DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968) Director: Ishiro Honda Genre: Kaiju eiga
THE MOVIE
Destroy All Monsters was the beginning of the end for the Showa Godzilla movies. By this point, Godzilla had completed his transformation from nuclear hellbeast to muppet and Destroy All Monsters was the last decent Godzilla movie of the 1960's. Curiously, two of his previous movies, Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster and Invasion of the Astro Monster, served as dry runs for Destroy All Monsters offering up confrontations not only with King Ghidorah but aliens as well. These movies took the first steps toward the more overtly science fiction and juvenile direction that the series would take.
In some ways, though, Destroy All Monsters is the ultimate Showa Godzilla movie. It is wild, colorful and features an impressive collection of Toho monsters, not rivaled until 2004's Godzilla Final Wars, which is essentially a remake of this movie, with alien controlled monsters attacking the world's cities. Whatever happened to monsters destroying the world's cities just for the hell of it?
This movie also introduced the idea of "Monster Island," where all of the kaiju are rounded up and live together. The movie is perhaps most famous for its iconic battle in front of Mount Fuji.
Where Brooklyn at?
THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS
This movie introduces us to the hated "cookie monster" Godzilla with his big goofy eyes, froggy face. This suit would be heavily used most of the series in the late '60's and early '70's to the point where it was literally falling apart on camera.
Also, Godzilla completes his transformation into a misunderstood Muppet doofus in this movie. There is actually a scene where Godzilla get into a "conversation" on Monster Island, kindly translated by Mothra about why he's so mad all the time. Ugh.
Also present is the horrible spawn of Godzilla, Minilla, first introduced in 1967's Son of Godzilla. In Star Wars terminology, Minilla manages to combine everything annoying about both Ewoks and Jar Jar Binks into one character.
MONSTERS FEATURED
Oh boy. Quite a diverse group from Toho's stable, some of whom had not appeared on film for quite some time, and some who had never appeared in a Godzilla movie.
Godzilla Minilla Anguirus Ghidorah Mothra Rodan Varan - Previously seen in Varan: The Unbelievable. Gorosaurus - featured in King Kong Escapes Kumonga - a giant spider introduced in the previous movie. Manda - a Chinese-style dragon/serpent introduced in Toho's 1960 movie Atragan. Baragon - a quadrapedal dinosaur introduced in the 1965 movie, Frankenstein Conquers The World.
The original Monsta Island Czars.
SEQUELS
Followed by:
All Monsters Attack (1969) an insanely trippy movie about a lonely latchkey kid who dreams of becoming Minilla's friend on Monster Island. He finds himself magically transported to the island where he and Minilla learn to defend themselves from bullies. And there's some bankrobbers. Or something. Also known as Godzilla's Revenge.
Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971) Godzilla fights Hedorah, a pollution monster against a swingin' 1960's backdrop. Best appreciated while high.
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953) Directed by Byron Haskin Genre: Sci-Fi
THE MOVIE
Loosely based on the groundbreaking novel by H.G. Welles, The War of the Worlds is the archetypical global alien invasion movie and inspired legions of clones, everything from Independence Day, Mars Attacks, and of course the 2005 Welles adaptation, the Spielberg-directed, War of the Worlds. The 1953 version was critically-acclaimed and even won an Academy Award for its visual effects. It was a movie that I saw at a young age, during those pre-VCR and cable years when I would watch old sci-fi movies on TV for a lack other exciting options.
The War of the Worlds takes the basic premise of the novel—an alien invasion of England by a faltering Martian civilization—and updates the Victorian-era story to 1950’s California. Welles’ novel was published in 1898, over a decade before the idea of a truly continental war would become a reality in Europe, and three decades before a near-global war would break out. The American filmmakers were only a few years removed from the Second World War, and they re-imagined the story as an epic planetary conflict during the Atomic Age with invaders landing all over the world. Like many of the sci-fi/disaster movies of the 1950’s, we are given a top-down view of the conflict. The convention of those kinds of movies was to put us with the elite: top scientists, generals, Presidents even. Our proxy in The War of the Worlds is a famous scientist, Dr. Forrester, and we spend lots of time in bunkers listening to high-ranking military officials as they discuss plans and tactics. Compare this to a movie like M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 invasion movie, Signs, which focuses on an invasion from the point of view of one rural family.
The Martian invaders are seemingly indestructible in their sleek warships. Not even the mighty atomic bomb is able to defeat them. Ultimately, they make one fatal (and pretty stupid) error: the Martians are not immune to our germs and all die of earth illnesses. This rather hare-brained conclusion is a holdover from the 19th Century, when germ theory was in its infancy. Even in the 1950’s the idea of an invading advanced civilization not preparing for the possibility of earth disease was ridiculous.
MONSTERS PRESENT
Martians
MONSTER/EFFECTS
The actual Martians are seen only briefly in this movie, a fact that made little sense to me as a child. You only get a good look at one in the scene in the farmhouse and then a another look at an alien arm at the end of the movie. Their “Simon”-like faces are composed of red, blue, and green lenses and their bodies are squat with long arms, not unlike ET. Their fingers end in suckers.
Their warships are featured more prominently in the movie, and are actually pretty cool-looking and seemingly influenced the design of the Enterprise from Star Trek, The Next Generation, with its sleek organic lines and ocular deflector dish. The Martian ships feature a long serpentine neck which ends in a deadly, death-ray shooting head, like some kind of deadly street lamp. They were a conscious departure from the flying saucers of the day. They were also a departure from the tripods that were described in the book. The movie does point out that the craft are actually using invisible energy “legs” to stay aloft and to move. Supposedly there is a point in the movie during which these legs are visible. So, technically they are tripods. Technically.
SEQUELS
No direct theatrical sequels, however there was a syndicated War of the Worlds TV series in the ‘80’s that served as a de facto sequel to this movie.
MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE
I’m a fan of the big “Oh shit” moment that occurs after the Army attempts to nuke the Martian ships, only to see them float out of the debris cloud completely unscathed.
DVD AVAILABILITY
Widely available on DVD with some good extras, such as a featurette on the life and work of H. G. Welles. Not available on Bluray as of this writing.
As I’ve stated before, I love a good time travel movie.Unfortunately, A Sound of Thunder is not that movie.It is based on the classic Ray Bradbury piece of the same name which is a milestone in time travel fiction and is famous for its idea that if you kill a butterfly in the Cretaceous the world will be totally different when you get back because of an exponential chain of cause and effect events.It was even parodied in a "Treehouse of Horror" episode of the The Simpsons.
What's that? Ripples in space/time? Let's shoot them!
I haven’t read the story myself but I can only assume that the movie is heavily dumbed down from its source material because A Sound of Thunder is a silly bimbo of a movie, filled with laughable science and some awful special effects.Edward Burns plays Travis Ryer, a Chicago scientist in the near future.Now I would buy Burns as a cop, a firefighter, even a guy who sells hotdogs at Yankee Stadium but not a biophysicist.Oh well, if Bruce Willis and J-Lo can play psychiatrists, I guess anything goes.Ben Kingsley is also on board a scheming executive showing that doing just one bad science fiction movie is not enough for him.
Ryer works for Time Safari a company that offers carefully controlled hunting safaris in the past (apparently only to the exact same point in the past).Rich douchebags are whisked away to take some potshots at a plastic-looking Allosaurus before it gets trapped in a swamp.The idea being that because the creature was about to die anyway there would be no changes made to the timeline.Of course, if you carry the movie's premise to its logical extent, any disruption to the past would result in a different future, even a microscopic one.
When someone accidentally steps on a butterfly we begin to see successive changes in the present, “Like ripples in a pond,” one of the movie’s scientists explains.Later ripples introduce us to weird creatures like a giant bat and the movie’s star monsters…the baboonasaurus.
THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS
He's too ridiculous to even have his own movie on the SyFy Channel.
Most of the effects are pretty bad, such as the very CGI looking Allosaurus and lots of bad composite shots throughout.The baboonasaurs are done well and are strangely compelling if only because they are so absurd.Maybe its just crazy enough looking to be a plausible animal.
SEQUELS
This movie was a huge flop and no sequels are planned.
MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE
Did I mention that this movie features a Baboonasaur?
DVD AVAILABILITY
Widely available.
SEE ALSO
The Relic also features some Chitown monster action by the same director.
Evolution also has as its theme evolution gone awry resulting in improbable creatures.
The words "An original SyFy movie" don't exactly fill me with confidence. The Science Fiction cable channel has had a hard time coming up with quality shows apart from its two shows based on Battlestar Galactica but has recently discovered a way to turn its crappy programming to its advantage: embrace and own the awful movies that they know that they are going to make. SyFy has had particular success in making audaciously ridiculous monster movies and they have seemingly discovered the secret Zen formula for creature films: A shark cannot jump itself.
Perhaps taking note of the attention given to movies like Snakes on a Plane and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, SyFy has decided to highlight their cheesy, Canadian-accented, Crocsploitation cheapos. Last night was the premiere of their new Roger Corman-directed, Dinoshark, which followed reruns of the aptly-titled Dinocroc and Spring Break Shark Attack. There's something refreshingly unpretentious about movies that tell you exactly what you are going to get in the title, particularly if they use the word "versus." Personally, I think every movie should have a "versus." Let's not pretend Jurassic Parkis a meditation on science gone awry, it's Dinos vs. Humans. By fully embracing their ridiculousness, these new SyFy movies are a pleasant throwback to the loopy old monster movies of yore, like the 60's and 70's Godzilla movies.
The titular creature fromDinoshark has the head of a T-Rex on the body of a shark. I really don't need to know anything more than that. You had me at Dinoshark. Not to be outdone, Corman has another SyFy movie coming out later this year, Sharktopus. I don't need to know how a shark and an octopus got it on. That's between that shark, that octopus and the ocean. I just want to see it.
What else does the future have in store? Bearasaurus? Giant Tarantula Shark? Squidcroc? Maybe a giant rampaging elephant that has a cobra for a trunk. Cobraphant anyone?
SPECIES II (1998)
Director: Peter Medak
Genre: Sci-Fi/Erotic Thriller/Body Horror
A BRIEF NOTE In Monster Movie of the Week, I have tried to profile movies that prominently feature a monster, creature, or monstrous robot that is significantly different from a human being. So vampires, zombies, and old school werewolves sort of fall outside the kinds of movies I like to look at. My other criteria is that the movie somehow have some sort of significance in history of monster movies, perhaps in terms of special effects, story-telling, being the work of a significant director, being an important example of a larger trend, etc. Now, that does not necessarily mean that bad movies are automatically excluded. As you can see from looking at my past entries, we’ve looked at some real stinkers (Anaconda, The Relic, and D-Wars come to mind) and for every Gojira and King Kong there are a Godzilla (1998) and King Kong (1976). As a fan of monster movies, I have built up a pretty high resistance to cinematic crappiness and can find genuine enjoyment in even a really bad movie. This week’s entry however, is significant for really only two reasons. First and most tenuously, it is the sequel to a mediocre hit movie that featured a memorable creature. Secondly, it is probably the second worst high-profile movie of the 1990’s behind Showgirls.
This is a totally legit scientific experiment.
THE MOVIE Whereas Species was an okay-to-bad creature flick, Species 2 is a searing hot mess of a movie. It is a poorly-written, badly-acted, offensive train wreck of a sequel. Let’s take a look at it!
You’ll remember that in the first Species, a cosmic signal was received via radio telescope instructing scientists how to build an alien hybrid and they do it FOR SOME REASON. The monster escapes and she tries to mate with numerous LA douches. She gets killed and a rat eats a piece of her and begins mutating. End of movie.
Species 2 begins two years later with a mission to Mars (!?), which is never a good sign. There are three astronauts and there is an abbreviated landing on the Red Planet in which they take some pictures and collect some core samples and take off. Billions of dollars well spent. On the ship the core samples begin melting and a weird oily slime (perhaps modeled after the films producers?) attacks the crew, which they later forget. See, in Screenplayland, even though the aliens have been established as coming from light years away, they can still ALSO come from Mars. Cause, you know, it's all space.
Meanwhile, government scientists have made another version of the Sil hybrid from the first movie (WTF!) this time her name is Eve and Marge Helgenberger’s character returns as the scientist in charge of studying her. Helgenberger is one of the many actors in this movie that seems to be in it for the check and she in particular gives an outstandingly bad performance. Helgenberger alternates between giving Eve compassionate motherly looks and putting Eve through scantily-clad, Nazi-like experiments.
The leader of the Mars expedition, Patrick Ross, returns to Earth to great fanfare. His father is a U.S. Senator who is grooming him to run for office. The father is played by James Cromwell, who paid off his house with his earnings from this movie. Patrick begins experiencing strange sexual compulsions and, in a Cinemax-y sex scene gone horrible, he impregnates two women (horny sisters, naturally), whose abdomens erupt with bloody alien children.
The government enlists Press Lennox (a returning Tom Sizemore, who spent his earnings on liquor and prostitutes) to track down this new alien menace. For a while, Sizemore and Helgenberger pair up to investigate the murders. They interview a “crazy” scientist played by Peter Boyle (who spent his salary on a big TV and home theater system). The scientist tells them that in his investigations of the Antarctic Mars rock (a timely reference in 1998) he discovered alien DNA. He warned them not to go to Mars. He warned them!
Margie walks into a murder scene, “It’s horrible…horrible,” she emotes, possibly referring to the script. Sizemore calls her while she’s dissecting stuff. It’s a lot like The X-Files until a general reassures us that “This is not the fucking X-Files!” After that, reminder, the script looks for something else to rip off and as luck would have it, Lennox teams up (for no apparent reason) with a jive-talking black sidekick (Mykelti Williamson, who spent his earnings on a new car for his mom). They drive around and wear sunglasses. It’s a lot like Men in Black only it sucks more. At this point, Patrick is abducting women left and right and raping them to produce hybrids. Since we are dealing with a male alien and the same basic premise as the first movie, the story takes on an uncomfortable edge. Unless movies about alien rape monsters are your thing.
Anyhoo, Eve utilizes her jumping through glass abilities to escape and track down the Malien. She steals a car, having learned to drive from watching The Dukes of Hazard(!?!) on TV. She and Patrick hook up in a barnhouse that is filled with cocooned hybrids. When we see Patrick in his full alien form, it is unclear whether he is from the same species as Eve or from a different species that is somehow sexually compatible with her. Sexual dimorphism aside, he looks a lot bigger and has a quadrapedal structure. Anyway, the humans bust the alien freak fest and save the world. Yay.
On the bright side, the movie is unintentionally hilarious. It is perfect fodder for a MST3K style lampooning. It really is stunningly bad on so many different levels: It’s illogical, stereotype ridden, poorly acted, offensive, derivative, unimaginative, all at the same time.
THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS Eve’s alien form is seemingly identical to Sil in the previous movie.
Patrick’s alien form looks like a mandibled Predator Alien Rastafarian bear skeleton. Interestingly, he tries to impregnate Eve through her mouth. The movie features a kind of kinky shot with an action that is clearly meant to represent oral sex. Kudos to the filmmakers for sneaking it in. There: That’s one thing I liked about the movie.
Someone really needs to learn how to relax her jaw...
HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY Widely available.And the director had the brass balls to record a commentary track. MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT Uh… SEQUELS Species III and Species: The Awakening
MINORITY REPORT Species 2 features one of the most irritatingly stereotypical black characters in recent memory. Despite the fact that his character is a U.S. astronaut chosen for a historic mission, he acts like a reject from a UPN sitcom. He says stuff like “Damn! A brotha can’t get no booty?” and while wielding a machete, “Im’a go back to Africa on his ass!” And after Eve shows no interest in him, “Man, I can’t even get any play from a alien!” If that’s not bad enough, the aliens are ultimately defeated using his sickle-cell anemia carrying blood.
Oh! And there's a deleted scene in which Patrick picks up a chick to impregnate only once he get her back the the room he finds out the she is actually a he! Hilarity ensues. SEE ALSO Showgirls 1996
This is a movie that features about a dozen characters brutally killed, some in disgusting and graphic ways and yet it is most famous as “As that movie where that dog got mutilated,” which just goes to show you that in American movies you can do any horrible thing you want to people, but if you mess with our pets you better watch out.The Fly II is the sequel to the 1986 masterpiece The Fly.Director Chris Walas was the make-up director in the original movie and the focus for this sequel is on gore and creature work.
How did this dude come out of the union of Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis?
The movie picks up as Martin, the child of Seth Brundle and Veronica Quaife is born.Conveniently, Veronica dies in childbirth so that we only have a few shaky shots to see that we are dealing with a Geena Davis look-alike.A biogenetics corporation (the same one referenced in the original movie as having funded Brundle’s research) takes possession of the child and he is raised in a lab environment where he rapidly matures and displays a genius level of intelligence and capacity for science.One day he sneaks out of his area and comes across and lab where they are keeping a number of animals, including a dog, which he befriends.When he returns the next day the dog is being led to one of the teleporters from the first movie.The dog comes out of the machine horribly disfigured and aggressive.This traumatizes young Martin and he is told by his handlers that the dog had been euthanized.
Martin, looking like a guest star on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Soon after, Martin has reached physical maturity and strikes up a relationship with a woman who works at the company.Martin is also in charge of getting his father’s teleportation pods to work.One night while walking through the facility Martin discovers that his old dog is being kept alive for study and he puts the poor thing out of its misery in a scene that achieves real tragedy andis a little difficult to watch.Meanwhile, Martin begins going through the same kinds of changes that afflicted his father, eventually morphing into a human fly.
I would suggest throwing this mermaid back in the ocean..
The Fly II is far from a great movie but is an enjoyable exercise in horror and gore.That is if you can stomach the sad and disturbing dog subplot.
MONSTER/EFFECTS
This movie is more horror and gore oriented than the first and the effects are all quite nice.The idea behind the design of the new final Brundlefly is that the fly DNA is now better integrated into the monster so that he is less of a mutant and more of a new creature all together.He is faster and stronger than the final creature from the previous movie.In fact, he looks something like the titular opponent in Godzilla vs. Megaguirus.Hm.Anyway, Brundlefly II is realized mostly using lots of makeup and rod puppet technology.
SEQUELS
None.Although there has been talk of another Fly remake in the pipeline, rumored to be directed by David Cronenberg himself.
MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE
I’m not trying to be all Fangoria or anything but I’m a big fan of the scene where dude gets his head popped by a descending elevator.I mean it is just so over the top and unnecessary.A close second would be the also gratuitous scene where a guy gets his face melted off by fly vomit.
Stay classy, Chris Walas.
DVD AVAILABILITY
Available is a surprisingly thorough two-disc DVD set, featuring commentaries and documentaries and everything. WTF?
MINORITY REPORT
Unless I am very much mistaken there is no one of color in this movie at all.I mean, I’m sure it was filmed in Canada, but come on!
TRIVIA
Ironically, Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty McFly in Back to the Future before they recast the role with Michael J. Fox.In this movie he plays a character named Mary who turns into a fly.How weird is that?
Where Brooklyn at?
The original Monsta Island Czars.
You show him Anguirus.
