The Monster of Piedras Blancas

This is one of those films that used to be shown on Creature Features on Saturday mornings. Its a rather dull film about a Black Lagoon-type creature who goes around killing people. Despite its dullness, it has a couple of the scariest scenes of any film made during this era. The first, when the monster comes bursting out of a door is a moment of shock and horror equal to the similar scene in "The Thing". And the second, at the lighthouse at the end of the film, is extremely terrifying and gave me recurrent nightmares as a child. Both scenes are still frightening to me as an adult. One also has to appreciate the amount of thought that went into the plot. The origins of the monster and the reasons he starts to kill are convoluted but, if you follow along carefully, everything is explained in a logical manner and there are no inconsistencies in the plot. In "Keep Watching the Skies", Bill Warren criticized the film as lacking a logical plot and explanation for the monster, but he is wrong! However dull, a lot of thought went into the plotting of this film and, had the script been better, this could have been a scare classic.