Navy Vs The Night Monsters

A late night TV favourite when I was a kid and one of the truly great movie titles of all time, I first encountered Navy Vs The Night Monsters in one of those newspaper ads for Super 8 films which were available to buy in the 1970s.  Back in those pre VHS and DVD days, these were the only way you could get to see movies at home - unless they happened to come onto TV - provided you had an 8mm film projector.  Basically, these were cut down versions of feature films (often to less than half an hour), to present just the highlights of the film, and were usually silent.  Generally speaking they were either older movies or low-budget productions from the fifties and sixties, Godzilla movies, I recall, were often available in this format.   Anyway, to my pre-pubescent mind at least, these advs seemed to be treasure houses of bizarre and enticing titles, inspiring all sorts of imaginative speculation as to the content of the films. Of course, I never saw any of them as we didn't have a projector at home, nor did anyone else that I knew.  Nevertheless, the titles fascinated and Navy Vs The Night Monsters was one of the most intriguing.

Of course, such a title could only ever disappoint - no film could ever live up to such promise and Navy Vs The Night Monsters was no exception.  As TV screenings revealed, it was part of that sub-genre of science fiction movies concerning themselves with the antics of perambulating carnivourous plants.  A distant relative of the 1962 Day of The Triffids adaptation, with an even lower budget and less convincing monsters.  The film's 'stars' make clear its level: quintessential B-Movie lead  Anthony Eisley and Mamie Van Doren and her mammaries - you just know those plants are going to try for a grope.  Personally, I've never found walking trees and the like particularly frightening, especially when they look as rubbery as those on view in this movie.  For one thing, they are so slow moving I'm always left wondering how they ever catch their prey. Like all low budget films of its ilk, Night Monsters, makes extensive use of military stock footage and wobbly back lot sets and features the popular device of a group of disparate characters trapped on an island with the vicious vegetables, building up to a climax where the survivors seem doomed until a deus ex machina solution.  In this case an airstrike by the US Navy, whose stock footage jets (of a type that hadn't been in front line service for around ten years, giving a clue as to the vintage of the stock footage), napalm the evil plants.  All pretty much standard for a low budget monster movie.  That said, it's still a reasonably entertaining film if you catch it in the right mood.  Mind you, I'm sure that if I'd seen it as a twenty minute silent 8mm short when I was a kid I'd think it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.