This week, I continue to write about new millennium additions to the creature canon with a CGI-heavy family film featuring friendly lake monsters and wartime drama.
Read about it on REVIEW ALL MONSTERS!
But you’re also going to be getting some bonus posts this month, starting with a little early fifties cheapie that marked the beginning of the late Roger Corman’s movie producing career.
This month, I’ll be covering another batch of sequels to movies I’ve written about previously, beginning with the further misadventures of the world’s most famous fish-man. I can promise you a disastrous trip to Florida and one of the first on-screen appearances of a very famous actor in this one.
Two new movie posts: up first, common garden pests with teeth ruin Halloween in Slugs.
Read about it on REVIEW ALL MONSTERS!
Second: CGI worm beasts with teeth ruin a boat party in Stephen Sommers’ Deep Rising.
This week has another Lovecraft adaptation, this one brought to us by Stuart Gordon and the Gang. Fish people fun in Spain! Old laptops and cellphones! Ancestry.com-style surprises!
Yes, I’ve written about a lake monster episode of In Search Of… before—but this isn’t just a lake monster, this is the lake monster. I can’t say for sure if I spent more of my youth learning everything there was to learn about the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, but it have to be close—these are the Big Two of the Cryptozoology field, after all (although technically the Yeti should be there, but I don’t make the rules, or name the giant-sized pizzas.) There were many, many books in the school library and just as many TV “documentaries” filling my head with variations on the exact same stories, the exact same “evidence” presented by the exact same people…it never once occurred to me that no matter when these things were made, the people searching that one big lake in Scotland never seemed to get any closer to finding the monster, but were more than happy to trot out the same collection of photographs and say that there must be something down there. Maybe, even in grade school, I had accepted that material progress on the Nessie front was never the point—it as about the mystery, the constant feeling of Loch Ness watchers that they were on the cusp of a breakthrough, the very idea that there was something big and amazing just outside our purview.
These days, I’ve read quite a few more skeptical and sociological books about the Loch Ness Monster phenomenon, which present the entire history of the idea (which is not as old as some have claimed, and not as consistent in what it’s describing) in ways that portray it more as a tale of interlocking fakers and sincere believers constantly interchanging iffy info, with periods of high activity aiming to give the monster a sheen of scientific credibility that ultimately goes nowhere. To call the whole thing a century-long hoax simplifies it too much—there’s so much nuance to it, historical context and folkloric connections and so many wacky characters involved (even occult superstar/orgy master Aleister Crowley is part of it), it’s genuinely fascinating stuff. These old documentaries barely even scratch the surface of the Loch Ness Monster story, and I feel that’s because they were so confident that we’d be seeing Nessie up close and personal very soon (they even gave it a scientifice name!) that they never thought to really examine everything leading up to it.
The career of director Joe Dante represents the ascent of the Monster Kid from fan to filmmaker—people who grew up during the creature feature boom of the fifties and sixties were suddenly given reign of the genre, which they knew inside and out. Having that kind of understanding of the formulas made it all the more easy to subvert and reinvent them, making a smarter and more self-aware range of monster movies in the late seventies and eighties, which Dante heavily contributed to with The Howling and Gremlins. Before those, though, he worked his way up in the B-movie system, cutting trailers for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures (and co-directing a movie made mostly of stock footage) before being assigned to direct Piranha, New World’s blatant attempt to cash in on Jaws‘ success. Following the general Corman ethos, however, meant that as long as you check off all the exploitation movie requirements—low budget, surface similarity to something popular, blood, and female nudity—you are free to do whatever you want (although that didn’t go quite so well for the director of Piranha II, some guy named James Cameron.) So, Dante got together with writer John Sayles to build a Jaws knock-off full of comedic touches and creature feature homages, something that wasn’t just another killer fish movie. As the story goes, Universal was fully prepared to sue this movie out of existence before it reached theatres…until it received the full approval of Steven Spielberg, who considered it by far the best imitation of his movie.
So, how exactly did we get a found footage monster movie from the director of Rain Man? According to the backstory, Barry Levinson was tasked with directing a documentary about the ecological problems of Chesapeake Bay, but not unlike the creatures at the heart of The Bay, the project mutated into something else entirely. It was 2012, right in the middle of the much-groused-about-at-the-time trend of found footage horror movies mostly instigated by Paranormal Activity (the producer of those movies, Jason Blum, is also a producer on this one), as well as what still felt like the early days of the mass adoption of camera-equipped smartphones—a perfect confluence of trends that inspired the idea of watching a disaster unfold from personal and media video footage, a collage of reactions and non-reactions from normal citizens, experts, and people in places of authority. The verisimilitude offered by this style of film might even bolster the real environmental issues that inspired the far more gory events in the movie! One could hope!
Of course, the other obvious inspiration for this movie comes from a place I’m sure we’ve all been to: finding out some random (maybe true?) fact on the Internet, especially about weird nature stuff. I imagine that most people only recently learned about Cymothoa Exigua, also known as the tongue-eating louse, probably from some listicle containing the same few photos of that oceanic isopod and its peculiar form of parasitism, where it sucks the blood from the tongues of fish until they shrivel up and fall off, and then replaces the tongue in the fish’s mouth. It’s hard to blame some writer for seeing those images and thinking “now, there’s a movie!”
Three years ago this month, we had an environmentally-themed slate of monster posts. Since it doesn’t seem like we’ve figured out all of our ecological problems in that time (not for lack of trying, I assume!), I think it’s time to pull up another bunch for what you can call Eco-Horror II: The Revenge.
There were of course, a number of movies coincidentally similar to Jaws in the mid-to-late seventies, many of them produced by prolific Italian film companies/exploitation houses—the animal attack movie business was bustling. Not one to avoid capitalizing on a trend, producer Dino De Laurentiis joined in on the good times in the year following the box office success of his King Kong remake (ol’ Dino D went really hard into creature features in 1977, with previous series subject The White Buffalo releasing two months before the one I’m writing about here), and along with screenwriters Luciano Vincenzoni and Segio Donati (both who contributed to the scripts of classic spaghetti westerns like For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,, among many others) and director Michael Anderson (previously of Logan’s Run) gave us the next logical step after a movie about a shark: a movie about an orca. But unlike certain later orca movies (that had cartoons spin-offs where the whale fights an evil cyborg), Orca—sometimes subtitled The Killer Whale for all the dummies who don’t know what an orca is—is not some family-friendly story about human and animals learning to respect each other, but a violent revenge thriller. The gimmick here is that the one seeking revenge is the whale—so this is less Jaws with a whale than it is Death Wish with a whale (and who was the producer on Death Wish? Why, Dino De Lautentiis!) In a sea of killer marine life movies, that immediately makes this one stand out.
I’ve already seen a few monster movies based around the eternal, extremely generalized struggle of good vs. evil—see The Creeping Flesh—and also a few that do the same thing while also contrasting Christianity with pre-Christian beliefs—see Viy—so I was prepared for what Blood Tide had on offer. There is obviously something very Wicker Man about the set-up here: outsiders intruding into an isolated place where the old beliefs still hold sway, maybe inviting a terror upon themselves with their unwariness, maybe being pulled in by destiny—certainly they both have a village full of people who are maybe outside the mainstream and are thus entirely suspicious. Substitute the British Isles with the Greek Isles and have the human sacrifice come with a monster, and you’ve got a pretty good idea. Those themes and the choice of location provides an atmosphere for this movie, one that helps it straddle the line between early eighties horror schlock and maybe a more serious kind of horror schlock.
Continuing on a minor “modern monster movie” kick, here’s a movie that’s maybe not trying to be funny like Psycho Goreman, but also has a practical effects creature at its core. Sweetheart is one of those recent co-productions between Blumhouse, the house that Paranormal Activity built, and Universal, which in some ways means that this is a modern Universal Monster movie—and proper horror, too, and not some bloated spectacle like that Dark Universe nonsense. It’s an efficiently-made thriller with a fairly simple concept—a lone person marooned on an island with a monster—and is at its best when director J.D. Dillard (whose only other directorial effort is Sleight from 2016) lets the idea, the actor(s), and the atmosphere speak for themselves. With a very lean cast, this is one of those movies where there is very little to no dialogue for the first forty minutes (of eighty-two), which I feel like is so praised by online film critics whenever it happens that the whole thing has really lost any outré cache, but at least it’s appropriately used here and lends a feeling of simmering loneliness to those scenes. This is a story about rolling with the punches whether you want to or not, and it just so happens that many of those punches are being thrown by a seven-foot-tall shark-man.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 