Whoa … Red Flag Down. We’re so spoiled by improved transfers of Public Domain titles that we forget that poor quality PD releases are still with us. This Sci-fi thriller was never a winner and can’t claim a positive reputation, but that doesn’t stop us completists from wanting to take a look … The cast has Mamie Van Doren, Bobby Van, Billy Gray and monster plants, so there must be a little fun to be had. Beware this release, however — it’s worse than an inferior YouTube copy.

The Navy vs. the Night Monsters
Blu-ray
Leomark/Shoreline
1966 / Color / 1:77 widescreen (grossly overscanned) / 85 min. / Street Date June 23, 2026 / Available from / $20.99
Starring: Mamie Van Doren, Anthony Eisley, Billy Gray, Bobby Van, Pamela Mason, Walter Sande, Edward Faulkner, Phillip Terry, Kaye Elhardt, Russ Bender, Biff Elliot.
Cinematography: Stanley Cortez
Art Director: Paul Sylos
Film Editor: George White
Stock music: Walter Greene, Hans J. Salter, Leith Stevens
Assistant director Wyott Ordung
Screenplay by Michael A. Hoey from the novel The Monster from Earth’s End by Murray Leinster
Produced by George Edwards, Jack Broder (executive) Madelynn Broder (assistant)
Directed by Michael A. Hoey

We’d never seen The Navy vs. the Night Monsters, and therefore grabbed this release hoping for a fun time with a Z-grade monster opus. We hadn’t looked at the film’s curious credits for some time, either. After twenty years of forming a better idea of who did what in monster film history, we were impressed by the number of creatives were connected to all kinds of fantastic productions. Few are high achievers, but what does that matter?  If a perfect disc of an all-time loser like  The Beast of Yucca Flats,  The Creeping Terror or  The Doomsday Machine were to surface, we’d want to take a peek … and Navy vs. the Night Monsters is at least a little better than them.

The actors featured in Night Monsters may have been taking any jobs offered, but we take the attitude that they could also have been enticed by a producer with an engaging sales pitch: “It’s a nail-biting suspense ordeal, with a military setting and good characters, like your matinee favorite ‘The Thing’ … and it has scary plant-monsters from the Antarctic, that creep and crawl and eat people, like that recent chiller ‘The Day of the Triffids.’  We’re going to title it as ‘The Night Crawlers.’ Don’t you think the kids will go for that?”  If the listener cared, the producer could say that the story came from a 1959 book by author Murray Leinster, a top writer for popular Sci-fi magazines for over 30 years.

We’ll dispense with the storyline right away. A plane full of scientists and previously unknown botanical specimens from Antarctica makes a gas stop at Gow Island, a remote Navy base in the South Atlantic. With his commanding officer back in the states, Lt. Charles Brown (Anthony Eisley) prepares to receive the special visitors. Radio operator Fred Twining (Billy Gray) hears screaming and gunshots on the plane; the panic on board is so bad, passengers throw themselves out of the plane’s door. After a crash landing, the Navy staff find nobody on board except for the pilot, who is in a catatonic state and can explain nothing. But he soon leaps up and attacks weatherman Bob Spaulding (Edward Faulkner) and must be restrained.

Gow’s biologists Arthur Beacham and Marie (Walter Sande & Pamela Mason) replant the rare ‘ice age’ plant specimens in a good jungle area near the base; but further alarm comes when personnel discover that small crawing plant-like things have come from the plane — and that they excrete fluids like acid. Nurse Diane (Kaye Elhardt) is burned when she leans on a wall where a crawler has been. People begin to disappear as had the scientists on the plane. Lt. Brown has fires set at night for visibility, Spaulding makes molotov cocktails and everybody takes cover until Navy relief can arrive. But the body count goes up as the ‘crawlers’ become tall walking plants that seize and dissolve unlucky victims.

That plot line sounds workable enough, but the finished film is no gem. The screenplay works up some decent military-speak, but the attempt to mimic the Howard Hawks The Thing vibe doesn’t go very far. Ordinary dialogue exposition is okay, but the attempts at relationship drama go nowhere. Top-billed Mamie Van Doren’s Nurse Nora Hall is dressed and made up without the over-glamorized trimmings. Because she’s not singled out as a sexpot, Mamie tends to fade into the background.

When it’s time for a dame to be threatened (or worse), 9th-billed Kaye Elhardt is the one to have her Navy blouse torn off … because of that burning Night Crawler acid, you see. Acting C.O. Anthony Eisley and the weatherman Bob form a romantic triangle with Mamie Van Doren’s Nora, which goes nowhere … Bob starts out as a jerk but soon becomes another straight-up monster fighter, with the love dispute unresolved.

Some of these actors know how to ‘stay alive’ in underwritten roles, simply through presence and attitude … you know, professionalism. Pamela Mason and Walter Sande are the old pros that never take a wrong step; whenever they’re in action, a scene works. Anthony Eisley is an acceptable leading man with plenty of experience in the long-running WB TV series Hawaiian Eye, but he’s not all that memorable in Sam Fuller’s  The Naked Kiss or Roger Corman’s  The Wasp Woman.

The same goes for Bill Gray, who never escaped his role in the old Father Knows Best series. He plays the professional radioman at just the right pitch. But the script gives Gray no opportunity to interact with anyone, let alone develop a character. The role is unworthy of the beloved actor, our favorite  Kid who Met a Real Space Man.

The talented dancer, singer and all-round entertainer Bobby Van had the misfortune to break into MGM just as the studio’s musical units were folding. He brings a lightness to his part, but again gets no help from the script. The overall direction is poor, even Van is left standing around with little to do. Viewers may not even notice the low-key presence of the capable actor Philip Terry. He survived a marriage to Joan Crawford, and almost seems to be hiding in his small role as the doctor.

The movie has a casting consultant but we wonder who gathered the cast. Producer George Edwards was ambitious enough to push Curtis Harrington movies through the works at  American-International and  Universal — was he personal friends with people like Mamie Van Doren, Dennis Hopper, Florence Marly, Basil Rathbone, etc.?  Edwards and executive producer Jack Broder were also behind Night Monsters’ co-feature  Women of the Prehistoric Planet. A decade before, Broder was the distributor behind two more good-for-being-bad movies, William Beaudine’s  Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and Curt Siodmak’s  Bride of the Gorilla.

It looks as if director Michael A. Hoey worked hard at his career, eventually finding a niche in TV work. This is his one feature we can see, and it shows very little creative input, as if cameraman Stanley Cortez called the shots. Most are wide and static. What’s the possibility that A.D. Wyott Ordung was involved in setting the camera?  Roger Corman claimed that Ordung did little for his  Monster from the Ocean Floor, but tried to take all the credit.

The production is simply insufficient to put together such an ambitious project — that, and it’s organized like something from the 1950s. We expect the proliferation of stock shots with ponderous narration to launch the show, but ‘Gow Island’ is a tropical island where the interior sets don’t have windows. The exteriors are mismatched bits of California hills, and a pitiful soundstage jungle. The lighting throws colored lights around, but the poor-quality video (see below) doesn’t allow us to see if any of it works. The jungle scenes are pitiful. A reverse angle on a ‘walking through’ jungle master is simply the same setup, shifted a couple of feet to the side.

An okay monster can cover up a lot of sins. These Night Monsters are just pathetic …a collection of immobile tentacles that might be attached to a vertical tube of some kind — plastic trash cans?  Keeping the image dark helps, but victim after victim must walk into the monster’s clutches and pretend to be paralyzed-absorbed. What do you do when your killer tree can’t even compete with  Tabonga, or Tabanga … let’s call the whole thing off.

Wide shots of a dozen Night Monsters are even worse … could they be miniatures?  Fire bombs blow them away, before the ending is given over to Navy footage of napalm drops in broad daylight.

Cutaways to an Admiral’s office back in the states (a closed-off small room) demonstrate some really poor acting. Back on Gow, nobody seems all that concerned when most of the main cast just go wandering off in the dark, to get gobbled up or burned to a crisp. Since the pilot’s kill-crazy notions come from being ‘infected’ by a plant, we might think that Murray Leinster had been inspired by  The Quatermass Xperiment. Leinster was putting stories like this in print back in the 1920s … he may have used the same concept many times over.

And is it fair to note that the ‘acid excretions’ of the Night Monsters and Night Crawlers may be a first, before their notable function in Ridley Scott’s Alien?

The IMDB lists a number of uncredited production types that may have had a hand in Night Monsters … only Tom Weaver’s interviews sort out all the potential influences on the picture or its financing. Did all these people hang out at Jon Hall’s for tropical drinks?   Hall and Arthur C. Pierce are said to have contributed direction and/or writing, while Roger Corman may have stealth-bankrolled part of the production. Somewhere among that mess of writers, somebody had an idea to make the on-duty military exchanges sound halfway believable. Nothing else is. Navy vs. the Night Monsters chalks up as an effort you don’t want to watch twice. I will, should some kind of perfect restoration surface. But I’m a masochist completist.

Leomark/Shoreline’s Blu-ray of The Navy vs. the Night Monsters is the first disc in years that I would call unacceptable, something to be returned for a refund. It’s not because the movie is not a gem, as there is a solid market for bad monster romps, no matter how bad. This HD rendering looks to have been been taken from an inferior print, one so bad I’d not even guess if it was a 16mm film or an old 2″ videotape master. We’re thinking videotape because the whole movie looks over-scanned: the titles are crowded off both sides of the frame, as if the whole movie has been blown up 15%. It’s not pretty.

Blu-ray dot com lists most everything released, good and bad. So far they have passed on this title.

The show looks to be intact, but the color and sharpness have been over-tweaked to try to make things look acceptable. The hues are harsh, and scenes with Stanley Cortez’s bright color effects dissolve into bright smears. This is most evident in the communications room, where radio man Billy Gray’s face is a featureless smear of red. We really don’t get a good look at anything.

Pretty much everything about the release is an insult to the purchaser. There are no menus, just a Shoreline logo. Pop the disc in the and the show starts playing. When it’s over it repeats. The cover art is an irrelevant image of an alien and a bearded man, neither which relates to the movie in any way. The back cover is almost blank.

Subtitles?  Don’t be joking. These Leomark discs proliferate on a certain disc distributor’s listing. This particular disc is a highly depressing experience. If more of them are anything like this, they’ll do little for the label’s reputation.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Navy vs. the Night Monsters
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Fair
Video: Poor
Sound: Good –
Supplements: None
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? No; No Subtitles
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: June 30, 2026
(7541navy)

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