If Reign of Firewas a purely 2002 vision of the apocalypse, Love and Monsters is its late 2010s counterpart, the same basic story with a completely different approach. Where Reign loudly communicated its era by draining itself of colour and humour and having only vague self-awareness of the limitations of its CGI effects, L&M reflects its own by saturating itself with bright cartoon hues and quippy narration and CGI that has become so advanced and widespread that its generally seamless integration feels almost effortless (in fact, it received an Academy Award nomination for Effects.) The interesting contrast between these two movies might be further bolstered by eerie coincidence: Reign took place in a decimated world in 2020, while L&M was released in the midst of a decimated world in 2020, which mostly killed its theatrical run minus a few small-scale screenings and left it to become a perennial item in the Netflix back catalogue. In short, choosing to watch these two in close proximity definitely gave me even more to think about.
Two movie posts in one week?Yes, I had so many things I wanted to write about that I’m starting my double features a bit early this summer. In June, you’ll be getting a new millenniumsubject early in the week, and something more vintage on Thursdays.
I was already planning on writing about this movie at some point, but the passing of Roger Corman (a few weeks ago as of this posting) made it a top priority, and I’m hoping to cover more of his movies in the near future. Of course, Corman had a big impact on the entirety of Hollywood film with his prolific filmography, general eye for talent, and, let’s say, economical methods, but the many monster movies he either directed (I’ve writtenabout a few of them) or produced do have a special place in that vast filmography—with all their B-movie qualities, there were a few that offered genuine innovation in the category, or at the very least were uniquely bizarre and entertaining. There are also the times where he provided a starting point for filmmakers who would go on to become some of the biggest creative forces in monster movie history, including Joe Dante’s big break with Piranha. In a career that spanned everything from Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to women in prison movies and eccentric comedies, the monster movies are a crucial part of his legacy—beginning with Corman’s first-ever film as a producer.
As the story goes, Corman was irritated after seeing a script he wrote altered by the studio, so he decided to start his own production company to have complete control of the movies he worked on. Monster From the Ocean Floor was the first film he produced, and its six-day, cost-saving-whenever-possible production (the budget is somewhere between $12,000 and $35,000 depending on who you ask) was the beginning of the patented Corman method that would serve him for the rest of his career. The money he received up front from Lippert Pictures for Monster was used to fund his next movie, something called The Fast and the Furious(!), which was the first movie he worked on with distributors Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, the founders of his longtime distributor American International Pictures.
On a pure film history level, Monster From the Ocean Floor is actually significant, even if it is rather unassuming as a low budget fifties monster movie that could be best described as “quaint.” I would also argue that it, in its unassuming way, it’s also a fairly forward-looking piece of fifties creature feature history—released between more famous big studio fare, specifically Creature From the Black Lagoonand Them!, it gets into some of the major themes of the era early, signalling the specific form of nuclear paranoia that haunts a large number of these movies. Corman and his crew were not establishing their own distinct brand of monster movie, but developing the entire genre as a whole without really trying—and that’s a very Corman thing to do.
All the way back in my post about King of the Monsters, I briefly mentioned the 2003 Playstation 2 title War of the Monsters, a game stomping the same grounds as SNK’s monster wrestling dust-up, but separated by an ocean and a decade’s worth of technological development in video games. I’ve stressed it over and over again that giant monsters are a topic that has been woefully underrepresented in the video game sphere—a situation that annoyingly does not right itself in the time between posts where I talk about it (although that GigaBash game from last year might be worth looking at)—and for the longest time, War of the Monsters was probably the highest profile entry, or at the least the highest profile one that didn’t have Godzilla’s name plastered on the box. It had the pedigree of being a first-party Playstation game released during the PS2’s unstoppable reign as the top console, and was developed by Incog Inc. (formerly the much more sensibly-named Incognito Studios), a company formed by the lead developers of Sony’s popular Twisted Metal series, alongside Sony’s stalwart Santa Monica Studio—the “original concept” was provided by Twisted Metal and God of War lead David Jaffe, back when he made video games instead of embarrassing Youtube videos.
There is an obvious logic to getting some the leading minds behind the car combat genre to tackle a giant monster game—they are both, after all, concepts that revolve around massive property damage, and in terms of raw tech, Incog could probably carry over the physics engine that powered the PS2 Twisted Metal entry that released a year-and-a-half earlier. You can feel the car combat roots in the basic feel of War of the Monsters, the way it moves and the way it’s structured, although it also attempts to go back to Twisted Metal‘s origins in the fighting game genre in a more direct manner, with hand-to-hand combat rather than a back-and-forth bombardment of projectiles (although there’s plenty of projectiles in this as well). It’s easy to see that this game is making a genuine attempt to be both a appealing competitive smash-em-up and a loving homage to the giant monster movie genre—in some ways, it represents the last hurrah for a specific view of creature features, and a last ditch effort to take what King of the Monsters was trying to do and get it “right.”
Last month saw the passing of fifties B-movie mainstay director Bert I. Gordon at age 100, an appropriately large number for Mr. BIG himself. Beginning with 1955’s King Dinosaur, Gordon was one of the most prolific producers of monster movies in one of the golden eras of monster movies—he directed (and, alongside is wife, provided the special effects for) three movies in 1957 alone—but his reputation in later decades was mostly as a figure of light (and sometimes not-so-light) mockery. The reason is fairly obvious: his most consistent theme in his movies is making things gigantic (or in the case of Attack of the Puppet People, making them tiny), a single-minded pursuit of one of the recurring trends in Sci-Fi movies of the time, and he did it through the use of rear projection, mattes, and split-screens, effects that, being charitable, do not impart a sense of realism. Even though the generations following Gordon’s heyday have often looked down on the special effects of the fifties monster movies as almost inherently phony, his were singled out as the cheapest of the lot, which is probably one of the reasons why he was the single most featured director on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, where most people outside the monster movie historian circles know him from exclusively. I’d like to say that he took this ribbing later in life in stride, but most stories I’ve heard indicate that he most certainly did not.
We can all get a laugh from stills or clips from Gordon’s movies where actors run away from hazy projections that seem to exist solely in the foreground or background, or watching objects clipping through transparencies in the monster’s limbs, but I myself cannot go to the level of genuine mockery of the man’s work. For as silly as something like The Amazing Colossal Man or Earth vs. The Spider looks to us now, these movies remain fixtures of monster history, producing the kind of imagery that, realistic or not, speak to their era and its fixations as much as the more unanimously agreed upon classics (and some of those would likely be sneered at by the same people making fun of Gordon’s movies.) I can’t imagine anyone would have had the kind of filmography he had in the fifties without some kind of enthusiasm for what he was doing—and he had so much enthusiasm for it that he would go back to making the exact same sort of movies in the seventies, a completely different cinematic epoch that still had drive-ins to fill—and simply did what he could with the resources he had. That is something I can relate to as a fellow enthusiast.
So, to honour the memory of Mr. BIG and his gigantic love for gigantic creatures, I viewed his second feature film, Beginning of the End. Within it you can see all the things that defined his films, for good and for goofy.
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.
Where the previous Roger Corman movie I wrote about benefited from a more character-based approach that made up for a fitful distribution of monster scenes, its follow-up goes in the complete opposite direction, intentionally paring the script down to primarily scenes about the monster at its centre and simplifying characters so they are defined only by their jobs, genders, or accents (hilariously, screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, a frequent Corman collaborator who will be showing up in future posts, explained that “[Corman] said it was an experiment. ‘I want suspense or action in every scene. No kind of scene without suspense or action.’ His trick was saying it was an experiment, which it wasn’t. He just didn’t want to bother cutting out the other scenes, which he would do.”) At around 63 minutes, Attack of the Crab Monsters barely makes feature length (but is even more perfect as part of a double feature), and while maintaining much of the feel of a fifties creature feature, its maniacal pace and devotion to “suspense and action” makes itself felt off the hop—we get a decapitation within the first five minutes, after all. Even aside from that, what would seemingly be a typical example of one of the fundamental types of narrative conflict—man against man, man against self, man against giant radioactive crab—is complicated by said giant radioactive crabs acquiring some truly bizarre characteristics, giving them an unexpected presence throughout the movie. This is a case of something appearing routine on the surface but having a truly peculiar imagination when you peer into the tidal pool.
We now travel from the early days of Toho monster movies to their waning days, with increasingly diminished budgets and increasingly diminished audience numbers. Space Amoeba (called Gezora, Ganime, and Kameba: Decisive Battle! Giant Monsters of the South Seas in Japan, and alternatively titled Yog – Monster From Space in North America) turned out to be the penultimate monster movie directed by Ishiro Honda, and while at this point these movies were expected to mostly cater to monster-loving kids, it carries on a number of his recurring themes, and even has a surprising number of parallels to Varan, despite the twelve years between them. This could have potentially been his last go-around in the genre, so it was entirely possible that Honda wanted a chance to get as much of the old gang back together, including several actors and composer Akira Ifukube, to make one of these—and while at times it, like Varan, feels like a composite of other movies, its place in the history and the ideas it utilizes make it interesting all the same.
Netflix has been funding plenty of original animation in recent years, and statistically there was always a decent chance at least some of it would be creature-based, or at least creature adjacent, and so would attract my attention (and there may be enough of it for multiple blog posts, hint hint.) Last year saw the release of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, a thirty episode series split into three “seasons” over the course of ten months, which was produced by Dreamworks’ television animation division with the actual animation provided by South Korea’s Studio Mir (which previously animated shows like Legend of Korra and Netflix’s Voltron reboot), and this is about as creature-centric as it gets, providing a post-collapse sci-fi world filled with unique specimens, rendered in some of the most eye-catching colours I’ve seen in a recent animated thing (it’s based on a webcomic made by series creator Radford Sechrist, an animation veteran, and admirably captures his comics’ colour palette and angular design sense.) Kipo has the serialized plot and gradual worldbuilding of much recent genre work (especially aimed at adolescent audiences), but its emphasis on action and its regular introduction of wacky new ideas and characters throughout give it a feel not dissimilar to the Saturday morning cartoons I used to watch as a kid, only much better in execution. But while it has a focus on excitement and humour, it becomes surprisingly nuanced as it goes along, not afraid to depict its characters’ legitimate struggles with morality and cooperation, while never giving up on their initial optimism and drive. It’s compelling as both a story and candy-coloured blast of imagination, which is still feels like a rare accomplishment.
(I don’t usually signal this, but since this show is still relatively recent and some people may still want to watch it, I’ll note that this post contains heavy spoilers for the entire series, so proceed with caution!)
Time to be honest: I’m only familiar with the bizarre career of punk/metal vocalist Wendy O. Williams because her name is referenced in the Mario series (thank you, late eighties American localizers and your random pop culture pulls.) In general, I don’t go out of my to check out the kind of high-octane guitar + screaming music that Williams specialized in, but there is something sort of liberating about being that loud, angry, and abrasive. Music so unadorned and designed to rattle your brain into submission can be pretty fun, and it can also get a point across pretty plainly—when there is a point, at least (with shock rock, it’s never a guarantee that it means anything other than “Look at me! Look at me!”) Williams and her band the Plasmatics’ 1987 release Maggots: The Record (so we don’t confuse it with any of the other maggot-based entertainment that was all over the place at the time) does seem to have a point—an extremely bleak point—when it’s not just going out of its way to be gross.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 