COSMIC MONSTERS-1958-In a rural section of England a group of scientists are working with magnetic fields to alternate the molecular structure of metal. They are lead by the rather brilliant but pompous Dr. Laird (Alec Mango). His more level headed American assistant is Gil Graham (Forrest Tucker). They both get upset when a French woman Michele (Gaby Andre') takes the place of an injured co-worker. "But a woman? This is
preposterous. This is highly skilled work!".
She turns out to be pretty much a genius and the only one who seems to feel something could go wrong. The nearby town doesn't like them because the experiments mess up their TV broadcasts. After a "freak storm" where they seem to lose control of the magnetic machine, the mysterious Mr. Smith (Martin Benson) appears.Then a tramp with a scarred face kills a woman. It seems the doctors' magnetic experiments have caused harmful cosmic rays to bombard the Earth making insects like grasshoppers and centipedes into monsters. "It's those insects. They've mutated and they're hungry!".
A bug loving little girl finds a big egg and Michele gets stuck in a spider's web. There's one fairly gory scene (for the time) where the killer insects munch on a dead soldier. Laird goes crazy in the finale threatening the whole Earth and Mr. Smith's real identity is revealed. A PLAN 9 type UFO shows up to help out. This British production's original title was THE WORLD OF PLANET X but in the US it was referred to as THE COSMIC MONSTERS, yet the title card reads COSMIC MONSTER...
2 comments:
The original UK title, under which it was released in the United Kingdom - was actually The STRANGE World of Planet X - I'm old enough to remember when it played my local cinema in Essex.
The movie played on Turner Classic Movies just last week (here in the US) and the title card, which I just checked via my DVR, certainly did read "Cosmic Monsters", plural.
Well, as you can see the version I saw left off the "s". I'm not exactly sure where my version came from....
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