Monster of the Day #156

Updated on December 15, 2010 By Ken Begg 27 Comments


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  • Ericb

    Andy Reid

  • BeckoningChasm

    Was this the one that had Patrick Troughton in it?

  • Yes, and a theme song by Survivor.

  • “Andy Reid”

    Close. It’s various members of the Chicago Bears trying to stop Tom Brady.

  • David Fullam

    This, Gorath, and an ep of Ultra Q are the only times I can remember something that featured a monster walrus.

  • The real question is why any movie would EVER feature a monster walrus? Few less terrifying creatures exist.

    Yes I know that a walrus could, in theory, kill you. But at your funeral, the preacher would be trying to suppress giggles at the means of your untimely demise.

    It reminds me of a debate I engaged in on a roleplaying forum about mooses. The European members kept trying to argue that moose-riders would be a terrifying sight and the Americans kept making Bullwinkle jokes, imitating the fabled moose mating call that every junior high male knows how to produce on cue, etc. It was very frustrating to the Europeans that the Americans found it impossible to take the mighty moose seriously.

  • P Stroud

    Do these giant Walri preceed Algore’s endangered Polar Bears? Are they the opening act?

    You know, any city could be made into a more interesting place to live if there were a few giant Walri around.

  • Gamera

    Yay, one of my favorite Christmas songs:

    Walkin’ in a Winter Walrus Land!

    Either that or someone kept stealing Jamie Hynieman’s lunch and finally in a rage he goes after Tory, Kari, and Grant…

  • Rock Baker

    Something about this monster I liked right off, and it has remained my favorite critter in the flick. Maybe it was the novelty of seeing a real creature brought to Dynamation life, or maybe it was just so skillfully done that it made an impact. The baboon wasn’t nearly as good, I felt.

    As to being fearsome, size helps. But they are bulky, have claws and tusks, and can be rather ill tempered. I’d certainly avoid one the size of a dinosaur, since even a whaler’s harpoon couldn’t really do important damage through all that blubber. If nothing else, the use of a giant walrus (no less than three times, as David pointed out!) shows a willingness to explore unusual ideas and showcase different enlarged animals. That’s what drove the 50s monster movie genre, and one reason I can’t be too hard on Night of the Lepus or Food of the Gods.

  • roger h

    Chumley, Noooo!

  • Hey I’m not arguing that a giant walrus couldn’t kill you. I’m just saying that if it happened, sheer embarrassment would probably trump terror at the time. I will say though that being scratched to death by a walrus’s “claws” (which you mention) is one of the most ridiculous deaths possible.

    You could be eaten by a giant adorable baby, too. .

    I myself feel well capable of faulting Night of the Lepus and its ilk. There are plenty of actually scary small animals that are available for use. Like centipedes for instance. Hell, even a giant frog or toad is scarier than a walrus.

  • Note that I’m also NOT saying I didn’t like the giant walrus – I absolutely loved every moment of it.

  • Well, the most dangerous animal in Africa is the hippo. So we might laugh at the idea of such a thing, but they kill people pretty regularly, and I imagine in a fairly nasty fashion.

    I got a visceral sense of how dangerous they were during this nature documentary about a river where large numbers of hippos and gators lived. These gators were huge, but they sat there unmoving while the baby hippos literally walked all over them. And it was because if a gator ever attacked a hippo pup, the adult hippos would stomp the gator into paste right quick. So gators might seem the scarier of the two to us, but apparently they’d beg to differ.

  • Yumpin’ yimminy!

  • roger h

    @ken, that is why i always get a kick out of “Jurassic Park” where they say that the vegetarian dinos are not dangerous. Most modern large vegetarian mammals are dangerous so, how could you make such a statement?

  • The Rev.

    I love this guy. He’s one of the highlights of the movie.

    Sandy: I too am mystified at the lack of centipedes in horror movies. I can only think of two offhand (one of which I’ve seen), and one of those only shows up at the end. They are so damn creepy. Sadly, Centipede! featured props that were very immobile, and odd-looking; they reminded me of the mutated critter in “Parasite Eve” (I would not be surprised if that was their inspiration for the head, as it looked almost exactly like it; and neither of them, to me, resembled an actual centipede.) Not a terrible little flick, though.

  • Rock Baker

    Wild rabbits are a lot nastier than one might think. Having lived around them, they may be the reason I’m more readily willing to accept the Night of the Lepus as true horror. Ditto the giant chickens in Food of the Gods.

    And think of all those poor Japs (and Rolisicans) whose loved ones had to tell how they were killed by a big butterfly…

  • Sadly, the bunnies in Night of the Lepus were not “wild” rabbits in any aspect of their appearance. Not that genuine jackrabbits would evoke much more fear.

    Hippos seem both dangerous and lovable to me, kind of like elephants. I can see being scared of both of those. And yes Jurassic Park was retarded when it talked about the peaceful vegetarians. From cassowaries to bison to parrotfish it just isn’t true.

  • Rock Baker

    But it does feed into the way we thought about dinosaurs as children. If they ate plants, like good ol’ Brontosaurus, they had to be gentle, like dairy cows. The meat eaters were always ‘the bad guys.’ That a film like Jurassic Park would take that stance is weird, but maybe that’s one reason it responded so well with viewers. On a gut level, the dinosaurs were easy to like by both kids and the kids-at-heart.

  • “Chumley, Noooo!”

    Ok, that‘s funny.

  • P Stroud

    Every once in a while they come across some hiker or backpacker who was killed by a moose. More than one of my acquaintances has been treed by a moose, usually a female with calves. Another friend had a bull moose chase his truck down a fire road and head-butt dents into the tailgate. Wild animals are dangerous no matter how cute, the movie “Bambi” notwithstanding. Heck, some guy got killed by a mountain goat a couple months back. They think he was trying to pet it. Now a walrus might be slow but their size makes them potentially very deadly. I think everyone already knows to not get between a bear and a picnic basket.

  • The Rev.

    “Ok, that’s funny.”

    I admit, I laughed at that line, but then was unhappy that I hadn’t thought of it first. Well played, roger.

  • “I admit, I laughed at that line, but then was unhappy that I hadn’t thought of it first.”

    Agreed. One of my pettiest traits. I’ll always remember an episode of Bewitched (which I probably haven’t seen in 30 plus years) where Paul Lynde’s Uncle Arthur hears someone else make a humorous jape and sourly replies, “It would have been funnier if I’d said it.”

  • The Rev.

    Yeah, I have gotten that feeling quite a bit over the years since I came across StompTokyo, and by extension the rest of B-Masters. With the talent pool in that group, there’ve been quite a few lines like that. My hope is that one day I write such a line.

  • zombiewhacker

    Apparently I’m the only one who doesn’t know what movie this is. A little help?

  • BeckoningChasm

    zombiewacker: “Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.”

  • zombiewhacker

    Man, I never made it all the way through that one. Thanks BC.