Deep Rising (1998)

What the creature feature supposedly gained in the post-Jurassic Park world was a new sense of freedom: with the advances in CGI, no longer would their monster designs and action be constrained by what was possible with anything physical. Any monster you can imagine, with all manner of inhuman body shapes and abilities and sizes, can appear on-screen and move in an ostensibly naturalistic way—the dream of the monster movie maniac who had lived through multiple decades of men in rubber suits, stop motion, and more realistic but time-intensive and complicated animatronics that still had to follow the laws of physics.

Deep Rising is the first movie I’ve written about from this period that has gone full-bore into CGI, without even the balance of practical and digital effects seen in films like The Relic and Mimic, released the year before. More than just how it changes the portrayal of the central monster, though, this movie shows that, in practice, what the CGI revolution often did was allow filmmakers with a fondness for mass scale to indulge in those impulses with impunity. Writer-director Stephen Sommers made a career of frenetic, CGI-heavy action, and Deep Rising carries all those hallmarks—it is a film that has no time for limitations or compromises, and in some cases no time for much of anything other than constant movement.

Mimic (1997)

This summer, the theme will be “B-Movies vs. Blockbusters”: I’ll be alternating between a big budget monster movie and a double feature of less mainstream fare. How much of a difference does money and Hollywood prestige make for this type of movie? Does schlock transcend all? These questions will probably not be answered here, but they’re interesting to think about.

Mimic‘s biggest claim to fame is being the Hollywood debut of Guillermo del Toro, one of the most important figures in monster movies in the past few decades—and as one would expect for a Hollywood debut for a director who started outside Hollywood, the experience was so great that he disowned the final film for several years. A director’s vision being heavily compromised by the Weinsteins of all people, how unusual! In 2010, del Toro made a director’s cut that he says is at least closer to what he wanted—but despite all the meddling in the original version, you can still see del Toro’s stylish horror sensibility. The burgeoning hallmarks of his approach is especially noticeable after watching The Relic, which released a few months before this: that one felt you like a classical creature feature presented with the tone of a violent nineties procedural—in Mimic, which is based on a Sci-Fi story from the forties (by prominent Golden Age author Donald Wollheim), you get the sense of a classical creature feature that is attempting to evolve the format, or at least give it a much more modern and specific aesthetic.

Creature Classic Companion: Piranha (1978)

The career of director Joe Dante represents the ascent of the Monster Kid from fan to filmmaker—people who grew up during the creature feature boom of the fifties and sixties were suddenly given reign of the genre, which they knew inside and out. Having that kind of understanding of the formulas made it all the more easy to subvert and reinvent them, making a smarter and more self-aware range of monster movies in the late seventies and eighties, which Dante heavily contributed to with The Howling and Gremlins. Before those, though, he worked his way up in the B-movie system, cutting trailers for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures (and co-directing a movie made mostly of stock footage) before being assigned to direct Piranha, New World’s blatant attempt to cash in on Jaws‘ success. Following the general Corman ethos, however, meant that as long as you check off all the exploitation movie requirements—low budget, surface similarity to something popular, blood, and female nudity—you are free to do whatever you want (although that didn’t go quite so well for the director of Piranha II, some guy named James Cameron.) So, Dante got together with writer John Sayles to build a Jaws knock-off full of comedic touches and creature feature homages, something that wasn’t just another killer fish movie. As the story goes, Universal was fully prepared to sue this movie out of existence before it reached theatres…until it received the full approval of Steven Spielberg, who considered it by far the best imitation of his movie.