Looks like I’ve been falling down on my Giant Spider reporting duties. A retro black-and-white giant spider film has been released called, oddly enough, The Giant Spider.
There’s an IMDB listing for it as well.
Posts Tagged ‘Monster Movies’
Oversized Arachnid Cinema
Tuesday, August 13th, 2013On San Antonio: Some Clarifications
Sunday, May 5th, 2013Many of you reading this blog will be attending LoneStarCon 3, the San Antonio Worldcon this year.
Many of you reading this blog have also watched the SyFy Channel’s film Chupacabra Vs. The Alamo.
I know it may come as a shock to some, given the painstaking technical accuracy evident in other SyFy films like Mansquito and Arachaquake, but Chupacabra Vs. The Alamo does, in fact, take certain liberties. As such, to avoid disappointment among those visiting San Antonio for the first time, and given that it’s Cinco de Mayo, which plays an important role in the film, I want to offer up some clarifications on errors made in the film.
I hope this has cleared up any confusion anyone might have about San Antonio or the Alamo. Happy con-going!
Big Ass Spider
Wednesday, February 13th, 2013Here’s a trailer for the forthcoming film Big Ass Spider:
It’s every bit as good as you would expect a trailer for a film called Big Ass Spider to be.
I’m pretty sure the intro at the beginning of the clip was timed just right to make the bikini volleyball scene show up as the default YouTube image…
Rare Exports: A Weird Christmas Horror Movie
Monday, December 24th, 2012In his tomb in upthrust Lapland
Dead Kris Kringle lies dreaming
If you’re looking for a weird Christmas horror movie, you could do a lot worse than the Finnish movie Rare Exports. The son of a reindeer herder/butcher finds out that a team just over the border in Russia are drilling into a mountain they believe to be a tomb.
It quickly becomes apparent that the tomb is that of Santa Claus. And the real Santa Claus is not the jolly fellow of Coke commercials, but a fearsome punisher of the wicked that looks a lot more like Krampus:
What makes the film work is its cold, gritty, unsentimental realism. It really does look like it was filmed in a tiny village in Ass End of Nowhere, Finland. Save an unconvincing CGI helicopter at the end, and the strange coda that gives the film its name, I thought everything about the movie worked pretty well. Of recent Scandinavian horror films, I thought this worked better than Dead Snow, but not as good as Let the Right One In.
Worth viewing, and available on Netflix.
I was going to do a longer review, but I’m running out of Christmas.
Random Thoughts on Watching Evil of Frankenstein
Sunday, December 23rd, 2012Watching Hammer Film’s 1964 Evil of Frankenstein, several thoughts occurred to me:
First Pacific Rim Trailer Drops
Thursday, December 13th, 2012The first trailer for Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro’s kaiju vs. giant mechs film, is out.
Oh yeah. I’m there.
Howard Waldrop and I have signed up to review this next year.
Halloween Horrors: That’s Just How I Monster Roll
Thursday, October 25th, 2012Enjoy the teaser trailer for Monster Roll, an indy film about sushi chefs vs. sea monsters that’s about to do a Kickstarter.
Monster Monday: Attack of the Monster From the Id in Forbidden Planet
Monday, October 15th, 2012Today I heard that some people are participating in “Monster Monday,” where they talk about some of the their favorite monsters.
So here’s a quick glimpse of one of my favorite monsters in one of my favorite movies, the attack of the Monster from the Id in Forbidden Planet.
The sound of the monster attacking is one of tracks I play out my windows on Halloween…
Movie Memories of Excessive Vagueness
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012Last Saturday I was over at A.T. and Carol’s house watching a Japanese science fiction action film called Returner (imagine every big budget American science fiction film between 1980 and 2000 being jammed into a blender and set to frappe and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the plot elements). It was fine if you didn’t mind the complete lack of originality, but we watched it because I thought it might be the one I saw a clip from a year or two ago. The problem is, while my memory of the clip is fairly clear, I can’t remember sufficient details to find it via a Google search.
In the clip I saw, people were fighting some freaky looking monsters that were obviously some sort of CGI (about the same level of the CGI in Returner, i.e. better than the Skiffy Channel’s cheap monster movies, but not as good as a major U.S. release). I think the monsters were sort of pale and slightly taller than human sized (but not multistory kaiju sized monsters). It was live action, not anime. And they were fighting in some sort of open, brightly lit interior area, like an atrium, or foyer, or perhaps somewhere in a museum. And the monsters weren’t guys in suits and didn’t look anything like the monsters on Ultraman, etc.
This should be enough to find the clip again, but it doesn’t seem to be. Maybe it wasn’t a movie, but part of a TV show. And maybe it wasn’t from Japan, but Hong Kong or South Korea. Or maybe Taiwan. (But not the Philippines. Probably.) And maybe they weren’t monsters, but aliens. Or maybe demons. Beings from another dimension? And I thought I saw it on Fark, but couldn’t find it when I searched there. Maybe it was linked from comments in the thread?
Movies I know it’s not:
Any ideas? It’s driving me to distraction…
Edison’s Frankenstein
Saturday, November 5th, 2011Did you know that the first first filmed version of Frankenstein was not the James Whale movie, but a 1910 Edison studios film?
Though full of the hokey melodramatic tropes of early silent cinema, it actually follows the basic plot of the Mary Shelly novel more closely than the Whale movie, at least up until the happy (and vaguely slipstreamy) ending. The creation of the monster scene uses not one, but two special effects: running the film backwards and at high speed. I’m sure it blew people’s minds in 1910.