Decades Before M. Night Shyamalan, This Horror Movie Turned Trees Into Boogeymen

A good half-century before M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening revealed that the mass suicides threatening to wipe out the Earth’s population weren’t the result of biological warfare or extra-terrestrial invasion, but simply some mightily peeved conifers, Hollywood witnessed a bizarre boom for similarly ridiculous B-movies about killer trees.

Celebrating its 60th anniversary today, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters was one of the last to plant itself in theaters, arriving long after the likes of The Day of the Triffids, From Hell It Came, and Womaneater had made Mother Nature the boogeyman. And yet thanks to its illogical narrative leaps, dollar store special effects, and on-the-nose dialogue (“That’s the heartbeat of a man in mortal terror!”), not to mention that the most convincing performance emerges from an adorable canine, it feels more like a leftover from ‘50s Ed Wood.

The production’s behind-the-scenes drama, far more compelling than anything that appeared on screen, wasn’t exactly conducive to sci-fi gold. Original director Michael A. Hoey was so embarrassed about the look of the tree monsters, arguing producer Jack Broder had “hired some guy who did them for $1.98,” that he tried to hide them in low light before walking off the project altogether.

Fearing for their future career prospects, the cast almost followed suit when they learned the film’s original title, The Monster from Earth’s End — named after the Murray Leinster novel it was adapting — had been changed to the far schlockier The Navy vs. the Night Monsters. Determined to make a 90-minute movie he could sell to television, Broder appointed action-adventure hero Jon Hall (The Hurricane) and Arthur Pierce, director of its double-bill partner Women of the Prehistoric Planet, to add to Hoey’s 78-minute cut. Unfortunately, their extra footage is like watching a tree grow.

Hoey, best-known for writing Elvis films Live a Little, Love a Little and Stay Away, Joe, needn’t have worried about the monsters looking like a bunch of mop heads attached to a coat stand. Chances are, most viewers will have already nodded off by the time they lumber into shot thanks to an overly talkative, exposition-filled opening blatantly designed to fill time. “It completely ruined the premise of what I had in mind,” Hoey later claimed about the monotonous workplace scenes set within a U.S. Navy weather station. To be fair, the rest of The Navy vs. the Night Monsters is hardly thrill-a-minute fare, either.

The story finally gets going when a C-47 transporting the findings of an Antarctic expedition crash-lands on the South Pacific’s Gow Island, blocking its only runway and destroying the only form of communication to the outside world. A team of scientists and medics discovers that everyone other than the shellshocked pilot is mysteriously absent, but that the creche of penguins and numerous prehistoric trees dug up from the glacial landscapes have survived (although the former, sadly, don’t last long).

“The Botanical Society will have us for murder,” says one of the experts about their decision to plant the trees on the island, but it’s not the environmentalists they have to be wary of. Soon, with a little help from a tropical storm, the prehistoric fauna start killing off residents at night, first by engulfing them with their branches and then by spewing an acidic residue that dissolves their skin.

Wisely, the film leaves most of the death scenes to the imagination. Even two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Stanley Cortez can’t make the static, hastily assembled greenery look anything other than laughable. To its credit, the sound design is far more effective, with the eerie whistling the monsters emit proving the adage that what you can’t see is always scarier than what you can. Things get surprisingly brutal, too, when one tree rips a sailor’s arm off out of its socket in the kind of gruesome violence you’d expect from a modern slasher.

In fact, the film’s tone is all over the place. A completely uninvolving romantic subplot between Anthony Eisley’s Lieutenant Charlie Brown (yes, really) and nurse Nora Hall (Mamie Van Doren) resembles a Carry On-esque bawdy sex comedy. “I put her in a tight sweater and a pair of slacks about 50 percent of the time,” Hoey later admitted about his blatant sexualization of the latter, a blonde bombshell once tipped to become the new Marilyn Monroe, and who only took on the role as a favor to uncredited producer Roger Corman.

And after meteorologist Spaulding’s (John Wayne regular Edward Faulkner) Molotov cocktails reveal that fire is the trees’ kryptonite (who could have guessed?) and radio contact is restored, the movie goes all Apocalypse Now as several military jets come to the rescue, dropping napalm to nuke the pesky perennials into oblivion. Never mind that the gung-ho display is clearly composed of some particularly egregious stock footage.

Interestingly, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters hasn’t been reevaluated as a cult classic, perhaps because, a handful of dodgy costumed scenes aside, it’s not campy, distinctive, or flat-out terrible enough to warrant repeated viewings. It’s worth one late-night watch, but ultimately, there’s nothing here to rival Mark Wahlberg pleading with a plastic plant.

The Navy vs. the Night Monsters is streaming on Tubi.