Love and Monsters (2020)

If Reign of Fire was a purely 2002 vision of the apocalypse, Love and Monsters is its late 2010s counterpart, the same basic story with a completely different approach. Where Reign loudly communicated its era by draining itself of colour and humour and having only vague self-awareness of the limitations of its CGI effects, L&M reflects its own by saturating itself with bright cartoon hues and quippy narration and CGI that has become so advanced and widespread that its generally seamless integration feels almost effortless (in fact, it received an Academy Award nomination for Effects.) The interesting contrast between these two movies might be further bolstered by eerie coincidence: Reign took place in a decimated world in 2020, while L&M was released in the midst of a decimated world in 2020, which mostly killed its theatrical run minus a few small-scale screenings and left it to become a perennial item in the Netflix back catalogue. In short, choosing to watch these two in close proximity definitely gave me even more to think about.

Warning From Space (1956)

With Daiei, I always seem to be discovering more pre-Gamera contributions to the tokusatsu genre—they had been testing out monster effects for a quite a while before unleashing their own major series (like Daimajin and Yokai Monsters.) Now I think I’ve found their earliest foray, earlier than even The Whale God—originally released in 1956, Warning From Space (Japanese title Spacemen Appear in Tokyo) premiered barely a year after Godzilla, and aside from capitalizing on the new trend of people in monster costumes, it also feels very much part of the general trends of American Science Fiction films in the mid-fifties, which is to say that it has almost exactly the same plot as several of them. But if some of the parts aren’t entirely original, this ramshackle little film’s general aura is much odder and more interesting—and its unassuming weirdness apparently had a surprising impact, as one biography named it directly as one of the films that inspired Stanley Kubrick to eventually try his hand at Sci-Fi. Who knows how true that really is, but who wouldn’t want to imagine a master filmmaker sitting around studying this tale of rogue planets and dancing starfish?

Screamers (1995)

Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story “Second Variety” is maybe the exact opposite of Gog, despite coming from the same Cold War context—it is absolutely an existentialist nightmare about our technology becoming self-replicating and ultimately superseding humanity, to the point where the armed conflict between humans that led to their creation is completely invalidated. It is quintessential killer robot fiction, and it is also classic Dick, concerned with identity and human behaviour, containing imagery that is sometimes both ridiculous and highly disturbing, and a final line with implications I still think about all the time.

It also has plenty of interesting visuals to work with, so a movie adaptation was certainly on the table after the success of Total Recall created a potential mini-industry of PKD-based films—and what do you know, the adaptation of “Second Variety”, called Screamers because it was the nineties, was co-written by Total Recall co-writer (and also Alien co-writer/Return of the Living Dead director) Dan O’Bannon (alongside Miguel Tejada-Flores, whose other best known work is…Revenge of the Nerds and The Lion King? Okay, whatever you say.) The movie manages to recontextualize the story for the post-Cold War age while keeping the desolate and paranoid tone, for the most part, and also gives it plenty of that cynical nineties dinginess that was so omnipresent in both horror and sci-movies of the time (the director, Christian Duguay, got his start directing straight-to-video sequels to Scanners, so it’s about what you’d expect.) While it’s clear that part of the impetus for this was its potential for violence and weird special effects, there are enough ideas here to make it a little bit more than that.

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!)