A vicious reptilian humanoid monster (Peter Dunn in a gnarly rubber suit) terrorizes a sleepy coastal community. Director Irv Berwick, working from a compact script by H. Haile Chace, keeps the enjoyable story moving along at a steady pace, makes nice use of the seaside locations, creates some pleasing spooky atmosphere, maintains a winning sincere tone throughout, and pulls out the exciting stops for the lively and thrilling climax. Moreover, Berwick deserves extra praise for his take-no-prisoners attitude: There's one remarkably gruesome moment involving a decapitated head and a few startling outbursts of brutal violence (this movie even goes as far as to kill both a little girl and a cute dog!). The solid cast do a good job of portraying the entertaining array of quirky and colorful characters: Les Tremayne as the pragmatic Dr. Sam Jorgenson, Forrest Lewis as the baffled Constable George Matson, John Harmon as cranky lighthouse keeper Sturges, Jeanne Harmon as the spunky and liberated Lucille, Don Sullivan as the amiable Fred, and Frank Arvidson as talkative and excitable storekeeper Kochek. The robust shuddery score hits the stirring spot. Philip H. Lathrop's sharp black and white cinematography provides an impressive crisp look. A really fun fright flick.

It's kind of interesting to see which members of the cast can act and which can't. The two young leads aren't bad, as a matter of fact. Jeanne Carman, the hefty, young college girl, is passable. She went on to become a kind of groupie of Sinatra's Rat Pack. Her sex life must have been beyond imagining.John Harmon, as her suitor and (maybe) an oceanographer -- the plot doesn't make it clear -- gives probably the best performance in the movie, right up there with Les Tremayne as the local doctor who is puzzled over the mutilated bodies that turn up at the beach from time to time. You can tell Tremayne is an experienced actor because his sonorous, seasoned voice, "speaking lines", marks him as one. Harmon, on the other hand, sounds almost believable, and doesn't look like a dork either but rather some kind of uncanny triangulation involving Mark Stevens, David Schwimmer, and Peter Gallagher.It's a small seaside town on the California coast, Piedras Blancas, with a nice lighthouse run by the heroine's embittered and mysterious father. The actual light house is at Point Conception, where the coast takes a sudden eastern bend, and at the time of filming would have been run by the U. S. Coast Guard.In any case, the whole area around Estero Bay is scenic and the weather benign, and Morro Bay has a splendid pizzeria. You don't get to see much of the town: one church, one house, one store front. Nearby California Polytechnic Institute is a magnificent institute of higher learning. I applaud Cal Poly because it has one of my books in its library, plus a raw manuscript of an article. If you want to see Morro Bay in excelsis, see "Personal Best." I know. It's a divagation. But it many ways it's at least as interesting as the movie. So Carman, Harmon, and Tremayne can act. And who can't? Well -- nobody else, really. But the standout is Frank Arvidson as Kolchek, the store keeper and rumor monger. We have to presume he's Slavic, yet when he shouts his lines they come across as Swedish. Fortunately, about at the half way point, he winds up as a decerebrate preparation.The story makes little sense. The monster looks like a close relative of the creature from the Black Lagoon only more ridiculous. The movie isn't really worth commenting on any further. Some of these 50s science-fiction movies are entertaining and some are unspeakable garbage. This one is somewhere in the gray area between, barely tolerable.

This story takes place in Piedras Blancas, a point located along the California coast. Killing by unknown assailant starts to happen in the town near the light house of Piedras Blancas. The victim is decapitated and the blood from their bodies are missing. Little do the people of the town know, the cause of this incident started when the owner of the butcher shop refused the sale of scrap meat to the light house attendant. The light house attendant is keeping a secret that the whole town will soon find out.Piedras Blancas exists in California coast along the part of Pacific Coast Highway, called Cabrillo Highway about 60 miles north west of San Luis Obispo, and 90 miles south of Monterey Peninsula. It's a picturesque part of the state where you can see endless expanse of the Pacific ocean, and sparsely forested hills of California. There's an actual light house there where presumably this movie was shot. There's no town as such that's depicted in this movie near this point.There is a monster in this movie as the title suggests. It looks very much like the creature that appeared on the movie "It ! The Terror from Outer Space" with some modifications. The story is rather thin, but because the monster has a good presence, this movie is entertaining.At just over an hour, the movie is short, but it's just the right length to tell this story. Not a big budget movie, but it has decent story and good acting. Recommended for '50s sci-fi movie fans.

The Monster Of Piedras Blancas is a low-budget monster movie from the golden heyday of low-budget monster movies, the 1950s. By this time, the British had begun introducing an element of gore into their horror movies with the likes of The Curse Of Frankenstein and Horrors Of The Black Museum… and here some of that gore makes it into an old-school American creature feature. While the film isn't especially good in the normal sense of the word, it does rise to a number of scenes that must have been very powerful to the unsuspecting audiences of the day, most notably the scene where the monster suddenly emerges from a freezer at the back of a store with a severed head in its hand.In a quiet Californian coastal town, a couple of fishermen turn up dead in a boat, their corpses decapitated with almost surgical precision and barely a drop of blood left in their bodies. Local store-keeper Kochek (Frank Arvidson) warns that the dead are not victims of a tragic accident, hinting that they have been killed by a living creature, perhaps even the Monster of Piedras Blancas which is a well-known but much-ridiculed local legend. Lighthouse keeper Sturgess (John Harmon) seems particularly upset by the killings and makes a point of telling his daughter Lucy (Jeanne Carmen), waitress in a local bar, to make sure she is vigilant on the way home. Meanwhile, the town constable Matson (Forrest Lewis) works tirelessly with the local doctor, Sam Jorgenson (Les Tremayne), to figure out a rational explanation for the recent deaths. Lucy ignores her father's advice and goes for a moonlight swim with her boyfriend Fred (Don Sullivan), but she can't shake the feeling that someone or something is watching them. Later, more decapitated corpses turn up – one of them a child – and people start placing more credence in the idea that a monster is at large. Finally, the monster shows itself and the townsfolk find themselves up against a seemingly indestructible mutant fish-man with a taste for red meat! For me, the thing that makes The Monster Of Piedras Blancas more bearable than many films of this type is that it tries to pay attention to logic. Admittedly, much of the logic in the film is flawed. For example, the "indestructible" monster falls from a lighthouse into the sea and everyone celebrates its destruction - erm, hold on folks, the monster's almost impossible to kill and it's back in its natural habitat… something tells me this thing ain't dead! However, in others aspects the film does try quite hard to provide feasible explanations for the origins of the monster and the actions of the characters. The monster itself is the best thing about the film – a nod towards The Creature From The Black Lagoon, with a more gruesome face and bucketloads of drool. Alas, there's not much else in the film worth mentioning. It's an extremely slow-moving flick for much of the time, and the years have diminished whatever shock value the occasional gore scenes might once have possessed. There's probably some nostalgic charm in revisiting a movie like this – indeed, a whole generation have The Monster of Piedras Blancas to thank for the first time they saw a severed head in a film – but overall it's not a film that has much else to offer for modern audiences.