The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Monster Movies concern creatures that go amok, causing damage and threat to the social order. Monsters can range from vast titans like Godzilla and King Kong, giant robots, aliens and Giant Animals to human-sized monsters such as zombies or Mutations or smaller menaces such as Animals Amok and swarms of regular-sized Bugs. Some common monsters have been spilled over and been given their own pages – see Vampires, Frankenstein Films, Zombies, Werewolves and Mummies.
Monsters can be created by science, be supernatural or mythological in nature, of alien origin, from other dimensions or from beneath the ground or ocean. A monster is usually blind in its rampage, having the intelligence of an animal or some instinctual drive (monsters are rarely capable of speech). Its rampage can be due to hunger and the need for some type of sustenance, to breed, or else it can be hurt or because humanity has awakened it or disturbed its natural territorial domain. It can cause mass devastation or work on a smaller scale (such as hunting people in a contained space).
There have been many other monsters that are not Monster Movies. Not all Giant Animals are monsters, while many films treat monsters sympathetically and are about friendships or misunderstandings. There is another whole field of Children’s Monster Movies.
There is another body of monsters that appear in fantasy such as Dragons or mythological creatures like the Cyclops or giants. These are covered under a separate entry Monstrous Encounters. Here the monsters being encountered do not necessarily threaten the social order (or if they do it is rarely depicted beyond a few villages being attacked), rather they are nemeses that are fought and vanquished by heroes. There is a world of difference between a Godzilla film and its spectacles of mass destruction and the adventures of Sinbad, St George or Siegfried and the dragon.
A subcategory is the Japanese Monster Movie, which does engage in mass destruction spectacles but treats monsters as combatants in gigantic wrestling matches with defined heroes and villains where Godzilla or Gamera is usually portrayed as being the defender of Japan from other monsters.
Uwe Boll gained a reputation as the world’s worst director on the basis of his videogame adaptations. Prize exhibit was Alone in the Dark, which abandons the game and is a series of action scenes without explanatory rationale
Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the entrance to Hades in Greek myth, is appropriated to become the focus of a standard md-00s CGI monster movie
Reasonable low-budget revived dinosaur film with not bad CGI effects and an often witty, genre savvy script
An interesting and worthwhile attempt to retell the epic legend of Beowulf but to give it grounding as an historical work. Filmed in Iceland with an international cast
Peter Jackson’s dream project, a remake of the 1933 film, and his finest work as a filmmaker. Jackson builds the original out considerably and his command of the effects gives us something quite dazzling
A remake of the first Quatermass story conducted as a live broadcast tv movie. Quite a considerable technical achievement considering the limitations and one that works with quite reasonable results
This big-budget film came out the same year as The Descent and is a very similar work about a cast of name explorers in a vast network of underground caves being hunted by monsters
B-movie in which a chemical spill at a lab causes a mass murderer to turn into a giant mosquito hybrid. An efficient cobbling of cliches that comes out as a B budget variation n The Fly.
Monster movie about larvae emerging from genetically engineered cattle feed and becoming giant bat-like creatures. When a film casts Rachel Hunter as a corporate lawyer, it is not exactly aiming for believability
One of the most ridiculous title creature to ever inspire a horror franchise – a possessed gingerbread man. From low-budget producer Charles Band, this rips off the Chucky series but with baked goods instead of a doll
Film about an all-girl caving expedition encountering underground dwelling monsters. This made the name of Neil Marshall who ratchets up a degree of gripping seat-edge tension that far exceeds any other film in recent memory
Another effort in the sad slide into shabby amateurishness that marked that latter years of Tobe Hooper’s career, a muddled effort set around a mortuary involving body-snatching fungus and deformed relatives in the crawlspaces
An initially low-assumption film that rapidly becomes highly watchable thanks to some way out jumps and creature appearances that propel it into real WTF territory. Where it falters is its arrival a well and truly cliched twist ending but the ride there is undeniably memorable
A ridiculous film with Lou Diamond Phillips pursuing aliens aboard a runaway train. Cliches are piled on with absurd effect and the show killed by cheap effects
The fourth of the Tremors films.; It is a surprise that the series has managed to remain consistently enjoyable despite a limited premise. The main spin here is an origin story that takes the series back to the West
A fairly routine cable monster movie about people dealing with a series of attacks by genetically-engineered killer fish that are loose in the bayous
The 28th Godzilla film, made for the series fiftieth anniversary and bringing every monster ever created by Toho together for a massive battle. The results are immensely satisfying
A giant CGI snake film that promptly heads into bad movie stakes through a combination of ridiculous dialogue and absurd posturing of its cast
Obscure Australian film about people being hunted by a mythical creature known as The Yowie
The third of the Species films, which follows Sil’s daughter. Some okay makeup effects but the plotting gets fairly silly
A sequel to the Jennifer Lopez-starring Anaconda that manages to be even more ridiculous and cliche ridden than its predecessor to the point you frequently laugh it off the screen
TV mini-series that tries to conduct a rigorously faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s book and largely succeeds apart from some minor changes. On the other hand, none of the period setting or story much comes to life
M. Night Shyamalan creates three-quarters of a tense and eerie film about a 19th Century village under siege from mysterious creatures only for it to fall apart when he produces a damp squib of a twist ending
Beginning as fan mill speculation, 20th Century Fox finally brought their Alien and Predator franchises together on the screen here. The result is an okay effort in the hands of Paul W.S. Anderson, even if it never has the grueling intensity of the early entries in either series
The sort of film that might make Troma radioactive green with envy they didn’t make it concerning a giant rampaging ass. Mind-boggling and willing to be stupid and in frequent bad taste
An incredibly bad monster movie supposedly based around the Latin American urban legend of the Chupacabra. So cheaply made it can’t even afford CGI
Video-released compilation of above average horror short films all set around the titular website
A routine horror about teens that live in fear of creatures that lurk in the dark. Presented by Wes Craven.
A completely ridiculous film about mutant scorpions on a plane – after something this laughable, it’s hard to see why Snakes on a Plane needed to plant tongue in cheek
Gimmicky B-budget film about a hi-tech future prison built at the South Pole. Thus has been thrown together with a giant snake amok plot. A passably routine effort
The 26th Japanese Godzilla film, the fourth pitting him against Mechagodzilla. After a slow first hour, the film delivers all the exhilarating mass destruction sequences we expect of it as the monsters go head to head
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin turn their attentions to revamping the 1950s giant insect film. They bring top-drawer effects to bear but everything else plays to standard formula
This is a B-budget film about genetically engineered killer bats where the usual is boosted by a sense of humour and a line-up of eccentric characters
The 25th Godzilla film which employs director Shusuke Kaneko who had done amazing things reviving the Gamera franchise. Kaneko doesn’t quite deliver the epic expected of him but does produce an amazing effects spectacle
Sequel to the ridiculous Octopus, this is slightly less cheap but no less absurd in its premise of a giant octopus attacking New York
Steven Spielberg handed the directorial reins of the series over to Joe Johnston and this emerges as a better film than The Lost World was, even if it is only ever arranged around a series of effects set-pieces
Taking only the name of the 1950s B movie, this is otherwise a horror film about an imprisoned mermaid creature that wields a sinister threat. This works with a modest effectiveness
This was the first of two sequels to Guillermo Del Toro’s intelligent insect film Mimic, although this has now becomes more of a regular and unexceptional monster movie
One of a series of films that borrow their titles from old 1950s films, this abandons any connection to the original end of the world film and concerns a boy who may be causing an alien monster to appear
Third of the films in the Tremors series, which have held up surprisingly well in their balance of creature effects and a considerable sense of humour. This adds a series of twists to the premise that are positively hilarious
Tobe Hooper delivers an entry amid the early-00s vogue for B-budget CGI monster movies, drawing clear inspiration from Lake Placid. Hooper had not made a good film since the 1980s and this does little to reverse the path of mediocrity
Hilarious Jan Svankmajer film about a mother who decides to treat a log as a child. Full of blackly funny humour before transforming into a macabre monster movie
B-budget mix of giant animal film and submarine drama with impoverished effects and a script only notable for its ludicrous improbabilities
The 24th Godzilla film where Godzilla faces a giant prehistoric dragonfly. While the modern Godzilla films have readily adopted CGI and animatronics, the effects here are much more variable
One of the more likeable among the 2000s fad for low-budget CGI monster movies, this is aided considerably by a sense of humour and a line-up of oddball characters
A CGI monster movie directed by a former Industrial Light and Magic visual effects supervisor that features a family under attacks by over-sized komodo lizards
David E. Kelley, better known as a high-profile tv producer, turns his hand to writing a killer crocodile film, although the result never ends up satisfying either as a monster movie or the jokey tone Kelley wants to take
An adaptation of the classic epic legend Beowulf that bizarrely recasts the story as a Christopher Lambert-starring action movie and sets it in a post-apocalyptic future
A killer shark film by way of Jurassic Park. The perpetually terrible Renny Harlin creates something almost watchable that vies between moments of tension and the entertainingly absurd
A very routine B-budget film in which Erik Estrada and Pat Morita face a giant animatronic snake. This was billed as Anaconda 2 in some places.
Killer shark from the 1990s heyday. This works passably as the B movie it is intended as, while the last third turns into the schlockily absurd with the insertion of two different corrupt conspiracy elements and action movie chases
Backwoods horror that starts well, keeping its menace ambiguous but collapses into a mishmash of pretensions and amateurish symbolism
An extraordinary reworking of the Japanese kaiju series with stunning CGI effects sequences. This set a new standard and is among the best of the modern Japanese monster movies
The 23rd Godzilla film where the effects were at such a peak for the genre that this became the first Godzilla film to be given a US theatrical release in fifteen years
A festival of H.P. Lovecraft short films held in Vancouver, which display a quality and faithfulness to the original texts that far outstrips the professional efforts being made elsewhere
Well-made Alien copy that seems to have been conceived as a crosshatch between The Dirty Dozen and The Thing where the creature remains mostly psychological
Early Stephen Sommers film that feels like it has been mounted as Alien meets Titanic. Between the ridiculous one-dimensional writing and Sommers’ CGI overkill, this heads well into bad movie material
One of the best and most underrated Dean R. Koontz adaptations, which creates eerie atmosphere out a town where the residents have disappeared due to what is revealed as a uniquely different creature
An anthology of three tales on an occult theme. The standout among these is the opening episode about a courtroom trial of a woman who was possessed
Much disliked English-language version of Godzilla from Roland Emmerich is a more watchable film than one might think. Emmerich does well when the film allows him to do what he does best – being a big, budget, massively scaled epic of mass destruction
Sequel to Species that this time offers up the male of the species. The film feels put together as an exercise in makeup effects but their physiological absurdity causes the film to topple into silliness
The third and least satisfying of the otherwise above average compilation films on the theme of alien invasion from Kevin J. Lindenmuth and other directors
After their successful revival of Godzilla in the 1990s, Toho revived Mothra for a series of standalone battles, albeit with a very juvenile focus made for children. This was the second and better of the three films
This was the second film from Guillermo Del Toro, a modest and quite good Alien copy with Mira Sorvino hunting evolved insects in the New York subway tunnels
A film crew in the Amazon headed by Jennifer Lopez encounter a giant snake. Mounted as a CGI monster movie in the aftermath of Jurassic Park, this has scripting that frequently descends into the ludicrous
This is a copy of Alien with a monster hunting people through darkened corridors and is generic in all regards, although you have to admit that Stan Winston creates an original monster and the film generates reasonable suspense
Another variant on Alien – a monster movie with Mark Dacascos as a doctor facing a genetically engineered insect monster in the jungles of Borneo
Dan O’Bannon scripted film that is uncreditedly based on an H.P. Lovecraft story about family horrors and creatures lurking beneath the graveyard. Aka Bleeders
The fourth of the Alien films. French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet comes on board and delivers a comic-bookish run through of a Joss Whedon script that overspills with too many ideas
The first sequel to the massive success of Jurassic Park where Steven Spielberg returns to direct with a script that seems a mishmash of loose ends that only weakly rehashes the original
A solid revival of the horror anthology, this tells three stories that all work well. The film also features several before-they-were-known faces
Big-budget film with a CGI creature made not long after Jurassic Park with Ted Danson as a zoologist investigating the existence of the Loch Ness Monster film. This only resorts to simplistic cliches
Beyond the wilfully ridiculous title, this is a surprisingly entertaining and funny film that lampoons monster movies in general concerning a monstrous condom on the attack.
Low-budget Alien copy directed by makeup effects artist Gary J. Tunnicliffe with a plot that prefigures Armageddon as drillers uncover an alien nasty on an asteroid
Shusuke Kaneko did extraordinary things in revitalising the Japanese monster movie in the 1990s with his trilogy of Gamera films. This was the second of them, usually seen as the weakest of the trilogy
One of the worst among the usually worthwhile Japanese monster movie revivals of the 1990s. Much of the film is played down at an inanely silly children’s movie level, with there only being the requisite mass destruction effects to enliven the show
The first of several sequels to the modest hit of Tremors with Fred Ward and Michael Gross repeating their roles, hunting Graboids in Mexico this time. As with the first film, this ably balances suspense, creature effects and a considerable sense of humour
Produced by Wes Craven and his son, this started as a third Hills Have Eyes film but ends up a generic Alien copy with a mutant monster hunting people in a desert laboratory
A ridiculously stupid giant bug film, albeit not unentertainingly so. This is a monster movie that has been premised solely on the provision of ridiculous creature effects every few minutes and very little else that one can take seriously beyond that
The 1978 Piranha is remade as a cable tv movie but has excised all the humour and witty genre in-referencing of the original
Slick and rather silly copy of Alien that conceptually cross-hatches it to emerge as essentially Basic Instinct with tentacles
In one of his last really good films, John Carpenter pays homage to H.P. Lovecraft in this horror film that becomes an amazing blurring of the line between reality and fiction
Shabby copy of Alien with shipwreck survivors facing a genetically engineered monster on an oil rig
Here Shusuke Kaneko revived the Gamera series of the 1960s/70s with a series of stunning effects. The result promptly set a new standard for the Japanese monster movie
Charles and Albert Band had a success with the H.P. Lovecraft adapted Re-Animator; their attempt to replicate that with another Lovecraft story is lacking Stuart Gordon’s splattery black humour
Space Godzilla is one the strangest nemeses to turn up in these kaiju films – a blue counterpart of the Big G with a giant glowing mass of crystal on its shoulders. One of the more routine entries in the modern Godzilla series
Typical 1990s video-released effort that stands out by dint of a far-out idea – a cyborg werewolf – even if in the end the film does nothing with it and everything only boils down to a standard monster movie that takes everything from the Alien playbook
The Stan Winston directed Pumpkinhead was one of the genuinely original monster movies of the 1980s. This was the first of several video-released sequels
Live-action version of a manga that was previously made as an anime. This Hong Kong-made version is the lesser, lacking the perverse sexual imagery of the anime. It does feature the wildly fantastical action scenes typical to HK fantasy of this era but this has been conducted on a low-budget and looks rubbery (*)
Routine variant on the 1970s killer bug film, although the bugs here are gooey and cartoonish not meant to be taken seriously
Film about a dog that has been experimentally crossbred with DNA from other animals that proceeds to go amok. The film proceeds to collapse into the completely ridiculous
A Roger Corman produced cheapie about genetically engineered dinosaurs that was quickly rushed out to exploit the success of Jurassic Park. Corman went on to make two sequels
An enormous hit for Steven Spielberg who took new emergent CGI technologies and wowed audiences with dinosaurs brought to life in dazzlingly realistic detail. It doesn’t hurt that he delivers a relentlessly suspenseful film too
A mishmash of Alien copy and supernatural serial killer film set in a drowned future London with a script that makes no real sense. The film’s buddy cop relationship starring Rutger Hauer does have its amusements.
The 19th Godzilla film, part of the 1990s revival where the series started to employ modern animatronics. This revives Mothra in quite beautiful ways and mounts to a rousing monster battle
Third of the Alien films, a directorial debut for David Fincher. A better film than was perceived at the time, this explores new character depths, while Fincher imprints his own visual style on the film
The 1980 Alligator was amusing but this hardly one of the sequels the world was burning to see. An utterly formulaic copy that is killed by impoverished giant alligator effects
Xtro was cheesily ridiculous Alien copy. This is a sequel that bears nothing in common with the original beyond the title. In between the two films, we had Aliens so there is now a plot about soldiers hunting the creature with biiig guns. Nothing bad, just an uninspired rehash of the standard Alien copy
The eighteenth Godzilla film and one of the best of the modern era. This has the most conceptually audacious plot of any Godzilla film and overflows with wild ideas involving time travel and changing the timeline
The third of the Critters films and in my minority opinion the best of the series generating some reasonable suspense. Featuring the film debut of a teenage Leonardo DiCaprio