The movies have given us some ridiculous monsters.
Who knows what these filmmakers were thinking. Maybe they dreamed bigger than their budget should have let them. Or maybe the mushrooms hit a little too hard. Whatever the case, here are 10 of the most ridiculous movie monsters in history.
Killer Bunny Rabbits: “Night of the Lepus” (1972)
Three years before “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” did it as a joke, this movie made rabbits into killing machines . . . and asked us to take it seriously. But did I mention they’re GIANT rabbits, made massive by hormone experiments intended to make them stop breeding?
Did I also mention that DeForest Kelley . . . Dr. McCoy from “Star Trek” . . . and Janet Leigh from “Psycho” are in it?
Vampire Turkey Man: “Blood Freak” (1972)
When Something Weird Video rescued “Blood Freak” from obscurity years ago, they promoted it as “The World’s Only Turkey-Monster Anti-Drug Pro-Jesus Gore Film.” And unless another one’s come along since, this statement is completely accurate.
Herschell is a Vietnam Veteran who becomes a turkey from the neck up thanks to a combination of bad weed and tainted poultry. He’s also a vampire, who must feed on the blood of other addicts. I mean, you try taking a hit off a joint with a turkey beak!
This is a terrible, terrible movie, and if that’s your bag, it’s a must-see.
Bad Movie Bonus: Co-director Brad F. Ginter appears intermittently as a narrator, warning us of the dangers of drugs and chemically altered food . . . while smoking a cigarette that at one point sends him into a coughing fit. I guess the budget didn’t allow for second takes.
The Were-Cicada: “The Beast Within” (1982)
1981 was a landmark year for werewolves, thanks to the release of both “The Howling” and “An American Werewolf in London”. But 1982 belonged to the Were-Cicada. And I am not kidding.
17-year-old Michael MacCleary hasn’t been feeling so hot. Turns out he was conceived when his mother was raped by a strange creature in the woods off a rural Mississippi backroad. The assailant was a man who used Native American magic to turn himself into a cicada-like creature, then impregnated a woman so that his offspring would emerge 17 years later, as cicadas do, and exact revenge against his enemies.
“The Beast Within” is a darn good movie with one exception: The monster. Thanks to budget and technological limitations, it looks NOTHING like a cicada. Or any other insect for that matter. It actually looks kind of like E.T., if he pumped himself with steroids but didn’t lift.
In 1986, David Cronenberg would insectify the crap out of Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly”, so maybe they should have just waited a few years for the technology to catch up.
The Demon Bed: “Death Bed: The Bed that Eats” (1977)
This movie is so ridiculous, it’s kind of genius. Yes, it’s a bed that eats people, but it’s so much more. First of all, the bed doesn’t have a mouth, or teeth. People who lay on it just sink into it. You can even see its stomach acid as it dissolves the people and things it devours.
This flick is so cheaply made I think the director’s mother paid the cast and crew in grilled cheese sandwiches. But it’s a lot of fun, and it’s got some really interesting lore involving a demon crying tears of blood and a young artist watching everything from his prison behind a painting, which the bed long ago banished him to.
This one’s about as weird as they come, but I promise you’ll remember it.
The Space Herpe: “The Ice Pirates” (1984)
A criminally forgotten sci-fi comedy swashbuckler starring the late Robert Urich, Anjelica Houston, and Ron Perlman, “Ice Pirates” is a funny, exciting, and sure, sometimes politically incorrect romp. It was the ’80s, people.
In a universe where water is scarce and controlled by the evil Templars, Urich and his band of misfits cruise around the galaxy stealing giant blocks of ice from the Templars’ ships to make a living.
But one of their raids yields more than just frozen H20. After falling out of a crate they’ve pilfered, the fast-moving slug-like SPACE HERPE hatches from a pod and runs rampant through the ship. It’s eventually caught, but not before biting a crew member and ruining what looked like it was going to be a delicious turkey dinner.
Annoying Giant Teenagers: “Village of the Giants” (1965)
A precocious little kid called Genius invents a substance he dubs “Goo”, which makes animals grow to incredible size. Some annoying teenagers, including Beau Bridges in an early role, get their hands on it, ingest it, and become SUPER-annoying, 30-foot-tall teenagers who take over the whole town.
Ultimately, Genius . . . played by Ron Howard, I’ll have you know . . . develops an antidote. But delivering it to these post-pubescent monsters requires a distraction, which comes in the form of a seductive go-go dance by a normal-sized Toni Basil. Yes, THAT Toni Basil, 16 years before her “Hey Mickey” fame.
Perhaps you’ve seen the film’s most infamous image, of a guy hanging off a gigantic Amazon chick’s cleavage. They even used it on the poster.
Robert the Car Tire: “Rubber” (2010)
Nothing to see here, just a rubber tire that suddenly comes to life, stands up and starts rollin’ down the highway. Oh, it also has telekinetic powers, and can make people . . . and small animals . . . explode.
This one is intentionally absurd, and to paraphrase Quint from “Jaws”, it’s either very smart or very dumb. Online opinions vary widely. But “Rubber” lets you know what you’re getting into from the jump, thanks to a character breaking the fourth wall to tell us that film, just like life, is full of things that happen for no reason. And it just keeps getting weirder.
A Volkswagen Dressed Up as a Giant Spider: “The Giant Spider Invasion” (1975)
Sometimes a simple premise and a little gusto is all you need, and that describes “The Giant Spider Invasion” perfectly. Spiders from outer space crash land in a small town inside meteors, grow to enormous size, and start doing what movie monsters do.
This one occupies a sacred spot in the so-bad-it’s-good bin, largely thanks to the awful, low-budget spiders. One of the bigger ones is actually a Volkswagen Beetle in a spider costume!
Bonus: The sheriff is played by Alan Hale Jr., a.k.a. The Skipper on “Gilligan’s Island” . . . and early in the film, he calls another character “Little Buddy”.
![The Giant Spider Invasion (1975) ORIGINAL TRAILER [HD 1080p]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/o3Mc0mgorZc/hqdefault.jpg)
The Vagina Dentata: “Teeth” (2007)
Every feminist’s dream, every man’s nightmare: The Vagina Dentata. If you’ve heard this term before, there’s a good chance it’s because of this movie. If you’ve never heard it, you can probably guess what it is just from the name, plus the title of the movie.
Dawn O’Keefe is a teenage spokesperson for a Christian abstinence group, and somehow, she keeps finding herself in the company of sexual predators who want to take advantage of her. She discovers her “gift” by accident, but by the end of the flick, she’s using it very deliberately . . . only on guys who deserve it, of course.
Hermaphrodite Gene Simmons: “Never Too Young to Die” (1986)
This film poses, but ultimately does not answer, an important question: Can one be a drag queen, or king for that matter, when one possesses both male and female sex organs?
If you’re thinking to yourself, “Wait, Gene Simmons isn’t a monster,” then you’ve never faced him in a trademark infringement case, or seen him chew the scenery in “Never Too Young to Die”. Here, Gene plays Velvet Von Ragnar, who’s the psychopathic leader of a gang he must have stolen from a “Mad Max” casting pool, a god-awful nightclub singer with unfettered access to Cher’s wardrobe, and an evil supervillain plotting to poison the water supply of a major U.S. city and hold it for ransom.
When he’s not busy trying to coax superstar gymnast-turned-spy Lance Stargrove, played by John Stamos’s hair, into bed, that is.
Has Gene, or his acting, ever been this horrific? Are we lucky that this film failed to launch John Stamos to action movie stardom? And did the Chinese-American actor who played Stamos’s nerdy friend who builds cool electronic gadgets ever apologize to the Asian community?
The answers to these questions are NOT in “Never Too Young to Die”. But Prince’s one-time muse Vanity is, and that alone is worth checking out.
