This popped up on Prime Video after we watched Invaders from Mars and Jami was hooked just from the name. It's an odd little number: it's well-written and solidly acted (although I didn't recognize a single actor) but the threat isn't really a monster. It's a chunk of radioactive matter that "feeds" every ten hours, and if you don't bombard it with energy, it sucks in everything around it in an implosion while magnetizing everything. They talk of it as if it's alive, and spin a convincing story of it threatening the Earth very soon (it could throw the Earth out of its orbit), but "monster" is definitely just PR. Lots of fairly plausible-sounding scientific mumbo-jumbo (our heroes work for an organization called "OSI - Office of Scientific Investigations" (apparently there are two more films about OSI)) and spend a lot of time squinting into various scopes.
It would make a good episode of some TV show, and indeed, Dr. Who could have run with it, maybe in the Pertwee era, but there's just not all that much tension. They try to throw some in by the main character, a (convincingly) uxorious scientist worrying about his 4-month pregnant wife because she's too skinny. (He tries to get her to feed up on pancakes and bacon!) So we are led to worry that maybe there's something wrong with her, and it's something to do with the radiation. Nope, she's fine - total red herring. Then the only solution they can come up with is to bombard the thing with so much energy that it "chokes" on it, and the only place with (potentially) enough energy is in Nova Scotia, so they have to fly there on fancy military jets, and we get shots of them refueling in mid-air. Then they try to throw in tension by having the Canadian (but sounds English) head scientist butt heads with our hero (in their power center deep below the sea, for cooling purposes) and almost sabotage the attempt because he can't bare to see his life's work explode. Well, it does and it takes him with it, but it was all worthwhile. Was it worth watching? I'd say it would have been perfect for a wet Sunday afternoon back when there were only three channels on the telly, and we still had a black and white TV.
(Oh, the director is Curt Siodmak. I thought that he was one of the top Noir directors, responsible for The Killers and Criss Cross, but that was his older brother Robert. They're both credited as directors on the classic German film People on Sunday, which also featured Billy Wilder and Edgar Ulmer as writers/directors. Bit of film trivia for you.) Oh, and I was surprised how comparatively small the cars were. Apparently my image of huge 50s boat-like cars dates from the late 50s at the earliest. These cars looked positively European.
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