Surprisingly, in over five years of writing about monster movies, I have never covered anything from the indefatigable Lloyd Kaufman and his company Troma Entertainment, whose run of intentionally over-the-top exploitation splatter comedies are certainly something of note in the realm of B-movies (if nothing else, a few famous filmmakers like James Gunn got their start there.) If Troma’s usual shtick is to take puerile content to its extreme for the sake of laughs, as typified by The Toxic Avenger, then writer-director Bob Dhalin’s Monster in the Closet is something of a pivot, an attempt to do a horror-comedy that’s borderline family friendly—which in practice means no gore and only one pair of naked breasts. That’s real restraint on their part! In place of the usual exploitation fare is a take on the average monster thriller—a little fifties melodrama and a little eighties grunge—that is maybe possibly a bit sillier than usual.
The Movie Monster Game, well, it’s a game about movie monsters. Released in 1986 (the same year as the even more famous giant monster game Rampage) for the Apple II and Commodore 64 and developed by Epyx, a company that gained a name for itself in the eighties PC game space with titles like Impossible Mission and California Games, it comes from a very different epoch than the previous giant monster-based game I’ve written about, a strange and experimental time when game design didn’t always have clear rules, and where a degree of abstraction was still present as a game could only convey so much visual information (Epyx’s earlier giant monster title, Crush, Crumble and Chomp!, a strategy game released in 1981, provides an even primitive-looking example.) Despite that, The Movie Monster Game actually shares a lot in common with later entries in this category, especially in the presentation–decades before War of the Monsterssurrounded itself with a nostalgic metafiction wrapper, Epyx went even further, not just basing its menus around a movie theatre motif (complete with “trailers” for other Epyx games that appear before you begin playing), but structuring their game as essentially a movie you construct from various component parts pulled from numerous giant monster movies across the subgenre’s history. Even this far back, you can see that the artifice of these stomp-em-ups, and the context of the audience itself, was considered an indelible part of the experience.
That’s all well and good, but there’s a major advantage that The Movie Monster Game has that even later creature feature games could not pull off: alongside a group of “original” monsters that directly homage specific movies and tropes, they managed to officially licence Godzilla from Toho, putting the King of the Monsters prominently on the package for all to see, and making it the first video game released outside of Japan to feature him. Epyx was not an unknown company in 1986, but even so, getting the sometimes fickle Toho to lend out their star monster to an American game developer at that point still seems like a feat (it is equally surprising that they agreed to let Godzilla and Pals appear in the recent indie brawler GigaBash, a game that I still intend to play.) This was not long after the release of The Return of Godzilla (and its English release Godzilla 1985), which at least put it outside the lowest periods for the franchise, and leads me to believe that this collaboration was not an act of desperation–maybe they were just feeling generous. In any case, Godzilla’s fully approved presence in something with as definitive a title as The Movie Monster Game certainly gives it an air of legitimacy.
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.
Okay, gang, it’s time to talk about Clive Barker. In the eighties, Stephen King contributed the highly-publicized pull quote “I have seen the future of horror…his name is Clive Barker”, based primarily on Barker’s six-volume short story collection The Books of Blood, which were published in 1984 and 1985. Among the stories first seen in those collections were classics like “The Midnight Meat Train” and “The Forbidden”, the latter the basis for the film Candyman—but it was a story in the third volume, “Rawhead Rex”, that ended up becoming the first of Barker’s works to make it to the big screen, with a script by the author himself and direction by George Pavlou, who had collaborated with Barker earlier on the 1985 horror film Underworld (aka Transmutation.) Unfortunately for Barker, this early stab did not go off as he hoped.
The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witchhas had me thinking about horror stories for children on and off for the last few months—that was a movie that completely homed in on a very specific kind of dread aimed squarely at kids, the sense of a family in collapse, the people you love suddenly turning against you, or authority figures simply not listening. An older and influential movie in that vein is Invaders From Mars, an early entry in the 1950s Science Fiction film boom that was apparently made in a rush in order to beat the George Pal-produced War of the Worlds to theatres (giving it the distinction as the first colour alien movie in American theatres)—it’s a smaller film, very clearly, but trades the spectacle of the bigger alien invasion movies with a nightmare scenario that aims squarely at the kids in the audience, utilizing many of the same triggers that Snake Girl eventually would. Although it might come off as hokey to modern audiences at times, its sometimes very inventive concepts scarred/inspired a generation of genre film fans—and to prove that, we need only look at the fact that one of the most influential horror directors of all time remade it in the mid-eighties, attempting to retain its atmosphere while updating its visuals to appeal to a modern audience.
The last time I wrote about something in the orbit of UK comics writer Pat Mills, it was the seventies sharksterpiece Hook Jaw, and he wasn’t even the writer on that (although if you know anything about British comics of that time, you’d know that the editor could still be very, very hands on with the writing)—and there’s still plenty to mine from Mills’ own credited work inside and outside 2000 AD, the comic that he helped define. He has had an incredibly varied career in fifty-plus years, but his genre work specifically has a number of idiosyncrasies that give them a genuinely unique blend of unabashed over-the-top absurdity and thinly-veiled ideology. Comics like ABC Warriors and Nemesis The Warlock are sci-fi action stories that are also heavily anarchist in nature, contemptuous of authority and sympathetic towards the lower classes of society, but also feature morally ambiguous anti-heroes; there is also a strain of Mills’ work based on the conflict between nature and humanity where the story’s sympathies lie almost entirely with nature, as seen in the series Flesh, Shako, and of course, Hook Jaw. To Mills, the true nature of the animal world is sheer brutality, but that’s also what makes it fascinating, and also a fun subject to base comics around.
Mills’ comics also benefit from his close friendship with some of the UK’s best artists, particularly Kevin O’Neill, whose combination of baroque design and cartoon expressiveness/exaggeration makes him perfect for stories about robots and monsters, both subjects that Mills returns to quite frequently. After co-creating ABC Warriors and Nemesis (O’Neill would cede regular art duties on both after a while), the two produced the comic Metalzoic, originally published in 1986 as part of DC Comics’ original graphic novels line and reprinted as a serial in 2000 AD after that (it is currently out of print, as DC apparently nixed a reprint several years ago.) Metalzoic feels like a dedicated vehicle for O’Neill’s knowingly ridiculous design sensibility and Mills’ pet themes about nature (and his general disregard for actual science): here is a story where the machinery created by man is left to fill an ecological void, artificial life taking over for the biological kind in the most direct way possible—and it is very clearly a world that we are supposed to like on some level.
With the cult success of their film Re-Animator, director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna (alongside co-writer Dennis Paoli) cemented their status as the top cinematic translators of HP Lovecraft’s influential horror stories—which was really not that hard to do, considering that there was only a handful of Lovecraft-based films before them (such as Die, Monster, Die!), and none of them were particularly notable. Maybe the atmosphere of boundary-pushing and the increasing sophistication of special effects found in eighties horror films is what made adapting Lovecraft’s existential abominations seem more attainable, and the Gordon/Yuzna line of movies do capture the sense of strangeness and dread that defined those stories that the ones made in the shadow of Hammer-style Gothic horror did not. At the same time, the other things that define Stuart and Yuzna’s movies are a comedy streak and a perverted parody of sexuality that are very much not found within the more repressed words of Lovecraft’s pulp fiction—they get the spirit of the thing, but bring plenty of their own spirit as well.
The team’s immediate follow-up to Re-Animator, once again distributed by Charles Band’s Empire Pictures (it’s funny to consider that Gordon’s style of film, while vastly superior, is not entirely dissimilar from Band’s usual effects-based schlock, stuff like Ghoulies and the roughly 400,000 Puppet Master and Evil Bong movies) and starring Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, adapted a lesser-known early story by Lovecraft, one whose simple story proved rife with possibility. From Beyond leans less in the overt comedy direction of it predecessor—although it certainly indulges in some ridiculousness, which is always part of the appeal of these movies—but goes more towards the mind-bending otherworldly implications. Just beneath the surface of our rational reality are inexplicable things, and if we were to get a glimpse of what is lurking just outside our senses, then sanity goes right out the window—that’s the recurring theme of Lovecraftian fiction, and this movie uses it as a vehicle not just for very eighties gory and gooey practical effects, but to really get into some of its creators’ other pet themes as well, producing a rather joyously disgusting deep dive into madness.
Back in the King of the Monstersentry, I lamented the paltry number of giant monster games made over the years, and also how few of them are truly exceptional in any way. The closest thing to a generally no-caveats success in this category probably was Peter Jackson’s King Kong, the tie-in game to 2005’s Kong remake: maybe it’s just because it was one of the more polished releases around the time the Xbox 360 debuted, or maybe the novelty of splitting gameplay between the first-person shooter human sections and smashing dinosaurs as Kong himself was simply appealing, but that game was the one that has received the highest regards. It does feel appropriate that the most well-received giant monster game is based around the original giant movie monster, even if he only stars in about half of it (they do include an alternate happy ending, though)—even more so when you consider that while there have only been a few King Kong games, the character has had an outsized influence over video games as a whole…I mean, Donkey Kong is all that needs to be said, right?
But there have been a few King Kong games aside from the ones based on the Peter Jackson movie. The one with the strangest history released close to twenty years before that: King Kong 2: Ikari no Megaton Punch (which translates to “The Furious Megaton Punch”), published on the Japanese Famicom (that’s the NES, just so you know) in 1986 by Konami. How does this one to earn the title of “King Kong 2” (not even Son of Kong got that honour), you ask? That’s actually the Japanese title for King Kong Lives, the reviled follow-up to the Dino De Laurentiis remake, made years after anyone cared—Lives is the Jaws: The Revenge of King Kong movies. Considering what an amazing flop the film was, how costly the license probably was, and how early in the lifespan of the NES this released, it’s pretty understandable why Ikari no Megaton Punch never made it over to English-speaking countries, despite the minimal amount of text in the game, which would have made localization a snap. Also considering that it released mere months after Castlevania in Japan, that probably made it much less of a priority. Still, this tie in to the worst King Kong movie turned out to be way weirder and more ambitious that you’d think, so it does deserve a place in the discussion of giant monster games.
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