Yesterday I ran over this article called “The Creatures That Ate Hollywood”. It was a nice little walk down memory lane (not that much for me, but for Hollywood itself). Had everything from Moby Dick to Aliens vs. Predator. Though it wasn’t just Hollywood, it had some Japanese too, well sure, Godzilla needs to be up there too, and people (still can’t tell why) don’t seem to like the Emmerich version at all.
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What I didn’t quite get is why throw in all of those movies, and not mention some pioneers like 1925′s The Lost World, or 1933′s King Kong. Sure, it does mention Moby Dick as evidence of Hollywood’s infatuation with giant, thrashing creatures, but somehow that fails to pay homage to these classics. And there were many more (even if quantity did take over quality). The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was just the first of a slew of creature movies in the ’50s. Nuclear paranoia was about.
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That changed a lot, mostly during the ’70s and ’80s. We got to see aliens, very very scary aliens, thanks to Ridley Scott and later John Cameron (the Alien Queen is still my favourite). George Lucas released upon an unsuspecting world his sci-fi universe full of wonder. Monsters even got to be funny, like in Ron Underwood’s Tremors. The 50 foot women of the early years were nowhere to be seen.
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Then came the ’90s and a little movie called Jurrasic Park. And the creatures became a lot more real than they seemed. Since CGI broke into mainstream there’s not much we haven’t seen in the department of creatures and monsters. Godzilla had it’s American remake, the Alien franchise got its share of sequels, and we got to see even more aliens from Lucas (Jar-Jar Binks…uhhh!). Cloverfield managed to demonstrate, Hollywood is nowhere near getting over its obsession with giant monster movies. And wouldn’t you know it, 2009 has at least one monster movie up its sleeve: The Wolf Man, starring Benicio del Toro.
Posted on November 24th, 2008 by MrWiseguy
Filed under: Movies
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