The Monolith Monsters



The Monolith Monsters is a 1957 B sci-fi movie directed by John Sherwood, which features a pretty unconventional antagonist for said genre. Are the eponymous Monolith Monsters giant lumbering beasts? Aliens?

No. They're - quite literally - rocks.

A meteorite lands in the deserts of the American southwest, near the small, sleepy hamlet of San Angelo. The impact scatters mysterious black rocks all over the place. Local geologist Ben Gilbert collects one of them. At night, a glass of water is spilt on it, causing it to bubble and smoulder. Ben stares, dumbfounded. The next day, Ben is found by the head of the geological office, Dave Miller (Grant Williams) standing upright, quite dead. He was petrified - turned into rock. And the rock has grown to an enormous size, destroying the office.

Not long afterwards, schoolteacher Cathy Barrett (Lola Albright) who is Dave's girlfriend, takes the schoolchildren on a field trip to the impact site, where a girl, Ginny Simpson, collects another one of the rocks. Upon going home, she dumps the rock in a bucket of water. That night, sure enough, the rock grows to a huge size and destroys the house, Ginny's parents are found turned to stone, and Ginny herself, alive albeit catatonic, is discovered via medical examination to be slowly turning to stone herself.

It is eventually discovered by Dave and his old professor Arthur Flanders (Trevor Bardette) that when touched by water, the rocks begin extracting silicon from their surroundings - including organisms that touch them, thus the petrification - and that they thereby grow into pillars which promptly crumble into more rocks, after which the cycle repeats itself. This spells bad news when it rains on the site of the meteorite. Giant monoliths grow and crumble, and then the pieces grow and crumble; causing an outward spread that lasts as long as the source of water does. The rain does pass, but part of the ground still contains moisture causing the monoliths to still grow and crumble along it, encroaching upon San Angelo. Its up to Dave, Arthur, Cathy, reporter Martin Cochrane (Les Tremayne) and police chief Dan Corey (William Flaherty) to stop the spread via unleashing a saline solution on the monoliths.

If anything, this film is a Disaster Movie.


 * Better Than It Sounds: This is a stunningly intelligent and different Alien Invasion film, with Earth facing disaster not from rampaging alien monsters, but from an objects from an alien ecology/environment entering our own.
 * B-Movie
 * Taken for Granite
 * You Fail Physics Forever/You Fail Chemistry Forever: Intelligent film, yes.  More than vaguely acquainted with basic science, or even simple logic?  No.  A few examples:
 * While the human body does have silicon in it, removing it would do the polar opposite of petrifying the victim.
 * The salt content of the human body's various fluids makes them just as strong a saline solution as the ocean -- trying to extract silicon from a human should be just as effective at stopping a monolith "seed" as simple salt water is, and possibly better.
 * If the monoliths are extracting silicon from the ground beneath them, they should be digging themselves into holes just as big as themselves, given that dirt and rocks are mostly silicon.
 * Conversely, the amount of silicon in a human body is not sufficient to create a rock the size of a house, unless it has the consistency of styrofoam or, more likely, Aerogel.