Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (September 25, 2025)
With 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, we get two Rays for the price of one! For the first and only time, legends and longtime pals Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen worked on the same film.
Okay, this stretches matters somewhat, as Bradbury’s credit states the tale was “suggested by” a story of his published in the Saturday Evening Post. Still, I needed a cheap and easy way to open this review so I went “two Rays”.
When nuclear tests revive a long-frozen giant dinosaur in the North Atlantic Ocean, it creates mayhem with only one survivor: Professor Tom Nesbitt (Paul Christian). However, no one believes Nesbitt when he warns of this menace.
This changes as the creature wreaks havoc down the North American East Coast. When it eventually arrives in New York City, a major battle ensues.
72 years after the movie’s release, I suspect Fathoms enjoys a place in the public memory mainly thanks to Harryhausen’s creature effects. Though he worked on Puppetoons shorts in the 1940s, 1949’s King Kong-influenced Mighty Joe Young became Harryhausen’s first feature film credit.
Only billed as a “technician” there, Harryhausen took full charge of the stop-motion animation for Fathoms. If nothing else, the film deserves a place in history thanks to this.
Unfortunately, Fathoms doesn’t stand out in many ways other than Harryhausen’s influential work. Despite the inherent excitement that comes from the plot, the movie tends to seem dull too much of the time.
This occurs primarily because Fathoms delivers an awfully chatty affair for an ostensible “monster movie”. Though we get a brief glance of the titular critter early, most of the flick’s first half remains slow-paced and dominated by less-than-scintillating dialogue.
Once efforts to capture the dino occur in the second half and then the rampage through NYC takes place, Fathoms picks up – well, somewhat. The movie still moves in a fairly sluggish manner, as it feels like the filmmakers go out of their way to avoid the Rhedosaur’s presence.
Which I suspect was the case, as Harryhausen’s time-consuming effects likely existed as a luxury. The more the filmmakers used those techniques, the slower – and more expensive – this low-budget production became.
Of course, some films work better because we don’t see much of the predators in question. 1975’s Jaws and 1979’s Alien stand out as prime examples of flicks that benefited from our sparse sightings of their title characters.
However, Fathoms director Eugène Lourié clearly wasn’t in the same echelon as Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott. Whereas they developed tension as their movies progressed, Lourié fails to deliver similar drama.
Fathoms springs to life more in its third act, as the dino’s assault on NYC attempts to compensate for all the action absent during the movie’s initial two-thirds. And it does manage to provide greater thrills.
Still, the tedium of the initial 55 minutes becomes a lot to overcome. Again, with a more talented filmmaker at the helm, the final act of Fathoms could turn exciting, but in Lourié’s hands, it just never gets there.
I do think Harryhausen’s effects hold up well after 72 years. Of course the dino never looks realistic but the animation nonetheless feels effective and shows a particular charm that most modern CG lacks.
But so much of the movie avoids the title critter and focuses on tedious dialogue that Fathoms never really clicks. Toss in an oddly anti-climactic finale and this becomes a disappointing dinosaur movie.
