Sunday, September 09, 2007

Daily Monsterism Triple Trouble

Okay, sorry if anyone's been following this and getting a kick out of it, the past few nights've been crazy. Caught up with some mates, worked, etc. Various things just got in the way. Anyway, here's a triple dose of monsterism.


Monster: Boar-wolf
Movie: The Caravan of Courage

For a television movie, The Caravan of Courage had some surprisingly good special effects. Granted, it was a post Return of the Jedi Lucasfilm effort, so I'm pretty sure it had a fairly good budget and crew of people working on it (although the giant spiders are pretty terrible), but the stop motion beast pictured above was fun to watch. They managed to integrate the stop motion beast into the live-action stuff pretty well, and the creature itself is just so outlandish and hideous. I love it and wish they'd make figures of these things (yeah... I collect Star Wars figures).

Monster: Sulley
Movie: Monsters Inc.

Having just seen Ratatouille, I've got Pixar on my mind. Ratatouille looked fantastic, but the story itself left a fair bit to be desired in my mind. Still, the awesome visuals wouldn't have been anywhere near as good had Pixar not made such incredible breakthroughs in hair animation with Sulley in Monsters Inc.

Monster: Dagon
Movie: Dagon

Sometimes, straight to DVD horror movies have the ability to blow you away with how good they are. Dagon is one of them. I have a feeling it got a really, really limited theatrical run, but either way, we only got it on DVD here. I'm a big Lovecraft fan. Love his books, and love the whole Cthulhu mythos thing, but Lovecraft on film has hardly ever worked. Dagon works. Really well. It gets excessively gory at times and the effects are pretty cheap, but the atmosphere it builds when the protagonist is scampering around the town is awesome. Anyway, I love the look of Lovecraftian monsters, so I thought it was pretty cool when Dagon eventually shows up, even though it's for a fraction of a second (and pretty bad CGI).

Completely aside, signed up for the gym today, feeling good!

1 comment:

dmcgee said...

Hey chief! I just found your entry on the phosphorescent forums where you mentioned your recent work on TMNT for Mirage - congratulations! I'm floating in Sydney and planning to break into comics shortly (art), and one of the things that keeps me inspired is Jim Lawson's old work on the early turtles comics, the dark blocky stuff with the manga screentones, I can appreciate what it must mean to you to get to work on these books. Congrats on the milestone!