Monster of the Day

Sadly, the attempt to deal with yesterday's MotD in an "environmentally-friendly" manner proved somewhat counterproductive.

If only I had some sort of applicable running gag here! The Mars Attack cards suddenly sent onto a long run of giant insect attack scenes, presumably because watching Martians disintegrate people (or most memorably, once a dog) could only provide so much fodder. Also, they came out in 1962, and that was pretty…

For some reason, this was the highest rated episode in Japan. As we've seen, mixing and matching animals is a pretty easy technique to generating an Incidental Monster. Snakes (like the Lion Snake previously featured) with a few other attributes like fur and some horns...and wa-lah, there's your monster. I kind of like the…

We didn't do much with Thundarr, so let's go back to him. Again, it's got to be tough to come up with fun designs for the incidental monsters that popped up every episode for a minute or two. A horned whale/shark is pretty neat, though.

Tyranno's Claw won, I suspect, on the strength of the trailer. Playing the old novelty tune "Alley Oop" in the background, it made this look like a Korean version of Ringo Starr's slapstick Caveman. Sadly, the film was far less funny and far more of a slog than the trailer made it look. Ah,…

This film was as silly as I remembered, with actors attacking themselves with their own hands and suchlike. Sadly, it was also far pokier than I recalled. Since the T-Rex film was also a bit of a slog, we would have done far better to have scheduled this in the after dinner slot and…

This film pretty much was exactly what we wanted it to be, taking plot motivated by b-movie logic (military killbots badly reprogrammed to deal with violent high schools in the future) and running with it. An amazing cast, too. John P. Ryan in particular looks like he never had more fun in his life.…

This guy as "Dr. Nadir" was an absolute hoot, leering at the bikini girls that Mars was stealing (a weirdly popular plot in the '60s) and yelling with relish for their space ray to be fired at "MAXIMUM...POWER!!!" If you think of John Lovitz playing in full Master Thespian mode, you'd be about 98%…

Things went swimmingly at T-Fest this year, with hiccups only appearing at the end of the evening. Thunder of the Gigantic Serpent (which I'm sure I've featured here before) starting things off and was delightful. Then it was on to Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, one of those films that while modest, if far…

Sorry about last week, as you may have heard, Chicago had a minor sports thing going on. The result was a rally that drew the largest gathering of people in US history. Crazy. I've finally caught up on sleep (and seen Dr Strange, which was pretty good--14 movies for Marvel without a clunker, which…