Reptilicus (1962)

Early 1961 saw an unusual uptick in European-made giant monster movies: over two months, Gorgo and Konga premiered in Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, while the Danish-made Reptilicus debuted in its home country. This represented a rather singular mad rush to cash in on the success of Godzilla and other Japanese-made monster movies, but it sputtered out as soon as it began, leaving us with only a few very odd attempts to recreate the kaiju film with different sensibilities. The rest of the world got their chance to partake in Denmark’s only giant monster movie after a year-long delay, as instead of simply dubbing the existing movie, our old pals Sidney W. Pink (acting as director and producer) and Danish expat Ib Melchior (as co-writer) essentially remade the movie, originally directed by Poul Bang, with most of the cast returning. The final product became rather infamous, ending up a modern Mystery Science Theatre 3000 punching bag and finding its way onto “Worst Movies of All Time” lists—by my estimation, it’s not even the worst Sid Pink & Ib Melchior movie I’ve watched, but there are definitely some issues that may be worth formally addressing.

Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Consider this: an early sixties Roger Corman monster movie spoof made in three days is regularly recreated in high schools across North America. This is but one result of the unexpected cultural nexus point that is Little Shop of Horrors, a previous site subject transformed into an off-Broadway musical in 1982 and then adapted into a new film in 1986. These roots are long and deep: both versions were produced by David Geffen, and written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, whose work here would get them the job of reinventing Disney’s animated musicals starting with The Little Mermaid; meanwhile, the film attracted the directing talent of Jim Henson’s (sometimes literal) right hand man Frank Oz, who brought a team of Muppets-trained effects team (including the design work of Lyle Conway, a veteran of films like The Dark Crystal) to give new cinematic life to the stage musical’s central charismatic flora. It really does feel like a decade’s worth of legendary figures in the entertainment industry came out to produce this—which, again, is based on a low budget monster movie.

The Ship of Monsters (1960)

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?

Monster Multimedia: Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts

Netflix has been funding plenty of original animation in recent years, and statistically there was always a decent chance at least some of it would be creature-based, or at least creature adjacent, and so would attract my attention (and there may be enough of it for multiple blog posts, hint hint.) Last year saw the release of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, a thirty episode series split into three “seasons” over the course of ten months, which was produced by Dreamworks’ television animation division with the actual animation provided by South Korea’s Studio Mir (which previously animated shows like Legend of Korra and Netflix’s Voltron reboot), and this is about as creature-centric as it gets, providing a post-collapse sci-fi world filled with unique specimens, rendered in some of the most eye-catching colours I’ve seen in a recent animated thing (it’s based on a webcomic made by series creator Radford Sechrist, an animation veteran, and admirably captures his comics’ colour palette and angular design sense.) Kipo has the serialized plot and gradual worldbuilding of much recent genre work (especially aimed at adolescent audiences), but its emphasis on action and its regular introduction of wacky new ideas and characters throughout give it a feel not dissimilar to the Saturday morning cartoons I used to watch as a kid, only much better in execution. But while it has a focus on excitement and humour, it becomes surprisingly nuanced as it goes along, not afraid to depict its characters’ legitimate struggles with morality and cooperation, while never giving up on their initial optimism and drive. It’s compelling as both a story and candy-coloured blast of imagination, which is still feels like a rare accomplishment.

(I don’t usually signal this, but since this show is still relatively recent and some people may still want to watch it, I’ll note that this post contains heavy spoilers for the entire series, so proceed with caution!)

The Mighty Kong (1998)

Sometimes, even the logical explanation for something doesn’t seem enough—case in point, The Mighty Kong, an animated family musical film released direct to video in the late nineties, in the waning days of the VHS glut I wrote about in another post. I don’t remember ever seeing this video on store shelves around the time, but at some point during the Internet age I stumbled upon it and learned that it was the “cartoon version of King Kong that has a happy ending”, and that was about the tall and short of my knowledge. That description reminded me of the massively hacked up 1930 movie version of Moby Dick , where Ahab is a hero with a love interest and an evil brother, that a friend told me about.

Co-distributed by Warner Bros. (who, many years later, would distribute a bigger King Kong reboot, and will be providing us with the long-awaited new version of King Kong vs. Godzilla) and a company that went out of business a year after this released, the basic idea here would be to make a watered-down family-friendly version of the Kong story (a movie that was beloved by children for decades because it was not family-friendly), and because people are familiar with it, they’ll use it as an electric babysitter for their dumdum kids. On paper, that makes some kind of mercenary business sense—but the actual product raises even more questions. For starters, considering the obvious cash-in nature of this thing, which is an officially licensed version of the movie complete with all the proper character names and truncated but mostly accurate recreation of the original plot, why did they spend all the money necessary to not only get Dudley Moore on as a marquee voice, but also hired the Sherman Brothers (of Mary Poppins and a bunch of other classics) to write the songs? It’s almost as if they were serious about this project—but I can tell, after watching it, that they were most certainly not.

The Lure (2015)

We’re now on the third and final sample of Creature Canon Contenders found on The Criterion Channel, and since we were on the topic of deconstructionist monster stories: The Lure, a Polish horror/musical/fantasy recreation of the eighties directed and co-written by Agnieszka Smoczynska, is a highly deconstructionist take on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” Do you consider mermaids to be “monsters”? Well, this movie certainly does—in this, mermaids have a tendency to rip throats out and eat human hearts, which is slightly different from the norm, but not that far removed from their mythical origins. BUT, aside from being dangerous, flesh-eating demi-humans with beautiful voices (whose existence in the hyper-stylized world of the film seems to be not necessarily common knowledge, but no one seems to have their mind blown by it), they are also a metaphorical representation of how women are exploited, and how they try to change themselves to better fit societal expectations. Moving between flashy choreographed musical numbers and a grungy depiction of urban Europe in the eighties, you can really see both sides of the central argument: is this really a world worth giving up heart eating and underwater merriment for?

Monster Multimedia: The Mighty Boosh – “The Legend of Old Gregg”

Very few comedy shows hooked me as hard as The Mighty Boosh did when I first watched it—it was unlike anything I had ever seen before, a show with a mastery of quirky, fast-paced dialogue and utterly ridiculous stories, coupled with catchy original music. It was among a wave of cult-forming British comedies that all debuted in the mid-two-thousands—Peep Show, The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, just to name a few—but what made it stand out was also probably what made me love it: the cartoonish world it presented, with outlandish fantasy plots and characters. As we are told in the theme song, we are being taken on a journey through time and space, and almost every one of its twenty episodes features one of its central cast (Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt, and Rich Fulcher) playing an over-the-top costumed character, which was more often than not some kind of goofy monster—sometimes, the show almost feels like a art school comedy take on Doctor Who.

No episode demonstrates The Mighty Boosh‘s capacity for monster-based merriment better than what may be its most well-known one, series 2’s “The Legend of Old Gregg.” For whatever reason, this one blew up, and managed to even reach outside the regular BBC Three audience—I distinctly remember seeing clips from it passed around by people who never mentioned watching the show before. Although it isn’t my favourite episode of the series, it does have a lot of the elements that made it so unique, including another amazing song and a memorable performance from Noel Fielding as the titular character.