1)Atomic fallout from H-Bomb tests can turn crabs into crab monsters.

2)Crabs monsters cannot be killed with conventional weapons. Bullets and grenades bounce off them harmlessly. Knives pass through them “as if passing through mercury.”

3)The only way to kill a crab monster is with a crab’s only known weakness: electricity.

4)This is because crab monsters are “charged” with “negative energy.” The only way to destroy a crab monster is by creating a device that will shoot bursts of “positive energy.”

5)Should your positive energy machine break down, toppling a radio tower onto a crab monster works equally effectively.

6)Though mountains, caves, and whole islands can be destroyed by earthquakes and underground explosions, a well-built cabin can withstand even the strongest jolt. While the people inside make shake and lose their balance, the items on the cabin’s shelves will never slip, fall, or break.

7)Crab monsters consume every part of their victims, but they do not digest them. Rather they are incorporated whole into their being. The victim’s brain merges with the crab monsters brain.

8)Thus, crab monsters can speak using the voices of those they’ve killed.

9)When luring others into a crab monster trap, crab monsters prefer to speak in the voice of a portly French scientist as dimwitted American scientists are 15% more likely to walk into a trap sprung by a portly French scientist than by scientists of other nationalities.

10)Crab monsters leave normal size crabs all over their crime scenes, possibly in an attempt to frame normal crabs for their misdeeds.

Even as science fiction, these are hard notions to swallow. ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS follows the exploits of an expedition of scientists who head to an island to investigate the disappearance of some other scientists who were there to investigate the impact of H-Bomb fallout on local geology. The crab monsters are a good indication of the wonders nuclear radiation is doing for the environment.

Besides the overabundance of sci-fi nonsense, CRAB MONSTERS’ greatest assets are its petulant titular monsters. Though they do kill a couple of scientists through the traditional beat-stuff-with-your claw method, they much prefer to use fiendish psychological trickery. As we’ve established, these crab monsters can assume the identity - in voice only - of anyone they kill, and they use this talent to lure unsuspecting victims out to caves and pits and other perilous locations for pitch black powwows.

Don’t confuse these crabs and their Michael Winslow caliber vocal talents for a truly efficient killing method. After all, they can’t imitate the person’s appearance, only their voice. For these late night rendezvous with death to work, the victims need to be rock stupid; willing to accept that a man previously thought dead is not only still alive, but now capable of throwing his voice over huge distances. What’s worse, the arrogant crab monsters feel so assured of their powers they give themselves away by talking in third person. “Awake Martha!” a crab monster cries at one point. “It is McClane!” Somehow, dense Martha - allegedly one of a team of brilliant atomic age scientists - actually accepts that McClane, a man who has been dead for weeks has returned to life and is now speaking to her via magic telephone. And he constantly calls himself “McClane!” Martha, please. Take a deep breath. Stop and think. C’mon, crab monster, it’s right there.

The best crab monster moment comes late in the film after the humans have tried a full-frontal assault on the creature with only marginal success. Climbing over a ridge in an unconvincing effect, the beast howls, “So! You wounded me! And I must crow a new claw! Well and good, for I can do it in a day! But will you grow new lives when I have taken yours from you?” Those are some clever intimidation tactics from the crab monsters. And it works well on this bunch of humans, who don’t appear to posses the intelligence necessary to double-knot their shoelaces. One pair of night watchmen who are killed early on are alerted from their post by a strange clack-clack-clacking sound (Crab claws, you see). One turns to the other and says, “Sounds like a kid dragging a stick across a picket fence!” The other nods and responds, “We don’t have no picket fences out here!” Before these two intellectual titans can scour the island for a picket fence, they are felled by the crab monster.