Can you imagine the nerve of some people? What director dares to call his film "Monster from GREEN Hell" and then deliver a black & white movie? How we are even supposed to recognize this hell in between the rest of the colorless locations and scenery? Anyway, the basic premise of this movie is fairly simply: an American space rocket crash-lands somewhere in the middle of the African jungle and causes a plain ordinary wasp to mutate into a gigantic buzzing monster. Yes, of course, that's exactly what the radiation of a whole rocket does to the fauna & flora of a jungle
it mutates ONE
SINGLE
WASP! And this critter must look truly petrifying because even the animals in the stock footage run away. Have you ever wondered what a giant wasp looks like when appearing in a zero-budgeted 50's movie? Indeed it looks ridiculous, pitiable and funny and there's a good reason why they keep it off-screen for so long. Back to the story. Responsible as they are, the Americans send a team to Central Africa and destroy the monster. This is where "Monster from Green Hell" turns into a dreadfully boring movie for an even more dreadfully boring reason. Before the expedition reaches the monster's turf, they first have to undertake a 27 day long safari during which they encounter primitive tribes (primitive tribes big enough in number to fill the entire Chicago Cubs baseball stadium, by the way) and suffer human losses through lion attacks. They're even faced with poisoned drinking wells! Why the hell are there poisoned drinking wells? !? The environmental conditions are harsh as well. The expedition first struggles through weeks of drought and dehydration and then subsequently weeks of unceasing rainfall. I swear, at a certain point I even feared there would come a volcano eruption as well. People don't care about that in this sort of movies; they want to see the giant wasp eat obnoxious characters, damned! Anyway, all this just to illustrate that the mission is half dead by the time they reach the monster and YOU just sat and watched an hour of wilderness documentary footage even though you counted on seeing a Sci-Fi monster movie. There's a funny name for this sort of thing and it's "shenanigans!" The Americans haven't got an idea of how big the wasp monster is and all through their journey they keep guessing its size, unaware that it's about a hundred times bigger than they expect. "Monster from Green Hell" is a hopeless film. I used to think all monster flicks from the 1950's were solid gold, but lately I've seen a few titles that altered this impression; like this one and "Beast from Haunted Cave". The cast is politically correct enough, though. There's an American, a Latin American, an Arab, a black guy and a woman! Too bad there wasn't an Asian and an Eskimo; otherwise this would have been the ideal "United Colors of Benetton" campaign.
