Attack of the Crab Monsters
          
Director: Roger Corman
Year: 1957
Rating: 5.5
Not at all surprisingly, Roger Corman jumped on top of the Giant Monster craze of the 1950s. I am only surprised it took him this long. but he was busy with alien films - It Conquered the World and Not of This Earth. He told his scriptwriter Charles Griffith that he wanted the mutation to be caused by the old reliable radiation and to have tension and excitement in every scene. He pretty much succeeds. For a budget of $70,000. Corman or Griffith came up with a little twist on the Giant Monster films that is extremely silly but gives the film some fun to run with.



It takes place on a small atoll in the South Pacific and if you know your history, you know what those atolls were used for after WWII. An earlier expedition of scientists went to this one atoll to study the effects of radiation and disappeared. Now another group of men and one woman go to find out what happened to them. Food is what happened to them. Before they even get out of the boats, one man falls into the water and has his head decapitated - following Corman's orders to have something in every scene.



It becomes a Crab version of And Then There Were None as two giant crabs begin picking them off one by one. But these crabs just aren't big - those come a dime a dozen - but when they eat people's brains, they incorporate them into their consciousness. So, they are able to use the voices of the dead to trick the others to come out - even the French accent of one. They even try persuading the others to join them by allowing the crabs to eat them - you will be a part of all of us. Like the Borgs. The Collective. If you kill me, you kill all your friends too. If this isn't enough, the island is literally falling into the sea - partly because these smarty-pant crabs are using the dynamite they found to blow up the island.  Why? I have no idea. But they are crabs - don't ask for logic.