It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987)

Some nine years after It Lives Again, Larry Cohen returned to his monster movie debut for one final bow—but this was Cohen returning after expanding his repertoire and innovating in the genre in the eighties, first with Q – The Winged Serpent and then The Stuff, both classics in their own right. The increasingly over-the-top and comedy-infused styles of those movie do in fact continue in It’s Alive III—sometimes in very direct ways, considering the actors involved—keeping it in line with Cohen’s eighties filmography; at the same time, it develops many of the themes and emotional beats that made the original It’s Alive and its supplementary first sequel into something genuinely special. Yes, these movies about murderous mutant babies carry all the marks of schlock genius, but as weird as it sounds, they also have a heart, and that makes something like Island of the Alive stand out just as much as…well, everything else in it.

Hellraiser (1987)

Maybe not surprisingly, I often determine Creature Classics subjects by asking the question “How often does this get ripped off?” Sometimes it’s not even in terms of ideas, but visuals—and you know you’ve struck some kind of nerve if disparate bits of culture liberally borrow your visual style for years afterwards. I think that’s more of the case with the original 1987 Hellraiser: not many people are doing their own take on the movie’s sadomasochistic themes, but they sure love all those chains and the stylishly leather-clad & mutilated demons that serve as the movie’s monster mascots (yes, even kids cartoons have taken a cue from them.) But, really, the visuals of those monster mascots in their first appearance—let’s just ignore the rest of the disjointed franchise, it’ll save us all a lot of time and a lot of headaches—are tied directly into that theme, creating a sui generis horror aesthetic based in the discomforting interweaving of extreme physical sensations, blending sex and pain in a way few other horror movies do, even when they are otherwise filled with both.

King Kung Fu (1976/1987)

It’s December and you can already hear the sound of carols filling the air, which means it’s time for another round of Christmas Apes—and the seventies are at it again with yet another low budget King Kong parody, and one with a history as strange as the previous ones. King Kung Fu was a project by local Wichita, Kansas filmmakers Bob Walterschied (producer) and Lance D. Hayes (writer/director) that they hoped would potentially bring the movie business to their state, but after filming from 1974 to 1976 (when they hoped to take advantage of the King Kong remake’s premier), they ran out of money before they could finish editing the movie. It was eventually completed and had a very small theatrical run in 1987, and who did they hire as editor in the end? Why, it was Herbert L. Strock, director of previous subject Gog. Funny how that works out.

You saw the title, so you can probably tell that this is a movie that combines Kong with the martial arts movies that were also popular at the time, but in reality this is meant to be a vehicle for extremely goofy comedy, another pre-Airplane spoof that tries hard to live up to its live action cartoon potential. I’ve always thought that a guy in a gorilla suit doing stuff is inherently funny—some may call it cheap entertainment, but I like to think of it as economical entertainment—so watching a full-length film consisting mostly of that is a real test of my beliefs. What it really feels like is a ninety-minute long Hilarious House of Frightenstein sketch, embracing its low production values, mostly amateur local actors, and dopey sense of humour in a way that is maybe hard to gush about, but is also hard to hate. Despite not being released until the eighties, too, the hair, clothes, and pretty much everything else indicate that we are once again dealing with the Most Seventies thing ever, which is the third year in a row that I’ve said that.

Blue Monkey (1987)

Just as a heads up, the next few posts in this series will be insect-themed. Now, you may be asking, “If you’re writing about insects, then why are you reviewing a movie called Blue Monkey?”; well, smart-ass, I’ll have you know that the movie Blue Monkey features absolutely no monkeys, let alone blue ones, but does have multiple giant mutant insects. The title is a non-sequitur likely aimed at attracting the attention of video store patrons* (although it’s based on actual dialogue from the movie), and it also has the much more appropriate, but also much more boring, alternate title Insect! In a battle between something nonsensical and potentially misleading and something accurate but plain, I know what I prefer.

This one hits close to home, in that it is very, very Canadian, no matter what it does to make you think otherwise (including getting actors to speak with shifting, unidentifiable accents.) Although made outside the era when con artist filmmakers produced low budget genre films in the Great White North as a tax shelter, this is still in the spirit of the low budget Canuxploitation, answering the success of Aliens the previous year with a cost-efficient movie about giant mutant bugs in a hospital, which is an underutilized setting for a monster movie, complete with minor body horror. The director is William Fruet, an old hand at the low budget horror game who otherwise has had a long, varied career in the Canadian film industry, and after making movies like Blue Monkey in the eighties he would eventually go on to direct 27 episodes of the Goosebumps TV series. Honestly, you could look at this as a movie-length episode of Goosebumps aimed at adults—and, in that light, it’s not a disagreeable bit of schlock.

Monster Multimedia: Maggots: The Record

Time to be honest: I’m only familiar with the bizarre career of punk/metal vocalist Wendy O. Williams because her name is referenced in the Mario series (thank you, late eighties American localizers and your random pop culture pulls.) In general, I don’t go out of my to check out the kind of high-octane guitar + screaming music that Williams specialized in, but there is something sort of liberating about being that loud, angry, and abrasive. Music so unadorned and designed to rattle your brain into submission can be pretty fun, and it can also get a point across pretty plainly—when there is a point, at least (with shock rock, it’s never a guarantee that it means anything other than “Look at me! Look at me!”) Williams and her band the Plasmatics’ 1987 release Maggots: The Record (so we don’t confuse it with any of the other maggot-based entertainment that was all over the place at the time) does seem to have a point—an extremely bleak point—when it’s not just going out of its way to be gross.