Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (March 13, 2025)
All careers start somewhere, and 1954’s Monster from the Ocean Floor brings us back to the roots of Roger Corman’s career. This sci-fi/horror tale exists as the legendary producer’s first film.
On vacation in Mexico, Julie Blair (Anne Kimbell) hears tales of a mysterious sea monster that stalks the locals. She eventually experiences a terrifying encounter with this beastie herself.
When Julie tries to warn authorities, she runs into resistance. She embarks on a crusade to deal with this aquatic menace.
In this set’s liner notes, Corman claims that Floor made a gross of $300,000 on a mere $18,000 budget. This meant he smelled profit in cheaply made B-movies and that set his career down the path he’d follow for decades.
One can only wonder where Corman might’ve gone if his early efforts flopped. Perhaps he might’ve tried to work in more “serious” fare.
Don’t take this as a criticism of Corman or a derogatory view of his career. He made a major impact on motion pictures, especially because so many notables got their starts with him.
None of this means Corman created movies that were consistently – or even frequently – good, though, as he cranked out an awful lot of clunkers. Add the sub-mediocre Floor to that pile of stinkers.
Even at a mere 64 minutes, Floor feels padded. We get seemingly endless underwater shots and plenty of other scenes that drag forever.
Floor also seems unwilling to fully commit to its main plot. At its core, we get a singular quest to deal with a threat, but the script goes off on completely unnecessary tangents.
In particular, some of the locals decide they need to sacrifice a hottie to placate the oceanic monster. This leads to attempts to send Julie to her watery grave.
These seem superfluous, as the story would work better if it stayed solely with Julie’s attempts to get others to take the threat seriously and deal with it. The “kill the white woman” theme goes nowhere.
Of course, it doesn’t help that Floor paints Mexicans as lazy, superstitious drunks too much of the time. Some characters come off better than others, but the racism remains obvious.
In a better made and more compelling movie, perhaps those elements become less of an issue. Not that I feel racism is A-OK in otherwise good films, but I also don’t believe Floor seems egregiously bigoted, mainly because it fits the attitudes of its era.
I do think Floor delivers a completely forgettable movie, though, one without any of the thrills its premise promises. Unsurprisingly, we see little of the titular creature, clearly to save money on effects.
When the beastie does appear, it underwhelms. Though the actual effect shows promise. The movie never makes the critter feel like part of the same world as the characters, so we sense no threat to them.
We also don’t especially care about the humans. Julie seems bland as can be, and the others fare no better.
Acting veers from hammy to wooden, with little between those extremes. None of the performers manage to get us to invest in their roles.
As an extremely low-budget piece of drive-in fare, I won’t come down too hard on Floor. It existed as disposable cinematic product.
That doesn’t make it enjoyable, though. Because it provides Roger Corman’s first production, Floor exists as a piece of movie history, but it doesn’t succeed as a film.
