Review: Monster from Green Hell (1957)
In his essay that's included with the new Blu-ray for 1957's Monster from Green Hell , Don Stradley asks "Would the hardworking souls who made B movies back in the 1950s believe we'd still be discussing their work 70 years later?" It's a reasonable question: these movies were made on the cheap and were never intended to be anything more than disposable entertainment, created for quick thrills and the hopes of making a couple of bucks so the filmmakers could do it again. But something happened that these entrepreneurs never could have predicted: we fell in love with their movies. We didn't fall in love with them because they were slick and polished, we fell in love with them because they were rough and raw. They featured actors that didn't feel like gleaming stars of Tinsel Town, but real people. The films offer unabashed spectacle, or the dime-store equivalent thereof. We love these movies because we can see the fingerprints of the creators who made t...