Popcorn Crunchers, Reel 31 Trivia Quiz

Answer: a blob of radioactive glowing mud

The creature comes out at night. It glows because everybody knows that radioactive things glow and it is radioactive. It is amorphous and one scientist compares it to a mass of mud. In search of radioactive substances, it terrorizes a Scots village. When fed with radioactive stuff, it grows.

Answer: Night of the Mummy

"Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy" (1955) involves an Egyptian mummy named Klaris. Both "The Aztec Mummy" (1957) and "The Curse of the Aztec Mummy" (1957) involve a Mexican mummy named Popoca. Blue Beard Entertainment introduced a board game called "Night of the Mummy" in 2022. An episode (Season 2, Episode 16) of the R.L. Stine television programme "The Haunting Hour" was titled "Night of the Mummy" (2012). Grosset & Dunlap published an illustrated juvenile novel by Tracey West in the Batman series titled "Night of the Mummy" (2010).

But there does not appear to have been a 1950s motion picture named "Night of the Mummy".

Answer: run over by a motor car

The "Americanized version" of "The Aztec Mummy" (1957), released in the US as "Attack of the Mayan Mummy" in 1963), follows the plot of the original rather closely. In the end, however, there is a great difference. The mummy Popoca kills one of the scientists, kidnaps the beautiful girl, and carries her away on a dark highway. He is killed by being hit by a passing automobile.

Answer: Ava Gardner

American Commander Dwight Towers lost his wife and children, living in Connecticut, to radiation sickness. Peter Holmes, the Royal Australian Navy liaison to the SSN Sawfish, and his wife, introduce Towers to their friend Moira Davidson and hesitating romance follows. Davidson was played by Ava Gardner.

Answer: They spread out on the ice to determine its shape.

When the party comes upon the space ship, it is buried in ice. It appears to have been so hot on impact that it melted the ice which then refroze over the top of it. They spread out to determine its shape and discover they are standing in a circle.

Answer: a novel by H.G. Wells

In "Beginning of the End," locusts/grasshoppers eat irradiated food of remarkable size then grow themselves to remarkable size, with remarkable hunger, to match. In H.G. Wells' 1904 novel "The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth", two scientists develop a food which, when fed to children, causes them to grow to remarkable size.

There were two motion pictures based on Wells' novel: "The Food of the Gods" (1976) and "The Food of the Gods II" (1989). While "Beginning of the End" is not plagiarized, the similarities in theme are themselves remarkable.

Answer: Gargons, rather like giant lobsters

The mission of the aliens on the flying saucer in "Teenagers from Outer Space" is to destroy humans and replace them with grazing enormous lobsters called Gargons.

Answer: acting

Joseph Cotten (1905-1994) starred in "From the Earth to the Moon" (1958) as Victor Barbicane. Cotten was an American actor in motion pictures, on the radio, on television and on stage. His roles were mostly of the handsome leading man sort but he had science-fiction and horror film credits for "Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte" (1964), "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" (1971), "Lady Frankenstein" (1971), "The Screaming Woman" (1972), "Baron Blood" (1972), "The Devil's Daughter" (1973), and "The Hearse" (1980).

Answer: in the New Mexico desert and L.A.

The premise of "Them!" was that nuclear testing had caused common ants to mutate to enormous size. The film was set in the deserts of New Mexico because the US had so many nuclear-bomb test sites there, e.g. the Trinity Site and the Carlsbad site. The desert scenes were shot around Palmdale in the Mojave Desert; the city sites were shot in the storm drains and spillways of the Los Angeles River between the First and Seventh Street Bridges, to the east of the city's center.

Answer: Uranium deposits disabled their equipment.

The search party flies in a DC-3. The same large field of uranium ore which disabled the guidance system on the missing rocket disables the electronics in their airplane. Their on-board Geiger counters go crazy, indicating a large source of radiation nearby. They crash land in the vicinity of the rocket's crash landing. All survive the crash.