"The Navy vs. the Night Monsters" (1966) Quiz

Answer: Gow Island in the South Pacific

Gow Island is a small fictional island in the South Pacific. It is located 600 miles north of the Antarctic ice cap. A US Navy meteorological station is located there. The island is visited regularly by aircraft traveling to and from Antarctica to take on supplies and fuel. The narrator of "The Navy vs. the Night Monsters" says of it, "Gow Island, in the past virtually unknown to the rest of the world. Today, a famous landmark in man's struggle with the unknown. Another step forward in the march of science."

One John Gow, an Englishman, was hanged on 11 June 1725 for mutiny, murder, and piracy. His life was fictionalised by Daniel Defoe. Although he never took his ship, the Revenge, as far as the South Pacific, perhaps the author of the novel on which the movie was based wished to add a piratical name to his setting.

Answer: Gissell Bay, Antarctica

The radio operator at the US Naval Station on Gow Island receives a routine radio message from a transport plane arriving from Gissell Bay, Antarctica. The C-47 aircraft is cleared to land to refuel and take on provisions. It is carrying some penguins, some soil samples, and some Antarctic vegetation. The plane's crew sends an emergency message, shots are fired aloft and the airplane belly-lands at the naval facility, ejecting and scattering its cargo.

Answer: They were eaten or committed suicide.

The crew chief, Sandy, hears a thump in the cargo bay and goes back to see if the load has shifted. He screams and jumps out of the airplane. On the radio, the people at the naval weather station can hear screaming and shots being fired. When the plane crash-lands, the naval personnel look on board the damaged aircraft, and find only the pilot, who is in a state of shock unable to speak. All the others are missing.

In the event, it appears that the plants are prehistoric acid-squirting carnivores who eat humans, the penguins brought from Antarctica, the native birds on Gow Island and Ensign Rutherford Chandler's dog.

Answer: Mamie Van Doren

Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) starred in "Monkey Business" (1952) which is a science-fiction comedy. The film is about a research chemist who discovers a "fountain of youth" pill. Jayne Mansfield (1933-1967) does not appear to have ever been in a horror or science fiction motion picture. Raquel Welch (1940-2023), in addition to winning the title of Miss La Jolla as a teenager, played (in a fur bikini) in "One Million Years B.C." (1966), which was a remake of "One Million B.C." (1940). Mamie Van Doren (b. 1931) appeared in two horror/science fiction movies: "The Navy vs. the Night Monsters" (1966) and "Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women" (1968).

Answer: They were from the Hot Lakes region of Antarctica.

Scientists exploring Antarctica discovered an area of about three hundred square miles which is heated by lakes. The vegetation growing in this warmth is unknown anywhere else on the planet. This is why the scientists are bringing specimens of this plant life back to the United States for study, when their cargo plane crash lands on Gow Island.

The plants are removed to a warehouse until the biologist Dr. Arthur Beecham, played by Walter Sande, opines that they would do better if planted near the hot springs on the island.

His advice is accepted, the trees are planted, and they thrive ... too much.

Answer: They "walk" only in the dark.

The prehistoric poison-expectorating carnivorous trees in "The Navy vs. the Night Monsters" remain firmly rooted in the ground during the day. After sunset, they pull up their own roots and teeter off in search of food. They can feed in daylight but their mobility in the darkness is what makes them "night monsters." A scientist on the island says of them, "These plants are most extraordinary. They're a living fossil, based on a structure that is unknown in present vegetation."

Answer: the novel "The Monster from Earth's End" (1959)

There are plenty of plots in which immobile, non-sentient, beneficent plants gain the ability to move, the ability to think and a homicidal desire to ingest and digest people. The movies "Little Shop of Horrors" (1960, 1986) are a twist on this subgenre. "The Day of the Triffids" (1963) is based on John Wyndham's novel by the same name. "The Thing from Another World" is about a vegetable man from a flying saucer with a taste for the blood of sled dogs and humans. "From Hell It Came" is about a South Pacific island prince who is murdered and returns in the form of a mobile homicidal tree.

Murray Leinster (1896-1975) was an American science-fiction writer. His 1959 novel "The Monster from Earth's End" was adapted by Michael A. Hoey, who also directed the resulting film "The Navy vs. the Night Monsters."

Answer: Anthony Eisley

Anthony Eisley (1925-2003), wearing an aloha shirt or displaying his well-developed thoracic musculature, was a familiar part of the ABC weekly detective series "Hawaiian Eye." In "The Navy vs. the Night Monsters" (1966), he plays hunky Lieutenant Charles Brown, the commander of the US Naval Facility on Gow Island.

When they are not combating flesh-dissolving arboreous monsters, Brown and Navy Nurse Nora Hall, played by Mamie Van Doren, share a romantic interest. Eisley also played in "Journey to the Center of Time" (1967), "The Mighty Gorga" (1969), "Dracula vs. Frankenstein" (1971), "The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals" (1969), "Monstroid" (1980), "Deep Space" (1988), and "Evil Spirits" (1990).

Answer: He is dissolved and consumed by a tree.

The only crew member found alive on the crash-landed airplane is its pilot Miller. He is severely traumatized and unable to speak. The base doctor says he is in shock. Miller gets out of his infirmary bed and attacks Nurse Diane. He then attacks the person guarding the warehouse filled with the plants.

The guard knocks him out. Miller is sedated but wakes up and escapes the infirmary, headed for the trees' nesting area. He runs directly into a huge tree stump which dissolves him with acid and then eats him.

Answer: fire

Firearms were seemingly useless against the night monsters leading the civilian meteorologist Robert Spaulding, played by Edward Faulkner, to assemble some Molotov cocktails. Spaulding reasons that if the creatures are like trees, they ought to be combustible.

He is shortly able to test his hypothesis; he tosses a fire bomb at one of the attacking trees, and it keels over and burns. Radio contact, broken by the monsters' attack on the generator shack, is restored. Briefed on the situation, Admiral Knight orders an airstrike with fighter jets carrying both napalm and air-to-ground missiles.

The attack is coordinated from the control tower. The night monsters are incinerated in the conflagration.