The Milpitas Monster

This is a feature movie but not of Hollywood quality. Here are some trivia about the movie:

The Milpitas Monster took three years to produce. The kids grew during all that time.

The director, Bob Burrill, was an art and photography teacher at Samuel Ayer high, he went on to write a book about the history of Milpitas and illustrated another history of the nearby town of Alviso. He was a student of famous photographer Ruth Bernhard and filmed a documentary of her shown on PBS. Some of his shorter projects can be viewed on YouTube on the moooose69 channel.

The persons in the film were often recruited from those families who contributed money, materials, and volunteer hours into making it.

The heroine, daughter of the Ayer High principal, and the young hero did marry in real life and raised a family.

A claw from the monster's hand was on display at the Great Mall, a shopping mall in Milpitas, until the President of the local historical society had it removed because she did not consider it to be part of the city's history.

The only professional, paid actor in the film was the drunk.

The film was shot in 16mm.

The attorney hired to copyright the film failed to do so, but the trusting producers never checked up on him. It took over 25 years for the error to be discovered.

The film has been pirated around the world with new covers.

The film is still shown in the South San Francisco Bay area as a fund-raiser for various charities, including an annual showing on Halloween to benefit the Niles Railroad Museum in Fremont, CA.

My review was written in March 1985 after watching the movie on VCI video cassette.

Reviewed for the record, "The Milpitas Monster" is an amatuer horror film completed in 1976, theatrically unreleased and now available via home video (presented by "Le Bad Cinema"). Distrib VCI includes a disclaimer that pic "may insult your intelligence", but as usual, caveat emptor.

Premise is a huge monster (portrayed alternately by stop-motion animation and a guy in a felt suit) spawned by limitless garbage dumped in the little town of Milpitas, 40 miles from San Francisco. Between scenes of failed comedy relief concerning the town drunk George Keister, monster attacks a dance at the local high school and is finally fried when it climbs up the town's transformer tower in emulation of "King Kong".

Non-actors and incompetent film technique reduce this one to the unwatchable category. Sole point of interest is credit for (much-needed in view of the shoddy sound recording) sound effects by young wiz Ben Burtt, late an Oscar-winner for "Star Wars" and key contributor to many other recent fantasy films.

Pollution yields a winged gargantuan beast which proceeds to de-populate the community of Milpitas, California.

The general consensus on this flick is pretty reasonable...a grassroots love-letter to 50s era monster movies, funded with pocket change. Now...consider that production of this movie initialized as a high school project involving complete amateurs in every aspect of its penny-ante construction, and the results begin to look pretty darned good. Miniature sets are efficiently overseen, the monster is uniquely designed, and the various technical parts and parcels of filmmaking are roundly on the beam. It's high camp fun with a likable regional charm, and being observably rough around the edges only makes it that much more appealing.

There's a world of movies made by "professional" low-budget filmmakers that are far less enjoyable than this giddily ambitious curio. The median mainstream movie viewer will probably have a tough time with THE MILPITAS MONSTER, but it's pretty unlikely that they'd ever merge with it in the first place. For those among us with an interest in cinematic novelties with unusual production backstories, this should manage to entertain, and occasionally even impress, if accepted on its own realistic terms.

A+ for effort.

And that's not necessarily a good or bad thing.

Let's face it: The Milpitas Monster is a cheapie...in fact it's the kind of movie that Frank Zappa immortalized in the song "Cheepnis", only a couple of decades removed. This movie rode the tips of the coat tails of the brief monster movie revival of the seventies (Octaman, The Crater Lake Monster, APE) that occurred right before the advent of Star Wars and the plunge of science fiction into the mainstream.

But it has its points. I actually like some of the stop-motion animation in this one, primitive though it may be. There are a lot of interesting camera angles that one wouldn't normally see on such a film, and the lighting is for the most part adequate (the movie, especially during most of the special effects sequences, is kept rather dark).

I even enjoyed the story up until the introduction of the stupid "odorolla" tracking device, and the particularly stupid way that was used to lure the monster to its death. I don't mind a "bad" script, but I hate a stupid one.

The Milpitas Monster is worth a look if you are a fan of the giant monster genre, or if you just like cheap movies in general. A film that has Paul Frees do the narration can't be all bad.

It is real easy to toast, roast, flay, and otherwise burn this film for all of its abundant flaws. It was made by high school students and faculty and a whole community; it shows! Sure, I could examine the script which is just ridiculous. A monster created from the garbage of a growing Californian city starts eating garbage and taking garbage cans all over the city. Soon this huge beast with wings no less begins to destroy buildings and even plays the "beauty and the beast" act with a young high school girl. Fortunately for her there is a gang of guys, her former boyfriend nicknamed "The Penguin," and the town drunk out to help her. The direction is awful, the production values just dreadful, the acting non-existent, and the pace sluggish. The movie is hard to sit through - period. However, that being said, it is also a miracle of a film when you consider that this thing was crafted by an entire community. You can see all the collective effort from the actors, the actual mayor and actual firemen and policemen, to the area location shots used. I also was really amazed at all the local businesses credited at the film's end with helping to finance or contribute in some way to the film. When you look at the film from that perspective, it is indeed quite an achievement. I didn't know anything about it before I sat down and watched it. Now that I have found out something about it, I am impressed. But make no mistake - I have no...NO...desire to sit through it again.