creature feature

Famous Monster B-Lister: The Mummy

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It may just be a marketing term coined by fans, but the existence of Universal’s “Famous Monsters” brand suggests that there must also be a Famous Monsters B-List. Every celebrity industry has its own power-rankings hierarchy, with public-figure colleagues competing amongst themselves for job opportunities and name recognition. Within Universal’s early horror successes from the 1930s through the 1950s, the C-List is easy to define, as it’s mostly made up of semi-literary characters who get excluded from the nostalgic posters and action figures celebrating the brand: Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, the bitchy little freaks Lugosi & Karloff play in The Black Cat, etc. Differentiating the B-List from the A-List is more of a case-by-case judgement call. To me, the official roster of Universal’s Famous Monsters can be cleanly split in half. The A-List celebrity monsters are Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. They’re the ones who most often cross-pollinate each other’s sequels, and they’re the ones whose likeness you’re most likely to see on generic Halloween decorations year after year. That leaves The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as B-List celebrity monsters, the ones whose numerous sequels and knockoff plastic masks collect dust on the shelf while the A-List monsters get to run wild in the streets every October into perpetuity.

The most curious case of B-List monster celebrity has got to be The Mummy, since his first appearance in the lineup immediately followed the success of Universal’s Frankenstein & Dracula, a decade before The Wolf Man. The problem is that the poor walking corpse spent his entire career following Frankenstein & Dracula’s heavy footsteps, never truly becoming his own thing. 1932’s The Mummy was penned by John L. Balderson, who is most famous for writing the 1924 stage play version of Dracula that starred Bela Lugosi and was eventually adapted to the screen by Tod Browning, kicking off the Universal Monsters brand. Balderson was seemingly going through the motions in his secondary contribution to the canon, writing yet another story of a foreign-born romantic ghoul who uses his evil powers of hypnosis to woo a young woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his one true love. Only, that archetype is instead played here by Lugosi’s career-long professional rival Boris Karloff, whose monstrous figure is most closely associated with Frankenstein’s monster, further minimizing The Mummy as a Famous Monsters footnote. Stuck between the lecherous behavior of one A-List Famous Monster and the walking-corpse physicality of another, The Mummy was destined to be relegated to the horror celebrity B-List, to the point where his initial onscreen outing is often confused for details from its various sequels & spoofs.

The Mummy pictured in the Universal Monsters branding never appears onscreen in 1932’s The Mummy; that’s a mummy of a different name. At the start of the picture, Karloff’s mummified Egyptian sorcerer Imhotep does appear wrinkled & bandaged as another monster creation from legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce, who also crafted the actor’s more famous look in Frankenstein. We just never see him moving outside the confines of his sarcophagus while wearing that get-up. After dismissing ancient curses warning against it as Egyptian “mumbo jumbo,” some naive archeologists invade Imhotep’s tomb to pilfer cultural artifacts for career-making museum exhibits, mistakenly activating the long-dormant loverboy’s corpse by reading the forbidden scrolls he was buried with aloud. Once awakened, Imhotep immediately leaves his tomb & rags behind to work on reclaiming his lost love through ancient magic spells, transforming from a dried up corpse to a mildly disconcerting gentleman with sun-damaged skin and glowing, hypnotic eyes. We never get to witness this bodily transformation, nor is there any shot of Karloff schlepping around in the famous mummy rags before putting on a more respectable fez-and-robe ensemble. The mummy’s walk out of his tomb is left mostly to the audience’s imagination, as the movie is more of a classy mood-setter than it is a proper creature feature. It leaves that cheap business to its many sequels, headlined by an entirely different mummy.

Although its many sequels frequently repurpose footage from the flashbacks to the undead Imhotep’s days as a living priest and self-proclaimed King of the Gods, they immediately swap him out for a new mummy named Kharis. Since the first of Universal’s Mummy films only has a couple shots of its titular monster in the iconic bandages, the sequels have to start over and dream up something more recognizable (i.e., more marketable) without relying on the familiarity of Boris Karloff’s mug. Weirdly, that leaves the 1940 follow-up The Mummy’s Hand both more archetypal and lesser seen than the original film it was tasked to rework. Getting ahead of the next decade’s trend of pairing Universal’s Famous Monsters with Abbott & Costello, The Mummy’s Hand already stars two over-their-heads Brooklyn goofballs who get into a scrape with the famous monster. The out-of-place American archeologists are desperate for a big score while shopping the markets of Egypt, where they again ignore locals’ warnings & curses and pry open the tomb of a long-dormant mummy, in this case Kharis. Again, that mummy is liberated from his sarcophagus and immediately seeks to reconnect with his supposedly reincarnated soul mate, but this time he never ditches the rags. This is where the image of The Mummy skulking around in full uniform is born, finally becoming his own thing (even if actor Tom Tyler plays him like Karloff’s Frankenstein with a bum leg).

Once Universal found a mummy they could market in Kharis, the rest of the sequels can only work to boost his stats to match the more formidable figures of Dracula, Frankenstein, and newcomer hotshot The Wolf Man. 1942’s The Mummy’s Tomb further legitimizes The Mummy by dressing up Lon Chaney, Jr. in the make-up for an otherwise pointless sequel, which is essential to the brand (see also: Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and the many appearances of Lawrence Talbot, a.k.a. The Wolf Man). Then, it proceeds to delegitimize the Mummy by further developing him into a blurry photocopy of Frankenstein’s monster; Kharis giveth, Kharis taketh away. Not only does Kharis start to carry around his unconscious, reincarnated loves with the exact posture of Karloff’s Frankenstein, but he’s also brought to a fiery end by an angry mob at the film’s climax, directly alluding to James Whale’s visual iconography. 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost continues that work by finally giving Kharis an official Bride of Mummy counterpart, complete with the white streaks of hair at the temples in the unmistakable style of Elsa Lanchester. At this point in the series, the perils of reckless archeology are no longer a concern. Once Kharis reaches American soil in Tomb & Ghost, the series fixates on red-blooded American men protecting their women from the corrupting forces of seductive foreigners. The most impressive thing about Ghost is that it commits to the bit in a shocker ending, finally allowing The Mummy to successfully steal away his reincarnated love, sinking into the swamp with her dangling in his arms as her body rapidly ages to close their centuries-scale age gap in mere seconds.

There’s some incredibly shameless runtime padding in The Mummy’s Tomb, starting off an hour-long sequel with over ten minutes of “Previously on . . .” recapping before setting The Mummy loose on American soil.  It’s an instructive reminder that these sequels were produced before the invention of home video and, subsequently, VHS rental stores. Since audiences couldn’t easily rewatch a classic movie on a whim, the studios would just remake that same movie again and again to scratch that itch, as a matter of routine. The later Mummy sequels have no interest in being their own thing; they just take the same old Mummy out for a walk. Even the choice to relocate Kharis to Cajun swamp country in 1944’s The Mummy’s Curse affords the series little novelty outside the amusement of hearing Old Hollywood’s goofy misinterpretations of the Cajun-French accent. The Mummy started as Egyptian Dracula in his first outing. Then, he gradually, improbably became New England Frankenstein. For his last trick, he emerges as Cajun Swamp Thing. He’s a true international playboy, seducing a new woman at each stop along the way, including a choice to leave The Bride of Mummy behind here in favor of a new The Mummy’s Princess love interest (future Folgers Coffee spokeswoman Virginia Christie, who looks incredibly hip here with some Bettie Page bangs). Even the novelty of seeing The Mummy trudge along in a swampy locale isn’t especially distinct to this famous monster, though, considering that Lon Chaney, Jr. had already appeared there in the previous year’s Son of Dracula (under the hilarious pseudonym Count Alucard). That’s not even getting into the obvious concerns of what would happen if you dragged your dried-out mummy through a humid swamp. The whole enterprise is one big afterthought.

Of course, the final indignity for all of Universal’s Famous Monsters is to officially sanction Lou Costello’s buffoonery, which The Mummy was tasked to do in 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. It’s here that the Mummy, forever following in Frankenstein & Dracula’s footsteps, has finally Made It. Even so, he’s way late to the party, taking his turn with the comedy duo after they already met Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll & Mister Hyde, and “The Killer, Boris Karloff” in similarly titled comedies. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was the very last of the comedians’ onscreen run-ins with Universal’s Famous Monsters, as it also marked the end of their overall contract with Universal Pictures. There are a few stray laughs scattered throughout the picture—mostly catering to fans of “mummy”/”mommy” puns—but the bit had very obviously been exhausted before The Mummy’s number was called, and it feels like just as much of a tired exercise as proper Mummy sequels like The Mummy’s Curse. None of the later Mummy films are especially great, but they are all mercifully short, and by the time you meet up with anyone for the sixth or seventh time they start to become your friend, so it’s fun to see him goof around in this final outing. It’s just that The Mummy is more like your work friend, whereas Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man are true buds you look forward to seeing on the weekend.

Like most horror franchises that stumble past their obvious expiration date, The Mummy’s initial outing is a great film in its own right, and its numerous, goofy follow-ups are only made endearing by their familiarity and nostalgic value. There’s nothing iconic about The Mummy’s lore, really. His tana-leaves medicine regimen, crime-scene contaminating mold, and smoky flashback pool have all been forgotten to time, as opposed to other Universal-specific details like Dracula’s hypnotic hand gestures or the bolts on Frankenstein’s neck. The Famous Monsters roster would feel thin & incomplete without him, but he’s mostly a background player. The biggest claim to modern fame for The Mummy is that its 1999 remake is by far the most success Universal has had in its attempts to revitalize its Famous Monsters brand for new generations. It succeeded where fellow studio titles like Renfield, Van Helsing, and Dracula Untold have failed. Even so, that accomplishment only further cements the original Mummy in a B-List status. When someone references the movie The Mummy in conversation, most people immediately picture Brendan Fraser, not Boris Karloff. The audience who remembers any of the Kharis titles in the series—Hand, Tomb, Ghost, Curse—is shrinking every year, despite that version of the monster being the one that appears on all of the throwback posters & Funko Pop boxes. Meanwhile, cinematic references to Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man immediately conjure the likeness of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr., which is what makes them official Famous Monster A-Listers. Everyone else is just lucky to be on the guest list.

-Brandon Ledet

Boys Go to Jupiter (2025)

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It’s been three decades since Toy Story diverted the animation industry towards computer animation instead of traditional hand-drawn & stop-motion techniques, and the world is mostly worse off for it. The CG animation era has largely been dispiriting, typified more by soulless corporate dreck like Bee Movie, Shrek, and The Secret Lives of Pets than more relatively artful corporate products like Across the Spider-Verse. It feels like the entire battlefield has been surrendered to lazy IP cash-ins so celebrities like Chris Pratt can collect easy voice-acting paychecks. I haven’t seen much genuine, personal art in the medium outside a few short films in festival showcases. The new debut feature from outsider 3D animator Julian Glander is a welcome glimpse of how that might change as the tools of the trade become more widely accessible outside the corporate offices of Disney & Pixar. Admittedly, Boys Go to Jupiter indulges in the same lazy celebrity voice-acting traditions of lesser, more expensive CG animated films, but this time the voice cast happens to be overpopulated with hip, talented people: Jeaneane Garofalo, Julio Torres, Cole Escola, Elsie Fisher, Joe Pera, Chris Fleming, Demi Adejuyigbe, Sarah Squirm, and the list goes on. It’s also got a distinct visual style, an understated tone, righteous politics, and an authentic sense of genuine humanity — all things that are difficult to find in the average computer-animated feature. It’s a vision of a better world, even if it’s one that satirizes the corporate hell world we currently live in.

In essence, Boys Go to Jupiter is cozy slacker art. It follows the daily toils of food-delivery-app worker Billy 5000 as he spends every waking minute scheming to earn the $5,000 fortune of his namesake. He scoots around his bumhole Florida town on a Segway, cramming in as many deliveries a day as he can to exploit a financial loophole in his delivery app before the bigwigs at Grubster catch onto the grift. Most of his interactions with fellow disaffected Floridians are exceedingly low-key, as he casually bumps into acquaintances like his dirtbag friends, his religious nut neighbor, an overly dedicated hotdog salesman, and his fellow Grubster drones while scooting from doorstep to doorstep. His coming-of-age Bummer Summer lifestyle is only effectively interrupted by the intrusion of two supernatural forces: an E.T.-type alien creature invading from beneath the Earth’s surface and a potential love interest who works at her mother’s science lab developing impossible varieties of semi-magical fruits. It turns out that even these fantastical players are weighed down by the daily mundanities of labor, however, as the older girl he crushes on struggles to accept her fate as her mother’s successor and the underground E.T. creature is revealed to belong to a family of social media food bloggers who have to transmit Grubster take-out reviews to their followers back home to justify their vacation on the surface. Many pointless hangouts and improvised junk food jingles ensue, with all of Billy 5000’s many trivialities revolving around one simple truth: having a job sucks.

The rounded edges, overemphasized light-sources, and blown-out haze of Glander’s visual style belong to the kind of 3D art renderings you’d only expect to see in indie comics and homemade videogames. Specifically, it plays like a D.I.Y. videogame set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City, so much so that I’m amazed it’s screening in neighborhood arthouses like Zeitgeist and not personal Steam Deck consoles. Whether Glander effectively applies that softly psychedelic visual aesthetic to anything especially unique or useful is up for debate. I didn’t find it had anything new to observe about gig-economy exploitation that wasn’t more successfully satirized in fellow low-budget sci-fi whatsit Lapsis, but it’s relatable & satisfying enough as a slacker comedy that its political effectiveness is a moot point. All I know is that I liked the way it looked, its laidback novelty songs soothed my addled brain, and I laughed every time Billy 5000 concluded a Grubster delivery with the fictional company’s signature slogan, “Have a Grubby day!” I know a lot of people had their faith in computer-animated outsider art restored by last year’s feline adventure flick Flow, but I couldn’t feel that future promise of the medium myself until I “went to Jupiter” (i.e. ate some junk food and sang silly songs on the beach) with the boys.

-Brandon Ledet

The Legend of Ochi (2025)

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For decades, whenever someone cited the “uncanny valley” effect of modern filmmaking, they were referring to the off-putting resemblance of CGI to real-life humanity. As computer technology inches nearer to photographic accuracy, the ways in which the images are still just slightly off become monstrously horrific, especially when rendering human faces. As a result, movie nerds tend to fetishize the practical effects of yesteryear, preferring the blatant artifice of movie-magic techniques like stop-motion, animatronics, and latex makeup transformations to the uncanny computer effects of our current corporate hellscape. Ironically, that fetishism has recently led to an entirely new uncanny valley forming between advanced practical effects and the CG graphics they’re meant to counteract. For instance, when the stop-motion Wallace & Gromit shorts were mostly made by Nick Park’s hands in the early 90s, you could see the lumpy imperfections of his fingerprints in the characters’ clay bodies, unmistakably marking them with evidence of human touch. Now that Wallace & Gromit features like Vengeance Most Fowl are being produced by hundreds of collaborators for major studios like Netflix, those fingerprints have to be artificially applied, intentionally warping the clay so the machine-printed faces can’t be mistaken for computer animation. Likewise, the new children’s fantasy-adventure The Legend of Ochi features an animatronic puppet so perfect in construction & operation that it uncannily resembles its CGI equivalents in movies from less discerning filmmakers. Music video director Isaiah Saxon has spent years perfecting the puppetry & matte paintings of his feature-film debut to revive an industry overrun by computer-generated tedium with some old-world movie magic and old-fashioned awe. He didn’t think to artificially muck up the final product like Aardman Animations, though, and the result is so uncannily similar to CGI that you have to wonder why he even bothered.

The titular Ochi are magical creatures brought to life via animatronic puppetry. The species largely resembles the golden snub-nosed monkeys of China, except that its bites are poisonous and its children are adorned with Mogwai ears for maximum cuteness. The Ochi are introduced to the audience in a scientific text titled Carpathian Beasts & Demons to help distinguish them from the real-life primates they resemble. Their presence on the fictional, Romania-adjacent island of Carpathia is treated as vampiric & monstrous, with a crazed patriarch played by Willem Dafoe training a new generation of boys to hunt & kill the supposedly demonic beasts on sight. His daughter is not so convinced of the nobility in this mission, and she quickly befriends a baby Ochi left behind by one of her father’s hunts. The rest of the movie is an E.T.-inspired children’s adventure, in which the sullen teenager runs away from home to safely return the Ochi to his fleeing family in a coming-of-age act of rebellion. If there’s any modern update to that familiar formula, it’s in Dafoe’s mockery of Jordan Peterson-style manosphere philosophy, which he preaches to impressionable young boys while driving around his monster-truck chariot in antique battlefield armor. He has no particular interest in his daughter beyond her value as “a father’s greatest treasure,” while she rejects her extremely gendered role in the house by donning costume vampire fangs and cranking heavy metal tunes from the fictional band Hell Throne. The goodbye note she leaves when she runs away proudly declares, “I am strong and cool and don’t believe anything you say,” speaking for all teenage rebels everywhere in their universal language of sass. As a result, the movie should spiritually speak to any depressed loner children who resent their bloviating fathers—of which there is always an infinite supply—regardless of whether they’ve already seen an E.T. riff or three.

The Legend of Ochi evokes all of the childlike wonder and sarcastic teen humor needed to make this genre formula work, but neither of those elements are entirely convincing. Its teenage characters (Helena Zengel as the Ochi’s bestie and Finn Wolfhard as a burgeoning fuckboy who’s “only nice when no one’s looking”) mumble their lines under mops of greasy hair to the point of near indecipherability. They aim for deadpan comedy but overshoot to land at dead-eyed monotony instead. There are also long stretches of the adventure to Ochi territory that have no dialogue at all, which would test audiences’ patience at any age and suggests that Saxon isn’t used to filling up a feature-length runtime with his writing. The real disappointment is that the psychedelic magic of his past music video work for artists like Björk & Panda Bear fall short of inspiring awe here. His puppetry & matte-painting visual tricks, while admirably old-fashioned, are too technically perfect to convey their construction by human hands. When the trailer for the film first dropped, social media C.H.U.D.s baselessly accused Saxon of boosting his budget with A.I.-generated imagery, which had to be heartbreaking for an artist who spent multiple years fighting to render this passion-project fantasy world through the most practical, tactile methods possible. Still, the final result is a little too machine-perfect to inspire genuine awe, and you can easily see what stoked those accusations. There’s an uncanny valley effect in how close its state-of-the-art puppets resemble computer-generated images, leaving them a little off-putting & soulless despite the passionate craft behind them. Saxon technically did everything right here. The aesthetic is distinct; the puppets are cute and smoothly operated; the gender politics are pointed and relevant to the moment; the kids are authentically mopey & rebellious. That’s what makes it so frustrating that the movie never fully sings, even if it can demonstrably hit all the right notes in perfect pitch.

-Brandon Ledet

Son of Godzilla (1967)

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Godzilla’s titular offspring in the 1967 kaiju comedy Son of Godzilla doesn’t officially have a name, or at least he didn’t yet. Between the film’s release and the character’s return in the following year’s Destroy All Monsters, Toho held a contest for Godzilla fans to name the reptilian tyke, and the world settled on the name “Minilla,” a portmanteau of “Mini” and “Godzilla”. In his initial appearance, however, he’s only referred to as “Baby Godzilla” by the humans on the ground gazing up at his towering, toddling glory. Minilla has gone on to become a viciously hated name within the larger, ongoing Godzilla fandom. He’s cited in online sources as Godzilla’s “adopted son,” but I’m not sure that his initial appearance backs that detail up either. In Son of Godzilla, Baby Godzilla is prematurely hatched from a mysterious egg when his nest is discovered by gigantic mantises (Kamakuras) looking for an easy meal. Before he can gather the strength to flee, he is immediately rescued by Godzilla, who is summoned by his pathetic cries for help. There is no appearance or mention of a mother figure who might have laid that egg, but the scientists & freelance reporter watching from the ground all immediately refer to Godzilla as the pitiful creature’s father. The King of Monsters takes on that responsibility with enough gusto that the question of their biological relation is beside the point. Godzilla teaches Baby Godzilla how to breathe fire and how to rule over the giant bugs that infest the small island where he hatched, like a dad teaching his son how to play catch or how to change a car’s engine oil. It’s all very cute, assuming that you can stand looking directly at the mini-Godzilla’s craggly face.

Baby Godzilla is cute in the exact way that a pathetically ugly rescue dog is cute. Every bumbling minute spent with him is a gift, since it’s a miracle he wasn’t immediately put down. When the giant mantises poke at his freshly hatched body, all he can do is roll around in the dirt like a waterlogged roast turkey that fell off the kitchen table. Minilla has neither a name nor a neck in his first appearance, the latter of which presumably develops during puberty for his species. He falls down constantly, he squawks like an injured donkey, and his every movement is scored as if he were an overweight clown trying to squeeze himself into an impossibly tiny car. I love him. The great thing about Godzilla movies is that they are, at their very least, 2-for-1 creature features that double the number of rubber-suited monsters you’d expect to see in an equivalent Roger Corman cheapie. Whether Godzilla’s fighting a three-headed hell beast, a giant crawfish, or a sentient pile of trash, you’re getting at least two monsters for the price of one. For its part, Son of Godzilla offers you four giant beasts: Godzilla himself (who graciously appears less than a minute into the opening scene), the aforementioned glowing-eyed Kamakura mantises, a giant spider named Kumonga and, the most unholy abomination of all, Baby Godzilla. That’s a lot of bang for your buck, so it’s a little silly that dedicated fans of the series waste so much energy complaining about this outing just because they have to babysit Godzilla’s uggo offspring to get to the good stuff. Not even Godzilla bodyslamming Kamakuras to death and then lighting their mantis corpses on fire is enough to overcome the film’s reputation as Kiddie Junk, à la Godzilla vs Megalon. Pity.

As always, the human drama in the periphery of these kaiju battles is mostly an afterthought. Director Jun Fukuda continues the fun island hangout vibe he previously established in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, putting in a bare-minimum effort to connect the kaiju shenanigans to an obligatory environmental message. A secret collective of environmental scientists has taken over a small island off the Japanese coast to conduct experiments in controlling the weather, in preparation for future climate change & overpopulation crises. Mysterious machines whir in the background while the scientists float balloons full of experimental chemical compounds into the atmosphere that can adjust the local temperature on demand. A freelance journalist crashes the party but ultimately doesn’t find these experiments nefarious, so he casually joins the crew as a cook (and a potential lover for the island’s sole resident, who lurks in the nearby jungle). The weather machine business does eventually come in handy in two ways, though. It offers Godzilla some miniature structures to knock down, as is his wont, and it sets up a graphically beautiful conclusion in which the scientists trigger a snowstorm that freezes Godzilla & Baby Godzilla into forced hibernation. The final image is of the parent & child huddling for warmth as they’re buried alive in snow, while the scientists escape the island via raft and congratulate themselves on a humane resolution to the monster attacks. Admittedly, they do find a way to escape without killing Godzilla’s baby, but I still found the image to be hauntingly sad. Baby Godzilla has a fucked up little face that only a parent could love, and Son of Godzilla vividly illustrates that cold isolation from an otherwise unkind world in its final minute. It’s almost enough to make you cry.

-Brandon Ledet

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)

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There are many ways in which the Louisiana education system is an embarrassing disaster. We often rank at the stank-ass bottom of US states in our education metrics, with a long history of political corruption, racial segregation, and religious privatization getting in the way of any progress towards improvement. So, I feel it’s totally legitimate to blame that system for the fact that I have been living in Louisiana for four decades and have never once seen the movie where Godzilla fights a giant crawfish. There should be annual screenings of Ebirah, Horror of the Deep in every local middle school. It should be as integral to Southeast Louisiana culture as The Blue Dog, “You Are My Sunshine,” and “They All Ask’d for You.” Godzilla fights a giant crawfish in it, for God’s sake. The school system has failed us yet again.

Part of the reason why Ebirah is missing from local syllabi is that the exact species of its titular crustaceous monster is up for debate. Most kaiju scholarship cites Ebirah as the middle ground between a shrimp and a lobster, citing that the “ebi” section of its name is interchangeable in reference to either shrimp or lobster in Japanese. It’s a compelling aural argument, but I also have eyes and, as a lifelong Louisiana resident, I know a crawfish when I see one. Ebirah enters Horror of the Deep claw first, smashing a fishing boat with its dominant limb to tease the mystery of what kind of giant crustacean it could possibly be: shrimp, crab, lobster, etc. As soon as its body emerges from the water to reveal its full form, however, the question is firmly, definitively answered. That’s a dang crawfish.

The kaiju saviors summoned to de-claw and dispense of this monster crawfish are Godzilla & Mothra, who spend most of the movie enjoying a nap. Returning to her winged moth form after spending a couple battles against King Ghidorah as a silk-spewing grub, Mothra is getting her beauty sleep on Infant Island, while the indigenous people she protects pray for her to wake up and save the day. Meanwhile, Godzilla is thought to be dead while he takes an angry-nap under a pile of rocks in a oceanside cave. He’s awoken Frankenstein-style via electric shock, channeling lightning through a sword and a trail of copper wire rigged to ruin his nap. Pissed, Godzilla immediately springs into action and destroys everything in striking distance, a rampage that includes ripping Ebirah’s claws off and kicking him back into the ocean depths.

Because the kaiju fights are delayed by siesta, Horror of the Deep leaves plenty of room for humans-on-the-ground drama, which it only takes semi-seriously. The story centers on a young man who’s desperate to reunite with a brother lost at sea, since he was told by a psychic that his brother is still alive. His schemes to engineer the family reunion improbably involve a televised dance contest, a stolen yacht, and a fugitive bank robber, only for both brothers to be shipwrecked on a small island overrun with militant fascists, thanks to Ebirah’s boat-smashing claw. You see, a vicious militia known as The Red Bamboo have forced the indigenous people of Infant Island to work as slaves in order to produce a fruit-based chemical that repels & controls the mighty Ebirah, and the only way to stop them is cause a little chaos by waking both Godzilla & Mothra — a scheme even more harebrained than saving the day via dance contest.

Once all of the skyscraper combatants are awake and engaged, Horror of the Deep proves to be one of the more fun, lively entries in the early Godzilla canon — the most playful since King Kong vs Godzilla. Director Jun Fukuda takes over from Godzilla mastermind Ishirō Honda here, and he loosens up the tone with some fun novelty additions to the format. Ebirah’s attacks are often filmed from a 1st-person perspective, shot in Crawvision. Godzilla also fights the crawbeast underwater, a precursor to the zombie vs shark fight of Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2. His reluctant face-turn to heroism is jubilantly scored to surf rock, a soundtrack that seemingly inspires Godzilla to dance. The biggest laugh of the movie, however, is the dialogue exchange where our yacht-stealing hero answers the insult, “Your brother’s crazy!” with the deadpan retort, “Yeah, crazy about helping those in need.” That’s good stuff.

Regardless of your personal Louisiana residency status, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep lands as an especially fun, light-on-its-feet Godzilla outing. I was surprised to learn that its American dub, Godzilla vs The Sea Monster, was given the robo-heckling treatment on an early episode of MST3k, which means the show was ironically mocking a movie that was already clearly intended to be an unserious hoot. That’s not the only American institution that let the film down, though, or even the most egregious. It’s time that Louisianans write their  senators to petition for Ebirah, Horror of the Deep to be screened in all local grade school classrooms (assuming that Louisiana schools can even still afford the AV carts of yesteryear). The kids need to know about the giant crawfish movie.

-Brandon Ledet

Enter King Ghidorah

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There’s just no way around it; King Ghidorah is the most heavy metal monster in movie history. I mean that in the literal sense, since the supreme kaiju being is seemingly armored by a layer of gold scales, making his “heavy metal” designation as matter-of-fact as Mechagodzilla‘s. Of course, I also mean it in the colloquial sense. The three-headed dragon beast is loudly & proudly metal as fuck on a cellular level. When Ghidorah flies into the frame to take down Godzilla and his fellow skyscraper flunkies, the image conjures the crushing sounds of heavy-metal guitar riffs in audiences’ brains, even in the 1960s pictures that were produced well before Black Sabbath had a record deal. Ghidorah is so metal, in fact, that it takes at least three other Toho-brand monsters to muscle him out of the pit, one for each lightning-spewing head. 🤘

The first time I encountered King Ghidorah was in the 1968 kaiju crossover picture Destroy All Monsters, in which the space-alien bio weapon was unleashed to union-bust a gang of kaiju that included Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan (among the less-famous monsters Minilla, Gorosaurus, Anguirus, Kumonga, and Varan). Seen out of order in my winding journey through Criterion’s Godzilla box set, this appeared to be an especially grand ego-boost for the giant beast, like when WWE puts over their biggest, brawniest wrestler by having them eliminate every other competitor on the roster during the Royal Rumble. As it turns out, that was Ghidora’s exact funciton from the very beginning, and his debut entrance into the Toho kaiju ring marked the very first time Godzilla felt compelled to team up with other monsters to fight on humanity’s behalf. That Godzilla face-turn was in 1963’s Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, in which evil space aliens declare interplanetary warfare by launching Ghidorah at Planet Earth, threatening to take over. It’s then up to Mothra, in her squirming grub form, to convince Godzilla & the pterodactyl-like Rodan to stop throwing rocks at each other like schoolyard children and instead join forces to fight off this existential, heavy-metal threat. They’re both petty assholes about it, but they eventually relent and team up to repel the flying hell-beast before going their separate ways.

The reluctant tag team of Godzilla & Rodan reforms when King Ghidorah returns in 1965’s Invasion of the Astro-monster. Rebranded with his new wrestler gimmick as Monster Zero, Ghidorah is once again deployed as an interplanetary weapon of mass destruction, one that can only be disarmed by the collective power of multiple kaiju opponents. His inevitable 2-on-1 battle with Godzilla & Rodan is delayed until the climactic 15 minutes of the runtime, though, as the invading Xiliens from Planet X smartly abduct Godzilla & Rodan with UFO tractor beams and imprison them for as long as possible so Ghidorah can do maximum damage, unchecked. Without the large-scale monster battles to fill up the runtime, Invasion of the Astro-monster spins its wheels with lengthy indulgences in political espionage and The X From Outer Space-style extraterrestrial cocktail parties. It’s maybe not the most thrilling approach to making a monster movie, but it does lead to some gorgeous 60s-kitch imagery. It’s impossible to decide what the most striking image of the film is in retrospect, but I’ve narrowed it down to two options: literalizing the Cold War aspect of the Space Race by putting a gun in the flag-planting astronaut’s free hand or Godzilla being abducted by a UFO. Then, Ghidorah soars into the frame to battle Godzilla & Rodan once again, erasing such questions entirely with heavy-metal bursts of lightning.

If there’s one detail of Ghidorah’s design that makes his metal-as-fuck majesty immediately obvious, it’s that each of his individual dragon heads moves independently, which is especially impressive when combined with his suitmation power of flight. It’s a lot like watching Kermit the Frog ride a bicycle for the first time in The Muppet Movie, adding an entire new dimension to kaiju suitmation spectacle audiences previously did not dream was possible. The suit was reportedly exceedingly difficult to operate as a result, often leading to longer shooting schedules as his operators struggled to keep his long, golden necks from tangling like noodles. Like headbanging to thrash riffs, it was well worth the headache. Everything else that makes Ghidorah so thunderously badass is immediately, visually obvious. He is the essence of metal, skyborne and beautiful. Godzilla mastermind Ishirō Honda’s impulse to bulk up the monster’s reputation by making him undefeatable unless several other kaiju attack in unison was a smart one, but it was also necessary. Look at him. No one would buy into the kayfabe otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

Dark Intruder (1964)

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Recently, Brandon texted me to let me know that Puzzle of a Downfall Child—one of my favorite films that I have ever seen and which, when we covered it for Movie of the Month in June of 2019, was almost impossible to find save for a (now deleted) YouTube upload—was on sale from Koni Lorber on Blu-ray for only $10. (We are not sponsored, but I would gratefully accept a free copy if the traffic on the above link is in any way influential.) Brandon mentioned that he thought Dark Intruder would be up my alley, and I realized that I had already acquired a copy of this in a lot of Alfred Hitchcock items some years ago. Dark Intruder is not actually a Hitchcock affiliated project, as it was shot as the pilot for a proposed series to be called Black Cloak, but the crew of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series did shoot it, so it makes sense that the aficionado whose estate sale I attended would have lumped it in there. 

Clocking in at a hair shy of a full hour, Dark Intruder has several points in its favor. Leslie Nielsen plays the lead: a socialite playboy named Brett Kingsford, whose persona belies a fascination with (and some talent for handling) the occult. He has a little person manservant/butler named Nikola (Charles Bolender) who assists him, and he’s friends with Police Commissioner Harvey Misbach (Gilbert Green). If you’re someone like me whose brain has been completely rotted by too many comic book movies, then you probably recognize a very Batman-like pattern in there, simply replacing the “cowardly and superstitious lot” that our apparent layabout aristocrat faces with investigations into the arcane and the mystical. It’s also a period piece, being set in late 19th Century San Francisco, so there’s plenty of handsom cabs, gaslights, and fog to establish the mood. The plot kicks off when Kingsford is visited by his friend Evelyn (Judi Meredith), who asks him to check in on her fiance Robert (Mark Richman), as he has started to become sullen and withdrawn. Kingsford is also summoned by Commissioner Gordon, um, I mean Misbach, to consult on a series of murders. There’s no apparent connection between the victims, but it is clearly the work of a serial killer based on both the modus operandi and that there is a ceramic statuette left behind; the sculptures depict a man with a gargoyle on the back of his head, with each successive totem showing the gargoyle emerging further and further. 

There’s some investigative rigamarole, and it’s moderately engaging. Kingsford goes to consult an Asian mystic (if the film was more specific, I could be too) who burns some incense with him and reveals, in a roundabout way, that there will be seven murders and then the creature will fully emerge. If you’re interested in this, it’s a fairly short time commitment (even if it’s one that I wouldn’t say is particularly worth the effort), so be forewarned that I’m about to spoil the reveal of this sixty-year-old failed TV pilot, if that’s something you can bring yourself to care about. Everybody still reading fine with the reveal? Ok. See, Dark Intruder throws out a lot of ideas, including talking about Lovecraftian concepts and name-dropping Dagon, but what this ultimately boils down to is a bit of a Basket Case situation. Evelyn’s fiance Robert was born with a malformed twin that all believed had died save for the family nurse who kept and raised him, and the murdered people were all party to this in some way or another. If the creature can kill all seven intended victims by a certain night (which also happens to be the night of Eliza and Robert’s wedding rehearsal … or something — this was very difficult to pay attention to) then he and Robert will swap bodies, and he will no longer be a monster. 

There’s nothing wrong with that premise, but I have to admit that as much as I love Nielsen, he does not feel right in this role. He’s playing the character a bit too modernly, with a bit too much of a sneer. This might be a long reach, but the thing it reminded me of the most was the early-aughts Bruce Campbell TV vehicle Jack of all Trades, a campy pleasure of mine in which Campbell plays an American spy named Jack Stiles, stationed on a South Pacific Island in the early 1800s, and doing a bit of a Scarlet Pimpernel thing in his alter ego as the Daring Dragoon. A part of the comedy comes from the fact that Bruce Campbell is playing the Jack no differently than he would play a modern part; the charm comes from how much you enjoy Bruce Campbell saying something pithy and then making a face at the camera, which is not for everyone (more for me!). It feels strange to call Leslie Nielsen’s performance something that feels “too modern” when we’re talking about something that predates the moon landing, but that’s precisely what’s happening. This isn’t the sincere, stoic Nielsen that you get in Forbidden Planet or any number of his appearances across Columbo & Murder She Wrote, nor is it the all-gas no-brakes tomfoolery of his later career. Instead, it’s just a little subtle smugness to him, where he’s a little too above it all and snarky about it, and it’s the same energy that he had in Airplane! It feels wrong, and that permeates the entire piece. 

The design of Robert’s Belial is a mixed bag. The face is appropriately harrowing to look at but is little different from a wolfman design. Dark Intruder is smart to keep this from us for as long as it does, instead showing only the monster’s impressive (and scary) hawklike talons for most of the runtime. Its best sequence involves Kingsford, Robert, and Evelyn having been drawn to meet a reclusive medium, who speaks from beneath a dark cowl with an eerie, distorted voice, and when the protagonistic group leaves, the reveal of those talons from beneath the psychic’s robes is effective. For much of the rest of it, however, wheels are spinning. I was reminded of the last few seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, when the program was retitled as the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the stories ran for an entire hour block instead of a thirty-minute one. Almost all of those that I have seen suffer a great deal from being expanded to that length, in comparison to the better-paced segments from when the show was half the runtime. Everyone besides Nielsen completists can leave this one off their watchlists, unless you’re merely drawn in by the oddity’s novel mechanical qualities. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Orang Ikan (Monster Island, 2025)

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I can’t remember the last time I saw a rubber-suit monster movie at the theater.  The modern monster movie has fully outsourced its creature effects to animatronics & computer graphics nerds, so that the traditional guy-in-a-suit Roger Corman creature feature is effectively an antique relic (outside the occasional tongue-in-cheek throwback like Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!).  There’s something refreshingly sincere about the new straight-to-Shudder monster picture Orang Ikan, then, which recently had its local theatrical premiere at The Overlook Film Festival.  It’s a fully traditional rubber-suit Corman creeper, even padding out its 80-minute runtime with a plot-recapping clip show to help it crawl into feature length — a classic Corman tactic.

The Western-market title Monster Island sets expectations for kaiju-scale creatures here, as does the early-40s WWII setting.  Two soldiers from opposing sides of the Japanese-British divide are shipwrecked together on a mysterious island in the Pacific Ocean, suddenly dependent on each other for survival instead of working towards each other’s destruction.  The search for food, shelter, and dry cigarettes is alone enough to make their time on the island lethally miserable, but then they also have to contend with the island’s native inhabitants: a creature from The Black Lagoon, or at least that famous monster’s distant relative.  In the earliest creature attacks, the monster is obscured in dark shadows, quick edits, and up-close angles that threaten to hide all of the money shots out of embarrassment for the production’s scale & budget.  Thankfully, the creature is soon displayed in a full-body wide shot in beachside daylight, proudly showing off all its classic rubber-suited glory.

If there’s any thematic justification behind importing a rubber-suited monster into what’s effectively a battlefield drama, it’s in how war transforms enemy combatants into The Other.  An international co-production, Orang Ikan is evenly split between Japanese & English dialogue, with its two stranded, chained-together soldiers attempting to find common ground despite the language barrier and their opposing military orders.  Likewise, when the creature first appears on the island, it’s likened to the instinctual violence of a territorial crocodile hunting for its next meal.  Then, the humanoid monster fights that croc to the death in a desperate bid for its own survival, mirroring the soldiers’ struggle with the local elements.  When the soldiers inevitably have to kill the monster anyway, there’s a tinge of sadness to the act, with the camera lingering on the death of the creature’s unborn fetus on a cave-room floor.  War makes monsters of us all, and so on, and so forth.

There seems to be something about aquatic creatures in particular that have made them the last refuge for the practical-effects monster movie.  Between the fish-men of The Shape of Water & Cold Skin, the killer mermaids of The Lure, and the aquatic goofballs of Lake Michigan Monster & Riverbeast!, they’re keeping the humanoid monster dream alive & wet.  In that context, I suppose that if Orang Ikan had gone full kaiju-scale “suitmation” in its rubber-suit monster mayhem, it might have registered as a more daring genre outlier, but I’m happy with the classic Roger Corman creature feature payoffs as delivered.  Funnily enough, the most daring aspect of the film was likely unintentional, as its push for wordless male bonding between its stranded soldiers reads as electrically homoerotic in moments.  It’s not like the soldiers smooch or anything, but they do lovingly call out each other’s names and light each other’s cigarettes. Of course, unspoken homoeroticism in wartime dramas is its own long-running cinematic tradition; it’s just one that usually doesn’t make room for a crocodile-murdering fish beast in the frame.

-Brandon Ledet

Gamera’s 90s Makeover

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All you really need to earn respectability in the entertainment industry is to stick around long enough for the bad reviews to fade away and your presence is undeniable. It worked for Keanu Reeves, it worked for Adam Sandler, and it also worked for the fire-breathing turtle monster Gamera.  When Gamera first premiered in the 1960s, the giant turtle beast was essentially a goofy knockoff of Godzilla, and he was treated as such.  As a result, he quickly pivoted to become a “hero to children everywhere” in a long string of kiddie sequels (before Godzilla also got into that game), so that the original Daikaijū Gamera film was never treated with the same critical or historical respect as the original Gojira.  We all love Earth’s hard-shelled protector anyway, though, so it’s good to know that Gamera did eventually get his deserved victory lap in the 1990s, when he was given a slick, big-budget makeover to help boost his reputation as one of the kaiju greats.  I haven’t yet seen all of Gamera’s kid-friendly sequels from the 1960s & 70s, but I can’t imagine any could compare with his action-blockbuster spectacles from the 1990s.  Gamera’s Heisei-era trilogy is a glorious run of high-style, high-energy kaiju pictures that for once genuinely compete with the best of the Godzilla series, instead of registering as a court jester pretender to the King of Monsters’ throne.

The debut of that 90s makeover, 1995’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, is both the best and the most faithful of the trilogy.  Gamera is re-introduced to the world as a living relic of Atlantis, not a newly arrived extraterrestrial protector.  He battles the Giant Claw-like bird creatures the Gyaos from his 1960s days, who are theorized to have been activated by Climate Change, and his ability to fight them off is powered by a child’s love.  Just in case audiences weren’t sure that this straightforward Gamera revival was inspired by the success of Jurassic Park, Guardian of the Universe almost immediately includes an archeological dig and a scene where the scientist studying the Gyaos shoves an entire arm into their droppings like Laura Dern going shoulder deep in triceratops poop.  It’s the Jurassic Park style mixed-media approach to the visual effects that really makes this one stand out, since the plot and the monster-of-the-week enemies are such classic Gamera fare.  There’s something gorgeous about the film’s 90s green screen magic, surveillance video inserts, and rudimentary CGI mixing with the rubber monster suit tactility of classic kaiju pictures that inspires awe in this reputation-rehabilitator.  We are all Sam Neill gazing upwards, slack-jawed at our giant reptile friend and, then, begging the Japanese military to stop shooting at him so he can save the day.  Every time Gamera bleeds green ooze in his fight to save us, we too ooze a tear in solidarity.

Things turn more horrific in the 1996 sequel Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, shifting from Jurassic Park to Mimic in Hollywood comparison terms.  Instead of fighting off the Gyaos sky-beasts, Gamera has to face underground bug creatures collectively called Legion.  As a threat, Legion can be genuinely unnerving in their Phase IV-style insectoid organization skills, at one point carpeting Gamera’s entire body in a collective swarm.  In individual design, they’re a touch creepier than the Arachnids from Starship Troopers, adding a gross little cyclops eyeball to the center of each bug’s frame.  All we can do in the face of such horrors is to thank Gamera for sticking around to protect us . . . unless you happen to be one of the poor children orphaned by the large-scale destruction of his skyscraper heroism.  Gamera’s enemy in the third installment, 1999’s Revenge of Iris, is the titular parasitic monster that has been orphaned by the turtle’s heroic violence, birthed from a loan surviving egg seemingly borrowed from the set of an Alien sequel.  Really, though, Gamera has to contend with the disaffected child psychically linked to that monster, who lost her parents when Gamera crushed their apartment during a Legion attack in the previous picture.  It’s a plot that questions whether the widespread collateral damage of Gamera’s heroism is worth having him around to fight off lesser monsters, to the point where he has to fight a personified version of the Trauma he’s caused in past battles. We all still love the big guy, but accountability is important.

Of the two sequels, Revenge of Iris is the only true contender for possibly besting Guardian of the Universe as the best of Gamera’s 90s run.  By that point in the series, Gamera’s reputation as something too goofy to take seriously had been fully overcome, so there was only one goal left to achieve: make Gamera scary.  It’s an incredible accomplishment, achieved by filming the giant turtle beast from inside the homes he’s supposedly protecting with his righteous, vengeful violence.  There’s a somber, funereal tone to Revenge of Iris, as if it were clear to the filmmakers that Gamera’s 90s revival was a special moment in time that had already reached its natural conclusion.  Images of dead Gyaos covered in flies and a sea floor carpeted in dead Gameras from Atlantis’s ancient past convey a sad finality to the series echoed in Gamera’s “What have I done?” moment self-reflection when he realizes he has traumatized the very children he sought to protect.  Personally, I was much more impressed & delighted by the spectacle of Gamera’s official makeover in Guardian of the Universe, but the tonal & thematic accomplishments in Revenge of Iris are just as remarkable, considering the monster’s humble origins three decades earlier.  Attack of Legion is a worthy bridge between those two franchise pillars as well, especially on the strength of its creepy creature designs.  Gamera may not have emerged from his 90s run as a hero to all children everywhere, but he carved out an even bigger place for himself in this overgrown child’s heart.  I love my giant turtle friend, and I’m happy that he eventually found the respect he’s always deserved.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #224: Pitch Black (2000) & The Riddick Chronicles

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Welcome to Episode #224 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the many chronicles of Richard B. Riddick, starting with the sci-fi creature feature Pitch Black (2000).

00:00 We Love to Watch

06:53 Vin Diesel
21:30 Pitch Black (2000)
48:52 The Riddick Cinematic Universe

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew