New York, Since the mid-1970s, with Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, and into the 1980s, monster movies like Larry Cohen's Q, the Winged Serpent (1982), Tom Holland's Fright Night (1985), George Romero's Creepshow and Ron Underwood's Tremors (1989) used comedy as a scaring device. All of which would count for nought if not placed into the hands of such a master technician and gifted storyteller as Spielberg, and despite its arduous shoot (Spielberg broke down with nervous exhaustion mere hours after the film wrapped) the Magic Beard managed to fashion an effortless and streamlined example of pure cinema, and created one of its most durable and elemental horrors. – David Jenkins, Stitched ’im up like a kipperArguably the single defining image in the history of Hollywood horror, Boris Karloff’s Monster, with his sutured skin, neck-bolts and childlike expression, remains the poster child for ‘sympathetic’ monsters. The monster: Giant multi-tongued worms known as graboids that live underground and pop up to devour humans. Time Out is a registered trademark of Time Out Digital Limited. But once the real villains show up, things fall to pieces: okay, they’re eight feet tall, homicidal and blessed with a multiplicity of variegated blood-red suckers. 1993 saw the release of Jurassic Park, based on the 1989 novel of the same name by Michael Crichton and directed by Steven Spielberg, which set a new benchmark in the genre with innovative use of CGI and tried-and-tested animatronics to recreate dinosaurs. In the second, it takes possession of Ash’s severed hand (which he gleefully amputates with a chainsaw) and proceeds to try and strangle him. Also worth noting is the sly reappropriation of Bernard Herrmann's seminal 'Psycho' score which, it being 1985 an' all, has been augmented with some echo drum beats. It's not Universal's most stylish monster movie, but it's got a certain melancholic charm. But we’re still keen to find out. The long set-up, following the party preparations of a bunch of well-heeled NY twentysomethings, is in itself a brave stylistic choice. (1954), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), Tarantula (1955), The Deadly Mantis (1957) and 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957). The irony is that the film responsible for ‘Piranha’s very existence, Spielberg’s world-masticating box-office behemoth, would also be the film that unwittingly wiped out everything New World stood for: once the B-movie had become the new A-movie, there’d be less and less room for the kind of madcap invention and subversive undertow that Joe Dante and writer John Sayles packed into this giddy, grisly little fish story. [7] Jurassic Park was an enormous critical and commercial success and at one point held the title of the highest-grossing film of all time. Cronenberg’s other great strength is the way he introduces his themes: subtly at first, but with increasing force and ferocity. Alongside the ‘Evil Dead’ films, it’s one of the few horror-comedies that actually delivers a laugh with every scare (see the entire Troma output for examples of how not to do it), and even though it doesn’t contain a monster per se, the reanimated severed head of a stuffed-shirt neurosurgeon is an example of low-budget prosthetics work at its ketchup-soaked finest. The gritty Sam Fuller enthusiast who turned to Cormanesque splat. Cloverfield went on to inspire an anthology-style franchise with two more entries, 10 Cloverfield Lane and The Cloverfield Paradox, both worth checking out if you're interested in uncovering some of the monstrous mysteries asked but not answered in the original. Disney's graphic mash-up sequel, 'Pete’s Dragon Slayer', was pulled after test screenings left young audiences in states of extreme distress. For a kids’ film (c’mon nerds, it is!) Sometimes monsters are friendly. Our feelings for the tragic Brundlefly run so much deeper than mere disgust or even pity: we admire his scientific genius and his goofy, loquacious charm, sympathise with his romantic uncertainty and tendency for adolescent jealousy, recoil at the grotesque transformation of his body and mind, and finally weep for his hubristic but inevitable destruction.It seems ironic that we’ve chosen ‘The Fly’ to top this list because it is, after all, the most painfully human of all monster movies. The shocking, infamously bleak ending divides opinion, but it sure as hell sticks in the memory. Monster movies originated with adaptations of horror folklore and literature. The movie: An action comedy horror starring Kevin Bacon as a handyman called Val whose small valley town falls under threat from a race of gigantic worms. The winner of Best Picture at the 2018 Academy Awards, Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water is a modern homage to monster movies like Creature From the … The most common aspect of a monster movie is the struggle between a human collective of protagonists against one or more monsters, who often serve as the antagonistic force. We're curating lists of streaming movies and TV shows on services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime to help you get through this tricky time. And if anyone can find proof that the aforementioned dreadlocks are actually Na'vi-style love tentacles, then you can pretty much forget the idea completely. Back in the 50's Christopher Lee was Hollywood royalty. Girls just wanna have furAn object lesson in how horror movies have always tackled subject matter which straight drama was afraid to touch, albeit in strictly allegorical terms, ‘Cat People’ is not, as it has largely been regarded, simply a bloke’s-eye view of the suspect female ‘other’. Lovelorn Big Apple florist Rick Moranis breeds a nondescript houseplant into a ravenous monster with a taste for human blood and doo-wop music before realising that it is in fact a ‘mean, green muthah from outer space’ with plans to colonise Earth. Taken more simply, as the tale of a woman so constricted by social propriety that she becomes a monster, it’s no less rigorous and challenging. – Tom Huddleston, Good fun until someone loses an eyeAnother movie which, like ‘The Howling’ (see above), actually gets less scary once the monster shows up. (Nope.) One thing’s for certain: like most of Cronenberg’s films from the period, it’s about flesh: how it defines us and defeats us, how it conspires against the self, the mind, in an ongoing battle for bodily dominance that we are ultimately doomed to lose. Before your cinematic universes and extended galaxies and interconnected constellations, there were the Universal Classic Monster movies. Thanks for subscribing! In fact, it feels like the perfect film to be sitting mid-table in a list like this, an impressive but overreaching political allegory whose underused trump card is some of most ornate monster model work in modern cinema. Visit our corporate site. Or the monster is from outer space, has been on Earth for a long time with no one ever seeing it, or released (or awakened) from a prison of some sort where it was being held. 25 Best Nintendo Switch games you can play right now, The 20 best PS4 exclusives that you need to play. If the sign of … To them we can only say this: if a film has the word ‘Monster’ in the title, it pretty much by definition deserves a place on this list (Aileen Wournos biopics notwithstanding). In the end, when constructing this list we decided to be precise. Aliens, ghosts and all sorts of scary creatures abound in these monster movie faves. It's a dark, dark comedy. Vin Diesel’s noble savage Richard B Riddick and an agreeably clichéd band of crash survivors have to contend with the bone-white desert wastes by day, but it’s at night when the fun really begins, as the darkness literally comes alive with shapeless fury. Vote your favorite movies to the top of the list, and if there are movies you hated, vote them down, to move them to the bottom! – Paul Fairclough, The movie that time forgotSeemingly inspired by the kind of logic-free games enjoyed by eight-year-old boys, this rarely seen gem pits cowboys against dinosaurs in a stark New Mexico. – Adam Lee Davies, Danger: heavy plant crossingAs anyone who watched TV this Christmas knows only too well, the definitive version of John Wyndham’s template-setting apocalyptic masterpiece has yet to emerge. Great performances from the young cast also prevent any ‘child acting’ awkwardness, while the themes of friendship and the loss of innocence are reminiscent of ‘Stand By Me’ (another King adaptation) and ‘ET’.
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