Giant Freakin Robot

The Star Wars saga, like any good space opera set in a far, far away galaxy, is full of imaginative creatures, nasty little bugs, and straight up terrifying monsters. J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII is sure to continue this tradition, but for now, we’ll have to make due with our favorites from the original trilogy, and, begrudgingly, the prequels. This new video ranks all of the beasties, from the creepy crawly all the way up to the I-might-eat-your-spaceship.

This is part of the Star Wars 10, where the staff of StarWars.com gets together and compiles a top ten list of various elements within the wider universe. And this time, as you no doubt inferred from the previous paragraph, their focus is on hideous monsters. Given that Halloween just passed us by, this is a subject at the forefront of many of our minds, not to mention it’s a topic near and dear to our hearts during the rest of the year as well.

This may be the best news you hear all weekend, and you might not even know why. Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo isn’t about to let the likes of Guillermo del Toro and Gareth Edwards have all the fun when it comes to giant monsters, and plans to make a kaiju movie of his very own.

In certain circles, Vigalondo is fairly well known, but he’s far from a household name for general audiences in the U.S. He’s contributed segments to horror anthologies like The ABC’s of Death and VHS: Viral, but he’s probably most widely recognized for his 2007 sci-fi thriller Timecrimes. His most recent offering, Open Windows with Elijah Wood and Sasha Grey, got high marks coming out of the recent Fantastic Fest, and I saw him at the Seattle International Film Festival a few years back talking about his alien invasion rom-com Extraterrestrial, which is also great.

Though the state of the modern creature feature is doing pretty well, with beasties appearing in all kinds of different scenarios, fans still aren’t getting enough Giant Freakin’ Monster movies. Thankfully, Tom Green’s upcoming sequel Monsters: Dark Continent is going to rectify the hell out of that, with super-huge CGI creatures a-plenty to pleasure your peepers with. Seriously, those trailers have some Lovecraftian shit happening with its tentacled antagonists, and a new crop of artwork and images show off just how stunningly massive these monsters are going to be. It allows one to say things like, “Dude, this Goliath Monster is the size of like, ten horse monsters, no lie.”

The scale above shows off just how insanely large the Goliath monsters are, in comparison to the military’s battle options, such as fighter jets, Blackhawk helicopters, Humvees, and soldiers. And this beast is obviously the definition of unrealistic, as the Earth just wouldn’t allow things this big to do the wacky things they do, but I’m hardly watching this movie for its admirable adherence to physics. I’m watching it to see extreme action sequences that I can’t get anywhere else.

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is a movie with major problems to be sure, and I tend to like it more than most people seem to. It’s full of characters making the absolute worst decision at every opportunity, and, admittedly, it wasn’t quite the triumphant return to the Alien universe we all hope it would be. But for all of its myriad flaws, one thing it does totally nail is the ominous, bleak tone and feel. Aesthetically, if nothing else, Scott creates one hell of a world, but what if that overall appearance and atmosphere was transferred to another movie, say Pixar’s Monsters, Inc.? If you’ve been wondering what that might look like, wonder no more, as this video combines these two disparate entities, with surprising results.

While you might not normally expect a dark sci-fi film to mesh well with what is essentially a bright, kid-centric affair, they oddly enough go together very well. This isn’t your standard, everyday mash up, though. YouTuber The Usual Suspect takes elements from Monsters, Inc. and simply tweaks them, giving them a Prometheus-esque makeover, rather than combining the two.

Gareth Edward’s low-budget 2010 creature feature Monsters may be an uneven movie—there are hints of greatness, but there are problems to be sure—but it certainly had a huge impact. Not only did it land the first time director/editor/writer/special effects guy the gig directing the Godzilla reboot that stomped through theaters earlier this summer (and a subsequent job directing one of the new standalone Star Wars movies), it also spawned a sequel, Monsters: Dark Continent, which is here with this new trailer to check out.

Immediately, you notice that this is a very different movie from Monsters, just in terms of scope and scale. The first film is little more than two characters walking through the jungle, trying not to encounter any massive space beasts in the quarantined “Infected Zone.” You rarely, if ever, get to see the world beyond, or even the titular monsters. Here, however, they’re all over the place, you go to different places, and even see things in space to a degree. And in this two-minute video there’s already more monster action than in almost all of the first film, at least up until the very end.

When you consider that he’s only directed one feature length motion picture—one with a miniscule budget at that—it’s surprising that Legendary and Warner Bros. tapped Gareth Edwards to helm such a titanic spectacle as Godzilla. Still, something in his 2010 creature feature Monsters caught the eye of the studio, and you can see the result stomping through theaters this weekend in the form of a revamped franchise. Edwards’ first film has spawned a franchise of its own, and the sequel, Monsters: Dark Continent, has roared back with a new trailer.

Part of what makes Monsters stand out is that the creatures themselves are kept off screen for the majority of the film, only revealed near the end when necessity dictates. This is largely a logistical concern. Edwards and company had little to no money to work with, and he actually handled all of the visual effects on his own. Still, he uses this teasing to great ends, building up the tension before the big unveiling. That said, Dark Continent doesn’t appear to have the same qualms or limitations as its predecessor. This trailer may only be slightly over a minute, but there are creatures crawling everywhere, and they look pretty damn intense.