Splice (2009)

The movies that get the tag “Science Gone Wrong” on here are part of one of the longest lineages in the history of creature features—and probably one of that history’s most reactionary undercurrents, demonstrating a ceaseless anxiety about scientific discovery and experimentation. The deeper we dive into the mechanics of nature, the closer we get to inevitably crossing lines we were never meant to cross, with terrible consequences the equally inevitable result—or, that’s the way they see it, and it’s a structure and theme that has never really gone away, and manages to adapt itself to whatever the latest technological and scientific advances (although by “adapt to”, I don’t necessarily mean “understand.”) Splice is a film that very intentionally hearkens back to some of the more hysteria-prone versions of that Sci-Fi narrative, and even places it in the consistently hackle-raising field of genetic engineering, which has been the topic of more than a few monster movies over the decades. The innovation here is that the lines being crossed in this story are not necessarily being done in the name of science, but something far more personal—and so the ensuing terrible consequences have some different and sometimes more disturbing dimensions.

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.

Nightbreed (1990)

By the late eighties, Clive Barker had enough clout in the movie world that he could pursue bigger and grander projects, including writing and directing an adaptation of his dark fantasy novel Cabal, which constructed a mythology tailor-made to appeal to the horror and monster-loving outsiders of the world. “Humans are the real monsters” is a common enough theme (that’s why I have an entire tag for it), but Cabal and its film counterpart Nightbreed might be the most blatant examples, presenting a story that explores the allure of the monstrous and the macabre, especially to the disenfranchised, and pitting it against the violent prejudice of the close-minded mass of mainstream society. In interviews, Barker explains this story in terms of obvious fantasies that monsters let us live out—of possessing immortality and other amazing abilities—but it also clearly draws a connection between monsters and underground subcultures, often similarly persecuted, which I’m sure was a very meaningful thing for an openly gay writer like Barker to explore, especially at the very end of the AIDS-haunted eighties. So the subversion in having the monsters be the “good guys” in the scenario carries a lot of weight.

Before I get into the bulk of the post, I should clarify which version of Nightbreed I watched—because this was famously one of those movies that the studio mishandled completely, leading to some crucial changes to the final product that in turn led to multiple cuts of the movie existing. The original 1990 theatrical version was 102 minutes; altered and removed footage was rediscovered in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which were re-inserted into what is called the Cabal Cut and has been re-released with lengths from 145 minutes to 159 minutes. The version I went with was the 2014 Director’s Cut put out by Shout! Factory, which is just over two hours long and utilizes footage from the Cabal Cut. None of us want to be here all day, so I won’t go over the differences between the versions.

Creature Classic Companion: The Brood (1979)

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.

Orca (1977)

Three years ago this month, we had an environmentally-themed slate of monster posts. Since it doesn’t seem like we’ve figured out all of our ecological problems in that time (not for lack of trying, I assume!), I think it’s time to pull up another bunch for what you can call Eco-Horror II: The Revenge.

There were of course, a number of movies coincidentally similar to Jaws in the mid-to-late seventies, many of them produced by prolific Italian film companies/exploitation houses—the animal attack movie business was bustling. Not one to avoid capitalizing on a trend, producer Dino De Laurentiis joined in on the good times in the year following the box office success of his King Kong remake (ol’ Dino D went really hard into creature features in 1977, with previous series subject The White Buffalo releasing two months before the one I’m writing about here), and along with screenwriters Luciano Vincenzoni and Segio Donati (both who contributed to the scripts of classic spaghetti westerns like For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,, among many others) and director Michael Anderson (previously of Logan’s Run) gave us the next logical step after a movie about a shark: a movie about an orca. But unlike certain later orca movies (that had cartoons spin-offs where the whale fights an evil cyborg), Orca—sometimes subtitled The Killer Whale for all the dummies who don’t know what an orca is—is not some family-friendly story about human and animals learning to respect each other, but a violent revenge thriller. The gimmick here is that the one seeking revenge is the whale—so this is less Jaws with a whale than it is Death Wish with a whale (and who was the producer on Death Wish? Why, Dino De Lautentiis!) In a sea of killer marine life movies, that immediately makes this one stand out.

Fiend Without a Face (1958)

Here we are at the 100^th post, surely a milestone worth celebrating—so, how do we do that? Why not a review of the only monster movie I know of that is set around where I live? Surely you are as interested in the subject as I am.

Nowadays (or, at least, the parts of “nowadays” that discounts the past year or so of disruption), my home province of Manitoba is used as the shooting location for a surprising number of films (prominently among them: The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford), including many horror films (they filmed at least one of those direct-to-video Child’s Play sequels here)—and why not? During the fall and winter months, the flat prairie landscape with its sparse wooded patches has a desolate quality that can bring atmosphere to these projects. Of course, none of them ever take place in Manitoba, but have it sub for whatever location they want—and, ironically, the one bit of horror movie history I’ve found that is explicitly set in Manitoba was absolutely not filmed here. That would be fifties B-movie staple Fiend Without a Face, a movie that has had a long life as a piece of out-of-context footage used in montages or clip packages about old Sci-Fi. This is likely because Fiend Without a Face features one of the most grotesque monsters from the fifties monster movie boom, and not because it’s set in Manitoba (which was apparently only because a Canadian location was considered a suitable middle ground between a British or American one.) In any case, this is another example of how these old monster movies could be quite a bit less quaint than their reputations would have you believe.

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.