Creature Feature

 I was never a fan of slasher flicks. I can do without Friday the 13th, Halloween, or Nightmare on Elm Street. There are exceptions of course. I don't hate the Scream franchise. The original Evil Dead trilogy was pretty neat though I admit that is mostly because I enjoy Bruce Campbell. Most of the time I am just not into "scary" movies unless it is a creature flick. 

Creature features are a pretty broad category. What got me thinking about it was finally sitting down and watching The Meg. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie though it is little surprise since there are so many of my favorite actors in it. I mean Jason Statham is obvious, but I really enjoy Rainn Wilson, Page Kennedy, Ruby Rose, Masi Oka, Robert Taylor, and Cliff Curtis. The visuals in the movie were excellent. 

I started thinking about the fact that I really love creature feature movies. I cannot get enough dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. I jump for Godzilla, King Kong, and Pacific Rim movies. Even Cocaine Bear has been on my radar because there is just something about a thin premise of a story as an excuse for carnage and strife that is satisfying to me. 

It is funny the things I pull out of horror and put into creature feature.  For example, I would consider the Terminator movies a creature feature spin off. Arguably, the first movie is more firmly in this category than the ...however many sequels. Though I think it differs in some important aspects. 

A really satisfying creature feature puts the humans at fault. The premise of the first Terminator movie meets this criteria quite well. We built the AI that decides we need to die as a species. To accomplish this a robot assassin is sent back in time to kill the mother of the person who will lead the resistance in the future. That is super cloudy though. The Jurassic Park movies do it better. 

In the original Jurassic Park, a company uses technology to genetically engineer monsters based on extinct species. Then, in a pure show of greed and capitalism gone wrong, they set out to profit from this technology by creating the world's most dangerous zoo. That model works so well that it allows for another five sequels before it really begins to wear thin. 

You cannot be mad at the dinosaurs for scarfing on humans throughout the movies. They are just doing what genetically engineers approximations of dinosaurs would do. It makes the gory business of humans being eaten alive enjoyable to watch. The people who get devoured mostly deserve it. 

More importantly there are members of the cast who do not deserve to get eaten. They act and speak out against the mentality of the greedy capitalists who are exploiting these dinosaurs for profit. You don't want to see Jeff Goldblum eaten by the dinosaur because he is advising against opening the park even though his character (in the first film) is smarmy and clearly a womanizer. We like him for seeing the obvious problems so we want him to live.

So the creature feature formula has to contain those elements. It is the humans fault this is happening. Character you like come close to being eaten, but they survive often through their own knowledge or even pure luck. Characters you don't like get eaten in gory and satisfying ways. The 'bad guy' characters often look as if they have gotten away with their bad behavior only to be brutally killed in a great jump scare. 

There are other important story elements to the creature feature. The monster has to be defeated but not really dispatched. This is true in all scales from the spiders in Arachnophobia, to the mutos from Godzilla, or the shark in Jaws. Sure, you can kill the rogue shark with an exploding scuba tank. That doesn't rid the ocean of killer great white sharks. In fact, the first encounter sort of sets up a premise of sequels where the monster becomes more sympathetic. Don't believe me? 

Well, let's return to the world of the Jurassic Park films. In the first movie we are challenged to believe that Velociraptors can be much more terrifying than the T-Rex even though both have a decent body count through the movie. In the end the T-Rex basically saves the protagonists of the movie by taking on the pack of Velociraptors. Fast forward a few films and we have the T-Rex proving it is the superior predator by having it kill the mutant dinosaur in a revenge match. Then there is Blue the heroic Velociraptor friend of Star-Lord. By building ever more human folly into the real monster the lesser monsters become sympathetic and allied with the good guys. I am genuinely surprised there isn't a Jaws movie where the shark teams up with marine biologists to kill a shark mutated by dumping of nuclear waste... then again maybe there is. I have only seen the first two and it has been a while. 

Creature features are enhanced by inhospitable environments and tight spaces. I think that so many of these films end up using deep water because the ocean is one of the most unnatural places for a human to survive unaided by technology. The deeper you go the colder, darker, and more unknown it gets. Another example that gets used a lot is the frozen polar regions. Would The Thing have been as great a movie if it had taken place in Times Square? Boy that certainly is an idea for a movie, but it wouldn't have been the same thing. Don't believe me?

Well let's take a look at the first two Predator films. The first one takes place in the jungles of Columbia. You have a lot of things in the jungle that can kill you already: snakes, big cats, and heat. Now you add in paramilitary banditos producing cocaine and taking hostages. That is a fun environment that can make for movie magic. Just ask Rambo. 

Now you add in a monstrous trophy hunter from outer space with a penchant for skinning and decapitation. That first film is wonderful. Arnold figuring out how to use the Predator's strengths against it is a great adventure that only cost the lives of his entire crew. We feel sympathy for the Predator because he only kills dangerous humans. That spark set the stage for the second film which, in my opinion at least, is a much weaker entry.

Now, we can talk about the urban jungle and how dangerous humans are all day long, but it is no depths of the ocean, vacuum of space, or frozen tundra. People are awful and with them engaged in illegal drugs and other gang activity they can be dangerous. Predator II just doesn't hit as hard. Danny Glover's character isn't struggling through Los Angeles in the same way that Arnold ran through the jungle.  It made it a weaker film. I don't mind creature features attempting to break from the formula by any means, but what works does so for a reason. 

I think another important element is the human believing that they can overcome whatever creature is out to get them only to find out they are wrong. John Carpenter's Vampires does this very well. The movie starts out with a group of slayers cleaning out a vampire nest with relative ease. The crew is smart. They are practiced. They are well armed. Then, Valek wakes up and promptly slaughters all but two of the main characters. We thought they could handle it all. They were wrong. 

Godzilla movies use this formula often. In the classic MechaGodzilla was meant to be a foil for the raw strength and power of Godzilla. It turns out that defeating the most powerful of earth's kaiju protectors has disastrous results. It is a lot more fun to have Godzilla shrug off machine gun fire, battleship heavy guns, and even nukes to go on and raze half of Tokyo protecting the planet from an evil kaiju from space. 

I could go on and on about creature flicks. I love them for being campy. I love them for being a bit predictable. Big budget or small, star studded cast or fresh faces, it is just really fun to watch these films. They age well. 1994's Jurassic Park hits just as hard as the newer The Meg. In many ways the first movie is much more enjoyable than the more recent sequels because it hadn't been stretched to the point of complete absurdity. Of course, I like these so much that I have them all on DVD and digital.