Monster of the Day #1984

I was hoping for Big Brother for this post.

Sounds cool. Good catch there EricB, I didn’t even notice.

The thing is, it had potential! That tooth arrangement is clearly based on Dunkleosteus, a 20-foot long prehistoric armored fish that would make an impressive movie monster. But instead they had to beat SyFy to the punch by several decades in the crappy monster idea department by crossing it with an octopus (and failing to pull that off too).

And they burned it, IIRC. Never thought to swim under the flame, cause they floated on the surface of the water…I’m just sayin’…

I actually got a little excited when I first saw this on MST3K, the first shot of it is in kinda murky water and all you can see is all those teeth, it actually looked cool for a second! Probably for the best that that’s the main view you get since the closest you get to seeing the whole thing is the silhouette on sonar, and man does it look stupid, basically a fish head sticking our of the top of an octopus. I Imagine some young, naive creature designer saying to the producers, “Look at this concept art, it’s based on this awesome prehistoric fish no one has used in a movie before”. The producers say, “Nah kid, we’re going with an octopus, which has a long history crap cinema…but I do like the mouth, so slap it on an octopus and call it a day”.

BTW: Off subject again but ‘The UnXplained’ TV series hosted by Bill Shatner on the History Channel tonight is actually pretty friggin’ good. It’s by the same company that makes ‘Ancient Anal Probes’ but personally I find it a much more entertaining show. In fact I’d compare it with ‘In Search Of’ which is fun considering the hosts of each.

How many movie versions of 1984 have there been? The only one I remember seeing was this goofy art film that had this badly-done sex subplot going all through the movie.

Yeah, it’s sad that this is the closest we’ve gotten to a Dunkleosteus movie.

Sandy and I have talked about sea creatures that have somehow not gotten movies made about them that should have, and Dunkleosteus is on the top of the list, as well as Kronosaurus and similarly-sized pliosaurs (considering how many books have been written about them — check Amazon — it utterly baffles me that there aren’t any movies with them). I would also love a gulper eel movie, but that’s just me. We did get a goblin shark movie a few years ago, which was nice…even if it wasn’t very good.

Peter Cushing as Smith? Now I wonder if they could have done a version with Christopher Lee as Smith. Probably not.

Lee might have made a good O’Brian opposite Cushing’s Smith.