Sometimes the victims aren't the ones trapped inside a nightmare.
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00:00 The monster movie is one of the cornerstones of horror cinema.
00:03 Since time immemorial, our screens have shaken and shivered with sequences of scaly creatures
00:08 rising from the swamp, hairy beasts howling at the moon, and bloodthirsty bad boys seducing
00:13 the uninitiated.
00:14 But just because a monster strikes fear into the heart of anyone who lays eyes on them
00:18 doesn't mean that the world they inhabit does.
00:22 So with that in mind, I'm Ellie with WhatCulture, here with 10 great movie monsters trapped
00:27 in awful horror movies.
00:29 10.
00:30 The Boogeyman in Boogeyman
00:33 Drawing on one of the most pervasive monsters of contemporary common folklore, Stephen K's
00:38 Boogeyman seeks to flesh out all of our childhood nightmares by bringing the ultimate bedroom
00:43 big bad onto our screens.
00:45 Unsurprisingly, the film features the Boogeyman, or the Bogeyman to us Brits, a supernatural
00:50 creature who lives under our beds and in our cupboards, emerging only at night to scare
00:55 the living daylights out of anyone in reach, and in several cases, murdering the home's
01:00 inhabitants and stealing the kids.
01:02 Unfortunately, this Boogeyman is confined by more than just a pair of plywood doors.
01:06 Make no mistake, the Boogeyman is a great monster, but it's ruined by some shoddy
01:10 CGI and a desperate need on the part of the filmmakers to blow their own tension and show
01:15 the bad guy out in the open.
01:17 What makes the Boogeyman scary, in both this film and real life, is that we don't really
01:21 know what he looks like, we only know what he does.
01:25 9.
01:26 Dracula in Blade Trinity
01:28 What do you get when you cross Creed Scott Stapp with one of the sexiest, deadliest monsters
01:33 of all time?
01:34 Drake is what?
01:35 Primary antagonist of David Escoya's Blade Trinity, the Marvel movie that Mahershala
01:40 Ali, Ryan Reynolds, and the MCU would rather audiences forgot, Drake is the early noughties
01:45 answer to Dracula.
01:47 Sporting all the neck jewellery and shirts that don't button higher than the navel,
01:51 Drake parades around as a human day by day, one of the perks of being the bad guy, and
01:55 turns all red and satany by night, with a monolithic presence and predator-style mouth.
02:00 The new, cool, modern Dracula was a great idea, especially as a counterpoint to the
02:05 holier-than-thou day-walking vamp Blade, but Goya and his DP Gabriel Beristain mishandled
02:11 the character something rotten.
02:12 Rather than striking fear into our hearts, Drake instead comes off as a bit tacky, especially
02:17 when strutting around the city in soft lighting to a hip-hop beat.
02:21 This is the least of the film's issues, though, as a brash and unbearably camp tone
02:25 drag it down to ground level, rounding out the trilogy with a flop.
02:29 8.
02:30 Mary Shaw in Dead Silence
02:32 The subject of poorly composed nursery rhymes and nightmares alike, Mary Shaw, the antagonist
02:38 of ventriloquism horror Dead Silence, is quite unlike any other horror movie monster.
02:43 A poltergeist ventriloquist, Mary rips out the tongues of those who scream in her presence
02:48 before, well, murdering them.
02:49 But that's not where the fun ends, oh no, as she has a penchant for creating and controlling
02:54 perfect dolls, life-size puppets made from the humans she kills.
02:59 Though Dead Silence was marketed on the enduring appeal of the living dummy, Mary turns out
03:04 to be far scarier by spades.
03:06 Unfortunately, the rest of the film can't keep up.
03:09 Locked down by a meandering plot, boring dialogue, and forgettable main characters, it fails
03:14 to make the most of its villain, and instead rests idly in the usual cheap horror tropes
03:19 and jump scares.
03:20 Mary is a monster for the ages; the human puppets are horrifying, but the film therein
03:25 is barely alive.
03:26 7.
03:27 The Wolfman in The Wolfman
03:30 The Wolfman is a cornerstone character of Universal's catalogue of classic movie monsters.
03:35 Thus, when the studio assembled monster movie master Anthony Hopkins, along with other big
03:40 hitters like Benicio Del Toro and Hugo Weaving, for a remake of the old classic, most of us
03:45 thought we were in for one hell of a ride.
03:48 Hopkins and Del Toro play two generations of the titular character, tearing the small
03:53 town of Blackmortar pieces in a bestial rampage that is surprisingly visceral and unafraid
03:58 of showing us all the blood, guts, and stringy bits in between.
04:02 But that's not to mention their transformations, in which director Joe Johnston takes great
04:07 delight in mapping out every snapping bone and unhinging jaw.
04:11 Unfortunately, the magnificence of the monster is lost in a film that, while true to the
04:15 gothic feel and broader narrative shape of its filmic roots, is frequently dull, rarely
04:20 surprising, and often at war with the varied performances of its cast.
04:24 Above all else, Hopkins phones in at least 50% of his performance, perhaps having foreseen
04:29 a critical disappointment in the making.
04:32 6.
04:33 Nemesis in Resident Evil Apocalypse
04:35 Follow-up to Paul W.S. Anderson's middling-to-good video game adaptation, Resident Evil, Resident
04:41 Evil Apocalypse takes Alice out of the Umbrella Corporation's underground facility and into
04:46 a hellish raccoon city, where the zombie apocalypse has hit hard.
04:51 And this time, Anderson brings in the well-loved and much-feared video game antagonist Nemesis
04:56 to stalk her through the streets.
04:58 A nigh-unstoppable mutant with a sewn-up face and an arsenal of heavy weaponry, Nemesis,
05:03 here played by Matthew G. Taylor, is the kind of, well, nemesis that can make a franchise.
05:08 The creature design is spot-on, feeling true to the source material while offering a tangible
05:13 non-CG monster for audiences to fear, and it casts a long shadow over the movie before
05:19 a final act twist that challenges everything we think we know.
05:22 Alas, Apocalypse is still a Paul W.S. Anderson film, and despite a stellar villain and an
05:27 arse-kicking lead, it manages to flounder in plot and substance.
05:32 It bets the house on big dramatic action sequences and comes up short.
05:36 How could they get it so right while getting it so wrong?
05:40 5.
05:41 Slender Man in Slender Man
05:43 Long before there was a film with his name on it, Slender Man haunted the minds and computer
05:48 screens of the 21st century teen, emerging as one of our first truly contemporary folklores.
05:54 A mysterious, elongated humanoid with a featureless face and a black suit, he hides in the background
06:00 of photographs, stalks children in the forest, and generally manipulates things from a distance.
06:05 It makes sense, then, for a film adaptation to draw on what was a largely untapped and
06:09 yet widely recognised well of terror.
06:12 But with the movie business being what it is, that is where the ingenuity began and
06:16 ended.
06:17 The film relied on the character's popularity to get bums on seats in the cinema and left
06:21 trivial concerns like story and scares for the birds.
06:25 As a result, the film's plot is as thin as the titular character, and the frights egregiously
06:29 few and far between.
06:31 At its core, though, Slender Man suffers from a similar ailment to Boogeyman, in that it
06:36 offers up too much of its monster, a monster who thrives in darkness, shadows, and background
06:42 scares.
06:43 4.
06:44 Frankenstein's Monster in Van Helsing
06:46 Stephen Sommers' gothic horror Van Helsing promised horror fans a smorgasbord of creatures
06:52 from across the literary canon and beyond, and boy did it deliver.
06:56 With so many good monsters to choose from, it's hard to know which to settle on, but
07:00 the crowning achievement of this film's rogues gallery is surely creature-cum-antihero Frankenstein's
07:06 Monster.
07:07 Unlike the hammy, green-headed hammer-horror Frankensteins of old, Shula Hensley's incarnation
07:12 of the creature feels raw, powerful, and quite unlike Robert De Niro's disastrous appearance
07:17 in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, very well cast.
07:20 The physical design feels authentic to the period setting, and yet modern at the same
07:24 time, looking as sharp today as it did in 2004.
07:28 And that's to say nothing of Hensley's performance, which perfectly captures the
07:32 pain and tragedy of the part, for at his core, Frankenstein's monster is a deeply misunderstood
07:38 creature, cast out by a society that fears him based on his appearance and origins.
07:43 Unfortunately for Summers, Hensley, and the monster, Van Helsing is just a Hugh Jackman
07:47 vehicle, and a weak one at that.
07:50 Visually flat while also overloaded with CGI, Frankenstein's monster winds up being one
07:54 of the few things ever really alive on screen.
07:58 3.
07:59 Amonet in The Mummy
08:01 Sophia Bertella's face may not be the one most of us bring to mind when someone mentions
08:05 The Mummy, and yet her monstrous incarnation of the undead mummy Amonet is a fearsome thing
08:10 to behold.
08:11 Her freaky split irises alone are enough to send children and small animals fleeing, but
08:16 add to that talented hands, preternatural strength, supernatural abilities, and taste
08:20 for snacking on the human spirit, and she could have most adults diving behind the sofa
08:24 to join them.
08:25 With an army of zombies at her back, it would seem there's not much can stop Amonet, except
08:30 perhaps the movie she features in.
08:32 Devoid of joy, terror, and pretty much every other identifiable emotion, The Mummy failed
08:36 as a film, failed as a Tom Cruise action vehicle, and failed to launch Universal's hotly anticipated
08:42 Dark Universe series, which would have brought together other classic monsters such as the
08:46 Invisible Man and Frankenstein's monster.
08:49 Too much effort was spent shoehorning Cruise's stunts and universe-building elements into
08:53 The Mummy, like Russell Crowe's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and not enough thought went into
08:58 figuring out what actually makes a monster movie tick.
09:01 Let that be a warning to you, franchise-baiting executives.
09:04 2.
09:05 Slappy the Dummy in Goosebumps
09:08 The true MVP of the Goosebumps series, Slappy the Dummy has lived rent-free in every 90s
09:14 kid's head since his introduction at the end of R.L. Stine's Night of the Living
09:18 Dummy.
09:19 Shiny head, black tux, blood red bow tie, you know the puppet.
09:23 A cursed ventriloquist doll with the ability to walk, talk, and commit atrocities of every
09:28 shape and size, Slappy may not have originated the Western world's fear of dummies, but
09:33 he sure as hell capitalised on it.
09:35 As the totem figure and arguably also the series' antagonist of Goosebumps, it makes
09:39 sense that he would be the primary villain of the 2015 Goosebumps movie.
09:44 This horror comedy, though, is far from the chills and thrills we used to experience between
09:48 Stine's pages, and bears more resemblance to a sort of live-action Scooby-Doo than the
09:53 horror story necessary to do such a character justice.
09:56 Acting opposite an absurdly cast Jack Black as RL Stine, Slappy is voiced by…Jack Black.
10:02 He's not intimidating, he's not especially clever, and when push comes to shove, the
10:06 dummy does little more than release other monsters to go on a rampage of their own.
10:10 An opportunity sorely wasted.
10:13 1.
10:14 Predalien in Aliens vs Predator Requiem
10:18 One would think that producers John Davis, David Guiler, and Walter Hill had learned
10:22 their lesson after the critical and commercial disaster that was Alien vs Predator.
10:27 And yet, these gluttons for punishment came back with a sequel a mere three years later,
10:32 scraping the very bottom of the barrel while waiting for someone to resurrect the Alien
10:37 franchise.
10:38 And yet, within this misguided cash grab, there is a great moment of unforeseen ingenuity.
10:44 Picking up where the first film left off, a chestburster hatches from a fallen Predator
10:48 warrior during the opening sequence, wreaking havoc on their ship and sending it crashing
10:52 back to Earth, where a new kind of beast is born.
10:55 By far the most compelling element of both films, the Predalien is a creature that combines
11:00 the strength, skills, intellect, and sheer determination of both creatures into one hulking,
11:06 dreadlocked, scaly-tailed brute.
11:08 Wreaking havoc around a town in Colorado, it goes toe to toe with humans, predators,
11:13 and…um…a nuclear bomb.
11:15 Yep, when deciding what narrative route might best serve such a creature, the writers decided
11:19 to nuke it.
11:21 As if that wasn't bad enough, the Predalien barely gets any solid screen time, and when
11:25 it does, it is mired in heavy blacks and shadows, so that by the end of the film, we're not
11:29 sure if we even saw it at all.
11:32 And that concludes our list.
11:33 If you think we missed any, then do let us know in the comments below, and while you're
11:36 there, don't forget to like and subscribe and tap that notification bell.
11:39 Also, head over to Twitter and follow us there, and I can be found across various social medias
11:44 just by searching Ellie Littlechild.
11:45 I've been Ellie with What Culture, I hope you have a magical day, and I'll see you real