bob Baker
Production manager: David Kramarsky
Film Editor: Edward Sampson
Music: André Brummer
Screenplay Written by Bill Danch
Produced by Roger Corman
Directed by Wyott Ordung

Roger Corman has been gone just a year, and it’s hard to believe he’s stopped putting in full work days, quietly mining the movie biz for more riches. Too many of our filmmaking idols finish up in diminished circumstances. Roger was one of the lucky ones to enjoy years of accolades, awards and general appreciation from fans and former collaborators alike.

Monster from the Ocean Floor was Corman’s first stab at producing a movie of his own, from top to bottom. It may be a tiny show, but in production terms it is absolutely brilliant. For decades, industry critics typed Corman as a ‘symptom’ of new movie trends that the majors didn’t like. But in the 1950s and ’60s he pretty much embodied the drive and spirit of a new, more accessible Hollywood. In Corman resided a perfect set of qualifications. He had a quality background in both liberal arts and engineering, and some experience in the industry. Add to that good looks, a sharp business edge, and the helpful boost of a brother making a living as an agent.

As a lone producer rowing against the current in the closed-door, unforgiving Hollywood system, Roger Corman must have felt like someone trying to pull off a criminal heist. The unions were always looking for small film companies trying to shoot in Hollywood without Guild contracts. Everything he did was a serious financial risk. He gave his show everything he could muster for a $12,000 cash outlay and perhaps $18,000 deferred. That kind of money wasn’t chump change in 1953, when twelve grand could easily buy a small home in a decent neighborhood.

Anecdotes from this first production are now legend. Corman talked a local company into lending a novel, experimental one-man submarine to the project. He filmed quietly in Malibu while sending up a trade-paper smokescreen suggesting that his show was being made in Mexico. The show’s tiny surf-side filming setup was discovered by a Teamster rep … who found the Mickey Mouse operation so amusing that he let Corman go. As usual, Corman had the last laugh.

When deciding what kind of movie he could make that would have the best chance of being picked up by a distributor, Roger Corman gravitated right away to a story with a Sci-fi monster, a subgenre that didn’t need a star name. A beachside hamlet in Mexico is a vacation spot for artist Julie Blair (Anne Kimbell), who makes friends with the locals and unravels a mystery. While painting pictures she takes a personal interest in a ‘sea demon’ that’s been killing local fishermen, sucking them right out of their diving suits. A dog has disappeared as well. If Julie hadn’t fainted, she may have seen whatever it was that devoured an entire cow, right on the beach.

Julie’s new friend is Steve Dunning (Stuart Wade),  ←  a marine biologist working in the area with Dr. Baldwin (Dick Pinner). Steve uses a tiny pedal-powered submarine in his work; their encounter underwater is the film’s answer to a ‘meet cute’ scene. Steve downplays Julie’s growing certainty that a mystery sea creature is on the prowl … until it becomes necessary for the two of them to enlist as monster killers.

Monster from the Ocean Floor is undemanding entertainment that charms with its simple story. The script and acting may be basic but the performances feel sincere, especially that of Anne Kimbell, whose sweet presence carries the show. Corman scales the production to fit his resources. We don’t think that audiences in 1954 felt cheated, as they certainly might have felt at  Robot Monster or  Phantom from Space.  The next year’s copycat cheapie  The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues tries to be too big of a show. Unable to properly tell its story of government cops fighting international spies and a rogue scientist, it did little for its makers’ careers.

Yes, Corman was living in a different entertainment era. Today’s tyro filmmakers ought to be impressed with Monster from the Ocean Floor’s simple competence. Low-budget filmmaking was a different thing when moving the camera a few feet meant shifting hundreds of pounds of delicate equipment. Monster always looks more than competent. It was more commercially viable than Stanley Kubrick’s artful first feature effort, made just the previous year.

Corman is now lauded for his ‘feminist themes,’ but he has often explained that he chose a woman for his leading character simply because he thought audiences were more likely to engage with a female lead. The story has a reasonably attractive seashore setting, a bit of romance, and a scene of danger every few minutes. It’s not afraid to be corny: the pleasant, rather square Stuart Wade serenades the leading lady with a decent rendition of My Love is Like a Red Red Rose.  ↑  We know that Wade’s Steve is a marine expert because he has memorized the relative sizes of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. And just think, the present spate of mayhem began not long after the Bikini Atom blasts. Gosh, could they be related?

Potential distributors must have been impressed by Corman’s competent underwater scenes, which in 1954 were still a novelty. There’s also a likable personality in Anne Kimbell, that interesting little submarine device, and an exploitable monster. Bob Baker’s marionette shop constructed the tentacled octo-cyclops, which looks a lot like the alien occupant of the flying saucer in The Atomic Submarine, made six years later. It’s no special effects winner, but neither is it distractingly silly. In a couple of the fish tank shots, the glowing eye is fairly creepy.  ↓

On this show we have to agree with critics that pointed out consistent themes in Roger Corman’s filmography — this creature from the ocean floor is the first example of the auteur’s Eye-centric motif. Eyes are important elements in numerous Corman fantasies. At the conclusion of  “X,” the Man with the X-Ray Eyes, when Ray Milland’s Dr. Xavier perceives an all-powerful intelligence at the center of the universe, he says that it looks like a giant glowing Eye.

Signing Floyd Crosby as Director of Photography was Corman’s best production decision. The ace cameraman had won an Oscar for the artistic imagery of  Tabu: A Story of the South Seas. On Monster from the Ocean Floor he barely had time to adjust his shots, let alone fuss with a filter or wait for a better sky background. But Crosby delivers consistently attractive visuals. He and Corman must have preplanned everything to the last detail, to sidestep the snafus encountered by most every show shooting in and around boats on the water. They would eventually collaborate on at over 25 pictures.

The credits reveal some important Corman collaborators getting in on the ground floor. The ambitious Jonathan Haze  ↙  went straight from gas station attendant to actor and all-round production assistant; he’s not at all bad as a Mexican. Production manager David Kramarsky would become the nominal director of Corman’s Beast with a Million Eyes… a tiny production that showed Corman trying and failing to evade the long, expensive arm of the Hollywood craft Guilds. That friendly teamster may have let Corman off once, but you can bet that he made a note about him for the future.

Corman negotiated deferrals for his lab work, audio mix and on-screen graphics, which might account for a misspelled name or two in the professional rolling-scroll credit sequence. The film’s sound work is first-rate. We wonder how much of the dialogue had to be post-dubbed — was the whole film shot without sound?  Stuart Wade’s song on the beach sounds fine, and he’s only a few feet from the surf line. Rather than approach potential distributors with a partly-finished movie, Corman was able to shop Monster as a finished product. He made a good deal with Robert L. Lippert, an independent distributor who had his biggest successes working with  Samuel Fuller and  Kurt Neumann. Could Lippert have sprung for new credits when he changed the film’s title?

Monster from the Ocean Floor may have been the last time Roger Corman ever made a film deal from a position of weakness. He hooked up with Nicholson and Arkoff to provide product for their fledgling studio, that became American-International Pictures. Corman’s profit on Monster could have been doubled if Robert Lippert hadn’t discovered just how cheaply it had been made, and unilaterally ‘altered the deal,’ so to speak. Roger had to settle for less, but he still came out way ahead. His investors and profit participants all saw a payday.

Film Masters’ Blu-ray of Monster from the Ocean Floor is presented in a handsome transfer. It was not taken from a collector’s remnant or a print deposited at the Library of Congress, but scanned in 4K from original pre-print lab elements. The title is one of many Robert Lippert films that ended up safely vaulted in the Kit Parker film library.

As noted above, Floyd Crosby delivers some fine images from that Malibu beach. Crosby had so much experience filming in the wild, he probably knew exactly how the light would look twenty minutes in advance. The underwater scenes were not filmed by a specialist, yet they look very good (if a bit more grainy). It’s really Anne Kimbell in the cold water off Catalina. Diving scenes always seem to slow a movie’s pace, yet this authentic footage betters what we see in Corman’s later  Attack of the Crab Monsters. According to Tom Weaver, those underwater scenes were filmed in a private swimming pool.

The film transfer is at the full-frame Academy ratio, which is not a bad call. Most studio work had switched to 1:85 widescreen by late 1953, something that Crosby and Corman would have known from explanatory articles in Variety and American Cinematographer. The main title frames well for wide screen, and the text in the original trailer (included) is arranged for wide screen as well. But too many dialogue scenes indeed look composed for Academy. I’ll bet that many projectionists showed the thing matted for wide screen, and then had to chase the framing up and down by racking the projector gate.

The show earned a lot of money for Robert Lippert, and became one of the most oft-screened midnight movies on TV. By the 1960s the prints on view looked pretty ragged. Our first opportunity to see it fully intact came with VCI’s 2013 double feature DVD.  ←  The dynamite extra included on that disc was a long-form audio interview with Roger Corman, conducted by Tom Weaver. For most interviews the filmmaker trotted out the same stories quoted in his autobiography. Weaver must have caught Roger at the perfect moment, for the director reached deep into his memories of Monster, offering many candid details.

We were initially disappointed to see this audio interview not listed on Film Masters’ extras docket … until finding that Tom Weaver has threaded three-score or so choice passages from it into a new commentary, where he matches Roger’s enthusiasm with his own. The sarcasm in the commentary is reserved for certain personnel who worked on the picture. Monster’s credited director is on record as betlittling Corman’s ‘contribution’ to the film. Tom remembers that Corman refused to ‘go negative’ with the interview, but in what we hear Roger does respond with some candid opinions … that are disparaging yet diplomatic. It’s a fine interview, perhaps more focused than the longer version on the old VCI disc.

Daniel Griffith provides a pair of entertaining featurettes, a really worthwhile one on the beloved late puppeteer Bob Baker, and a decent survey of Roger Corman’s early film career, through interviews and clips taken from PD sources. Tom Weaver’s insert program notes are pitched at disc buyers that just want a quick intro.

Yeah yeah, a personal sidebar:  The third chapter stop on the feature begins with a scene in a Mexican restaurant. A few years back I realized that it had been filmed at L.A.’s original El Cholo eatery on Western Avenue. The establishing shot shows a patio eating area with a stone & grass floor, and distinctive arched pillars.

In the early 1970s the restaurant still resembled a little house. If you go to El Cholo now, the pillars will look a little lower than they do in the movie. I believe this change happened when the owners put in a raised floor, to bring the patio indoors, at the same level of the rest of the building. I wrote up this amazing, fantastic, award-worthy find of cinematic archeology for the CineSavant Column  back in 2021, with illustrations.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Monster from the Ocean Floor
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Tom Weaver, with interview audio with Roger Corman
Ballyhoo featurettes
Bob Baker: From Monsters to Marionettes on Bob Baker
Roger Corman: Becoming a B-Movie Maker on Roger Corman
Original 35mm Theatrical Trailer, and re-composited video version
Still photo gallery courtesy of Mike Barnum.
Insert pamphlet (16 pages) with liner notes by Tom Weaver
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: March 11, 2025
(7293floo)

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