One of the coolest of the 1950s sci-fi movies that I love so much is The Monolith Monsters, released in 1957.  Anyone who has ever grown crystals as a science project will appreciate the small alien rocks which land on Earth as meteorite bits and grow into gigantic monoliths (hence, the title) when exposed to water, fall over, shatter into hundreds of pieces and begin to grow again, destroying everything and everyone in their path.

The most famous science-fiction monsters are often humanoid in appearance and temperament, or bugs grown or evolved into tremendous size.  But my favorite monsters are those which come from basic galactic nature and cannot even comprehend human emotion.  The Blob, for instance (which always gets my vote for Best Alien), or the micro-organisms which are termed The Andromeda Strain.  The Monolith Monsters, which are actually just big rocks that can suck silica from a human body, thereby causing petrification, certainly qualify as naturally-occuring phenomena that, if left unchecked, could doom our civilization.  What a neat idea!

Like some of the best sci-fi films of the era, The Monolith Monsters is set in the desert of the American southwest.  While this location is not as creatively utilized as it is in It Came From Outer Space (1953) or Them (1954), the desert provides an apt, sensible and eerie point of origination for the alien invasion.

The minutia of small-town life forms the background for this tale; the main characters are the geologist (Grant Williams) who unlocks the secret of the stones, the local newspaper editor (Les Tremayne) who complains that local life is quite dull and a pretty school teacher (Lola Albright).  Yet it is this group of ordinary people, along with a handful of others, that face the danger from the rocks, evacuate the town and figure out a way to stop the mighty monoliths.  ✰ ✰ ✰.  (6:2).