What are your favorite monster movies?

The scariest movie monsters don't look monstrous at all. Looking like normal people, they can easily hide dangerously close to us. Only when the monster inside reveals itself, even as mere inklings, do we begin to feel fear. When we see how horrible the monster is, it is doubly scary, for not only are we now in danger now, but we'd been in the habit of carelessly ignoring whatever signs might have warned us away. We are in trouble, and we find our survival instincts are performing poorly.

In Silence of the Lambs, we got two monsters for the price of one, Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill.

Does The Terminator count as a monster?

My earliest memory of a creature horror movie (on good ole suspense theater, Pittsburgh Channel 53) was Frogs (1972). I saw it on cable about a year ago and, while it was about as cornball as you could imagine a movie about frogs eating people to be, I still got a charge out of it.

Still being a Clive Barker fan, Hellraiser (1987) rates as of my favorite horror films. It may be a stretch to call the Cenobytes "monsters," but this was a film with simply no comic relief whatsoever...at least not until the plastic Jesus fell out of the closet as Kirsty was hiding...I think the entire theater about went through the ceiling when that happened.

Although the first twenty minutes was rough to get through, I thought Cloverfield (2008) was a great monster movie. I'm super glad I didn't see its motion-cam approach in the theater, but from a storytelling standpoint, I thought its tension was fantastic.

Night of the Living Dead (1968). I say Zombies stand tall as the best monsters ever. There have been a lot of good (and a lot more bad) zombie movies since this one, but Romero set the bar too high to ever be reached.

I rather like the 'Tremors' series of films; they have a much different atmosphere when compared to traditional monster movies and the human characters are surprisingly realistic. Additionally, with the exception of the antagonists of the 'Alien' saga, arguably no monster from any film has a more well-developed life cycle than the graboid. Despite its campiness, the original film version of 'The Blob'(1957) is highly enjoyable. Other favorites include:
-King Kong (1933)
-Godzilla (1954: original Japanese version only!)
-The Beast from 20,000 phantoms
-Them!
-Aliens
-The Black Scorpion
-The Giant Gila Monster

Them! Love it and have it on DVD.
Saw it for the first time as a little kid on vacation. I watched it ever time I could find it on TV and was thrilled when it came out on VHS and later DVD.
I also adore the Alien series, Frankenstein (Boris Karloff and Robert De Niro versions) and Dracule (Bela Lugosi and Gary Oldman versions).
My favorite horror film is The Haunting. The original with Julie Harris, not that travesty they made with Liam Neeson. I watched that one at home, alone on a cold windy day. For YEARS I could not sleep with the door closed (I was 12 when I watched it), those stretching door panel scenes haunt me still.

For a 'serious' monster movie, i.e. not campy or schlocky, Dagon is another favorite.

For low-budget, guffaw-inducing rubber monsters, I always liked The Giant Claw.

Aliens is awesome beyond words. Also, The Thing is a classic. Tremors was a good call. The Host is a good Korean monster movie, as was the recent Stephen King flick The Mist. And Cloverfield was a good nod to the Godzilla movies of yore. Stretching my memory a bit, Dragonslayer was one of the best and most realistic depictions of a dragon to be put on the big screen, if you like a little sword and sorcery with your monsters. Of course, if we're going there, then the superb The Lord of the Rings series can't escape without a mention. Hmm, let's see...there's Pumpkinhead, Krull, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Starship Troopers, and the monstrously weird Pan's Labyrinth, just to name a random few.

For cheesey camp, I love Bert I. Gordon's Earth vs. the Spider about a giant tarantula in Carsbad Caverns. I also like The Beginning of the End about giant grasshoppers attacking Chicago.

For serious horror, nothing scared me like the original Halloween. Carpenter did a beautiful job of building suspense, the cinematography hid most of the gore while being scarier than flaunting it would have been, and the score was like icicles down the spine, keeping you nervous all the time.

Of course, not all horror movies are monster movies, and you could probably argue that not all monster movies are horror movies.

Having said that, the great one-two punch of James Whales's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein has never been equaled.

In the Talent Deserving Wider Recognition category, I'd like to nominate Amando Ossorio's 1971 La noche del terror ciego, aka Tombs of the Blind Dead. It's not a perfect movie by any means, but the reanimated, sightless, dessicated Templars are brilliantly creepy.

I'm old-school: the Universal monsters from the '30s; Dracula, Frankenstein, King Kong, The Wolf Man and The Mummy. Anything by Lon Chaney, Sr. His Phantom of the Opera is still by far the creepiest. I agree with Mark Mancini, above. When I was a kid, I wished I could be the Creature of the Black Lagoon. I love all of the Japanese Giant Rubbery Monster Trampling Tokyo movies. I'm also a sucker for stop-motion animation, so naturally, anything by Ray Harryhausen rates high on the list.

Of the movies in color, John Carpenter's The Thing and Tremors are good. Another favorite of mine is the Penisaurus (made by Jim Danforth) from Flesh Gordon, a '70s soft-core porn flick.

The first two Tremors films because (a) they show a good mix of story, humor, and monsters, and (b) the characters are not pathologically stupid.

I liked the The Thing. Have you read the original story?

A friend lived in a small town as a kid. Went to see The Thing one night. Kind of got the twitchies over it. He decided to walk home the shortest way, by the cemetary (no street lights). He is walking along by the cemetary, in complete darkness, and all of a sudden he runs into this big hairy thing which snorts at him. He almost died on the spot. Turns out a horse had gotten out and was standing in the middle of the road.

Cinemassacre's Top 10 Giant Movie Monsters
Contains some monsters we've mentioned, some we haven't.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTVvok4S_9E&feature=related

I always loved the original Alien. Scared the daylights out of me.

My favorites includes ...

Them
Alien
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Yes, the villain is a monster)
Bluebeard (Speaking of villains as monsters)

"Godzilla" (1954) as a serious movie, and some of its follow-ups for fun (especially "Godzilla vs Monster Zero").
"Alien" (no comment needed)
"King Kong" (ditto)
Lucio Fulci's "The Beyond", for the rotting zombies, the eery music, the white-eyed girl, and the general atmosphere of disconnected nightmare.
Anything with the name "Ray Harryhausen" in the credits.
And for the really, really bad: Tobe Hooper's "Crocodile" and some immortally cheesy 50s flicks ("Robot Monster", "From Hell it Came", "Creeping Terror", "Blood Freak"...)

And, by the way, I still keep a soft spot for the first "Jurassic Park". Yes, it has quite a few flaws, but remember the first time you saw that brachiosaur...

I have lived a shameful life that includes very few horror films (I wasn't allowed to wach growing up, and I just don't have much of an interest in movies in general now), but one of the things I have seen that I found terrifically creepy was in Jurassic Park III, the scene with the Pteranodon walking out of the mist - I was lying down in the dark, and it wasn't that I was afraid of it, but the way it moved (combined with the initial obscuration of its outline) just did something to my brain. (Many a time have I now re-watched it, lying down in the dark and trying to recapture that moment, but it never works because I'm execting it. *Sigh*)

Since it was mentioned, I do love Pan's Labyrinth, but I've never thought of it as a horror/monster flick (it just tends to make me sad).

The original Predator was another entry in the action genre with an excellent 'monster'.

Rt

I am a total monster movie junkie. They're one of my obsessions. As in the post about rereadable books I'm going to have to avoid going on and on and on...

Most of my absolute favorites have been mentioned -- and in terms of recent movies I'll back up the recommendation for The Host and The Mist. Interestingly, both of these feature father/son relationships at the dramatic core. And don't watch The Host dubbed -- it really detracts from the acting and makes it a much more casual, dismissible film.

Nobody's mentioned the Ray Harryhausen sword-and-sandals movies like Jason and the Argonauts, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Clash of the Titans. Perfect casual entertainment to my mind...

For goony fifties monster movies, Fiend Without a Face rocks. You start out with an extended boring setup with cardboard characters dealing with a series of mysterious deaths but when the climax comes... wow. The violence is a lot nastier than you'd expect and the monster effects are simultaneously ridiculous and effective. Well worth the wait but in these days of DVDs you could always cut to the chase.

If you like to see a guy in a big rubber suit doing the Tokyo Stomp check out the second-generation Gamera trilogy -- Guardian of the Universe, Attack of Legion, and Revenge of Iris. Unlike other movies of this ilk, the parts without monsters are still entertaining, there's an interesting background story, and the special effects are really good for this kind of thing.

Slither is kinda like an eighties-drive-in version of an H.P. Lovecraft story. Lots of splattery grossness and slimy tentacles and parasites and zombie action and that sort of thing.

Of course it's referencing films like From Beyond, which was made by the same folks who did Reanimator. It is based on a Lovecraft story and of course it totally blows the Lovecraft mood and tone -- but since it does this with lots of rubber face-eating eels and a cute blonde wearing a patent-leather parachute harness it's all good.

Just about any monster movie by Larry Cohen is gonna be good -- Q, God Told Me to Kill You, It's Alive, The Stuff... One of the secrets to a lot of great monster movies is a smart lefty political subtext and Cohen delivers that by the bucket without compromising entertainment value.

I don't really think of zombie movies as monster movies -- I like my monsters as animalistic as possible -- but these days my favorite zombie movie is Cemetery Man, which among other things proves that there's no nudity like Italian nudity.

And the only movie monster that can really compete with the above-mentioned The Giant Claw (the monster totally looks like a third-rate Muppet designed by Dr. Seuss) is Roger Corman's (Praise be!) Creature from the Haunted Sea. This one starts off with an animated satire of the Cuban revolution and then it gets weird. Honestly, this is one of the all-time bafflers, the kind of movie where you keep hitting the pause button so you can slap yourself in the head and scream WTF at the top of your lungs. I mean that in a gooooood way -- it's the Dolomite of monster movies.

Well, maybe Reptilicus can run with those dogs. It's another giant sock with eyes but its special power is acidic saliva -- the special effects for which seem to have consisted of having someone spit on the camera lens.

Great. The floodgates have opened again... but there are some subjects I can talk about all day long and this is one of 'em. Now I'd better get back to writing the novel -- I'm in the middle of a fight scene.

And yes. There's a monster.

Here's Some:
Godzilla VS Hedorah: The Hippy Acid Casualty of Godzilla movies, it's wonderfully surreal as well as being one of the most violent childrens' movies ever made. The final battle is a wonder of demented invention!

Gamera 2- Advent of Legion: A good ol' straightforward Giant Monster Slugfest. He sheds his precious blood for us. His side is pierced. He seemingly dies and is resurrected. BUT CAN HE SAVE TOKYO FROM THE GIANT SPACE BUGS??!? Oh, and best product placement. Ever.

Return of the Alien's Deadly Spawn: Horribly grody People Eating Slug Monsters From Outer Space invade the suburbs! The seniors' vegetarian potluck scene alone is worth renting the movie for.

The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant: The Thing With Two Heads seems to be more well known, perhaps for it's stab at social commentary, but The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (I just like typing that) The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant Is older, uglier, nastier, and Much More Monstery!!