The third of the Shin series, this one written and directed by Hideaki Anno solo, follows the general trends of the previous two by returning to the first incarnation of a massive tokusatsu institution and sussing out the meaning inherent within it. As in the Anno-written Shin Ultraman, the type of examination at heart of this update of Shotaro Ishinomori’s insect-themed, monster-battling superhero is entirely compatible with an equal amount of superfan-pleasing callbacks and repurposed imagery–even though I’m not as familiar with Kamen Rider as I am with Ultraman, I can see still see that this is all coming from a place of respect for the originators of the series, even if it’s not always as direct as the previous movie (less outright use of the original soundtrack, for example, although older tracks are remixed for key moments.) Even more than in Shin Ultraman, I think Shin Kamen Rider’s delirious narrative momentum comes from its own visual and conceptual idiosyncrasies.
(A reminder: Shin Kamen Rider is not the follow-up to previous subject Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue. That two completely unrelated movies called Shin Kamen Rider could be released decades apart is one way to know just how long running and arcane this franchise is–another way you know is because Shin Kamen Rider isn’t even the first time Toei has put out a cinematic reboot of the 1971 Kamen Rider.)
The potential pitfall of all those self-aware, meta-referencing pieces of genre entertainment—a particular specialty of the nineties—is a sense of having your cake and eating it: they point out all the tropes and cliches while actively using them, without necessarily demonstrating any original or truly subversive ideas of their own. The Faculty aims for that style of storytelling, but has at least one new-ish angle up its sleeve: it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers set in a high school, leading to all sorts of new metaphorical possibilities for a well-worn concept. Of course, because of the style of writing, it’s a version of that concept where characters directly talk about Jack Finney’s original Body Snatchers story as well as Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, signposting all of those metaphorical possibilities before you even get a chance to really take them in. That part of the movie was, not surprisingly, the contribution of Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who was assigned by the supervillains at Miramax to revamp a script by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel, with the directorial role given to Robert Rodriguez, coming off of From Dusk Till Dawn and his support work on Mimic. As aggressively 1998 as any movie could be, this does make some honest attempts to straddle the snarky hipness of the meta dialogue with a nominally serious Sci-Fi horror take on teenage alienation.
The recurring question I’ve been asking about these bigger budget nineties creature features has been “Is this a plot that could have worked in the fifties?” In the case of Species, the answer is a little yes, and a little no—this is clearly a riff on the old “sinister alien woman” cliche that popped up all over Sci-Fi back then, where the most terrifying thing these writers could come up with was the idea of a beautiful woman being assertive or domineering rather than frail and dependent, as God intended. It’s a cliche so musty that it was lightly parodied by our old pal Ship of Monstersback in 1960. Species takes that concept and ramps it to a 1995 degree, and not surprisingly given the time frame, emphasizes the aggressive sexual component that was once mostly subtext. It’s the nineties, subtext is for cowards! Taking advantage of the permissiveness of cinema of the time to be more explicit and grotesque, and gathering some important names in Monster Movies to help bring this vision to life, you’d hope there’d be something brewing underneath it all—but no, all the surface slickness only hides the pure exploitation energy fuelling this thing.
Released at the tail end of the eighties, Leviathan followed a string of major projects for Stan Winston—he had worked with Rob Bottin on The Thing, and after opening Stan Winston Studio, crafted the effects for The Terminator, Aliens, and Predator (as well as Invaders From Marsand Pumpkinhead), establishing that team to be the top studio for creature effects in Hollywood. Winston himself was well past his Gargoyles mask-masking days, acting as Producer of Creature Effects alongside his crew, including Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. (the latter once again tasked with wearing the monster suit), who would move on to Tremors immediately after this. With those in mind, one can’t help but look at Leviathan as a victory lap, the kind of movie that these people could make in their sleep. It doesn’t change the game like Stan Winston Studios prior projects, but it allows them another chance to show why they got those earlier movies in the first place.
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.
Previous techno-wary monster movies I’ve written about like The Invisible Boyand The Lift are about humanity losing control of their increasingly complicated machines—The Colossus of New York takes a different angle, asking if our increasing integration with that technology will cause us to lose our humanity. The idea of human enhancement with mechanical parts had existed in Sci-Fi literature prior to this, but in terms of film, Colossus is taking on what was likely fairly new ground even while using some of the ideas (sometimes pretty directly) from those earlier examples, and in doing so it anticipates decades of cyborg movies (as well as decades of movies with New York in the title that were definitely not filmed in New York) and debates about transhumanism, two years before the term “cyborg” was coined (but only a year after the term “transhumanism” was.) It is a classical sort of monstrous tragedy in many ways, too, but what struck me was how surprisingly dark it is.
It is 1953—the space race hasn’t even started yet, and no one has ever been sent into orbit. In Britain, you turn on the telly and see the first humans ever to visit space, put there by an independent science group. That group loses contact with their astronauts, and then learns that they will crash down in the middle of the country. Three men were in that rocket when it launched; only one is there when it returns to earth, and he has been irrevocably changed.
I’ve written about the work of Nigel Kneale before, sometimes directly and sometimes only in regards to other things, and while he is known primarily as a UK television writer, he was also one that had a profound impact on science fiction—and horror fiction—in the fifties and beyond. This began with his 1953 BBC serial teleplay The Quatermass Experiment, which introduced his self-possessed, problem-solving scientist hero Bernard Quatermass. Considered singularly thought-provoking and terrifying when it originally aired, it gave Kneale the clout to continue to produce more more well-regarded Quatermass serials, as well as other relevant-to-me subjects like The Creature (aka The Abominable Snowman), among a plethora of television projects. It also got the attention of a little-known movie studio called Hammer Films, who bought the rights to make a film adaptation of the story in 1955, and in the process changed its name to The Quatermass Xperiment (except in North America, where it was called The Creeping Unknown), a nod to the fact that its horror content would certainly lead to an X rating from British content regulators (they would repeat that joke a year later for X the Unknown, a movie that they initially hoped would feature Quatermass, before Kneale refused the rights.) The film was also a success, and it gave Hammer the idea that maybe science fiction and horror movies were a business they’d like to get into.
Famously, Kneale hated the fact that Hammer recast his very British vision of Bernard Quatermass, played by veteran actor Reginald Tate in the TV serial, as a gruff American scientist, played by film noir regular Brian Donlevy. He had other issues with the way they changed the script, but mostly he was bitter about the BBC owning the rights to the original serial and not paying him for the adaptation. As it turned out, the only real consequences of those disagreements was that Kneale would write or co-write all the other adaptations himself—including the two Quatermass sequels and The Abominable Snowman—which led to consistently good films. Unfortunately for Kneale, despite viewing his own version of Experiment as the definitive one, the BBC’s decision not to keep recordings of four of the six episodes of the serial (this was back in the days when teleplays were broadcast live, and the original airing even suffered from some technical issues) means that the only complete filmed version of the story is Hammer’s Xperiment.
This really brings me back to when I voraciously read movie websites ten or so years ago—I distinctly remember reading about Bad Milo! when it was new, as it’s the exact sort of high concept, mid-tier film that those websites loved to give attention to, with a real “ha ha can you believe this?” vibe. That felt like the beginning of a time when bigger names in Hollywood were trying to half-jokingly reach for the schlock heights usually left to disreputable, low-budget movies—and it usually begins with a premise that, on paper, is meant to sound incredibly stupid. Most reviews from relatively mainstream sources would begin with that premise, either to say “it certainly lives up to it!” or “it turns out to be more than that!”, and in either case the rest comes off as a slightly bewildered spiral around the gravity of the premise. It’s not hard to see why: just saying “a monster comes out of man’s butt” will automatically make you think it’s a gross-out parody, and the cast of comedy veterans would lend to that view. But, in fact, Bad Milo! is not a parody, and turns out to be rather sincere in many places—which is something that works for and against it.
Sometimes, a movie is just a vehicle for a cool monster idea you had—it’s a time-honoured tradition, really, maybe as old as the genre itself, and it became even more noticeable when superstar effects and make-up people started getting the clout to direct their own movies (is it not what Zeiramor Pumpkinhead was, ultimately?) For as highbrow as I like to position myself on this, a site about monsters, I also enjoy just seeing a neat monster concept in action, even it doesn’t without go for any deep commentary on the world from which the monster emerged (not that it won’t stop me from trying to mine for it.) In the end, we are all fans of monster movies because we like the monsters themselves, with everything else just adding some additional spice to the proceedings. The risk in that proposal is that, with everything else in the story primarily serving as a conduit for the monster ideas, the execution of that monster better be there, and that monster better be something truly out there and original, because you have nothing else to latch on to. The independently-made Splinter is an example of that sort of movie, and thankfully, it succeeds in both the originality and execution of its monster, making for a swift, raw horror experience.
David Cronenberg’s name is synonymous with body horror—he spent the first three decades of his career defining it (and recently came back to it after a long absence), pushing the envelope when it came to fleshy protuberances and disturbing hybridization. But as repulsive as the effects could be in his movies, they’ve never really felt like puerile shock for its own sake, as there has always been a sense of fascination about the way bodies could be warped, and an equal amount of fascination with how physical changes affect people. They are visceral both physically and psychologically, and that’s why Cronenberg’s filmography is a thing unto itself, an idiosyncratic fusion of horror and science fiction.
It all started in low-budget exploitation films of the seventies, beginning with Rabid and Shivers, all shot in his home town of Toronto (where all, or at least most, of his movies have been filmed), which overcame moral outcry from local sources who took umbrage at their combination of sex and violence to be reasonably profitable, allowing him to continue making increasingly larger-scale movies. All of his obsessions were there from the beginning, from bizarre body modifications and infections to, yes, a combination of sex and violence (and music brought to us by regular collaborator and future Lord of the Rings composer Howard Shore)—and his seventies run culminated in The Brood, distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, which was the big leagues, comparatively speaking. Here, Cronenberg went beyond just the parasitic terror of his first two movies and turned to both parenthood and psychotherapy, and with those themes created some of those notably Cronenbergian images that would define his aesthetic. But this is a movie that is also deeply personal in a way that his other movies aren’t, which makes it all the more disturbing.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 