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.

The Thing From Another World (1951)

Let’s go back to the beginning…or one of the beginnings, at least.

This movie has been brought up several times before—in reference to the general tone of the Sci-Fi monster movies of the 1950s, and in all the times it’s been ripped-off directly in the ensuing decades. In truth, most monster movies made after The Thing From Another World are ripping it off in some way: this type of movie, with this kind of structure and these themes, didn’t really exist before 1951—The Man From Planet X, an alien-based movie that released at almost the same time, still has a foot in the days of the Universal Monster movies, and while The Thing also does in certain ways we’ll get into, it also loudly asserts its time and place, the early fifties of it all. This is the movie that made paranoia the central feature of so many creature features of the era, literalizing the fears of all that is unknown and inscrutable in a wider universe humanity was gradually discovering—but what became increasingly generalized and irrational as the decade wore on still has a shocking clarity and specificity here at the point of origin.

The Lift (1983)

For this Halloween season, I have lined up a selection of some of the odder monster movies I could find. First up, this Dutch production directed by equally Dutch filmmaker Dick Maas (director of the perfectly-named Amsterdamned), who like Razorback‘s Russell Mulcahy came from the world of music videos, gaining notoriety for his videos for the Golden Earring songs “Twilight Zone” and “When the Lady Smiles” (which was banned in the US.) Maas does not make The Lift (De Lift) nearly as stylistically wild as Mulcahy did with his creature feature, although there is certainly a style to this—more importantly, this has a much more unusual premise, because as the name implies, this is a horror movie about a killer elevator. The purpose in watching a movie about a killer elevator is to discover just how strange the execution of such a premise could be, and what I discovered is that, as unusual as the central conceit is, many of the things surrounding it are equally unusual in some unexpected ways.

The Monolith Monsters (1957)

This movie poses a real conundrum: does something have to be alive to be considered a monster? In this case, the filmmakers obviously don’t think so, because they put “monster” in the title—but make no mistake, the titular Monolith Monsters are simply space rocks whose reign of terror is caused by chemical reactions, an inanimate cycle of cause-and-effect. In that way, they’re probably closer to a natural disaster than a monster. Still, it was 1957, and I imagine that in the minds of the bigwigs at Universal (because yes, The Monolith Monsters should technically be part of the same Universal Monsters canon as Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the fifties Sci-Fi inflected counterparts like The Creature From The Black Lagoon) it was a lot easier to sell a movie with “monster” in the title to the kids who went to see Tarantula and The Deadly Mantis than if it were “just” a science fiction disaster movie. So, these rocks became monsters.

Part of the reason I started writing these reviews in the first place was to highlight creature features that fell outside the norm, so this that is about giant rocks fits right into it. How the rocks operate and how the story progresses is really not that different from the movies featuring flesh-and-blood (or mechanical, I guess) monsters, and applying those tropes to something outside the usual alien invader scenario does provide some interesting new ways to look at them. For example: the space-themed paranoia that is a constant in so many of these genre movies in the fifties being projected onto something as seemingly simple as minerals from a meteorite indicates to us that anything that comes from outside our planet, be it animal, vegetable, or mineral, is potentially a world-ending intruder. This is so pessimistic as to be outright existential, imagining a universe so hostile that even rocks are to be feared, and so The Monolith Monsters intentionally or unintentionally brings that particular recurring Cold War era theme to its peak intensity.