The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (2007)

There have been films about the Loch Ness Monster pretty much from the beginning—the first movie about the monster released in 1934 (a film edited by future Lawrence of Arabia director David Lean), only a year after the first noteworthy sightings took place. Needless to say, very few of them are particularly noteworthy, so The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep can take the crown as both the most well-known Loch Ness Monster movie and the best one almost by default (I’ve already written about the only other contender.) Based on a novel by Dick King-Smith (whose book The Sheep Pig was adapted in the movie Babe), Water Horse is pitched as a traditional sort of whimsical family movie, with a cast of respected British thespians and the structure of a “child befriends an animal” story enlivened with fantastical elements ala ET. It burnishes this well-worn plot by taking advantage of the historical context of the Loch Ness Monster story, arguing why a legend like this may have resonated in an era of strife.

Reign of Fire (2002)

All told, 2002 seems like the appropriate point where the strain of big studio Creature Features should come to an evolutionary dead end—Reign of Fire continued the trends of genre mixing and the infatuation with all the things CGI would let filmmakers put on screen, but scaled up to a world-demolishing scope that was in keeping with the increasingly bombastic blockbusters of the turn of the millennium. I’m sure the studio and screenwriters Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka, and Matt Greenberg (the latter having done uncredited rewrites on Mimic) thought that renewed interest in high fantasy thanks to movies like The Lord of the Rings would directly benefit their high concept of portraying fantasy-style dragons with a Sci-Fi approach to “realism”—instead, this turned out to be box office disappointment (although its $60 Million dollar budget was relatively modest in that era), and big studios stopped being so keen about putting that much money into monster movies. That leaves us with a mildly novel take on giant monsters and post-apocalyptic world building that oozes 2002 from every pore.

Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (2008)

Yes, this is indeed a much belated follow-up to The X From Outer Space, the second tier kaiju film from Japan’s sixties Monster Boom period that I covered over four years ago, and from the subtitle alone you are probably left with many questions. A nominal parody of both the original film and the state of geopolitics circa the late aughts, this one-off reboot is brought to us by director Minoru Kawasaki, who specializes in comedy tokusatsu projects with names like The Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala, and writer Masakazu Migita, an Ultraman TV series writer who has worked with Kawasaki on multiple projects. Migita was also the writer of previous subject Death Kappa, and while this certainly shares comedy stylings with that movie, it benefits from having a direction to its humour beyond just slightly off-kilter recreations of older kaiju films.

Zillatinum: Part 2 (The Return of Godzilla & Godzilla 2000: Millennium)

The anniversary capsule reviews return! This time, I cover two of the many reboots of the Godzilla series, both offering reflections of the time in which they were made, and how the King of the Monsters could still potential resonate within them.

Demeking, the Sea Monster (2009)

See, this is a real indie kaiju movie—it’s such an indie kaiju movie that it isn’t even really a kaiju movie! But that’s okay—one of the reasons I started this whole thing was to see just how far from the norm of creature feature something can fall while still dealing with monsters in some way, and Demeking, The Sea Monster is an example of a monster being used as an element in an otherwise non-fantastical story. I’m sure that many viewers who were going by the title were shocked when they found a movie with little giant monster content in it (although not zero giant monster content), but a lot of low-key slice-of-life storytelling.

Geharha: The Dark and Long-Haired Monster (2009) & Death Kappa (2010)

Japan is another country where giant monster movies are produced. Did any of you know this?

In the gaps between major kaiju films, you can always expect to see alternative sources pick up the slack, including fans. The late aughts and the early 2010s were one of those gaps, and while neither of the two subjects I’m covering here, one a short film that aired on television and the other a feature-length film that comes off as multiple short films cobbled together, are technically fan-produced, they certainly feel like they are. They carry with them the same loving attempts to recreate classic tokusatsu effects (utilizing veterans of the field), and the same desire to fill as much of the cast with recognizable faces from other tokusatsu productions—all things we saw in previous site subject The Great Buddha Arrival, which is an actual fan-made film. In this case, both are also affectionate parodies of the genre, capturing the technical craft while making light of their cliches—with that in mind, another one of their major similarities to each other might be their oddly uneven approach to spoofing the form.

The Descent (2005)

If there is any consistent thread you can find throughout the most well-regarded monster movies that premiered after the new millennium, it’s an attempt to bring a classical sense of economy and imagination to a subgenre that had been overtaken by bloat and complacency. While the possibilities of digital filmmaking are utilized, special effects are kept practical, both in the sense of being generally handmade and in that they are cost-efficient and serve a purpose other than showcasing soon-to-be-outdated CGI rigs—that also means budgets are low enough that actual risks can be taken in the subject matter and tone. Neil Marshall’s The Descent is generally held up as one of the best examples of that: here is a horror film based not on impossible effects or haunted house thrills, but a general ratcheting of dread to the point of physical discomfort, one that builds from a grounded place and then introduces its monsters as a form of escalation. This is a return to some of the most unsparing horror of the seventies and eighties, while adding some of its own stylistic touches that mark it as part of a growing movement of bold experiments from genre experts.

Monster Allergy

The popularity of the Godzilla films in their heyday did not just lead to homegrown competitors and imitators—as we saw with Yongary and Gorgo, film makers worldwide sometimes made their own attempts at similar monster material. I’ve written about that particular “Monster Boom” period pretty extensively, but a very similar pattern emerged following Pokémon, a later monster-based phenomenon that was clearly inspired by nostalgia for the original Monster Boom. That series’ thundercrack emergence in the late nineties led to a plethora of other media based on the idea of monster collecting and battling, especially in Japan, and I’ve written about some of those as well (you can also find a surprisingly deep recollection of even more Pokémon coattail riders in Daniel Dockery’s 2022 book Monster Kids)–but wouldn’t it be interesting to see how the basic ideas of a monster collecting franchise could be filtered through a completely different cultural lens?

This brings us to Monster Allergy, an Italian kids comics-turned-attempted-franchise that doesn’t outright announce its indebtedness to Pokémon and the other kids monster series of its era, but come on—it’s about “monster tamers” capturing monsters in small objects, and that alone makes the connection obvious. It’s certainly no rip-off, as any similarities largely disappear past those barest of surface elements, and instead follow more traditional western low fantasy storytelling. But regardless of the degree of intention, this does represent a very European take on some of Pokémon‘s core ideas, a kid-focused adventure in a monster-filled world, and In this way, it is to Pokémon what a Gorgo or a Reptilicus was to the original Godzilla.

Splice (2009)

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.

The Burrowers (2008)

One of my goals in the coming months is to cover more movies made in the past twenty-four years. After the nineties, a decade where most monster movies were either unambitious direct-to-video schlock or unambitious Hollywood blockbuster schlock, the new millennium seemed to usher a slew of lower budget indie creature features made by enthusiasts with fresh ideas, given a wider audience thanks to the thriving genre film festival circuit. These ready-made cult films could vary in tone and quality, but you could still sense the verve and imagination returning to the genre after that decade-long hibernation.

In that spirit of experimentation, The Burrowers combines the monster movie with a western, an established but infrequent combination. I’ve said this the last few times I’ve covered a western/monster movie mash-up, but the two styles work well together, with the western’s untamed setting and sense of isolation providing the kinds of spaces where the unknown can creep in, giving new ways to mythologize lands that are now completely familiar to us. That comes into play even more here, as we’re dealing with something of a revisionist western, casting a caustic eye on the colonialist myths of the American frontier—a place of human horror that also has room for some of the inhuman kind as well.