Surely all horror movies fans love a good movie monster, but secretly I reckon that we all love a bad movie monster too. Some are just straight out bad, but there are wonderful gems of movie monsters that are so bad that they are good, and inadvertently steal ever scene they are in, if not the whole movie because of their awesome awfulness. Here are my personal "top three" of the 1950s. (Other decades will follow!)
#1. Gor the giant floating alien brain from The Brain from Planet Arous (1957).
#1. Gor the giant floating alien brain from The Brain from Planet Arous (1957).
| This movie is one of my guilty secrets of 50s b-movies, it just has all the right clichéd elements worked into it. And the giant floating blimp of a brain Gor is just precious. The way he's often superimposed on the screen so badly that he dramatically alters scale in relation to the background still makes me snigger. Gor "One of the greatest intellects in the world where intelligence is everything!" Couldn't even crack a beer, and chill out on an evening. No wonder he's so up-tight! |
#2. Ro-Man (Ro-Man Extension XJ-2) the gorilla suited robot from the moon in Robot Monster (1953).
| I know it's kind of an obvious choice, as Ro-Man is likely one of the most infamous of bad movie monsters, but I like Ro-Man, he's cute. You just want to give him a big hug. The half gorilla, half gold fish bowl may well have destroyed the whole of humanity apart from the few bad actors that appear in the movie with him, but it turns out he's a monster with a heart. Despite managing to traverse the world seemingly without any major problems, taking out billions of humans with his Calcinator Death Ray, all it took was the love of a good woman to reveal poor old Ro-Man's weakness. Even after Ro-Man has killed her sister, Alice actually seems quite enamoured of him. And wouldn't we all be? After all he is just a big cuddly-wuddly teddy bear in need of love and understanding. Sure he has TV antennas sticking out of his head, but hey we all have our flaws don't we? |  |
#3. Zontar the shuffling cone shaped creature from It Conquered The World (1956).
 | And not to be confused with the ugly abomination that was the Zontar of the 1966 remake, Zontar, the Thing from Venus. No! This is the original Zontar, the one of the Roger Corman movie. The cone-shaped cactus creature with lobster claws. Apparently Zontar was red, though I always visualise him as green, cactus green. Like the discarded end of an unwanted courgette (sorry zucchini), that'd mutated and was trying to take revenge for not been made into that delicious ratatouille you had for dinner. |
