Beast of 20,000 Fathoms: Being a fan of Kaiju, I figured I should at least give some American Giant Monster movie classics ago...well, at least ONE...that wasn't King Kong...so why not go with the one that basically started the Atomic Radiation Monster Movie bang of the 50s, actually predating the original Godzilla by a year!?
Special effects were pretty damn good for the time; Stop Motion effects have really aged a lot better than you'd think. I figured the fact that the movie is significantly before Clash of the Titans (also Ray Harryhausen), it'd be notably inferior and clunkier, but...no, the monster was very smooth and looked almost real at times.
Otherwise...well...first off, the Romance stuff needed to die. It was pointless and added like an extra 5 minutes to the movie! Yes, I know; Hollywood = ROMANCE IS A MUST, doesn't mean I can't rag on it, especially when it feels forced! Damn B-movies *shakes fist*
I guess it deserves props for an original idea...FOR THE TIME. And the way the monster was geared as a threat in a way more than "its a Monster" was a nice touch too ("ok, we can wound the thing but its blood causes DISEASES? Crap, we die either way!") which led to Radioactive Isotope Grenade Gun! Yeah, I dunno where I'm going with this.
Lastly, being the 50s, I naturally expected lots of Cold War undertones, with the Monster being Russia/Communism and what not. I didn't quite pick up on how it was suppose to be that barring one line here and there like "This is war against a modern enemy!"
...then I actually looked at the name of the monster's fictional race (couldn't quite get a good hearing of it in the movie; they say it all of like 3 times).
"Rhedosaurus"
...yeah, any doubts about it not being a personification of COMMUNIST RUSSIA kind of went out the window at that point <.<
So yeah, guess its good for what it was; not amazing, but passable enough. The fact that it was basically the first of its era certainly gives it points, since it didn't really have anything to feed off of.
I will note, however, that despite the idea between the two movies being the same, Godzilla King of the Monsters is very much NOT like this. The visuals, the underlying theme, the way the destruction is presented, what have you...they're all so different. Anyone who claims that Godzilla is a rip off of Beast of 20,000 Fathoms needs to shove it, cause the two are different enough, and really just run off the same basic idea of "Nuclear Bomb -> Giant Lizard Monster."