In the shabbier corners of cinema, there are the monsters who create wonder – you wonder how they ever wound up on big screen. For those who like movie monsters that inspire more smirks than shrieks, here are 10 creatures who give monsters a bad name.
“The Alligator People” (1959): Actually, there is only one alligator person in this film, a Florida man who turns into a giant bipedal reptile thanks to a medical experiment that somehow didn’t quite work as planned. The alligator person in this film is more of a victim than a predator and winds up being attacked by a real alligator who was clearly not amused by this two-legged poseur.
“The Brain from Planet Arous” (1957): There may have been a brain on the screen, but which brains behind the camera came up with this? The eponymous character in this film is Gor, an evil brain from planet Arous who somehow inhabits a scientist’s body and plans to take over the Earth. But another intergalactic brain, named Val, tries to stop Gor by inhabiting the brain of his dog.
“Ebirah, Horror of the Deep” (1966): Did somebody order a jumbo shrimp? Because that’s what you have in this Japanese monster mash – a massive crustacean lurking in the waters off a mysterious island where a criminal enterprise enslaved the natives to make heavy water for use in weapons of mass destruction. Mercifully for the oppressed population in the film, Godzilla and Mothra show up to save the day. The combat between Godzilla (an actor in a rubber dinosaur costume) and Ebirah (another actor in a giant crustacean costume) has to be seen to be believed.
“From Hell It Came” (1957): The prince of a South Pacific island is framed for murdering his chieftain father and is executed, with his body dumped in a tree trunk. As a result of radioactive fallout from an atomic bomb test on a neighboring atoll – thank you, Professor Oppenheimer! – the dead prince’s spirit merges with the tree trunk to become the Tabanga, a monster that is half-man, half-tree and fully ridiculous.
“The Giant Claw” (1957): And yet another zany monster film from 1957, this time involving a bird “as big as a battleship” that terrorizes New York City. While the film’s concept was satisfactory for the genre, the presentation of the massive avian (created in a cheap and unwieldy marionette) left the audiences in hysterics rather than horror. Leading man Jeff Morrow claimed that none of the cast knew what the monster looked like until the film’s premiere, but after seeing the completed film with an audience, Morrow went home and got drunk in a state of shame.
“Mansquito” (2005): This made-for-television film skims some elements of “The Fly” with its merging of human and insect into a buzzing monster, but instead gives us two Mansquitos for the price of one – a convict who is turned into the monster during an experiment that goes awry and a lady doctor who finds herself slowing transforming into an oversized bug. And for a film made in 2005, you’d think there would be somewhat more sophisticated make-up and costuming than the crummy effects offered here. Someone get the flyswatter!
“Matango” (1963): In this Japanese offering, the passengers of a yacht stumble upon a deserted island where bizarre mushrooms grow. Unaware that the island was contaminated by radioactive fallout from a nuclear test (again?), the passengers eat the mushrooms and turn into giant mushroom people. While inspired by a serious work of horror – William Hope Hodgson’s short story “The Voice in the Night” – the outlandish appearance the mushroom people makes the film look like a Sid and Marty Krofft comedy. (The film was also known as “Attack of the Mushroom People.”)
“Octaman” (1971): The monster in this Mexican-American co-production is another byproduct of excessive radiation exposure. In this case, audiences wind up with a half-man and half-octopus (or, to be accurate, a hexapus since it only has six tentacles instead of eight). Octaman’s sluggish gait and clumsy movements make it one of the slowest-moving creatures to terrorize humanity. Jeff Morrow outdid his “Giant Claw” ignominy with an appearance in this happy mess, which was also the last film appearance of Pier Angeli, an Italian-born actress who briefly shined as a promising Hollywood talent in the mid-1950s and committed suicide after production wrapped.
“Pulgasari” (1985): North Korea is not known for its competent filmmaking, as witnessed in this tumultuous tale of a giant metal monster that also eats metal during the jolly old days of feudal Korea. “Pulgasari” is a loose remake of a now-lost 1962 South Korean film called “Bulgasari” with more than a little inspiration from the Godzilla romps. North Korea had such a deficit of cinematic talent that dictator Kim Jong Il tricked a group of Japanese filmmakers into the production (they thought they were going to be working in China but wound up in Pyongyang for an extended stay).
“Robot Monster” (1953): The grand-daddy of the silly monsters was the immortal Ro-Man, who was supposed to be a robot invader from the moon. Filmmaker Phil Tucker couldn’t afford to rent a metal-man costume for his sci-fi film about an invasion by lunar robots, so he snagged a gorilla costume and put a diving helmet over its head that was crowned with two antennae. But this was actually sane in comparison to the robot/gorilla’s dialogue, which is overstuffed with angst-filled soliloquies of existential crises.