The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms aka The Monster from Beneath the Sea is a 1953 American blackandwhite science fiction monster film from Warner Bros., produced by Jack Dietz and Hal E. Chester, directed by Eugne Louri, and starring Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway, and Kenneth Tobey. The films stopmotion animation special effects are by Ray Harryhausen. Its screenplay is based on Ray Bradburys short story The Fog Horn, specifically the scene where a lighthouse is destroyed by the title character.
The Beast begins making its way down the east coast of North America, sinking a fishing ketch off the Grand Banks, destroying another near Marquette, Canada, wrecking a lighthouse in Maine, and crushing buildings in Massachusetts. Nesbitt eventually gains allies in paleontologist Thurgood Elson Cecil Kellaway and his young assistant Lee Hunter Paula Raymond after one of the surviving fishermen identifies from a collection of drawings the very same dinosaur as Nesbitt saw. Plotting the sightings of the Beasts appearances on a map for skeptical military officers, Elson proposes the Beast is returning to the Hudson River area where fossils of Rhedosaurus were first found. In a diving bell search of the undersea Hudson River Canyon, Professor Elson is killed after his bell is swallowed by the Beast, which eventually comes ashore in Manhattan. A later newspaper report of its rampage lists 180 known dead, 1500 injured, damage estimates 300million.Arriving on the scene, military troops led by Col. Jack Evans Kenneth Tobey first stop the Rhedosaurus with an electrified barricade, then blast a hole with a bazooka in the Beasts throat, which drives it back into the sea. Unfortunately, it bleeds all over the streets of New York, unleashing a horrible, virulent prehistoric contagion, which begins to infect the populace, causing even more fatalities. The infection precludes blowing up the Rhedosaurus or even setting it ablaze, lest the contagion spread further. It is then decided to shoot a radioactive isotope into the Beasts neck wound with hopes of burning it from the inside, killing it without releasing the contagion. ........
Source: Wikipedia
