Tasked with putting out a follow-up to Creature From the Black Lagoonjust over a year later, producer William Alland, director Jack Arnold, and screenwriter Martin Berkeley (who also co-wrote the Arnold-directed Tarantula) took what was probably the most logical path: if the the first Creature film seemed directly inspired by the voyage to a prehistoric world as seen in King Kong, then a second one should take cues from the New York climax. In Revenge of the Creature, the once dominant life form in a secluded natural habitat is forcibly transplanted to our modern world—rather than a film about entering an unreal world of evolutionary alternatives, it’s about the unreal entrapped by more recognizable surroundings. By itself, this storytelling decision de-mystifies the monster by taking him out of his element and making it a lone aberration interrupting normalcy—but, intentionally or not, the rest of the movie degrades and diminishes it to such a degree that it may be an even more pitiable figure than in the first movie.
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.
While the giant monster movie genre originated in America, it was the productions by Japanese studios like Toho that really gave the genre its own topoi. When studios outside of Toho tackled the subject from the late fifties and into the sixties, it was always in the shadow of Godzilla and its successors, and it’s interesting to see how they responded. Surprisingly few of them really attempted to utilize the tokusatsu kaiju style, instead attempting to keep the stop motion tradition of King Kong alive—Gorgo is one of the few examples of a non-Japanese studio tackling suitmation.
You could call Gorgo a British homage to Godzilla, with “homage” being quite generous—on the other hand, Godzilla itself was a “homage” to The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, so you know, turnabout is fair play. Who is the director of this? Why, it’s Eugène Lourié, director of (the non-Ray Harryhausen parts) of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, “homaging” the “homage” to his own movie! It was also the third time he directed a light variation of “giant marine reptile attacks a city”, with the other two being The Beast and1959’s The Giant Behemoth, the latter featuring stop motion by King Kong‘s Willis O’Brien ( Lourié also directed previous site subject The Colossus of New York between those two.) Two years after Behemoth and yet another lizard from millions of years ago is battering London—but despite the clear attempt to ape from Godzilla (and despite it featuring no apes), one of the ways it differentiates itself is by eschewing the nuclear radiation fears that animated both Toho’s and Lourié’s own movies and going back to ape the plot, and sympathetic monster(s), of King Kong (which does feature apes.) Coming out in the same year as Toho’s Mothra, which also has a Kong-esque plot, there seemed to have been a convergent sense of nostalgia in the giant monster genre at the time.
The profound cinema influence of King Kong rests not only in the fantasy it effectively brought to life, but in the tragedy at the core of its story, both conveyed in the mythic terms of early cinema. Yet one of the most interesting things about the creative minds behind Kong—producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack and his screenwriter wife Ruth Rose, and stop motion animator Willis O’Brien—is that they essentially remade their greatest creation twice, and in both cases tried to put a much more optimistic spin on the story. This started shockingly early with Son of Kong, released nine months (nine months!) after the original, and is a movie that I think has very interesting as a follow-up (I’ll probably write about it someday); it then came rolling back over a decade-and-half later with Mighty Joe Young, which saw the old gang working together one last time to unknowingly usher in the next decade of monster movies. This intentional softening of Kong‘s giant ape melodrama may in some ways seem like a commercial decision, to make it more kid-friendly (more kid-friendly than King Kong, a movie that fascinated children for decades), but the interpretation I’ve always preferred is that it’s the result of a deep guilt: they had created a resonant tale of humanity exploiting and destroying natural wonder and beauty, as represented by a beast both terrifying and sympathetic, and it’s terribly sad to think that such a thing could only ever be a tragic monster laying dead on the Manhattan concrete. Mighty Joe Young manages to capture many of those same themes, but in its deviations from the Kong template, it demonstrates that there is another way for it all to end.
In order to better understand the essence of the classic Giant Ape Movie, I’ve sought themanyriffsonKing Kong that have improbably filled movie theatres over multiple decades, and I think I may have finally seen all the most notable examples—which is really not saying much. Konga is one of the only ones that was released well before the banana gold rush of big apes that occurred around the release of the 1976 Kong remake, and so has a unique late fifties/early sixties B-movie vibe when compared to the others—I can imagine it was at least partially made because of the successful theatrical re-releases of the original Kong throughout the fifties, which really raised that movie’s cultural stock. But despite being from an entirely different era of movies, it still ultimately falls in line with the brazen schlock that came to define the giant gorilla genre, setting a standard for the films that followed, and not a particularly high one.
As King Kung Fuwas to Wichita, The Milpitas Monster is to the city of Milpitas, California (once a rural hub, now essentially a Silicon Valley suburb): a micro-budget, locally-made monster movie that acts as both an affectionate parody and time capsule, which is probably why it seems to still get played in theatres there on a yearly basis. It’s also a production that sometimes makes King Kung Fu look lavish by comparison—not surprising given that this was a project initiated by students and a photography teacher at Samuel Ayer High School (leading to the “Samuel Golden Ayer Productions” gag at the beginning of the movie), although the fact that it received some kind of national distribution is maybe a bit more surprising (it was even blessed with one of those VHS-only title changes, sometimes being called “The Mutant Beast.”) Needless to say, one does not watch a movie like The Milpitas Monster expecting a professionally-made object, but an odd piece of local colour—employing almost every civil servant and local business in the city if the credits are anything to go by—that is anchored by a fantasy plot based on local waste management issues. In eco-horror terms, it’s a broad issue placed in a very specific context.
It’s December and you can already hear the sound of carols filling the air, which means it’s time for another round of Christmas Apes—and the seventies are at it again with yet another low budget King Kong parody, and one with a history as strange as the previous ones. King Kung Fu was a project by local Wichita, Kansas filmmakers Bob Walterschied (producer) and Lance D. Hayes (writer/director) that they hoped would potentially bring the movie business to their state, but after filming from 1974 to 1976 (when they hoped to take advantage of the King Kong remake’s premier), they ran out of money before they could finish editing the movie. It was eventually completed and had a very small theatrical run in 1987, and who did they hire as editor in the end? Why, it was Herbert L. Strock, director of previous subject Gog. Funny how that works out.
You saw the title, so you can probably tell that this is a movie that combines Kong with the martial arts movies that were also popular at the time, but in reality this is meant to be a vehicle for extremely goofy comedy, another pre-Airplane spoof that tries hard to live up to its live action cartoon potential. I’ve always thought that a guy in a gorilla suit doing stuff is inherently funny—some may call it cheap entertainment, but I like to think of it as economical entertainment—so watching a full-length film consisting mostly of that is a real test of my beliefs. What it really feels like is a ninety-minute long Hilarious House of Frightenstein sketch, embracing its low production values, mostly amateur local actors, and dopey sense of humour in a way that is maybe hard to gush about, but is also hard to hate. Despite not being released until the eighties, too, the hair, clothes, and pretty much everything else indicate that we are once again dealing with the Most Seventies thing ever, which is the third year in a row that I’ve said that.
What makes Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion work stand out is his attention to lifelike detail. Following on the techniques of his mentor, King Kong animator Willis O’Brien, the animated creatures in his movies have tics and behaviours that mimic those of real animals, no matter how outlandish or fantastical the creature is. They make the kinds of seemingly pointless movements that living things have, and they react dynamically to situations—all the kinds of things that lesser animation and guy-in-suit movies generally lack (although they sometimes make up for it with unique performances), but with the same “physical object” gravity that all practical effects possess. Yes, these days his animation no longer has the “realism” that they once touted, especially when seen in a level of fidelity they were never intended for, but there’s a sense of empathy that comes through Harryhausen’s work, a sense that these things have a vitality and a presence, and aren’t just there for schlocky thrills, which is why in interviews he never liked his creations to be called “monsters.” Remember, too, that for most of his career, he did all that painstaking frame-by-frame animation by himself—it’s a true labour of love.
Of course, the history of monster movies really begins with the desire to bring dinosaurs back to life—that’s what built O’Brien’s career, and Harryhausen followed dutifully. As I’ve said elsewhere, dinosaurs are like every imaginary monster humanity has ever concocted, except they were real animals that roamed this planet in a time so long ago, it was more or less an alien world. Artists have been trying to resurrect them visually ever since Richard Owen coined the term in the nineteenth century, and when film came around, suddenly we had the opportunity to see these long-dead organisms move around (based on our current knowledge of how they moved around) for the first time. O’Brien was the master of the movie dinosaur, and nothing could match the marvel of his work on King Kong, but he never really got a chance to work on that subject again during his unfortunately turbulent career—it was appropriate, then, that Harryhausen would see one of his unrealized dinosaur-based ideas come to fruition years after his death. That would be The Valley of Gwangi, which probably felt like a bit of a throwback when it was released in 1969, and was under-seen at that time (because the new management at the studio gave it paltry advertising, at least according to Harryhausen himself), but did prove to be a bit of a benchmark when it came to portraying dinosaurs on-screen.
There is a very specific reason why I am writing a post about the 1976 movie film A*P*E (I refuse to type it any other way), and that’s because I have been regularly using an image from it on the Internet for years. I probably had no idea where the picture/GIF of the gorilla suit man flipping us off originated from, but I knew in an instant that it was a perfect visual, one that would provide endless amusement and would have an infinite number of applications in my everyday existence online. Do I need to respond to someone I don’t like? The gorilla is there! Do I need something to properly represent my mood? The gorilla is there! Do I just want to make myself laugh? The gorilla is there! I have always kept that image somewhere in my files, and since I learned of where it came from, I considered checking that out, just to see how a bird-flipping-gorilla fit into an actual movie. Now that I have seen it, I’m still not entirely sure it is a movie.
I’ve written about some lower budget or lower quality productions in the series (looking at you, Frogs), but I haven’t quite gotten into the truly bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. That ever-dropping barrel bottom, though, is an important part of monster movie history, especially in the fifties and sixties, when barely coherent excuses for film (which were sometimes imported films, but not always) found their way into cinemas, often as part of double bills. Sitting through something like The Creeping Terror or The Beast of Yucca Flats was a rite of passage for many burgeoning monster fans, as they promised terrifying delight, but mostly provided endless tedium because unexciting things are cheaper to film—basic competence was no longer a guarantee. These movies provided good examples of what separates different kinds of schlock: while some movies may not have coherent plots, consistent special effects, or top tier acting, they at least have ideas, style, or atmosphere—others seem like they could have been home movies (and some of them pretty much were), and contain so little of what they advertised that they are basically a scam. A movie like Inframanis super silly, but it feels like the people making it knew what they were doing in the end. A movie like A*P*E on the other hand…
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 