**SPOILERS** Trying to get to Provincetown MA. for a play that she's staring in the famous and temperamental actress Laura Winters, Rita Morley, who's stranded in NYC, some 300 miles away, gets herself so smashed on gin that she'll have trouble remembering her name much less her lines. This has her very concerned agent Jan Letterman, Barbara Wilkin, get a charted plane to fly Laura there for opening night as a major storm approaches the New England coast.
Down and out shuttle pilot Grant Murdoc, Byron Sanders, who at first balks at flying through the dangerous cloud-cover changes his mind when Jan offers him three times the amount of cash that he usually takes for the flight. Airborne and on a due north course to Cape Cod with the storm overtaking his plane Murdoc is forced to land on this uncharted and , what at first looks like, deserted island in Long Island Sound. Murdoc together with Jan and the barley sober Laura are surprised to find this creepy-looking guy who claims to be a professor in marine biology Peter Bartell played Joseph Gobbels look-alike Martin Kosleck.
Acting normal, which is a herculean task for him, not to get his guests on the island suspicious to his real intentions Bertell is well on his way of perfecting this radio active and flesh eating algae or plankton. Who's formula he's planing to sell to the highest bidder, the US the USSR the UK and even Germany East or West. With which it, the country that Bertell sells it to, can not only conquer the waves but the world as well.
Things get a little muddled for Bertell when he loses himself in a fit of carnal and uncontrollable lust when he finds Laura sunning herself on the beach all by herself. Bartell tries to rape the drunken, but very well endowed, Laura who fights off the horny old guy. Laura had already gotten herself so drunk that the next day she completely forgot what happened to her. Which gives the hot in the pants Bertell a second chance at her which he does later in the film.
It's later that when this spaced out beatnik Omar, Ray Tudor, shows up on his raft that things really start to get out of hand. Omar together with Laura later discover what Bartell is doing which cost them both their lives. I turned out that the professor himself is, more then anyone in the movie, responsible for his own demise by thinking that he can fool with the laws of nature and get away with it. Bartell's mad experiments with the man-eating plankton which, after he electrifies it, turns into a glowing and flesh-eating crab-like monster. A monster which there's no way of him controlling or stopping from swallowing all life, human as well as fish and animal, on earth.
Really a Martin Kosleck movie with everyone else in the film, with the possible exception or the drugged out and mind addled beatnik Omar, just there going through the motions and nothing else. Kosleck or the person he's playing Proffesor Peter Bartell gives it all he's got as the crazed, in the flashbacks we don't really know for sure if he was or wasn't, ex-Nazi mad scientist who like his deceased and beloved Fuhrer wants to take over the world. In Bartell's case for a nice and tidy profit not to, like in German Fuhrer Adolph Hitler's case, National Socialize or Nazify it.
Like all movie about mad scientists Bartell screws himself up big time by him trying to create an army of killer and flesh-eating micro organisms he instead creates, by electrifying the waters off shore, a giant illuminating crab. The glowing crab has the crazed Bartell run for his life only to get attacked by flesh-eaters who make short order of him by turning Bartell into a bag of bones.
Murdoc who found out, through Laura's strange death, what can stop this crab-like creature and with a syringe of anti-flesh-eating serum, plain human blood, sticks it to it and puts an end to this insanity. An insanity of gigantic proportions that only a fruitcake, with lots of nuts in it, like Professor Peter Bartell could have dreamed up.
Down and out shuttle pilot Grant Murdoc, Byron Sanders, who at first balks at flying through the dangerous cloud-cover changes his mind when Jan offers him three times the amount of cash that he usually takes for the flight. Airborne and on a due north course to Cape Cod with the storm overtaking his plane Murdoc is forced to land on this uncharted and , what at first looks like, deserted island in Long Island Sound. Murdoc together with Jan and the barley sober Laura are surprised to find this creepy-looking guy who claims to be a professor in marine biology Peter Bartell played Joseph Gobbels look-alike Martin Kosleck.
Acting normal, which is a herculean task for him, not to get his guests on the island suspicious to his real intentions Bertell is well on his way of perfecting this radio active and flesh eating algae or plankton. Who's formula he's planing to sell to the highest bidder, the US the USSR the UK and even Germany East or West. With which it, the country that Bertell sells it to, can not only conquer the waves but the world as well.
Things get a little muddled for Bertell when he loses himself in a fit of carnal and uncontrollable lust when he finds Laura sunning herself on the beach all by herself. Bartell tries to rape the drunken, but very well endowed, Laura who fights off the horny old guy. Laura had already gotten herself so drunk that the next day she completely forgot what happened to her. Which gives the hot in the pants Bertell a second chance at her which he does later in the film.
It's later that when this spaced out beatnik Omar, Ray Tudor, shows up on his raft that things really start to get out of hand. Omar together with Laura later discover what Bartell is doing which cost them both their lives. I turned out that the professor himself is, more then anyone in the movie, responsible for his own demise by thinking that he can fool with the laws of nature and get away with it. Bartell's mad experiments with the man-eating plankton which, after he electrifies it, turns into a glowing and flesh-eating crab-like monster. A monster which there's no way of him controlling or stopping from swallowing all life, human as well as fish and animal, on earth.
Really a Martin Kosleck movie with everyone else in the film, with the possible exception or the drugged out and mind addled beatnik Omar, just there going through the motions and nothing else. Kosleck or the person he's playing Proffesor Peter Bartell gives it all he's got as the crazed, in the flashbacks we don't really know for sure if he was or wasn't, ex-Nazi mad scientist who like his deceased and beloved Fuhrer wants to take over the world. In Bartell's case for a nice and tidy profit not to, like in German Fuhrer Adolph Hitler's case, National Socialize or Nazify it.
Like all movie about mad scientists Bartell screws himself up big time by him trying to create an army of killer and flesh-eating micro organisms he instead creates, by electrifying the waters off shore, a giant illuminating crab. The glowing crab has the crazed Bartell run for his life only to get attacked by flesh-eaters who make short order of him by turning Bartell into a bag of bones.
Murdoc who found out, through Laura's strange death, what can stop this crab-like creature and with a syringe of anti-flesh-eating serum, plain human blood, sticks it to it and puts an end to this insanity. An insanity of gigantic proportions that only a fruitcake, with lots of nuts in it, like Professor Peter Bartell could have dreamed up.