Solemplex
To me, this movie is perfection.
WasAnnon
Slow pace in the most part of the movie.
Beystiman
It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.
bsmith5552
"The Monolith Monsters" was another of the low budget little Sci-Fi/Horror films turned out by Universal in the 1950s.This one is about a meteor crashing in the desert leaving a number of fragments scattered about. Geologist Ben Gilbert (Phil Harvey) stops among the fragments to add water to his car's radiator and takes along a meteor fragment for analysis.Back at the office, the fragment becomes wet with water and begins a reaction. The next day Gilbert's boss Dave Miller (Grant Williams) finds Gilbert essentially turned to stone with the fluids drained from his body. An autopsy by local doctor Reynolds (Richard H. Cutting) finds nothing. Newspaper man Martin Cochrane (Les Tremayne) wants to report the incident but is cautioned not to.Meanwhile on a school excursion on the desert, a little girl Ginnie Simpson (Linda Scheley), picks up a fragment to take home. Ginnie's teacher Cathy Barrett (Lola Albright) becomes alarmed when she learns of Gilbert's fate. Dave and Police Chief Dan Corey (William Flaherty) learn of this, they go immediately to the little girl's home. They find the girl's parents petrified and their farm in shambles with several more meteor fragments in evidence. Ginnie has survived but is in shock.Dr. Reynolds refers Dave, Cathy and Ginnie to Dr. Steve Hendricks (Harry Jackson) who discovers that Ginnie has begun to turn to stone. He feverishly tries to save her. In the meantime, Dave consults with his old professor, Flanders (Trevor Bardette) to try to find the cause of the trouble. They discover that the meteor and it's fragments grow to an astronomical size when exposed to water.Just then, as luck would have it, a thunder storm breaks out and.................................Most of the "horror" scenes are in the final quarter of the film. The first three quarters is spent trying to find out what is going on. I didn't find the monolith monsters all that scary although the premise of them rolling over the town suggests more horror than it shows.Grant Williams in his follow up to "The Incredible Shrinking Man" the previous year is nothing more than a card board hero this time around. Lola Albright would find fame as Peter Gunn's girl Friday in the TV series of the same name. Les Tremayne was a noted radio actor and voice over narrator. And watch for youthful Paul Peterson (as a paper boy), Troy Donahue and William Schallert in small unbilled parts.
Rainey Dawn
This has got to be one of the most bizarre films I have ever seen: Killer Alien Rocks. I hated it but kinda liked it to a degree. It was pretty good up until the ending which was predictable and extremely lame. The first two-thirds of the movie was the best part to me - having elements of suspense and a few surprises to but the last third of the film was a let down - to me.I don't understand the real attraction to this movie with this really lame ending. The movie isn't good but it's not completely awful - it's weird. I really don't know how to feel about this film overall, neutral I guess.If you like weird, off the wall 1950s sci-fi movies then you might like this movie - just remember it's a meteor that crashed and it's about killer growing giant alien rocks.4/10
arcdanku
This is a better 50s sci-fi movie, interesting plot, fast-paced and well-acted. The science is very questionable, especially the function of silicon in the human body (which is none), but in the 50s a lot of such theories were thrown around. Now the setting might be conventional, an isolated desert town, but the threat is different from most other sci-fi. I would have liked to see the crystals have some consciousness, after all they are called monsters, but that's a minor issue. I liked the way scientists, police and journalists worked together without stereotyping. Lola Albright is gorgeous. In the first scenes she wore pants, unusual for 50s movies!
Lee Eisenberg
Yes, it's another sci-fi flick from the '50s. "The Monolith Monsters" is about a meteor that crashes in the California desert, and pieces of it get exposed to water and grow to the size of buildings, threatening a nearby town. The characters in "2001: A Space Odyssey" never had to deal with these sorts of monoliths!* As is pretty much always the case with '50s sci-fi flicks, the whole thing is very enjoyable, although I did occasionally take the time to throw out the kinds of comments that the characters on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" make. An interesting thing about this movie is that there's a family named Simpson, and a character named Flanders.Anyway, good times.*Once while taking a course about Stanley Kubrick's movies, I thought of something: the word monolith in Greek means "one stone", which is also what Einstein means.
