Another bonus: the town of San Angela is the Universal courthouse square backlot best known from Back to The Future and Gremlins (but surrounded by a matte painting of a desolate desert). The towering crystals are so strange they’re scary, and the sound effects of them crashing to earth sell their size. My god! They’ve discovered groundwater! I loved the special effects in this sequence, and I say that non-facetiously. and so on, marching across the desert so long as it keeps raining, and then even once it stops. The chunks of meteor in the desert grow into massive crystal towers, crack, fall over, smash into tiny chunks, and grow into massive towers, etc. Touch the rocks while they’re reacting, and they suck out your silica, which according to a very intelligent scientist provides you with elasticity. Silica, by the by, being in essentially everying, including people.

The meteorites absorb any silica they come into contact with. When brought into contact with water, a reaction begins. Slowly but surely, our heroes learn that the meteor is made of an impossible agglomeration of silicates. I mean unless they’re rolling down a mountainside or falling out of the sky, what are they going to do? Pick a fight? They can’t even insult you, let alone knife you in the gut or punch you in the head. Bits of a meteor, so okay, space rocks, or, shall we say, alien space rocks. I say it’s the weirdest because the enemy isn’t a monster, an alien, a robot, a giant bug, a tiny man, a mutant, or some fantastical combination thereof. Lucky moviegoers were blessed with two of the best lesser known giant bug movies, Beginning of The End (giant grasshoppers) and The Deadly Mantis (giant praying mantis), both The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Amazing Colossal Man (huge oversight not to put them together in a sequel), the classic 20 Million Miles to Earth, featuring beautiful stop-motion monster work by Ray Harryhausen, and such B-movie wonders as Invasion of The Saucer Men, The Astounding She-Monster, The Mysterians (by Godzilla director, Ishiro Honda), and what I’m here to claim is the weirdest of the lot, The Monolith Monsters. The list spirals on into the infinite.ġ957 was an especially strong year for outrageous sci-fi. The Flying Saucers? Attack of The Crab Monsters? And here I’m barely scratching the surface. The Mole People? Zombies of The Stratosphere? Earth Vs. It was an incredible era for incredible movies, and by “incredible” I mean it’s hard to believe most of them were made.

You couldn’t throw a rock in the ‘50s without hitting a science fiction flick.

Zombie farm 2 monolith