The Beast From 20 000 Fathoms Free Download
Melony Kai
Tom Nesbitt (Paul Christian aka Paul Hubschmid) is collecting data from an arctic atom blast when he's almost killed by what he thinks is a prehistoric monster. Recovering in New York, he befriends paleontologists Professor Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway) and his research assistant Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond). They begin to believe his tale when a chain of strange events and sightings appears to be moving from Baffin Bay toward New York City. Deducing that Nesbitt's monster is returning to its ancestral spawing grounds off Long Island, Elson undertakes to trawl the sound in a diving bell in hopes of catching a glimpse of a 'paleolithic survival'.
In the disc's generous interview extras, Harryhausen explains the felicitous coincidences that led to his fashioning the animation effects for a story written by his childhood pal Ray Bradbury. Perhaps reacting to the socko 1952 reissue of King Kong, the writers of this Sci-Fi programmer gave its prehistoric monster an unlikely atomic motivation. They loaded their script with economical padding scenes to kill time before the beastie's third act appearance. Most of the giant monster genre clichés are seen here, maybe for the first time. There's a hero with a story nobody will believe, the kindly scientist with the shapely assistant for the hero to fall in love with, lots of terrified witnesses, initial monster attacks in isolated locales, and finally, an all-out attack on a major city. That template for monster mayhem was repeated almost without variation in scores of 50s productions - Toho's Godzilla is an obvious inspirational offspring. When Harryhausen began his Dynamation career two years later with Charles Schneer, their first picture It Came from Beneath the Sea was a typical programmer in the subgenre initiated by his own The Beast. Columbia's 1998 Godzilla is really an elaborate remake of this film, right down to the details: an early appearance sinks a fishing boat, and the Army blasts at the monster from the Manhattan rooftops.
The actors in this picture are secondary to the monster, but they have nothing to be ashamed of. As 'Paul Christian', Paul Hubschmid of Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Eschnapur makes a stalwart hero. Paula Raymond is merely okay, but Cecil Kellaway wins our hearts in no time with his adorable scientist routine. It's sad to see Kenneth Tobey playing a second-string Army officer after doing so well in The Thing from Another World; when actors discovered that working in a Sci-Fi movie wasn't a ticket to better things, the field was cleared for the likes of Richard Carlson, Peter Graves and Richard Denning. From the Warners' stock company comes Donald Woods, and every kid immediately recognizes Lee Van Cleef as the army sharpshooter who picks his teeth with a grenade rifle. The IMDB list Paul Picerni and Vera Miles in deleted scenes; they definitely show up in the trailer.
Warners' The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms looks just fine on DVD with a transfer from an element that seems in even better shape than the 1993 laser disc. The extras include trailers from this film (great trailer: The Beast! The Beast! THE BEAST!), The Valley of Gwangi and The Black Scorpion.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is a 1953 science fiction giant monster film directed by Eugène Lourié, starring Paul Christian, Paula Raymond and Cecil Kellaway, and with visual effects by Ray Harryhausen. The film is about an atomic bomb test in the Arctic Circle that unfreezes a hibernating dinosaur, the fictional Rhedosaurus, which begins to wreak havoc in New York City. It was one of the first monster movies that helped inspire the following generation of creature features.
Far north of the Arctic Circle, a nuclear bomb test, dubbed Operation Experiment, is conducted. Prophetically, right after the blast, physicist Thomas Nesbitt (Paul Christian) muses, "What the cumulative effects of all these atomic explosions and tests will be, only time will tell." Sure enough, the explosion awakens a 9.1-metre (30 ft) tall, 30.5-metre (100 ft) long carnivorous diapsid known as the Rhedosaurus, thawing it out of the ice where it had been hibernating for 100 million years. The only witness to the beast's awakening, Tom Nesbitt, is dismissed as delirious, but he persists.
The Beast starts making its way down the east coast of North America, sinking a fishing ketch off the Grand Banks, destroying another near Marquette, Canada, wrecking a lighthouse in Maine, and crushing buildings in Massachusetts. Nesbitt gains allies in paleontologist Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway) and his lovely young assistant Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond) after one of the surviving fishermen identifies from a collection of drawings the same dinosaur as Nesbitt saw. Plotting the sightings of the Beast on a map for skeptical military officers, Elson proposes the Beast is returning to the Hudson River area where fossils of Rhedosaurus were first found. In a diving bell search of the undersea Hudson River Canyon, Professor Elson is killed by the Beast. The Beast eventually comes ashore in Manhattan. A newspaper report of the Beast's rampage lists "180 known dead, 1500 injured, damage estimates $300 million".
Arriving on the scene, military troops led by Col. Jack Evans (Kenneth Tobey) stop the Beast with an electrified barricade, blast a bazooka hole in the Beast's throat and drive it back into the sea. Unfortunately, it bleeds all over the streets, unleashing a "horrible, virulent" prehistoric germ, which begins to contaminate the populace, causing even more fatalities. The germ precludes blowing the Beast up or burning it, lest the contagion spread. Thus it is decided to shoot a radioactive isotope into the Beast's neck wound with hopes of burning the Rhedosaurus up from the inside, killing it.
The short story "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" by Ray Bradbury was published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1951. When Dietz and Chester were negotiating with Bradbury to rewrite their screenplay, he reminded them that both works shared a similar theme of a prehistoric sea monster and a lighthouse being destroyed. The producers, who wished to share Bradbury's reputation and popularity, promptly bought the rights to his story and changed the film's title. The film credits list "Screen Play by Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger, Suggested by the Saturday Evening Post Story by Ray Bradbury."
The climactic roller coaster live action scenes were filmed on location at The Pike in Long Beach, California and featured The Cyclone Racer entrance ramp, ticket booth, loading platform, and views of the structure from the beach. Split-matte in-camera special effects by Harryhausen effectively combined the live action of the actors and coaster background footage from The Pike parking lot with the stop-motion of the Beast destroying a model of the coaster.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was the first live-action film to feature a giant monster awakened or brought about by an atomic bomb detonation to attack a major city. Due to its financial success, it helped spawn the genre of giant monster films of the 1950s. Producers Jack Dietz and Hal E. Chester got the idea to combine the growing paranoia about nuclear weapons with the concept of a giant monster after a successful theatrical re-release of King Kong. In turn, this craze included Them! the following year about giant ants, the Godzilla series from Japan that has spawned movies from 1954 into the present day, Behemoth, the Sea Monster (UK 1959, US release entitled The Giant Behemoth) and Gorgo (UK 1961).
In the 2008 monster movie Cloverfield, which also involves a monster terrorizing New York City, inserts a frame from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (along with frames from King Kong and Them!) into the hand held camera footage used throughout the film.
Nevertheless, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms remains connected to both Godzilla and the original King Kong for another reason: Terry Turner. A master promoter, Turner worked on the advertising campaigns for all three films in the US, specifically the 1952 reissue of Kong and the 1956 localization of Godzilla. His skill at delivering exploitation marketing via radio and (importantly) television, as well as saturation theatre bookings, ensured that each film was a financial success.
Finally, director Eugene Lourie would twice return to dinosaurs for Behemoth, the Sea Monster (1959) and Gorgo (1961). Both films repeat and expand on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in a variety of ways, be it the radioactive horrors of Behemoth or the softer ending of Gorgo, which sees the titular monster (and its mother) escape unharmed, quite unlike the poor old Rhedosaurus.
In The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the Rhedosaurus goes out amidst a burning roller-coaster on Coney Island, taken out by a radioactive isotope. He gets all the drama, while the people are along for the ride, though Cecil Kellaway as Dr. Elson is quite good. I am always happy to see him in a film and the character even makes jokes about leprechauns, which I thought was ironic since Cecil Kellaway had played a leprechaun in a movie only a few years before. Another familiar face is Kenneth Tobey as Colonel Evans. He makes a crack about flying saucers, another irony, since he helped discover one in the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World.
This is certainly the case with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which takes the formula of the monster loosed amok on civilisation established by King Kong (1933). The inspiration for Beast came with King Kong was re-released in 1952 to huge success, earning over four times what it did in its original theatrical release.
Swiss-born Paul Christian (better known as Paul Hubschmid, under which name he had a successful career in German cinema and tv) is a poor choice as lead, playing through an appallingly thick accent. He is only exceeded in woodenness by his leading lady Paula Raymond. They are at least balanced by respectable performances from quintessential 50s military man Kenneth Tobey and a young Lee Van Cleef as a cocky sharpshooter. The show is fairly much stolen by an amusingly absent-minded, schoolboyish performance from Cecil Kellaway.
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