Plot: A mostly immobile Boris Karloff stars as a scientist (you can tell, because he sits at a desk in front of a periodic table) who tests a long-gestating theory by sending a party to look for life that might thrive at high temperatures underground. Somehow communicating with the party via rotary phone, he's pleased when their discovery seems to bear out his theory and they return with an apparently living slab of rock bathed in an eerie glow. Less pleasing: What it takes to keep the rock alive and happy. Unfortunately…
Key scenes: …it lives on human fear. So Karloff must ask his associates to lure women of easy virtue to the lab, watch through air-conditioning grates as they strip down to their underwear, then draw them into underground chambers where they're tortured and convinced that they're about to become human sacrifices. (Hey, man, it's all in the name of science.) It all goes swimmingly until a few women get scared to death. Then the rock creature decides to cut out the middleman.
Can easily be distinguished by: It's one of four movies a dying Karloff made simultaneously for a Mexican producer in the late '60s, but it's the only one with a living rock.
Sign that it was made in 1973: The rock creature's victims include a stripper wearing go-go boots. Also, all science is conducted in rooms filled with blinking lights and wall-sized reel-to-reel tape recorders.
Timeless message: Rocks may look innocent, but who knows, they might be fear-sucking beasties.
Memorable quotes: When a colleague suggests Karloff confirm his theories with outside experts, there's no arguing with the airtight logic of his response: "Experts? Experts once thought the world was flat."
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