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.

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.

Digimon Adventure (1999) & Digimon Adventure: Our War Game! (2000)

Bandai was pretty quick to expand on their line of Digimon virtual pet toys after they debuted in 1997 (as I wrote in my post about Digimon as a franchise from a while back), commissioning both an anime television series and a theatrical short at the same time, and eventually deciding to have the latter act as a prequel to the former—the short premiered as part of one of Toei Animation’s film festivals the day before the series began. That a company like Bandai would want to get in on the multimedia action ASAP is not a surprise (they’re also heavily involved in both Ultraman and Kamen Rider as well), and I can imagine that the meteoric rise of Pokémon at around the same time encouraged them to hype up their own battling monster concept as much as possible. But there’s a lot more going on in the early days of Digimon’s animation history, which makes it more interesting than just another toy franchise getting some spin-offs.

First and foremost, there’s the involvement of animator Mamoru Hosoda. Hosoda had really wanted to work for Studio Ghibli, and while his application was rejected, he was encouraged by Hiyao Miyazaki himself to continue pursuing his art. He then found work at Miyazaki’s old stomping grounds at Toei, and eventually was given the role of directing the Digimon Adventure short, impressing Toei enough that a year later he also directed the next Digimon film, Our War Game!, which in turn impressed the heads of Ghibli enough that they finally decided to hire him (meanwhile, those two short films were haphazardly cobbled together with two later Digimon films, and a soundtrack of contemporary pop songs, to create the English-language Digimon: The Movie, released theatrically in October 2000. This blog post is about the original Japanese versions, as the English compilation would probably be better suited for an Ink & Pain post.) Hosoda was intended to direct Howl’s Moving Castle, but creative clashes with the studio convinced him to leave, which led to Miyazaki taking over the project (an experience that seems to have left Hosoda with some long standing bitterness that has shown up in his subsequent films and in interviews.) In the two decades since, Hosoda has directed a string of acclaimed and award-winning animated films including The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Wolf Children, and Mirai, all praised for their distinctive animation and emotional content (his 2009 film Summer Wars, in terms of theme and story, is essentially a re-imagining of Our War Game!) And to think, it all started with Digimon.

The Milpitas Monster (1976)

As King Kung Fu was to Wichita, The Milpitas Monster is to the city of Milpitas, California (once a rural hub, now essentially a Silicon Valley suburb): a micro-budget, locally-made monster movie that acts as both an affectionate parody and time capsule, which is probably why it seems to still get played in theatres there on a yearly basis. It’s also a production that sometimes makes King Kung Fu look lavish by comparison—not surprising given that this was a project initiated by students and a photography teacher at Samuel Ayer High School (leading to the “Samuel Golden Ayer Productions” gag at the beginning of the movie), although the fact that it received some kind of national distribution is maybe a bit more surprising (it was even blessed with one of those VHS-only title changes, sometimes being called “The Mutant Beast.”) Needless to say, one does not watch a movie like The Milpitas Monster expecting a professionally-made object, but an odd piece of local colour—employing almost every civil servant and local business in the city if the credits are anything to go by—that is anchored by a fantasy plot based on local waste management issues. In eco-horror terms, it’s a broad issue placed in a very specific context.

Creature Classic Companion: Society (1989)

So ends a month spent with Arrow, and let’s cap it off with the type of movie that makes you appreciate the existence of these specialty services, because you know most mainstream streamers wouldn’t touch this with a ten-foot pole.

There’s a particular strain of eighties movies, genre movies especially, which are almost entirely about how the eighties were terrible, and specifically railed against the wealthy and the corporate culture that seemed to increasingly dominate everything during the Reagan era. Robocop is probably the highest profile example, but you also have John Carpenter’s The Live and Larry Cohen’s The Stuff all espousing the same kind of anti-authority stance—and in using genres and styles that were considered disreputable to mainstream consensus feels like an appropriate punkish way to do so. Horror with B-movie sensibilities, ultra-violent action, and an emphasis on gross special effects have a visceral anger to them, and thumbing your nose at the idea of good taste probably felt like the most subversive way to get your point across. Society is another example of this from the tail end of the decade, and it acquired a strong cult following among horror aficionados by taking things as far as they could go.

This is the first film directed by Brian Yuzna, who was mostly known for producing the movies of the late Stuart Gordon, including such favourites as Re-Animator and From Beyond (which he co-wrote.) Apparently after Gordon and him co-wrote the initial version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids(!), Yuzna wanted more independence, and was able to secure financing for whatever he wanted as long as he also produced a sequel to Re-Animator. Taking that sweet deal for all it was worth, he picked up an intriguing script about a Beverly Hills teen becoming increasingly suspicious of his rich family’s secret life, but felt that the cult/slasher angle of its ending was not his speed, and so altered the twist into something else entirely—a monster movie, but more than that. What was produced was one of the most audacious and disgusting of all eighties horror movies, one that left an indelible impression on everyone who stumbled upon it during the heyday of practical horror effects.

Creature Classic Companion: It Follows (2014)

It Follows managed to crack a certain critical barrier among horror movies when it was released, garnering the kind of widespread praise that these things only rarely get. Not being a horror fan, but reading a lot of movie websites at the time, I heard a lot about it, and saw it held up as a new sort of innovative, self-aware (but not self-parodying) fright flick, one of the select few from the middle of the previous decade being touted. I can imagine this was at least partially due to it straying away from the found footage-focused paradigm that proliferated back then. I also imagine that it has to do with its efficient pitch, one with a primal meaning at the centre of it that still allowed for a depth of symbolism: a sexually-transmitted curse that puts you in the sights of a methodically murderous shape-changing entity, one that only the cursed people can see and that will not stop until you are dead or you pass it on to someone else…but with the possibility of it going back to you once its current target has been dealt with. It’s a gimmick for sure, one that comes with its set of rules—and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s a subset of horror fans who love rules—but it also intelligently plays with the fears of its adolescent target audience, and director David Robert Mitchell uses the camera to show all the the ways that the gimmick can sow paranoia.

Monster Multimedia: Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts

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!)

Monster Multimedia: Needle/7 Billion Needles

At some point, Science Fiction writers probably got tired of the standard assortment of Bug Eyed Monsters that had populated the pages of the pulps since back when they called the genre “scientifiction”, and wanted to get at something a bit more conceptual, like the aliens dreamt up by H.G. Wells in War of the Worlds and First Men in the Moon. This was especially the case during much of the “Golden Age” in the forties and fifties, where scientific rigour was emphasized over expediency-for-the-purposes-of-plot (and sometimes over plot itself), so writers began looking at biology to inspire new kinds of extraterrestrial life forms and make more interesting and “accurate” stories (and also so we could get some intelligent aliens with character, rather than just slavering beasts to be raygunned.) Among the more notable examples can be found in Hal Clement’s 1950 novel Needle, which probably introduced a lot of SF-reading kids to the idea of symbiosis.

Equinox (1970)

I always appreciate a movie whose trailer yells its title at me multiple times

Equinox is a home movie made by some dudes who would become major figures in the special effects sector that was later distributed as an actual movie—that sounds reductive, but it also means that this is part of the history of movie effects, which is definitely something notable. Mostly directed by Dennis Muren (later: Star Wars, Jurassic Park) with stop motion animation by David Allen (later: Q – The Winged Serpent) and Jim Danforth (later: a whole bunch of stuff, although I’m mostly familiar with his work on Jack the Giant Killer from 1962) with a budget of $6,500 (in mid-sixties dollars, mind you), this exists mainly as a showcase for creature effects in the Ray Harryhausen mould—would you be at all surprised that they had the direct support of Famous Monsters of Filmland’s Forrest J. Ackerman? This is pretty much the exact kind of movie you’d expect a Famous Monsters reader to make.