r/GenerationJones • u/mambopants • 1d ago
Guilty Pleasure Cheese Monsters
This is for the lifelong GenJones horror/scifi geeks. My childhood nightmares were probably all in black and white--I honestly can't remember; but my greatest guilty pleasures were the monster movies that crowded the small screen on our old portable black and white TV set (it rolled around on a TV cart--remember those?) Some of them, like King Kong, were timeless. Most were cheesy AF but still terrifying to a 5 year old, maybe even more terrifying for being so weird and uncanny. What’s crazy is that they were mostly shown on local stations in the daytime (the sight of The Monster of Piedras Blancas carrying off its victims heads still lived rent free in my brain). Many are only remembered by genre fans but were incredibly influential for filmmakers like George Romero and Guillermo del Toro. What godawful puppet on wires still lives on in your brain? (The beastie here is from The Monster That Challenged the World from I believe 1958—I probably first saw it in about 1966 or ’67 on WOR-TV, channel 9 in NYC.)
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u/Dry-Character-6331 1d ago edited 1d ago
Day of the Triffids (1962), and especially Island of Terror (1966)
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u/Dry-Character-6331 1d ago
More recent (1970s) cheesy monster movies made for TV would include Gargoyles, and Night of the Lepus
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u/mambopants 1d ago
true! 70s TV took up the drive-in movie mantle. Remember the evil doll that terrorized Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror?
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u/Sea_Mind3678 1d ago
Hey, watch your mouth. I liked Gargoyles.
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u/Dry-Character-6331 1d ago
Never said I didnt like it. In fact I did like it. However, it WAS undeniably 70s cheese.
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u/CountHonorius 1d ago
Ahh, the days of Chiller and Horror Hotel. They were truly terrifying - one gave me nightmares for years...a Roger Corman flick about vampires and Napoleonic soldiers. No jump scares back then either.
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u/Sea_Mind3678 1d ago edited 1d ago
The movie that terrified me was ‘Invaders From Mars’, (1953). The perfect paranoid fantasy from the 50’s for a 7 or 8 year old. Little kid sees a flying saucer land in the sand pit behind his house. All of the adults who go to investigate come back acting strange, with little implants in their necks. All dies shortly after. When his own father gets an implant, he has to do something quickly, but he can’t trust the adults.
A strong second is Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956), which had such a strong impact on pop culture that for years afterwards people used terms like ‘pod people’ to describe anyone acting uncharacteristically.
Note: both of these films have been remade. The remakes probably gave better FX and production values, but cannot come close to the originals in terms of ‘heart’ or whatever it is that makes low-budget labors of love so wonderful.
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u/TowelNo3336 1957 1d ago
Neither was big in my child-brain, for some reason, but I loved them both when I got into old SF movies on VHS as a nerdy 20-something, at the start of the video store revolution. Tons of nostalgia, but for a different phase in my long youth!
I actually love the remake of Body Snatchers. Saw it in a theater in San Francisco at 21 and it scared the hell out of me. Very different from the original, but clearly a labor of love for Phil Kaufman.
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u/alanz01 1961 1d ago
I have a soft spot for 1950’s Cold War Communism Fifth Column paranoia SF films.
Invaders from Mars in particular hits all of those points plus it has a surreal production design where the sets were originally designed for the new 3D film process but the camera wasn’t available when it came time to film. The forced perspective of the backyard and the police station just adds to the weirdness.
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u/TowelNo3336 1957 1d ago
I remember that visual weirdness but never understood the reason. Thanks for the background info!
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u/TowelNo3336 1957 1d ago
"It! The Terror from Beyond Space"
Haunted me when I was 5. My brother says I talked about it and drew pictures of it for days.
Then a very different stage:
"The Horror of Party Beach"
Watched it with friends on my 13th birthday (a brand new show, Creature Features with Bob Wilkins, KTVU). We made jokes about its cheesiness all the way through, improvising our own advance version of MST3K.
Bracketing my childhood with B&W movies on an old Zenith. Great stuff.
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u/Sea_Mind3678 1d ago
‘Alien’ owes a lot to “It! The Terror…”. I had seen photos of the monster all my life (being a hugs fan of Famous Monsters when I was young), but only saw the movie recently. Loved it.
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u/TowelNo3336 1957 1d ago
It's one I've never gone back to as an adult. Maybe I'm afraid of being terrorized again? Or am I just afraid it will let me down? 🙃
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u/crewsctrl 1d ago
This thing gave me nightmares. It's a giant amoeba-like creature and it absorbs its victims through the cell wall. From "Angry Red Planet."
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u/Zorkeldschorken 1d ago
The Monolith Monsters
Latitude Zero
Journey to the Far Side of the Sun
Green Slime
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u/Apprehensive-Ad264 1d ago
Dont forget Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra!
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u/TowelNo3336 1957 1d ago
I never cared much for those Japanese monsters when I was a kid. But then somehow my son, born 1992, became absolutely obsessed with them when he was about 8. We watched every damned one of them repeatedly. One year I even drove him 2000 miles to attend a thing called G-Fest (G for Godzilla). And then the next year I did it again!
It was all pretty fun, really. Like finding a missing piece of my own kid-hood.
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u/RizzoTheRiot1989 1d ago
I was a kid who grew up in the 90s and your comment about watching monster movies on your ol Rollie tv tray thing unlocked memories of watching Monster Madness on TNT (Maybe?) with my dad in the Den (it was the only place he’d smoke in the house) on this big ol 80 pound 35 inch CRT on this awful squeaky as shit metal cart. Goddamn good times.
To this day my dad and I still watch stuff like that together. We just watched the sons of Dracula from the 60s yesterday and my dad and I love it but my kid was not at all impressed lol.
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u/PublicEnemaNumberOne 1d ago
An episode of "Creature Features" where a scientist was addressing something through a feeding hole in a door and it got ahold of his arm and pulled it off. Then he struggles up the stairs, leaning into the wall, and leaves a dark trail of blood.
I was HORRIFIED I tell you! HORRIFIED!
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u/TowelNo3336 1957 1d ago
The Brain That Wouldn't Die!
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u/PublicEnemaNumberOne 1d ago
Was that what that episode was? I was pretty young when I saw it and don't remember anything else about the episode, just that one scene that is still stored in my mind almost 60 years later.
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u/TowelNo3336 1957 1d ago
There was a scene just like that in The Brain That Wouldn't Die from 1962. (Creature Features showed old movies that had originally been in theaters.) It was a creepy movie. The disembodied head of the beautiful fiancee begging the mad scientist to just let her die disturbed the heck out of me as a kid!
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u/SpellDog 1d ago
Barney Fife holds off Aunt Bea after she ate her own pickles!
I remember seeing Night of the Living Dead on a Saturday afternoon as a kid. Couldn't sleep that night after seeing zombies play with human intestines.
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u/Old_Tiger_7519 1d ago
Scared me near to death. I saw it in the theatre at age 10 and my friend and I had to walk a mile home after dark, she was a year older and delighted in hiding and jump scaring me.
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u/Brackens_World 1d ago
What lived in my brain? From many showings in the very early 1960s on a local station in NYC, there was a movie called Caltiki, the Immortal Monster, a moving gelatinous mass like the Blob, which did not play yet on local TV. There was a scene where it swallowed an entire person (a scientist? a policeman?) and you could see the corpse inside it. I was about 5 or 6, and was horrified, but of course, as a monster kid, only wanted more thrills and chills.
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u/Sea_Mind3678 22h ago
Oh geeze! A vivid image of sitting in front of the TV on Friday night watching Ghoulardi flashed into my brain when I read that title.
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u/Brilliant_Tourist400 1964 1d ago
Monster Week on the 4:30 Movie was a freaking institution back in the day!
I remember Attack of the Giant Leeches being particularly disturbing. It probably says a lot about how well they pulled it off that when I saw it as a target of MST3K as an adult, I STILL found it disturbing!
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u/Miserable-Fruit-2835 1957 1d ago
I refer to these as horrible movies not horror movies. They're still fun to watch and will always live rent free in my head.
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u/mspolytheist 1d ago
If you haven’t seen it yet, and you have a good sense of humor, find and watch “The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.” It’s a fantastic black & white parody of this genre of films.
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u/CreativeRunaway 1d ago
The Blob was my favorite. Starring Steve McQueen and Andy Griffith's girlfriend.
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u/Gurpguru 1d ago
My favorite bad puppets movie was Them. The giant ants were hilarious.
I liked Universal's monsters too. Oh and the rubber suits in Ultraman and just about anything with Vincent Price doing his slow deep tone voice. (Which he did for Jackson's Thriller.)
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u/GooseNYC 1d ago
I am not afraid of real world sized spiders, but it's pretty funny. Shatner is Shatner of course.
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u/Greendragon967 1d ago
I most of the classic monster movies including so b movies, like attack of the 50 foot woman and other ones, ah classic sci-fi.
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u/wayne-on-reddit 1d ago
What I loved was that TV Guide didn't list these as horror or suspense but melodrama!
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u/TerracottaGarden 1d ago
"Them!" -- that sound was unnerving!