Giant Monster Movies

It’s a flaw of the grammatical structure of the English language that the title of Robert Marrero’s Giant Monster Movies can be read as a book about movies involving giant monsters or about giant movies involving monsters.

You can’t blame the guy for that but the book does seem like it was quickly written: the word “weather” in place of “whether” and “bohr” for “boar.”

There are a lot of fun features to it; my favorite was Marrero’s breakdown of how special effects affect bad movies:

He grouped bad films saved by special effects as 1960’s Dinosaurus (didn’t see), 1955’s The Beast From Hollow Mountain (too little, too late), 1966’s One Million B.C. (two things saved it but neither were special effects), 1970’s When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (I saw this one but I have no specific memories), 1977’s Laserblast (the aliens were cool but not enough to save it), 1977’s Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (I can remember who I saw it with but nothing about the movie), 1978’s Planet of the Dinosaurs (didn’t see), and 1981’s Clash of the Titans (I’m all with him here).

When Effects Couldn’t Save the Show: 1958’s Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (only saw clips), 1962’s Reptilicus (I have this on DVD and can unequivocally agree), 1977’s The Crater Lake Monster (didn’t see), and 1978’s The Last Dinosaur (apparently this is not the one with William Katt so I must not have seen it).

Bad Effects Make Things Worse: 1989’s Sinbad and the Seven Seas (I’ll take his word for it).

Bad Everything:  1957’s The Giant Claw (can’t argue with that!)

Overall, I hope editors cleaned up the text for later editions but it was fun to see giant monsters that I had never heard of before.