Archive for the ‘Monster’ Category
Thursday, September 17th, 2026
HOPE is the new movie from the great South Korean director Na Hong-jin, his first since the horror movie THE WAILING nine years ago. Before that he did two really excellent, bleak crime movies, THE CHASER (2008) and THE YELLOW SEA (2010). This shows some of the detail, personality and mastery of those films, but it’s Na’s version of going into blockbuster mode – a big, action-packed monster movie. And though it shares some of the matter-of-fact horrors of his previous movies (it’s not the anti-septic death and destruction we’re used to from PG-13 Hollywood), it’s pleasant by comparison, because it’s very funny, and even a little warm at times. (Other times it’s mean as hell.)
Oddly, a movie it kept reminding me of was TREMORS, because it’s about the quirky residents of this small, rural area called Hope Harbor gathering their resources to deal with some crazy shit involving a monster. The lead is the police chief, Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min, THE WAILING), who in the opening scene pulls up to the spot where some guys found a dead cow with giant claw marks on her. His second cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung, HUMINT) has gathered some of the boys and their hunting rifles – there’s a great running joke that Bum-seok keeps being surprised by how many illegal guns everybody has – and they tell him about sightings of a tiger in the area. He’s incredulous until they insist and tell him detailed stories about it, but later we find out they were just fucking with him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alicia Vikander, Cameron Britton, Eum Moon-suk, Hoyeon, Hwang Jung-min, Im Hyun-sik, Lee Sang-hee, Michael Fassbender, Na Hong-jin, Taylor Russell, Zo In-sung
Posted in Reviews, Action, Monster, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 5 Comments »
Friday, September 11th, 2026
August 23, 1996
I don’t remember knowing anybody else like this, but I loved THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU at the time. It was a big summer movie, hugely expensive by New Line Cinema standards, but it was sci-fi horror, and rampant with outstanding Stan Winston makeup effects. It had more of Fairuza Balk fresh off of THE CRAFT, but this time she grows cat fangs. I knew that Ron Perlman (CRONOS, THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN) was under the makeup of the goat man called “The Sayer of the Law,” and Mark Dacascos (CRYING FREEMAN) was the leopard man Lo-Mai, but I didn’t know who Temuera Morrison (BARB WIRE) was yet so I didn’t know it was motherfuckin Jango Fett as the dogman Azazello. A great character I’ll come back to in a bit.
The crucial thing about the movie is that it was defiantly, extravagantly weird. Watching it now I realize how much of it tonally and texturally reminds me of NIGHTBREED, but since it starred two big time movie stars it wasn’t marketed as weirdo shit. It was marketed toward a mainstream crowd, and they didn’t like it. Nor did any of the other crowds. But sometimes you gotta stay away from crowds.
There are many possible criticisms of the movie, a few I might even agree with, but the popular one that to this day infuriates me is the claim that Marlon Brando is bad in it as Dr. Moreau. Unsurprisingly he won the Razzie and Stinkers Bad Movie Awards for Worst Supporting Actor, so for the record that’s the company you keep if you hate this performance. The way they talked about it at the time it seemed like it wasn’t a performance, it was documentary footage of Marlon Brando misbehaving. Why is he on set wearing white makeup and a weird hat, riding a popemobile, making weird speeches, playing a piano duet with a little mutant pal? How unprofessional! He was supposed to be the normal version of this character. Why did he do it unlike anything we’ve ever seen? Why must he be so captivating and bizarre and hilarious? What an embarrassing bungle, that they accidentally did this. I want to talk to the manager. I’m calling the cops. I’m going to sue.
Gary Thompson in Philadelphia Daily News: “with comical dialogue that can only have been meant to elicit laughter.” Oh, you think so? You think so? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Thewlis, Fairuza Balk, H.G. Wells, John Frankenheimer, Marco Hofschneider, Mark Dacascos, Marlon Brando, Richard Stanley, Ron Perlman, Stan Winston, Temuera Morrison, Val Kilmer
Posted in Reviews, Monster, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 28 Comments »
Monday, November 17th, 2025
I don’t say this lightly, but I think Guillermo del Toro’s FRANKENSTEIN might be up there pretty high among the top Frankensteins? Or at least it hits hard for me. It’s one of the more faithful adaptations of Mary Shelley’s 207-year-old novel Frankenstein: But If You Think About It It’s Almost Like a Modern Prometheus, but it’s reinterpreted enough to feel like pure, personal del Toro.
He uses the wraparound story of a Royal Danish Navy expedition to the North Pole that’s now stuck in the ice. The crew sees an explosion nearby and discovers injured Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac, THE CARD COUNTER). Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen, of the Copenhagen Mikkelsens) takes him on board to shelter him from The Creature (Jacob Elordi, THE MORTUARY COLLECTION), and this strange guest decides to be dramatic and tell his whole damn story from childhood to that very day. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Charles Dance, Christoph Waltz, David Bradley, Felix Kammerer, Guillermo Del Toro, Jacob Elordi, Lars Mikkelsen, Mia Goth, Oscar Isaac
Posted in Reviews, Horror, Monster, Romance | 21 Comments »
Thursday, November 13th, 2025
At some point on this here internet I started seeing people refer to the alien species from the PREDATOR movies as “Yautja.” I sure never noticed anybody calling them that in the movies. Looking it up now I have learned it comes from a 1994 book called Aliens Vs Predator: Prey by Steve Perry and Stephani Perry*, which is a novelization of the original Aliens Vs Predator comics. Okay, so it seems the word has been around for a while, but still – Yautja mind if you think I’m gonna call those things anything other than Predators. That has always been my stance.
So I laughed when the very first thing on screen in the new movie PREDATOR: BADLANDS was the word “Yautja.” They use the word dozens of times, conservatively. So it’s official now – they’re Yautja, from the planet Yautja Prime. But in this review they’re Predators. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Benjamin Wallfisch, Cameron Brown, Dan Trachtenberg, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, Elle Fanning, Jacob Tomuri, Mike Homik, Patrick Aison, Reuben De Jong, Sarah Schachner, Vincent Bouillon
Posted in Reviews, Action, Monster, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 22 Comments »
Wednesday, November 12th, 2025
BASKET CASE 3 (advertised with the subtitle THE PROGENY, but that’s not on the actual credits) came a year after part 2 and continues in a similar vein. Once again, they knew exactly which “previously on” footage would make an incredible opening (Belial doggystyling Eve).
We’re still at Grannie Ruth’s place. She re-separated the twins after Duane’s little self-surgery, and luckily she has a padded cell and straitjacket for him. (Where does she get the money for this stuff? Is she eligible for grants?) Duane has been spaced out for months, giving Grannie an excuse to straight up tell him/us what’s going on now: Belial has gotten Eve pregnant, and “no one’s exactly sure what will come out of her,” so they’re all getting on a school bus for a road trip to Georgia, because some guy named Uncle Hal (Dan Biggers, MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL) is “the only doctor I’d trust with a delicate case like this.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Annie Ross, Frank Henenlotter, Gabe Bartalos, Jim O'Doherty, Kevin VanHentenryck
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Monster | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 11th, 2025
You know from the jump that BASKET CASE 2 (1990) is gonna have a little more money behind it than the first one, because it has both Troma and Shapiro Glickenhaus credits. That’s power right there. For those just joining it starts with footage from the end of part 1, with poor Duane and his murderous, surgically separated lump brother Belial hanging off a hotel sign, falling and splattering in front of screaming New Yorkers. We also get a news report from Times Square, describing Belial as “a small, grotesque monstrosity” and a “small, twisted deformity whose most startling feature is an unnervingly human face” and a “strange little being” that “might actually be human.”
An old lady, Grannie Ruth (Annie Ross, PUMP UP THE VOLUME), and her adult granddaughter Susan (Heather Rattray, “White House Press Conference Reporter [uncredited],” DEEP IMPACT) flip through the channels watching all the coverage, and seem to know who the Bradleys are, and they head to the hospital to free them. By that time though the boys have already escaped on their own and added to their crime spree. (Henenlotter pulls a HALLOWEEN II by having hospital staff hitting on each other before becoming victims.)
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Annie Ross, Frank Henenlotter, Gabe Bartalos, Heather Rattray, Jason Evers, Joe Renzetti, Kathryn Meisle, Kevin VanHentenryck
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Monster | 8 Comments »
Monday, November 10th, 2025
BASKET CASE (1982) is one of those cult movies everybody knew about in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It stayed alive by having a couple sequels and being in video stores or being mentioned often in Fangoria. Now it’s on 4K disc and on Shudder with credits saying it was restored by the Museum of Modern Art. But it was genuinely a creature of the grindhouses, a $35,000 exploitation movie conceived in Times Square by twentysomething New Yorker Frank Henenlotter, written on napkins at Nathan’s Famous, and shot in 16mm, partly in front of XXX theaters on 42nd Street. The producer was a hospital administrator whose only other films are Henenlotter’s and two yoga videos.
It opens with a mysterious murder at a house out in Glen Falls, before cutting to Times Square and a strange young man named Duane Bradley (Kevin VanHentenryck), who carries a large wicker basket. He checks into a shitty hotel, the kind where the v-neck undershirt-wearing clerk asks, “Couple of hours, couple of years, what? Give me a hint.” It’s twenty dollars a night up front and the lobby is crowded with residents gossiping about the death of somebody named “Dirty Lou.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 42nd Street, conjoined twins, Frank Henenlotter, Kevin VanHentenryck, New York City
Posted in Reviews, Horror, Monster | 5 Comments »
Friday, October 31st, 2025
There was a time when I was 14 years old and Clive Barker’s NIGHTBREED was my favorite movie. Maybe that was too soon to move on from BATMAN, or maybe they were both my favorite movie. They blew my brain open in a similar way, and come to think of it they have more in common than just baroque, enthralling music by Danny Elfman (his ninth and tenth film scores). Both are ambitious early films from idiosyncratic directors who are also visual artists, who are breaking into a larger budget range than their previous work but getting even wilder than before. Both are arguably a little stiff with the traditional action expected of a blockbuster, but it doesn’t even register much because they’re so overflowing with visual imagination and invention that they create their own, very specific worlds. And though both were intended as mainstream event movies, at their heart they’re by, for, and about misfits and weirdos.
NIGHTBREED, unfortunately, was treated like a misfit and weirdo itself. It was produced by Morgan Creek (YOUNG GUNS, ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES) and distributed by 20th Century Fox (whose other releases that year included DIE HARD 2, PREDATOR 2 and HOME ALONE), but they didn’t know what to do with it. Barker was forced to make compromises that were drastic, though not catastrophic in my opinion (or I would never have loved it so much). Other than changing from the book’s title Cabal (I agree with that), they really didn’t know how to market it to the normies, though they did okay with nerds. I still cling dearly to autographed comic books and a “Nightbreed Chronicles” paperback with portraits and bios of the movie’s Star-Wars-esque collection of background creatures. Though a triumph in the minds of myself and my best friend at the time, it was a financial flop and novelist turned director Barker never even wrote the next book in the proposed trilogy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anne Bobby, Clive Barker, Craig Sheffer, Danny Elfman, David Cronenberg, Doug Bradley, Hugh Quarshie, John Agar, Oliver Parker
Posted in Reviews, Fantasy/Swords, Horror, Monster | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, September 9th, 2025
Man, a Hollywood remake of THE TOXIC AVENGER has almost happened a million times since, what, the ‘90s? I always thought something like that would be funny or interesting or maybe even good. For a while they said it was gonna be for kids, a live action version of the cartoon Toxic Crusaders. Fifteen years ago it was gonna be from the director of HOT TUB TIME MACHINE with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the villain (but he did TERMINATOR GENISYS instead? I love you Arnold but you gotta get your priorities straight). Later it was gonna be the director of SAUSAGE PARTY, a movie I did not finish but I wondered if an animator would want to give us a goopy partly animated Toxie I thought that could be cool. But it became more promising when Macon Blair, the star of Jeremy Saulnier’s MURDER PARTY and BLUE RUIN, and director of I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE, signed on to write and direct. That was in 2019, so that’s how many years I’ve been waiting just for this version. One of my friends saw it at Fantastic Fest two years ago and raved about it, but it went without a distributor until finally the TERRIFIER people Cineverse picked it up. These things take time I guess.
It’s hard to live up to all that, but I still had a great time with Blair’s transmutation of my questionable childhood favorite. It has some of the spirit of what we love about the original, blended with a concoction of entirely new active ingredients. It’s not the same story or even the same character, Melvin Ferd. Instead Peter Dinklage (THE THICKET) plays Winston Gooze, who is also a janitor (this time at a sinister pharmaceutical company called Bi-Toxiphetamine Hydroxylate) but he’s a grown man whose wife died of cancer and now he struggles to make a connection with his teenage stepson Wade (Jacob Tremblay, THE PREDATOR). If I had been guessing what the TOXIC AVENGER remake would be about the entire time they were developing it I would’ve needed at least a couple more months to come up with that one. That may be the single most surprising change from the original: this one is sincere about some things. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Yow, Elijah Wood, Jacob Tremblay, Julia Davis, Julian Kostov, Kevin Bacon, Macon Blair, Margo Cargill, Peter Dinklage, Spencer Wilding, Taylour Paige, Troma
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Monster | 15 Comments »
Tuesday, March 11th, 2025
SON OF GODZILLA (1967) is Godzilla picture #8, coming one year and one day after EBIRAH, HORROR OF THE DEEP and from the same director, Jun Fukuda and same writer Shinichi Sekizawa, this time with co-writer Kazue Shiba, whose only other credit is a war movie called ZERO FIGHTERS. Masaru Sato also returns as composer, with some goofily upbeat themes to represent the title character.
When I reviewed EBIRAH I learned that it was set on an island so they could build fewer models and save money. This one continues that trend but seems even more economical, without any city scenes at all. The only man-made structures are a science lab built on remote Sollgel Island. Sometimes they’d cut to a shot of a tower and I’d think I was watching Thunderbirds. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Akira Kubo, Bibari Maeda, Godzilla, Jun Fukuda, kaiju, Shinichi Sekizawa
Posted in Reviews, Monster | 12 Comments »
