The Movie Monster Game

The Movie Monster Game, well, it’s a game about movie monsters. Released in 1986 (the same year as the even more famous giant monster game Rampage) for the Apple II and Commodore 64 and developed by Epyx, a company that gained a name for itself in the eighties PC game space with titles like Impossible Mission and California Games, it comes from a very different epoch than the previous giant monster-based game I’ve written about, a strange and experimental time when game design didn’t always have clear rules, and where a degree of abstraction was still present as a game could only convey so much visual information (Epyx’s earlier giant monster title, Crush, Crumble and Chomp!, a strategy game released in 1981, provides an even primitive-looking example.) Despite that, The Movie Monster Game actually shares a lot in common with later entries in this category, especially in the presentation–decades before War of the Monsters surrounded itself with a nostalgic metafiction wrapper, Epyx went even further, not just basing its menus around a movie theatre motif (complete with “trailers” for other Epyx games that appear before you begin playing), but structuring their game as essentially a movie you construct from various component parts pulled from numerous giant monster movies across the subgenre’s history. Even this far back, you can see that the artifice of these stomp-em-ups, and the context of the audience itself, was considered an indelible part of the experience.

That’s all well and good, but there’s a major advantage that The Movie Monster Game has that even later creature feature games could not pull off: alongside a group of “original” monsters that directly homage specific movies and tropes, they managed to officially licence Godzilla from Toho, putting the King of the Monsters prominently on the package for all to see, and making it the first video game released outside of Japan to feature him. Epyx was not an unknown company in 1986, but even so, getting the sometimes fickle Toho to lend out their star monster to an American game developer at that point still seems like a feat (it is equally surprising that they agreed to let Godzilla and Pals appear in the recent indie brawler GigaBash, a game that I still intend to play.) This was not long after the release of The Return of Godzilla (and its English release Godzilla 1985), which at least put it outside the lowest periods for the franchise, and leads me to believe that this collaboration was not an act of desperation–maybe they were just feeling generous. In any case, Godzilla’s fully approved presence in something with as definitive a title as The Movie Monster Game certainly gives it an air of legitimacy.

“The Curse of Fenric” (S26E8-11)

It is 1989, and Doctor Who is on its last legs. You may have noticed that I skipped over all of the serials featuring Colin Baker in the lead role—this is not simply because of the poor reputation most of the stories have even among fans of the series, but because none of them offer a particularly compelling monster-centric story to write about. Things started looking up at least a little bit in 1987, when the show went through a small-scale creative overhaul, with a new batch of writers behind the scenes and a new lead in Sylvester McCoy, but none of the active attempts to make the series more ambitious and relevant saved it from going on an indefinite hiatus just as the eighties ended, leaving it at a still-impressive twenty-six consecutive years on television.

The three years with McCoy and lead writer Andrew Cartmel carry a very distinctive atmosphere, one that attempts to mine the best parts of the series’ past, especially its sense of imagination and its capacity for moments of child-friendly horror, and infuse a puckish kind of whimsy and more focus on the characterization of the Doctor and his companion. “The Curse of Fenric”, the classic series’ penultimate story, carries with it the DNA of previous serials we’ve talked about: there’s a the moody atmosphere and marching army of monsters of “The Web of Fear”, a somewhat Quatermass-esque combination of mythology and Sci-Fi similar to “The Awakening”, and even the winking social commentary of “Carnival of Monsters.” Another similarity to “Web of Fear” is its attempt to provide a new interpretation of a well-established monster—but this goes much further in taking its inspirations and playing around with the iconography.

It Lives Again/It’s Alive II (1978)

This month, I’ll be focusing on sequels to movies I’ve written about previously—and while there’s a really tendency in horror movies especially to push out a series of cheap follow-ups made by workman creatives to capitalize on even mild amounts of brand recognition (which was accelerated during the heyday of the VHS market), sometimes you’ll find sequels that have more going for them. Larry Cohen’s 1974 killer baby classic It’s Alive is the kind of simple shock concept that an exploitative producer may want to turn into cheap grindhouse fodder, but both sequels were written and directed by Cohen himself, which indicates to me that the B-movie auteur still had ideas worth exploring. Larry hasn’t led me astray yet!

Even so, the surprisingly human-focused and emotional story of the original It’s Alive seems like a trick that you can only pull once—and I can say that It Lives Again/It’s Alive II does not equal its predecessor on that front. Despite that, Cohen is doggedly intent on actually following up on the implications of the original’s ending, where we learn that murderous mutant babies are being born across America. As one would expect from Cohen, this new story goes in some weird directions, sometimes logically considered and sometimes pure nightmarish grotesque, and the ways it parallels the beats of the first one continue many of its themes while presenting them in a slightly different light. Although escalation is certainly at play here, it’s not as simple as just multiplying the number of monster babies and car chases.

The Bay (2012)

So, how exactly did we get a found footage monster movie from the director of Rain Man? According to the backstory, Barry Levinson was tasked with directing a documentary about the ecological problems of Chesapeake Bay, but not unlike the creatures at the heart of The Bay, the project mutated into something else entirely. It was 2012, right in the middle of the much-groused-about-at-the-time trend of found footage horror movies mostly instigated by Paranormal Activity (the producer of those movies, Jason Blum, is also a producer on this one), as well as what still felt like the early days of the mass adoption of camera-equipped smartphones—a perfect confluence of trends that inspired the idea of watching a disaster unfold from personal and media video footage, a collage of reactions and non-reactions from normal citizens, experts, and people in places of authority. The verisimilitude offered by this style of film might even bolster the real environmental issues that inspired the far more gory events in the movie! One could hope!

Of course, the other obvious inspiration for this movie comes from a place I’m sure we’ve all been to: finding out some random (maybe true?) fact on the Internet, especially about weird nature stuff. I imagine that most people only recently learned about Cymothoa Exigua, also known as the tongue-eating louse, probably from some listicle containing the same few photos of that oceanic isopod and its peculiar form of parasitism, where it sucks the blood from the tongues of fish until they shrivel up and fall off, and then replaces the tongue in the fish’s mouth. It’s hard to blame some writer for seeing those images and thinking “now, there’s a movie!”

The Milpitas Monster (1976)

As King Kung Fu was to Wichita, The Milpitas Monster is to the city of Milpitas, California (once a rural hub, now essentially a Silicon Valley suburb): a micro-budget, locally-made monster movie that acts as both an affectionate parody and time capsule, which is probably why it seems to still get played in theatres there on a yearly basis. It’s also a production that sometimes makes King Kung Fu look lavish by comparison—not surprising given that this was a project initiated by students and a photography teacher at Samuel Ayer High School (leading to the “Samuel Golden Ayer Productions” gag at the beginning of the movie), although the fact that it received some kind of national distribution is maybe a bit more surprising (it was even blessed with one of those VHS-only title changes, sometimes being called “The Mutant Beast.”) Needless to say, one does not watch a movie like The Milpitas Monster expecting a professionally-made object, but an odd piece of local colour—employing almost every civil servant and local business in the city if the credits are anything to go by—that is anchored by a fantasy plot based on local waste management issues. In eco-horror terms, it’s a broad issue placed in a very specific context.

Creature Classic Companion: It’s Alive (1974)

The late Larry Cohen may be the perfect B-movie director: someone who has no problem utilizing the absurdity found in the more disreputable genre films, with wacky premises and bizarre special effects and actors putting in heightened performances, in order to make something both memorable and meaningful. His films look dumb on the surface, but are full of inspired creative choices, comedic touches, and a devotion to pursuing ideas no matter how weird they get, producing movies that I don’t think anyone else could. This is the freedom one is allowed in those disreputable genre films, if you know how to work within certain limits.

While working in many genres, Cohen’s monster movies stand out for their particularly dogged combination of schlock and big ideas—Q and The Stuff are some of the most unique entries in the entire genre, hilarious and anchored by actors going all out to portray the kinds of characters you never really see in these types of movies. The heights of Cohen’s career are very much apparent in It’s Alive, his first foray into the realm of creature features, beginning with its simple, silly, and imaginatively fertile high concept: what if you had a baby, and your baby was a monster? The idea of a killer baby would probably be enough for people who just want to see some violence, and enough for it to be dismissed out of hand by people with good taste, but what’s amazing about this movie is how much it actually focuses on the social and emotional fallout of the situation, and especially the effects it has on the parents of the terrible infant. There’s an appreciable human centre to this off-the-wall pitch, and that’s the Larry Cohen difference.

Creature Classic Companion: The Host (2006)

I was definitely not expecting to see anyone with a major hand in creature feature history take home the Academy Award for Best Picture within my lifetime, but the last few years gave us not one, but two. Of course, Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar nod for The Shape of Water has the double validating effect (not that I need validation, especially not from the Hollywood fatcats) of being for an actual monster movie, even if a revisionist one, but Bong Joon-ho’s win with Parasite was notable on its own for being the first non-English, non-Western film to get the gold. That’s an impressive first to have on your resume! Joon-ho’s career has spanned over twenty years and various genres, producing many critically-acclaimed films in South Korea and abroad—but I can imagine that a lot of you reading this first heard of him back when his monster movie was making the rounds in the film festival circuit and attracting the attention of cult movie websites, as I did. Fifteen years later, and The Host is still a genuine classic, one of the most engaging and inventive monster movies in recent memory, with a stylistic and cultural specificity that remains singular.

Rebirth of Mothra II (1997)

Around this time last year I wrote about the first instalment in Toho’s Rebirth of Mothra series, and as is my glacially-paced method of reviewing trilogies, we’ve now reached the second part. Much of what I said about the first Rebirth movie still applies to this one—this is clearly trying to be more of a kids fantasy story rather than a traditional kaiju smash-up, a choice that is at least in line with the original sixties Mothra in spirit if not in execution, and one with a recurring ecological theme, as was the case in much pop culture in the nineties. Rebirth II might actually feel more like a kids fantasy movie in tone than its predecessor, with broader comedy and a greater emphasis on “ground level” special effects, including puppets, elaborate sets, obvious green screen, and even more obvious mid-nineties CGI. The first movie really straddled the line between the style and tone of the Heisei Godzilla movies and a much lighter touch (it’s worth noting that Rebirth II is final bow for special effects director Koichi Kawakita, who started out as an assistant on Godzilla vs. Hedorah and would become the lead from Godzilla vs. Biollante onward, so this movie marks the end of an era; meanwhile, this movie’s director, Kunio Moyishi, was the second unit director on previous subject Orochi, the Eight-Headed Dragon, but this seems firmly ensconced in this poppier, sillier world.

Creature Classic Companion: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

I didn’t plan on watching Shin Godzilla and the 1984 movie version of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on the same day, and it was probably only about halfway through the latter when I realized what an appropriate double feature it was. The direct connection is obvious to everyone who knows about those movies’ histories: Shin Godzilla co-director Hideaki Anno (known mainly as the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion) got his start in the animation industry working on Nausicaä, being specifically tasked with animating the sequence featuring the giant God Warrior, a melting, corpse-like entity that would prove to be one of the (many) iconic elements of the film. Three decades later, Anno produced a live action short film depicting the God Warrior attacking Tokyo for a museum exhibit on tokusatsu that used a combination of classical and digital effects (I’d link to it, but no complete version of the original exists online), which likely had a large influence on the making of Shin Godzilla a few years after that.

But it’s also clear that his work on Nausicaä had a much deeper influence on the movie: in Shin, Godzilla is as much like Miyazakis’ God Warriors as he is like previous incarnations of Godzilla, both in his visual depiction—less like a giant animal and more like a sickly aberration, scabbed, gelatinous flesh in his earlier “unfinished” stages, and something like a molten tumour with ungainly proportions in his final form—and in his behaviour, which seems borderline mindless, the destruction he causes often coming off as just a mechanical reaction to what happens around him. Even his trademark radiation breath looks very similar to the hyper-destructive beams fired by the God Warriors. Both are meant to represent the worst abuses of the natural world by human hands, but the simpler allegory of the older Godzilla films (which took inspiration mainly from movies like King Kong) has been usurped by the coarser and angrier one pioneered by Miyazaki in his story, which feels increasingly appropriate as we’ve had further decades of thoughtless environmental abuse. It wasn’t enough for us to accidentally create a giant monster in these stories: the giant monster has to look like Death Itself to get the point across.

That unexpected thematic two-fer only reinforced a notion I’ve held for a while: while both the manga and animated versions of Nausicaä are rightly regarded as seminal, and are highly influential to the entirety of Japanese pop culture (you wouldn’t have the world design of many video games without it), they are also innovators specifically in the realm of monster stories, providing some of the most memorable creatures of all time, and making them a central part of the narrative’s thematic core. Not since the original Godzilla had giant creatures, and how they relate to mankind, been taken that seriously—and very rarely have they ever been made to feel a wholly organic part of their universe.

Rebirth of Mothra (1996)

Last year around this time, I was writing about eco-horror monster movies, where humanity screws with nature and then nature messes us up (which is kind of what’s happening in real life right now)—this time, though, I thought it would be interesting to look at a more positive depiction of an environmentally-minded monster. So, now we’re paying a visit to Mothra, Toho’s brightly-colourful guardian of nature and regular cohort of Godzilla—the original film from 1961, directed by the stalwart Ishiro Honda, is one of the classics of the giant monster genre, but Mothra never starred in another solo film until 1996, despite repeated attempts to make one. Mothra has always been a more lighthearted and fantastical creature compared to Godzilla, and allowed them to make a monster movie with a different tone, but the inability to give her another starring role could possibly be chalked up to the much more limited capabilities of the suits and puppets compared to the bipedal kaiju in Toho’s stable. This was no longer an issue by the mid-nineties apparently, so it was full-steam ahead on Mothra films, which despite being contiguous with the Heisei Godzillas, have a very different feeling to them.