S01E13 - The Black Scorpion

Plot

After an earthquake in Mexico creates a volcano practically overnight, a pair of geologists are sent in to investigate the newly formed volcanic area. Almost immediately they discover that peculiar occurrences are happening in and around the nearby towns, and it's only much later when they discover that giant prehistoric scorpions have been unleashed by the volcano.


Movie Review

This is a monster movie, in the same vein as The Slime People and The Crawling Eye. Unlike those movies, The Black Scorpion is a monster movie of the "giant animal" variety, taking a well-known creature of Earth and upgrading the size to gigantic proportions. It is also thoroughly generic, and despite some incredible special effects, the film fails at being interesting or well-written.

Let's get the most important bit out of the way first: the giant scorpions (plural, unlike what's indicated in the film title) look amazing, which is understandable considering their stop-motion effects were overseen by Wills O'Brien, who was responsible for the legendary effects in the original King Kong. Close-ups of the scorpions' faces do look a little silly with their pseudo-human eyes, but all other shots of the creatures feature stunning stop-motion animation. If there is any major flaw, it's that several shots of the scorpions only show a scorpion silhouette with no detail, thanks to the movie running of funds for the composite process.

And it seems that the small budget could explain a lot of what went wrong with this flick. The story borrows a lot of ideas from the giant monster movie Them!, which featured giant ants (Black Scorpion even reuses the high-pitched squeal of the Them! ants). Some of the other giant monsters in the movie are actually reused models from King Kong. Characters appear and disappear with no resolution or warning. It's as if the producers studied the template on how to make a giant monster flick but half-assed it along the way, ending up with pieces of the final film that don't gel together, like poorly made jigsaw pieces.

Let's look at an example of what I mean. One character introduced in the first half of the movie is a young boy called Juanito. He tries to be cute but is irritating and serves no purpose whatsoever in the film outside of being an annoyance, but he ends up in several scenes just the same because he's the monster movie kid. After he nearly kills the film's hero geologists by stowing away on their exhibition into the scorpions' nest, Juanito is never seen again. A similar occurrence happens with the film's love interest, who is present solely to be a love interest. Oh, sure, the film tries to reason with the audience that she's useful because she's a local rancher with knowledge of the land, but said knowledge is put to no use at all in the film. She also fails in the one task given to her, and that's watching Juanito. Her part is so disposable that she isn't even made a damsel in distress at any time in the film, which, while welcome, gives her practically nothing interesting to do.

Outside of woefully underdeveloped and irregularly used characters and some fault story editing, Black Scorpion is not that terrible of a film. The acting is actually decent for a film of this caliber, and as previously mentioned, the special effects are exceptional outside of some miscues due to budget cuts. Beyond that, the film's biggest pitfall is that it's criminally bland outside of any scene involving the giant scorpions, more so than other films of this type.

If anything, this film must be studied by stop-animation buffs for its incredible scorpion models. Outside of that, trying to find an interesting narrative joining the scorpion scenes together is an exercise in tedium.


MST3K Review

The first season ends not with a bang nor a whimper, but something squarely in the middle. By now Joel and the bots seem to have gotten used to the routine of riffing movies for a national audience and sounded very comfortable with their jokes (the silhouetted wienie roast over the volcano lava was brilliant). The jokes themselves were amusing, though few true gems were present in the riffing this time around, likely because the movie didn't give them much material to work with. Still, there's no reason to expect that the fine folks of MST3K won't take what they've learned in these first 13 episodes and improve upon the formula for the next season.