The Relic (1997)

Once again, I watch a monster movie made in what would seem to be a more modern time (albeit, over twenty-five years ago), and what strikes me is how much it still adheres to the half-century-old structures and ideas. Opening with a white researcher experiencing something strange among a mysterious indigenous tribe in the Amazon rainforest, and then sending something equally mysterious back home in marked crates, is one of the hoariest old cliches in the book—you could easily see a version of this story made in 1957, the details changed but the spirit intact. The details, ultimately, are the things that make something like The Relic feel like a 1997 movie, planting this classical B-movie plot into the violent, flippant world of an R-rated nineties thriller, with a monster that can be portrayed more “realistically” by Stan Winston Studio’s advanced animatronic puppets and a smattering of nineties CGI rather than a guy in a suit.

Creature Classic Companion: Them! (1954)

The atomic monster category that was so profuse in the 1950s did not appear fully-formed, despite the timeliness of its inspiration: in the first major monster movie to use that device, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, the nuclear bomb test that unleashes its titular dinosaur feels almost incidental, possibly even flippant when considered alongside the military triumphalism it ends on. That film was so successful that Warner Bros. was quick to follow it up the next year with more radiation-spawned giant monsters, this time going from stop motion dinosaurs to giant ant puppets (and in the process begot yet another category of monster movie that spanned the entire decade, the giant insect movie), but by comparison, Them! is a much more sober and startling take on the idea, despite what the excitable title and the promise of giant radioactive ants. While not coming off as some sort of didactic warning of what could happen now that Pandora’s box of atomic energy has been opened, it is much more serious-minded and engaged with the long-term effects of these things, and coming within a few months of Godzilla‘s premier in Japan in the same year, captures a period of more intelligent consideration of that new age than the wacky radioactive free-for-all that subsequently became the movie norm.