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.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

But if I’m going to be writing about the history of Godzilla, I should go back to where it really started.

In the development of the monster movie as we know it, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was the second impact, following previous Creature Classic subject The Thing From Another World, and the two of them set the tone for the rest of the 1950s. As was the case in writing about The Thing, I feel like it’s difficult to convey to readers how this type of movie, which most people probably assume has always been one of the primordial ideas of cinema, was simply not a thing before this—okay, it had had been a thing once before, almost twenty years prior, but there was nothing in between. For myriad reasons inside and outside of the film itself, King Kong (which had been re-released the year before this and saw a surprising amount of success) casts a long shadow over this film, possibly even more than all the subsequent movies about giant monsters stomping through a city, and while both share a dedication to realistic-as-possible depictions of prehistoric animals (even if they are fictionalized ones) and showcasing excessive property damage in New York City, Beast 20K (as I like to call it) offers a significant and timely innovation: attributing the appearance of the monster to atomic bomb testing. With this single narrative detail, one of the primary fascinations and terrors of the monster movie was unleashed upon thousands of theatre screens—it is not the only thing from this movie that subsequent ones would utilized, but it is among the most significant, providing a recurring theme for decades of movies about the perils of the post-war age of scientific advancement. With that in mind, it’s even more interesting to look at how this story’s use of that concept feels so removed from its imitators.

Mimic (1997)

This summer, the theme will be “B-Movies vs. Blockbusters”: I’ll be alternating between a big budget monster movie and a double feature of less mainstream fare. How much of a difference does money and Hollywood prestige make for this type of movie? Does schlock transcend all? These questions will probably not be answered here, but they’re interesting to think about.

Mimic‘s biggest claim to fame is being the Hollywood debut of Guillermo del Toro, one of the most important figures in monster movies in the past few decades—and as one would expect for a Hollywood debut for a director who started outside Hollywood, the experience was so great that he disowned the final film for several years. A director’s vision being heavily compromised by the Weinsteins of all people, how unusual! In 2010, del Toro made a director’s cut that he says is at least closer to what he wanted—but despite all the meddling in the original version, you can still see del Toro’s stylish horror sensibility. The burgeoning hallmarks of his approach is especially noticeable after watching The Relic, which released a few months before this: that one felt you like a classical creature feature presented with the tone of a violent nineties procedural—in Mimic, which is based on a Sci-Fi story from the forties (by prominent Golden Age author Donald Wollheim), you get the sense of a classical creature feature that is attempting to evolve the format, or at least give it a much more modern and specific aesthetic.

Creature Classic Companion: The Host (2006)

I was definitely not expecting to see anyone with a major hand in creature feature history take home the Academy Award for Best Picture within my lifetime, but the last few years gave us not one, but two. Of course, Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar nod for The Shape of Water has the double validating effect (not that I need validation, especially not from the Hollywood fatcats) of being for an actual monster movie, even if a revisionist one, but Bong Joon-ho’s win with Parasite was notable on its own for being the first non-English, non-Western film to get the gold. That’s an impressive first to have on your resume! Joon-ho’s career has spanned over twenty years and various genres, producing many critically-acclaimed films in South Korea and abroad—but I can imagine that a lot of you reading this first heard of him back when his monster movie was making the rounds in the film festival circuit and attracting the attention of cult movie websites, as I did. Fifteen years later, and The Host is still a genuine classic, one of the most engaging and inventive monster movies in recent memory, with a stylistic and cultural specificity that remains singular.

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.