There have been films about the Loch Ness Monster pretty much from the beginning—the first movie about the monster released in 1934 (a film edited by future Lawrence of Arabia director David Lean), only a year after the first noteworthy sightings took place. Needless to say, very few of them are particularly noteworthy, so The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep can take the crown as both the most well-known Loch Ness Monster movie and the best one almost by default (I’ve already written about the only other contender.) Based on a novel by Dick King-Smith (whose book The Sheep Pig was adapted in the movie Babe), Water Horse is pitched as a traditional sort of whimsical family movie, with a cast of respected British thespians and the structure of a “child befriends an animal” story enlivened with fantastical elements ala ET. It burnishes this well-worn plot by taking advantage of the historical context of the Loch Ness Monster story, arguing why a legend like this may have resonated in an era of strife.
Two movie posts in one week?Yes, I had so many things I wanted to write about that I’m starting my double features a bit early this summer. In June, you’ll be getting a new millenniumsubject early in the week, and something more vintage on Thursdays.
I was already planning on writing about this movie at some point, but the passing of Roger Corman (a few weeks ago as of this posting) made it a top priority, and I’m hoping to cover more of his movies in the near future. Of course, Corman had a big impact on the entirety of Hollywood film with his prolific filmography, general eye for talent, and, let’s say, economical methods, but the many monster movies he either directed (I’ve writtenabout a few of them) or produced do have a special place in that vast filmography—with all their B-movie qualities, there were a few that offered genuine innovation in the category, or at the very least were uniquely bizarre and entertaining. There are also the times where he provided a starting point for filmmakers who would go on to become some of the biggest creative forces in monster movie history, including Joe Dante’s big break with Piranha. In a career that spanned everything from Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to women in prison movies and eccentric comedies, the monster movies are a crucial part of his legacy—beginning with Corman’s first-ever film as a producer.
As the story goes, Corman was irritated after seeing a script he wrote altered by the studio, so he decided to start his own production company to have complete control of the movies he worked on. Monster From the Ocean Floor was the first film he produced, and its six-day, cost-saving-whenever-possible production (the budget is somewhere between $12,000 and $35,000 depending on who you ask) was the beginning of the patented Corman method that would serve him for the rest of his career. The money he received up front from Lippert Pictures for Monster was used to fund his next movie, something called The Fast and the Furious(!), which was the first movie he worked on with distributors Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, the founders of his longtime distributor American International Pictures.
On a pure film history level, Monster From the Ocean Floor is actually significant, even if it is rather unassuming as a low budget fifties monster movie that could be best described as “quaint.” I would also argue that it, in its unassuming way, it’s also a fairly forward-looking piece of fifties creature feature history—released between more famous big studio fare, specifically Creature From the Black Lagoonand Them!, it gets into some of the major themes of the era early, signalling the specific form of nuclear paranoia that haunts a large number of these movies. Corman and his crew were not establishing their own distinct brand of monster movie, but developing the entire genre as a whole without really trying—and that’s a very Corman thing to do.
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.
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.
It is 1989, and Doctor Who is on its last legs. You may have noticed that I skipped over all of the serials featuring Colin Baker in the lead role—this is not simply because of the poor reputation most of the stories have even among fans of the series, but because none of them offer a particularly compelling monster-centric story to write about. Things started looking up at least a little bit in 1987, when the show went through a small-scale creative overhaul, with a new batch of writers behind the scenes and a new lead in Sylvester McCoy, but none of the active attempts to make the series more ambitious and relevant saved it from going on an indefinite hiatus just as the eighties ended, leaving it at a still-impressive twenty-six consecutive years on television.
The three years with McCoy and lead writer Andrew Cartmel carry a very distinctive atmosphere, one that attempts to mine the best parts of the series’ past, especially its sense of imagination and its capacity for moments of child-friendly horror, and infuse a puckish kind of whimsy and more focus on the characterization of the Doctor and his companion. “The Curse of Fenric”, the classic series’ penultimate story, carries with it the DNA of previous serials we’ve talked about: there’s a the moody atmosphere and marching army of monsters of “The Web of Fear”, a somewhat Quatermass-esque combination of mythology and Sci-Fi similar to “The Awakening”, and even the winking social commentary of “Carnival of Monsters.” Another similarity to “Web of Fear” is its attempt to provide a new interpretation of a well-established monster—but this goes much further in taking its inspirations and playing around with the iconography.
Most people seem to accept that Creature From the Black Lagoon is part of the classic Universal Monsters line-up, sitting alongside Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy on home video covers, in theme park attractions, and on twelve-packs of soda and bags of potato chips—but in terms of context and content, it is at a removed from the films of the thirties and forties. Those films carried a certain Victorian literary flair (even when they ostensibly took place in “modern” times), set in a Gothic version of Europe (and maybe some other places) frozen in time, full of old foreboding castles and supernatural curses; the 1950s, often favoured science-based horror, and not the theatrical mad science of Frankenstein or The Invisible Man, but the kind that discovered and unleashed the atomic bomb, or that probed deeper into the prehistoric past or into outer space, and finding signs of man’s ultimate insignificance. In that sense, Black Lagoon is closer in spirit to its contemporaries, the less-commented-upon run of Sci-Fi monster movies put out by Universal that spanned everything from It Came From Outer Space and This Island Earth to Tarantula and even something like The Monolith Monsters. These films were about contemporary scientific thought—or, as close as movies like these actually get to it—and grapple with the idea that the more we learn about our universe, the more strange and terrifying it becomes, which is something a bit different from the otherworldly horrors of older stories.
But Black Lagoon still feels like a bridge between the “classic” monsters, which were gaining a new following thanks to television re-airings, and the new breed of mutants and space aliens haunting horror films—while the style of fifties-style monsters and the “classics” differed, that’s not to say that they were completely incompatible. This movies demonstrates that there are, in fact, many places where the two eras both diverge and meet: while steeped in the modern conventions and trends of the day, it maintains a good deal of the spirit of its predecessors, especially in characterizing its lead monster as an individual, tragic figure as well as a terrifying force. There is indeed a reason why this Creature gets to be part of the gang.
Years ago, I wrote about my initiation into the…fandom?…of Cryptozoology and other stories of unexplained phenomenon through books and TV programs like Animal X, which focused entirely on cryptids and other weird animal anecdotes. In the grand scheme of things, a show like Animal X was niche, a foreign import that found its way into circulation during the strange expansion days of cable TV—even a broader-minded program in a similar vein like the Leonard Nimoy-hosted In Search Of… (a recurring topic on my other website) was mostly a minor staple of syndication. These series have snuck their way into the nostalgic memories of lifelong channel surfers, and likely introduced more people to the many mystery monsters of the world…but I imagine that even more people were introduced to Cryptozoology through the most mainstream mysterious phenomenon TV show, Unsolved Mysteries.
Its credentials as an actual hit are pretty evident: the initial run, which like In Search Of… started out as a series of specials, ran for fourteen straight years on three channels, including two of the big networks (NBC from 1987 to 1997, and CBS from 1997 to 1999) and one cable network (Lifetime, from 2000-2002); it almost certainly became another staple of syndication in that timeframe as well, and was recently revived in a revised form on Netflix. A series like that doesn’t go on for that long and end up with hundreds of episodes without being seen by a few people, and the trick to getting this type of show in front of so many eyeballs is ingenious: it’s a Trojan Horse, of sorts. From its inception, Unsolved Mysteries was a true crime docu-series, focusing on murders, robberies, disappearances, separated families and other down-to-earth cases—it’s a good example of what the genre was like before the more recent trends in True Crime “entertainment.” This makes it cheap to produce for networks, and it even includes an audience participation angle, with a telephone line open to hear from people who may have information that will crack those cold cases, with subsequent episodes providing updates on previous stories that showed that this hotline actually worked.
When it became a full weekly series in 1988, the show expanded its range of topics to include different sorts of mysteries, including supposed supernatural phenomena: UFOs, hauntings, and starting in a first season episode from 1989, monster legends. One could question the taste of putting stories with genuine pleas to help reunite families and solve violent crimes to give people closure next to sensationalism about crop circles and Bigfoot, but it’s the exact sort of gleefully tone-ignorant juxtaposition you expect to see on television. These things are all “mysteries”, and so they are jumbled together regardless of their actual content (I do wonder how many phone calls they got with “information” about the weirdo stuff.) In any case, this means that the sorts of people who would initially watch a series about real crimes were, more often than not, also exposed to some of the most well-known cryptids, and maybe even came away convinced that they’re real—and believer or not, other people came away from the show with the memories of these creatures burned into their memory thanks to the dark and menacing atmosphere the show imbued in their portrayal.
The potential pitfall of all those self-aware, meta-referencing pieces of genre entertainment—a particular specialty of the nineties—is a sense of having your cake and eating it: they point out all the tropes and cliches while actively using them, without necessarily demonstrating any original or truly subversive ideas of their own. The Faculty aims for that style of storytelling, but has at least one new-ish angle up its sleeve: it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers set in a high school, leading to all sorts of new metaphorical possibilities for a well-worn concept. Of course, because of the style of writing, it’s a version of that concept where characters directly talk about Jack Finney’s original Body Snatchers story as well as Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, signposting all of those metaphorical possibilities before you even get a chance to really take them in. That part of the movie was, not surprisingly, the contribution of Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who was assigned by the supervillains at Miramax to revamp a script by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel, with the directorial role given to Robert Rodriguez, coming off of From Dusk Till Dawn and his support work on Mimic. As aggressively 1998 as any movie could be, this does make some honest attempts to straddle the snarky hipness of the meta dialogue with a nominally serious Sci-Fi horror take on teenage alienation.
What the creature feature supposedly gained in the post-Jurassic Park world was a new sense of freedom: with the advances in CGI, no longer would their monster designs and action be constrained by what was possible with anything physical. Any monster you can imagine, with all manner of inhuman body shapes and abilities and sizes, can appear on-screen and move in an ostensibly naturalistic way—the dream of the monster movie maniac who had lived through multiple decades of men in rubber suits, stop motion, and more realistic but time-intensive and complicated animatronics that still had to follow the laws of physics.
Deep Rising is the first movie I’ve written about from this period that has gone full-bore into CGI, without even the balance of practical and digital effects seen in films like The Relicand Mimic, released the year before. More than just how it changes the portrayal of the central monster, though, this movie shows that, in practice, what the CGI revolution often did was allow filmmakers with a fondness for mass scale to indulge in those impulses with impunity. Writer-director Stephen Sommers made a career of frenetic, CGI-heavy action, and Deep Rising carries all those hallmarks—it is a film that has no time for limitations or compromises, and in some cases no time for much of anything other than constant movement.
Released at the tail end of the eighties, Leviathan followed a string of major projects for Stan Winston—he had worked with Rob Bottin on The Thing, and after opening Stan Winston Studio, crafted the effects for The Terminator, Aliens, and Predator (as well as Invaders From Marsand Pumpkinhead), establishing that team to be the top studio for creature effects in Hollywood. Winston himself was well past his Gargoyles mask-masking days, acting as Producer of Creature Effects alongside his crew, including Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. (the latter once again tasked with wearing the monster suit), who would move on to Tremors immediately after this. With those in mind, one can’t help but look at Leviathan as a victory lap, the kind of movie that these people could make in their sleep. It doesn’t change the game like Stan Winston Studios prior projects, but it allows them another chance to show why they got those earlier movies in the first place.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 