The Black Scorpion ** (1957, Richard Denning, Mara Corday, Carlos Rivas) – Classic Movie Review 3,917

Every Horror You’ve Seen on the Screen Grows Pale Beside the horror of The Black Scorpion (1957).

‘Every Horror You’ve Seen on the Screen Grows Pale Beside the horror of The Black Scorpion!’

Director Edward Ludwig’s amusingly feeble 1957 Warner Bros black-and-white giant arachnid horror film The Black Scorpion stars Richard Denning and Mara Corday as American geologist Hank Scott and his pal Teresa Alvarez.

It is a daft Them!-style monster movie about an attack of the giant scorpions freed from underground caverns in a Mexican volcano by a series of volcanic eruptions. The giant scorpions wreak havoc in the rural countryside and then threaten to demolish Mexico City. It’s up to Hank and Teresa to save the day.

Exciting though this idea may be on paper, alas there is no sting in the tale and the acting is creaky and feeble in cardboard characterisations cruelly exposed in David Duncan and Robert Blees’s weak and ailing screenplay.

But the movie is saved by its enormous kitsch appeal and the sweet goodish old-style stop-motion animated special effects from the legendary, masterly Willis O’Brien. That giant worm with the octopus-like arms and the trapdoor spider are said to be miniature props from O’Brien’s unused spider pit sequence from the original King Kong (1933). The models used in King Kong were still in storage at RKO in the 1950s but many were decayed.

Willis O’Brien is the special-effects supervisor and his co-worker Pete Peterson does most of the hands-on animation. They also worked together on Mighty Joe Young (1949) and The Giant Behemoth (1959).

And it is always a pleasure to spend time in the company of Mara Corday. That same year she was battling The Giant Claw (1957) after battling Tarantula in 1955.

Also in the cast are Carlos Rivas, Carlos Múzquiz, Pascual Peña, Fanny Schiller, Pedro Galván, Arturo Martínez and Mario Navarro.

The Black Scorpion is directed by Edward Ludwig, runs 88 minutes, is made and released by Warner Bros, is written by David Duncan and Robert Blees, is shot in black and white by Lionel Lindon, is produced by Frank Melford and Jack Dietz, is scored by Paul Sawtell, with special effects by Willis O’Brien.

Release date: October 11, 1957 (US).

The sounds of the giant scorpions are similar to the giant ant sounds used in Them!.

The models were not all miniatures. A large-scale scorpion head is used in the film for the close-up reaction shots.

The opening sequence uses footage from the eruption of Parícutin, a volcano in Mexico that erupted suddenly from the cornfield of farmer Dionisio Pulido in 1943.

Mara Corday aka Marilyn Joan Long (born Marilyn Watts on January 3, 1930)

Mara Corday died at her home in Valencia, California, on February 9, 2025, aged 95. She married the actor Richard Long in 1957. They had two sons and a daughter.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3,917

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com