Time Out's 50 greatest monster movies: part three

In part three we're goin' fishing for 'Piranha' in the 'Black Lagoon', feeling a little post-9/11 angst with 'Cloverfield' and 'The Mist', and chowing down far too much of 'The Stuff'...

See 20 through to 11

30. Island of Lost Souls (1932)
Directed by Erle C Kenton
Manimal!
In an ideal world we’d be listing Richard Stanley’s take on HG Wells’s ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ here - as anyone who’s read Stanley and Michael Herr’s original script can attest, it would’ve been amazing. But that movie was handed to John Frankenheimer, and became one of the shoddiest monster movies ever made. So instead we turn to the best surviving adaptation, this retitled Charles Laughton vehicle, in which ropey makeup effects and a hokey romantic subplot are more than made up for by Kenton’s genuinely eerie directorial style and Laughton’s magnificently seedy, sweaty and grotesque central performance. TH
Watch the entire out-of-copyright classic

Read the original Time Out review of 'Island of Lost Souls'


29. Cloverfield (2008)
Directed by Matt Reeves


World’s largest metaphor eats NYC
‘Gossip Girl’ meets ‘Godzilla’ by way of ‘Blair Witch’ shaky-cam in one of the most original expressions of post-9/11 angst since the city of Taft, Michigan, banned a twentieth-anniversary screening of ‘Ishtar’ for being ‘pro-Taliban’. The long set-up, following the party preparations of a bunch of well-heeled NY twentysomethings, is in itself a brave stylistic choice. Hence, when the horror finally hits, there's a real sense of sudden, jarring peril even if you wouldn't give most of the characters space in your heavily armed rescue chopper. With nothing in the way of explanation (no pipe-smoking astro-boffins here), and mercifully few sightings of what turns out to be a slightly duff monster, New York becomes in effect a huge haunted house in which a confused populace takes on the role of Screaming Babysitter. The result is a film as paranoid, morally equivocal and randomly violent as the decade which gave it birth. PF
Click here for furrier version, ‘Groverfield'

Read the original Time Out review of 'Cloverfield'

28. Hellboy (2004)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro


Well red
Comic fans have long been used to seeing the wit and intelligence of their favourite stories surgically excised by zoot-suited Hollywood bean counters, so Del Toro's faithful vivification of Hellboy was something of a landmark in judging its audience to be some way above high-functioning cretins. With creator Mike Mignola onboard and Ron Perlman at his best since his 'Penitenze Agite!' days in ‘The Name of The Rose’, the movie tapped a rich vein of outsider humour and was so teeming with ideas that it could throw away on a prologue a story that Spielberg would have made into a three-picture franchise. Best of all, for a brief, glorious moment, it seemed that Niles Crane had been transformed into a mind-mangling aquatic superhero. Abe Sapien's disdain for dry sherry and his watery inability to attend the Seattle Philharmonic's opening nights put paid to that beautiful illusion, but in blending humanity and monstrous action, ‘Hellboy’ and its even more monster-stuffed sequel have raised the stakes when it comes to bringing inky imaginings to the big screen. PF
Watch the trailer

Read the original Time Out review of 'Hellboy'


27. Re-Animator (1985)
Directed by Stuart Gordon

Dead and loving it
Evoking a mixture of HP Lovecraft’s 1922 serial, ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’, and Willy Russell’s ‘Educating Rita’, director Stuart Gordon whisks us to the campus of Massachusetts’s Miskatonic Medical School to tell of a mad, mad scientist (Jeffrey Combs) who believes he has bridged the gap between life and death with the help of some lime green goo. 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. 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. DJ
Watch the trailer

Read the original Time Out review of 'Re-Animator'


26. The Stuff (1985)
Directed by Larry Cohen

Enough is never enough
Though his career as a writer-director remained in fitful if failing health for another decade, ‘The Stuff’ is generally regarded as Larry Cohen’s last and perhaps greatest subversive statement. Turning his laser-sharp satirical eye on the American tradition of boundless consumerism, Cohen presents a world in which a mysterious sentient dessert substance known only as ‘the stuff’ has conquered the hearts, minds and stomachs of an increasingly couch-bound populace. Once more featuring the great Michael Moriarty in the lead role of shambling huckster corporate spy Mo Rutherford (see also Number 10, ‘Q: The Winged Serpent’), the film skewers its intended target with a slew of brilliantly constructed, hilariously off-kilter mock ads. TH
Find out what happened to Chocolate Chip Charlie

Read the original Time Out review of 'The Stuff'


25. The Mist (2007)
Directed by Frank Darabont

It’s a real pea-souper
In this benighted decade of torture porn and unnecessary remakes, one American director dared to buck the trend with a defiantly old-school slice of politically motivated monster schlock, and created the most unfairly overlooked horror movie of the Noughties. Eschewing the ponderous classicism of his previous Stephen King horror adaptation ‘The Green Mile’, Darabont hooked in the production team from TV’s ‘The Shield’ in an effort to make ‘The Mist’ a more confrontational shakycam affair, albeit crammed with Cormanesque tentacular touches. It’s a rip-roaring success, fusing to-the-minute anti-social commentary with fabulously icky critter effects and fountains of gore. The shocking, infamously bleak ending divides opinion, but it sure as hell sticks in the memory. TH
Watch how they made the monsters

Read the original Time Out review of 'The Mist'


24. Tremors (1990)
Directed by Ron Underwood

I got worms!
Kevin Bacon managed to cast off the man-meat pin-up shackles he’d become bound in to as a result of films like ‘Footloose’, ‘She’s Having a Baby’ and bike-courier no-no ‘Quicksilver’ as the charming Southern huckster who manages to take on a giant, flesh-eating sand worm and win. Generally considered the gold-standard of B-movie revivals, ‘Tremors’ takes place in the dustbowl nowhere town of Perfection, Nevada, where the tiny populace gradually fall prey to a pair of hulking worms that are slithering around under foot. What’s so radical about the film is how unabashedly unradical it is, combining rock-solid action set-pieces (the pole-vaulting across the desert scene is a taut classic), whipsmart dialogue and a monster that really is as revolting and terrifying as they come. Plus, it contains MOR country songstress Reba McEntire’s rootin'est, tootin'est screen performance to date as an utterly charming white-power survivalist. DJ
Watch the trailer

Read the original Time Out review of 'Tremors'


23. Pan’s Labyrinth (2007)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro

Ai caramba! El Diablo!
Now the dust has finally settled, can we agree on the fact that Guillermo del Toro’s baroque historical fantasia (‘Alice In Wonderland’ meets ‘Land and Freedom’, as one wag put it) is not the masterpiece everyone said it was. 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. Starring Doug Jones - who’s fast joining the ranks of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney and Nicolas Cage in the pantheon of classic screen demons - as the faun who offers inquisitive young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) three tasks in order for her to be reunited with her absent father, the film never manages to find a happy medium between fantasy and reality, though it does show the breathtaking results of sticking some googly eyes onto the palms of your hands (see above). DJ
Watch the trailer

Read the original Time Out review of 'Pan's Labyrinth'

22. Piranha (1978)
Directed by Joe Dante

One school you don't want to get into
The jewel of the post-‘Jaws’ nature-on-the-loose boom, ‘Piranha’ was also one of the last and greatest movies from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in its ’70s heyday. 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. TH
Watch the classic trailer

Read the original Time Out review of 'Piranha'


21. The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
Directed by Jack Arnold

Weird and gilly
What is it with ancient, primeval beasts attacking hot chicks in bikinis? Sure, sex has been a primal urge since the dawn of time, but you’d think studs like King Kong, Jaws and the fish-faced hero of this frenetic ’50s frightener might not have to resort to terror tactics to lure in the opposite sex. But then again, when you’re the bastard son of man and lungfish (as the labcoat-wearing boffins solemnly inform us), perhaps you’re born with a built-in inferiority complex. Cheer up, Blackie (or should that be Goonie?). No one remembers so-called ‘stars’ like Richard Carlson and Julie Adams, while your multi-fronded mug has become the defining image of ’50s horror. Float on, chum, and let the ladies swim to you... TH
Watch the wonderfully OTT trailer

Read the original Time Out review of 'The Creature from the Black Lagoon'

See 20 through to 11

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