The Relic (1997)

It starts like a tongue-in-cheek episode of Law & Order with Tom Sizemore's suited cop joining forces with Linda Hunt's museum director and Penelope Ann Miller's evolutionary biologist to investigate grisly urban deaths, and for as long as the investigation lasts, it is fun 90s horror nostalgia full of sassy lines and smirks, but the second half - once the hideous reptilian monster from South America is revealed - plays out in the near-total darkness of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History's afterhours, and it doesn't matter how many times Penelope Ann Miller's biologist is able to find time to put her hair up and don glasses at a computer, the results of her scans of Brazilian leaf eggs - revealing a dizzying confluence of genetics, South American mythology, and something about hypothalami and DNA and a "Kothoga" - never help and merely drag out to overlong the shadowy goings-on.

★★☆☆☆

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Godzilla Minus One (2023)

"Godzilla looks really ticked off," a naval officer says at one point, and it is funny because in this 37th Godzilla movie in 2023 the kaiju is still a stiff, rather rubbery, frozen-faced stare-bear - it doesn't matter if he has taken gunfire to the face, swallowed a mine, or been plunged over 1,500 metres to the bottom of the ocean, the demented grin persists - but everything else in Godzilla Minus One, which takes the series back to its roots and presents Godzilla as nuclear annihilation itself, is elaborately, effectively staged, from the razed-to-zero post-Second World War Japan setting to the big-budget Jurassic Park-style chomps and stomps.

★★★★☆

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Deep Rising (1998)

Imagine Die Hard banged together with Alien, without the sophistication, on a cruise liner at sea, with a cheesy Big Trouble In Little China sort of all-American goofball lead and BTILC-esque special effects, and you've got this zany cult classic, so bad it's fun, about a hijacked boat full of torpedoes, a cruise ship overrun with winding gnashing alien (?) creatures, some ghastly body horror, and if it sounds mad consider the rumors that the never-made sequel, Deep Rising 2, was to be set on Skull Island and feature King Kong, as if this original weren't already loopy enough!

★★★☆☆

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Wolf man (2025)

The poignant family drama at the start suggests something interesting will follow — perhaps the strong cast is getting you ready for creature chills and spills that mean something to the family psychology – and don't forget director Leigh Whannel did something interesting in 2020's The Invisible Man – except once Wolf Man's family retreats to a cabin in the woods, complete ennui devours the movie and the cast: there are scenes where the two leads literally stand opposite each other and appear not to know what they should do or day to continue the scene, and the whole movie amounts to one single tiresome werewolf-transition scene extrapolated to movie-length.

★☆☆☆☆

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Dangerous Animals (2025)

As if to demonstrate the abyssmal depths to which film has sunk, this serial killer thriller and creature-feature mash-up, about an Australian serial killer who feeds foreign tourists to sharks, is built up around its thirty-minute-mark spectacle of a woman being torn to pieces by a shark, and nothing else matters:, the plot, very possibly spat out by Chatgpt, starts with a thoroughly unclever and utterly unrewarding opening sequence, then features disappearing bodies, plastic shiv neck injuries and knife wounds that are shaken off and disappear, plot lurches that defy logic, and a lot of repetitive catch-and-escape, catch-and-escape sequences - Tom and Jerry cartoons are more entertaining and efficient - and chaining the film industry to its watery grave forever at the bottom of the ocean is the fact mind-numbed audiences have given this prosaic nonsense an 86% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

★★☆☆☆

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Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)

A string of five or six encounters with dinosaurs - one encounter at sea, one on a cliff, another in some sort of tunnel, many involving water - with very little effort made to link these encounters with a sensible story or populate the episodes with characters you care less about and want not to get chomped or stomped.

★★☆☆☆

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A Quiet Place II (2020)

The start takes audiences back to "Day One" when the extremely sound-sensitive creatures first land on Earth, an arresting sequence that has debut director John Krasinski demonstrating Shyamalan-at-his-best flourishes, but long before the audience is satisfied with this backstory and before any point to it is established, the movie abruptly gives way to three concurrent story threads in the present, post-the original movie, in which three different characters simply walk heel-to-toe on three different sand tracks to three different destinations, hardly enthralling and full of directorial looseness, with the alien threat along these boring paths not much more worrying than if, say, you were hiking in an area inhabited by wild dogs (but wild dogs that, although certain to appear at each significant landmark, only turn up in ones or twos, never more, irrespective of how much noise you make).

★★☆☆☆

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The Meg (2018)

A team of marine researchers led by a wetsuit-clad, ripped Martin Brody-sort of disbelieved boy-who-cried-shark (Jason Statham) takes on a megladon, a prehistoric shark of incredible proportions dwelling unseen in the deepest parts of the ocean until thermal currents bring it to the surface; the occasional sight of the megladon leaping out of the water or torpedoing out of the ocean's darkness towards the camera makes it worth wading through the rest of this overlong creature-features's by-the-numbers mindlessness.

★★★☆☆

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Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Of course, the single purpose of these kaiju movies is to stage spectacular cgi fights between the towering beasts, which this movie does impressively and without a boggly ping-pong eyeball in sight; everything else - a signing child, a conceptually confusing Hollow Earth, a mystical glowing axe, a plethora of unnecessary characters (many of them annoying children with no business being there at all), a visit to Hong Kong, mecha-robots, "skullcrawlers", is just a whole lot of nonsense to fill the time and whether you care less about this filler will depend on which side of thirteen you are. 

★★★☆☆ (my score)

★★★★★ (my nephew's score)

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Gamera VS Viras (ガメラ対宇宙怪獣バイラス) (US: Destroy All Planets) (1968)

My first encounter with Gamera, the beloved icon from Japan's long-running kaiju movie series, was watching this 1968 movie, the fourth, that pits the fire-breathing turtle-with-a-frozen-stare against a fidgetspinner from outerspace with a bumblebee paint job; the incoherent monster battles that make up a bulk of the movie's ninety-one minutes entertain on account of their rudimentary but serviceable special effects, but you'll want to experience them with the tv muted — kaiju battles make nails down a blackboard sound positively melodic.

★★★☆☆

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Rampage

Chris Pratt, I mean, Dwayne The Rock Johnson is a dinosaur wrangler, I mean a primatologist, who has developed a special friendship with a velociraptor, I mean a gorilla, but when a mutagen is released on Earth that causes the gorilla and several other beasts to mutate into city-wrecking colossi, it takes the white-shirted hero, himself a big mutant cinematic monster, to overcome the dinosaurs, I mean, the genetically-mutated animals and the fact this B-grade Jurassic Park action blockbuster is all based on an arcade game series is unimportant except that it sort of helps to explain the movie's pair of villains, a remotely located pair of buffoons so dastardly they make Lazy Town's Robbie Rotten seem like Hannibal Lecter.

★★☆☆☆

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Ragnarok (Gåten Ragnarok) (2013)

Following in the giant footsteps of André Øvredal's Troll Hunter (2010) is this creature feature - nothing to do with superheroes - also set in the wildest reaches of Norway, but where Troll Hunter plumbed Norwegian folklore and came up with a creature feature that was inventive, this movie is far more tired with its main character, a gormless cross between an Indiana Jones archeologist and an Alan Grant paleontologist, banging on for the first half of the movie about Norse mythology - Oseberg ship artefact finding, runic alphabet-deciphering, code-breaking and very loose history-building - but only as an extremely longwinded way of getting him and his two children and a few other hangers-on to a Jurassic Park in Finnmark where a giant monster briefly harrasses them.

★☆☆☆☆

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Zombeavers (2014)

Both words are stressed on the first syllable, making the portmanteau cumbersome — 'zɒmb(i)vəz and zɒm'bivəz are more natural, but the far more awkward 'zɒm'bi'vəz is probably correct — and a lexical horror that will gnaw at you as this low budget creature feature pretends to be meta but remains utterly derivative for its first two-thirds, setting up as disposable meat objects a threesome of scantily-clad sorority girls in a cabin in the woods, letting three revolting boys get their turn before the 'zɒm'bi'vəz are set upon them, leaving the surprisingly funny stuff — perhaps two or three intentionally ridiculous scenes of humans transforming into zɒm'bivəz and gnawing at trees to create roadblocks — for the far-too-little-too-late end.

★☆☆☆☆

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Colossal (2016)

A simple but effective metaphor, likening an alcoholic's lifestyle to a gigantic monster wreaking havoc in South Korea, becomes thoroughly mixed because someone wanted to see the monster fighting a giant robot under the spotlights of hovering helicopters - Hathaway survives but characterisation, side plots, and creative potential are left decimated.

★★☆☆☆

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The Abyss (1989)

Three years after his huge success sending a Sigourney Weaver-led crew of marines on a deep-space salvage mission in Aliens, James Cameron blasts a Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio-led crew of oil engineers on a deep-sea salvage mission where an Aliens' gun metal blue and grey colour-palette (cut across with bright yellow industrial pipes and machinery) is the setting for a convergence of underdeveloped plotlines (like one character's bad case of the bends, a volatile marriage, and political tensions between Russia and the USA), things all better explained in a later released extended version but here only very loosely held together by the presence in the movie's periphery of a species of, what, lost jellyfish Aliens?

★★★☆☆

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A Quiet Place (2018)

Some unlikely physics involving one-and-a-half year old corn and a handful of other daft moments aside, this 90-minute horror exercise, thematically similar to but more sensible than It Comes At Night, and thematically similar to but less distasteful than Don't Breathe, is fun and should please silent birthers, librarians and creature-feature fans who will revel in scenes that reveal the gnashing, ravenous monsters with no eyes but supersonic hearing.

★★★☆☆

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The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

Jeff Goldblum does his zany thing, reprising his role of zany chaos theorist Ian Malcolm and taking the lead in this sequel, a darker, more violent, headache-inducing and overall lesser Jurassic Park movie which has Malcolm sent by John Hammond to a second island of the park to research and document dinosaurs but he finds mercenaries from the InGen corporation are also there with less sensible, more short-term commercial interests in mind.

★★★☆☆

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Piranha 3D (2010)

This is one of those 3D-enhanced creature features that pretends to pay tongue-in-cheek homage to its trashy roots when it fact it simply perpetuates the genre's crimes, stripping unrealistic women of their bikinis, having their naked forms ogled by frat boys and a Weinstein filmmaker type played by Jerry O'Connell, and then for their trouble they are referred to as "bitches" and eaten alive by person-eating fish.

★☆☆☆☆

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Godzilla: Resurgence (シン•ゴジラ) (2016)

In Tokyo, the emergence of Godzilla, a big destructive sock puppet with a frozen stare, requires a multi-agency response from Japan's various emergency response services, and the administrative workings and bureaucratic interactions of these agencies is a bit like watching Parliament sitting.

★★☆☆☆

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Troll Hunter (Trolljegeren) (2010)

Stick this out through its tired first 20 minutes while the Blairwitch found-footage premise is cornily set-up and be rewarded - to some extent - with inventive creature footage, Norwegian scenery, amusing moments (Ned Kelly suits and fake bear tracks, for example) and plotting that though uneven adheres to traditional Norwegian troll folklore.

★★☆☆☆

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