Cosmic Monsters aka The Strange World of Planet X

Tell your friends, “He’s mad – mad I tell you!”  But be that as it may, I actually waited twenty-seven years to see this movie!  Ever since I read a terse (and unkind) review of the film in Castle of Frankenstein #8 (1966 issue), I’ve wanted to behold this tale of giant radioactive insects on the loose in England. During the sixties, it didn’t help when I noticed via out-of-town newspapers that Cosmic Monster was showing on TV stations hundreds of miles away.  “Why can’t it come on one of our local stations?” I fumed inside.  (I also fumed outside, but that’s another story.)

Time passed (doesn’t it always?), and though I shoved the desire to see Cosmic Monster to the nether regions of my cranial cinemahouse, I knew I would watch it if ever given the chance.  Well, that chance came when I purchased the movie as a used video off ebay in 2003.  (Yes, I could have bought it years earlier, but paying over fifteen bucks for a sight-unseen film that might barf cactus teeth is not my cup of creature feature frugality.)

Now that I have finally beheld 1958’s Cosmic Monster in my fortysomething years, what can I say?  Well, for one thing, it’s Great Britain’s only bona fide Big Bug flick.  In addition, despite the usual critical brickbats hurled at it, Cosmic Monster is a fairly enjoyable (albeit severely budget-strapped) story of an English scientist whose experiments smack a hole in the ionosphere; this causes a small portion of England to be inundated with cosmic rays that bloat the local bugs to Real Big Proportions.  Fortunately, the enigmatic Mr. Smith, a superior but friendly alien monitoring the scientist’s ill-conceived activities, saves the day.

While the effects are almost all rear-screen projections, and though you almost never see humans and bugs in the same scenes, the film nevertheless achieves a minor frisson at times.  Three best scenes:

The heroine caught in a giant spider’s web while the spider subdues a colossal cockroach in the background;
A giant ant literally munching on a soldier’s face (quite graphic for a fifties flick!);
And a teacher trapped inside a small schoolhouse while the big bugs outside try to break in.

Now I couldn’t and wouldn’t proclaim that Cosmic Monster is an underrated classic – it isn’t.  It’s not even a minor classic, nor a sub-minor near-classic.  But it is a mildly diverting, albeit low-rent example of fifties sci-fi/horror from the land of Big Ben and Piccadilly Circus. (Mike Bogle, American Kaiju)