We here at Arrow in the Head can hardly contain our excitement for the upcoming monster mash Godzilla vs. Kong, as it has been far too long since Godzilla and Kong first battled, back in 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla. To help pass the time until Godzilla vs. Kong reaches theatres and the HBO Max streaming service on March 31st, we decided to put together a list of some of the Best Giant Monster Movies. Here’s ten of them:
THE HOST (2006)
Bong Joon Ho’s The Host was not an instant favorite of mine, this is a movie I had to come around to over the course of a few different viewings. I just couldn’t connect with it the first time I watched it; its sense of humor was off-putting to me, and I found the dimwitted lead character to be ridiculous. Keeping an open mind during further exposure to the movie, I started to enjoy it. The opening twenty minutes are quite cool, showing a mutant amphibious creature, created by pollution, rising from South Korea’s Han River and wreaking havoc. This sequence ends with the creature carrying a young girl back to its lair in the sewer – and from then on we follow the girl’s family, including her dopey dad, as they desperately try to rescue her, facing resistance from the authorities along the way. The Host still goes in some directions that I don’t really like, but it’s a well-made movie that’s worth checking out.
COLOSSAL (2016)
One of the odder films on this list, and one with the least amount of giant monster action, Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal stars Anne Hathaway as Gloria, an alcoholic woman who comes to discover that if she walks through the local park in her small New England hometown at a certain time, a giant monster will appear in Seoul, South Korea and mimic her movements. This inspires her to try to improve her life. Problem is, her buddy Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) also has a massive Seoul avatar, a robot, and Oscar is a total douchebag who wants to take control of Gloria’s life. Fights in the park ensue, with the monster and the robot fight in Seoul at the same moment. This is a really clever, unique, entertainingly quirky take on the concept of giant monster battles. You see much more of Hathaway and Sudeikis than you do of the monster and the robot, but their confrontations are just as interesting as a brawl between giant creatures. A newer entry compared to the others on this list, it’s no less worthy of being called one of the best giant monster movies out there.
Q: THE WINGED SERPENT (1982)
To enjoy Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent, you’ll have to accept the fact that there’s a giant, man-eating monster flying around New York City, snatching up window washers, construction workers, and rooftop swimmers and sunbathers, and nobody notices – not even when shadows are being cast on buildings and blood is raining from the sky – because this creature can somehow fly in line with the sun from every angle. If you can take that leap of logic, you’ll be rewarded with a highly entertaining movie in which Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree take on the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, which is now nesting in the Chrysler Building. Cohen was one of our great genre filmmakers, and he brought Q to the screen with a fun tone, a cool cast (Bruce Willis and Eddie Murphy were up for roles, but it worked out without them), and awesome stop-motion effects that were provided by Randall William Cook and David Allen.
RODAN (1956)
Godzilla cohort Rodan has kind of gotten short-changed over the years, because most of its appearances have been in films that feature multiple monsters. The Pteranodon has only gotten one solo movie, and its solo movie leans heavily toward horror, which I very much appreciate. Directed by Godzilla‘s Ishirô Honda, Rodan begins with the mystery of people getting slashed to death in a mine, bringing to mind My Bloody Valentine. Turns out it’s prehistoric insect larva doing the slashing, and from the mine also emerges the supersonic Rodan, hatched from an egg that was sealed in the ground by a volcano eruption… until nuclear bomb tests disturbed it. Rodan is a lot of fun, beginning with underground death and ending with large scale action sequences of a flying creature battling jets and blowing a city apart. This shows that Rodan needs more solo movies – a sequel to this is more than sixty years overdue!
THEM! (1954)
Ants can be a troublesome pest, but it would still be easy to dismiss a movie about giant ants (the smallest is nine feet in length!) as something silly without giving it a chance. That’s not the approach to take to Gordon Douglas’s Them!, which handles the concept of giant ants in the best way possible. The build-up to the reveal that ants are responsible for death and destruction in the New Mexico desert is handled in a creepy way, and once we know there are giant ants that need to be wiped out, the film turns into an exciting “bug hunt” adventure with scenes involving raids on subterranean nests, complete with gas bombs, machine guns, and flamethrowers. The action isn’t just restricted to the desert, either. These things, which are the mutated results of atomic bomb tests, manage to escape New Mexico and set up nests in other locations, presenting the threat that humans could be extinct within a year.
THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
In the time of dinosaurs, Manhattan was home to the creature known as the Rhedosaurus – so when a scientific experiment involving a nuclear bomb detonation beyond the Arctic Circle causes a Rhedosaurus to rise from the icy ground, the beast instinctively returns to Manhattan. This causes a lot of trouble, since mankind does not greet the deadly dinosaur with enthusiasm. They have to be careful how they handle it, though, because the creature’s blood contains a virus that is extremely infectious. Eugene Lourie’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is notable for several reasons: this was the first of many movie monsters to be awoken by nukes, the film drew inspiration from a story by Ray Bradbury, and the awesome stop-motion special effects that allowed the beast to wreak havoc have a connection to a classic from two decades earlier, as they were created by Ray Harryhausen, the protégé of King Kong effects artist Willis O’Brien.
SUPER 8 (2011)
J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 is a monster movie I can relate to, because the core characters are a group of young kids from Ohio who are attempting to make a horror movie inspired by the works of George A. Romero. I was a young aspiring filmmaker from Ohio who looked up to Romero and tried to make movies with his friends. I can relate to this movie even more now than I could ten years ago, because I also understand what lead Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) is going through, dealing with the loss of a parent. But this is way better than my experiences, because the filming of the movie these kids are making is disrupted when an alien creature is set loose in their town. The creature roams at night, attacking people and stealing appliances, and it’s so scary that the local pets run away. You don’t see a lot of the monster, but it has some good action scenes here and there. More important than the action is the amount of heart this movie has.
TREMORS (1990)
I was hesitant to put Tremors on this list, because every other movie on here is about giant monsters that stomp around on the ground, or fly above it. While Tremors does indeed feature giant monsters, these are subterranean creatures. Above ground or not, in the end I had to include this one because it’s one of my all-time favorites. Starring Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, and Michael Gross, the film shows what happens when the tiny desert town of Perfection, Nevada is besieged by huge, worm-like creatures that move through the dirt and hunt their prey by sensing vibrations. Tremors was directed by Ron Underwood and is one of the most fun, captivating films ever made, with a whole lot of monster action, a great sense of humor, a terrific cast, and an incredibly well written script. The “Graboids” may not have legs or wings (those will come in the sequels), but they cause a lot of destruction and eat plenty of people.
GODZILLA (1954)
A 1952 re-release of King Kong and the nuclear origins of 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms inspired the creation of Godzilla, another monster of the past that is awoken in the modern nuclear age. Godzilla even spews atomic fire from its mouth, like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was shown doing on a poster but not in the movie. What gives Godzilla a greater emotional depth than the average giant monster movie is the fact that this nuclear monster comes from Japan, the country that knew more than any other the devastation nuclear bombs could cause. That was something director Ishirô Honda saw firsthand while serving in World War II, so he made it clear in his film how horrific and painful it would be to have a nuclear monster rampage through a country. Made on a production schedule too short to allow for stop-motion effects, Godzilla used a technique called suitmation, which isn’t always pulled off convincingly but absolutely was in this film, and decades later still makes it stand tall as one of the best giant monster movies.
KING KONG (1933)
More than eighty-five years after its initial release, and after multiple remakes and reboots, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong holds up as one of the best giant monster movies ever. A film crew’s search for a legendary, gorilla-esque creature called Kong leads to an extended adventure on an uncharted island still populated by dinosaurs, and if that weren’t enough excitement it leads to a climactic sequence that moves the action to the streets and skyscrapers of New York City. The stop-motion effects Willis O’Brien used to bring Kong and the other creatures to life is awe-inspiring to look at, and O’Brien and the directors were able to make Kong a creature we fear at first, but by the end care about and feel sorry for. Other versions of this story have had their charms, but none have managed to come close to being as good as the original. This was an amazing achievement for its time, and it can still impress, easily making it one of the best giant monster movies to this day.