Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 beta 3/9/83; site nsc.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!menlo70!nsc!foster From: foster@nsc.UUCP (Jerry Foster) Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers Subject: FAVE SF MOVIES Message-ID: <704@nsc.UUCP> Date: Fri, 24-Feb-84 19:37:20 EST Article-I.D.: nsc.704 Posted: Fri Feb 24 19:37:20 1984 Date-Received: Fri, 2-Mar-84 11:53:18 EST Organization: National Semiconductor, Sunnyvale Lines: 43 Along with other obscure sf movies, I would like to include "The MONOLITH MONSTERS" as a personal favorite. Made as one of a plethora of low budget black and white sci-fi films in the middle fifties, this one had no intelli- gence at all in it (that's alien intelligence, not human intelligence, although I sometimes wonder about Hollywood movie producers). The movies of the period all had some kind of monster, be it humanoid, beastial, insectial(?), amoebic, demonic, robotic, or whatever, beating the stuffing out of the local homo sapiens. The typical Hollywood title notwithstanding, the MONOLITH MONSTERS were not monsters at all, they were ROCKS! Yes folks, twenty years before people learned to love and cher- ish pet rocks, Hollywood was showing the world how fearsome a rock could be! Actually, they were crystals which came to earth in a meteorite and did what crystals are supposed to do in a suitable environment, they grew.....and grew.....and grew. They grew from baseball size to thick cylinders 60 feet tall in a matter of minutes and then succumbed to a perfectly normal phenomenon .... gravity. When they got to be a cer- tain size, they couldn't maintain their shape anymore and they crashed to the ground, (beating the stuffing out of the local homo sapiens) and breaking up into thousands of base- ball sized pieces which immediately started to grow again. The catalytic element which caused them to grow was water (not too difficult for people to understand and easy on the budget). The element which stopped them from growing and covering the earth (there had to be one you know) was salt (same comment as for water). The plot wasn't as intricate as 2001/2010 and the special effects were far short of a Lucasfilm, but it was different enough at the time to catch my attention.