Too many fans seem to be blown away

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Expected more

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

I'd never heard of this one until yesterday, and now I find out that Mario Bava was involved too. That's nice, seeing as I've just watched Baron Blood. This is a proper creature feature, and the creature featured is one of my favourites – a man-eating blob!This one is called Caltiki and our very white scientists discover him while mooching around some Mayan ruins looking for some cool jewellery to pawn at the local Cash Converters. We begin with one scientist staggering back to the camp, howling about Caltiki and how his mate has gone missing. Our other scientists (one is our square-jawed, married hero and the other a snivelling snidey guy who's hitting on our hero's wife) go looking for the missing guy and find some camera footage, which makes the film turn in Cannibal Holocaust for a couple of minutes.The film shows the two guys finding a cave revealed by a recent volcanic eruption which leads to a temple to Caltiki. Suddenly, they are attacked by some unknown creature, which prompts the rest of the expedition to head down there and instantly forget about finding the missing guy after they find a huge stash of gold at the bottom of an underground lake. Dismissing the many, many skeletons lying around, a diver goes for the gold, gets attacked, and comes back to the surface minus his face. As the huge blob Caltiki attacks the rest of them, the snidey guy tries to get the gold and gets all the skin from his arm dissolved. Our hero is having none of it and drives a truck full of gas into the cave, cooking Caltiki and saving the day. However, this is only fifteen minutes into the film, so maybe everyone should start worrying about that small piece of blob stuck to that guy's melted arm…and the fact that the guy's going nuts…and the radioactive comet that's passing by Earth (don't dwell too much on that plot point or you'll go nuts).I wasn't expecting too much from a horror film made in 1959, but I was wrong. Freda (or Bava, depending who actually made it) knew that if you have a giant blob, you've got to have it eat people, fight the military, and destroy things, so that's what they have Caltiki do here. The special effects are quite well done (using tripe…very Roman!) and there's a lot of miniature effects on display too. There's the added bonus of the film only being seventy-five minutes long.Giacomo Rossi-Stuart appears as a professors assistant who is dubbed with a rather camp voice and is there mainly to explain the strange comet sub-plot which barely makes any sense. Talking about not making any sense, I'm not sure quite what forced the professor to swerve off a cliff (unless it really was because he was thinking too much about the blob), and I'm also not sure why the military were dispatched before the hero could convince the cops there was such a thing as a giant man- eating blob.Nice!

Archaeologists investigating some Mayan ruins come across a blob-like monster. They manage to destroy it with fire, but keep a sample. Meanwhile, a comet is due to pass close to the Earth - the same comet passed near the Earth at the time the Mayan civilization mysteriously collapsed. Coincidence? As the story goes, director Riccardo Freda intentionally dropped out of the production early on in order to allow his cinematographer (Mario Bava) to take over and get the first film under his belt as director. Whether this is accurate is unknown, and ultimately neither of them ended up taking credit, the director being some pseudonym. What makes this historically important is that, of course, today Bava is celebrated and Freda is much lesser-known outside of hard-core movie geek circles. Though we have to credit Freda for "The Horrible Dr. Hichcock" (1962) and "The Ghost" (1963), both starring Barbara Steele, as well as the under-appreciated "Tragic Ceremony", it is Bava who is considered the father of Italian genre cinema.Now, "Caltiki" is not a perfect film. Most noticeably, the film or camera used did not allow for a high amount of contrast. Some scenes, particularly the darker ones, make it hard to see exactly what it is we are supposed to be seeing. But this is made up for with the ingenuity of the slime monster. Even knowing that it is "tripe", it still has a very effective appearance and the growing / splitting movements are quite good. Comparisons to "The Blob" (1958) are inevitable, but this film and its effects are plenty strong enough to be more than a cheap knock-off. Even the makeup on Max (Gerard Herter in his debut) looks great, far better than Italian horror films are often given credit for.As noted by others more knowledgeable than myself, "Caltiki" was given a successful run on a string of double and triple bills by Allied Artists in America, but has been largely elusive on TV and home video with only a couple of token VHS appearances in Europe. The first official DVD release came from NoShame as a Region 2 Italian release in 2007. Those of us in Region 1 territory had to settle for poor quality bootlegs from a mid-quality original.The Arrow Video Blu-ray is packed tighter than a clown car, and is sure to be one of the most sought after releases of 2017. We have a new audio commentary by Bava expert Tim Lucas, as well as a new audio commentary by the other major Bava expert, Troy Howarth. One commentary probably would have sufficed, but we got the best of both worlds here. And that is just the beginning. There is "From Quatermass to Caltiki", a new discussion with author and critic Kim Newman on the influence of classic monster movies on Caltiki. We get "Riccardo Freda, Forgotten Master", an archival interview with critic Stefano Della Casa and "The Genesis of Caltiki", an archival interview with filmmaker Luigi Cozzi. And, just to put the cherry on top, an archival introduction to the film by Stefano Della Casa.Fellow reviewer Dan Day writes, "I have a feeling this Blu-ray is going to wind up on my annual top five list at the end of the year." I whole-heartedly concur. A Blu-ray of a little-known film from a beloved cult director packed with extras? No doubt this will be a must-have for many fantastic film buffs and may likely even get a Rondo nomination.

Caltiki has some connection to the Mayans. The monster is a big bag of jelly that has the ability to ingest human flesh. The plot has to do with a cave and lots of gold and trying to deal with this thing. I remember that the monster is amorphous, unlike the blob which was more like a congealed wad of bubble gum. The production value on this one is really lacking, but, in fairness, they probably only had a few bucks and a coupled months to pull it off. As is usually the case, people do lots of stupid things as they encounter this menace. I feel sad now that we have become so jaded that we can't produce a tacky equivalent to this. It would never make the screen.

I'm not a big fan of fifties monster movies in general, but this one is pretty decent. The film was directed by Riccardo Freda, although he was going under the pseudonym 'Robert Hamton' in order to fool audiences into thinking that the film was an American picture. The film does take obvious influence from the American monster movies and is similar in style, plot and execution; and actually credit does have to go to Freda in that respect as if it wasn't for the awful dubbing, one would have no reason to think that this wasn't an American film. The plot is rather well worked and focuses on the demise of the Mayan civilisation. We focus on a team of archaeologists studying some ancient Mayan ruins when they come across a cave which houses a lake. After diving into the lake, they discover that it is full of gold; although things go a bit awry when they also find out that the lake is inhabited by an ancient blob-like monster. They end up taking part of the creature back to the lab where upon studying it, they realise it could threaten the whole world...It was unveiled that many of the films which Riccardo Freda took credit for were actually directed by his young apprentice, Mario Bava - and Caltiki is one of those films. I have no idea how much of the film was directed by Bava, but I'd hesitantly say that I think it was mostly done by Freda as the film does not feature much in the way of Bava's trademark styling's; although in truth the filming style is all very by the numbers and there's not a lot of room for stylish visuals. The plot is well done, however, and is certainly more inventive than I thought it might be. The special effects are not particularly spectacular; though they certainly are serviceable for the type of film and are used well. There are a handful of good ideas on display - the fate that awaits a particularly greedy archaeologist being one of the best parts of it. The film tries to a bit spectacular towards the end, and it does work somewhat, although many of the American pictures did the spectacular ending better. Still, this is a decent little monster movie and I'm sure fans of this stuff will enjoy it.