terrible... so disappointed.

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

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...

Lame giant insect movie about irradiated wasps that grow to elephantine proportions and wreak havoc in Africa -- even if the title suggests South America. Big Jim Davis and some fellow scientists are testing the effects of cosmic rays on various creatures, which inadvertently results in the giant bees. About half the movie is stock footage, and the rest of the movie has Davis and crew standing around, talking, or walking about. Plus the giant bees just look plain silly, like floats in a parade. The middle of the movie is strictly padding, with Davis and crew trekking 400 miles across "Africa" (clearly California) to reach the giant bees' nest. Also, it's pretty sad when the only female in the movie is played by an actress you pray will keep fully clothed. Mercifully, she does.

Monster from Green Hell starts as a rocket is sent into space, scientists Dr. Quent Brady (Jim Davis) & Dan Morgan (Robert Griffin) are being paid good money to conduct research into the exposure of space to living animals, a rocket ship containing some Wasp's has gone missing & stayed in space for six months before crashing back to Earth somewhere in Africa. Quent is worried & newspaper headlines claiming of unrest in central Africa because of sightings of huge monsters does nothing to improve his mood, Quent suspects that the Wasp's aboard the rocket have mutated to an enormous size & are buzzing around Africa scaring the locals. Something must be done. Quent & Dan decide to go to Africa & discover the truth, unfortunately they need to hike through 400 miles of jungle to get to the location of the sightings but once they do their worst fears become a terrifying reality...Edited & directed by Kenneth G. Crane this cheap black and white late 50's sci-fi monster flick has a bad reputation & after watching it I can understand why, apart from the ridiculous monster Wasp's this thing drags badly which is odd considering it only lasts for 70 minutes. The main problem is that it starts off like a rocket with the mutant Wasp's making an early appearance but then the script slows right down & is padded to the extreme, once Quent lands in Africa the hike across 400 miles of jungle lasts for about forty minutes where next to nothing happens. The expedition run short of water, then it rains. A lot. They are attacked by native tribes & generally just walk around a lot as Quent narrates the story so copious amounts of stock footage can be used. Then during the final ten minutes the Wasp's show up again & are destroyed in a Volcanic eruption, why don't they just fly away? I mean don't Wasp's have wings? Can they not fly? Maybe I'm just thinking about this too much, yeah that's probably it. The character's are poor, there's no chemistry between any of them & not even the obligatory romance between the hero & leading lady. The scientist guy keeps referring to radiation but correct me if I am wrong I don't think there is any radiation in space? The film as a whole feels very dated, the scientific concepts used to explain plot points wouldn't convince a seven year old these days & it really does drag at times with a rather rushed climax.Lots & lots of stock footage is used in Monster from Green Hell, some of it quite nice & nicely edited into the final film but it does stand out all the same. Apparently some footage from Stanley and Livingstone (1939) starring Spencer Tracy was used. The special effects are predictably laughable, the toy Wasp's slowing move along with little wings which barely flap & plastic heads that just look so inanimate & stiff. The attacks aren't that good but there is a cool scene in which a mutant Wasp has a fight with a huge animated Python in easily the films best & most (only?) memorable sequence.Probably shot on no money in California with Bronson Canyon doubling up for the Green Hell of Africa, the whole film plods along with no great suspense or resolution. The acting is wooden as expected, I can't say that I personally recognized anyone in the cast.Monster from Green Hell is a pretty bad sci-fi horror giant insect film that as usual for this period blames radiation, the large amounts of stock footage & the tedious expedition through Africa slow things down to a crawl from which the film never really recovers. The giant Wasp's are also silly looking but kind of cool in a quaint way. I can't really recommend it but that giant Wasp versus Python fight was cool & I had a bit of fun with it, if not much.

Can you imagine the nerve of some people? What director dares to call his film "Monster from GREEN Hell" and then deliver a black & white movie? How we are even supposed to recognize this hell in between the rest of the colorless locations and scenery? Anyway, the basic premise of this movie is fairly simply: an American space rocket crash-lands somewhere in the middle of the African jungle and causes a plain ordinary wasp to mutate into a gigantic buzzing monster. Yes, of course, that's exactly what the radiation of a whole rocket does to the fauna & flora of a jungle … it mutates ONE … SINGLE … WASP! And this critter must look truly petrifying because even the animals in the stock footage run away. Have you ever wondered what a giant wasp looks like when appearing in a zero-budgeted 50's movie? Indeed it looks ridiculous, pitiable and funny and there's a good reason why they keep it off-screen for so long. Back to the story. Responsible as they are, the Americans send a team to Central Africa and destroy the monster. This is where "Monster from Green Hell" turns into a dreadfully boring movie for an even more dreadfully boring reason. Before the expedition reaches the monster's turf, they first have to undertake a 27 day long safari during which they encounter primitive tribes (primitive tribes big enough in number to fill the entire Chicago Cubs baseball stadium, by the way) and suffer human losses through lion attacks. They're even faced with poisoned drinking wells! Why the hell are there poisoned drinking wells? !? The environmental conditions are harsh as well. The expedition first struggles through weeks of drought and dehydration and then subsequently weeks of unceasing rainfall. I swear, at a certain point I even feared there would come a volcano eruption as well. People don't care about that in this sort of movies; they want to see the giant wasp eat obnoxious characters, damned! Anyway, all this just to illustrate that the mission is half dead by the time they reach the monster and YOU just sat and watched an hour of wilderness documentary footage even though you counted on seeing a Sci-Fi monster movie. There's a funny name for this sort of thing and it's "shenanigans!" The Americans haven't got an idea of how big the wasp monster is and all through their journey they keep guessing its size, unaware that it's about a hundred times bigger than they expect. "Monster from Green Hell" is a hopeless film. I used to think all monster flicks from the 1950's were solid gold, but lately I've seen a few titles that altered this impression; like this one and "Beast from Haunted Cave". The cast is politically correct enough, though. There's an American, a Latin American, an Arab, a black guy and a woman! Too bad there wasn't an Asian and an Eskimo; otherwise this would have been the ideal "United Colors of Benetton" campaign.