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.

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.

Gargoyles (1972)

Monster movies were in a bit of a slump in the seventies, but began to pick up steam starting in the eighties. This, I think, can primarily be attributed to the rise of increasingly complicated special effects, and the dedicated studios producing those effects that started pushing the limits on the imagination and believability of monsters in film. Once monsters stopped looking so much like guys in rubber suits, a number of possibilities began to open up, and movie studios noticed. Stan Winston and his studio were among the pioneers in that space, providing award-winning effects for some of the biggest movies of the eighties and nineties.

But before he could be the director of Pumpkinhead, Winston had to start somewhere, and that somewhere was the 1972 TV movie Gargoyles, his first credited work as a make-up artist (a credit that he apparently had to fight for), which won the 1973 Emmy in the make-up category alongside effects overseers Ellis Burman Jr. (“prop manufacturer” for Prophecy) and Del Armstrong. You can tell that they really wanted to emphasize the make-up effects in this thing because they include several publicity shots and scenes of the titular gargoyles in the opening narration as it slips from quoting Paradise Lost to giving an entire history of gargoyles before we’ve had a chance to catch our breath. Seeing the monsters before the movie even begins would seemingly spoil the surprise, but I guess the question is…what surprise? This is a TV movie made in 1972.

The Blood Beast Terror (1968)

It just wouldn’t be Halloween without at least one British horror movie starring Peter Cushing in a lead role. Apparently Cushing considered The Blood Beast Terror (US title The Vampire Beast Craves Blood, and we can only hope that whoever came up with these titles lived a happy, contented life knowing that they made the world a brighter place) the worst movie he ever worked on in his long and storied career—of course I can’t definitively state whether that’s true or not, as I haven’t seen every one of his movies. Among the ones I have seen, there have been excellent ones (The Abominable Snowman, Horror Express), solid ones (Island of Terror), and interesting but flawed ones (The Creeping Flesh)—Blood Beast is probably the least interesting of these, the one that feels the most like a procedural monster movie, but that’s not to say it isn’t interesting at all. As has been the case many times before, while it proceeds in a predictable manner, all the little details (or, in some cases, the lack of details) build up a pleasingly melodramatic mix of Victorian moralism and Gothic ghoulishness.

Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

Where the previous Roger Corman movie I wrote about benefited from a more character-based approach that made up for a fitful distribution of monster scenes, its follow-up goes in the complete opposite direction, intentionally paring the script down to primarily scenes about the monster at its centre and simplifying characters so they are defined only by their jobs, genders, or accents (hilariously, screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, a frequent Corman collaborator who will be showing up in future posts, explained that “[Corman] said it was an experiment. ‘I want suspense or action in every scene. No kind of scene without suspense or action.’ His trick was saying it was an experiment, which it wasn’t. He just didn’t want to bother cutting out the other scenes, which he would do.”) At around 63 minutes, Attack of the Crab Monsters barely makes feature length (but is even more perfect as part of a double feature), and while maintaining much of the feel of a fifties creature feature, its maniacal pace and devotion to “suspense and action” makes itself felt off the hop—we get a decapitation within the first five minutes, after all. Even aside from that, what would seemingly be a typical example of one of the fundamental types of narrative conflict—man against man, man against self, man against giant radioactive crab—is complicated by said giant radioactive crabs acquiring some truly bizarre characteristics, giving them an unexpected presence throughout the movie. This is a case of something appearing routine on the surface but having a truly peculiar imagination when you peer into the tidal pool.

Blue Monkey (1987)

Just as a heads up, the next few posts in this series will be insect-themed. Now, you may be asking, “If you’re writing about insects, then why are you reviewing a movie called Blue Monkey?”; well, smart-ass, I’ll have you know that the movie Blue Monkey features absolutely no monkeys, let alone blue ones, but does have multiple giant mutant insects. The title is a non-sequitur likely aimed at attracting the attention of video store patrons* (although it’s based on actual dialogue from the movie), and it also has the much more appropriate, but also much more boring, alternate title Insect! In a battle between something nonsensical and potentially misleading and something accurate but plain, I know what I prefer.

This one hits close to home, in that it is very, very Canadian, no matter what it does to make you think otherwise (including getting actors to speak with shifting, unidentifiable accents.) Although made outside the era when con artist filmmakers produced low budget genre films in the Great White North as a tax shelter, this is still in the spirit of the low budget Canuxploitation, answering the success of Aliens the previous year with a cost-efficient movie about giant mutant bugs in a hospital, which is an underutilized setting for a monster movie, complete with minor body horror. The director is William Fruet, an old hand at the low budget horror game who otherwise has had a long, varied career in the Canadian film industry, and after making movies like Blue Monkey in the eighties he would eventually go on to direct 27 episodes of the Goosebumps TV series. Honestly, you could look at this as a movie-length episode of Goosebumps aimed at adults—and, in that light, it’s not a disagreeable bit of schlock.

Monster Multimedia: Urban Yeti!

Now, to conclude this year’s Christmas Apes season (which is also the last post of this year), another tale of a certain legendary wild man, albeit one that is probably a little less classy than the last one I wrote about…

For the longest time, I thought that Urban Yeti! would remain something that only I would remember. The Game Boy Advance software library, which I’ve written about elsewhere, was a strange beast, housing some truly outstanding portable games, but just as with its predecessors, it also attracted a glut of low-quality nonsense trying to trick kids or their parents into picking them up (generally speaking, if it was a licensed game or had CG art on the cover, you’d best avoid it.) So, a blatantly bad GBA game was so common that it rarely attracted a second glance when they graced the pages of the game magazines that were often forced to briefly cover them to fill space—but despite looking about on par with the chaff of the system, just the title Urban Yeti! (yes, with the exclamation point) caught my attention back in my game mag-reading heyday of 2002. The game’s cover was ugly-looking yet intriguing, and the accompanying screenshots and text that conveyed a certain level of bafflement on the part of the staff of Nintendo Power or whoever painted a portrait of something that was, while not good, at least unique. If memory serves, one or more of the game magazines I was reading at the time continued to reference it for a few months afterwards, especially the game’s iconic opening line “Now, get ready to yeti!” (if only more games commanded you with such power and conviction), which I also found incredibly amusing. Of course, the game industry would inevitably leave Urban Yeti! in the literal bargain bin of history, where it probably deserved to be, and thought no more about it once that magical summer of 2002 passed us by—but I didn’t forget. No, I carried that exhortation to prepare myself for future yeti-ing with me out of early adolescence and well into adulthood, where I figured that a silly line from a mediocre game (that was evidently the sort of thing that was being sold through a 1-800 number at one point) I had never played would die with me. There was no shame, in my mind, in becoming the lonely torchbearer for Urban Yeti!

AND YET: last year, the charity speed running event Awesome Games Done Quick featured a streamed playthrough of the game as part of their Bad Games block, introducing this strange piece of crypto-Cryptozoological ephemera to a new audience. Apparently, far more people were Ready To Yeti than I had imagined! But what exactly drew us all to the call of this sassy Sasquatch adventure?