THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD did so back in 1957, part of the year’s horde of monster rampages. As one of the agog witnesses puts it “Can you imagine an army of these things descending upon one of our cities?”  “Sure!”, kids in the audience would agree: in ’57 they’d have answered “Keen!” or “Neato” because “Cool!” hadn’t quite taken Numero Uno—and held it, rightfully, forever. There are just a couple of said ‘things’ on view (and seen just one at a time, the budget halted at $200,000) during 84 minutes and they don’t challenge the world, a hemisphere, or even a country, just a landlocked lake in California, at the time a resort playground, today an environmental disaster more irksome than a few monsters, neato ones that they were.

Southern California, the Salton Sea. Earthquake activity opens fissures in the saltine lake. Investigating sailors go missing, then a couple on a midnight swim vanish. Since screams and thrashing around are involved, we know before the Navy and scientists do that there’s something in the water that goes beyond fishy. After ‘Lt. Commander Twill’ (Tim Holt, 38, a little pudgier after being offscreen for five years) and radiation expert (uh-oh) ‘Dr. Rogers’ (Hans Conreid) have their boat attacked by an icky Cadillac-sized water bug, testing determines it’s a giant mollusk. If you must spoil science-fiction by being scientific, it looks nothing like a mollusk but instead the larva of an aquatic beetle: but if either were 12 feet long, weighed over a ton and were hungry you wouldn’t much care about their name, rank or genus. Blaming an earthquake was hasty, since radioactive goo samples indicate the ‘unusual size’ element is due to more of that darn atomic testing: apparently nobody in the Pentagon watched Them!—or did they?

Directed by Arnold Laven, written by Pat Fielder, it’s not bad compared to some of the other bugs-meet-bomb frolics that followed the superb Them! out of the blast zones, the actors are personable and play it straight and the cast includes Irish transplant Audrey Dalton, 23, who oldsters will always associate with 1953’s Titanic. *

Nobody watches movies like this for the acting or accuracy: they want beasts, big, bad and not beautiful, and the critter created by special effects designer Augie Lohman (Barbarella) isn’t a miniature or process photography cheat but a full-size, movement flexible bug-eyed freak with clicking mandibles and a supply of ooze, features to fit its voracious appetite to drain victims of their insides and leave a grotesque husk behind. True, Holt’s ultimate faceoff with fire extinguishers—and throwing beakers at the thing—is a little goofy, but the hostile life form makes a definite impression. What’s actually creepy is when Conreid’s scientist (“From the instant they’re born, they’re hungry“) shows Holt, generals and cops film of actual mollusks, magnified, showing how they devour their prey: just another reason to be glad they’re not 12 feet long and weighing a ton.

TMTCTW doesn’t get any credit for it, but by a good 18 years it beat Jaws to the munch with its screaming-girl-yanked-below sequence, while also borrowing a ‘look’ out of Creature From The Black Lagoon—hot babe, white swimsuit, swim in the dark = devour, or in this case, dessicate of bodily fluids. **

With Casey Adams, Barbara Darrow (va-voom mutant mollusk bait & poster girl for the flick), Gordon Jones, Harlan Wade, Mimi Gibson and Jody McCrea.

* Dalton: “The monster stuff was fun, crouching behind a desk with a monster breaking down the wall. But you had to play it very straight. Once you start seeing the funny side of it, it doesn’t work. Tim Holt had come out of retirement to do this movie. He was a quiet, very nice man–the most “unactor” actor that I ever worked with.”

** Two personal firsts—(1) I’ve been aware of this movie forever, seeing photos from it in wonderful old era mags like Famous Monsters of Filmland. Yet I never saw it as a child, and somehow didn’t catch up until a ripe (not yet dessicated) older age. Would’ve loved it as a kid. (2) Only time ever to keyboard in research query “Do mollusks have sexes?”  We hasten to add that ‘sexes’ is plural, otherwise I likely would have been flagged for some obscure kind of man-mollusk deviance. Time to clam up…