Let's get this over with.
Teenagers Battle the Thing, made in 1958, is a film that would have been perfectly acceptable if it in fact invented the Monster Attack Horror genre. It...did not, so it's not acceptable. What it is is a 59 minute, 29 second film that can't bother to to get its butt in gear and have a plot until about halfway through its run time, and...doesn't really pick up from there.
Heck, it's 6 minutes and 7 seconds until the first character other than a narrator actually speaks. That's more than a tenth of the movie.
It isn't until 25:45 that we get our first shot (other than a very brief clip in the intro set millions of years before the movie's actual plot) of what will eventually be our monster in the general vicinity of our main characters. That's close to halfway through!
This is like if you were watching Captain America: The First Avenger and they only happened to mention that World War II was going on at the hour mark.
Or if you were watching Thor and the entire first half of the movie was just following the science team slowly taking readings and stuff and talking about Norse history for a full hour, without any sign of thunder god hijinks.
Some movies use a slow burn...with this one, the fire actually went out and no one ever bothered to go check up on it.
The plot...allegedly...is that a high school history or archaeology class went with an archaeologist (who rather resembles Jim Crockett Promotions wrestler Johnny Weaver - I should at least get an ad for Let's Go to the Ring! out of this - on a dig, where they uncovered a sealed tomb, unsealed it (of course), and took a mummy, which came to life and went on a killing spree (of all of one person) until they boldly battled it to the death.
That's...pretty much the entire film, right there. There's nothing deeper than that.
No characters get any deeper characterization than "teenager" or "teacher" or "archaeologist" or, far too late for the movie to introduce new characters, "sheriff."
There are no subplots. There are no extra touches.
There is no personal development, not for a single character. Heck, there's not even some kind of ham-handed moral lesson.
No, what there are instead is a nearly endless series of shots of people slowly walking around. Teenagers Battle the Thing wants you to watch every...single...step of every...single...journey.
Apparently, the concept of "editing" did not develop until at least 1959.
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| Get used to walking shots, folks. Lots of walking shots. |
The worst offender is probably the mountain climb leading up to the discovery of the tomb, where not only do we see a simply offensive number of shots of people slowly shuffling their way up cliffs, but they make sure to highlight that they're going to get a climbing rope and proceed to not use the dang thing at all, even on slopes that look quite steep where a rope probably would've been a good idea, until they just happen to find an ancient sealed tomb that they, to be clear, had no idea was there and they finally use the rope. What, was it just a rope that granted +3 to Climbing Skill just for holding it?
..but don't worry, once they get the mummy from the tomb and it revives, the Story doesn't pick up at all! Instead, we're treated to endless discussions of who will go get soda from the store, every step of a walk from the car to the shed as the teacher shows the sheriff where they stored the mummy that escaped, and every single person hopping over a tiny gap in a grove like its the escape from The Mines of Moria.
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| When we finally see the monster, it's...not worth the wait. |
It's not that interesting stuff doesn't happen in the plot, mind. It's just that it mostly happens off camera.
We do see the monster break into a house and attack a woman (though we cut away as soon as that actually starts), but we only find out later from the Sheriff that apparently someone shot at the creature later that night.
Weird line in that part, by the way - the Sheriff notes that the shooter must have hit the creature, because there's blood at the creature's camp in the grove, but then says he must've missed because his hunting rifle would've stopped anything on a hit.
The teacher and the archaeologist warn the town (off camera), and, having decided based on slim evidence that the cop's revolver won't hurt the monster, decide to use a fire trap to kill the creature.
The cop gives the teacher his gun because the teacher, going into the woods, will need it more. Yes, the same gun we've just established is likely useless.
By the way, the cop ends up being attacked by the creature. Maybe bring more than one (apparently useless) gun on a monster hunt? Possibly?
At precisely 58 minutes, 26 seconds of a 59 minute, 29 second film - so almost exactly one minute from the end - teenagers do indeed battle the thing, as they assist their teacher by splashing gas on the thing and setting it on fire with a flare.
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| Arrrgh! Why am I invulnerable to bullets but easily defeated by technology that was readily available in the time in which I originally lived but for some reason never killed me then? |
...and then the movie just ends.
So...yeah. It's not quite false advertising, but still, Teenagers Battle the Thing really gives a mistaken impression of the bulk of the movie. It's more like...
Or maybe...
Yeah. Someone bothered to colorize this thing, add about a half hour more of pretty much unrelated filler, and release it under another title, which is entirely more work than it deserved.
Worth noting that in no way is this creature Bigfoot, but I definitely did feel cursed watching this, so the title's half right.
All told...this was far from the worst thing that Al's made me watch for his birthday, and at least it was short, but...this is barely a movie.
It's more like 30 minutes of Intro to Archaeology, followed by about 29 and a half minutes of the very basic outline of a horror film that no one bothered to develop any further before deciding, "Yeah, we're done with classwork for the day and I've got my dad's old, beaten up werewolf costume from Halloween 20 years ago, let's go ahead and shoot that."
Definitely, definitely, definitely do not watch this without the aid of the fine folks at Rifftrax.
Happy Birthday, Al.
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