Freakish Fish People of Sci-fi #2: The Monster of Piedras Blancas

Much like the first entry in the series, The She-Creature, the Monster of Piedras Blancas is a prehistoric humanoid reptilian amphibian (or amphibious reptilian, or whatever) that likes to hang out along a section of the California coast and kill any landlubbers who are unfortunate enough to cross its path. (As I noted in the first installment, I am using the term “fish people” very liberally to include not only humanoid fish monsters, but ambulatory amphibians, crustaceans, cephalopods and other assorted mutant sea creatures.)

Although I didn’t know it when I first saw the movie, Piedras Blancas is a real place. It’s located in the central part of the beautiful California coast, just up the road from San Simeon and Hearst Castle off of Highway 1. The area is known for its historic lighthouse and elephant seal watching. (However, the movie was actually shot in Cayucos, CA and at the Point Conception lighthouse in Lompoc.)

The Monster of Piedras Blancas is a cautionary tale about the dangers of people feeding wildlife. The film opens in a very Creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon-like way with a wicked-looking claw suddenly appearing from behind a rock and grabbing a big metal food bowl. Later, we find out that the grizzled lighthouse keeper Sturges (John Harmon) has been looking after his monster friend and feeding it ever since he discovered the thing hiding in a cave near the beach.

Sturges, probably driven batty by his lonely job, started feeding the creature fish, then gradually added meat scraps from the local store to its diet. So now the creature has decided it likes people -- for meals. And it has a distressing habit of playing with its food by decapitating it first.

When townspeople start turning up dead, the best the old coot can do is to warn his daughter Lucy (Jeanne Carmen) to stay away from the caves near the beach. Fortunately, Lucy’s boyfriend Fred (Don Sullivan), the town constable Matson (Forrest Lewis) and the town doctor Jorgenson (Les Tremayne) seem to possess all their marbles, and eventually they form a posse to hunt the creature down -- but not before it’s taken a considerable bite out of the town’s population.

The Hand-me-down Monster

Jack Kevan, who produced the film, was a make-up and special effects artist who helped create some of Universal Studios’ most iconic monsters, including the Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), the Xenomorph from It Came from Outer Space (1953), and Monster on the Campus (1958).

With his Universal Studios connection, he supplied the Piedras Blancas monster with the claws from one of The Mole People (1956), and feet from the Metaluna Mutant of This Island Earth (1955). (For more on the making of the Monster, see my post on “How to a Monster: FFB’s Low Budget Creature Effects Awards.") 

"The Fiend that walks lovers' beach with the feet of the Metaluna Mutant!"

The monster is credited with being a living-fossil offshoot of the Diplovertebron family of prehistoric amphibians dating back 300 million years. In his review of the film, sci-fi historian Bill Warren concedes that the monster is scary for a B movie, but lacks the logic and elegance of Universal’s exquisitely designed Creature (well, duh!):

[T]he Monster of Piedras Blancas seems to be designed solely to be scary. It follows no obvious logic, and while individually its various characteristics may seem plausible, and though it’s well designed in that all its body parts seem to hang together (although it has the Mutant’s fee and the hands of the Mole People), it completely misses on the basis of amphibious monster logic. … The head is preposterous. It has inexplicable stubby little horns, huge flared nostrils (in a sea creature?), and a mouth which, though full of sharp teeth and inclined to drool, seems to be incapable of being opened: there are two extrusions from the upper lip which are fastened to the lower. It’s a monster all right, and certainly ugly -- but it does not make sense. [Bill Warren, Keep Watching the Skies, Vol. II, McFarland, 1986, p. 320]

While there's always a place for logic and consistency, Warren seems to miss the point here. Nightmares are inherently illogical, and although this unpretentious B movie can’t hold even a tiny cupcake-sized candle to Universal’s Creature, it was nonetheless effective enough to cause a sleepless night or two for some Monster Kids back in the day (including yours truly). 

I Can’t Believe My Parents Let Me Watch That, Part Two

Way back in February 2020, I wrote about how grateful I was that my parents looked the other way when, as a pre-teen, I stayed up on Friday and Saturday nights to watch my beloved sci-fi flicks and Universal horrors.

I’m sure they had some mild reservations about my viewing choices, and they weren’t above occasionally using TV privileges as a disciplinary tool, but at the same time, the attitude clearly was “so he’s watching old reruns of Dracula and Frankenstein-- how harmful can that be?”

And most of the time, they were right. By the time I started collecting copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland, paging through the dogeared issues while eagerly awaiting the next installment of the local creature feature, I was too old to be frightened by the classic monsters. It was a lot of fun watching them chase their victims around creepy cobwebbed castles and retro laboratories, but really scary they were not.

The Jasons, Freddies, and Michael Myers had quite a few more years to wait before a more relaxed, “oh, whatever” society allowed them to slice and dice their way across movie and TV screens.

When I was a kid, I was allowed to watch my late night monster
movies on one condition: I had to watch them in the basement.

By contrast, the classic monsters were born in an age of moral panic. In the 1920s, when Lon Chaney was thrilling audiences with his portrayals of The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame in Universal’s first horror cycle, studio moguls were worried that too many thrills -- especially in the form of Hollywood sex and murder scandals, played against a backdrop of scantily clad flappers -- were turning uptight mainstream America off of their products.

Even as Universal was gearing up for its second horror wave featuring Frankenstein and Dracula, Hollywood was attending to its image problem by developing the Motion Picture Production Code to stake out what was permissible and what was not for U.S. audiences. (The code was popularly known as the Hays Code, after Will H. Hays, first chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.)

By the time the Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula’s Daughter were done strutting their stuff, the Code was in full effect, and Universal took a few years off from monster-making before the lure of profits brought the monsters back in the form of Son of Frankenstein in 1939. The Code’s finger-wagging lasted until 1968, when it was replaced by the Motion Picture Association ratings system, which is still in force.

It’s testimony to the genius of the folks at Universal that they were able to navigate the moral panics and the Code to produce a series of horror films that were long on atmosphere but hardly contained a drop of blood, mostly suggesting violence rather than splashing it on the screen. Even in today’s over-the-top entertainment landscape, the relatively understated Universal monsters are still revered by some and recognizable to almost everyone.

I was barely a teenager when the MPAA ratings were introduced in 1968. Along with a cartoon, theatergoers at the time were treated to a short introduction to the new system, which replaced the Code’s pre-censorship of content with a scheme that theoretically prevented children from being exposed to rough content that was increasingly becoming the norm. The very first letter ratings were:

• Rated G: Suggested for general audiences.
• Rated M: Suggested for mature audiences - Parental discretion advised.
• Rated R: Restricted – persons under 16 not admitted, unless accompanied by parent or adult guardian.
• Rated X: Persons under 16 not admitted. [Wikipedia]

By 1968, there was plenty of rough content to be protected from. It was the beginning of the of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll era, with a good amount of blood mixed in. Independent filmmakers were finding that almost any kind of transgressive, youth-oriented subject matter translated into box office gold, so theater and drive-in screens started filling up with hot stewardesses and nurses, drug-crazed motorcycle gangs and LSD trips.

On the horror front, Hammer Films had spent the past decade spicing up the classic monsters with heaving bosoms and technicolor blood. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead upped the ante even further, introducing mainstream audiences to zombies munching on human body parts, forever changing what was acceptable to show in your neighborhood theater.

As with most revolutions, it only seemed like propriety and the conservative status quo had been toppled overnight. In reality, there were all kinds of rough and shocking scenes in movies leading up to the late ‘60s that made their way past censors, decency leagues and concerned parents, and eventually wound up on my cherished creature features.

The following are a few more examples of shocking scenes that I watched late at night, and paid for with fitful sleep and a few nightmares. They may not seem much by today’s horror standards, but each was a sort of building block leading to today’s “freedom” of expression. I survived them, and I’m better for it (I think).

Cosmic Monsters (aka The Strange World of Planet X; 1958)

At the time, Cosmic Monsters seemed like a perfectly innocuous big bug sci-fi movie, produced by the Brits on a nothing budget, and starring American C-list actor Forrest Tucker (who around the same time starred in such UK productions as The Abominable Snowman and The Crawling Eye).

The highlight of Cosmic Monsters features scenes of soldiers shooting at supposed giant insects, which consisted of insert shots of actual insects doing insecty sorts of things. However, two scenes grabbed my attention. In the first, protagonist Michele Dupont (Gaby André) gets tangled up in a giant spider’s web -- which of course had been done before, but in this version, the filmmakers cleverly integrated shots of Gaby with an actual spider jerking its legs around in real spider-time (not a lame-looking, slow-moving puppet), making for a more shuddery effect.

In the second, a large centipede-looking thing attacks a soldier and chews half of his face off -- needless to say, that got my attention. The only copies of the movie I’ve been able to find show only the aftermath of the giant bug attack, but my memory might not be so shaky after all. According to the movie’s IMDb page:

"The film was originally released in the UK in 1958 with an uncut 'X' certificate as 'The Strange World of Planet X (1958)'. It was then cut down to an 'A' certificate in 1960 and released as "The Strange World", and was missing some shots of Michelle trapped in a giant web and a dead man's face being eaten by an insect."

Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)

Speaking of getting caught up in a web of sci-fi intrigue, 20 years before Alien, Beast from Haunted Cave captured hapless humans and spun them up tight in huge webs in order to drain their lifeblood a little at a time.

The first time I saw the scene below, it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end (see my full review of Beast here). Beast from Haunted Cave was shot quick and cheap, but also delivered the stuff of real nightmares.

The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959)

While The Monster of Piedras Blancas is a poor man’s Creature from the Black Lagoon, it is far from the worst Creature imitator. In spite of the low budget, the producers managed to get Jack Kevan, who had worked on the original Creature suit, to cobble together the Piedras Blancas monster from parts scavenged from other productions (see more about how the suit was created here). The end result is pretty effective.

Nevertheless, the filmmakers decided that they needed something more than a cool suit to lure jaded teenagers to the drive-in, so they gave their creature a predilection for **GULP** decapitating its victims before feasting on them.

The Hypnotic Eye (1960)

This one is really rough, and in retrospect, it’s amazing that by the time I turned 13, I had seen Hypnotic Eye at least twice. The disturbing plot revolves around women in deep trances mutilating themselves with common household appliances and chemicals. Investigators find a common thread: they all had attended a stage hypnotist show and were volunteer subjects.

The film immediately gets down to business with one such incident. It’s perhaps all the more disturbing that, despite the low budget, the movie is well made, with more than a few stylishly suspenseful moments.

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)

In addition to adding copious amounts of blood and boobs to cinematic vampire lore, Hammer Studios transformed Dracula from a smooth, refined nobleman who patiently lured his victims into his trap like a human spider, to a frenetic, bloody-eyed monster who could scarcely wait to put the bite on his prey.

The culmination of Hammer’s feral Dracula was Prince of Darkness, in which Christopher Lee plays the part with silent ferocity, stalking his unwary guests more like a wolf than a spider. The way in which the Count is resurrected was a big eye-opener for me, the first time I had seen a human being trussed up like a side of beef and sacrificed in such a horrific way.

How to Make a Monster: FFB’s Low Budget Creature Effects Awards

Now that the slow, rolling train wreck that was this year’s Academy Awards is finally over, the Governors or whatever they call themselves must be breathing a heavy sigh of relief. Profiles in courage they were not. First, to address the show’s declining viewership, they tried to introduce a new “Popular Film” category. They backed down when social media exploded with derision. Next, they picked popular comedic actor Kevin Hart to host. The social media warriors immediately dug up dirt to prove that he was a normal human being who makes mistakes, and he was gone. Finally, adding insult to injury, they proposed offloading the cinematography and editing awards from the live show to a few seconds of tape, and once again they backed down after a tidal wave of indignation (rightly so, of course).

“Ladies and gentlemen, by technical knockout in the third round, your winner and new world champion, Social Mediaaaaa!!!!!!”

"I don't think I can last another round -- those tweets are so mean!"

I do feel sorry for the Academy. It’s an impossible task to try to please everyone -- fans, critics, industry types, the show’s advertisers, etc. IMHO, their biggest challenge is the growing chasm between the big budget, big effects, big box office movies that are loved the world over, and the smaller, character-driven dramas that dominate the major awards but that relatively few people see.

Lumping something like Roma or Green Book with Black Panther in one Best Picture category is like comparing apples and elephants. Ultimately, I think the Best Picture category needs to diversify, but instead of “Popular” (which focuses too much on marketing and box office), they should go in the direction of the Golden Globes, with possibly three best pictures in such major genres as Action, Drama, and Comedy/Musical.

Even with the current status quo, the popular big effects movies do have their own sort of best picture award -- Best Visual Effects. (Interestingly, the Academy delivered something of a rebuff to comic books and sci-fi this year, as the award went to the docudrama First Man. Damien Chazelle’s biopic of Neil Armstrong was nominated in various technical categories, but was shut out of the major awards. In spite of some initial positive press, a fact-based movie about white men with crew cuts flying phallic-like rockets to the moon was/is distinctly out of step with current Hollywood culture. On the other hand, it seems the effects artists voting in this category rightly acknowledged that recreating authentic spaceflight on the big screen has its own set of challenges, perhaps even greater in some ways than creating a complete fantasy world.)

Obviously, this is a collective, not an individual’s award. A veritable army of highly talented artists and technicians, backed by big bucks, labors months on end to bring fantasy worlds and action heroics to life.

Before CGI helped sci-fi and fantasy action dominate the movie market, filmmakers with ambitious visions still had quite an array of tools on hand, from mechanical props and foam rubber appliances, to stop motion photography, mattes and optical printers. But they could scarcely imagine how computers would transform the business to the point that anything someone could dream up could be vividly and realistically depicted on the screen. Or how much money would flow into sci-fi and comic book adaptations -- genres that in their time were often disreputable and threadbare.

Of course, this blog specializes in just those disreputable and threadbare movies of old that against all odds, still have a fan base to this very day. In the spirit of the recently concluded film awards season, I’d like to honor the special effects maestros who didn’t have wads of cash or supercomputers to work with, but still managed to create some of the more memorably weird creatures of ‘50s sci-fi with the equivalent of chewing gum and baling wire (and lots of foam rubber).

Without further ado, here are my nominees for Outstanding Achievement in 1950s Low Budget Sci-fi Creature Effects:

Nominee: Paul Blaisdell
Film: It Conquered the World (1956)
Creature: Beulah, the Venusian vegetable monster

Paul Blaisdell was the premier wizard of low budget effects in the ‘50s, responsible for some of the weirdest, most imaginative monsters of the pre-CGI era. He was a sort of one man effects shop, designing and fashioning props, mechanical creatures and monster suits, and then operating and/or wearing them on camera.

He worked so cheaply and reliably that he was the go to monster maker for Roger Corman and American International Pictures, creating such unforgettable menaces as Marty the Mutant from Day the World Ended (1955) and the surrealistic She-Creature (1956).

"I wonder if I still have that recipe for Venusian vegetable soup?"

Perhaps his most outlandish creation is the titular monster of It Conquered the World, which he affectionately dubbed “Beulah.” The film is about a Venusian creature that establishes radio contact with an earth scientist (Lee Van Cleef), who, believing the advanced alien intends to bring peace and prosperity to the world, unwittingly helps it to establish mind control over key government people in order to subjugate the planet.

In his biography Paul Blaisdell, Monster Maker (McFarland, 1997), author Randy Palmer relates that, in developing the concept of the Venusian menace, Blaisdell, director Roger Corman and American International Pictures president Jim Nicholson all agreed that a creature from Venus’s particular environment and gravity “should naturally be built low to the ground.” But Blaisdell took the conception even farther, and Palmer quotes him at length:

At that time the belief about the physiognomy of Venus was that it was hot, humid and conducive to plant life but not too well suited to animal life. If anybody would care to think it out, there is a kind of vegetation we have right here on earth that you wouldn’t particularly feel like fooling around with… something that grows in the darkness and dampness, something that might grow on the planet Venus. Something that might, in lieu of animal life, develop an intelligence of its own. … It would move like a perambulating plant, but it would not move very far. When it wanted to conduct direct action, it would send out small creatures which it would give birth to, and they would do its dirty work. (p. 65)

The result looks like nothing else from ‘50s sci-fi. Purportedly, when actress Beverly Garland first set eyes on the creature, she responded with a sarcastic “That conquered the world?!”  The press also got in on the action, referring to it as the “cucumber” from space.

However, “Beulah” got its revenge on the set.

According to the script, Garland’s character uses a Winchester rifle to fill the monster full of lead in between lines of dialogue, but ends up perishing in its lethal grasp. To help Blaisdell play the scene, Corman stationed two prop men below the camera lens who would help maneuver the costume’s monstrous arms into the frame. The first take was ruined when one of them misjudged the target and smacked Garland square in the chest with those oversized pincers. (Palmer, pp. 70-71)

Beulah is truly a one-of-a-kind monster next to all the rubber-suited humanoids and giant insects and dinosaurs that rampaged across drive-in screens in the '50s. After you get over your initial instinct to snicker, her distinctive WTF! ugliness commands attention. She reputedly was director Roger Corman’s favorite of all of Blaisdell’s creations.

Nominees: K.L. Ruppel and Baron Florenz von Nordhoff
Film: Fiend Without a Face (1958)
Creatures: The brain creatures

This category would not be complete without a stop-motion animated monster, and Fiend Without a Face delivers a ghastly gaggle of repulsive animated creatures that make your skin crawl even as another part of your brain is marveling at how ridiculous they are.

At a military nuclear research facility in Canada, Major Cummings (Marshall Thompson) has his hands full when several local townspeople die under mysterious circumstances and people start blaming the facility. At the same time, the facility experiences inexplicable power drains on the nuclear reactor. It seems a local scientist is hijacking the facility’s power in order to conduct experiments on turning thought into material form. What could go wrong?

The brain creatures dial up the suspense in Fiend Without a Face.

 The terrifying mind-into-matter creatures were the brainchildren (pun intended) of German effects specialists K.L. Ruppel and Baron Florenz von Nordhoff. The duo managed to pull off some amazing stop motion effects using the SFX equivalent of a low rent Frankenstein’s laboratory. In his book Cheap Tricks and Class Acts (McFarland, 1996), John “J.J.” Johnson quoted from an old Fangoria magazine interview with the film’s producer John Croydon:

The entire maze [Ruppel’s studio] was a mixture of an aircraft control panel and a computer. Each button controlled a selsyn motor, used primarily for the activation of aircraft rudders and flaps on an early motion-control principle, refined years later by George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic. To these were attached wires which, in turn, activated a single movement of a fiend: to raise the head, to make it stand on its tail, to fasten its feelers beneath the wooden boards barricading the windows, to pick up and withdraw a hammer left on the sill. Ruppel had carefully timed the movements of the fiends to coincide with the camera shutter. The creature models were linked up with the camera in such a way that a single small movement of a fiend was photographed on two frames of film. … It was a long laborious process, taking three weeks to accomplish, but once this footage was combined with live-action through rear projection and blue-backing traveling mattes, the results were fantastically realistic. (pp. 72-73)

The beauty of the brain creatures is that when you first see them -- naked brains with insect-like antennae and spinal cord tails -- you want to guffaw. But when they wrap their tails around the necks of the horrified victims, they suddenly aren’t so ridiculous. This alone makes Fiend Without a Face one of the more memorable minor classics of the ‘50s.

Nominee: Richard Cassarino
Film: The Hideous Sun Demon (1958)
Creature: The reptilian Sun Demon

Although The Hideous Sun Demon had an ultra-low budget somewhat south of $50,000, it boasts one of the coolest (and yes, most hideous) creature masks in a decade that swarmed with all manner of foam rubber horrors.

"Do you want pepperoni or mushrooms on your pizza?"

The Sun Demon was born when B actor extraordinaire Robert Clarke, noting the box office success of the cheap-as-dirt The Astounding She-Monster (1957) he had recently starred in, decided that he could do just as well producing his own monster movie.

He had the idea to do a sci-fi variant on the classic Jekyll and Hyde story, but instead of a serum, it’s accidental exposure to radiation that turns the mild mannered scientist into a ravening monster. Another story kicker is that as a result of chromosomal damage to his body, the protagonist only changes into a monster when exposed to the sun.

In an interview with Tom Weaver (Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers, McFarland, 1988), Clarke revealed that he had thrown in $5000 of his own money to get the project started. To keep costs down, he recruited non-professional actors, used students from nearby U.S.C. as crew members, and shot the film on weekends. He also got a screamin’ deal on the monster mask and suit (although at the time it seemed like a huge cost):

For us it was a major expense -- five hundred bucks is what it cost. I went to see Jack Kevan, the fellow who did Creature from the Black Lagoon, and he said, ‘To make what you want, I would charge you at least $2,000.’ He was not overpricing it, but luckily I found this fellow Richard Cassarino, who was a film buff and sometimes-actor. … The suit was made on the base of a skin diving wetsuit, and it was hotter than blue blazes! It was so hot that my perspiration ran down my body and [laughs] into my trunk area, shall we say, and during the fight we got so much energy going that one of the still shots shows me standing up there with this wet appearance -- it looks like I couldn’t make it to the men’s room... (p. 86)

Although overall the film looks as cheap as its budget and the acting is variable at best, the hideous, reptilian Sun Demon looks way, way cooler and scarier than its $500 cost would suggest.

Nominees: Herman Townsley and Howard Weeks
Film: The Angry Red Planet (1959)
Creature: The Rat-Bat-Spider-Crab

When I first saw Angry Red Planet at about the age of 9 or 10, I was mesmerized by it. It had everything a sci-fi fan could want: a needle-nosed spaceship, wisecracking astronauts, a beautiful red-haired scientist-astronaut (Nora Hayden), a weird, glowing red Martian landscape (thanks to Cinemagic!), and monsters galore. There was a gelatinous blob with a huge rotating eye, a three-eyed Martian, and best of all, the unique Rat-Bat-Spider-Crab that towered over the terrified space travelers.

This hybrid horror was designed by effects supervisor Herman Townsley and brought to fruition by model maker Howard Weeks. It required a lot of finesse and “fly by the seat of your pants” ingenuity to pull off the ambitious creature sequence. In his biography of director Ib Melchior (Ib Melchior: Man of Imagination, Midnight Marquee Press, 2000) Robert Skotak notes how tricky it was to make the lightweight Rat-Bat-Spider puppet convincing for the big screen:

Known for his invisible wire work, Townsley had solved the problem of visible strings on the batrat puppet by casting the critter in the lightest weight resin known, allowing him to use superfine wires coated with a patented acid he’d developed, which eliminated the metallic reflections. Even the the whole thing, -- complete with monkey fur -- hardly weighed a couple of ounces, Townsley had faced knotty physics problems in working out the delicate weight-to-support ratios… Howard Weeks, who had created the effects for the low budget The Man from Planet X in the early ‘50s, employed a double ‘flying T’ rig to operate the creature, but, unfortunately, found the nearly weightless marionette had a bouncy quality that was difficult to eliminate in only one or two takes… He hired marionette maestro Bob Baker to help operate it. (pp. 110-111)

It’s a good thing that the crew found a way to make it all work within the limited budget, as it’s the most memorable scene in the film. And befitting his status as the lead attraction, Rat-Bat-Spidey is featured prominently on most versions of the film’s poster.

Nominee: Jack Kevan
Film: The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959)
Creature: A Poor Man’s Creature from the Black Lagoon

Like the Hideous Sun Demon, this nomination is all about the suit. While Robert Clarke found Jack Kevan to be a little too pricey for his production, the producers of The Monster of Piedras Blancas scored a coup in enlisting Kevan to work up their creature suit. Kevan had not only been involved in helping to create The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), he also lent his talents to such sci-fi classics as It Came from Outer Space (1953) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957).

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy..."

The Piedras Blancas creature was partially built, Frankenstein-like, from other body parts. The Metaluna Mutant of This Island Earth (1955) contributed his feet and torso, and the huge claws came from The Mole People (1956).

Even with borrowed body parts, the monster has its own distinctive, gruesome look. The producers, perhaps feeling that a cool suit by itself wouldn’t bring audiences flocking to the drive-in, upped the gore factor considerably -- the monster likes nothing better than to decapitate its meals before eating them.

In his survey of American sci-fi films of the 1950s and early ‘60s Keep Watching the Skies (McFarland, 1982), Bill Warren compared the Piedras Blancas monster with its obvious inspiration, The Creature from the Black Lagoon:

Certainly the design … isn’t as interesting or as logical as those for the 1950s Universal monsters, although it is well-constructed. … The Monster … is in the ‘diplovertubron’ family, and was ‘created at the bottom of the sea.’ An amphibious ‘mutation of the reptilian family,’ he deserves comparison with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Gill-Man. And on the basis of reasonableness, the Monster doesn’t measure up to the Gill-Man. The Creature, of course, is unlikely, but has an overall logic: to protect against the water, the eyes are shielded and glassy; it has a mouth like a frog, and no nose at all; there are highly visible gills; the hands and feet are webbed. While it plays hob with any know ideas of adaptability to the water, it has its own logic, and is such a plausible design that creators of amphibious monsters, whether for comic books, film or TV, have to work hard to make their monsters not look like the Gill-Man. It’s that persuasive and logical. (pp. 319-320)

Again, like the Hideous Sun Demon, the film suffers from cheap production values, but in the end is redeemed by an ultra-cool member of the Gill-Man family.

And the winner is:

"I only have eyes for you." Paul Blaisdell with his creation.

Paul Blaisdell for his freakish, yet endearing creation Beulah. She is both an imaginative suit and a mechanical contrivance. Some may disparage Beulah for her cartoonish appearance, but she is the result of Blaisdell’s thoughtfulness about what sort of a creature might evolve on a planet with extreme atmospheric pressures and gravity.

Ib Melchior, the director of The Angry Red Planet, was also an advocate of not just creating fearsome-looking monsters, but making them plausible:

To me, if you design a creature that lives in a world that is bathed under two suns, and you design a creature with huge eyes -- it’s nonsense. Its eyes would be tiny. … It seems most people just design these monsters which don’t bear any relationship to where they come from. Same thing if you design a creature that comes from a planet with 10 times the Earth’s gravity and you give it long, spindly legs. You don’t do that. They would be squat. This is what I object to in monster design, that there is no relationship between what they [look like] and their environment. (Skotak, p. 114)

There’s no record that Ib ever saw Beulah, but I think he would have approved.