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.

Mad God (2021)

Visuals effects artist Phil Tippett has been at the game of producing amazing on-screen creatures since the seventies, including the ones seen in the original Star Wars trilogy, Piranha, RoboCop, and Starship Troopers. In the very early nineties (around the time his studio was creating effects for RoboCop 2), he began work on the independent stop motion-animated project, but shelved it—partly because his studio was too busy, and partly because while working on Jurassic Park (famously given the credit of “Dinosaur Supervisor”) he was shown early footage of the CGI that would eventually be used in the movie and became convinced that his innovative puppet-based effects had been made completely irrelevant (something I learned from the documentary Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters.) Over twenty years later, the people in his orbit convinced him to finish the film, and with the help of a Kickstarter campaign and support from his employees and numerous volunteers, he created three shorts that were then combined and expanded to become the film Mad God (which can now be watched on our old pal Shudder.) One does get a sense from the movie itself that multiple decades of pent-up creativity in the realm of classic-style physical effects and stop motion has been unloaded into it…and many other pent-up emotions as well. It is both celebration of the imagination that Tippett brought to cinema and also an unrelenting nightmare burned onto film, and that’s what makes it particularly special.

The Angry Red Planet (1959)

Let’s do some retroactive projection: The Angry Red Planet was released in November 1959, making it the very last Sci-Fi monster movie of the fifties, the decade where the form flourished. There would be more films approximating that style made in the sixties, but the space age obsessions that animated them, both the exaggerated optimism and the equally exaggerated fears, would be gradually replaced with new ones as the genre film business moved on. Completely unintentionally, this movie serves as a sort of denouement for the decade’s monster movies—so, now that we’ve put The Angry Red Planet in the hot seat, what does it have to say about the whole mess? As it turns out, it’s a lot of the same things these movies had been saying since the beginning of the decade.

Howl From Beyond the Fog (2019)

As a crowd-funded kaiju project (reaching 150% of its goal in 2017 and guaranteeing credits full of bizarre nom-de-plumes), the thirty-minute short film Howl From Beyond the Fog is already marked as something fuelled by fan passion, but it has even deeper historical roots that further illustrate that. Director Daisuke Sato had worked on the suits and models of the Millennium-era Godzilla films and Gamera the Brave, and his main collaborator on both the effects and the cinematography was Keizo Murase, whose credits include…well, almost every single Toho and Daiei kaiju movie I’ve written about on this site (as well as Yongary and The Mighty Peking Man), usually as the one sculpting the suits—obviously, they are two veterans of this style of film, although they also chose to go a slightly different direction this time by using puppets to portray the human cast alongside the traditional man-in-suit and miniatures. The choice of story is also very much a nod to the history of giant monsters: a re-interpretation of Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story “The Fog Horn”, a melancholy tale of a gigantic marine reptile who mistakes the titular sound as the call of another of its kind, which was sort of co-opted into the 1953 Eugène Lourié/Ray Harryhausen monster film The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (the original title of Bradbury’s story), which in turn served as the inspiration for Toho to produce the original Godzilla. I don’t think there’s any greater signal of passionate fandom than going all the way back to one of the source texts of the genre (Sato even directed another short film based on the story in 2007), and this not only uses it as the basis for its imagery, but also for the tone and atmosphere, creating a giant monster that is much more sympathetic than most of the ones that directly followed “The Fog Horn.”

Monster Multimedia: The Trap Door

Kids are an audience that is especially open to the appeal to the creepy and macabre, maybe because the idea of normalcy has yet to be hammered into them by the wider culture and they can see the fun in being so inherently repulsive, even if they aren’t one of the outsider kids to whom monsters and weird things are something they identify with—not that I would know anything about that. What that means is that there is a whole history of creepy entertainment aimed at the youth audience, and the more monstrous and unseemly, the more they latch onto it. The Trap Door, which aired forty episodes over two series in 1986 and 1990 (such is the inconsistent airing whims of British television) on two of the UK’s independent broadcasters, ITV and Channel 4, is as good an example of that aesthetic as any, following a group of clay animated (I won’t say “claymation” because I don’t want Will Vinton’s ghost to haunt me with spectral legal trouble) monsters in a spooky castle as they go about their strange days. Everything about the show, created by animators Charlie Mills and Terry Brain (the latter of whom would later go on to work at Aardman, makers of Wallace & Gromit), seems tailor-made for the anti-social child who gets a kick out of seeing bugs, worms, and bizarre creatures running around a chaotically protean plasticine world, full of raucous physical comedy (the kind of carefree love of nonsense that had been mostly stamped out in most contemporary cartoons in North America, as we have regularly seen on this website), but also a working class edge that adds even more colour to a series full of all-in-good-fun nastiness.

Yamasong: March of the Hollows (2017)

Continuing on with our Tubi run, and if I end up being the Internet’s top source for reviews of independent puppet-based fantasy films, it is an honour I must humbly accept.

While Blood Tea and Red String, which I wrote about back in February (remember February? ‘Cause I don’t), was entirely stop-motion, Yamasong is mostly traditional puppetry, with movement that at times resembles a modernized version of the “supermarionation” of Gerry Anderson TV shows like Thunderbirds, mixing things up with computer effects (and a bit of stop motion.) You don’t see a whole lot of movies made in this way, by which I mean I have never seen a movie made in this way, so this is new and exciting for me. Like I probably said in my Blood Tea piece, there’s tactile nature of puppets gives the imaginative characters in a fantasy story a feel that can’t be replicated with any other medium, and even if they move in a way that doesn’t read as “natural”, it just makes the world seem all that much more removed from our own. That’s very true of this movie’s combination of puppetry and digital effects, giving all its characters a very unique and designed look (clearly meant to invoke an “eastern” aesthetic, which is complemented by Shoji Kameda’s score, which uses both traditional instruments and Tuvan throat singing), and making its world very dream-like in the way it embraces artifice—it also feels very appropriate in a story where about half the characters actually are artificial.

Yonggary (1999/2001)

If you recall, around this time last year I…okay, running joke’s over. We all remember Yongary as the slightly strange South Korean attempt to create their own giant monster during the Japanese Monster Boom, carrying many of the traditional visuals and tropes. The name apparently had enough cache thirty years later that there was an attempted reboot in 1999, directed by one Shim Hyung-rae, who would later gain some notoriety in the bad monster movie circles with his ambitious 2007 debacle Dragon Wars: D-War. I would say that Yonggary (sometimes called Reptilian in western releases) is a reboot in name only, but they added an extra g, so it doesn’t even technically share that. What it is, aside from the most expensive film made in South Korea at the time, is a million different monster movie things all crammed together into a confusing and sometimes amusingly nonsensical mishmash. Considering how much of it is reliant on CGI that definitely looks PS1 cutscene-caliber, it most resembles the legion of late nineties/early two-thousands TV monster movies (such as those infamous Sci-Fi Channel originals), while also taking nods from the Godzilla films of the time. It’s basically a little bit of everything, except of course the original Yongary.

Blood Tea And Red String (2006)

Here’s something a little different: Blood Tea and Red String is an independently-made stop-motion animated film created by Christiane Cegavske over thirteen years (because making stop-motion by yourself is a long, laborious process), which by itself is an impressive feat. The film, hand-crafted over a period where professional-level filmmaking tools were not available to most, carries many of the purely tactile elements that give stop-motion a unique appeal: even if the things on screen don’t move like real things, they are, in fact, real objects, with a texture that is difficult to replicate digitally. The uncanny realm between the reality of the components and the unreality of its movement plays right into the surreal, dream-like fantasy of Blood Tea (which was clearly inspired by the stop-motion work of Jan Svankmajer), which presents a humanity-free world of inscrutable creatures, with no dialogue, but plenty of symbolism.

Monster Multimedia: Plasmo

We’re in the midst of another themed batch of Creature posts, and following directly after last week’s entry, it’s all about extraterrestrials. Aliens are a kind of monster, we all should agree (…or else), and it seems like they can often be the inspiration for some of the oddest and most unique concepts out there, really letting creators’ imaginations loose. It doesn’t matter what the target audience or medium is, either—at some point, aliens just became a justification for any wacky idea to become a character or creature, and sometimes we can even sympathize with them, because non-humans can still possess humanity.

This is especially important in a show like Plasmo, a thirteen-episode series of Australian stop-motion shorts that aired in the mid-nineties, because all its characters are weird aliens, not a particularly humanoid one among them. Although originating Down Under, Plasmo was one of those shows that benefited from the desperate need for content that many new cable channels had in the nineties, which often meant buying many obscure old shows or foreign productions in order to fill time. This made TV in the decade unintentionally cosmopolitan and historically-minded, which is how a kid in North America (e.g. Myself) could suddenly find airings of a show like this filling interstitials between other shows (it’s also how I was able to see so many old monster movies.) There were certainly not many five minute stop motion shows starring a diverse cast of alien creatures, so it’s understandable why this caught my attention, and why it stuck with me for so long.