The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This refers to films that concern themselves with larger than usual sized animals and insects. These are almost always seen as going on the rampage and are thus Monster Movies. Regular sized animals that appear in genre cinema are covered under Animals Attack Films. Dinosaurs are certainly giant-sized animals but get their own entry because they are not enlarged beyond their normal size.
The most famous and endearing of all giant animals is King Kong (1933) who roared his way onto screens, fell for Fay Wray and met his end on the Empire State Building and has made many screen appearances since.
The major iteration of the Giant Animal film came during the Atomic Monster fad of the 1950s. Although not all giant animals were atomic in nature, plentiful giant ants, spiders, scorpions, crabs, leeches, grasshoppers, shrews, octopi and gila monsters ran across the screen.
The 1970s Nature’s Revenge and Animals Attack cycle saw another wave of giant animals. Since then, we have seen sporadic individual revivals of the genre, principally of the giant bug variety and a number of others among the CGI monster fad of the 2000s/10s.
A mockbuster from The Asylum that sets out to copy Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit such that Jackson and co sued, forcing The Asylum to change the title in several territories
Amid the spate of post-Jaws Animals Amok films, this, which comes armed with a John Sayles script and plays on the urban legend of baby alligators flushed into the sewers, was a rather enjoyable effort that plants tongue in cheek
The 1980 Alligator was amusing but this hardly one of the sequels the world was burning to see. An utterly formulaic copy that is killed by impoverished giant alligator effects
A sequel to the Jennifer Lopez-starring Anaconda that manages to be even more ridiculous and cliche ridden than its predecessor to the point you frequently laugh it off the screen
South Korean-made cheapie intended to ride the coattails of the 1976 remake of King Kong, this must be one of the worst films ever made with some of the most pitiful special effects ever put on film
The Asylum’s mockbuster version of Godzilla vs Kong that features a giant-sized chimpanzee and gila monster facing off against one another
Fred Olen Ray offers up a bimbo movie take on Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Where the original was an early feminist parable, Olen Ray offers up a giant woman whose only motivation is wanting a bigger set of breasts
One of the essential items in the cult of B-movie director Roger Corman. A cheerfully absurd atomic monster movie that comes with clear corners cut but played by Corman and cast with more seriousness than it deserves
A typical 1950s B monster movie. The first half creates an entertainingly torrid drama in the bayous, although when they eventually turn up the giant leeches never get to do much
A deliberately ridiculous Charles Band production where students throwing their laptops into a lake causes an alligator to float through the air and become giant-sized
Giant grasshoppers invade Chicago – what’s not to like? A sterling example of the 1950s atomically enlarged insect film from Bert I. Gordon who found his calling make cheap giant animals/people films during this era.
Giant spider film that seems to be aiming for the same gonzo territory the killer shark film has of recent. Instead we get an average B movie with some good effects and a line of comic banter that falls flat in the delivery
This was designed as a copy of the giant ant film Them! substituting scorpions for ants. The plot is average but what stands it out are the excellent stop-motion animated effects from King Kong creator Willis O’Brien
A giant CGI snake film that promptly heads into bad movie stakes through a combination of ridiculous dialogue and absurd posturing of its cast
The first sequel to the Troma hit and with all of the usual bad taste and moron humour you associate with a Troma film, but also better produced then most their films
The best-selling children’s book series come to the screen with a big red CGI dog, which proves more enjoyable than the low-expectation film you initially expect going in
Another of the films inspired by Cocaine Bear, this features an invasion by alien crabs that become wired on cocaine. It is hard to tell if this is being deliberately ridiculous or not
An amusingly tongue-in-cheek horror comedy that is a throwback to the1950s featuring an attack by giant crabs. With some surprisingly good crab effects too.
The late 2000s brought a spate of giant crocodile amok films that included some really good efforts like Rogue and Black Water. This is a belated entry from China, featuring some surprisingly good CGI effects
This has the clever idea of updating the Cyclops from The Odyssey to the era of the atomic monster movie. Director Bert I. Gordon is otherwise back at his usual tricks of serving up optically enlarged insects and animals
Disastrous adaptation of the Roger Zelazny novel where the story of a Hell’s Angel on a trek across the post-apocalyptic wasteland is recast with a G.I. and a girl and kid along for the journey, plus the addition of giant mutant cockroaches
James Herbert was a writer of extraordinary ferocity and gore-drenched extremes. This is an adaptation of his first book The Rats where all the ferocity has been watered down to a standard Animals Amok film
Routine entry in the giant bug cycle of the 1950s, this essentially rehashes The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms with a revived prehistoric giant mantis on the attack
British children’s film in which a dog is made giant sized after being fed a growth formula by scientist Spike Milligan. Amiable but nothing great
Typical Syfy Channel creature film with people encountering giant fire-breathing genetically-engineered wasps in the jungles of Belize
Rather tatty effort in the 1950s giant bug cycle from director Bert I. Gordon who spent most of this era making similar films about big and small creatures and people
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin turn their attentions to revamping the 1950s giant insect film. They bring top-drawer effects to bear but everything else plays to standard formula
In the 1950s Bert I. Gordon specialised in cheap giant insect films. Here he takes H.G. Wells’ name in vain and jumps aboard the 1970s Animals Amok cycle but still makes another shoddy film about giant ants
A cheap and impoverished entry in the 1950s fad for giant animal movies with the giant monster being unconvincingly represented by an optically enlarged lizard
From Bill Rebane, a film about a rampaging giant spider (having emerged from a black hole we are told). This has a bad movie reputation, although on most accounts it emerges as strictly average
An incredibly bad Canadian-made sequel to Food of the Gods about a scientist who devises a growth hormone that accidentally creates a horde of giant rats
A completely mad and all over the place film with Sam Rockwell as a time traveller (or madman) arrived at a diner to recruit six people on a mission to save the world from an evil A.I.
A film based on the hugely popular children’s horror series. The film creates a story where the creatures from all the books are unleashed. This is fun to watch, yet what we ultimately have is easy, undemanding horror for family audiences
One of the other films from Godzilla creator Ishiro Honda. This has been incorrectly identified as a Japanese giant monster film but is mostly a colourful space opera about a rogue planet
From a Stephen King short story about mill workers facing a giant rat, this has become one of the most ridiculed of all King adaptations. Everything takes place with absurdly over-the-top melodrama
Peter Jackson returns to J.R.R. Tolkien and epic-sized adventure in the first of his Hobbit films. The visual sweep is there but the film feels over-extruded and over-burdened by its own self-importance.
The Hobbit became Peter Jackson’s equivalent of the Star Wars prequels and this is the weakest work he has produced under the J.R.R. Tolkien banner. Five picaresque chapters of the book are extruded into bloated set-pieces
Film about giant crabs amok that feels like a throwback to a certain kind of 1950s monster movie. This plays itself remarkably seriously for the most part only to fall apart right at the end
An early film from cult stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen. Here he seems to have been given orders to copy the basics of his earlier The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and offers up the tale of a giant atomically-mutated octopus
This seems to have been slung together as a mash-up of Jaws and the 1970s fad for occult films. Ridiculous and badly made on all levels, no more so than the climax with a giant snake conducting a devil worship ceremony
Sequel to Journey to the Center of the Earth, a supposed adaptation of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island and a consistently silly, nonsensical film that operates at the level of a children’s cartoon
A mockbusters from The Asylum made to coincide with the big-budget Brendan Fraser film. Resemblance to the Jules Verne book fairly much ends at the title
This was The Asylum’s mockbuster copy of Disney’s Jungle Cruise and is a similar kind of adventure film. However, this proves far more entertaining than what you expect
A sequel to Killer Crocodile, which was a dreary Italian-made Jaws ripoff. Here another radioactive waste mutated crocodile stalks people. Indifferently made.
An Italian exploitation ripoff of Jaws with a group of environmentalists in South America dealing with a killer crocodile that has been made giant size by radioactive waste
A cheesily bad alien invader film from the 1950s that seems to be trying to throw every element in SF of the era into the mix from mind controlling aliens to atomic monsters
The first film from Bert I. Gordon, known for his cheap giant animal films through the 1950s. This concerns a space expedition to a planet inhabited by dinosaurs – cue Gordon’s usual cheap effects
Perhaps the greatest of all monster movies, one that has attained iconic status. A masterpiece of stop-motion animation, it imbues Kong with character and attains a delicate fairytale-like atmosphere
The infamous miscalculated Dino de Laurentiis remake of King Kong where the stop-motion is replaced by Rick Baker in an ape suit, while the fairytale romance is replaced by Jessica Lange as a flower child who cracks jokes
Peter Jackson’s dream project, a remake of the 1933 film, and his finest work as a filmmaker. Jackson builds the original out considerably and his command of the effects gives us something quite dazzling
Toho Films obtained the rights to King Kong to pit him against Godzilla in King Kong Vs Godzilla and then made this entertainingly silly sequel where Kong fights a robot copy of himself
Everybody hated the 1976 remake of King Kong but Dino de Laurentiis has the chutzpah to produce a sequel and the results are absolutely awful, full of scenes guaranteed to have an audience rolling in the aisle
The third of the Godzilla films wherein Toho managed to obtain a coup in leasing copyright to pit Godzilla against a rather tatty-looking King Kong for one of the great title bouts of the century
A CGI monster movie directed by a former Industrial Light and Magic visual effects supervisor that features a family under attacks by over-sized komodo lizards
Herman Cohen production with Michael Gough as a mad scientist who creates a giant ape. Aside from Gough’s entertainingly mad performance, this is killed by incredibly tatty effects
A big-budget fantasy film made too much in the shadow of Star Wars by people with little understanding of the genre. The fantasy elements feel leaden and fail to take any imaginative flight
David E. Kelley, better known as a high-profile tv producer, turns his hand to writing a killer crocodile film, although the result never ends up satisfying either as a monster movie or the jokey tone Kelley wants to take
A film about giant fire-breathing spiders. This is lifted from formula by a sense of humour and even peculiarly brings many of the cast of the Police Academy series out of retirement
The weakest of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. This is the most variant from the source material and the one where Jackson allows his tendency to visual effects bloat to take over
A nerdy guy sets out across a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with giant animals to be with the girl of his dreams. This sound promising in description but suffers an identity crisis on screen
Another entry in the Wu Xia cycle. By this time most of the moves of the genre have been used so this goes to wild extremes to find some type of originality
If you could take it seriously, Mega Piranha would be a strong contender for a bad movie; however, its awareness of its own absurd shortcomings becomes its saving grace. The sight of giant piranha skipping down rivers and impaling themselves in the sides of buildings has an appealing delirium
The Asylum had hits with Mega Python vs Giant Shark and Mega Piranha, both featuring former teen pop stars Debbie Gibson and Tiffany as the leads. This pits both Tiffany and Debbie together in an epic bitch-fight against the backdrop of clashing giant animals with rather entertaining results
The first sequel to The Asylum’s Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus and marginally a better film. This is less sparing with the cheap effects, while in every other regard it plants tongue-in-cheek and tries to make a virtue out of the sheer ridiculousness of the action
The Asylum’s first venture into the gonzo shark movie that would spin off a series of sequels and culminate in the Sharknado phenomenon. Despite one of the great attention grabbing titles of all time, this is an unmemorable affair
Third in The Asylum’s series of Mega Shark films where they borrow the Godzilla series’ idea of Mecha-Godzilla and pit the Mega Shark against a robot copy of itself. Here the Mega Shark series is starting to approach the entertaining silliness of their Sharknado films but still flounder amid tatty effects
In the vein of their Mega Shark films and Mega Python vs Gatoroid, The Asylum make a monster movie about a giant-sized snake. Cheesy with a B movie competence.
Cocaine Bear proved a reasonable success. The Asylum’s response was to give us Methgator about a drug-addicted giant alligator
Many of the people involved in the 1933 King Kong came back together to create another giant ape film. Much overlooked, this is one of the masterpieces of stop-motion animation
The original Mighty Joe Young was a wonderfully underrated giant ape film. This is a remake conducted in the post-Jurassic Park era that adds CGI but holds none of the magic of the original
Cheap and ridiculous attempt to cash-in on the 1976 remake of King Kong made by Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers. A classic bad movie on most counts
Possibly the worst film to be made out of the 1950s giant bug cycle concerning giant wasps marauding in Africa. All the dramatic scenes are composed of scenes cannibalised from other adventure films, while the effects have a shoddiness that frequently reduces you to laughter
Average entry in the atomically enlarged animal cycle of the 1950s concerning a giant mutated mollusc on the attack
This tries to go one up on Sharknado and offers a tornado made up of assorted animals and prehistoric life. A completely ridiculous film from prolific British producer Scott Jeffrey
A ridiculously stupid giant bug film, albeit not unentertainingly so. This is a monster movie that has been premised solely on the provision of ridiculous creature effects every few minutes and very little else that one can take seriously beyond that
Amid the fad for Jules Verne adaptations of the 1950s/60s, we had this version of Verne’s desert island story, which has been pumped up with the addition of giant-size Ray Harryhausen animals and insects
Hallmark tv mini-series adaptation of Jules Verne’s desert island drama featuring no less than Patrick Stewart as Captain Nemo. This sinks badly amid incredibly shoddy giant animal digital effects
About the ninth film version of Jules Verne’s desert island survival story. This doesn’t add the giant animals/insects other versions do, although we still get a number of wild sf elements the original book never had. Problem though is that the film never adds enough to make proceedings very interesting
Gimmicky B-budget film about a hi-tech future prison built at the South Pole. Thus has been thrown together with a giant snake amok plot. A passably routine effort
A film with a premise – giant killer rabbits – that is sunken entirely the failure to make a series of photographically enlarged rabbits look threatening
Sequel to the Eddie Murphy remake of The Nutty Professor. That film’s tour-de-force was a scene with Murphy playing all the members of his family. Here the family have been brought to the fore. Murphy’s performance and the effects are expectedly great but the plot is all over the place
B-budget mix of giant animal film and submarine drama with impoverished effects and a script only notable for its ludicrous improbabilities
Sequel to the ridiculous Octopus, this is slightly less cheap but no less absurd in its premise of a giant octopus attacking New York
Amid the spate of deliberately ridiculous monster movies of the 2010s, we have also seen a fad for absurd hybrid creatures. In actuality, the piranhaconda is just a giant snake – and served by some incredibly bad effects in this negligible effort from B-budget hack Jim Wynorski
One of the more likeable among the 2000s fad for low-budget CGI monster movies, this is aided considerably by a sense of humour and a line-up of oddball characters
A spectacularly terrible film. Designed to exploit the 1976 remake, this offers up a sex-reversed parody of King Kong – only the Kong producers didn’t see that way and sued to stop the film being released. Robin Askwith, the star of the softcore Confessions films, engages in a romance with a female Kong amid excruciating puns
The idea of Dwayne Johnson facing a giant gorilla in an adaptation of a 1980s arcade game doesn’t exactly shout out Academy Award material; on the other hand, appreciated as a zero expectation cartoon of a film and the mindless mass destruction spectacle it is, this works in a goofily entertaining way
The third of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad films, this came out the same year as Star Wars and Harryhauden’s stop-motion animated creatures look much more flat in comparison
An early CGI animated film conducted on a cut-price budget that tells further adventures of Sinbad
As with numerous examples in the zombie and killer shark film of recent, the idea has been to parody an existing title with the addition of a monster and a pun on the original’s title. Essentially what we have is a Scary Movie-like parody of the true-life rapper tale Straight Outta Compton but with the addition of a giant snake
The first of The Asylum’s mockbusters intended as a soundalike copy of Snakes on a Plane, this ends up defeated by low-budget and one of the most absurd premises of any film in recent memory
The 1933 King Kong is a landmark classic Yhis sequel was quickly produced soon after its success,. While the original created a monster movie fairytale, this plays everything for maximum cuteness – it is essentially King Kong mounted as a children’s film
A 1980s film that was sold around a single air bladder makeup effects scene where a man swells up and explodes from a snakebite. That and the entirely risible premise of Oliver Reed as a billionaire who has a psychic link with a giant snake
From incredibly prolific B-budget British producer/director Scott Jeffrey, a film about a radio broadcaster who ventures to the home of a scientist to find it overrun by genetically engineered spiders
In a whole bunch of ways this – plausibility being a big one of them – is a bad film. On the other hand, it does boast an entertaining array of giant spiders all emerged from a space shuttle crash
When you approach this in terms of exactly what it promises to be – a revival of the good old B movie standard of the giant spider film – this proves absurdly entertaining and with some surprisingly good CGI spider effects
Disney’s 61st animated film. A lost world adventure that emerges as Fantastic Voyage by way of Avatar
1950s British science-fiction entry that draws influence from the Quatermass films. While the title(s) leads you to expect an alien invasion entry, it is in actuality more of a British copy of a giant insect film. A routine effort that is eventually done in by utterly impoverished giant insect effects
Likeable variant on the giant bug film – concerning giant mutated wasps, no less. This is largely predicated around some accomplished creature effects and having something gooey happening every few minutes
An early mockbuster from The Asylum, a copy of 2007’s crocodile amok films with a giant 100-foot-long crocodile heading towards Los Angeles