(1955)
Overall: MEH
Universal's intentional answer to Warner Bros. previous year's Them!, Tarantula was another giant insect run amok film, this time directed by Jack Arnold and even based off of a story of his, which was inspired by a Science Fiction Theater episode "No Food for Thought". While it is fine for what it is, the problem with huge monster movies in general is that everything else happening besides the giant monsters terrorizing people on screen is dreadfully dull. The characters are all flat and generic, (there is an overweight sheriff, a handsome doctor/hero, a pretty girl who gets saved by said hero, an old doctor doing secret experiments in a laboratory, etc), and because the movie is called Tarantula, the fact that it takes over thirty minutes to see the title creature in its full, humongous glory is problematic. The other issue is that when your monster is just a big, mindless thing, the creature has no personality so unlike Arnold's own Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein, or pick your favorite, it is more of a bore to watch people make small talk while we wait for the giant beast to just get blown up by bombs. There are a couple of unique elements here like the effects of the scientist's radioactive serum on themselves, but it is still mediocre stuff.
(1957)
Overall: GREAT
Though Universal's classic monster cycle was spent by 1957, they still had a few ingenious genre films up their sleeves and The Incredible Shrinking Man is easily one of the strongest. During that decade, Jack Arnold proved to be the studio's tightest and most accomplished director and while he continued to be prolific up until 1980, this ended up being his last truly memorable production. Speaking of prolific, this also served as the first screenplay from Richard Matheson, who adapted it from his own novel The Shrinking Man, which infused some of his own frustrations with being a struggling provider for his family. The film manages to feature a slew of impressive set pieces, turning the contemporary suburban home of Grant Williams' protagonist into a treacherous landscape where everything from a doll house to a pencil puts him in life or death peril. In addition to the spider-fighting/cat-fleeing spectacle of it all, Matheson's script maintains its focus on the crippling psyche of such a strange affliction. As Williams' plight becomes more and more hopeless, his sanity, masculinity, and compassion as a human being continues to break down. All of this plus Arnold's brisk pacing makes the movie increasingly compelling as a bizarro-world tragedy on par with the best of them.
(1958)
Overall: MEH
Jack Arnold's last foray into straight horror, Monster on the Campus, (Monster in the Night, Stranger on the Campus), was Universal's cash-in on American International Pictures' slew of contemporary teen-centered films of an identical ilk. More of a lab coat melodrama than a teenager genre romp, it centers around Arthur Franz' college professor who inadvertently reverts to a primitive form after coming in contact with a rare, million year-old preserved coelacanth fish. Suffering from the usual issues with such movies in that we do not get a full look at the monster until over an hour in and that it is padded with bland characters talking in rooms to each other, Arnold was skilled enough from behind the lens to keep the pacing more agreeable than would be surmised. David Duncan's script offers up no mystery for the audience, so watching everyone on screen try and get to the bottom of who is murdering people around town is hardly the most gripping of narratives. The title monster looks more silly than frightening, yet thankfully there are some quirky/brutal elements like a giant dragonfly showing up and the aforementioned beast man hurtling a hand ax at a policeman's head. It is better than your average I Was a Teenage Whatevers, but still nothing extraordinary.
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