10 Best Movie Monsters
Spoiler alert: I give away details of some of the movies listed below, so if there's one that you haven't yet seen, read only the underlined part, and then go rent it. Once you've seen it, come back and finish reading the rest of the commentary. You're welcome.
10- The Predator from Predator (1987): A humanoid creature with a head like a crab and a mouth like one too, only with fangs. It has dreadlocks and fish-like skin, and came from another planet to hunt humans with its shoulder mounted laser gun, keeping their skulls as trophies. It can be hurt by bullets like us, but you have to find it first, as it has a great camouflage system in its arsenal that makes it nearly invisible. It's just a guy in a costume, but it's still a good movie monster.
9- King Kong from King Kong (1933): If a normal sized gorilla can be strong, fierce, and frightening, imagine one that's sixty feet tall and running loose in New York City. That's how scary King Kong must have been to the first audiences seeing the movie back in the thirties, and so successful a monster was he that he's still well known today. Kong was given life on film using stop motion photography, a slow and painstaking process where a model is posed, a frame of film is shot, and then the model is moved slightly and another shot taken and so on until all the frames put together and run at normal speed give the appearance of motion. A few seconds of Kong on the film took days, if not weeks, to produce.
8- The Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park (1993): Nothing scares us more than the primal fear of being eaten, and a hungry 30 foot T-Rex that can outrun us is our worst nightmare come true. It looks so real in this movie that you'd think they actually cloned one.
7- Frankenstein's Monster from Frankenstein (1931): A monster created in a lab by a mad scientist by assembling parts from corpses. He was tall, full of stitches, with a flat head and bolts in his neck (used to attach the wires needed to re-animate him). He spoke only in grunts, and terrified torch carrying villagers. His face is instantly recognizable today despite the fact that the original movie came out over sixty years ago…that's a successful monster.
6- Rosie O'Donnell from Exit to Eden (1994): I only caught a glimpse of this movie, but I saw a monster that was the ugliest, fattest-headed, most foul creature I had ever…what? It wasn't a costume? Oh. In that case...
6- Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors (1986): "I'm just a mean green mother from outer space and I'm bad…" sings Audrey 2, the man-eating plant that Seymour (Rick Moranis) finds in an exotic plant store. At first, it only needed a little blood (lovingly provided by Seymour), but when it grows to over six feet tall, its hunger multiplies. It starts to talk (voiced by Levi Stubbs, lead singer of "The Four Tops"), and offers Seymour fame and fortune in return for just a few people to munch on. It was a giant mouth with a purple tongue, big teeth, and lips that could form an evil smile. Though confined to a pot, Audrey 2 had vines that could grab things and move itself around somewhat. The effect was pretty remarkable for what was essentially a giant puppet.
5- The thing from The Thing (1982). This monster is different, in that it can take the shape of any living thing. If you catch it in the midst of transforming, though, you see what amounts to a distorted mass of flesh, muscle, and gooey organs, with multiple arms, legs, and heads. At one point in the movie, a head sprouts spider legs and tries to scamper off, only to be taken out by the one sure way of killing it: a flame thrower. There's only one scene that gets close to giving us a look at its true appearance, but even then it looks like a skinned dragon, again with the multiple body parts. A monster without specific form, but a great movie monster nonetheless.
4- The arachnids from Starship Troopers (1997). Although this movie is filled with giant bugs, my favorite is the yellow and black "arachnid": a ten foot tall spider-like creature with jagged edges and pointed legs that it uses to spear its victims. It kills without emotion, and it takes dozens of bullets to bring one down. One on its own is scary, but when they attack, there are often hundreds of them. The effects are excellent, a mixture of computer generated images and full scale models.
3- Godzilla, from the original Japanese version, Gojira (1954) and the many, many sequels. A giant green lizard monster that stood upright, Godzilla was created by American nuclear testing in the Pacific. It stood hundreds of feet tall (though its dimensions varied due to inconsistencies in scale), breathed radioactive fire, and destroyed cities by clumsily marching through them while the public ran in terror. Essentially, it was a guy in a cheap rubber suit strolling through model buildings…laughable by today's standards, but thoroughly entertaining to watch nonetheless, and immensely popular in it's time.
2- The "Graboid" from Tremors (1990). A forty foot worm that burrows underground, pushing its way through the earth with horn-like appendages. It hunts by hearing, as it has no eyes, and was named "Graboid" by one of the film's characters because of how it pops up from underground to grab its victims. It does so with a giant multi-sided beak, and contained within are three tongues, each one essentially a snake head, which can also grab. Bullets can harm it, but only when it's exposed, as the earth proves to be a great bullet stopper when it's under the ground. This makes it a frightening movie monster, as the characters never know exactly where it is.
1- The alien from Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997). A creature that starts off life by jumping out of its egg on to the face of an unsuspecting onlooker, where it lays another egg in its victim's stomach that eventually grows big enough to burst out, killing its host. It then feeds on whatever's around (frightened crew members on a spaceship, for example) growing at an alarming rate. The creature is pitch black, looking almost like a cross between a giant insect and the skeleton of a velociraptor. It has a long, curved head, a fang filled mouth set in a permanent evil grin out of which shoots a set of extendable jaws, and acid for blood. It's fast and smart, and has no mercy for its victims. Hands down, the best movie monster ever.