Attack of the…. Whatever….
March 14th, 2007 by 
Rory Harper
I’m at home for the rest of the week, on Spring Break. (That name is bitterly humorous, considering my current physical condition.) It’s raining cats and dogs and sheep outside. I’m bored. So, without further ado, a follow-on to my previous post.
For those of you with an academic bent, I’d like to point out that ‘Black Sheep‘ is the latest in a long and illustrious line of scary movies about unscary monsters.
Below are some that come immediately to my mind. If anybody knows of others, I’ll add them to this post in an edit.
The Grand-daddy of them all was Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds‘. Things went downhill after that….
We have had ‘Frogs‘:
:
:
Probably the best thing about this movie is the poster. And Ray Milland, who was great even when he was in a movie that sucked. The poster scene doesn’t exist in the movie itself, which has no large frogs. Only little-bitty ones. But lots and lots of them.
There was also ‘Night of the Lepus‘ , which was about giant carnivorous bunny rabbits.
Interestingly, the promos for it gave you absolutely no hint that the monsters were rabbits. It’s all reaction shots. I wonder why? Here’s a review. With spoilers, as if we care.
Most recently, Troma came out with ‘Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead‘. Budget was under $100, I suspect. It’s superior to all the other movies mentioned here, in that it has hot lesbian babes in it. Click the pic for the preview.
Perhaps the most brilliant of them all was 1978’s ‘Attack of the Killer Tomatoes‘, which played at all the midnight movies back then.
On a more personal, and painful, note, my old friend Brian Roberston and I once wrote a screenplay for a Texas film production company. It was called ‘The Amulet’, about supernatural doings in a small Texas town. In actuality, Brian did almost all the real work on the script. (I like to think I redeemed myself on our next script, ‘Rockenstein’. But that’s another story….)
It got within one day of being funded, with the backers chickening out at the last moment. A script consultant told them that the special effects would be too costly.
Then he sold them his script to replace ours. They ended up going into the East Texas piney woods and making a movie about voracious killer trees.
You can bet that they saved money on special effects for that one. I’m sure that it was really scary, too. I have no idea whether the film actually ever got out of the can. But it supposedly has a scene where a power boat on the lake strays too close to the shore and gets devoured.
I’d kinda like to see that….
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Addendum:
Props to Dain LaRaye, who posted to remind us about ‘The Killer Shrews’. The thing to keep in mind from this poster is that the thing caressing the shoe, next to the blood splotch, isn’t a weird tongue or tentacle. It’s a mousy tail.
Click the pic to go to a great site that discusses the movie in detail.
Posted in Art, Daily Life, History, Horror, Pop. Culture, Rory, Writing | 
16 Comments »
March 14th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Your Hare will stand on end!
Oh, my!
March 14th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Poultrygeist looks better than even Black Sheep
March 14th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Yep. If only they’d gotten Weta Workshop for the effects.
I stumbled across it accidentally when I was setting this post up. It’s the only one in my list that I haven’t seen, and I’m gonna hunt it down as soon as possible. Troma makes some of the cheapest and best Really Bad movies.
March 14th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
I loved Night of the Lepus. There’s this great scene where it’s night and far off in the distance, people hear a distant thump thump. Thump thump. Cut to what has to be a train model town, and just off camera, people are gently lobbing rabbits onto the set. The rabbits sort of plop there, go a couple of steps, look befuddled.
It’s great. I wanted to be a rabbit wrangler for that movie.
March 14th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
What I remember is the scene where the hungry rabbit is burrowing up from underneath, into the room where the people think they’re safe. It bursts in and makes this horrific basso bunny-sound.
I’m not entirely sure whether I’ve imagined that scene. But it was great.
March 14th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Well, if not, there’s a scene just like that in Tremors.
March 14th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Another great film about perfectly harmless critters turned dangerous!
And the fate of the whole world often seems to ride on a round of rock, paper, scissors.
March 14th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Steve and I just chatted, and he brought up the whole Giant Insects genre, like ‘Them’ and ‘The Deadly Mantis’ but I kinda think that doesn’t count, since insects are scary.
March 14th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
I’m so glad you mentioned Night of the Lepus. It’s just so mind-numbingly mind-numbing. The bunnies look so befuddled about what they’ve found themselves in. (“Wait. I’m a monster? I’m a monster? But I’m a bunny, fercrissakes!”
March 14th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
One of the stars of ‘Lepus’ is Rory Calhoun. My mom once almost admitted that I’m named after him….
‘Tremors’ is not only my favorite Giant Monster movie, it’s one of my favorite movies of any kind. Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward are great, as is everybody else in the movie.
One of the all-time great cinema lines is “Broke into the wrong goddam rec room, didn’t you?” triumphantly howled by Burt Gummer, after he and his wife (Reba McEntire) use their astonishing armory to slaughter a monster that mistakenly thought it had an easy dinner in front of it.
March 14th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Brilliant movie. Every time I watch it, I laugh so hard that the next day my sides STILL ache.
March 15th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Can’t forget that nugget of drive-in fodder from ‘59-The Killer Shrews. By the way, did you know that DeForest Kelly from Star Trek had a part in Night of the Lepus? Cool site, I enjoy reading everyone’s posts.
March 15th, 2007 at 11:59 am
Dain — Jeez! How could I have forgotten ‘The Killer Shrews’! I’ve added it to my original post.
Thanks!
And welcome to EOB!
March 15th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Badly dressed up german shepards were the shrews in the Killer Shrews…
I remembers seeing it on MST3000. I also vaguely remember seeing on TV on our monster Saturday nights when I was a kid. it was supsenseful until I saw the ’shrews’ and then I lost it laughing.
March 15th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
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March 16th, 2007 at 12:23 am
Uh-oh. Apparently ‘Poultrygeist’ is a musical.
They have a MySpace site, where you can stream four songs from the soundtrack album. I’m enjoying ‘Slow Fast Food Love’. The lyrics are NSFW.
We may be getting into ‘Rocky Horror’ territory here, folks.
Or not.