Monster in the Closet (1986)

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.

Tremors (1990)

Big Hollywood studios have a hot-and-cold relationship with monster movies—they’ll cede that territory to B-movie productions for years, or decades, at a time, and then start investing some bigger budgets into a select few before dropping the whole thing again. The nineties was one of those periods with a minor streak of classic-style creature features—”classic-style” in the sense that they’re more or less following the structures that were laid down in the fifties. Their special effects may be more sophisticated, the dialogue less stiff and expository, and the violence more explicit, but in the end it’s still a movie where a group of people have to deal with the sudden appearance of a monster or monsters, and the expected plot beats are barely changed, even after forty years.

Tremors, which could be considered the first in that wave, wasn’t a significant success in its original release, and likely accrued its cult following through home video and TV airings, leading it to become a direct-to-video franchise with a surprising amount of longevity (as in, it’s most recent sequel came out in 2020)—it even had a short-lived TV show, and a more recent series attempt that wasn’t picked up. Technically, it’s also an end-of-the-eighties movie that was delayed into the dead early months of 1990, just like Nightbreed, making it something of a liminal artifact. Looking at it now, you can see how it heralds some of the ways the subsequent decade of monster movies attempted to differentiate themselves from their predecessors, some minor tweaks in presentation likely meant to pull in new audiences—while Tremors and what followed tended to resemble the old school entries in basic plotting, they change just enough of the surface details to make themselves feel contemporary, with a particular emphasis on comedy.