5 Monsters the World Has Forgotten

I’m holding out hope that I’m not the only person left who remembers some of these lesser movie beasts. I’ve always had a special fondness for monsters, be they ugly or mean or downright murderous. Think of it. If  you looked half as ghastly as them, wouldn’t you be a bit on the irritable side, if not downright homicidal? Everyone knows about Jason and Godzilla and Frankenstein, but there are so many others out there that just came and went. Here are 5 that left an impression on my warped little brain over the years. Please seek them out, but don’t put your fingers in their cage!

1. HUMONGOUS

I rememeber seeing this in the drive in when I was a kid. The thing about this mad beast that really got to me was the piercing scream he’d let out every ten minutes, turning my little bladder to ice. In the late 80’s, I rented this at a video store and was accused of never giving it back, so this movie really sticks in my head. You can’t beat the synopsis I found at IMDB. “Woman is raped at cocktail party. Years later, her son grows up to be a big hairy murderous monster who stalks a group of teens shipwrecked on his island.”

2. HORROR EXPRESS

This has a great cast of Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas. While on a train to God-remembers-where, a monster thaws from its icy prison and begins to murder the passengers. What scared the spaghettios out of me at  the time was this dude’s face. Seriously, out of all the horror movies I’d watched as a kid, this face is the one that haunted me right through adulthood. Let’s just call him scary-red-eyed-Jesus. And he’s not even the monster that took over the train!

3. The DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS

Think a bunch of maneating, shambling plants can’t be scary? Guess again, sucker. These things moved with the slow, measured assurance of a Michael Meyers decades before he donned his William Shatner mask. This is an all time great, but sadly forgotten monster movie. Check out the book that inspired it. Both are excellent.

4. FROM BEYOND

This gem is from the mid 80’s by the same team that brought us Reanimator. This was another loosely adapted Loevcraft story where a mad scientist (score!) develops a machine that lets us see into other dimensions. Unfortunately, they can come into ours as well, and some things are just not meant to be, like Justin Bieber’s career. What the crazy doctor eventually becomes is nothing short of awesome.

5. CREEP

I’ll end with a relatively recent movie that very few people ever bring up. The creep in this fantastic British flick is a deformed man living in the tunnels and passageways of London’s underground. He wails like a rat and looks like all kinds of hell, plus he has some wicked strength, despite the seeping infections all over his flaky, gnarled body. If I stumbled across him in a subway, I’d probably drop dead immediately.

Those are my 5. I know there are tons more out there. Which ones did I miss that you love and remember, in a twsited kinda way? Let me know so I can include them in a future post!

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To see the monsters I lived with in Forest of Shadows, click here.