Monolith Monsters

Monolith Monsters (2006)

This one from last year came from fuzzy recollections of a sci-film I saw as a kid. It centered on a "monster" that was formed from many jagged, rocky monoliths growing and crashing in an unending cycle. The sleepy desert town of the main characters was in danger of being pulverized into monolith residue.

From written with the brain of a rock Wikipedia:

A meteor crashes near a small town in the American desert southwest. One of a pair of geologists finds a piece of it in a roadway and, not recognizing the mineral, takes it back to their laboratory to study. In the morning his partner finds the lab wrecked and the man himself petrified, completely drained of fluid. It is eventually determined that the substance composing the meteor is susceptible to water. If wetted it grows into black, crystal-like shafts which absorb all available liquid nearby, including from any animals or humans who come in contact with it. Once all water is absorbed and grown to its fullest possible height, the shaft becomes dormant, but may easily totter and collapse, shattering into a legion of fragments, waiting to grow entire new shafts at the next contact with water. The original meteor has also shattered all about the area where it crashed. A local schoolgirl on a field trip takes a piece home and puts it in water ... her farmhouse is later found demolished, and the girl near death. She's rushed to the city and kept barely alive in an iron lung. The big problem for the town is a rain storm is on the way.... Our hero races time to find a treatment for the little girl and protect the town from the onslaught of the towering, destructive Monolith Monsters.

Lower left corner detail of Monolith Monsters

Naturally, it all works out in the end. If my memory holds up, I think saline solution negated the regeneration process of the shafts of spiked charcoal.

But I don't recall the hero peeling out from Walgreen's with a dump truck filled with nasal spray.

Today, he'd be swarmed by state troopers and taken away for questioning on suspicion of running a meth lab.

As the desert southwest ever so slowly is reduced to a Kingsford graveyard...

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