The Descent (2005)

If there is any consistent thread you can find throughout the most well-regarded monster movies that premiered after the new millennium, it’s an attempt to bring a classical sense of economy and imagination to a subgenre that had been overtaken by bloat and complacency. While the possibilities of digital filmmaking are utilized, special effects are kept practical, both in the sense of being generally handmade and in that they are cost-efficient and serve a purpose other than showcasing soon-to-be-outdated CGI rigs—that also means budgets are low enough that actual risks can be taken in the subject matter and tone. Neil Marshall’s The Descent is generally held up as one of the best examples of that: here is a horror film based not on impossible effects or haunted house thrills, but a general ratcheting of dread to the point of physical discomfort, one that builds from a grounded place and then introduces its monsters as a form of escalation. This is a return to some of the most unsparing horror of the seventies and eighties, while adding some of its own stylistic touches that mark it as part of a growing movement of bold experiments from genre experts.

Kong: The Animated Series

In another time, on another website, I wrote parallel analyses of a Godzilla cartoon and a King Kong cartoon, two series with no real relationship to each other that nonetheless called for comparison due to the title monsters’ interlocking history. Decades later, television was briefly rocked by the arrival of another Godzilla cartoon and another King Kong cartoon (and not the other other King Kong cartoon that I already wrote about), but this time their proximity was far closer and their parallel existence seemed far more intentional. Wikipedia and the fan sites that steal from Wikipedia claim that Kong: The Animated Series, a product of the Bohbot/BKN cartoon factory alongside French animation studios Ellipsanime and M6, was created to “rival” the FOX-airing Godzilla: The Series, starting its two-season, forty-episode run just as the other series was ending, airing briefly on FOX and in syndication from 2000 to 2001. As one would expect from anything said about a piece of pop culture ephemera on the Internet, there is no source for that claim, and most of the surviving press releases and industry pieces from the time I browsed made no mention of Godzilla—but I can at least understand where the assumption came from. In the year 2000, with nothing going on in the series movie-wise, what other reason would someone have to make a King Kong cartoon but to pit it against the ape’s scaly counterpart?

Of course, the caveat there is that, despite all appearances, Kong: The Animated Series is probably not an official King Kong cartoon (I also think it stole its logo from the movie Congo, which definitely won’t be featured on this site soon very soon.) Rather than a revival, even if an odd one, this is actually a clever theft that likely fooled every child in its audience with its quasi-authenticity. But, as it turns out, that is only one of the many strange things I discovered by digging up this copyright-eliding incarnation of the world’s premier giant primate.

The Great Yokai War (2005)

Being so inundated with Hollywood blockbusters for so long, it’s nice to see how other movie industries go about it—what you find is often eminently familiar in their storytelling and reliance on special effects, but in a way that makes their idiosyncratic approaches and cultural differences all the more noticeable. The Great Yokai War is ostensibly a big budget remake of previous subject Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, but in effect the films are barely connected—instead, it takes Japan’s beloved spirits and monsters and puts them in a big special effects extravaganza and a children’s adventure story with your standard “learning to be brave” character arc for the pre-adolescent hero. An even more important difference is that unlike Daiei’s Yokai trilogy, this is set in the modern day and actually grapples with some of the spiritual underpinnings of yokai myths as they apply to a current consumerist culture—all in the name of broad action and comedy, mind you, but it’s still an angle on yokai that I haven’t seen in a movie.

Isolation (2005)

Last year, I said that hospitals were effective and underutilized settings for monster stories—and for reasons both similar and different, I think the same about farms. Like hospitals, farms are a place where the most biological aspects of life are no longer hidden, all the gross internals and externals of the animal (human or other) made part of everyday existence—the difference is that while the gleaming, artificial walls and stainless steel implements of the hospital contrast the blood and sickness in between those walls, a farm by its nature (even the most systematized, industrial version) has to wallow in the mud and dust-encrusted world. You’re never far away from dripping fluids, disease, injury, and death. The Irish horror film Isolation plays up the grotty visuals of the farm in many ways—a desolate blue-gray blankets the world, the surrounding land seems vast and shadowy, living spaces are modest and unkempt, animals exist in either lonely spaces or crowd together anxiously in their pens, and the camera peers at human activity from down below or through slats, showcasing every dark corner of the barns and sheds. If one were to choose any place to make a new variation on The Thing—which Isolation very much is—a farm is certainly a good place to go.

Digital Monster X-Evolution (2005)

This and the next entry on this site have been chosen for a specific personal reason: I actually wrote about them on another website six years ago (almost to the day), but looking back, I really don’t like the approach I took. I was still all about the Internet smart-assery back then, trying way too hard to be funny, and it’s just not particularly interesting to read now—so, I want to give some of that subject matter its proper due. Not that these things are necessarily lost gems unworthy of some light mockery—they are, after all, film spin-offs of popular Japanese media franchises—but there could still be some material worth digging into.

Case in point: Digital Monster X-Evolution (yes, that means it’s Digimon, but I’ll refer to it by its original Japanese title for clarity), a TV movie that aired in Japan in 2005 as part of a new merchandising push for the series by Bandai (the version I watched even included spots trumpeting the sponsorship and toy/video game tie-ins), which sounds especially cynical and only makes the actual product even stranger in context. Completely unrelated to the previous Digimon anime series, it’s the only entry that foregoes any human characters, and instead is entirely about the Digimon themselves and their lives within their computer data world—this is the rare monster story that is all monsters, all the time. It’s also the only Digimon TV/movie production that is animated in CG—which is interesting considering that it’s always had that computer connection—provided by Imagi Studios, the Hong Kong-based company that would later go on to make feature films based on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Astro Boy, and then not make a feature film based on going bankrupt because they were too busy going bankrupt. A TV-budget CG film seems like an iffy proposition, and you wouldn’t be wrong to think so, what with the lifeless-looking backgrounds (with the odd splashes of 0s and 1s floating around) and scenes with lower frame rates. But X-Evolution is so peculiar in general that it’s really easy to overlook that.

Monster Multimedia: The Mighty Boosh – “The Legend of Old Gregg”

Very few comedy shows hooked me as hard as The Mighty Boosh did when I first watched it—it was unlike anything I had ever seen before, a show with a mastery of quirky, fast-paced dialogue and utterly ridiculous stories, coupled with catchy original music. It was among a wave of cult-forming British comedies that all debuted in the mid-two-thousands—Peep Show, The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, just to name a few—but what made it stand out was also probably what made me love it: the cartoonish world it presented, with outlandish fantasy plots and characters. As we are told in the theme song, we are being taken on a journey through time and space, and almost every one of its twenty episodes features one of its central cast (Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt, and Rich Fulcher) playing an over-the-top costumed character, which was more often than not some kind of goofy monster—sometimes, the show almost feels like a art school comedy take on Doctor Who.

No episode demonstrates The Mighty Boosh‘s capacity for monster-based merriment better than what may be its most well-known one, series 2’s “The Legend of Old Gregg.” For whatever reason, this one blew up, and managed to even reach outside the regular BBC Three audience—I distinctly remember seeing clips from it passed around by people who never mentioned watching the show before. Although it isn’t my favourite episode of the series, it does have a lot of the elements that made it so unique, including another amazing song and a memorable performance from Noel Fielding as the titular character.