The Monster of Piedras Blancas/Fun Facts

From The Grindhouse Cinema Database

< The Monster of Piedras Blancas

Piedrasblancasff.jpg

  • Piedras Blancas actually exists. It's a town on the central California coast, and it does have a lighthouse that was used in this film, but only for exterior shots. Incidentally,'Piedras Blancas' is Spanish for 'White Rocks.'
  • The monster suit looks like the one from Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), mainly because the creator of The Creature, Jack Kevan, produced and supervised the make-up effects on the film. Much is credited to Universal-International's standard make-up credit of Bud Westmore, but he had little to do (other than posing for publicity photos) with the great monsters from that studio in the '50's.
  • The hands of the monster were the same as those props used in The Mole People (1956).
  • The Monster of Piedras Blancas was the movie the used for the drive in scene in Grease: Live
  • The Monster of Piedras Blancas was showing during the drive-in movie scene of the 2016 live broadcast of Grease on Fox.
  • The exterior and interior lighthouse location used in the film is the Point Conception Lighthouse in California. The same location was used in the 1980 film series Brave New World, directed by Burt Brinckerhoff and based on Aldous Huxley's best known 1932 novel 'Brave New World'.
  • The Monster is realistically described as member of the real-world Diplovertebron family. Diplovertebrons were an extinct genus of Anthracosauria (Labyrinthodont) that lived in the Late Carboniferous period (Moscovian) some 300 million years ago. They were medium-sized amphibians, 60 cm in length, with triangular shaped skulls similar in look to crocodiles. Newspaper reports of fossil examples found in Pennsylvania during the late 1950s may have inspired the scriptwriter.
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