Review of Attack of the Crab Monsters

Two giant crab monsters, grown from poisonous radiation thanks to the H bomb(good ole reliable radiation sure provided many a screenplay with the perfect excuse to enlarge regular animal and fish life into killing monsters), terrorize a Navy science research team sent to an island to investigate the disappearance of another science team who stopped communication with their base. It seems that the crab monsters are equipped with the ability to absorb the knowledge of the heads they eat from their various victims since the brains essentially carry electrical impulses. The team will race against time to find out a way to try and outlast the two monsters hoping to study them while staying alive as the island is being capsized, by detonated dynamite, around them. The crabs can telepathically communicate through metal(!)to the crew through the voices of those they behead and eat. This telepathy, at first, is used to lure victims to them, and then as a device to threaten. It seems that bullet-fire and grenades do little to stop the giant crabs, but attacking their brains(where their ultimate power stems from)or the use of positive electrical energy are the perhaps the crew's only defense against them.

Charles B Griffith's screenplay uses science to explain the shenanigans of the crabs and their preposterous powers thanks to radiation, but this flick is ultimately for fans of creature features. The monstrous crabs are, at the very least, more effective than that hilarious patch-worked beast in Corman's other sea-creature flick, "Creature from the Haunted Sea." Russell Johnson, the Professor of "Gilligan's Island" fame has the part of handyman Hank Chapman.