Visitors From the Arkana Galaxy (1981)

Stumbling into something new while seeking out material for this site is always an exciting experience—and nothing demands my attention like the phrase “weird Yugoslav-Czechoslovak Science Fiction movie from the early eighties.” Visitors From the Arkana Galaxy (sometimes referred to by the more nondescript title Visitors from the Galaxy) is definitely a weird one, and has only found wide distribution in English-speaking countries in the last year thanks to Deaf Crocodile Films—its combination of unvarnished eighties European settings and borderline surrealist storytelling makes for the kind of cult-ready object that modern boutique film distributors regularly gift to us. Shifting between exaggerated reality and extreme fantasy, Visitors has something of a satirical edge, and combined with its bizarre visuals, you can really tell that director Dušan Vukotić comes from an animation background (the movie was partially produced by prominent Croatian animation studio Zagreb Film.) To further invite attention—my attention in particular—there is a prominent monster element that was designed and partially animated by stop motion animation master Jan Svankmajer before he gave us such classics as Alice and Little Otik.

It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987)

Some nine years after It Lives Again, Larry Cohen returned to his monster movie debut for one final bow—but this was Cohen returning after expanding his repertoire and innovating in the genre in the eighties, first with Q – The Winged Serpent and then The Stuff, both classics in their own right. The increasingly over-the-top and comedy-infused styles of those movie do in fact continue in It’s Alive III—sometimes in very direct ways, considering the actors involved—keeping it in line with Cohen’s eighties filmography; at the same time, it develops many of the themes and emotional beats that made the original It’s Alive and its supplementary first sequel into something genuinely special. Yes, these movies about murderous mutant babies carry all the marks of schlock genius, but as weird as it sounds, they also have a heart, and that makes something like Island of the Alive stand out just as much as…well, everything else in it.

Splice (2009)

The movies that get the tag “Science Gone Wrong” on here are part of one of the longest lineages in the history of creature features—and probably one of that history’s most reactionary undercurrents, demonstrating a ceaseless anxiety about scientific discovery and experimentation. The deeper we dive into the mechanics of nature, the closer we get to inevitably crossing lines we were never meant to cross, with terrible consequences the equally inevitable result—or, that’s the way they see it, and it’s a structure and theme that has never really gone away, and manages to adapt itself to whatever the latest technological and scientific advances (although by “adapt to”, I don’t necessarily mean “understand.”) Splice is a film that very intentionally hearkens back to some of the more hysteria-prone versions of that Sci-Fi narrative, and even places it in the consistently hackle-raising field of genetic engineering, which has been the topic of more than a few monster movies over the decades. The innovation here is that the lines being crossed in this story are not necessarily being done in the name of science, but something far more personal—and so the ensuing terrible consequences have some different and sometimes more disturbing dimensions.

Bride of the Gorilla (1951)

So this is Christmas Apes, and what have you done? Well, I’ve started watching another batch of ape-themed films to write about on this site. I hope you, the reader, have fun.

With a title as sensationalistic as Bride of the Gorilla, you’d probably expect something pretty bombastic—but things are not what they appear. That title was not the first choice for writer-director Curt Siodmak, screenwriter of The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (and author of the oft-imitated Sci-Fi story Donovan’s Brain), who began the project under the name “The Face in the Water”, something a bit more mysterious that maybe better reflects the film he was trying to make, something closer to a psychological thriller than a monster movie (also, technically, there is no gorilla in this movie.) Looking past the surface ridiculousness, one can detect traces of not only Siodmak’s previous work on The Wolf Man, with its cursed and agonized protagonist, but Jacques Tourner and Val Lewton’s acclaimed 1942 thriller Cat People (Siodmak had worked with both on the film I Walked With a Zombie), which kept the audience unsure of the movie’s reality. Well, this is trying for that level of ambiguity, at least, regardless of it it achieves it.

Possession (1981)

After a few weeks of classical monsters, it’s now time for something very different.

If I really wanted to justify watching and writing about Polish art film director Andrzej Żuławski’s cult classic in October, I could say that the heavily, heavily truncated original North American release was released on Halloween in 1983—that version cut out over forty minutes from the movie, in an attempt to make it something resembling a “normal” horror film. But it is not a normal horror film, even though any one scene in this might be among the most upsetting you’ll ever—and despite being featured in histories of “monster movies”, it isn’t quite a monster movie, either, although it does have a memorably disturbing monster in it. Possession is, first and foremost, a story about a married couple whose lives together and their hold on reality completely disintegrates, a game of mutual destruction where they remain circling the whirlpool and dragging each other down further—and like many of the most interesting monster stories, the bizarre creature becomes a manifestation of all that has gone wrong and all that they secretly want.

Spring (2014)

Always on the lookout for monster movies that venture outside the norm, writer-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s Spring caught my eye—it even received plaudits from Guillermo del Toro, who referred to it as a “Lovecraftian film.” I personally think you’d have to have a pretty broad definition of “Lovecraftian” for this to fit the label, but I guess I can also see where he’s coming from—this is dealing with things strange and ancient that span across human history, things with a certain inexplicable nature, and things that really blur the line between Science Fiction and Fantasy (which is sort of theme in the movie itself.) Despite what some websites will tell you, though, this is definitely not a horror movie, even with some of the grotesque imagery and violent moments (this is the same sort of dispute with online resource genre tags I got into with Lamb—why must these massive websites be so very wrong all the time!), but a fantastical romantic drama, which is certainly unique, and is totally up del Toro’s alley given his own monster filmography.

Colossal (2016)

Colossal falls in with the sorts of postmodern-ish alternative monster movies that seem tailor-made to make the rounds on cult movie websites that have particular love for high concept genre takes, a category that includes the likes of Big Man Japan, Rubber, and Bad Milo! Writer-director Nacho Vigalondo’s 2007 time travel thriller Timecrimes was another favourite in those same circles, and so his particular high concept take on the giant monster genre had some clout going in. Even so, for a project like this, there’s always a risk that the people making an “unusual” take on the genre have no real understanding or connection with that particular genre and produce something that is actually less “unusual” or interesting than they think, or that the big concept and meta jokiness takes the place of actual substance or entertainment value (I’m looking at you, Rubber.) While Colossal‘s use of giant monsters sticks to the standard ideas and imagery (Vigalondo apparently pitched it at film festivals by mentioning Godzilla and even using images of Godzilla, which earned him a ticket to lawsuit city), its purpose is to act as a fantastical shadow of the human narrative, reflecting it as well as looming over it.

I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958)

I’m happy to have finally written something about The Thing From Another World, in part because it contextualizes many of the other Sci-Fi creature features of the fifties I have and will continue to write about, showing how each of them is a variation on a theme established at the beginning of the decade. The histrionically-titled I Married a Monster From Outer Space is another one of those variations, and much like The Thing, you can very easily read a lot of specifically Cold War paranoia into its story of unfeeling foreign agents taking over the lives of average Americans to further some secret agenda (it was shown on a double bill with The Blob, another one of those anxiety-drenched thrillers.) In that way it more specifically borrows from another fifties Sci-Fi mainstay, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, showing that you can’t even trust the people closest to you.

With all that said, this movie is not as straightforward as you might think, a light but fascinating deviation from the formula. For one, it has a specific vision of paranoia that goes beyond just looking for Communist subversives in the community. Most importantly, it makes a narrative choice that alters its tone compared to The Thing or Body Snatchers: it allows us to understand the motivation of the titular monster, and maybe even feel bad for it.

Deep Dark (2015)

Although very different in execution, Deep Dark reminded me a lot of previous subject Splinter: both feel like short independent films that were expanded into feature length (it won’t surprise you to learn that writer/director Michael Medaglia’s only other credits are for short films), and both rather knowingly hinge themselves on the novelty of their intentionally strange central monster. Splinter used this as a vehicle for pure, undistilled horror filmmaking, while Deep Dark is aiming for more of a comedy-horror, although it never goes that far in either direction. It’s also attempting to spin a sort of dark modern fairy tale, one set in the absolutely-not-overused-at-all world of modern art, and with the freedom from traditional logic that would allow, the biggest question becomes just how hard it pushes into the strangeness of its own premise. The answer to that is “just hard enough, sometimes.”

Konga (1961)

In order to better understand the essence of the classic Giant Ape Movie, I’ve sought the many riffs on King Kong that have improbably filled movie theatres over multiple decades, and I think I may have finally seen all the most notable examples—which is really not saying much. Konga is one of the only ones that was released well before the banana gold rush of big apes that occurred around the release of the 1976 Kong remake, and so has a unique late fifties/early sixties B-movie vibe when compared to the others—I can imagine it was at least partially made because of the successful theatrical re-releases of the original Kong throughout the fifties, which really raised that movie’s cultural stock. But despite being from an entirely different era of movies, it still ultimately falls in line with the brazen schlock that came to define the giant gorilla genre, setting a standard for the films that followed, and not a particularly high one.