The Creeping Flesh (1973)

Continuing the trend of returning to old favourites, we’ve got another Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee joint, one that premiered a year after they appeared together in Horror Express. The Creeping Flesh is a proper British Gothic horror, a period piece full of parlours and lacy clothes and laboratories and grotty asylums, directed by a longtime hand at the genre, Freddie Francis (who apparently replaced Don Sharp, another British horror director), an Academy Award-winning cinematographer who also made several thrillers for rival studios Hammer and Amicus (this one is by the other other UK horror studio, Tigon) and apparently wasn’t that big a fan of the genre. In any case, here he is with Cushing and Lee, reversing the roles they had in Horror Express—Cushing is the one with more scruples this time!—in this weird combination of evolutionary science, psychiatry, and timeless supernatural evil. Whatever point Flesh is trying to make is embedded in layers of pseudo-scientific theorizing and even Victorian gender politics, and some of those ideas are implemented so subtly that it’s hard to tell if I’m just projecting them in there myself. This is a truly perplexing object.

Monster Multimedia: The Trap Door

Kids are an audience that is especially open to the appeal to the creepy and macabre, maybe because the idea of normalcy has yet to be hammered into them by the wider culture and they can see the fun in being so inherently repulsive, even if they aren’t one of the outsider kids to whom monsters and weird things are something they identify with—not that I would know anything about that. What that means is that there is a whole history of creepy entertainment aimed at the youth audience, and the more monstrous and unseemly, the more they latch onto it. The Trap Door, which aired forty episodes over two series in 1986 and 1990 (such is the inconsistent airing whims of British television) on two of the UK’s independent broadcasters, ITV and Channel 4, is as good an example of that aesthetic as any, following a group of clay animated (I won’t say “claymation” because I don’t want Will Vinton’s ghost to haunt me with spectral legal trouble) monsters in a spooky castle as they go about their strange days. Everything about the show, created by animators Charlie Mills and Terry Brain (the latter of whom would later go on to work at Aardman, makers of Wallace & Gromit), seems tailor-made for the anti-social child who gets a kick out of seeing bugs, worms, and bizarre creatures running around a chaotically protean plasticine world, full of raucous physical comedy (the kind of carefree love of nonsense that had been mostly stamped out in most contemporary cartoons in North America, as we have regularly seen on this website), but also a working class edge that adds even more colour to a series full of all-in-good-fun nastiness.

X the Unknown (1956)

I don’t see any patterns in my choice of review subjects this month. Where did you get an idea like that?

Hammer’s run of Sci-Fi movies began in 1955 with their adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment, and they apparently wanted an immediate follow-up, which Kneale decided not to participate in (the next Quatermass movie would be released in 1957.) So, rather than continuing the exploits of master scientist Bernard Quatermass, they got together their usual gang (including writer Jimmy Sangster, who also scripted many of Hammer’s Gothic horror movies) and made up their own master scientist with a bizarre science mystery to solve (and maybe there was blackjack thrown in as well), which is what gave us X the Unknown. Despite kinda being a bootleg appropriation of Kneale’s influential SF/horror hybrids, X does capably capture a bit of the cosmic existentialism that makes productions like Quatermass (or even The Abominable Snowman, another movie based on a Kneale TV production) resonate—the idea of a unknowable, and possibly hostile, universe being unleashed upon us by pure happenstance. Its featured menace, a blob of radioactive mud that surprisingly predates The Blob, skirts the line of plausibility just enough that you really get the sense of it as a disaster unfolding, and the movie’s violence approaches the grossness of Caltiki without quite getting there, but is impressive nonetheless.

Monster Multimedia: Hilda

One of those useless thoughts I’ll sometimes have when taking in something aimed at a younger demographic is asking whether I’d have enjoyed it when I was a kid, rather than the wan and decrepit skeleton beast I am currently. My youthful tastes were so contextual and arbitrary that I can never hope to have a definitive answer, but as someone who got really into reading about mythology and folklore in grade school (with, as I have mentioned in the past, their own ambitions of creating the ultimate bestiary of mythological creatures—I still have all my notes in a manila folder), and who then loved to see those stories and creatures I was reading about referenced in the wider culture (so I got to think “I know that one!”), Hilda endeared itself to me very quickly. Created by illustrator Luke Pearson (who has also worked in animation as a storyboarder on Adventure Time), Hilda began as a series of graphic novels, starting with 2010’s Hildafolk (sometimes titled Hilda and the Troll), carrying an adventurous and whimsical spirit that brings to mind both the work of Hayao Miyazaki and Tove Jansson (the latter can especially be seen in the clean, wide-eyed characters Pearson draws), reinterpreting and modernizing (mostly) Scandinavian legends in clever and often beautiful ways. In 2018, Netflix released an animated series adaptation, capturing Pearson’s art with its very smooth and colourful animation (and its ethereal soundtrack, with a theme song provided by Grimes), and expanding on the world presented in the comics, mixing direct adaptations of the books with original stories that fit the tone. I wrote briefly about watching the first Netflix season back in 2019, but after going through the second season that premiered last month, I have an even greater appreciation for the whole series, especially in the way it thoughtfully introduces all the fun stuff about folklore (the silliness, the scariness, the endless possibilities they present) to a new generation of kids.

Queen Kong (1976)

With a chill in the air and the sidewalks slick with ice patches ready to instigate comedic pratfalls and concussions, we all know what time of the year it is: time for the return of Christmas Apes, a month-long celebration of seismic simians in the media. Just like last year, I’ll be beginning with another trip to the magical year of 1976, where everyone was putting men in gorilla suits in order to cash in on the imminent release of the hotly anticipated Dino De Laurentiis remake of King Kong. Yes, everyone was indeed wanting to ape that ape—the big difference between the other two Kong klones from that time, which I wrote about last Christmas Apes season, and Queen Kong is that only the latter got hit with an infringement suit, with both RKO (the original distributors of Kong Kong) and the De Laurentiis Company managing to block its theatrical release in all but a few countries. Director and co-writer Frank Agrama is mainly known as the CEO of Harmony Gold, which was a major distributor of anime in the eighties (specifically Robotech), of which there seems to be many heated opinions—he was also a business associate of infamous Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and ended up being convicted of tax fraud.

As you can probably tell, there’s a lot of seediness all around this production, which at least feels appropriate: this a relatively lowbrow spoof, going for a manic absurdity that would be perfected in Airplane!, but doesn’t land all that often here (maybe they were a little ahead of their time—they even have a singing nun on a plane joke, just like Airplane!) The primary source of comedy seems to be all the gender reversals at play (which was also part of their legal argument in the copyright case), which isn’t so much commenting on gender roles in the original King Kong as it is a way to revel in broad ridiculousness and a condescending view of second-wave feminism. It even has a theme song (played by The Peppers, who appear in the movie wearing ape masks under the name The Orangotangs), which is full of bass and includes lines such as “She’s the queenie for my weenie” and “When I’m feelin’ mighty spunky/I want to do it with my hunky monkey.” In short, and I’m pretty sure I’ve said this about every one of these seventies giant ape movies, but this feels like the most seventies thing in existence.

Monster Multimedia: The Mighty Boosh – “The Legend of Old Gregg”

Very few comedy shows hooked me as hard as The Mighty Boosh did when I first watched it—it was unlike anything I had ever seen before, a show with a mastery of quirky, fast-paced dialogue and utterly ridiculous stories, coupled with catchy original music. It was among a wave of cult-forming British comedies that all debuted in the mid-two-thousands—Peep Show, The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, just to name a few—but what made it stand out was also probably what made me love it: the cartoonish world it presented, with outlandish fantasy plots and characters. As we are told in the theme song, we are being taken on a journey through time and space, and almost every one of its twenty episodes features one of its central cast (Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt, and Rich Fulcher) playing an over-the-top costumed character, which was more often than not some kind of goofy monster—sometimes, the show almost feels like a art school comedy take on Doctor Who.

No episode demonstrates The Mighty Boosh‘s capacity for monster-based merriment better than what may be its most well-known one, series 2’s “The Legend of Old Gregg.” For whatever reason, this one blew up, and managed to even reach outside the regular BBC Three audience—I distinctly remember seeing clips from it passed around by people who never mentioned watching the show before. Although it isn’t my favourite episode of the series, it does have a lot of the elements that made it so unique, including another amazing song and a memorable performance from Noel Fielding as the titular character.

Hardware (1990)

The late eighties and eary nineties were certainly an age full of grimy, rusted, industrial hellscapes—even after the Cold War ended, there was a certain punk ideology that revelled in its own cynicism and loved to create images of modern civilization collapsed under its own moral decay, cites transformed into mountains of dilapidated junk. Hardware came from the beginning of the decade, and embodies many of the aesthetics that would show up in big studio films after it (everything from Tank Girl to Waterworld to Super Mario Bros.), presenting a grungy, blasted world full of horrible people and no escape. Amusingly for a movie about a killer robot, it gives off some serious heavy metal/industrial music vibes that run pretty deep— it has Ministry on its soundtrack while also resembling a Ministry music video (it also has cameo appearances by Lemmy from Motorhead, GWAR, and Iggy Pop as a sarcastic radio DJ.) This is the debut feature of Richard Stanley, whose success would later lead to the ordeal that was 1996’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, where he was hired and then fired, but secretly stayed on the set of the movie (there’s a whole documentary about it), and his style really puts the nineties music video feel on full blast, with everything that may imply.

The Abominable Snowman (1957)

A lot of very important monster history is to be found in 1957’s The Abominable Snowman (which sometimes has Of the Himalayas in the title): it’s one of the notable Hammer Films thrillers released before they went all-in on lurid Gothic horror in the late fifties, and it’s also another Hammer production co-written by legendary British television writer Nigel Kneale, based on his own earlier BBC drama, after the studio found success adapting Kneale’s Quatermass stories. Kneale produced some incredibly influential pieces of television and film science fiction and horror from the fifties to the seventies, stories with sober intelligence and fascinating existential themes about humanity and its place in the universe. Abominable Snowman is another example of that, taking the search for the elusive Himalayan hominid (which was in the public consciousness again in the fifties after the Everest climbs of Eric Shipton and Sir Edmund Hillary and the accompanying footprint photographs) and using it as a vehicle to examine the nature of our own species. This is a deliberate and atmospheric movie, one that actually takes the implication of the subject matter seriously.

Monster Multimedia: Hook Jaw

Someone could argue that Jaws shouldn’t be considered a monster movie because a slightly larger than average great white shark is not a real monster—I think the structure and tone of it is more important in classifying it as a monster movie than how fantastical the creature is, but whatever. In any case, Jaws has had a major influence on how monster stories are told, probably because the supposed plausibility of the “monster” (abetted by mainstream ignorance of nature) and the contemporary setting and characters made it a more gripping type of thriller for people at the time, especially compared to the increasingly stodgy Gothic and atomic horrors of the previous decades. After all, lots of people spend time on the ocean, and we know there are sharks there. Sharks are real, but to many people who don’t know anything about them, they pretty much are monsters. This led to a whole decade of animal attack stories that were more often than not complete rip-offs of Jaws in every single way, and that includes plenty that were also about sharks.

Among those was the infamous UK comic strip Hook Jaw, which ran in 1976 in the magazine Action. Action was a comic that attempted to push the format of boys adventure comics in an intentionally abrasive and brutal direction, and was so shockingly violent for its time that it was denounced by tabloids, truncating its run as newsstands refused to sell it. This eventually led to the main architects of Action, including editor Pat Mills and writer John Wagner, to take the anarchic and subversive philosophy that was buried underneath the gore and turn it into 2000 AD, an institution in British comics for over forty years. Before that, though, we got Hook Jaw, a killer shark tale that I think people would have less of a problem calling a full-on monster story, because the titular killer shark behaves in a way so far removed from real sharks that it might as well be a made-up animal. It’s definitely capitalizing on Jaws, but Hook Jaw feels less inspired by the movie and more by its iconic poster.