Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Consider this: an early sixties Roger Corman monster movie spoof made in three days is regularly recreated in high schools across North America. This is but one result of the unexpected cultural nexus point that is Little Shop of Horrors, a previous site subject transformed into an off-Broadway musical in 1982 and then adapted into a new film in 1986. These roots are long and deep: both versions were produced by David Geffen, and written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, whose work here would get them the job of reinventing Disney’s animated musicals starting with The Little Mermaid; meanwhile, the film attracted the directing talent of Jim Henson’s (sometimes literal) right hand man Frank Oz, who brought a team of Muppets-trained effects team (including the design work of Lyle Conway, a veteran of films like The Dark Crystal) to give new cinematic life to the stage musical’s central charismatic flora. It really does feel like a decade’s worth of legendary figures in the entertainment industry came out to produce this—which, again, is based on a low budget monster movie.

Swamp Thing (1982)

1982 turned out to be one of the most influential years in genre filmmaking, hosting movies that reverberated whether they were an initial box office success or not. In a time when ET, Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and Poltergeist all premiered within weeks of each other, there was also John Carpenter’s The Thing, a critical and financial failure at the time that nonetheless ushered in a new wave of revisionist monster movies, taking the ideas from the classic creature features of the fifties and revitalizing them with dark humour and special effects that realized or exceeded people’s imaginations. Later that same year you also saw Q -The Winged Serpent, another movie in that vein, but the real kick-off for this trend was Wes Craven’s adaptation of Swamp Thing—and while just as indebted to the classic tropes of the old monster movies as The Thing (and was also a financial disappointment at release, leaving Craven in career doldrums until he started working on something called A Nightmare on Elm Street), it represents a very different sort of revisionist take. While The Thing took the paranoia and unknowable monstrosity of its fifties predecessor (and the short story it’s based on) to its utmost extreme, Swamp Thing is a movie about a tragic accident of science, as many of the classic monsters were, who then becomes a hero, playing into the sympathies of a whole generation who questioned why the Creature From the Black Lagoon and Frankenstein had to die before the movie ended.

Blood Tide (1982)

I’ve already seen a few monster movies based around the eternal, extremely generalized struggle of good vs. evil—see The Creeping Flesh—and also a few that do the same thing while also contrasting Christianity with pre-Christian beliefs—see Viy—so I was prepared for what Blood Tide had on offer. There is obviously something very Wicker Man about the set-up here: outsiders intruding into an isolated place where the old beliefs still hold sway, maybe inviting a terror upon themselves with their unwariness, maybe being pulled in by destiny—certainly they both have a village full of people who are maybe outside the mainstream and are thus entirely suspicious. Substitute the British Isles with the Greek Isles and have the human sacrifice come with a monster, and you’ve got a pretty good idea. Those themes and the choice of location provides an atmosphere for this movie, one that helps it straddle the line between early eighties horror schlock and maybe a more serious kind of horror schlock.

Attack Of The Super Monsters (1982)

I’ve written about Ultraman studio Tsuburaya Productions’ strange, two-and-a-half decade long wilderness period in brief before, and after all this time I still don’t know much about what really went on in that time. I do know that the seventies Oil Crisis made the costs of many kaiju/tokusatsu productions untenable, and heavily contributed to the cessation of both the Ultraman and Godzilla franchises at the time. During the Ultra series’ hiatus, Tsuburaya tried a few different directions, such as providing special effects for overseas productions (see: The Bermuda Depths), monster-less sci-fi series (Star Wolf, which was adapted into MST3K favourite Alien Fugitive), and, probably the strangest and most intriguing style of all, combining miniatures and suit acting with animation. Among those late-seventies oddities was a trilogy of dinosaur-themed series (albeit, only the first two were hybrids, and the third one was purely live action), the middle entry being Dinosaur War Izenborg, which ran 39 episodes from 1977-1978 on Japanese TV. In many ways, Izenborg feels like an attempt to get back to Tsuburaya’s bread-and-butter, with a military science team tasked to defend Earth from giant monsters using fantastical vehicles, with an added superhero element—but this time, our human heroes are all animated (with that side provided by multiple studios, including the very prolific Studio Deen), either existing in an equally animated space or contrasted heavily by live action photographed backgrounds (it’s about as equally realistic in either case.) This makes it probably one of the most aesthetically jarring pieces of tokusatsu media you’re likely to find.

Of course, if you actually read the title of this post, you’ll notice that I’m not actually writing about Dinosaur War Izenborg, which is not readily available in English (although it was apparently quite successful in both Italy and Saudi Arabia, with financial backers from the latter helping to put together a documentary about the show released in 2016), but Attack of the Super Monsters, an English-dubbed “film” version, which is four episodes of the show stitched together to get it to feature length, released in North America in the early eighties. As we saw back in the Serendipity entry, dubbing and awkwardly editing a TV series into a straight-to-video movie was all the rage in the heydays of VHS. Super Monsters is probably even more blatant in its Frankensteined nature than Serendipity, thanks mostly to the formulaic nature of its original context, with each “segment” having the exact same structure, with multiple instances of reused footage—probably not the way the producers of Izenborg wanted it to be seen. On the other hand, the format also highlights and enhances the already ridiculous nature of the show, creating an experience that is both repetitive but also sometimes enjoyably silly.

THOUGHTS ON Q – THE WINGED SERPENT

•As advertised, the outstanding element of this movie is Michael Moriarty’s performance, a never-ending bundle of tics and tone changes, like he’s playing an insane adult toddler (one of the highlights of the whole movie is the one-on-one between him and Carradine in the diner, where you get Moriarty demanding to get a picture with Rupert Murdoch, but also being casually racist because he’s pissy about how Richard Roundtree’s cop character manhandles him.) It’s a uniquely bonkers thing to see, you genuinely never know in what direction he’s going – the point of this character is that he gets involved with stuff way over his head and never seems sure how to react, except when he sees it directly benefiting him, but Moriarty takes that way further than that, making someone who is pathetic and unhinged and it’s not clear if he knows it or not. Most movies of this type wish they had an anchor as entertaining as him.

•Meanwhile, David Carradine barely seems to take the movie he’s in seriously at all (he probably didn’t), and his reactions are often as subdued as Moriarty’s are exaggerated. This kind of works for his own role, though – the whole god/monster complex this movie is working through needs him to be sort of the ultimate agnostic, someone who’s interested in seeing whether this supposed god is the real deal, primarily by filling it full of bullets. The ritual killings subplot doesn’t really connect to the main story that strongly, but it’s such a weird idea and gives the story a whole other layer to deal with. So just because he seems kind of laid back considering all the people being decapitated and/or having their skin flayed, he’s still invested in his own way.

•There’s lots of aerial shots of New York (obviously), and those and a lot of the street scenes really give off a lovably scuzzy vibe for the city throughout this movie – all crowded streets and dilapidation and people being jerks (really enhances the legitimacy of the scenes of raining blood and people getting being decapitated by a flying lizard.) I’m unfortunately not boned up on my NYC history, but this feels like a specific snapshot of the city at the time, all the more interesting because it’s one of several monster movies set there (for homework, compare and contrast between this, Kong ’76, and Ghostbusters.)

•The stop-motion effects for the monster are fine, but Harryhausen they are not – though, there’s a likeable quality to how chintzy they can be. The monster itself looks cool and is animated well, and the obvious dolls used when it throws people off of buildings feels almost like a throwback to the original King Kong – they also don’t show us the whole thing enough (though it is all during the day, bucking the usual sfx shortcuts) for it to be distracting, spending most of the movie in brief cuts. I do love the way they animated the thing’s shadow – it’s certainly not realistic, but man is it stylish.

•The best moment aside from Moriarty’s Murdoch lines are when the mime is revealed to be an undercover cop.

•After a certain point Q seems to stop eating people and starts instead tossing them off buildings, which seems like not very good survival tactics?

•Speaking of homages to King Kong, of course the movie ends with the bullet-riddled beast falling to its death off a building (according to the director, the whole movie was partially an attempt to give the Chrysler Building its own monster.) This follows closely behind the first remake of King Kong, and in a way rebukes it – that movie was more violent than the original but still posits Kong as the victim without any subtlety, and this movie is EVEN more violent and has no sympathy for the monster whatsoever! Despite the fact that it was clearly just an animal trying to survive and care for its young, it doesn’t belong so it needs to die. Good thing it’s not a god, just a monster – what kind of god has babies?