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.
So, The Outer Limitsis not the only monster-heavy Science Fiction series to be celebrating a sixtieth anniversary this year—in fact, only a month or two separates the debut of that series and the debut of the BBC’s own Doctor Who, which I have written about before as a Creature Classic. That means another series of posts about classic television for the next few months, with each entry analyzing a monster-focused storyline from multiple eras of the show. Considering that its original run lasted for twenty-six years, from 1963 to 1989, and its current one has been airing for eighteen, there are a lot of different eras to choose from.
Even so, I think it’s best to go back to the beginning (or close to the beginning, at least), not only to the original cast, but to the very first, and ultimately most famous, monsters to appear on the show. As I laid out in the “Ark in Space” Creature Classic, the original direction for Doctor Who was for it to avoid Science Fiction cliches in its tales of alien time travellers, which included the deployment of “bug-eyed monsters”—but writer Terry Nation had already penned a storyline, submitted under the title “The Mutants” (although back then, each episode had its own title), involving a battle against an alien foe on a distant planet, and a lack of other suitable scripts meant that his serial was not only given the greenlight, but ended up the second aired story in the series’ history. That in turn meant that, almost as soon as Doctor Who started, it was already moving away from its own internal edicts, and would only move further away when audiences got a glimpse of the first alien menace to appear on the show.
That serial introduced the Daleks, which Nation had specified in the script would be “legless”—it was up to series production designer Raymond Cusick to come up with a final design, a job that was originally assigned to another BBC employee who became unavailable…Ridley Scott (seriously.) It was Cusick who gave the Daleks their distinct pepper pot shape, an inhuman, mechanical appearance that immediately set them apart from the men-in-suits aliens of so much of the 1950s creature features—combined with their staccato, electronically-modified voices, they became mass culture figures almost instantly, recognizable to the large swathe of public in the UK. They became so popular that not only were they figures of reference and parody, and not only was their debut story the basis for the Amicus-produced film version starring Peter Cushing, but Terry Nation, who maintained a controlling stake in them, even attempted to create separate Dalek media projects outside the BBC, sometimes leading to periods where they did not appear on Doctor Who itself. As I said in the older post, the reason why Doctor Who has continued to make imaginative monsters such a core part of its identity is almost certainly because of the perfect notes that Cusick and Nation manage to hit at the beginning of the series.
A follow-up to the original story—now generally referred as “The Daleks”—was essentially guaranteed, and so in the second season, Nation was back again to apply a novel twist to the Daleks: bringing them to our planet. This is the central conceit of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, which aired in six parts from November 21st to December 26th 1964, once again the second storyline in the line-up. As the original Daleks story inadvertently set the tone of the series by introducing iconic monsters, this story evolved the series’ approach to monsters by introducing the conceit of monsters appearing in familiar English locations, contrasting the everyday with the extraordinary, which would prove to be one of the series’ frequently recurring motifs.
Moving from householdpests to garden pests, Slugs faces one potential hurdle to its status as horror: slugs are not particularly scary. Some people might find them creepy or gross, but probably not scary. I’m sure that was probably part of the appeal of making a horror story about them, though—they are so common, and so seemingly innocuous, that to turn them into bloodthirsty monsters creates a mildly subversive “horror of the everyday” scenario (they’re also weird enough as animals that actively ignoring their real biology won’t be noticed by most.) That’s all well and good, but you’re still going to need to put in some effort to make slugs come off as menacing, and this movie does try various things to do that—it doesn’t succeed, but it is sort of funny to see it try.
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.
The atomic monster category that was so profuse in the 1950s did not appear fully-formed, despite the timeliness of its inspiration: in the first major monster movie to use that device, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, the nuclear bomb test that unleashes its titular dinosaur feels almost incidental, possibly even flippant when considered alongside the military triumphalism it ends on. That film was so successful that Warner Bros. was quick to follow it up the next year with more radiation-spawned giant monsters, this time going from stop motion dinosaurs to giant ant puppets (and in the process begot yet another category of monster movie that spanned the entire decade, the giant insect movie), but by comparison, Them! is a much more sober and startling take on the idea, despite what the excitable title and the promise of giant radioactive ants. While not coming off as some sort of didactic warning of what could happen now that Pandora’s box of atomic energy has been opened, it is much more serious-minded and engaged with the long-term effects of these things, and coming within a few months of Godzilla‘s premier in Japan in the same year, captures a period of more intelligent consideration of that new age than the wackyradioactivefree-for-all that subsequently became the movie norm.
This month sees the release of the oft-delayed Shin Ultraman, the movie re-imagining of the original series directed by Shin Godzilla effects director Shinji Higuchi (and produced by Shin Godzilla director Hideaki Anno.) That has inspired me to spend the month covering the most exciting of all topics: franchise extensions! Get ready to be synergized this May!
Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue is not the prologue to Shin Kamen Rider, the movie directed by Anno scheduled for next year—in fact, it is technically a prologue to nothing. Produced in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of the Kamen Rider franchise (although it didn’t release until early 1992, slightly after said anniversary), this is a direct-to-video reboot of the motorcycle-riding bug cyborg superhero created during one of the franchise’s quiet periods, the long stretch between new TV productions that also saw the release of the Ultraman vs. Kamen Rider special I wrote about. Being V-Cinema (although it apparently did get a theatrical run as well), the term for DTV stuff in Japan that has an interesting history of its own, and also being made in the early nineties obviously meant that this new Kamen Rider is very different from the ones that came before—taking on all the dark elements from Shotaro Ishinimori’s original concept (he seemed to be fascinated with the idea of people being transformed against their will) and making them the emphasis, changing its superhero tale into a full-on monster movie, a bloody and dour experience replete with body and psychological horror. This was apparently done to appeal to the now-adult Kamen Rider fans, although it’s difficult to say if it actually did—in any case, it’s a bizarre and fascinating exercise.
Released in the same year as Varan, The H-Man sees director Ishiro Honda return again to ideas and imagery from Godzilla, just four years old at the time, beginning with more footage of a nuclear bomb test and another invocation of the Lucky Dragon 5 incident. What’s different here is that while the kaiju films visualized the fear of nuclear fallout and ongoing weapons testing through the creation of a walking natural disaster, this one is entirely human-based: men transformed into nightmarish new forms, completely unlike anything seen in nature (this is, in fact, yet another blob movie that predated The Blob—there must have been something gooey in the air in the late 1950s.) While treading some similar ground to other Honda/Toho genre films on the surface, the smaller scale and bizarre nature of the threat lead to something far different from the other monster movies of the Showa era.
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—Qand The Stuffare 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.
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.
Now, to conclude this year’s Christmas Apes season (which is also the last post of this year), another tale of a certain legendary wild man, albeit one that is probably a little less classy than the last one I wrote about…
For the longest time, I thought that Urban Yeti! would remain something that only I would remember. The Game Boy Advance software library, which I’ve written about elsewhere, was a strange beast, housing some truly outstanding portable games, but just as with its predecessors, it also attracted a glut of low-quality nonsense trying to trick kids or their parents into picking them up (generally speaking, if it was a licensed game or had CG art on the cover, you’d best avoid it.) So, a blatantly bad GBA game was so common that it rarely attracted a second glance when they graced the pages of the game magazines that were often forced to briefly cover them to fill space—but despite looking about on par with the chaff of the system, just the title Urban Yeti! (yes, with the exclamation point) caught my attention back in my game mag-reading heyday of 2002. The game’s cover was ugly-looking yet intriguing, and the accompanying screenshots and text that conveyed a certain level of bafflement on the part of the staff of Nintendo Power or whoever painted a portrait of something that was, while not good, at least unique. If memory serves, one or more of the game magazines I was reading at the time continued to reference it for a few months afterwards, especially the game’s iconic opening line “Now, get ready to yeti!” (if only more games commanded you with such power and conviction), which I also found incredibly amusing. Of course, the game industry would inevitably leave Urban Yeti! in the literal bargain bin of history, where it probably deserved to be, and thought no more about it once that magical summer of 2002 passed us by—but I didn’t forget. No, I carried that exhortation to prepare myself for future yeti-ing with me out of early adolescence and well into adulthood, where I figured that a silly line from a mediocre game (that was evidently the sort of thing that was being sold through a 1-800 number at one point) I had never played would die with me. There was no shame, in my mind, in becoming the lonely torchbearer for Urban Yeti!
AND YET: last year, the charity speed running event Awesome Games Done Quick featured a streamed playthrough of the game as part of their Bad Games block, introducing this strange piece of crypto-Cryptozoological ephemera to a new audience. Apparently, far more people were Ready To Yeti than I had imagined! But what exactly drew us all to the call of this sassy Sasquatch adventure?
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