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.

Quatermass II

Finally, we are rounding out Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass trilogy, three alien-heavy Sci-Fi films whose impact on the genre in the UK and beyond cannot be understated (maybe don’t expect to see coverage of the much-belated Quatermass/Quatermass Conclusion, which was made when Kneale was in full “Old Man Yells At Cloud” phase.) As with The Quatermass Xperiment, Quatermass II was originally written by Kneale as a six-part BBC television serial, which aired 1955 (commissioned partly to give the BBC a high profile answer to their first privately-owned competitor, ITV), and then adapted into film form by Hammer in 1957 under the slightly altered title Quatermass 2 (or Enemy From Space in other countries.) With Kneale demanding new terms following his displeasure with Hammer’s adaptation of the first Quatermass serial (that argument led to the creation of X the Unknown as a substitute for a second Quatermass in film in 1956), he was given a chance to write the first draft of Quatermass 2 himself, which was then revised by director Val Guest, who had directed both Xperiment and the other 1957 Nigel Kneale adaptation, The Abominable Snowman. Kneale was so pleased with the resulting movie that, when he gained controlling rights to it, he proceeded to remove it from circulation.

Watching both versions of this, it’s difficult to really agree with Kneale’s position—Hammer’s version of Quatermass II is a thoughtfully condensed version of the serial, and even Brian Donlevy returning to play Quatermass (which one of the things that Kneale disagreed with most vociferously) fits better here than he did in The Quatermass Xperiment. While the movie version of Quatermass and the Pit made over a decade later is a generally good adaptation where you can still feel the missing depth and detail of the extended TV serial, the Quatermass II film captures all the atmosphere and deliberate storytelling without much compromise, and in some ways the story is even enhanced thanks to the upped budget. Importantly, the themes that Kneale imbued in that story are fully maintained, and with Guest’s direction, often intensified.

All of the Quatermass stories deal with a loss of human agency due to the machinations of cosmic horrors—the first one featured a near-mindless extraterrestrial organism that altered a man inside and out, and Quatermass and the Pit showed human evolution manipulated by a self-destructive alien civilization in the distant past. By comparison, Quatermass II feels almost normal, as a variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers paranoia; the TV serial came after Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers but preceded the film version, a case of parallel thought reflecting the fears in the air in the mid-1950s of secret subversive plots and the battle between free will and conformity. What this version of that story emphasizes is the terrifying speed in which the outside influence seeds itself into positions of power, and how the machinations of our higher offices seem almost tailor-made to shield this invasion from the public eye. There is a specific set of very British observations and ironies animating Kneale’s writing, leading to something that is relatively more grounded than the other two Quatermass stories and their broader existential anxieties, while still suggesting that a malignant, inhuman universe can suddenly assert control over us.

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.

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001)

As we’ve frequently seen (even as recently as last week), the spirit of fifties B-Movies remained—and arguable remains—strong in creature features, and one part of that legacy is embracing the poor reputation the low-budget monster movies in the black-and-white era often had. Making fun of that particular oeuvre—their overly-expository and unnatural dialogue, their toy-like special effects, their nonsensical plots—has been a go-to for decades, and I can imagine that seeing so many of those movies turned into comedy fodder on something like Mystery Science Theatre 3000 broadened their audience and extended their period as laugh material for another few decades. A movie like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is an obvious outgrowth of all that: a conscious pastiche of lousy programmers, their most ridiculous traits amplified while still keeping as much of the look and sound of the real deal as possible. Even with the ubiquity of this particular brand of parody, I’m sure there was still a sense of novelty to seeing a movie like this in the early aughts, especially when it was distributed by a major studio like Tristar (three years after it premiered at film festivals), who even let their logo be shown in black-and-white to match the spirit.

There was a time where I would have taken this sort of thing at face value, but after years of watching the kinds of older movies that inspired Cadavra, the experience of watching it feels a bit different. When these fifties B-movies were something a bit more distant—a strange and infrequent discovery on late night television, all blurring together in your memory—the kind of schlock being mined for comedy here probably felt accurate to the general atmosphere. But when you really drill down into the lesser-known genre flicks of this period, you find that they are often much more interesting than their reputation says, offering weirder sights and sounds and wilder ideas even with their budget-constrained nature. Shockingly, you also find that these movies were entirely capable of making fun of themselves in the moment, the filmmakers knowingly playing up their own ridiculousness at a time when irony was not expected. If the targets of mockery have already been cracking all the same jokes this whole time, then what, exactly, can a comedy pastiche made over four decades later bring to the table?

Mothra vs. Godzilla & Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)

1964 was the turning point for the Godzilla films—after ten years and four movies, the series not only solidified into what it would be for the rest of the Showa era, but what it would be in all the years beyond that. After hitting on the kaiju battle premise in Godzilla Raids Again, King Kong vs. Godzilla, demonstrated that having multiple monster headliners duking it out brought in audiences like nothing else. As we have seen in the sixty years since then, it’s a pitch that finds its way back into public favour even after a period of downtime—watching two or more big monsters fighting hits a primal nerve.

These shifts in focus inevitably changed how the stories were written—for one, humanity was no longer living in a world where monsters were a freakish and tragic aberration, but one where they are woven into the fabric of existence. More importantly, though, was how all of this altered the depiction of Godzilla, which spoke of changing attitudes in Toho and possibly in the populace. Although the tone of the movies had significantly softened after the stark nuclear terror of Ishiro Honda’s original, one thing that stuck around even with the relative optimism of Raids Again or the lighthearted spectacle of KKvG was the idea of Godzilla as the ultimate threat, a walking disaster that humanity must contend with again and again as a constant reminder of what they had brought upon themselves. In 1954, Godzilla’s atomic origins made it feel like a new existential problem for life itself—but what happens when that becomes normalized? If Godzilla is eventually part of everyday life, how are we supposed to see him? Could he even become something more than a menace?

Circumstances at Toho led to the regular monster movie crew producing two movies in the Godzilla series in 1964 (with Dogora released between them), and you can see the drastic shift in the tone of this series happen in real time as you watch them. Godzilla gets one more round as the antagonist that brings humans (and more benevolent monsters) together—but within a few months, the tables turn completely, and it is Godzilla himself that humanity turns to for help from an even greater threat. There is something of a logical through line in this—Godzilla’s subsequent change into monster hero did not come from nothing—but it still rather dramatically realigned how these movies would be made from then on.

The Cremators (1972)

So, who were the people behind all the drive-in filler in the seventies? Sometimes, it was small-time movie industry outcasts, as we saw in Blood Freak—but in this case, it was Hollywood veterans trying desperately to stay in the game in whatever way they can. The Cremators was written and directed by Henry Essex, who was the writer or co-writer of both It Came From Outer Space and The Creature From the Black Lagoon, two of the most significant entries in the fifties Sci-Fi and monster movie canons. He otherwise mostly stuck to either crime films or TV, but apparently thought he could return to his glory days in the seventies, writing and directing both this movie and the previous year’s even more infamous Octaman. You can certainly find a vein of that fifties B-movie energy in Cremators—it’s based on a high concept monster and features a lot of standing around trying and mostly failing to make sense of that high concept monster—but unlike the mid-sixties movies I’ve written about previously, this is very clearly trying to feel contemporary. Maybe that’s part of the issue: reminding you that it is 1972, with colour and almost two decades of movies to compare it to, does something like this very few favours.

Rebirth of Mothra III (1998)

Speaking of Mothra and King Ghidorah…

I said this back in my post about the first of these movies (who can remember what happened two years ago, though?), but the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy was clearly Toho trying to keep their kaiju business alive after the “retirement” of Godzilla in anticipation of the big Hollywood reboot—thankfully, their second most famous giant monster was still on hand. Rebirth of Mothra III released six months after that big Hollywood Godzilla reboot, and by the next year, Toho was back making Godzilla movies like that deal never happened. Mothra ended up just keeping the seat warm.

Capping off this moth-eaten threesome, ROMIII brings back two things from the first movie: director Okihiro Yoneda, and, of course, King Ghidorah. As an interesting transition point, assistant director Masaaki Tezuka and special effects director Kenju Suzuki would immediately begin working on the Millennium era Godzilla movies (the former directing vs. Megaguiras, Against Mechagodzilla, and Tokyo SOS) after this movie. This is, in essence, the true end of the Heisei era of Toho monster movies that began in 1984 (although as any actual person familiar with Japan would tell you, the Heisei era was still going on until 2019, but Godzilla does not follow such useless things as actual historical reality), and while the Millennium era did carry over most of the tokusatsu traditions, there is still a certain kind of spiky texture and weight to the monster action in movies like this that gradually vanished as subsequent Toho stomp-em-ups more fully integrated digital effects to assist the guys in the suits. Which is not to say that this movie doesn’t use CGI—oh lordy, does it ever not not use CGI—but it feels more of a piece with the kaiju films of the previous fourteen years, with a dogged insistence on keeping things practical where it can. The tone of these Mothra movies is different from their Godzilla predecessors, but the look of them is very much the same.

Creature Classic Companion: The Day of the Triffids

English author John Wyndham wrote numerous highly influential Science Fiction novels in the fifties, including the likes of The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, and The Midwich Cuckoos (source of the multiple Village of the Damned films)—but The Day of the Triffids, originally published in 1951, remains singular. Yes, it’s foundational to the post-apocalypse subgenre, providing some early and potent imagery of decaying social cohesion and a major city turned into a hollowed-out wasteland, but what really struck me was how the background of the story combines many contemporary-at-the-time fears: the dangers posed by arms race secrecy, unchecked scientific experimentation (for mostly economic purposes), and ecological distortion, all becoming a volatile chemical combination that eventually blows up in the face of the entire civilization. Unique among killer plants, the triffids are far more frightening for the way they become the ultimate invasive species, and how they’re not even the most immediate threat the surviving humans have to deal with—but they’re always there, spreading, and it’s only deep into the novel (and in the successful adaptations of it) that the survivors realize just what they’ve wrought upon themselves.

Die, Monster, Die! (1965)

Back in August, I wrote about the recent adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s short story “The Color Out of Space”, and mentioned one other previous movie adaptation of the story—so why not write about that as well? It is very interesting to look at two different versions of the same story, released over fifty years apart, and how they reflect the horror movie trends of their times—hey, they even both feature big actors in analogous roles! The 1965 version, given the incredible title Die, Monster, Die! In North America (and the slightly more sedate Monster of Terror in the UK), was partially brought to us by American International Pictures, who had just finished their run of Roger Corman-directed Edgar Allen Poe films (the director of this, Daniel Haller, was the set designer of those movies)—and this is definitely in that vein, presenting a horror world of huge, dilapidated English estates, wary villagers, and Boris Karloff in his twilight years. This was the kind of horror movie that was kind of on its last legs by the mid-sixties, and while this isn’t a period piece as many of its predecessors were, it has the feel of something from an older time—even its veering into science fiction territory feels old-fashioned. It makes for a very loose adaptation of the source material, one with less of the lingering dread but one still based on ideas of legacy and familial dysfunction.

Color Out of Space (2020)

Back in January, I wrote about the film Hardware, which in 1990 had become enough of a cult hit to make Hollywood interested in working with director Richard Stanley. This ultimately led to the debacle that was 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (featuring Marlon Brando in white makeup wearing an ice bucket on his head), an experience so unpleasant for Stanley (before he was replaced as director by John Frankenheimer) that he ended up abandoning the mainstream film industry for decades. That story, and whole lot more, was told in the 2014 documentary Lost Soul, which you should definitely watch, and may possibly still be on Tubi as you read this. This past year saw his return to directing a non-short/documentary film, and it just so happens to be a very Creature Compatible® one at that, so for the first time in a while we’re going to be taking a look at contemporary material (and the next visit to modern times may be sooner than you think!), as well as our first foray into the career of a master of weird, mind-bending fiction that makes you question the nature of reality: Nicolas Cage. Also Lovecraft, I guess.