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.
After a few weeks of classical monsters, it’s now time for something very different.
If I really wanted to justify watching and writing about Polish art film director Andrzej Żuławski’s cult classic in October, I could say that the heavily, heavily truncated original North American release was released on Halloween in 1983—that version cut out over forty minutes from the movie, in an attempt to make it something resembling a “normal” horror film. But it is not a normal horror film, even though any one scene in this might be among the most upsetting you’ll ever—and despite being featured in histories of “monster movies”, it isn’t quite a monster movie, either, although it does have a memorably disturbing monster in it. Possession is, first and foremost, a story about a married couple whose lives together and their hold on reality completely disintegrates, a game of mutual destruction where they remain circling the whirlpool and dragging each other down further—and like many of the most interesting monster stories, the bizarre creature becomes a manifestation of all that has gone wrong and all that they secretly want.
As previously reported, there was much ado about Swamp Thing between the 1982 release of Wes Craven’s film adaptation and its belated 1989 sequel—on the back of that original movie, DC relaunched the comic series, and a year or two into that run, it was given to Alan Moore, John Totleben, Stephen Bissette, Rick Veitch, et. al., who reinvented the character through their journeys into “Sophisticated Suspense.” The opening credits for The Return of Swamp Thing features a montage of comics covers from the entire series run, showcasing striking images by Totleben, Bissette, Richard Corben, and character co-creator Bernie Wrightson, among others—playing over that montage is, of course, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Born on the Bayou”, indicating that the tone of this movie is probably nothing like those comics. Nor is it anything like Wes Craven’s movie, which was sincere to a fault, while, for better or for worse, this doesn’t have a sincere bone in its swamp debris body.
Always on the lookout for monster movies that venture outside the norm, writer-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s Spring caught my eye—it even received plaudits from Guillermo del Toro, who referred to it as a “Lovecraftian film.” I personally think you’d have to have a pretty broad definition of “Lovecraftian” for this to fit the label, but I guess I can also see where he’s coming from—this is dealing with things strange and ancient that span across human history, things with a certain inexplicable nature, and things that really blur the line between Science Fiction and Fantasy (which is sort of theme in the movie itself.) Despite what some websites will tell you, though, this is definitely not a horror movie, even with some of the grotesque imagery and violent moments (this is the same sort of dispute with online resource genre tags I got into with Lamb—why must these massive websites be so very wrong all the time!), but a fantastical romantic drama, which is certainly unique, and is totally up del Toro’s alley given his own monster filmography.
If we’re talking about Lovecraft adaptations, we’re eventually going to circle back to Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, who were the first ones to really make effective cinematic use of ol’ Howard’s stories in Re-Animator and From Beyond, capturing the eldritch universe while infusing it with horror-comedy sensibilities and carnal undertones—they get the original work, and they also make it their own, what a novel concept! The two of them would periodically venture back into Lovecraftian territory in the nineties, and at the turn of the millennium produced an adaption of one the major works in the Cthulhu Mythos, 1931 novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth (while borrowing the name from the related short story “Dagon.”) As a story of unspeakable Elder Gods and the mutating effect they have on humans that come into contact with them, it contains many of the recurring motifs of the Mythos (including some of the Really Questionable ones that we’ll get into), and like the previous adaptations directed by Gordon and written by frequent collaborator Dennis Paoli, those themes are filtered their own parallel preoccupations.
About ten years ago, I was seeing radio horror programs, usually from the forties, passed around on my usual online haunts. It’s always interesting to me when something that old unexpectedly finds new life on the Internet. Remember when people were suddenly obsessed with Dracula when it was retold through Tumblr? I’ve observed that kind of thing happening on occasion, and while it’s sometimes difficult to tell if all the people suddenly buzzing about a viral golden oldie aren’t coming from a place of weird kitschy irony, I think it’s safe to say that the starting point is usually someone with a genuine interest in these historical pieces of entertainment, sharing their finds not just out of a semi-detached academic curiosity, but because they like the style of this old thing, even if it’s “dated.”
Radio shows have been one example of the outmodded finding strange new life in current times—you can find quite a few them uploaded to sites like Youtube, as bizarre as that sounds. Radio used to be the broadcast medium of choice once upon a time, the source for mainstream thrills—it was, to say something dumb and obvious, the television of its day. When a person unfamiliar with radio plays encounters these shows, they may recognize all the ways TV takes after this style, while also having a hard time adjusting to all the idiosyncrasies the medium developed. It’s familiar, and yet so different…on the other hand, we’ve also been seeing more than a few podcasts start telling stories in a similar manner. A revival of that style may indeed have led to some seeking out its historical antecedents.
Among those old horror programs uploaded to Youtube (the video part usually just a single image of a haunted-looking radio sitting in a foreboding void), the one I really saw get talked up was the anthology series Quiet, Please, and what was one of its most famous episodes, “The Thing on the Fourble Board.” Being interested in Things, it immediately drew my attention, and what I found was an interesting monster story in a style I had little familiarity with at the time. One would probably not expect to be creeped out by a radio program from 1948, but at least on first listening, the way this particular story utilizes the radio medium is clever, intentionally ridiculous, and, at times, unnerving.
By the late eighties, Clive Barker had enough clout in the movie world that he could pursue bigger and grander projects, including writing and directing an adaptation of his dark fantasy novel Cabal, which constructed a mythology tailor-made to appeal to the horror and monster-loving outsiders of the world. “Humans are the real monsters” is a common enough theme (that’s why I have an entire tag for it), but Cabal and its film counterpart Nightbreed might be the most blatant examples, presenting a story that explores the allure of the monstrous and the macabre, especially to the disenfranchised, and pitting it against the violent prejudice of the close-minded mass of mainstream society. In interviews, Barker explains this story in terms of obvious fantasies that monsters let us live out—of possessing immortality and other amazing abilities—but it also clearly draws a connection between monsters and underground subcultures, often similarly persecuted, which I’m sure was a very meaningful thing for an openly gay writer like Barker to explore, especially at the very end of the AIDS-haunted eighties. So the subversion in having the monsters be the “good guys” in the scenario carries a lot of weight.
Before I get into the bulk of the post, I should clarify which version of Nightbreed I watched—because this was famously one of those movies that the studio mishandled completely, leading to some crucial changes to the final product that in turn led to multiple cuts of the movie existing. The original 1990 theatrical version was 102 minutes; altered and removed footage was rediscovered in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which were re-inserted into what is called the Cabal Cut and has been re-released with lengths from 145 minutes to 159 minutes. The version I went with was the 2014 Director’s Cut put out by Shout! Factory, which is just over two hours long and utilizes footage from the Cabal Cut. None of us want to be here all day, so I won’t go over the differences between the versions.
Although very different in execution, Deep Dark reminded me a lot of previous subject Splinter: both feel like short independent films that were expanded into feature length (it won’t surprise you to learn that writer/director Michael Medaglia’s only other credits are for short films), and both rather knowingly hinge themselves on the novelty of their intentionally strange central monster. Splinter used this as a vehicle for pure, undistilled horror filmmaking, while Deep Dark is aiming for more of a comedy-horror, although it never goes that far in either direction. It’s also attempting to spin a sort of dark modern fairy tale, one set in the absolutely-not-overused-at-all world of modern art, and with the freedom from traditional logic that would allow, the biggest question becomes just how hard it pushes into the strangeness of its own premise. The answer to that is “just hard enough, sometimes.”
There’s very few things as enjoyable as discovering another good vintage B-movie—the quaintness that can be found in the best low budget flicks from the fifties and sixties has a special feeling all its own, which is why I’m always on the lookout for ones I’ve never heard of. As a Mexican Sci-Fi comedy musical creature feature, because it is indeed all those things, The Ship of Monsters (Le nave de los monstruos) is another great find, a film that revels in the silliness of its genre and the limitations of its own budget in a way that’s difficult not to admire. I usually wait until the second paragraph to outline the plot, but I feel it’s necessary to get that out early in order to really get you on board: after atomic radiation kills off all the men on the planet Venus, two bikini-clad saviours are sent to scour the galaxy for male specimens of different species to help repopulate the planet with the best combination of genes, and after picking up several monsters and putting them on a ship (they are certainly open-minded) as well as a lone robot, they have to make an emergency landing on Earth for repairs, and then meet up with a singing cowboy. Are things like this not the reason we have cinema?
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?
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 