Continuing our monthlong celebration of Halloween with various scary movie and TV-related lists. Check out our online movie database at staytunedmag.com to see if any of these or other scary titles are on this month.
SUSPENSION OF BELIEF:
TOP 5 LAMEST MOVIE MONSTERS
We’ll give you a rest from true terror for a little bit, as it’s doubtful that the following monsters would scare anyone over the age of 2. Just be careful not to die laughing:
5. The walking tree-stumpy thing in From Hell It Came (1957)
Well, technically it’s a “tobonga,” a murdered South Seas prince reanimated in the form of a tree monster courtesy of nuclear radiation … or black magic … or something (they covered all their bases). And while the producers could be commended for trying something different than the usual giant bug or reptile, this creature was so poorly realized that it caused one film reviewer of the time to cry, “And to hell it can go!”:
4. The Monolith Monsters (1957)
Again, filmmakers were at least trying something different, but these monsters are literally dull as a rock. They are actually crystal shafts (“mammoth skyscrapers of stone thundering across the earth!” according to the movie poster) composed of a material from a meteorite that grow to large heights before toppling over and shattering into pieces that then grow into more living shafts. Insert your phallic jokes where needed. In this inefficient manner, the shafts inch ever so slowly toward a desert town, rising up and crashing down over and over again, one after the other, like my many failed attempts at playing Jenga. Oh, did I mention they can only grow when touched by water? To speed the film along, the writers put in an approaching rainstorm — otherwise the town likely could have packed up, left and resettled somewhere else before the monsters arrived.
3. Reptilicus (1961)
This first and last Danish monster movie sets a laughable puppet that breathes deadly film scratches loose on Copenhagen:
2. The Creeping Terror (1964)
Some sort of walking shag carpet that’s so slow-moving and inept that it needs assistance from its moronic victims to push themselves into its mouth:
1. The Giant Claw (1957)
A giant turkey about a giant eagle/vulture-type thing terrorizing the skies, with even rolls of stock footage unable to stop it. Man, looking at this list, it appears that 1957 sounded the death knell for giant monster movies: