There are many reasons to love Halloween. Free candy, dressing up in outrageous costumes, mad parties and plenty of scares. But for me the appeal of the season comes from one simple pleasure and that pleasure is getting to indulge my love of trashy monster flicks.
Now monster movies come in all shapes and sizes but for a true party atmosphere with a few friends and a few drinks there is nothing better than a cheap and nasty CGI creature feature flick. I remember when my friends and I settled down to watch Shark Attack 3. I was forever changed after that experience!
Much like the VHS you could get before them, my love of these movies stems from their covers, which often have little to do with the film’s content, and the laughs held within. You know these films will be bad, how bad is part of the fun!
So I have compiled a gallery of some of my favorite covers from these movies to give you an idea of the content out there. Are these the best? No. In fact, some of these are absolute stinkers, but boy do they have great covers! In honor of that recent viewing of Shark Attack 3, I have just chosen ‘creature on the rampage’ type movies. Look for a future instalment to see the many delights of monster movie CGI flicks!
Shark Attacks!
This is where it all began. Jaws was the first huge shark movie, but the birth of the CGI shark, though starting slowly, blew up once the technology became cheap enough for anyone to utilize. Larger budget movies like Deep Blue Sea showed us what shark films could do, but it movie trickery films like Shark Attack 3 and schlock hits like Sharknado that really showed how silly the genre can get. Anything film makers could think of to bang into a sharks DNA got put in there with mixed results!
Dinosaur Disasters!
Jurassic Park gave us incredible visuals, mixing CGI and practical effects to give us a taste of what dinosaurs would look like today. But soon enough the rip offs came a calling. Carnosaur was one of the first I can remember, and hugely entertaining it was, however that was all practical effects. The mixing of CGI and practical effects still happens in some CGI movies, but mostly it is cheaper to do this all with computer effects. Maybe this is why the CGI Dinosaur movie was slightly slower to come about than its shark counterpart, dinosaurs being more varied than sharks. They have caught up big time, though and since the release of Jurassic World we now have a mass of Dinosaur related movies coming out, 90% of which have a T-Rex proudly strutting on the front cover.
Assorted Creature Rampages
Killer animal movies are nothing new. They were doing incredibly cheesy, yet hugely entertaining flicks like Frogs! and Grizzly back in the 1970s, and killers pet movies were all the rage in the ’80s. But the real breakthrough for CGI movies of this type was Snakes On A Plane, were Samuel L. Jackson got rather miffed about the amount of serpents on his mode of transport! This film itself sparked off some odd yet bonkers copy cats like Snakes On A Train (voodoo mishaps and a giant snake eating a train are just one of the many delights on show), while Flight Of The Living Dead replaced snakes with zombies! These all opened the way for a variety of different movie monsters to slither, creep and crawl their way onto the small screen a few of which you can see below.
Fight Of The Century
Since Dracula had his first epic encounter with Frankenstein’s monster, film goers have loved to see movie titans clash and the CGI horror field is no different. In fact one of the first to come out, or at least the most famous of the bunch, has spawned a series of sorts. Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus had what is now the staple of the genre; a great cover and title, clumsy scenes of CGI monsters fighting, and lots and lots of talking, normally in one spot! But there are not as many of these titles as you would think, with just a handful on show here. One of the more interesting releases which I cannot wait to get my hands on is the mash-up of the Anaconda movies with the killer croc from Lake Placid!
Now this article barley skims the surface of what is out there, and I know full well that tons of potential delights have been missed from this list, purely because I have not come across them yet. That’s the fun (or annoyance) of these movies is that much like the zombie films, they aren’t going away anytime soon! Keep checking Grizzly Bomb for more cheap and cheerful releases as and when I get chance to find them!
If you like your films to be on the terrible side, then take a look at our DVD Catastrophe collection, and for more Halloween related pieces check out Grizzly Bomb’s Countdown to Halloween to get your scare on. And then check out the VHS Vault for a showcase of some of the best and worst non-DVD released flicks out there.
Images: Warwick Films, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 88 Films, Maneater, Signature Entertainment, Spirit Entertainment Limited,
Platform Entertainment, Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment,
High Fliers Films, Optimum Home Entertainment, Chelsea Films, SyFy, First Look Pictures, New Horizon Films, Proper, Studiocanal,
Mandala Films, Lions Gate Home Entertainment, Metrodome Group,
Columbia Tristar, Warner Home Video, Lightning Pictures,
Scanbox Entertainment, Momentum Pictures, Terror-Cotta.
Grizzly Bomb 