Monster of the Day #934

I’ve never seen it, but I think this is “Blue Monkey.” Maybe?

Most excellent Veloxi sends greetings to Terran explorers!

Blue Monkey…as sung my Elvis? Time for a song parody…

I find it so very depressing that I’ve seen Blue Monkey maybe twice and I still recognized that.

I have only seen it once, back in high school, and knew it on sight. (Two for two this week so far!) To be fair, it’s about the only memorable part of the whole movie (I recall the movie overall being a slog), and there just aren’t a lot of giant bug movies from the ’80s. The prop for this thing is fantastic; this really doesn’t show how big and neat it is since it’s a close-up.

I never did figure out what the hell the title had to do with giant mutant man-eating mantis-roach-whatevers.

Supposedly the creature was originally envisioned as being more simian like. There is also an old alchemy legend that if you perform a certain procedure wrong (perhaps the old lead into gold bit?) that instead of the desired result, you will get a blue monkey.

That reminds me of a (very) short Manly Wade Wellman story where a guy promises some people he can make gold if they don’t think about a blue monkey. Of course everyone does save for one fellow who concentrates in the spell. Later, he tellls people that HE can make gold if they don’t think about a red fish. He does the spell and asks, ‘Who thought about a blue monkey?’ Naturally, no one did because of the red fish and so when he opens the jug it’s full of gold nuggets.

Take this with a grain of salt, cause it’s been a bijillion or so years since I read the Fangoria article (or whatever magazine it was in) but I seem to recall them calling this Green Monkey be changed the name because of some legend about a green monkey being the source of AIDS.