October 29th, 2007
12. Vampire dogs (Zoltan: Hound Of Dracula, 1978)
Pity poor Zoltan. Once he was a peasant's happy dog. Then, after interrupting Dracula mid-bite, he was forever enslaved to the bloodsucking ways of his new master. After a couple centuries, Zoltan resurfaces in 1970s California, intent on terrorizing the family of Dracula's distant relatives, starting with their dogs. A vampire dog isn't the worst idea for a horror-film foe but there's nothing particularly scary about Zoltan, a perfectly pleasant-looking Doberman outfitted with a pair of unconvincing prosthetic fangs (courtesy of a young Stan Winston). Even less scary: Fight scenes in which the actors appear to be fighting off doggie kisses, and a final scene that sets up a sequel involving Zoltan's downright adorable Dracupup offspring.
13. Rapping leprechaun (Leprechaun In The Hood, 2000)
By the time Leprechaun In The Hood hit undiscriminating video stores in 2000, original star Leprechaun star Jennifer Aniston was long gone, the titular diminutive badass had weathered a trip to space in the franchise's fourth entry, and the brain trust behind the series had more or less given up on even trying to be scary. Like Seed Of Chucky, Leprechaun In The Hood—which co-stars such paycheck-hungry rap luminaries as Ice-T and Coolio—trades in bad horror for leaden camp as Warwick Davis busts rhymes and menaces a trio of rappers who've come into possession of his magical flute. Yes, magical flute. Cause honestly what's more terrifying than a rapping leprechaun? Oh wait, just about everything. That nevertheless didn't prevent a return trip back to the hood for Davis and the gang in 2002's no doubt grindingly essential Leprechaun: Back 2 Tha Hood.
14. Fetus in a bottle (The Jar, 1984)
Eraserhead was a cult classic, but it understandably didn't prompt a lot of knockoffs. An exception can be found in the 1984 shocker The Jar, a bizarre psychodrama about a hirsute, sullen loner (Gary Wallace) tormented by a mysterious, bottled embryo-like creature that gradually tears his life apart and induces ostensibly frightening hallucinations involving crucifixion and the Vietnam War. Wallace shifts the jar's location around, but he can't outrun its extremely silly, abstract evil. The titular fiend ultimately drives Wallace to kill in what can only be described as the apex of storage-unit-based horror.
15. Tree-monster thingy (Wendigo, 2001)
Larry Fessenden makes thinking people's horror movies, which is a nice way of saying his movies are metaphorically rich but not terribly frightening. That certainly holds true of 2001's Wendigo, an atmospheric would-be scare fest about a big city family that encounters a half-man, half-deer shape-shifting creature that can transform into anything. Unfortunately, in Wendigo, the title beastie transforms into a weird tree creature that's ultimately more silly than scary. Fessenden followed up with this year's Last Winter, another metaphor-heavy, scare-light allegory about global warming.
16. Robot monster (Robot Monster, 1953)
Often mentioned alongside Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space as a science-fiction movie so incompetent that it's charming, Robot Monster was made in four days for $16,000 with mainly amateur actors, and it shows. The cheapness and lackluster production design is epitomized by the bizarre appearance of the movie's title villain. Director Phil Tucker cast veteran stuntman and actor George Barrows as Ro-Man the robot monster for one simple reason: Barrows already owned his own gorilla suit. Because that's what a robot looks like, right? A diving helmet was added to give Ro-Man at least some semblance of actually being a mechanical creature, but as Mystery Science Theater 3000's Joel Hodgson quipped, "I've seen Salvador Dali paintings that made more sense than this." Even weirder: Ro-Man talks like Frasier Crane and speaks in sentences that sound like Donald Rumsfeld wrote them: "I cannot. Yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do 'must' and 'cannot' meet? Yet I must. But I cannot."
17. Rug/slug thing (The Creeping Terror, 1964)
Unlike Ro-Man, the alien beast in The Creeping Terror actually is kind of creepy. And in fact, the same basic concept—an amorphous, amoeba-like creature that eats and eats and eats—was handled well in a similar movie, The Blob. What dooms The Creeping Terror to laughability is a combination of general filmmaking incompetence and legendary bad luck. The story goes that the filmmakers' original alien costume was either stolen or destroyed only days before filming. The replacement they were forced to build in order to finish the movie is, well, not great. Intended to be a giant slug-like creature, the monster looks like it was sewn together from carpet remnants and tarp. The crewmembers' feet are often clearly visible underneath, and the whole assemblage moves so slowly that the actors playing its victims literally have to stop and wait for it to catch up to them.
18. Octopus-man (Octaman, 1971)
Makeup artist Rick Baker has won six Oscars for his work, which includes highly praised creature designs on An American Werewolf In London and Star Wars. But everyone's gotta start somewhere, and Baker's first movie was inauspicious, to say the least: Octaman, a cheapie horror-thriller about a deadly man/octopus hybrid mutant terrorizing a Mexican town. It was written and directed by Harry Essex, who basically rehashed the major ideas from his considerably more successful 1954 screenplay, Creature From The Black Lagoon. The monster in Black Lagoon is an iconic classic; Octaman is just a guy in a very unconvincing rubber suit. To fake the appearance of eight limbs, Baker simply suspended two extra arm-tentacles by wires attached to the actor's real arms, and attached two pathetic-looking rubber legs to the back of the real legs. Just how bad was the movie? Here's Baker himself, from an interview with the website revolutionsf.com: "The very first film that I did was Octaman, with [actress] Pier Angeli. Don't ever watch it. You'll lose all respect for me. I was like, 'I'm making a movie!' It was shot in 10 days. Pier Angeli killed herself immediately after Octaman was filmed. Can't blame her."
19. Evil brains (The Brain From Planet Arous, 1957)
Earth is invaded by an extraterrestrial evil criminal mastermind—a literal mind. The inhabitants of the planet Arous are brains—giant, disembodied brains with glowing eyes, who can take over human bodies and use them for nefarious criminal purposes, including leering at their host bodies' girlfriends. In practice, though, the brains from planet Arous look more like helium balloons with lightbulbs for eyes.
20. Bulldozer (Killdozer, 1974)
Based on a 1944 novella by celebrated science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, the TV movie Killdozer has one of the weirdest premises—and most awesome titles—of its era. A group of construction workers on a Pacific Island accidentally strike a meteorite with the blade of a bulldozer, releasing a malevolent alien made out of blue light that possesses the earthmover, creating a rampaging, driverless mechanical killer with no apparent need for gas, but plenty of bloodlust. Beyond the premise and title, though, the movie doesn't have much to recommend itself—it's a fairly lackluster made-for-TV blandfest, though it does boast an early credit for future TV star Robert Urich. And it inspired the name of the influential 1990s-era punk band, which counts for something.
21. General proximity to nature (Frogs, 1972)
Frogs just aren't very scary. In theory, though, a whole swamp full of poisonous snakes, alligators, spiders, lizards, scorpions, and leeches, with some frogs thrown in as garnish, might be kind of frightening. George McCowan's Frogs seems to get this—in spite of the title and the poster depicting a particularly pop-eyed frog with a bloodied human hand poking out of its mouth, the freakin' frogs in Frogs never actually kill anyone. They just hang around and try their damnedest to look menacing while cranky billionaire Ray Milland insists his poison-and-pollute anti-nature policies are right and just, no matter how many members of his extended family fall prey to vengeful nature. Unfortunately, their deaths are laughably choreographed, and usually involve shots of victims rolling around screaming in mud or water, interspersed with close-up shots of animals swimming or sitting around peaceably. Some of the better sequences involve death by looking at a zoomed-in shot of a snapping turtle, death by repeatedly grabbing and rolling around on top of an alligator whose mouth is clearly banded shut, and Milland's apparent death by just generally being freaked out by all the frogs in his vicinity. Moral: don't get within 50 feet of nature, or some Spanish moss might fall off a tree and bury you to death while tarantulas watch nearby.
22. Rabbits (Night Of The Lepus, 1972)
The trailer for William F. Claxton's Night Of The Lepus is all about the mystery: What hideous creature is haunting the night? What's killing all those people? What the heck is the adversary in this film? Answer: bunnies. Giant carnivorous mutant bunnies. Which look suspiciously like perfectly normal bunnies hopping around in slow motion, with scary roaring and snarling noises superimposed on the soundtrack. Hey, at least they're more ferocious than those frogs.
23. Elevator (The Lift, 1983)
Elevators conjure up two very real fears: being trapped in a confined space, and falling hundreds of feet to your death. But making an entire movie (two movies, actually, since director Dick Maas remade his original Dutch production as 2001's The Shaft, with Naomi Watts) that revolves around a murderously sentient lift takes a certain amount of chutzpah. There's only so much it can do to kill people, though it does somehow develop the ability to empty itself of oxygen to suffocate its passengers, and it gets the drop on an unwitting victim by descending unexpectedly, cutting his head off. Next time, we'll take the stairs.
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