These eight creatures from the dark side demonstrate several of the reasons monsters can go bad. Sometimes they start out with some potential to be scary but fall flat. Maybe it’s some aspect of their physical appearance that doesn’t work. One of these examples was done in at least in part by its own name.
Sometimes a good monster just needs a better agent. Even a well-practiced denizen of hell can die the death of snickering audiences if everything around it is so cringe-worthy that it never gets the chance to spread its leathery wings, bare its fangs and give everyone a good scare.
On the other hand, a lot of monsters are just born lame. Some have no scare potential because they’re too cute to be frightening. But more often such monsters are everyday things transformed into agents of evil by plot twists so implausible that the movie can’t sustain the audience’s belief in them. “Okay, that’s just stupid” is pretty much automatic death for a horror picture.
Pazuzu in Exorcist 2: The Heretic – Before the original Exorcist launches into pea soup barfing and crucifix crotch stabbing, it opens with a genuinely eerie little sequence shot in Iraq. Here an elderly priest runs up against an unnamed demon that manifests itself in part through an ancient statue. The sculpture they used was of an actual Babylonian devil, and it worked pretty well.
So for the first sequel someone must have said “Hey, let’s get that Babylonian devil thing back. What was it called?” And therein lay the rub, because the real name of the critter – which the folks who made the first movie had the good sense to omit – was Pazuzu. That might have been quite terrifying indeed to the denizens of ancient Mesopotamia, but 4000 years later it’s the sound of a bike tire going flat, or maybe a variation on Jimmy Stewart’s daughter’s name in It’s a Wonderful Life. Quick hint to monsters everywhere: if your name sounds like it should be followed by “the Clown,” pick out a good pseudonym before you show up on screen.
Of course to be fair, our poor pal Pazuzu never really stood much of a chance to begin with. Even an exceptional horror with a terrifying name would have been hard pressed to overcome the Linda Blair tap dancing number or even to get its acting done in front of the scenery before Richard Burton ate it all. But even in the best of worlds, that name was a real deal breaker.
Evil puppy in Devil Dog, The Hound of Hell – The logic here is that evil is at its worst when it’s disguised as something innocent. That works in theory, but here it falls totally flat in practice. A German Shepherd puppy can set fire to all the maids it wants, and the audience response is still going to be “Aw, cute!” Even when he grows up and turns Mom and the kids into his zombified minions, he still looks like an adorable family pet.
Now, it’s certainly possible to make a German Shepherd – an adult one, anyway – look scary. Cujo him up a bit. Anyone who ever sat through that grade school health movie about rabies knows just how scary a rabid dog can be. But no, not in this movie. In the end the Devil Dog is transformed into its true self: a 20-foot-tall Pomeranian with a clown collar and a pair of stick-on horns. You can false-color that thing all you want, but it’s just not gonna frighten anyone.
Killer bunnies in Night of the Lepus – Many animals can be made scary if covered with the right makeup and shot from the right angle. But there is nothing, nada, zero, no way, no how, not a thing you can do to a fluffy bunny to make it look scary. These pet store refugees are going to draw a “Wook at the adowable wittle wabbit” no matter what. They can be as big as a Gweyhound bus, and they’re still going to look sweet and cuddly.
Of course it doesn’t help that the movie surrounding the Bunnies of Doom is one of the dumbest things ever distributed by a major studio. But sometimes even in a well-financed, carefully-assembled production, a cute animal falls flat. For instance, in Hannibal they spent a ton of money and carefully explained why the killer pigs were so dangerous. They did their level best to make them look menacing. Yeah, they’re not as cute as fuzzy bunnies, but their big scene is still a “Wow Hank, you’re really scared of them pigs, aintcha?” moment.
So horror movie makers take note: if you absolutely have to have a scary animal, start with something that’s actually scary. Snakes and spiders don’t always work, but they stand a better chance than puppies and bunnies.
Sentient garbage pile in Godzilla vs. Hedorah – Godzilla has taken on his share of lame monsters in his time. Of course that’s part of his job description. Defending the Earth against all attackers is sort of like being a Major League Baseball team. Sometimes you’re up against the evil Yankees (Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla), but for at least part of your schedule you have to host the Royals: giant caterpillars, giant roaches, and of course Hedorah.
In the movie’s original U.S. release, this thing was called The Smog Monster. The idea here is that if you get enough of the wrong kind of industrial waste together in one place, it undergoes garbage parthenogenesis and turns into a city-devouring beast. After Minimata Bay – or even just a hot, windless afternoon on the streets of Tokyo – the Japanese have every right to a particular dread of environmental disasters. But when the problem manifests itself as a Hefty Bag with a big, plastic eye? Godzilla must have come out of his trailer, got one look at this thing and thought, “Aw, c’mon! I’ve gotta fight that?”
Crab Monsters in Attack of the Crab Monsters – Giant crabs aren’t completely without shock value, as Ray Harryhausen proved in Mysterious Island. On the other hand, these things look like parade floats. It’s also their dumb luck to be stuck in one of Roger Corman’s “production speed is of the essence” monster movies. The plot is ridiculous, the script abysmal and the acting even worse.
Some might argue that the true king of this particular subsection of bad movie monsters is actually Ro-Man from Robot Monster. True, it’s hard to beat a guy in a gorilla suit with a half-baked space helmet head, especially when he menaces mankind with a bubble machine. But that’s exactly the problem. This isn’t an ineptly-made horror movie. This is a horror movie that’s so astoundingly ineptly made that it actually becomes a comedy. And as a comic character, Ro-Man does his job admirably.
Crab monsters, on the other hand, would only send you to bed with nightmares if you happened to have a dream about eating at Red Lobster and finding out that these things were the only items on the menu. That would have you waking up screaming “Yuck!”
Piñata in Piñata: Survival Island – Evil playthings are such a staple of the horror genre that they almost deserve a whole sub-genre all to themselves. And to be completely fair, sometimes they even kinda work. The first Chucky movie isn’t too terrible, and it seems like Rod Serling got a good Night Gallery sequence out of devil dolls once.
But more typical is a movie like Dolly Dearest. It starts with the same adorableness-of-evil premise as the demon-possessed puppy movie. And it falls just as flat.
Still, most killer doll movies are a birthday present compared to Piñata: Survival Island. For starters, the damn thing isn’t even a piñata. Instead it’s some kind of ancient voodoo fetish that transforms into an Xbox-worthy piece of CGI. And that’s a crying shame. Experience tells us that voodoo fetishes typically take 90 minutes or so to kill (or 30 minutes if they’re just one segment of an anthology piece). A piñata, on the other hand, can be wrecked in a matter of seconds by a small child with a stick. That would have been a much shorter movie, and with productions of this quality shorter is certainly better.
Giant prunes in The Langoliers – The last two spots on this list belong to Stephen King. Or in this case, the spot belongs to the film-makers who made a royal hash out of a King story. As a quarter of Four Past Midnight, the original tale was a solid piece of horror writing. A small band of characters get stuck outside the normal flow of time and find themselves in danger of being devoured by The Langoliers, monsters that consume reality after time has passed on and left it behind.
But what does a Langolier look like? I don’t remember how King described them, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t “oil drill bits stuck into giant, flying prunes.” The only blessing with these beasts is that they’re only on screen for ten minutes or so, leaving the rest of this mini-series to stink of its own accord.
Runaway trucks in Maximum Overdrive and Trucks – This fiasco, on the other hand, actually is King’s fault. The premise here is that some alien force has turned our cars and trucks against us. That makes it extremely hard to get past the “how,” let alone the “why.” Further, the story almost immediately starts to sink under its own weight. Won’t we be okay as soon as the monsters run out of gas? So then the trucks have to find ways to force people to pump gas for them. And so on.
Throw in Emilio Estevez as the savior of the human race, and you’ve got a four-wheeled dog on your hands. And just to prove that it wasn’t somehow Estevez’s fault, they tried it again in a made-for-TV version a couple of decades later and surprise surprise, it failed a second time.
In King’s defense, this same general concept worked to better effect in Christine. But the demon-possessed vintage auto was a little easier to swallow. The idea that an object can be infested by an evil spirit is as old as religion itself. Further, the car is tied to its owner’s bullied desire for revenge, so it makes more sense (and also supplies a fuel source). Even so, the reader of the book or viewer of the movie can’t help but have at least a moment or two where credulity slips and a “Demonic car? Jeez this is dumb!” feeling sets in.
Evil vehicle productions also suffer from some inherent logistical problems. In addition to needing gas, cars and trucks have only a limited ability to get people indoors, in the woods and in other places where tires aren’t much of an advantage. Worst of all, however, is that we have plenty of proof that these things fail no matter what. In The Car and the pickup-from-hell sequence from Nightmares, the evil machines attack most of their victims in the open where there’s genuinely no escape. Even so, they somehow just never get past the “Jeez this is dumb” point. Perhaps the auto dealership should join the pet store on the list of inherently bad locations for horror movie casting calls.
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