Love and Monsters (2020)

If Reign of Fire was 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.

Attack the Block (2011)

Attack the Block was another one of those destined-for-cult-status movies that was championed by the genre-focused movie websites I read back in the late aughts and early 2010s, and it’s not difficult to understand why. At its heart, this is a throwback movie to older creature features and to the youth-centric films of the 1980s, with a fannish tint to its writing that is reflected in the references in the dialogue and the love of Big, Cool Moments. Writer-director Joe Cornish already had a following from his radio and television comedy work, and was able to parlay his association with Edgar Wright’s comedy-pastiche crew (Wright is an Executive Producer on this with his frequent collaborators Nira Park as Producer and Nick Frost in the cast) to get his film off the ground, and to some extent the exuberant aficionado tone of Wright’s work is evident here even if it’s not as much of a direct homage as his films often are. While this movie didn’t necessarily make a huge splash back in 2011, its favour among an influential crowd almost certainly led its two leads, John Boyega and Jodie Whitaker, to be cast as the new faces of two different long-running franchises, something that both might feel a tinge of regret about.

So, yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that Sci-Fi and horror nerds flock toward, an attempt to capture a bit of nostalgic spirit in its kids-vs-monsters set-up, but it’s also an intelligent and novel twist on that idea that goes places those older movies did not. The straightforward kind of monster action utilized by Cornish becomes a frame in which to place a cast of well-defined, lower class youths, the kind whose lives are not simply left out of fantasy films, but are regularly dehumanized into faceless, hoodie-wearing creatures themselves by people far removed from their poverty-stricken living conditions. Like many of the best monster movies, this is one about taking something very specific and very real and letting the fictional aberrations draw out the reality of it.

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.

The Faculty (1998)

Consider this a back-to-school special.

The potential pitfall of all those self-aware, meta-referencing pieces of genre entertainment—a particular specialty of the nineties—is a sense of having your cake and eating it: they point out all the tropes and cliches while actively using them, without necessarily demonstrating any original or truly subversive ideas of their own. The Faculty aims for that style of storytelling, but has at least one new-ish angle up its sleeve: it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers set in a high school, leading to all sorts of new metaphorical possibilities for a well-worn concept. Of course, because of the style of writing, it’s a version of that concept where characters directly talk about Jack Finney’s original Body Snatchers story as well as Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, signposting all of those metaphorical possibilities before you even get a chance to really take them in. That part of the movie was, not surprisingly, the contribution of Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who was assigned by the supervillains at Miramax to revamp a script by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel, with the directorial role given to Robert Rodriguez, coming off of From Dusk Till Dawn and his support work on Mimic. As aggressively 1998 as any movie could be, this does make some honest attempts to straddle the snarky hipness of the meta dialogue with a nominally serious Sci-Fi horror take on teenage alienation.

“The Web of Fear” (S5E23-28)

Almost four years after “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, Doctor Who returned to the concept of aliens overtaking London—but at that point, the show was in a slightly different place than where it began. The role of the Doctor had been handed off to Patrick Troughton, establishing the tradition that has allowed this series to continue to exist for sixty years by making its lead a character who can change their appearance when necessary. The show also really started to take the form in which it would be known for those sixty years, putting its full emphasis on Science Fiction-based plots, which often meant focusing more specifically on creating new, memorable monsters to give those plots an additional horror bent. The Troughton years were especially rife with monster-centric thrillers, with “The Web of Fear” being a fairly well-known example—and by sharing a milieu with the previous serial I wrote about, it makes for some interesting comparisons in approach.

Pulse (1988)

Programming Note: I’ll be on vacation next week, so the next scheduled movie post will be sometime during the week of August 20th. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The idea that our increasingly technological lives set us up for trouble has been a recurring theme since the twentieth century (and probably before that), updating itself whenever some new convenience becomes entrenched in the routine of the average westerner. Pulse is the late eighties version of this, set in a home with such advanced appliances as VCRs, microwaves, and air conditioning units, all things that can be turned against us when under the influence of something sinister. In the mind of the devoted Luddite, our homes used to be a solidly independent thing of wood and stone, but the advent of appliances not only makes people overly reliant on them, but invites an outside presence that we do not even understand, let alone know how to control. In this case, the presence takes the form of a malevolently intelligent jolt of electricity, something that can undermine the entire modern home—it’s another high concept horror, but one with a surprising amount on its mind, fanning out not just into the technological aspects of contemporary living, but with a specifically eighties critique of suburbia.

Alligator (1980)

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.

Slugs (1988)

Moving from household pests 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.

Zeiram 2 (1994)

You may remember Zeiram as the movie that begins as a Sci-Fi martial arts clash between an alien bounty hunter and a mutant super-weapon that suddenly pivots into a Laurel & Hardy duo of dimwits having a Scooby-Doo chase with said mutant super-weapon in an empty warehouse district. More than anything, it was a vehicle for director/character designer Keita Amemiya’s intricate tokusatsu aesthetic, probably one of the most prolific ones in the eighties and nineties (aside from various TV series, he worked on the effects of both GUNHED and Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue, and directed the Ultraman vs. Kamen Rider special), let loose from the strictures of television and plot—but that comic relief twist made it an odd one. Amemiya’s sequel, made three years later, actually streamlines the storytelling in a way that better distributes the action throughout its runtime and integrates all the characters in a more organic way, meaning that it might be a better-constructed film, while still being almost exactly the same.

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.