This movie that was kind of fascinating, not from being an inherently good movie, but as a clear precursor to almost every slasher film made in the 1980s and after.
The plot involves a handsome geologist, an older archaeologist, and the archaeologist's pretty young daughter who all take a trip into the mountains together in search of the burial grounds of a particularly violent Spanish conquistador and his men. It turns out that the ground there has special properties that can cause suspended animation, and wouldn't you know it, the conquistador was playing possum for nearly 400 years, the scamp! Anyway, the long nap didn't improve his disposition at all, and he wakes up ready to inflict bloody murder on anyone and everyone. Did I mention he's at least 7 feet tall?
This movie is a curious mix of being "of its time" and "before its time", because it's both of those to an extreme degree. In terms of being a 50s horror movie, there's a compulsion to explain the conquistador's revivified existence as something scientific rather than supernatural or magical. You have lots of 50s archetypes... the scientists nobody believes, the hard-headed local sheriff, and the chaste blonde heroine who's relegated to making sandwiches and coffee as a masked murderer stalks about whenever she's not busy fainting and getting carried around by him. (And like most monsters of the time, he seems drawn to beautiful women but seems a bit confused on what to do with them after picking them up, wandering about aimlessly.) We also have the actor Morris Ankrum playing the archaeologist, which is a treat because I immediately recognized him as the General from "The Giant Claw" (1957), one of my all-time favorite 50s B-movies. That poor guy just couldn't seem to land in a good movie around this period, but he always put 110% into his performances. So, it was very much a movie of the 50s.
It was also a 1980s slasher movie if ever I saw one, though! The film is about a bunch of people having a nice time in the woods next to a lake until a giant, hulking, partially-undead monster of a man starts stalking through the woods and killing everyone with an ax. He's a practical bullet-sponge who just won't seem to die no matter how much you shoot him. He kills some of his victims, sometimes with an ax and sometimes with his bare hands, in manners so grisly I don't recall seeing them again in horror movies until at least the 1970s. He rises to life from a lightning strike to his weapon (Friday 13th: Part 6) and (SPOILER ALERT) can only seem to be vanquished by sinking him to a lake bottom (Friday 13th: Part 7). The movie complements its violence with sex (less overt than in the 80s, but pretty risque for 50s stuff) and has a surprisingly high death count for a film like this.
I don't want to oversell this film's influence, because I not sure it actually *had* any. I can't recall hearing anyone talk about this movie as a conscious influence on the slasher genre, nor is it famous. It's also pretty slow for most of its runtime, only launching into the horror elements with any regularity in the second half. There are also some clear callbacks here to even earlier movies, especially the Frankenstein films of the 1930s and 1940s. Still, this flick deserves credit for establishing a certain type of horror villain in an certain type of setting with a certain subset of supporting elements, over two decades before every low budget horror director in America copied its playbook. Some movies are Columbuses that discover a new creative continent and receive credit for discovering a new world; others are more like the nameless Vikings (or maybe conquistadors) who landed on American shores a few hundred years earlier, ate some good grapes, and sailed home with almost no fanfare. Still, the fact remains that the latter got there *first*, and that's the credit "Giant From the Unknown Deserves". This stupid little flick invented the modern slasher film... and that's pretty neat!
The plot involves a handsome geologist, an older archaeologist, and the archaeologist's pretty young daughter who all take a trip into the mountains together in search of the burial grounds of a particularly violent Spanish conquistador and his men. It turns out that the ground there has special properties that can cause suspended animation, and wouldn't you know it, the conquistador was playing possum for nearly 400 years, the scamp! Anyway, the long nap didn't improve his disposition at all, and he wakes up ready to inflict bloody murder on anyone and everyone. Did I mention he's at least 7 feet tall?
This movie is a curious mix of being "of its time" and "before its time", because it's both of those to an extreme degree. In terms of being a 50s horror movie, there's a compulsion to explain the conquistador's revivified existence as something scientific rather than supernatural or magical. You have lots of 50s archetypes... the scientists nobody believes, the hard-headed local sheriff, and the chaste blonde heroine who's relegated to making sandwiches and coffee as a masked murderer stalks about whenever she's not busy fainting and getting carried around by him. (And like most monsters of the time, he seems drawn to beautiful women but seems a bit confused on what to do with them after picking them up, wandering about aimlessly.) We also have the actor Morris Ankrum playing the archaeologist, which is a treat because I immediately recognized him as the General from "The Giant Claw" (1957), one of my all-time favorite 50s B-movies. That poor guy just couldn't seem to land in a good movie around this period, but he always put 110% into his performances. So, it was very much a movie of the 50s.
It was also a 1980s slasher movie if ever I saw one, though! The film is about a bunch of people having a nice time in the woods next to a lake until a giant, hulking, partially-undead monster of a man starts stalking through the woods and killing everyone with an ax. He's a practical bullet-sponge who just won't seem to die no matter how much you shoot him. He kills some of his victims, sometimes with an ax and sometimes with his bare hands, in manners so grisly I don't recall seeing them again in horror movies until at least the 1970s. He rises to life from a lightning strike to his weapon (Friday 13th: Part 6) and (SPOILER ALERT) can only seem to be vanquished by sinking him to a lake bottom (Friday 13th: Part 7). The movie complements its violence with sex (less overt than in the 80s, but pretty risque for 50s stuff) and has a surprisingly high death count for a film like this.
I don't want to oversell this film's influence, because I not sure it actually *had* any. I can't recall hearing anyone talk about this movie as a conscious influence on the slasher genre, nor is it famous. It's also pretty slow for most of its runtime, only launching into the horror elements with any regularity in the second half. There are also some clear callbacks here to even earlier movies, especially the Frankenstein films of the 1930s and 1940s. Still, this flick deserves credit for establishing a certain type of horror villain in an certain type of setting with a certain subset of supporting elements, over two decades before every low budget horror director in America copied its playbook. Some movies are Columbuses that discover a new creative continent and receive credit for discovering a new world; others are more like the nameless Vikings (or maybe conquistadors) who landed on American shores a few hundred years earlier, ate some good grapes, and sailed home with almost no fanfare. Still, the fact remains that the latter got there *first*, and that's the credit "Giant From the Unknown Deserves". This stupid little flick invented the modern slasher film... and that's pretty neat!