The Monolith Monsters

After an expository prologue in which a somber off-camera narrator imparts a quick primer on meteorites, the action shifts to San Angelo, a fictional southern California desert town of 2,000 souls whose sleepy banality is suddenly turned on its head by a rather peculiar alien menace.

Peculiar, because this time the threat isn’t the typical viscid alien creature with a yen for conquest, but rather an odd meteorite fragment that multiplies, growing to terrifying and dangerous proportions when it comes into contact with plain old H₂O. The concept of an inorganic “villain” is certainly original, drawing on popular theories of so-called “hypothetical types of biochemistry”, particularly the idea of a potential lifeform which substitutes silicon for carbon (the two elements share several chemical properties, primarily the electron configuration in the outermost, or valence band, and are in fact adjacent on Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev’s first periodic table published in 1869).

Offbeat “enemy” aside, Sherwood’s film fits the mold of classic works in the vein of Jack Arnold – the latter participated in the film’s development after all – and it incorporates all the familiar features:

1. the importance of the desert, a genuine custodian of deadly secrets, not to mention a locale meriting deep respect (“The desert’s full of things that don’t belong“);
2. an emphasis on the realization that we’re surrounded by the unknown (“[The monolith has] been gathering the secrets of time and space for billions of years“), with the corollary that scientific knowledge is based solely on an endless succession of hypotheses and refutations (“In science there are no guarantees“);
3. a focus on prototypical small-town Americans (the local reporter, the sheriff, the schoolteacher, etc.).

The catastrophic monolith eruption makes for a memorable final half hour, thanks to Clifford Stine’s ingenious special effects, characterized by a generous and artistic use of models and miniatures.