Feb 121959
 
two reels

A Cornish fisherman turns up dead with radiation burns, and overly enthusiastic scientist Steve Karnes (Gene Evans) is sure that a giant sea monster is responsible. With the aid of various government officials and scientists, he seeks to solve the mystery until the beast turns up and solves it for him. It is a radiation breathing dinosaur and it is headed toward London.

Eugène Laurie is the father of the radioactive giant monster genre. The Giant Behemoth is the second, and least, of his three entries, after the defining The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and before Gorgo (1961).

Well, you can’t plagiarize yourself, which is what keeps Lourié in the clear as he’s basically remade The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. The one remarkable change is location. England needed its own giant monster and now it had one (though it did better a few years later with Gorgo). Lourié makes good use of British locations, particularly the bleak, yet comfortable Cornish seaside. And the secondary British actors make a better show for themselves than the American ones had done. But the copy can’t compete with the original. He no longer had Ray Harryhausen to animate the creature. The Behemoth is a stop-motion monster, which gives it an edge over lesser puppet and suit-mation critters in other films, but it is greatly inferior to Harryhausen’s beast. The animation was rushed, and it looks it. Since the film plays it straight and even a bit depressing, it needed a monster that wouldn’t elicit giggles.

Steve Karnes doesn’t embarrass himself as the lead be he’s neither interesting nor fun and there is no love interest to distract from the routine mystery-solving. It’s odd in that the first fifteen minutes set up a Cornish fisherman and the daughter of the first victim to be our stars, and then abandons them. There were script rewrites, changing the monster from a blob to a dino; I wonder if that earlier draft had them as the leads.

In Britain it is known by the less repetitive title of Behemoth, The Sea Monster.

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