Frankenstein’s Monster. Dracula. Freddy Krueger. Leatherface. Godzilla. Henry Kissinger. These are some of the monsters whose names get evoked every year at Halloween, the monsters with the highest Q ratings and maybe their own personal publicists. But there are many more monsters out there, monsters who kill, terrorize and stalk their prey far outside of the limelight. For the next few weeks, we’re going to be paying tribute to these Forgotten Monsters of Filmland.
Some of these monsters are just a successful film away from making the mainstream. Some were more popular years ago and have fallen out of favor. Some are just sort of utterly bizarre. Some of these monsters will be familiar to the loyal readers of CHUD.com, while others will make just about everybody scratch their head. All of them deserve more love. That’s where we come in.
Probably a bad idea to bring Tandy back for Driving Another Miss Daisy.
Name: Trumpy
AKA: Eat.T. Bright Eyes. The Ruffian on the Ceiling. Potato Hoarder.
Appearances: Los Nuevos Extraterrestres or Pod People (1983)
Monster Type: Faruk Alatan
Its Place in the Film: Ah, the days before day-and-date worldwide distribution! It used to be that when America made a blockbuster, each country had a two-year grace period to produce a homegrown ripoff. Such was the case with Los Nuevos Extraterrestres, a Spanish inflected E.T. riff that dared to ask, “What if there were two E.T.s, and what if one of them had it out for the members of the Mike Curb Congregation?” In a stunningly brilliant narrative gambit, the film introduces the malevolent alien first; then comes Trumpy, the benevolent twin of the furry murderizer. When Trumpy is welcomed into the home of a precocious kid named Tommy (who keeps a petting zoo in his bedroom much to the chagrin of his hateful, probably abusive father), a lesson in tolerance is forthcoming. But first, there will be a stop-motion interlude in which the contents of Tommy’s room make like an animated short from the National Film Board of Canada.
Distinguishing Characteristics: Brown, furry, snouty, affable, prone to doing stupid things.
Why It Is Forgotten: The “theatrical” cut of Los Nuevos Extraterrestres isn’t only forgotten, it isn’t terribly available. And unlike most widely detested movies, there isn’t a small but vocal cult lobbying in defense of its misunderstood genius. That’s why, for the last fifteen years or so, it’s been exclusively associated with Mystery Science Theater 3000. Without the heckling of Joel and the Bots, we wouldn’t know Trumpy at all.
Why It Shouldn’t Be Forgotten: The touching, if ineptly dramatized, inter-species relationship between Trumpy and Tommy will one day end all human conflict. And if it doesn’t, at least it’ll remind us that the contents of a common board game can square dance.
Name: Killer Cockroaches
AKA: The Last Things Standing. Georgia Pigeons. LEGION.
Appearances: Damnation Alley (1977)
Monster Type: The Realest.
Its Place in the Film: In one of those classic Hollywood book adaptation stories, Damnation Alley, the movie, differs vastly from Damnation Alley, the Roger Zelazny novel.
But does the book have Jan-Michael Vincent (
)? Paul Winfield? THE DEADLIEST FUEL-UP SCENE EVER? Didn’t think so. This proves that print is dead and books are for pussies who ride in the front of the bus.
Just because ‘s pagebound doppelganger is [a] the last surviving Hell’s Angel and [b] actually called ‘Hell’ means nothing.
So and his cohorts are trekking across America’s post-nuclear holocaust landscape in a pair of massive Landmaster ATVs. Mind you, and the boys created this landscape at the beginning of the film, so whatever happens to them is fair game. They run low on fuel and decide to get some gas in a town that looks deserted. It’s not. Paul Winfield opens a hatch to discover an endless stream of stomp-resistant, armored killer man-eating cockroaches just as and Dominique Sanda run across their own batch in a department store. This leads to a near simultaneous display of alley-jumping by and his motorcycle and gratuitous screaming by Paul Winfield as he’s eaten alive. And George Peppard gets to scream “This whole town is infested with killer cockroaches!”
Why It Is Forgotten: Technically, these are supposed to be Giant Killer Cockroaches, but they’re just sort of big, not exactly giant. In fact, some of the masses of roaches actually seem to be just a piece of netting being pulled along the ground by a piece of fishing line.
Why It Shouldn’t Be Forgotten: Jackie Earl Haley is in this movie, for one. More to the point: to achieve a more simple, primal, true horror, you’d have to dig up Anne Ramsey and convince her to strap on the cock () she had removed at the tender age of 15.
– Russ Fischer