7.1 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
An A-bomb test in the Arctic awakens The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and it makes New York City its stomping ground.
Starring: Paul Hubschmid, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, Kenneth Tobey, Donald WoodsHorror | 100% |
Sci-Fi | 14% |
Adventure | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital Mono
Spanish: Dolby Digital Mono
Spanish: Dolby Digital Mono (Spain)
English SDH, French, Japanese, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
The first feature film to include a credit for legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen was 1953's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (or, simply, "Beast" for short). Beast is also the film that is generally credited with starting the long series of creature features in which popular culture reflected anxieties about the future of humanity in the atomic age. It's certainly true that the success of Beast, which was made independently, then acquired by Warner Brothers, prompted the greenlight for the studio's profitable feature Them!, which appeared the following year. Beast has also been claimed as an inspiration, or at least an encouragement, for Toho's Godzilla series, the first of which appeared in 1954. (Like Japan's "King of the Monsters", the giant lizard in Beast was initially conceived as having some sort of fiery breath, but the idea never progressed beyond concept art.) At its core, though, Beast is little more than a dinosaur movie, an indulgence by Harryhausen and his lifelong friend, Ray Bradbury, of their childhood fascination with the prehistoric behemoths and the same desire to see them brought to life that, forty years later, would make Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park a cultural landmark. As Dr. Alan Grant says in the later film: "Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?" Harryhausen and Bradbury made a pretty good guess, and even though their dinosaur was an invented species (which solved certain practical problems, such as its ability to breathe underwater), they told much the same cautionary tale as Spielberg and novelist Michael Crichton. Meanwhile they and the audience could enjoy marveling at what was, for the time, the best realization of a dinosaur yet shown on the screen. Beast is one of the four films new to Blu-ray in Warner's Special Effects Collection. (It is also available singly.)
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was shot by John L. Russell (Hitchcock's Psycho). For Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray release, the studio's MPI facility has created a new 2k scan from a fine-grain positive. As with the other films in Warner's Special Effects Collection, Beast's creature effects were optically superimposed into the finished film, so that shots in which the resurrected Rhedosaurus appears routinely contain portions that have suffered generational loss of detail and cannot look better than they do here. It's also worth noting how frequently effects supervisor Ray Harryhausen positioned his stop-motion model wholly or partially in shadow, and used water or smoke to obscure its artificiality. In later work in color, Harryhausen's work had advanced to the point where he could place his models in full illumination without camouflage. Within the limits of the source material, the Blu-ray image is very good: sharp and detailed, with solid blacks, well-delineated grays and a natural grain pattern. The Arctic snows are white, but the remaining scenes retain their natural texture and have not been artificially brightened to create a false sense of "pop". Like the other films in the Collection, Beast has been well encoded at a high bitrate, in this case 31.91 Mbps.
Beast's original mono soundtrack has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA mono, and it is remarkably effective for its era. Not only is the dialogue clear, but the all-important roar of the angry Rhedosaurus makes an appropriate impact (though it doesn't exactly rattle the room). The sounds of destruction wrought by the creature would be more dramatic in a contemporary mix, but they tell the story well enough. The score by David Buttolph (House of Wax) is a classic among creature features.
The extras have been ported over from Warner's 2003 DVD of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, except that the DVD contained additional trailers for films featuring Harryhausen's stop-motion animation.
There's a little of Beast in every Godzilla film ever made and also in hybrids like Cloverfield. But the most direct successor is The Lost World, Spielberg's sequel to Jurassic Park, which has a third act that pays homage in numerous respects to Harryhausen's 1953 classic. In both films, a creature from a bygone era suddenly appears in a modern city (New York in Beast, San Diego in Lost World) and barrels its way through people and buildings as if they were so much forest. Both scenarios result from a child-like fascination with dinosaurs, except that no one in Beast is trying to capitalize on that fascination to create a theme park. Harryhausen and Bradbury worked in less cynical times. Highly recommended.
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Warner Archive Collection
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Roger Corman's Cult Classics
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2K Restoration
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Slipcover in Original Pressing
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