Monster Mania
This film is, bar none, among my favourite creature flicks! The alien monster is the most amazing thing I’ve seen. It is humanish, but it’s also has its own cool alien apparatus, weapons, and sounds.
Kevin Peter Hall played the creature. He was an incredibly tall man of 7′ 2″ who died tragically of AIDS from a blood transfusion. His handful of films were almost all creature related.
Also in the cast are, of course, AHHHHNOLLLD, (Schwarzenegger) playing Major Dutch Shaeffer. One of my favorite little nuggets is the Shane Black character who forever can’t tell a joke (he later soared to fame as the screenwriter of the original Lethal Weapon. It is hilarious to realize he was doing fine as an actor but then writing came along and stole him from us). Sexy black actor, Carl Weathers, is constantly at odds with “Dutch,” and my favorite babe in the cast is Native actor Sonny Landham who plays Billy Sole.
Hilariously, Jesse Ventura is in this movie and both he and AHHHHNOLLD are now governors of American states! Hmmm, will other cast members follow? Richard Chaves plays Poncho but he really doesn’t have the power that his fellow cast-mates do.
The plot runs like this: teams of commandos are on a mission in a South American jungle. They find themselves hunted by an extra-terrestrial warrior, in an extra-terrestrial version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. It is so well done that I refuse to scream about that. After all, the number one rule of stories is that there are only so many plots.
Some of the super cool effects include the infrared vision the creature uses when it hunts. I know it’s been used before, but these sounds and sights play so well. Of course, the creature is outsmarted quite by mistake when Arnold is on his own at the end of the film and crawls through mud on a shore, masking his body temperature so that mister extraterrestrial dreadlocks can’t see him!
The creature gets dealt with as a last moment with Arnold wounds him. But then in a lovely twist of traditional creature movies, the creature blows itself up! It darn near blows up Arnold too.
The flick runs 107 minutes. I find it odd that this film is rated as R. It is kind of gory but by today’s standards the gore is low.
This flick is still such a favorite I can’t begin to tell you. Pop the popcorn and enjoy it if you haven’t seen it lately.
Laura Seymour first published herself, at age 8. She has since gone on to publish a cookbook for the medical condition Candida. She is working toward her B.A. (Psyc).