The Monster Mash-Ups - Part 5: the 1990s

FILM & TELEVISION

Things definitely take a turn toward improvement in the 90s.  The stinky cheese stench of commercial abuse lingers, but is fading.  Midnight movie nerds like Tim Burton and Joss Whedon are on the rise, exorcising and exercising their demons, as it were, and changing flow of the mainstream.

Waxwork II: Lost in Time - 1992
Written & Directed by Anthony Hickox

Featuring: Frankenstein's Monster, Ghosts, Aliens-but-definitely-not-"Aliens"-aliens, Zombies, Mr Hyde, Jack the Ripper & more

The first Waxwork was a pleasant surprise for me, but Waxwork II was an outright delight.  While relying on an even more contrived framing device, the segments that made up the body of the film were even better tributes to beloved films, and the laugh-out-loud moments made it a rollicking good time.

Picking up immediately after the first movie, albeit with a new actress in the role of Sarah, the sequel wastes no time killing off her stepfather, courtesy of a zombie hand which escaped from the waxwork.  She's blamed for the death and stands trial for murder.  Having sent the homicidal hand down the garbage disposal, she's hard pressed to back up her story.  Before the trial is finished, she and Mark return to his uncle's home to find some kind of Hail Mary play to prove her story.  This leads them to a portal through time, and they spend most of the movie looking for evidence and fighting evil in various film tributes (mostly horror based) and trying to find their way back home.  The homages here are more overt, and more on the nose than those in Waxwork, touching on Frankenstein, The Haunting, Alien, Legend and other sword & sorcery films, with brief trips through even more.  As in the first, the effects range from surprisingly good to definitely not but that's okay, particularly for the kind of movie it is.  Once again, we're treated to some fabulous character actors in the supporting cast including Bruce Campbell, Jeffery Combs, Marina Sirtis, Patrick Macnee, Juliet Mills and David frickin' Carradine, among others.  Everyone seemed to have a lot of fun making this movie, and I had a hell of a lot of fun watching it.

The Nightmare Before Christmas - 1993
see link to make sense of writing team credits
Directed by Henry Selick

Featuring: a town full of monsters

Though commonly attributed to Tim Burton, he neither directed nor wrote the screenplay for the much beloved film.  Burton wrote the short story upon which it was based.  I find this curious, since it's regarded by many as the high point of his career.  In my more esoteric moments, I might even wonder if this mightn't explain his creative flailing and repeated attempts to recapture something that was never fully his to begin with.

But I digress.  Jack Skellington is the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, a kind of anthropomorphism of the Halloween spirit.  Amid an existential crisis of sorts, he discovers that there are other towns, each representing other holidays, and sets his sights on taking over Christmas.  He enlists all the citizens of Halloween Town, which represent all sorts of fearful images associated with the holiday, or just fear and weirdness.  Jack himself is a skeleton.  His beloved Sally is a patchwork girl (a la Frankenstein's monster).  There are witches, corpses, demons, vampires, mummies and so on; taking many of the classic tropes under the "Universal Monsters" umbrella and mixing them in with all manner of spooky night-bumpers.  Now, more than 20 years on, I feel that it's safe to say that this is not only a classic, but it's quite possibly the truest classic of all the monster mash-ups.  It just now occurs to me that stop-motion animation doesn't age the same way that CGI does, assuring that the Nightmare Before Christmas will continue to look as fresh as the day it... died.  Mwahaha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa....

Dollman vs Demonic Toys - 1993

I am aware that this is a thing that exists.  It combines two other things that, surprisingly, also exist.

That is all.

Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II - 1993
Written by Wataru Mimura
Directed by Takao Okiwara

Featuring: Godzilla, Godzilla Jr, Rodan, Mechagodzilla & Mecha King Ghidorah

Despite the Roman numeral two in the title, Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II is not a sequel to 1974's Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla.  It does, however, function as a sequel to 1991's completely senseless yet smashingly successful Godzilla vs King Ghidorah, so go fig.  That's how Godzilla's intermittent and resettable continuity works.

The original Mechagodzilla was created by aliens and posed as Godzilla to lead their invasion plans.  The new one was created (using technology salvaged from the Mecha King Ghidorah from the future) by the UN-backed G-Force to end the global threat posed by Godzilla.  Don't worry, the most convoluted part of this film is when they refer back to GvKG.

A team of scientists is investigating a radioactive island where they discover a giant egg when Rodan shows up (called "Radon" here, which is evidently the monster's actual name, before Americans goofed it up).  Godzilla arrives not long after and he and Rodan get into a pretty brutal fight while the scientists escape with the egg.  Back in Tokyo, the egg eventually hatches, revealing not a pteranodon like Rodan as they expected, but a baby godzillasaurus reminiscent of the baby Godzilla known as Minilla from late 60s installments.  Godzilla comes to Tokyo, apparently looking for the baby, but is confronted by Mechagodzilla.  With the giant robot, they're able to get a couple electrified harpoons into Godzilla and take him down... until the energy starts to feedback and fry its own systems.  With the "Baby" in their care, the scientists are able to study its anatomy and glean some insight into what went wrong before, and how they can bestter go about killing Godzilla.  This, however, raises some ethical questions, both about how they're using Baby and what it would mean to kill Godzilla.  This all culminates in a massive brawl between Godzilla and Mechagodzilla, thank heavens.

The final battle takes place in the city, which is awesome.  The miniatures include skyscrapers and a sports arena which really gives some nice scale to the giants, to say nothing of the mass destruction.  Sure, there are still some nonsensical story beats, but nothing near as bad as the completely ridiculous story in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah.  I'm finally coming to accept that that's just another part of what makes a Godzilla movie a Godzilla movie.

Monster Force - 1994

Universal proves that it can exploit and devalue their monster legacy as well as anyone with this 13 episode animated series.  A group of teens (plus Frankenstein's monster) team up to combat poorly animated versions of classic Universal Monsters and to keep the copyright active.

Monster Mash: The Movie - 1995
Written & Directed by Joel Cohen & Alec Sokolow

A low-budget musical based on that song you hate, written by the guys who wrote the Garfield movies and featuring that girl from some show and Jimmie "J.J." "Kid Dynamite" Walker.

As my sweet Grandma Frances would have said, "You figure it out."

The Creeps - 1997
Written by Benjamin Carr
Directed by Charles Band

Featuring: Mini-Dracula, Mini-Frankenstein's Monster, Mini-Mummy & Mini-Wolf Man

A mad scientist gathers first editions books to bring their characters to life.  I haven't seen the movie, so I'm not clear on how that's "science."  Anyway, he succeeds, but only partially.  The characters he brings to life are Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy and the Wolf Man, but they all turn out to be "mini" versions of each.  You might remember this movie from the fierce Oscar competition of which it was a part.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - 1997-2003
Created by Joss Whedon

Featuring: everything (except leprechauns)

In a category oft defined by low-budget fan-serving schlock, Buffy slays 'em all.  At first glance it might be a little unfair to include a seven season show that trotted out a new monster on an episode-by-episode basis, but for a group of misfit high schoolers who evolved into a hell-beasty death squad comprised of a demon-fuelled slayer, a witch, a werewolf, a former demon, a vampire with benefits, and... Xander, I'd say they more than achieved the many-monsters-one-box spirit.  As for the other creatures of the night and sometimes late afternoon, BtVS included countless vampires (I'm actually pretty sure that someone has counted them -- oh internet) including such Universal Monster homages as a skeezy rendition of Dracula himself, a Frankensteinian footballer, a hot Gothy werewolf, a hot Incan mummy, a Creature from the high school swim team, an Invisible Girl as well as two different kinds of zombies, and so, so, SO much more.  Buffy is a milestone in TV history.  Anyone who loves monsters and/or series television should have seen it at least twice by now.

I'm not going to list Angel separately as that would be redundant.  There was less tribute paid to classic monsters in the series, and less overall variety altogether.  That's not a dig.  Angel did a really strong job of developing its own mythology and maintaining characters over longer, sustained story lines.

Archie's Weird Mysteries - 1999-2002

Archie and the Riverdale gang get involved in all kinds of mysteries, often with a supernatural theme.  Vampires come to town, Veronica turns into a 50 foot woman, there are ghosts, aliens, a "glob," ghosts, mummies, time travel and ghosts.  It's a clean-cut good time for all, and actually sounds less embarrassing than most monster mashing cartoons we'd seen up until now.  Actually, it sounds a little like a watered-down Buffy.  It was produced by DiC, so make that very watered down.  There was also a comic based on the cartoon based on the comic.

The thrills continue with The Monster Mash-Ups - Part 6: the Twenty-Aughts!

Or you can catch up with the series, from the top with The Monster Mash-Ups - Part 1: the 1940s & 50s!

The Monster Mash-Ups - Part 1: the 1940s & 50s

FILM & TELEVISION:

If there's anything better than a monster, it's more monsters, right?

Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you?  Well, it's a good thing you're pretty.

Big monster dust-ups are some of the best-worst things in film history.  The idea is almost always thrilling, but sadly the execution of the idea is frequently disappointing, if not outright craptacular.  They seem to be at their best when they're part of a fresh universe created from whole cloth, rather than a catch-all for recycled and/or public domain properties.  Since they're so often thrown together as a quick and easy cash-in, they bear all the loving craftsmanship that typically accompanies the term "quick and easy cash-in."

And yet... and yet there is just something undeniably exciting about the things that go bump in the dark bumping into each other.  How will it change their dynamic?  Do multiple monsters mean more monster screen-time?  Who would win in a fight?

I don't mind telling you; my criteria here is kind of vague.  At first I was just looking at the Universal Monster crossovers, or anything that co-opted the public domain origins of those characters.  Universal Pictures had big, big hits with the now classic Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man, but also the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Invisible Man, Dr Jekyl & Mr Hyde, Phantom of the Opera, the Mummy, This Island Earth and of course all manner of sequels and other horror movies.  Other filmmakers grew up with these movies running on TV, and would later pay tribute to them and/or exploit them in their own work.  While I don't want to just throw in everything that has more than one kind of monster in it, I do want the ones that feel like they are, for better or worse, tapping into that lineage.

I also have many of Godzilla's bigger throw-downs.  Some of them do, in fact, cross over with other characters, and the series has had such longevity in its own right that they do kind of feed on that same thrill of recurrence and magnification.  I think the experience of reading this article will convey to you the continuity of excitement that comes from having a house full of monsters.

And so, please enjoy... the Monster Mash-Ups.

Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man - 1943
Written by Kurt Siodmak
Directed by Roy William Neill

Featuring: The Wolf Man & Frankenstein's Monster

This is where it all began.

The now legendary 1931 Frankenstein had spawned three sequels including the equally legendary Bride of Frankenstein.  1941's The Wolf Man had also been a big hit for Universal, and its screenwriter jokingly pitched the producer the idea of bringing them together, which almost backfired on him, and where would we be now?

The film really belongs to Lon Chaney's Wolf Man far more than it does Frankenstein.  As a fairly direct sequel, it opens with Lawrence Talbot (Chaney) escaping from his crypt and going on the road to find relief from his curse.  The Wolf Man has always been kind of the runner-up to Dracula and Frankenstein, but he's really the most interesting character of the three.  Frankenstein's monster is misunderstood, and Dracula is just plain bad, but Talbot is tormented, and it gives him the strongest motivations of the lot.  Talbot seeks out the old gypsy woman who understands his condition, and together they journey to find the brilliant scientist who has been doing earth-shattering work in the subject of life and death; Dr. Frankenstein.  Once they get to Frankenstein's village, however, they discover that he has been killed... and stir up the fear and loathing of the villagers.  Searching the ruins of Castle Frankenstein for clues about the late doctor's work, he discovers the monster frozen in ice.  Once thawed, the monster guides him to Dr. Frankenstein's hidden cache of notes, but his personal diary is still missing, which leads Talbot to enlist the aid of his heir, the lovely Baroness Elsa Frankenstein in the hopes that she still has his diary.

The film works pretty well while it maintains its focus on Talbot/the Wolf Man.  The Frankenstein parts are not as good.  Due to the nature of the character, the monster just isn't that strong of a protagonist.  It's one thing when he's misunderstood, but he doesn't really have a stake in things here and his motivation suffers.  What's more, the character has become more convoluted the further he's gotten from his origins.  And frankly, the make-up is lazy and Bela Lugosi plays him far more campy than Karloff did in the first couple films.  It's by no means a great film, but it has some good parts in it, and it planted a seed of something that would grow and mutate in ways that its creators never could have imagined.

The Return of the Vampire - 1944
See link for writing team
Directed by Lew Landers

Yikes!  This one almost got away from me!

It stars Bela Lugosi as a vampire who is not Dracula, but Armand Tesla.  He went and got himself staked in 1918, but the German bombing of England during WWII knocked the stake out of his heart and he reconstituted to seek vengeance upon the people he was trying to kill in the first place.  Jerk.  What makes this a Monster Mash-Up is that his faithful manservant is a mild-mannered werewolf.

I truly wish I could tell you more, but I have, as yet, been unable to see the movie.

House of Frankenstein - 1944
Written by Edward T. Lowe Jr.
Directed by Erle C. Kenton

Featuring: The Wolf Man, Dracula & Frankenstein's Monster

A direct sequel to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein has precious little Frankenstein in it, but it does bring a bit of Dracula into the equation.  No, the Wolf Man is the lead monster again, although the movie truly belongs to Dr. Niemann (Boris Karloff), a criminal scientist obsessed with continuing Frankenstein's work.  Having escaped from prison, he and fellow inmate/hunchbacked sidekick "friend Daniel" go undercover in the assumed identity of a -- ahem -- recently deceased sideshow operator offering a cabinet of terrors.  It just so happens that his skeleton of Dracula actually IS the skeleton of Dracula, and once Niemann removes the stake from its ribs, the vampire reconstitutes in a jiffy (although as a gray haired and mustachioed John Carradine rather than Bela Lugosi, who somehow got scooped out of TWO roles he'd played in this film).  Dracula helps Niemann settle a few old scores, then promptly gets himself dusted by the rising sun.

Niemann and Daniel, meanwhile, investigate the ruins of Castle Frankenstein, discovering both the Monster and the Wolf Man frozen in the subterranean ice cavern.  Talbot springs back to shape right away and gets back to a bust schedule of brooding.  This is, of course, like an aphrodisiac to the gypsy dancing girl upon whom Daniel's eye had fallen.  The Monster, however, remains unconscious and in poor condition.  Talbot leads Niemann to Frankenstein's diary, and they all set off for Niemann's castle to get down on some mad science.  The Monster remains unconscious until the dramatic climax, but everyone else is in conflict, each with their incompatible agendas, and let us not forget the villagers.  Villagers always have a burr up their butt about something, don't they?

House of Frankenstein keeps things going and ramps them up from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.  The performances are stronger, thanks largely to Karloff's Niemann, J. Carrol Naish as Daniel and the bubbly gypsy girl Ilonka played by Elena Verdugo.  There's a new actor & makeup job for the Monster, which helps too.  Carradine's Dracula is a disappointment, however, although we don't get much of him.  I suspect that will change in House of Dracula, but then again, judging from the distribution of screen time in House of Frankenstein, he could just appear on a postage stamp licked by the Wolf Man.

House of Dracula - 1945
Written by Edward T. Lowe Jr.
Directed by Erle C. Kenton

Featuring: The Wolf Man, Dracula and a glimpse of Frankenstein's Monster

The third and final Universal monster crossover vamps (no pun intended) on the same component parts that made up the first two.  The central character is, once again, really the scientist that ties them all together.  Dr. Edelmann is initially contacted by Dracula, who for reasons not explained, managed to get himself reconstituted in the years since the events in House of Frankenstein.  Dracula claims to wish to be freed from his curse, although it isn't really clear whether this is his true purpose, of if he's merely trying to get over with Edelmann's buxom blonde nurse.  Edelmann tells him that he'll need some time to prepare the treatment, so Dracula disappears until the middle of the movie.  Meanwhile, Lawrence "Wolf Man" Talbot shows up, also in inexplicably good health and looking for a cure.  Unwilling to face another full moon as the wolf, Talbot throws himself into the ocean, but washes into a cave in the cliff face.  When Edelmann goes down to find him, they discover a mud flow carrying the skeleton of House of Frankenstein's Dr. Niemann and the unconscious Monster.  So HIS whereabouts are explained, but it's a pretty dopey and unlikely scenario.  Edelmann is less unhinged and obsessed than the previous films' doctors, but even he feels the strong temptation to revive Frankenstein's creation.

Dracula drops by around that time to seduce the nurse and Edelmann decides he'd better up the dosage, which for some reason involves a transfusion of his own blood... which has to be direct... and he has to be unconscious for it.  Go fig.  During the transfusion, Dracula wakes up and reverses the flow, then leaves.  Edelmann finds Dracula's coffin and opens it to sunlight, and that's the last of THAT plot thread.  Unfortunately, the transfusion begins to transform Edelmann into a vampire and his decision-making skills take a nosedive.

Frankenstein's Monster isn't revived until literally the last 2 minutes of the film.  Talbot may have gotten his happy ending.  This time out, the hunchback is Edelmann's cute brunette nurse.  And the creepiest critter of the lot is a sallow faced villager.  Given that House of Dracula is a fairly nonsensical remix of the same elements from the first two, it's probably just as well that Universal didn't build any more Houses.  They were out of ideas.

Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein - 1948
see link for writing team
Directed by Charles Barton

Featuring: Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolf Man & the Invisible Man

The first of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello's "Meet" movies is also their most jam-packed.  It features Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man, and Glenn Strange as Frankenstein's Monster.  Lugosi and Chaney, of course, originated those roles, and Strange played the Monster in both of the "House" movies.  Obviously, it's a pretty silly movie concerning a couple of schlubby baggage handlers who just happen to receive shipment of Dracula's coffin and Frankenstein's corpse, but I'll let you in on a little secret -- it's at least as good as the straight-faced trio of crossovers that preceded it.  In fact, depending on what you value in the films, I could easily say that it's much better.  The story is cornball, but so were all the others, and A&C do it with so much humor that less time is wasted on overwrought drama.  Moreover, the monsters have WAY more screen time than in any of the other monster mash-ups.  Heck, Frankenstein gets more screen time here than he did in all three of the other crossovers combined.  You really can't overstate value of having Bela back as Dracula either.  John Carradine was... okay, but Bela IS Dracula and vice versa.  When he started putting the hypnotic whammy on Costello, I totally geeked out.  Most of the comedy holds up pretty well, although that depends on the how willing the viewer is to allow it to exist within its own context.  Anyone who complains about Abbot & Costello but admits to laughing at Scary Movie is someone to remove from your friend list.  The only downside to A&CmF is that it created the template for the classic monsters in goofy comedy and wanna-comedy.  The madcap mayhem and chases toward the end really brought Scooby-Doo to mind, and that just shouldn't happen.



Horror and Sci-Fi monster movies really went through a lot of changes in the 1950s.  The classic monsters became passe, and the whole enterprise became a much lower budget, lower respectability business.  Giant radioactive creatures were on the rise, so at first I didn't have anything to represent monster mash-ups in the 50s, but these two just barely squeak through.  Toward the later 50s, England's Hammer Films studio took up the cause of the classic creatures, but with a seriousness that eschewed the camp of crossovers.

How to Make a Monster - 1958
see link for writing team
Directed by Herbert L Strock

Featuring: a teenage werewolf & a teenage Frankenstein's monster

I had heard of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, (largely because it starred Michael Landon and was a Trivial Pursuit question) but I didn't realize that the studio, American International Pictures, had also released I Was a Teenage Frankenstein the same year, much less that the both had a sequel in How to Make a Monster, the following year.

The story revolves around a make-up artist for "American International Studios" who discovers that he's being phased out when the studio he helped to enrich with his monsters has decided to shift their focus to musicals.  He uses his monstrous creations and the power of hypnosis to exact his revenge.  Sounds pretty "meta" if you ask me.

I have, as yet, been unable to view this film.

Plan 9 from Outer Space - 1959
Written & Directed by Edward D Wood Jr

Featuring: grave-robbing aliens, Vampire Girl and ghouls (zombies)

Notorious and uproarious, the badness is most glorious!  Ed Wood's "masterpiece" has been dubbed "the Worst Movie Ever Made."  It's not, but not for lack of trying.  Wood filled a box with his passions, shook it up, and Plan 9 is what came out.

The story isn't completely nonsensical, nor is it completely stupid, but between the two of them, they pretty much keep things covered.  Aliens come to Earth.  The dead rise.  There are some pretty (unintentionally) hilarious scenes, but they don't necessarily add up in any context.  Wood managed to wedge in a number of future cult figures, or perhaps they became cult figures for having been in Plan 9.  TV mentalist Criswell delivers the opening monologue.  Elvira's role model Vampira appears as a "Vampire Girl" despite no real connection to vampires in the film.  Bela Lugosi gets one last posthumous credit via footage that Wood shot with vague intentions and worked into Plan 9.  His character is played in other scenes by an actor holding his cape over his face.  And then there's Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson...  I don't have anything to say about that.  He's just there.

It's been a long time since I saw Plan 9 itself.  I've mostly recovered.  I'm far more willing to watch Tim Burton's Ed Wood.  He captures the experience so well that they blur together in places.  You really get all you need that way, without the impatient discomfort of watching Plan 9 itself.

Continue reading with The Monster Mash-Ups - Part 2: the 1960s!

Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud

BOOKS:















One of the most unexpected and delightful occurrences of 2012 was Stephen Colbert's interview with author and illustrator Maurice Sendak.  I'd never seen Sendak before or known anything about him (other than how much I loved his work), when out of left field Colbert delivered this fascinating and hilarious two-part interview.



           

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 1
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Colbert starts to edge up on that line where he's a little too "Colbert" in Part 2, but it's still a lot of fun and Sendak shines through.


                   

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 2
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Sadly, this was just a few months before Sendak passed away, May 8, 2012.  The interview made the loss more palpable, I feel, which maybe it should be.



A New York Times tribute by Christoph Niemann on his passing, culled from a Terry Gross interview on NPR's Fresh Air.





And here's the Terry Gross interview.  Hm, it doesn't seem to want to embed, so here's the Fresh Air interview on NPR.



Gladly, he kept working right up until the end, and leaves a trove of books yet to discover.  While I grew up loving Where The Wild Things Are like crazy, in recent years, it was his first pop-up book, Mommy? (2006) that really blew me away.

They're doing incredible things in pop-up craft nowadays

It's silly and short, but I love the tribute to classic Universal Monsters and the way the pop-up is animated, rather than just "boing! I'm a picture and now I'm poking out!"  Opening that flap on the mummy page is a show-stealer.

Did you know that there was almost an edition of The Hobbit illustrated by Sendak?  There was, until someone screwed up the labels and Tolkien got all grumbly that Sendak didn't know the difference between a hobbit and a wood elf.

I don't have a conclusion here.  Maurice Sendak was awesome and now he's gone.  It's happy and sad and happy again, because of who he was and all he left behind.

We should be so lucky.


6/11/2013
In recognition of Maurice's 85th birthday yesterday, I'm adding a couple more incredible interviews that came to my attention.  In fact, any time I find a new one, I'll throw it in.  He had some pretty brilliant things to say while he was with us.


This is another nice animated tribute based on interview audio, from Blank on Blank & PBS Digital Studios.





This one is particularly great.  Bill Moyers AND Maurice Sendak?  Oh, BABY!

(It's in 2 parts with Madeline Albright in the middle.  Go ahead and skip her, but make sure you get both parts of him.)





EDIT: Another!  From the TATE & Guardian UK.





EDIT: For Maurice's birthday this year, I'm adding this fantastic interview he did with Dave Eggers for Vanity Fair in 2011.