Monster of the Day #500

Updated on June 20, 2012 By Ken Begg 28 Comments

500 MotDs! Who knew? Anyway, I clearly wanted someone iconic for this anniversary edition, and if much of the world can identify from your silhouette, I’d say you fill the bill.

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  • Guy Hoyle

    Wolverine!

  • Flangepart

    Freddy the hand rake. Clean up man for the last MotD.

  • Ken_Begg

    Ha, true. He’s clearly dealing with the flying debris from the last entry. (Which might be the very first MotD that I don’t think anyone identified.)

  •  So it wasn’t Superstition?  For whatever reason it kind of looked like it,

  • Ken_Begg

    Oops, should have checked that before I said it. Good call. The only reason that one is *totally* obscure is because TCM runs it sometimes on their late night Friday cult movie slot.

  • The Rev.

    That’s where I saw Superstition.  I’d read about it years prior, but had never seen it anywhere.  I liked it a bit better than Braineater did.

    If I had remembered that Freddy hadn’t been used previously, he would’ve been one of my first guesses for # 500, since you like the original so much.  I laugh when I think of a young Ken Begg shaking his fist at the screen during that horrible tacked-on ending.

  • The Rev.

    He may have turned into “Shecky Green with claws,” but he sure started out as a wonderful screen menace.

    Chelsea and a friend snuck into the remake of NoES when it was in theaters, and even as undemanding 15-year-olds they were disappointed.  She said it wasn’t scary at all, which was interesting for her to be disappointed in, since she hates being really scared.  (She loves Jaws, for example, but she legitimately screamed twice during her first viewing and didn’t want to watch it again for quite a while.)  I’ve yet to introduce her to the original since it’s got a couple of pretty scary moments (that one girl getting dragged around the ceiling freaked me out good), but am anxious to.  I probably should; it’d be a good gauge of whether I can finally show her Halloween or Alien, which gave me two of my three biggest movie frights to date.

  • Ken_Begg

    Yeah, I was pretty pissed off. Still am, really. I think I would actually buy another entire DVD if they released a version sans the bumper.

    Freddy did appear in his “Snake Freddy” guise, but for the purposes of MotD, that’s a discrete beastie.

  • sandra

    Finally, a monster I recognize. “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you ….”

  • Ken_Begg

    I’d bet a hundred bucks that one of the Jaws screams was inspired by Ben Gardner popping out of his boat. The entire audience screamed back in the day when I first saw it.

  • GalaxyJane

    I always pretend the movie ends before the stupid “stinger”, since it totally invalidates the whole damned movie, which otherwise stands on it’s own merits beautifully.  Stupid studio interference. The rest of the movies are pretty negligable, though all except the 2nd are at least a fun ride.

    I will say that I enjoyed the vastly underrated “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” for being one of the better filmic explorations of metafiction and it’s use of the old idea of the Trickster god concept common in Native American folklore, though not specifically identified as such (I don’t think, it’s been years since I saw it) in the movie.

  •    I like to think the stinger shock in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET was just a little (harmless) nightmare that Nancy had after being able to go back to sleep after axing Kruger, as if her unconscious was working out everything she’d been through recently, and that she woke up as the credits were rolling. At least that’s the only way I can accept the film as it currently stands. There really needs to be a special cut, though, that removes that stupid ending.

       Seems like the second film wasn’t awful, but my favorite remains the third film. That one was really good. Then I like to ignore all the following films until WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE, which was a dandy piece. And then, shock of shocks, I thought FREDDY VS JASON was a terrific little movie. The recent remake wasn’t bad, but I’m not sure it was really necessary. Those four films, though, 1, 3, New Nightmare, and Vs, I’d love to own by themselves. They could release a special box set, The Really Good Nightmare Movies Collection.

  • By the way, which film is this still from? This seems a fairly generic image that could be from pretty much any point in the series.

  • Ken_Begg

    It’s from the first one.

  • Ken_Begg

    3 also *clearly* ignores the sting ending of the first film, since Nancy is back.

  • bgbear_rogerh

     The last time I saw jaws on TCM was the first time it hit me that no one mentioned the head to the mayor after they found the boat.  Amazing what you will excuse when a movie is really good.  (yes, I know now that Spielberg added the head after main filming). 

  • 500 monsters and counting! You should really post a list of all the monsters you’ve featured.

  • Ken_Begg

     Ha, I’m working on it! The first 100 were posted at that point. After we went to the new format I mostly have worked on putting in thumbnails for all the MotDs so that when you call up the list you get the small image of who is featured. Done with the list soon.

  • Ken_Begg

    They do allude to the fact that Gardner is dead: “It was Ben Gardner’s boat, it was all chewed up. I helped tow it in,
    you sh– you should have seen him!”

  • Something which  helps me justify my nightmare-after-the-nightmare excuse for the first film’s final.

  • bgbear_rogerh

     darn it, now I’ll have to watch it again. 

  • zombiewhacker

    500 monsters and still counting!

  • Freddy Kruger Wins!  FATALITY

  • The Rev.

    I don’t know who said it (might’ve been Ken), but the three Craven helmed (1,3, and NN) are the only good ones.  They actually kind of work together as a whole on their own.  I haven’t seen 4, although I understand it’s pretty terrible, but 2, 5, and 6 were all awfully damn bad.  This seems to reinforce the idea that Craven’s the only one who should be handling Freddy.

  • The Rev.

    That’s a safe bet, and yes, it was.  The other was when it pops up behind Brody as he’s chumming, proving once again that that’s one of the most well-executed cinematic scares of all time.

    Both of those made me jump my first time, for certain, and they’re definitely scary moments, but for my money that scene of the shark rising from the depths to chomp that poor bastard as he tries to get back in his little rowboat is the scare highlight.  It didn’t make me jump or scream; instead, it gave me an actual “Tingler” moment (I’m sure we all know what I’m talking about here.)  It still raises my hackles a little to this day.

  • The Rev.

    It occurred to me that, since I still haven’t seen FvJ, that that could be an exception to the rule.  I recall people talking about how Freddy is actually a figure of menace again in that movie.

    I really need to get around to that, he said for the 1,245,659th time.

  • GalaxyJane

    I thought FvJ was reasonably entertaining, it just doesn’t fit into the rest of the canon for me, so in my mind it always stands alone off to the side from the rest of the films.  It’s a touch both gorier and mean-spirited than the normal run of NoES flicks, from the F13 influence, but it works surprisingly well for a movie that started out more or less as a punchline.

  • Ericb

    Maybe someday they’ll go whole hog and have the tag team battle of Freddy & Jason vs. Alien &  Predator in a supernatural vs.science battle for the ages.