Monster Awareness Month Days 21-25

We’re getting into the home stretch here. In the meantime, my From Strange & Distant Shores column on The Abominable Snowman went live and my good friend and former employer Jeff Owens wrote a long and impassioned paen to Marvel comics monsters here.

Now, on to the movies:

Day 21: Jurassic Park (1993)
Confession time: I haven’t re-watched Jurassic Park for Monster Awareness Month yet. I planned to, and still plan to, but it just hasn’t happened. I haven’t seen Jurassic Park in years, and I mean lots of years, but it used to be a favorite movie of mine. I can still remember seeing it in theatres, before I’d seen any footage of the dinosaurs. I remember going to the theatre and getting Jurassic Park pogs, and them having a big inflatable Godzilla (which I think was supposed to stand in for a T-Rex, maybe) in the lobby.

There was a time when Jurassic Park meant a lot to me, and I could probably still recite whole sections of it to you verbatim. But as to how it holds up after all these years, I can’t speak. At least, not yet.

Day 22: Dagon (2001) & Call of Cthulhu (2005)
Dagon I did re-watch for Monster Awareness Month, albeit just last night. It I had seen only the once before, and I didn’t remember much besides some fish-people, some weird monster sex (it’s a Stuart Gordon/Brian Yuzna movie, after all), and an exposition character whose accent and drunken slurring were so thick that I could only understand about every third word out of his mouth.

It was OK. The fish people were sometimes pretty good, but mostly what saved it, to the extent that it got saved, was the decaying seaside town in which it was set. Lots of great, dreary, damp, falling-down sets and old houses and canted alleys and such, and some of the scenes where people are pursued through the streets by the town’s shambling inhabitants are pretty spectacular. Mostly, though, it just feels like a bunch of misfires, and the protagonist is super-annoying. I liked it, but it could’ve been better.

The silent Call of Cthulhu is a big improvement, though I didn’t re-watch it, having seen it recently and being short on time. Still, it’s a hell of an evocation of silent films of the time, and a good imagining of what a Lovecraft movie made when Lovecraft was alive might have been like (although given how long it’s taken us to get to making Lovecraft movies that even vaguely resemble their source material, probably not).

Day 23: The Mothman Prophecies (2002)
And again, I admit to not re-watching. This is another one I saw a few years ago, when it was new, and only the once, but I remember not being impressed, and the aforementioned time crunch led to me not being interested in giving it another go.

Day 24: Hellboy (2004)
This is the first of the movies that I wrote up for Monster Awareness Month myself. Check it out.

Day 25: The Host (2006)
I didn’t like The Host. There goes all my credibility, I know, but I didn’t, and can’t bring myself to pretend otherwise. I wrote it up for my column at Innsmouth Free Press earlier in the month, which you can find over here.