Tag Creatures/Monsters

• AKA:


• Director: John R. Cherry III


• Writer: John R. Cherry III (story), Charles Gale (screenplay), Coke Sams (screenplay & story)


• Starring: Jim Varney, Eartha Kitt, Austin Nagler, Shay Astar


• Run Time: 91 mins

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A long time ago, the town of Briarville was terrorised by an evil troll who stole the town’s children and turned them into little wooden carvings. But he was stopped by Ernest P. Worrell and enslaved beneath an oak tree, never to be disturbed again. Years later, Worrell’s bumbling great-grandson unwittingly helps a group of local children build a tree house on that very tree, inadvertently freeing the troll to continue his reign of terror and get revenge upon the Worrell family.

I may be lowering the tone of the site somewhat by reviewing this goofy 1991 family comedy-horror – after all, the Ernest films have been widely ridiculed and mocked by critics. For those who don’t know, Ernest P. Worrell was a bumbling, comedy character played by the late Jim Varney. He started off playing the character on commercials and television but then received his own films series based on his popularity in North America (nine films in total, although the joke character wore off significantly over the years). On a similar vein of comedy to Pee-Wee Herman, Ernest was designed to appeal to children and panders to the lowest common denominator of comedy: falling over a lot, acting silly, talking in daft voices, etc. The character was always seen in low paid jobs like janitors or cab drivers and got into disastrous situations which were way over his head. But he was a sincere oaf – a kid in an adult’s body.

The fourth of the slapstick series, Ernest Scared Stupid sees the lovable dim-wit doing his bit in the comedy-horror genre. It’s easily his best performance in the role and the best film in the series. Varney was a classically-trained Shakespearian actor before he donned the cap and assumed the character so you know that everything he hams up, he’s doing so deliberately. One of the trademarks of the role is his ‘multiple personality’ scenes in which he rapidly changes character from Ernest to an assortment of old ladies, Roman generals, lumberjacks, Ottoman warriors and more. It’s interesting to watch the character from an adult perspective, understanding just how well Varney manages to bring to life a variety of different accents and characters, albeit for a few fleeting moments.

Adults will find a few humorous references to other films (notably Ernest being trapped inside a garbage compactor which harks back to Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom). Plus the credits sequence features clips from a whole host of old school shockers like The Brain from Planet Arous and The Killer Shrews. Kids will love the silliness of it all, with Ernest running into doors, being thrown off moving trucks in oil drums and get into old school slapstick moments with cars, dumpsters and such like.

Taking the slapstick out of the equation, Ernest Scared Stupid is actually a great family-friendly horror film which really manages to strike the right spooky atmospheric vibes. As a horror film, it includes many of the usual clichés including the unbelieving townspeople, the resident nut job who knows more than they should (played here with relish by Eartha Kitt) and the array of stock characters who inhabit the town. The plot itself is rather threadbare and is more or less introduced right from the start so the rest of the film is just set piece after set piece. At least pacing of the film is spot on as Ernest lumbers from one predicament to the next, all leading up to a memorable finale as the townspeople attempt to defeat the troll and his children in the woods. The forest locations are superbly dark, fog-drenched, swampy places to add to the ambiance and there’s a terrific score to add to the Halloween spirit.

Big props need to be given to the Chiodo Brothers and make-up department here. The troll looks awesome, all dripping with slime and goo. He’s a nasty piece of work, aggressive and violent enough to pose a threat but not overtly horrifying to frighten the life out of the target audience. Late in the film, his ‘children’ come to life and again the make-up job is superb, giving each new troll a bit of character in the brief moments that they’re on screen.

Ernest Scared Stupid is perfect family Halloween foil: light-hearted, good-natured and with just enough chills and spills to entertain young children without scaring them too much (though one or two scenes are pretty tense). Yeah I admit, it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea but if you’ve got kids and its Halloween, put this on and watch them love it (and who knows, you may even find yourself smiling along)

• AKA:


• Director: Roy Knyrim


• Writer: Pat Coburn (story), Brian Patrick O'Toole, J. Victor Renaud (story)


• Starring: Reggie Bannister, Peter Stickles, Aime Wolf, Nicole DuPort


• Run Time: 92 mins

Trespassers will be eaten!

A genetically mutated Tasmanian devil is released into a woodland cemetery by the two eco-activists who stole it from its laboratory. This is unfortunate for a group of college students who have chosen the cemetery as the location to shoot their low-budget zombie film.

Cemetery Gates has clearly been designed as some sort of throwback to the 80s low budget home video flicks and there’s plenty of evidence that the makers of the film have seen their fair share of horror films. With its low budget, a slightly camp approach, a good old fashioned man-in-a-monster-suit and plenty of splatter, Cemetery Gates tries a little too hard to impress but it the end product never really matches up to it’s aspirations.

“It will kill seventeen people in ninety minutes” proudly boasts the trailer. This is all well and good if there were more than a handful of main characters but as there aren’t, this means that the film trots out as many non-characters as possible to be ripped to shreds. You know the type of non-character I’m on about – people without names, introduced in the film in one scene and literally killed by the same scene without so much as a whimper. There are hillbillies, stoners, joggers, cemetery workers and more who all cross paths with the monster with obvious consequences. They have no bearing on the story. They don’t contribute anything to the film except die a horrible death. It’s just an endless array of fodder for the Tasmanian devil to devour and it gets boring. How I am supposed to care about these people if I know they’re going to die about two minutes after being introduced into the film?

The first-rate gore effects look fantastic in the kills, with heads being smashed into fences and arms getting torn from sockets. But after a while, they lose their shine because there’s just too many of them. Whilst an effect looks good the first time, it soon outstays its welcome after the third repetition. There’s no suspense or build-up to the attacks, the Tasmanian devil just stumbles across a newly-introduced character and then proceeds to tear them a new one. In many respects, this just sums up the entire film which is basically a gore set piece fan’s dream. Unfortunately this does not make for a good viewing experience as there’s nothing of substance to hold it all together. The gore and set pieces were clearly priority here, with the script trailing in last place.

Not helping matters is the fact that the film is shot during the day so you’ll get a good, regular look at the monster. We all know it’s a guy-in-a-suit but this isn’t the problem, it’s just the fact that you can tell it’s a guy-in-a-suit without hesitation! Couldn’t they have shot the film more at night or dusk when there was a little less sunlight to illuminate the suit? They could have kept the monster partially hidden or submerged in darkness – anything to hide the suit a little more. Having it run around in broad daylight is asking for trouble, especially when the camera tends to linger upon it. However, I’ll take this rubber-suited monster over a CGI creation any day and it shows no mercy to anyone that it comes across. I would have just liked to see a bit of intelligence used in how it was shot on film.

Cult horror actor Reggie Bannister (famous thanks to his role in the Phantasm series) is on hand to provide the necessary ‘name’ in the cast. He looks as bored as I felt in his role as the scientist who created the Tasmanian devil and tries to keep a straight face throughout proceedings despite clearly knowing the film is a load of rubbish. The rest of the cast are terrible – most of the people on show don’t even get names as I’ve alluded to in the review. Kristin Novak only gets a brief mention because she provides the token nudity.

Cemetery Gates is gory and at least shows that there is some potential from the director as his heart is obviously in the right place. But when there’s hardly any story, no real structure and a lot of people running around being killed off without anything resembling characterisation, there’s only so far the blood can stretch before it wears thin.

• AKA:


• Director: William Malone


• Writer: William Malone (story), Robert Short (story)


• Starring: John Stinson, Diana Davidson, Jonathan David Moses, Toni Jannotta


• Run Time: 93 mins

They wanted to create a new form of human life…They failed.

An ex-cop, now working as a novelist, is called out of his retirement to help solve a series of puzzling murders which seem to be the work of a serial killer but are in fact being carried out by a Syngenor – a synthesised genetic organism.

A schlocky low grade flick which has clearly been studying Alien quite a lot, Scared to Death doesn’t work on many levels, if any. Coming in the midst of the straight-to-video low budget rubber monster revolution, Scared to Death is director William Malone’s first crack at bringing monstrous mayhem to life (he would later go on to direct Creature, an even more blatant cash-in but more successful cheese with the remake of House of Haunted Hill) and it seems like he built up a story solely around the novelty value of one huge creature which feeds on human spinal fluid.

But credit to Malone, he really wanted to make this film and apparently sold his car, loads of belongings and mortgaged his house! He constructed the suit himself and shot the film in four weeks for a total cost of $74,000. Talk about commitment. Unfortunately for him, the film never managed to gain the sort of low budget notoriety as The Evil Dead, The Blair Witch Project or more recently, £50 zombie film Colin. Though it did make a profit, almost no one has heard of it. That’s for a very good reason mind you – it’s not that good.

A perfect example of the old school men-in-rubber-suits school of effects, Scared to Death at least has some charm when delivering up a gooey, green-eyed killing machine. In the few occasions that you do get a glimpse of it, given that its scenes are virtually pitch-black, the creature doesn’t look too bad, if a little similar to H. R. Giger’s infamous alien creature. Maybe the director should have a little bit more faith in his monster instead of relegating it to the side lines. But the creature walks far too slowly which leads you to question just how it manages to kill so many people. It doesn’t receive much screen time either and whilst the momentary shots of it aren’t too bad, they’re too few and far between to make any sort of impression.

That’s about where the positives end. As I touched on earlier, the idea was obviously to build a monster and then come up with some sort of story to showcase it. But the end script is a mess, resulting in a film which serves no real purpose other than to offer up some monster attacks on partially lit sets. All of the greatest build up in the world (not that Scared to Death offers any) can be ruined if you can’t actually see what is going on. Any sort of pay-off that the individual stalking scenes have here is shrouded in darkness or simply not shown as the camera cuts away elsewhere. The production values are also low, given the budget this is understandable, but it gives the film a shoddy look, not helped by the fact that everything is so dark.

Plus it’s dull. The promise of monster action is a false one as you’re cheated out of getting anything gory or half-way exciting. Unfortunately for the audience, most of the running time is taken up by a bunch of really bad actors that have little to business being around a film set, let alone acting in one. “Feed them to the Syngenor” you’ll be shouting by the end of it and thankfully, quite a few of them are (just not enough).

The dramatic story behind Scared to Death is much more interesting than the dreary and uneventful end product. I’m not sure whether the final film was worth all of the risks that Malone took to get it made – I guess it was since he directed a succession of bigger budgeted horror films. Someone also filmed a sequel, Syngenor. Wonders never cease.

• AKA:


• Director: George Huang


• Writer: George Huang


• Starring: Clea DuVall, Steven Culp, Tyler Mane, Jason Marsden


• Run Time: 91 mins

What started out as a simple game … became a virtual nightmare!

A computer game company hires three eccentric programmers to complete an unfinished game called Evilution and their objective is to make it the scariest game ever with the promise of a million dollar bonus to the one who does the best work. On a dark and stormy night, an electrical surge brings the motion-capture monster suit to life and it becomes controlled by the computer AI. The monster then begins to stalk and kill the team throughout the lab as if they were actually playing the game.

Part of a host of old AIP drive-in films that were remade under the ‘Creature Feature’ label headed up by effects man Stan Winston, How to Make a Monster shares the name of its 1958 predecessor but the comparisons stop there. It begs the question of why you’d remake something if you’re going to change the entire story and characters. Even ‘name recognition’ doesn’t matter here because I’m sure anyone in their teens, twenties or thirties has never heard of the original, let alone seen it.

How to Make a Monster sits itself firmly in the ‘people trapped in a confined space being killed off one-by-one by a monster’ camp and it brings nothing new to the table whatsoever apart from the variable monster. We’ve all seen this formula in action plenty of times before and no doubt we’ll see it in action plenty of times in the future too so we know exactly what to expect. The predictable story does nothing new with the material and clearly never has intention to do so.

There are some underlying messages about greed, violent video games and the like but I’m not sure whether the film was for and against them. Besides which, video games don’t make psychos, they’re just a scapegoat for our broken society. But I’m not going into that argument in a review about some B-movie! The problem with this is that the game itself, Evilution, looks like something out of the 16-bit era. It’s an underlying problem which films that create video games to use in the story face. Given how quickly the video game industry moves nowadays and how graphics have improved tenfold in the matter of a few years, the jerky sprites and crappy graphics look dated as soon as the film has been released. I think to the more recent Stay Alive for a similar issue, where the in-film video game looks like something no one in their right mind would give the time of day to. Plus how many video game companies do you know of that only have three designers working on a game? The credits for the latest Call of Duty games are longer than some old Hollywood blockbusters.

A decent cast has been assembled for this one and the three main computer geeks come off as likeable enough for you to care if they survive or not. The best part of the film is actually before the monster comes to life as the geeks argue and trade amusing barbs with each other. Tyler Mane (Sabretooth from X-Men and Michael Myers in the Halloween remake) is the pick of the bunch as the less-than-friendly Hardcore who likes sharp weapons a little too much for my liking.

When the monster does finally show up, the film shifts into familiar territory with predictable consequences and all leading up to a rather naff finale involving VR helmets and swords. The monster looks fairly creepy but it’s not given enough time to work its magic and it is nowhere near as menacing as it should. The monster kind of sums this film up – starts off looking ok but you don’t enough of what you want to see and too much of the stuff you don’t. With a bit more work and polishing it could have been so much better.

How to Make a Monster isn’t a bad time waster and it’s certainly a pretty good effort for a TV movie, punching above its weight fairly respectably. It’s just that we’ve seen it all done before and done better. Alien-clones work better with aliens, not computer games come to life!

• AKA:


• Director: George McCowan


• Writer: Robert Hutchison (screenplay & story), Robert Blees (screenplay)


• Starring: Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, Adam Roarke


• Run Time: 91 mins

Cold green skin against soft warm flesh…a croak…a scream.

Jason Crockett is a disabled millionaire who invites his family to his birthday celebrations on his private island in the middle of a lake. Two of his family cross paths with freelance photographer Pickett Smith who is conducting a pollution survey for an ecology magazine. Crockett hates nature and poisons and exterminates any creature that is on his property. However it seems that the poison has had an adverse effect on nature and on his birthday night, the frogs and other creatures decide to get their revenge.

I can see how this obscure 1972 film has certain horror fans foaming at the mouth. It’s one of those films that can either be labelled ‘so bad, it’s good’ or ‘so bad, it’s horrific.’ Opinion seems to be divided but I’m definitely in the camp of the latter. It sucks so bad that it really is a complete chore to sit through no matter how cheesy and absurd the idea of killer frogs could be. Your patience for the worst kind of trashy nonsense will be put to the ultimate test, should you dare rise to the challenge and sit and watch this.

Like any true to form slasher film (yes that’s right, slasher film – because the way the film runs, you could quite easily substitute the animals for a guy in a mask), Frogs follows a bland routine of mundane dialogue, death, mundane dialogue, death, etc. There’s not a whole lot of linking anything together, just plenty of bickering between the family members followed up by someone walking off to their death. I think the problem is that everyone in the film plays it straight. Even the script doesn’t throw in any gags. Could anyone really have taken the film this seriously when they were making it?

The frogs don’t actually do anything during the film except appear every two or three minutes after a scene of dialogue. There’s plenty of stock footage of them croaking and leading the charge but not a lot else. Actually there’s plenty of stock footage here generally – snakes, spiders, crocodiles and lizards all get their moments to shine and most of their shining is done by stock footage. The way they each kill off their victims is about as cheesy as you can get. The spiders cocoon an injured handyman in the forest and bear in mind that these are only small tarantulas, not giant monsters. The lizards are even smarter as they knock off bottles of poison in the greenhouse and fumigate another of the rich people with their own weapons. Bear in mind that the bottles do actually say poison on them so why anyone would keep them on the top shelf of a creaky wooden fixture is beyond me. These people are either unlucky or terribly stupid (and that’s not just because they decided to star in this). Another schmuck is fed to the crocodiles. But the manner in which these scenes are filmed is just appalling and I could not even comprehend trying to leave my brain in check to watch someone killed in these ways. It’s just utterly stupid.

The positive, and I repeat the positive, is that the cinematography is great. This isolated mansion looks just that and the surrounding swamps and forests drip with slime – you can almost smell how foul they are. You do get the sense that this bunch of characters are in the middle of nowhere and miles away from help. Oh yeah and the film stars a very young Sam Elliott, who would eventually find fame in the movies portraying grumpy Texans.

Frogs is one of the direst films I’ve ever seen. Even the money shots of people being attacked by animals are so ridiculously concocted that it’s hard to take seriously.