Applying the found footage concept to a large-scale disaster, it follows a group of friends the night some fleshy, skyscraper-sized alien thing rises out of New York Harbor in a supremely bad mood. Was it a live-action Voltron, as some websites speculated? Another Godzilla reboot? A Lost spinoff? Cthulhu? As it turned out, everything we really needed to know was right there in the trailer. All it showed was home video footage of pretty young New Yorkers partying in a loft, followed by chaos and the disembodied head of the Statue of Liberty crash-landing in the middle of a Manhattan street. The film’s first teaser revealed next to nothing - not even the title. In the days before trailers had their own trailers, it was possible for a movie preview to catch audiences off guard, and Cloverfield producer JJ Abrams took full advantage. God bless you, Steve Miner, and all the other unsung Hollywood heroes. The work, in fact, of a man equally at home in Camp Crystal Lake or Dawson’s Creek. Why am I telling you all this? Because Lake Placid is nothing if not the work of a reliable, hardworking journeyman: occasionally inspired, occasionally flat, always fun, never dull. Once again, teen TV beckons: this time its Dawson’s Creek, at least until deliverance arrives in the form of the severely underrated franchise instalment Halloween: H20, the success of which leads directly to this superbly cast, solidly entertaining giant-croc tale. More fruitful years follow, until Miner, again, makes a major misstep: the US remake of French comedy hit Mon Père ce héros, in which Gérard Depardieu lumbers threateningly after his nubile daughter through a series of lurid tropical locations. Miner spends the rest of the '80s wandering in the wilderness of The Wonder Years, before bouncing back with daft timeslip romp Warlock. Having brought cheap thrills to the masses with Friday 13th Parts 2 and 3, and much-loved skeletons-in-the-closet charmer House, he decides to try his hand at a little social comedy with notorious race-relations misfire Soul Man. Let us, for a moment, pause to examine the career of Steve Miner. Disney's graphic mash-up sequel, Pete’s Dragon Slayer, was pulled after test screenings left young audiences in states of extreme distress. Richardson steals the film despite his early immolation, but the Industrial Light & Magic special effects come a close second and, nearly thirty years on, have an ethereal charm that CGI-drenched descendants like Beowulf can't match. Not an ideal arrangement, but one that worked well enough until Sir Ralph Richardson’s permanently flummoxed wizard turns have-a-go pensioner and sets up a nice revenge saga for his young apprentice. In a world, the trailer might have intoned, where the dung hovel is the standard unit of social housing, a boy on the brink of manhood is all that stands between a great fire-breathing beast and a rather fey cadre of aristocrats bent on offering up their virgins to the monster. Not to be confused with Dragonheart, Dragonlance or Dragon: The Bruce Lee Storyīefore Peter Jackson gave Sword and Sorcery (for it is they) an irresistibly sexy sheen, this 1981 effort took a proudly cod-medieval stomp through damsel/dragon territory, becoming the lodestone of dark-tinged family fantasy. □ The 50 best fantasy movies of all-time □ The 100 best sci-fi movies of all-time □ The 100 best horror movies of all-time Written by Tom Huddleston, Adam Lee Davies, Andy Kryza, Paul Fairclough, David Jenkins & Matthew Singer Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers are surely monstrous, but at the end of the day, they’re basically just serial killers – iconic, highly skilled and hard to kill, sure, but they’re still not monster monsters, y’know? Instead, we focused on all the killer rabbits, killer plants, killer fish, killer clowns, killer aliens and killer giant sandworms – and trust us, that’s a lot on its own. For starters, no zombies or vampires, as there are simply too many. So we narrowed the field with a few caveats. That can make putting together a list of the all-time best monster movies a bit overwhelming. But the form they take is practically unlimited. Whatever their origin, they’re frequently grotesque, usually mean and incredibly hard to stop. Some represent their creators’ deepest fears, others are manifestations of the things that frighten society at large. They’ve ranged from Lon Chaney in a fur mask to giant stop-motion lizards to any number of extraterrestrial and interdimensional nightmares. From the earliest days of cinema, filmmakers, make-up artists and special effects whizzes have plumbed the darkest corners of their imagination to extract beastly creatures to scare the bejesus out of us. Movie monsters are a many-splendored thing.
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