azathothpwiggins Test animals are shot into space, returning to crash-land just off the coast of Africa. Oh no! Native people are being attacked by some unknown creatures! Giant, buzzy bugs are on the move, sending humans and animals alike, fleeing in all directions! This occurs in the jungle of the title. Dr. Quent Brady (Jim Davis) finds out about the chaos, and sets out for the continent. He's convinced that r-a-d-i-a-t-i-o-n is to blame. A safari is organized, and Brady and company wait before beginning their arduous trek. Meanwhile, others perish needlessly. After three weeks (!), the safari finally gets underway. This is one long, drawn out safari! These people are walking 400 miles! Thankfully, tons of wild animal stock footage and Brady's dull narration stand in for any real excitement! Lots more walking takes place. Enough walking to make even the viewer's feet hurt! Where are those big bugs when we need them? The safari plods on, burning up valuable film time. Various hardships strike, having nothing to do w/ monsters. Still more walking. An outpost is reached. Brady enjoys an organ recital in the bush. On and on it goes. By the time the group arrives at their destination, it hardly matters. MONSTER FROM GREEN HELL is an endurance test, much like holding hot coals in your hand. A must for the movie masochist! The pain is exquisite! EXTRA POINTS: For the cheeeze-tastic, jumbo-sized, mutated wasps. Their fleeting appearances are the only joy to be found here...

Michael O'Keefe A typical 1950's Science Fiction flick; thrills are cheap and radiation takes the blame for mutated creatures. Low budget indeed, some footage seems to come from other films. But when your mind is set on watching a low budget movie perfectly fit for the drive-in theater, MONSTER FROM GREEN HELL will suffice. Dr. Quent Brady(Jim Davis)experiments with sending animals and insects into space. A testing rocket containing wasps more than exceeds its flight limits, but lands in a mystery location. When giant wasps are reported terrorizing natives near the location of Green Hell in Africa, Brady and fellow scientist Dan Morgan(Robert Griffin)fly TWA to Africa to investigate. Maybe these giant wasps are related to the cosmic radiation picked in deep space flight. Makes a whole lotta sense when you're a young kid paying to be frightened. Others in the cast: Vladimir Sokoloff, Barbara Turner and Joel Fluellen.

bkoganbing Before Jim Davis got his last and career part as Jock Ewing in Dallas, he had one tortured path to Hollywood success. He had a much publicized debut as Bette Davis's leading man in Winter Meeting which was one of her worst films. His portrayal of a war hero about to enter the priesthood met with a ton of critical guffaws. Still Davis persisted and took any kind of work. The Monster from Green Hell qualifies as any kind of work.A wasp is sent up in space to see the effects. Unfortunately on re-entry the space capsule crashes in the region of West Africa and the wasp has grown to the size of a Panzer tank. To top it all off the geniuses sending up the rocket sent up a pregnant queen so we've got all kinds of those Panzer wasps running around Africa.Jim Davis is sent to clean up the mess and runs into a medical missionary played by Vladimir Sokoloff. Albert Schweitzer was very much alive at the time and running his mission in West Africa. No one in 1958 mistook who Sokoloff was portraying. The wasps set up a colony in the shadow of a volcano. You can figure out the rest.This is typical Fifties science fiction when all kinds of radiation was the explanation for these creatures. In this case it was the radiation from cosmic rays, presumably from the newly discovered Van Allen belt around the earth. Tepid acting and chintzy special effects make The Monster from Green Hell great cult stuff. One thing though that is timely. An Arab character played by Eduardo Ciannelli joins forces with Davis and one of the natives Joel Fluellen to combat the danger the giant wasps present. Amazing how religious differences can suddenly melt away in time of crisis.

sol ******SPOILERS****** Coming back from outer space a rocket launched from the southern part of the United States crashes into the African continent with a Queen Wasp. The wasp was on the rocket to see how it would react to the weightlessness and cosmic rays from space. The Queen Wasp grew thousands of times it's size forming a hornet's nest at the base of a volcano in an area of the jungle known by the local natives as "Green Hell". The movie "Monster from Green Hell" follows the usual pattern of monster movies made in the 1950's with one major exception. The giant wasps are done in not by mankind technology but by the forces of nature via an volcanic eruption that buries them in a river of lava. Meager special effects but better then average acting for a low-budget monster film made "Monster from Green Hell" watchable for the 70 odd minutes that it's on the screen. All the efforts to find and destroy that wasps in the movie turned out to be for nothing since all that had to be done was to let nature run it's course.Cheap and unconvincing effects made the giant wasps look and act ridicules in their attacks on the natives and safari members with the real action highlight in the movie was an attack by thousands of native warriors on the safari. Those scenes was far more effective and scary then any of the giant wasp attacks. Good acting by Jim Davis and Robert E. Griffin as the two American doctors on the safari with Joel Feuellen and Eduardo Ciannelli as their native and Arab guides with Vladimir Skoloff, who ended up killed by the wasps off screen. There's also in the movie Barbara Turner as Skoloff's young daughter who looked and sounded like a young Igrid Bergman. The special effects of the giant wasps was only so/so but there was a very good scene with a giant wasp battling it out with a large python that was a lot like the scene in "King Kong" between the giant ape fighting with a pre-historic snake-like creature. The last five minutes or so of the movie was shot with an beige or orange tint to give the volcanic eruption at the end of the film a fiery look to it.