This is a brave and robust monster -- and it travels well too. It started off around 1950 as a Ray Bradbury story about a lonely sea monster who mistakes a lighthouse fog horn for the mating call of a possible mate. Then it became "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms", about an Apedosaurus who is released from his cryogenic state by a nuclear blast, attacks New York City, pillages rabidly, kills with its radioactive blood, and perishes amid a conflagration in Coney Island's roller coaster. (I'm thinking -- twenty-thousand fathoms. That's 120,000 feet or 23 miles. The deepest location on the earth's crust is the Marianas trench, and that's only 6.8 miles.) This animal may not be deep but he is tough to kill. Here it shows up on the English coast, under a different name, with a smaller budget, and starring Gene Evans and Andre Morell. Gene Evans is the scientific expert who cuts up the radioactive fish that wash ashore in adumbration of the monster's appearance. A morel is some kind of eel.<br /><br />The plot is very similar to that of "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms," really. Some of the shots are almost exact duplicates of the original. A fishing vessel is attacked at sea. An amusing, oddball professor is a paleontological enthusiast and is done away with. A brick wall crumbles beneath the animal's elephantine foot and crushes the pedestrians on the other side. A car is stomped, chewed up, thrown away. Citizens in a panic run this way and that in front of the camera. Someone falls and the others clump over him or trip and fall themselves. The streets of London are eerily empty of people and traffic because no one is willing to venture outside. Urgent international emergency broadcasts in six different languages. The monster's skull is too thick to penetrate, so a radioactive projectile must be blasted in through a soft point in its neck.<br /><br />The original was no masterpiece but it's better in every respect, from the acting to the special effects by Ray Harryhausen. Here, instead of Cecil Calloway, there is Gene Evans. Gene Evans. Not to put the guy down, but he is from Holbrook, Arizona, which I recall from a generation ago as consisting of a crossroads, some scattered housing, a few small shops, a gas station, and a Dairy Queen. I'll have to look up his background to find out how Gene Evans managed to get from that Dairy Queen to a starring role in a British monster movie. His looks -- balding, freckled, with a fringe of russet hair around his ear line -- is most unprepossessing. His acting talents were modest. (You or I, dragged in fresh off the streets, could probably equal him in a contest.) And when he announces, "I'm just going to cut up a fish," he sounds as if he knows a lot more about cutting up fish than about science.<br /><br />I've kind of made fun of the film and, to be honest, I don't really know why it was made. But I watched it all the way through, partly out of curiosity, and partly out of respect for Andre Morell, a fine actor who looks and sounds the part he plays. If you like these kinds of movies, you'll enjoy this movie. It's not likely to present you with any kind of challenge, anymore than it challenged the plagiarists who wrote it.