The Mole People: Virgil W. Vogel

I've begun to notice an amusing trend among some cheap B-movies from the 50s.  Occasionally these low-budget creature features will try and convince the audience of its story's credibility by giving science lectures insisting that there is some modicum of truth to them.  My all-time favorite example is from Nathan Juran's The Deadly Mantis (1957), a film about a giant praying mantis which bizarrely begins with a mini-documentary about the function and construction of the United States' radar defenses in Canada.  But Virgil W. Vogel's The Mole People also tries to justify its story through "science."  The film starts with a literal science lecture by Dr. Frank Baxter, a real-life English professor from the University of Southern California, who explains various hollow earth theories by John Symmes and Cyrus Teed.  Of course, the audience desperately needs this information since the ensuing film is about underground Sumerian albinos and their slave race of humanoid mole men.  Anyhow, The Mole People is a deliriously preposterous film about two archaeologists, Dr. Roger Bentley and Dr. Jud Bellamin, who discover this underground world during an expedition. They are immediately mistaken as Messengers of Ishtar due to their flashlights.  So, for a time, the scientists enjoy a regal life. But then one of their number is killed by one of the mole people. So the scientists must escape from the subterranean civilization before they are sacrificed to the ominously titled "Eye of Ishtar." And, of course, this being a 50s B-movie, they must also escape with Adad, a beautiful woman from the caves born with natural Caucasian skin.  The Mole People is a ridiculously absurd film.  Perhaps it would have been more enjoyable if the movie didn't try so hard to convince us that the idea of an underground race of ancient Sumerians was scientifically possible.  Still, it does have the occasional enjoyable moment. I love the actual design of the mole people and the way they seem to swim in and out of the very ground itself.  But other than that, The Mole People is just a silly, silly movie.

5/10