Spidersecu Don't Believe the Hype

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Coventry Can you imagine the nerve of some people? What director dares to call his film "Monster from GREEN Hell" and then deliver a black & white movie? How we are even supposed to recognize this hell in between the rest of the colorless locations and scenery? Anyway, the basic premise of this movie is fairly simply: an American space rocket crash-lands somewhere in the middle of the African jungle and causes a plain ordinary wasp to mutate into a gigantic buzzing monster. Yes, of course, that's exactly what the radiation of a whole rocket does to the fauna & flora of a jungle … it mutates ONE … SINGLE … WASP! And this critter must look truly petrifying because even the animals in the stock footage run away. Have you ever wondered what a giant wasp looks like when appearing in a zero-budgeted 50's movie? Indeed it looks ridiculous, pitiable and funny and there's a good reason why they keep it off-screen for so long. Back to the story. Responsible as they are, the Americans send a team to Central Africa and destroy the monster. This is where "Monster from Green Hell" turns into a dreadfully boring movie for an even more dreadfully boring reason. Before the expedition reaches the monster's turf, they first have to undertake a 27 day long safari during which they encounter primitive tribes (primitive tribes big enough in number to fill the entire Chicago Cubs baseball stadium, by the way) and suffer human losses through lion attacks. They're even faced with poisoned drinking wells! Why the hell are there poisoned drinking wells? !? The environmental conditions are harsh as well. The expedition first struggles through weeks of drought and dehydration and then subsequently weeks of unceasing rainfall. I swear, at a certain point I even feared there would come a volcano eruption as well. People don't care about that in this sort of movies; they want to see the giant wasp eat obnoxious characters, damned! Anyway, all this just to illustrate that the mission is half dead by the time they reach the monster and YOU just sat and watched an hour of wilderness documentary footage even though you counted on seeing a Sci-Fi monster movie. There's a funny name for this sort of thing and it's "shenanigans!" The Americans haven't got an idea of how big the wasp monster is and all through their journey they keep guessing its size, unaware that it's about a hundred times bigger than they expect. "Monster from Green Hell" is a hopeless film. I used to think all monster flicks from the 1950's were solid gold, but lately I've seen a few titles that altered this impression; like this one and "Beast from Haunted Cave". The cast is politically correct enough, though. There's an American, a Latin American, an Arab, a black guy and a woman! Too bad there wasn't an Asian and an Eskimo; otherwise this would have been the ideal "United Colors of Benetton" campaign.

JoeB131 1950's Sci-Fi had a bunch of movies based on the notion of giant insects that creep us out in the small version scaring the bejeebers out of us in the large version. There were some good examples of this, most notably "Them", about Giant Ants from the nuclear test ranges.This was one of the less successful version. Essentially, the guy who played Jock Ewing on Dallas sends a queen wasp into space to see what atomic radiation would do to it, and it lands in Africa, where they grow to be as big as semis and promptly kill everything in their path.So what follows is stock footage of African Wildlife as filler, bad stop motion animation as filler, endless trekking through the imaginary African Savana as filler. And in the end, the giant wasps are killed by a stock footage volcano that just happened to go off at the right time... Good thing those giant wasps could FLY like real wasps, eh? What a total waste of time.

Tom van der Esch Monster from Green hell.I pictured a movie about demons escaping hell or some kind of prison, terrorizing people and whatnot.Ehh... guess I was being a bit too enthusiastic.The green hell refers to an area in Africa. An atomic rocket crashes there and causes the wasps to mutate and grow to a huge size. Better call the exterminators! And they come, accompanied by the local tribe.It's a rather strange movie that didn't turn out as great as I had hoped. The acting is mediocre, the effects are... fine (for the time) and the story is rather broken.One more thing, people can't seem to scream in this movie. I say go rent, buy (for a cheap price) or download this just to hear the 'screams'.5 out of 10 stars.

bkoganbing Before Jim Davis got his last and career part as Jock Ewing in Dallas, he had one tortured path to Hollywood success. He had a much publicized debut as Bette Davis's leading man in Winter Meeting which was one of her worst films. His portrayal of a war hero about to enter the priesthood met with a ton of critical guffaws. Still Davis persisted and took any kind of work. The Monster from Green Hell qualifies as any kind of work.A wasp is sent up in space to see the effects. Unfortunately on re-entry the space capsule crashes in the region of West Africa and the wasp has grown to the size of a Panzer tank. To top it all off the geniuses sending up the rocket sent up a pregnant queen so we've got all kinds of those Panzer wasps running around Africa.Jim Davis is sent to clean up the mess and runs into a medical missionary played by Vladimir Sokoloff. Albert Schweitzer was very much alive at the time and running his mission in West Africa. No one in 1958 mistook who Sokoloff was portraying. The wasps set up a colony in the shadow of a volcano. You can figure out the rest.This is typical Fifties science fiction when all kinds of radiation was the explanation for these creatures. In this case it was the radiation from cosmic rays, presumably from the newly discovered Van Allen belt around the earth. Tepid acting and chintzy special effects make The Monster from Green Hell great cult stuff. One thing though that is timely. An Arab character played by Eduardo Ciannelli joins forces with Davis and one of the natives Joel Fluellen to combat the danger the giant wasps present. Amazing how religious differences can suddenly melt away in time of crisis.