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.

Without Warning (1980)

Without Warning belongs to the curious category of “movies that are similar to more well-known ones, but came out first” (the last time we saw this phenomenon was with X the Unknown.) Get this: an extraterrestrial comes down to Earth and hunts humans in the wilderness with alien weaponry—sound familiar? This one debuted a full seven years before Predator, though, and most interestingly, the alien in both is portrayed by the same actor, Seven-foot-two Kevin Peter Hall. That’s an amazing bit of coincidence that the Internet often speculates about, but it’s also worth remembering that the Predator was originally supposed to be played by Jean Claude Van Damme and then was subsequently replaced by Hall when they overhauled the design and the suit. If there was any actual direct inspiration from Without Warning in Predator, there’s no concrete evidence of it—so it’s just sort of a weird, interesting bit of trivia.

In any case, this has long been simply considered the proto-Predator movie in cult film circles, but this low budget early eighties affair should also be known as the thing with the wildly overqualified cast and crew. While director Greydon Clark’s filmography includes such classics as…Satan’s Cheerleaders, and the video game-themed sex comedy Joysticks (as well as Mystery Science Theatre 3000 favourite Final Justice), the film features cinematography from Dean Cundey, favourite DP of directors like John Carpenter and Robert Zemeckis, a monster mask designed by Rick Baker, and a cast that includes two future Academy Award winners, as well as a young David Caruso (future star of CSI) running around in short shorts. It’s a large confluence of things that help elevate this movie above its $150,000 exploitation movie predilections.

Prophecy (1979)

The Hollywood fascination with eco-horror seemed to diminish significantly by the end of the seventies, probably when all the leftover moralism from the sixties had finally faded and the culture seemed perfectly fine with doing everything without a social conscience, from movie-making to voting. It probably didn’t help that many of the environmentally-minded movies made that decade were quite bad, and were made to look even worse when a new wave of thrillers in the latter half of the decade like Jaws, Alien, and Halloween were actually, you know, good. The thing is, Hollywood and environmentalism were never really a good mix, because it’s a subject too nuanced and important to be properly conveyed by the average broad, dumb motion picture experience, and the need to make a movie a movie often superseded even the best of intentions. This also had the additional effect of cheapening genuine environmental concerns, or making them look hyperbolic or shrill, any reality or humanity sacrificed for blunt sermonizing and melodrama.

All of those things apply to 1979’s Prophecy, a film that makes a interesting contrast to Frogs, a similar film from earlier in the decade. Frogs was pure B-movie schlock, while Prophecy is ostensibly a big studio picture by a big name director (John Frankenheimer, as far away from his Manchurian Candidate heyday as he was from his Island of Doctor Moreau nadir)—in reality, Prophecy being a Paramount movie just means it has a few slightly bigger-named actors, some better camerawork, and an orchestral score. It’s certainly not any smarter than Frogs, though it’s a lot slower, and also doesn’t have the excuse of being an animal attack movie made in a pre-Jaws world. It’s almost fascinating how out of step this movie feels with its times, especially when you consider that Alien premiered just one month prior—it was obsolete before the first reel started.