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.
But if I’m going to be writing about the history of Godzilla, I should go back to where it really started.
In the development of the monster movie as we know it, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was the second impact, following previous Creature Classic subject The Thing From Another World, and the two of them set the tone for the rest of the 1950s. As was the case in writing about The Thing, I feel like it’s difficult to convey to readers how this type of movie, which most people probably assume has always been one of the primordial ideas of cinema, was simply not a thing before this—okay, it had had been a thing once before, almost twenty years prior, but there was nothing in between. For myriad reasons inside and outside of the film itself, King Kong (which had been re-released the year before this and saw a surprising amount of success) casts a long shadow over this film, possibly even more than all the subsequent movies about giant monsters stomping through a city, and while both share a dedication to realistic-as-possible depictions of prehistoric animals (even if they are fictionalized ones) and showcasing excessive property damage in New York City, Beast 20K (as I like to call it) offers a significant and timely innovation: attributing the appearance of the monster to atomic bomb testing. With this single narrative detail, one of the primary fascinations and terrors of the monster movie was unleashed upon thousands of theatre screens—it is not the only thing from this movie that subsequent ones would utilized, but it is among the most significant, providing a recurring theme for decades of movies about the perils of the post-war age of scientific advancement. With that in mind, it’s even more interesting to look at how this story’s use of that concept feels so removed from its imitators.
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 Monsterssurrounded 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 2019 graphic novel BTTM FDRS finds its monster in the legacy of gentrification and exploitation, with beautiful ideas twisted and then abandoned, and the people on the lower rungs of society left to deal with the resulting mess. Writer Ezra Claytan Daniels (author of 2018’s Upgrade Soul) and artist Ben Passmore (creator of numerous comics across mediums including the completely unsparing Sports Is Hell) make no bones about the racial make-up of both sides of that equation, showing its black protagonists putting up with the indifference and hostility of white people in positions of relative power, something used as both a source of horror and of comedy. This is a story that reflects a wider recognition of social stratification, a heady mix of self-consciousness, guilt and anger, and that complexity puts it well beyond just a simple vehicle for social critique and a side of the grotesque—although it is also both of those things, rather pointedly.
Werewolf stories are one of those things that often thrive on having established mythology/rules—the fun for audiences become not just in seeing the specific execution of those rules (i.e. more and more elaborate transformation sequences), but also seeing that mythology used as a parallel or an allegory (i.e. adolescence), and sometimes in seeing those rules subverted. Project Metalbeast is an attempt at subversion, taking the supernatural angle of the werewolf story and messily grafting it to a Science Fiction-Horror concept, all in the name of creating a new kind of monster for the direct-to-video gorehounds of the mid-nineties. There is novelty in exchanging the typical curse plotlines and uncontrollable transformation with science-gone-wrong medical trauma and Alien style bases-under-siege and conspiracy backstories, but the question is whether the movie realizes that novelty or is simply okay putting out the bare minimum of horror schlock.
This October will mark five years since I started writing monster media reviews on a regular basis—and almost two hundred movies (and dozens of other things) later, I know that there’s still plenty left out there. For this year’s Halloween season, most of my subjects will be themed around sneakily breaking my own personal rules when it comes to subject matter—since this project began, I steadfastly avoided covering movies based on the “traditional” monsters of horror, things like vampires, werewolves, and the undead. For me, those represent their own little corners of culture, with their own histories and tropes and meanings that have already been examined in great detail, offering less for me to dig into than the vast “miscellaneous” monster category.
However, if one were to find movies that are ostensibly about those most famous of monsters, but with some kind of twist…
In that spirit, we’re starting this Halloween month off with a film that name checks one of most well-known monsters in history…that’s right, the Space Monster (or Spacemonster, depending on how seriously you take the stark-looking opening titles of the movie.) But anyone coming to this looking for a traditional Space Monster story are going to be in for a shock, because this is really an in-name-only Space Monster movie—it is actually an odd duck mash-up of retro Sci-Fi movie concepts and early sixties cultural trends, a drive-in chimera if there ever was one. If you squint real hard you might be able to make out the Space Monster spirit hidden somewhere in this bricolage, but that is only one minor ingredient among many.
One of the major inflection points in the evolution of the monster movie was when well-informed fans started working behind the scenes, aware of all the tropes and knowing just where to push them to take something from cliche to slyly self-aware examination. The ur-example of this was the Joe Dante-directed Piranha, which took what could have easily been a movie simply following the trend of ripping off Jaws and turned it into something else entirely—someone was clearly paying attention, because when director Lewis Teague (later of movies like Cujo) was given the job of making a Jaws rip-off about a giant alligator, he threw out the original script and called in Piranha screenwriter John Sayles (later of several award-winning films) to help him craft something more interesting. Together, they produced a movie in the middle ground between traditional drive-in schlock, the intelligently eccentric B-movies typified by Larry Cohen’s entries in the genre, and the cartoonish and loving parodies that Dante continued to refine in the eighties—and it does it in a way casual and subtle enough that many critics of the time didn’t even catch the dark comedy at the heart of Alligator.
From what I’ve seen, the western-produced monster movies from the second half of the sixties very rarely show any real evolution from what was being produced a decade earlier—a movie like The Vulture could have been in theatres at any point from mid-fifties to the early sixties and would have been exactly the same, and yet it was produced well into a decade of major societal change. You wouldn’t know it from watching it, as it simply doesn’t reflect then-modern culture at all, staying in its B-movie bubble and acting as if its rather puzzling tale of science gone wrong has any bearing on anything. Based on what I’ve seen, it took years for drive-in filler like this to really start getting with the times, both thematically and visually.
Which is not to say that there is nothing novel about The Vulture—although its novelty is more in its particular choice of nonsense than in the movie itself. It was the final project of Lawrence Huntington, a British workman director with over thirty movies to his name stretching back to the thirties, and the fact that he both wrote and directed it (getting financial backing from American and Canadian studios and also an English football club?) leads one to believe that this was something of a passion project. It’s difficult to discern from the film itself what that passion was, but maybe it was in the aforementioned choice of nonsense, which represents not so much a development of the nuclear and scientific themes of the fifties creature features as it as a weird, borderline incoherent offshoot of it.
I hope you didn’t get your fill of cockroaches from the last entry, because here’s even more of them! Bug comes with two major distinctions off the top: it’s the fourth movie I’ve written about with animal and/or plant photography from Ken Middleham, master of the artful micro-creature shot since at least The Hellstrom Chronicle, and it’s the final film produced (and co-written) by William Castle , master of the gimmick horror movie since at leastThe Tingler. Middleham’s contributions are front-and-centre, with the same sort of creative creepy crawly camerawork that you saw in Phase IV, which had been released the previous year. The contributions of Castle are maybe not as obvious—when I think of his classic movies, I think of things with a bit more macabre joviality to them than what you see in this; it also lacks one of his signature theatrical gimmicks, although he claimed to have taken out a one million dollar life insurance policy for the movie’s “lead cockroach”, and apparently tried to find some way to give random audience members the sensation of things crawling on their legs. On the other hand, Castle has always had fairly eclectic tastes when it came to thrillers, and this is a very eclectic movie, the sum of many different clashing ideas that produces something truly and memorably strange.
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.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 