Attack the Block (2011)

Attack the Block was another one of those destined-for-cult-status movies that was championed by the genre-focused movie websites I read back in the late aughts and early 2010s, and it’s not difficult to understand why. At its heart, this is a throwback movie to older creature features and to the youth-centric films of the 1980s, with a fannish tint to its writing that is reflected in the references in the dialogue and the love of Big, Cool Moments. Writer-director Joe Cornish already had a following from his radio and television comedy work, and was able to parlay his association with Edgar Wright’s comedy-pastiche crew (Wright is an Executive Producer on this with his frequent collaborators Nira Park as Producer and Nick Frost in the cast) to get his film off the ground, and to some extent the exuberant aficionado tone of Wright’s work is evident here even if it’s not as much of a direct homage as his films often are. While this movie didn’t necessarily make a huge splash back in 2011, its favour among an influential crowd almost certainly led its two leads, John Boyega and Jodie Whitaker, to be cast as the new faces of two different long-running franchises, something that both might feel a tinge of regret about.

So, yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that Sci-Fi and horror nerds flock toward, an attempt to capture a bit of nostalgic spirit in its kids-vs-monsters set-up, but it’s also an intelligent and novel twist on that idea that goes places those older movies did not. The straightforward kind of monster action utilized by Cornish becomes a frame in which to place a cast of well-defined, lower class youths, the kind whose lives are not simply left out of fantasy films, but are regularly dehumanized into faceless, hoodie-wearing creatures themselves by people far removed from their poverty-stricken living conditions. Like many of the best monster movies, this is one about taking something very specific and very real and letting the fictional aberrations draw out the reality of it.

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.

Arachnophobia (1990)

Last year, I delved into the strain of big studio monster movies that popped up throughout the nineties—an era emboldened by advances in special effects and a sense that creature features could be made even more palatable to a mainstream audience through genre mixing and nominally self-aware writing. The first movie of era, Tremors, demonstrated those latter points by taking a mostly traditional monster movie premise and imbuing it with a goofy, blue collar sensibility—one must remember, though, that Tremors was not particularly successful in theatres, and only gained its notoriety from home video and television airings afterwards. Arachnophobia, which premiered six months later, carries the same basic tenor, but attracted a bigger initial audience—so it could be argued that this is the true starting point for the dark comedy sensibility that permeated so many of the subsequent creature features.

Arachnophobia did have one major advantage: whereas something like Tremors can only borrow Steven Spielberg vibes, this movie is a true Amblin production—working with Disney’s slightly-less-than-reputable Hollywood Pictures label—with Spielberg on board to produce a movie directed by longtime collaborator Frank Marshall (later to direct previous subject Congo.) This pretty openly formalizes the way these movies attempted to recapture the most successful elements of Jaws, particularly the more grounded approach for both the characters and the thrills. Maybe even more than Jaws, this movie plays into existing, everyday fears—I mean, the title alone tells you that—by exaggerating them just enough, and by filling the scenes in between the horror with a colourful supporting cast that have a particular small town quality, creating a movie approximation of a recognizable world. Just beneath the surface of that, you can find what would become a consistent thread in the next few years of monster horror: the way these elements reveal themselves to be something of a facade, a way to grab people into seeing something as ludicrous as the older monster movies and as mean-spirited as less mainstream films, a prototype form of pulpy excess that would eventually be refined into the spectacle of Spielberg’s own Jurassic Park.

Grabbers (2012)

I’ve written about some wildly varying monster comedies, and one of the potential points of variation in them is just how seriously they take their monster—it is still possible for a movie to be a comedy while still presenting us with a monster that is threatening or even scary in a relatively straightforward manner. Alligator is a good example of that, as is Tremors—and the latter is the one that is the most apparent inspiration for the Irishcreature comedy Grabbers, where even the title seems to be a sly reference. The similarities run deep: both are rooted in a certain working class milieu, focusing on a group of small town personalities forced to do battle with a extraordinary menace, with the more ridiculous elements of their generally uneventful lives playing a part, good or bad, in the ensuing chaos; moreover, both are also indebted to classic monster movie traditions, and present those things without intentional subversion (but with inventive creature designs.) It’s an entertaining kind of light horror that doesn’t come around that often—with less overt cynicism or gruesomeness than most horror-comedies—and this one utilizes its setting and its ensemble to very good effect while getting an equal amount of juice out of its monsters.

Monster in the Closet (1986)

Surprisingly, in over five years of writing about monster movies, I have never covered anything from the indefatigable Lloyd Kaufman and his company Troma Entertainment, whose run of intentionally over-the-top exploitation splatter comedies are certainly something of note in the realm of B-movies (if nothing else, a few famous filmmakers like James Gunn got their start there.) If Troma’s usual shtick is to take puerile content to its extreme for the sake of laughs, as typified by The Toxic Avenger, then writer-director Bob Dhalin’s Monster in the Closet is something of a pivot, an attempt to do a horror-comedy that’s borderline family friendly—which in practice means no gore and only one pair of naked breasts. That’s real restraint on their part! In place of the usual exploitation fare is a take on the average monster thriller—a little fifties melodrama and a little eighties grunge—that is maybe possibly a bit sillier than usual.

Alligator (1980)

One of the major inflection points in the evolution of the monster movie was when well-informed fans started working behind the scenes, aware of all the tropes and knowing just where to push them to take something from cliche to slyly self-aware examination. The ur-example of this was the Joe Dante-directed Piranha, which took what could have easily been a movie simply following the trend of ripping off Jaws and turned it into something else entirely—someone was clearly paying attention, because when director Lewis Teague (later of movies like Cujo) was given the job of making a Jaws rip-off about a giant alligator, he threw out the original script and called in Piranha screenwriter John Sayles (later of several award-winning films) to help him craft something more interesting. Together, they produced a movie in the middle ground between traditional drive-in schlock, the intelligently eccentric B-movies typified by Larry Cohen’s entries in the genre, and the cartoonish and loving parodies that Dante continued to refine in the eighties—and it does it in a way casual and subtle enough that many critics of the time didn’t even catch the dark comedy at the heart of Alligator.

Tremors (1990)

Big Hollywood studios have a hot-and-cold relationship with monster movies—they’ll cede that territory to B-movie productions for years, or decades, at a time, and then start investing some bigger budgets into a select few before dropping the whole thing again. The nineties was one of those periods with a minor streak of classic-style creature features—”classic-style” in the sense that they’re more or less following the structures that were laid down in the fifties. Their special effects may be more sophisticated, the dialogue less stiff and expository, and the violence more explicit, but in the end it’s still a movie where a group of people have to deal with the sudden appearance of a monster or monsters, and the expected plot beats are barely changed, even after forty years.

Tremors, which could be considered the first in that wave, wasn’t a significant success in its original release, and likely accrued its cult following through home video and TV airings, leading it to become a direct-to-video franchise with a surprising amount of longevity (as in, it’s most recent sequel came out in 2020)—it even had a short-lived TV show, and a more recent series attempt that wasn’t picked up. Technically, it’s also an end-of-the-eighties movie that was delayed into the dead early months of 1990, just like Nightbreed, making it something of a liminal artifact. Looking at it now, you can see how it heralds some of the ways the subsequent decade of monster movies attempted to differentiate themselves from their predecessors, some minor tweaks in presentation likely meant to pull in new audiences—while Tremors and what followed tended to resemble the old school entries in basic plotting, they change just enough of the surface details to make themselves feel contemporary, with a particular emphasis on comedy.

Deep Dark (2015)

Although very different in execution, Deep Dark reminded me a lot of previous subject Splinter: both feel like short independent films that were expanded into feature length (it won’t surprise you to learn that writer/director Michael Medaglia’s only other credits are for short films), and both rather knowingly hinge themselves on the novelty of their intentionally strange central monster. Splinter used this as a vehicle for pure, undistilled horror filmmaking, while Deep Dark is aiming for more of a comedy-horror, although it never goes that far in either direction. It’s also attempting to spin a sort of dark modern fairy tale, one set in the absolutely-not-overused-at-all world of modern art, and with the freedom from traditional logic that would allow, the biggest question becomes just how hard it pushes into the strangeness of its own premise. The answer to that is “just hard enough, sometimes.”

Bad Milo! (2013)

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.

Creature Classic Companion: Piranha (1978)

The career of director Joe Dante represents the ascent of the Monster Kid from fan to filmmaker—people who grew up during the creature feature boom of the fifties and sixties were suddenly given reign of the genre, which they knew inside and out. Having that kind of understanding of the formulas made it all the more easy to subvert and reinvent them, making a smarter and more self-aware range of monster movies in the late seventies and eighties, which Dante heavily contributed to with The Howling and Gremlins. Before those, though, he worked his way up in the B-movie system, cutting trailers for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures (and co-directing a movie made mostly of stock footage) before being assigned to direct Piranha, New World’s blatant attempt to cash in on Jaws‘ success. Following the general Corman ethos, however, meant that as long as you check off all the exploitation movie requirements—low budget, surface similarity to something popular, blood, and female nudity—you are free to do whatever you want (although that didn’t go quite so well for the director of Piranha II, some guy named James Cameron.) So, Dante got together with writer John Sayles to build a Jaws knock-off full of comedic touches and creature feature homages, something that wasn’t just another killer fish movie. As the story goes, Universal was fully prepared to sue this movie out of existence before it reached theatres…until it received the full approval of Steven Spielberg, who considered it by far the best imitation of his movie.