Ape vs. Monster (2021)

A long-thought lost joint Russian and American space probe crashes back to Earth after 30 years, releasing its simian test pilot, Abraham, into the New Mexico desert.

The chimpanzee, and his craft, are coated with a green, alien goo that causes him to grow at an incredible rate... and unfortunately a passing gila monster lizard sups from the liquid and transforms into a kaiju beast of its own.

Abraham is captured by the American authorities, led by Dr Linda Murphy (Arianna Scott), who has a childhood connection with the ape through the controversial work of her scientist father, Noah Murphy (Rudy Bentz).

Assisted by an old Russian friend, Eva Kuleshov (Katie Sereika), with whom there is obvious sexual tension and an unspoken past, Linda tries to study Abraham while tracking the escaped gila monster, which is tunnelling underground and has some kind of power-dampening field.

Abraham escapes while Linda is away, and it becomes a race against time as both giant creatures appear to be converging on Washington D.C. 

The military, under the gung-ho and patronising General Delaney (R.J. Wagner) wants to blast both creatures off the face of the planet, but Linda believes that Abraham is still the ape she knew as a child and is really on the side of humanity.

Oh, and there's an alien ship coming round the dark side of the Moon that seems to be beaming some kind of mind control ray at the giant monsters.

Just another day at the office.

Originally crafted by the crew at The Asylum as a Godzilla vs Kong mockbuster, Ape vs Monster is an unsurprisingly awful - yet hilarious - flick that just manages to scrape into the "so bad it's good" category, as long as you're willing to cut it a lot of slack.

If you watch the film closely enough, you realise how little the two giant CGI beasties actually appear on screen, but also you gain an appreciation of The Asylum's masterful melding of stock footage with their own material to fill out the 88-minute flick.

It should also be noted that while the giant ape certainly resembles an oversized chimpanzee more than a direct rip-off of King Kong, the mutated gila monster bears more than a passing resemblance to Godzilla.

Dramatic action scenes are broken up by protracted, earnest, exchanges of waffle and technobabble in an attempt to stitch together a nonsensical story into something an easy-going (possibly drunk) audience might be willing to swallow.

And while it starts off far-fetched, the plot of Ape vs Monster rapidly goes so far off the rails that credibility is stretched beyond breaking point and the moment they start talking about "aliens" you can't help but wonder if you're somehow watching an entirely different movie.

However, I certainly don't regret the £2.35 I spent on Amazon to buy the DVD of this movie, and I can't wait to see what Abraham gets up to next.

Godzilla's Gonna Take A Bite Out Of The Big Apple

Godzilla Minus Zero picks up in 1949, two years after the tumultuous events of Godzilla Minus One, and continues the story of the Shikishima family as they face an all-new calamity.

Additionally confirmed out of CinemaCon, Ryunosuke Kamiki, the hero who faced Godzilla’s terror in Godzilla Minus One, returns as Koichi Shikishima, and is joined by Minami Hamabe as Noriko Oishi, who miraculously survived Godzilla’s first attack on Tokyo.

You Come At The King (Kong), You Best Not Miss

Kong. Godzilla. Titan X.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters returns February 27 on Apple TV.

Based on the Monsterverse from Legendary, this dramatic saga — spanning three generations — reveals buried secrets and the ways that epic, earth-shattering events can reverberate through our lives.

Monster From Green Hell (1957)

In those wild and carefree days of the late 1950s, long before America had put a man on the Moon, a scientific project is examining the effects of cosmic radiation on living beings... by sending up rockets loaded with test animals!

Unfortunately, one vessel goes off course, exposing its subjects to an extended dose of radiation, and causing the rocket to crash somewhere in Africa.

Six months later, square-jawed scientist Dr Quent Brady (Jim Davis, who would go on to star in Dallas) and his associate Dan Morgan (Robert Griffin) read newspaper reports of  supposed monsters wreaking havoc near where they believe their lost rocket might have ended up.

Naturally, they head off to investigate, speculating that there might be some connection with the consignment of wasps sent into space on the doomed ship.

Their journey from the coast to Central Africa is long and arduous, and they find themselves and their bearers plagued by hostile natives, insufferable heat, dehydration, contaminated water, et al before they even get to the missionary station on the edge of the region known as Green Hell, where these "monsters" are said to be.

Unfortunately, their arrival at the missionary station coincides with the death of the 'saintly' Dr Lorentz (Vladimir Sokoloff), who had been investigating the monsters himself.

Our heroes' bearers have had enough and scarper, but Dr Lorentz's daughter, Lorna (Barbara Turner), persuades local villagers to take their place - on the condition that she can accompany Dr Brady's expedition into the Green Hell.

Turner seems a bit lost here but she would later write the screenplay for the killer-dog movie Cujo, so I can forgive her anything.

Monster From Green Hell is a must-watch for aficionados of kitsch, 1950's B-movies that are so awful they're hilarious.

Spliced together with stock wild animal footage and scenes from 1939's Stanley and Livingstone, California stands in for Central Africa... and it's quite obvious.

The narrative structure of Monster From Green Hell is an object lesson in bad storytelling, from giving away the appearance of the kaiju-sized killer wasps within the first 10 minutes (thus destroying any sense of mystery as to what our heroes are tracking) to committing the cardinal sin of cinema: a deus ex machina resolution that the protagonists had absolutely no hand in.

Spoilers for a six decade old movie, but the wasp queen and her drones are all wiped by a volcanic eruption (which, of course, our heroes had nothing to do with) before they can multiple and take over the world.

The way the story unfolds the destruction of the giant wasps would have occurred whether or not Dr Brady had been hunting them. 

Even though Monster From Green Hell only runs for 71 minutes, and starts off very breezily, director Kenneth G Crane's pacing is all over the place, with the extended journey through Africa taking up an inordinate amount of time, for instance. Then, with only 10 minutes or so to go at the climax of the piece, the movie suddenly switches to an almost pointless "explorers lost in maze of underground tunnels" story.

You don't come to a B-movie expecting character development and there's certainly none on display here, with pretty much everyone simply being walking mouthpieces for the lines of Louis Vittes and Endre Bohem's screenplay.

The giant wasp model, though, is a classic of the era, which is probably why Crane decided the audience should get to meet it long before the main characters do. 

However, I'm not sure that wasps have pincers, but I guess that's part of the mutation that caused them to balloon up to Godzilla size.

The size of the giant wasps seems quite flexible, and we rarely see more than one at a time, leading me to think - right up until the final act - that there might only be one giant wasp, despite Dr Brady's insistence that there was a swarm of them.

It also feels rather odd that Brady and his team are able to track the wasps by giant footprints they leave in the dirt. It's never stated outright, but I decided in my headcanon that due to the creatures' enormous size their fragile wings aren't powerful enough now to lift them off the ground.

The restored print of 1957's Monster From Green Hell, for the most part, is striking in its crisp black-and-white, although there are still scenes with the odd scratch down the centre, but then the film is 65 years old and I doubt it's been treated with any particular reverence until it was cleaned up for its physical media release a few years ago.

It has now been officially released online (see above) by Film Masters.

This version of the movie also comes with a slightly random, but nevertheless oddly delightful, colourised final sequence... when the heroes watch as nature does what they couldn't.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Night House (2020)

Grieving widow Beth (Godzilla vs Kong's Rebecca Hall) returns to the lake house her husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), built for them, but can't shake the feeling she is not alone.

Desperate to understand why Owen killed himself, Beth starts to dig through his belongings as she spirals into a maelstrom of paranormal activity, lucid dreaming, and paranoia.

The more secrets about Owen she unearths, the more threatened Beth becomes by whatever is haunting her home.

Despite the best efforts of her friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg) and lovely neighbour, Mel (Vondie Curtis Hall), an elderly widower, to get her to cease her pursuit of "answers" and move on with her life, Beth is a woman on a mission.

Perhaps I watch too many movies, but there are some pretty hefty sign posts/red flags in the first act of The Night House that - knowing I was in for a ghost story from the get-go - pretty much spelled out what was going on.

Despite the nice, measured, slow burn I couldn't help but feel the movie may have shown its hand a bit early with the first of Owen's note books that Beth comes across, with its strange diagrams and cryptic notations.

There are plenty of clues to the underlying mystery throughout the film with many left ambiguous even as the central conceit is spelled out in a necessary info-dump.

Director David Bruckner delivers some really impressive camera tricks, particularly in his use of shadow entities, but also in a wonderfully disturbing sequence with an invisible ghost, as well as a striking, sudden, switch of POV as Beth's dreams overlap with her reality.

He also has an uncanny knack of building to what you expect to be a jump scare, but then taking the scene in a different direction, which only accentuates the creepiness of the situation.

Even the story's ultimate resolution is atypical for this style of predominantly threatening and violent ghost story.

Unfortunately, there is an inescapable sense that the film doesn't do enough with some of its more intriguing elements, such as the lake itself, the "other house" (that exists in different forms in dreams and reality), Beth's real connection with the entity, the "mirror world" etc

While occasionally evoking comparisons with other modern ghost stories, from Twin Peaks to Final Destination, The Night House certainly has a style all of its own.

Sometimes this obfuscates the narrative a bit too much, but generally it creates something that is truly memorable - if only for some of its clever imagery, at the expense of its plot.

However, as intriguing and enthralling as Brucker's direction of Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski's script is, The Night House truly belongs to Rebecca Hall, whose central performance as Beth dominates this 107-minute movie.

She is in almost every scene, often alone, and wholly convinces us of Beth's heartache, despair, deterioration, confusion, anger, and fear. 

Ultimately, The Night House feels a bit patchy, but it's certainly unnerving viewing and never resorts to cheap tricks when trying to elicit a reaction from its audience.