Has Anyone Noticed...
the similarities between this and THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)? And I just noticed that Eugene Lourie directed both films!
"I don't use a pen: I write with a goose quill dipped in venom!"---W. Lydecker
Well yeah, that's the general idea. The original story for Behemoth was by Alan Alder(I think... I'm pretty sure....and not the actor by the same name) and it involved a floating mass of radioactive sludge. Executive Producer David Diamond was given the go ahead for production based on a distribution deal from Allied Artist that the film would be picked up if it had a sea monster in it...and when I say sea monster, I mean of the standard reptilian variety...a big lizard that flips its Jurassic lid and Jay Walks all over the lower end of a big city.
Kids love this.....kids buy tickets.
Naturally Alder thought his short treatment was more in the line of a thinking man's monster movie ala The Quatermas series but the heads of Allied wanted to sell tickets and since the majority of the audience that wants to see a dinosaur pick up a car in its mouth and shake it like a terrier shakes a rat are ten year old dinosaur loving boys....well....
Designer/director Eugene Lourie' was sought after to helm the pic BECAUSE he directed the Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Lourie' agreed only after they met a few of his demands, one of which was having a black-balled writer friend of his work on the screenplay.
The powers that be said ok, but that the script better be evocative of the BEAST movie from 1953.
Lourie' said himself that he agreed to this and that he and his pal wrote a Beast immitation just to get the project sold and planned to write a better script on location. I have no proof, but I kinda doubt this as Lourie' probably spent the better part of his life after 1959 answering the same question over and over and over again ...the question that "Harold Robbins" innocently asks here.(I don't blame him for getting defensive... (Lourie' not Robbins. Sheesh!)
I doubt this for many reasons....not the least of which is that in order to get a movie underway you have to have insurance based upon the shooting script and, while you certainly can change things in a minor sense here and there on location, major things, like stunts...crowd scenes...special effects plate photography.... change things like that and it would be counter productive to distributors..and, of course, the Allied executives seeing a movie that is filled with new dialogue and concepts that they did NOT buy, well, ... Lourie' would be leaving himself open for a lawsuit.
In my opinion, such as it is, I believe that they were told to copy the beast formula as best they could....it is standard in Hollywood...it's called..."Make it just like the other one...only different."
There was a movie years ago called Deep Rising and the fellow from the distribution company that handled the film yakked..."It's ALIEN but set on a luxury liner, not a spaceship, and instead of a space monster we have a sea monster."
This is a quote kids.
That's one proud CEO moron.
Behemoth is like that.
But...I personally think the screenplay to Behemoth is, for the most part, pretty damn good. Some of the science is a little wonky (you can't "project" either particle or isotopic radiation along a stream of free electrons and you can't have an animal like this, however large, generate an electrical charge that would shoot out like a ray gun and "zap" people. It's a dinosaur not a thundercloud. But gosh darn it ...it SOUNDS like it makes sense and that's good enough for this monster kid.
O'Brien followed what was in the script and Peterson animated accordingly, and the script was full of immitations of the Harryhausen picture.
The Beast steps on a car....The Behemoth steps on a car
The Beast picks a car up in its mouth.....The Behemoth picks a car up in its mouth
Both the Beast and Behemoth walk down the street like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade float gone mad and people flee in front of them....
The Behemoth knocks over a brick wall....The Beast pushes through a brick building!!!!!
A scientist goes down in a diving bell and is eaten by the Beast.
A scientest goes up in a helicopter and is fried by the Behemoth.
Both films feature moody night scenes of the monsters in the city.
Both films feature daylight rampages by the monsters in the city.
Both monsters are dinosaurs.
Both monsters are rubber stop motion puppets.
Both monsters run afoul of high tension electrical wires.
And....both monsters have cute Maguffins....The Behemoth is radioactive so ya can't just blow it up or burn it....the deadly tissue fragments would splatter all over London and the charcoaled bits would be carried in the wind for miles and...you get the picture.
The Beast had some sort of virulent disease and when he bled, the pools of blood gave off airiated bacteriums or some sort of virus or whatever and if they blew up the Beast, Manhattan would be subject to a Mesozoic plague for God's sake...now THAT's writing, Lou Morheim!!!!!
Anyway, The Giant Behemoth/Behemoth the Sea Monster is not the first (nor will it be the last) monster movie that jumped on the bandwagon of some creature feature that had previously scored big at the Box Office...
7th Voyage of Sinbad=Jack the Giant Killer
Them=Black Scorpion
Gorgo=Glitter
(OK.......OK...I'm tired.)
http://www.woodywelch.com
Love your analysis of the films - BEHEMOTH, with its nasty radiation burns, really freaked me out as a kid when I saw it on TV in the 1960s, and I didn't see it again until somewhere in the 1990s - I watch BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS every couple of years or so, but I probably hadn't seen BEHEMOTH in a good 10 years or more, so the similarities only just sprang to mind when I watched the DVD this week.
I've since listened to a few minutes of the Audio Commentary wherein it's mentioned that the Behemoth itself wasn't originally in the script, just a yucky radioactive substance. But NO! We gotta have a monster! Kind of like when the studio insisted that Tourneur's NIGHT OF THE DEMON show the demon.
Of course, the pattern was set way back in 1925 when that Brontosaurus tore London up in THE LOST WORLD, and then in 1933 when KING KONG got loose in New York City - those two pretty much set the standard for big beasties on the loose.
"I don't use a pen: I write with a goose quill dipped in venom!"---W. Lydecker
You're abosolutely right, Harold Robbins, that enormous Brontosaurus in The Lost World (1925) was INDEED the seminal influence of King Kong....Beast From Twenty Thousand Fathoms, Gorgo, and a few more. And notice in the Lost World movie how the huge saurapod rises up on its hind legs and crushes in the side of a building. Then look at the shot in Beast from 20,000 Fathoms when the Rhedosaurus, enraged at being blasted with shotgun shells by a small group of cops, rises up and crushes in a building (walks through the damn thing to!)
I love it when Ray Harryhausen tips his hat to O'Brien. A good gag is a good gag. Timeless.
http://www.woodywelch.com
"
7th Voyage of Sinbad=Jack the Giant Killer
Them=Black Scorpion
Gorgo=Glitter"
Uh...Obit pardon me for asking but what's 'Glitter'?
NM
Glitter? Why it's a musical drama also featuring a huge beast who bellows alot.
http://www.woodywelch.net
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When making a movie about a dinosaur that goes on a rampage and jay-walks all over a major city, you either have to make the critter impossibly huge and almost indestructible like Godzilla and Rodan....but when you make your prehistoric beast a little more believable, like the Rhedosaurus in BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, or THE GIANT BEHEMOTH's Paleosaurus, you have to come up with a "gimmick" that keeps the action going or the movie would be over before the monster gets its antideluvian tail out of the water.
in BEAST, the creature had a virus in its blood that was airborn, and if you simply had the bazooka men track the monster down and put a few more well-placed shells into him, well, the results would've been catastrophic....swine flu? How about Dino flu.
The radioactive poisoning of the Paleosaurus's flesh in BEHEMOTH was the same thing...blast the monster with a couple of large shells and the irradiated situation of the thousands of pieces of meat would scatter all over the lower London area...making it "hot" as they say, and virtually uninhabitable.
Burning either one of these creatures would be no good, for the smoke would carry the diseased particles of the Rhedosaurus God knows how far in the wind and the isotopic radiation in the Behemoth would also be carried in the wind on smoke as a kind of biological fall out.
Even the crappy REPTILICUS couldn't be blown up because the pieces would regenerate into new Reptiles....
These gimmicks just make the final act more interesting and more tense, and , hopefully, shut the gobs of the people who say...why don't you just shoot it?
The funny part about Behemoth was, that when it was released in America, there was a tooth paste commercial on television where they would show a poor unfortunate person with bad breath and optically superimposed concentric circles came out of the person's mouth to simulate the stink of the person's mouth. He or she used the toothpaste and it made their mouth all clean, white and fresh smelling.
Unfortunately this was almost the exact same effect used to "show" the Behemoth sending out its radioactive death on whorls of electric discharge...it looked to many American audiences, because of that toothpaste commercial, that the Behemoth simply had really bad breath.
http://www.woodywelch.net
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If you watch Dr Who with the Loch Ness Monster making a pest of itself
when its head appears it looks like the dinosaur in this movie .
If you watch Dr Who with the Loch Ness Monster making a pest of itself
when its head appears it looks like the dinosaur in this movie . - mlaughlin22
That is "Terror of the Zygons," with the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker), but the scene in "Zygons" in which Nessie is chasing the Doctor across the Scottish countryside always reminds me of the Drashigs chasing the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) in the earlier serial "Carnival of Monsters."
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"We hear very little, and we understand even less." - Refugee in Casablanca share
That is some impressive research! Many thanks!
cinefreak
They both also used the same drawing of the dinosaur to identify it.
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