Kevin Strange’s Top 8 Obscure Monster Movies


I don’t know about you dudes, but when I was a kid, there was nothing cooler than finding a brand new monster flick at the video store. There was Godzilla and King Kong, horror monsters like zombies, demons, giant insects, werewolves, vampires, mummies, you name it. I loved them all. Sit me in front of the TV and all my worries went away as soon as those monsters hit the screen!

I was a fucking monster kid and still am. I used to wish I WAS a monster. To this day I still make movies full of monsters and write novels about monsters. And still to this day I LOVE to find new and cool monster movies that I never saw when I was a kid.

This list is my attempt to introduce you lot to some monsters you may not necessarily be familiar with. Of course since I’m an 80s kid, my list is going to be biased toward rad 80s flicks. Here are my top 8 obscure monster movies. Hope you like em!

8. Dead Heat

This whopper of a flick stars Joe Piscopo and Treat Williams and is so weird and wacky it flies right under most people’s radars. I can’t in good faith call it a good movie, but it IS an obscure movie so I can include it on my list and still sleep well tonight.

In essence, this is a zombie cop buddy movie but it takes such bizarre twists and turns and basically turns all of the main characters into monsters that I just HAD to include it on my list. Furthermore, I like this movie so much I dedicated a whole podcast to it.

Melty love interests, killer cold-cuts, violently murdered partners. This flick brings the monster gore!

7. Brain Damage

So if you’re worth your salt as a monster kid, you’ve probably seen the BASKET CASE series of films. They were displayed prominently at video stores in the 80s. Each subsequent sequel got weirder and weirder until there were musical numbers and shit. Totally wacky stuff.

But the BASKET CASE dude also made this weird little gem (and FRANKENHOOKER which will inevitably end up on another of my movie lists in the future) that most people haven’t seen. It’s called BRAIN DAMAGE which often gets confused with BRAINDEAD, the original title of the Peter Jackson zombie flick DEAD ALIVE.

This low budget nonsense is about a parasitic alien thing named Aylmer who lives inside a dude’s body and gets the dude hooked on his blue brain-piss or something.

It’s very reminiscent of the BASKET CASE storyline but with an even weirder monster and even more violent kills. Definitely a must watch if you’re into the body horror sub genre and love getting grossed out by bodily fluids.

6. Rawhead Rex

Just look at that goofy muppet face! How could yo not love RAWHEAD REX? Written by Clive Barker himself, this is probably his most obscure writing credit based on one of his most popular books.

RAWHEAD REX appeared in Barker’s Books of Blood short story collection series. The movie basically ends up being nothing like the story and has some of the worst practical effects for a monster shown so prominently and made to be taken so seriously.

Add in some great gore, some awkward monster-stalking and some bizarre priest-pissing scenes and you’ve got yourself one helluva monster flick most people have never even heard of!

5. Killer Tongue

This is another of my personal favorite flicks. KILLER TONGUE takes the hot chick zombie from RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 and pits her against Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund as a sadistic prison warden bent on hunting down said hot chick’s boyfriend at all costs.

KILLER TONGUE features insane cannibalism, sexy leather body suits, a talking tongue monster, a gaggle of poodle-turned-transvestite sidekicks and you have one of the weirdest most batshit crazy monster movies you’re ever likely to come across.  I dedicated a podcast to this one, too.

4. Society

SOCIETY is a flick that I’ve already included in another one of my movie lists but we’re gonna go ahead and cover it again here because it’s both one of the coolest melt movies ever AND one of the most obscure monster movies you’ve probably never heard of.

The flick features literal “butt heads” a chick who turns her entire body around to soap up her own ass in the shower and a ton of other absolutely bonkers monsters and ends in a gigantic orgy where all of the monsters melt into a gigantic orgy of connected flesh.

It’s so odd that most people have never even bothered to watch it. But if you like the off-the-wall shit, you should totally check it out!

3. Hardware

Alright so this flick only has one monster in it and that monster is actually a killer robot but let’s take a damn second, settle down and talk about just how cool HARDWARE is.

Richard Stanley is an auteur renegade filmmaker who shamefully never got a real shot at making a gigantic visionary film. Well, he actually did. He was set to make that awful 90s ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU disaster but got fired part of the way through.

He’s never worked on another significant film which is a crying shame. BUT he did make HARDWARE and it is an absolute visual treat. It is the film equivalent of the 90s industrial metal music genre. In fact, it uses music from MINISTRY as part of its soundtrack.

The gore is brief but brutal and the killer robot’s design is magnificent. You’ve probably never seen HARDWARE but you owe it to yourself as a monster movie fan to rectify that immediately!

2. The Keep

THE KEEP for sure has one of the coolest soundtracks of any monster flick and also one of the coolest monsters that you’ve probably never even heard of. THE KEEP is Michael Mann’s red-headed step child. It’s never been released on Blu Ray or even DVD because he’s embarrassed that he made a low budget horror flick early in his career.

Well fuck him, buddy. This movie is fucking badass! It features Nazis getting the fuck killed out of them and one of the absolute coolest monsters you will ever see on film, guaranteed.

Nazis try to loot a citadel only to unleash a demonic force that proceeds to wipe them out to one of the best Tangerine Dream synth soundtracks ever! This demon spends the first half of the movie as some sort of anthropomorphic smoke with glowing red eyes. Seriously you have to see it to understand just how fucking cool it looks.

Find THE KEEP if you can. It’s worth every penny.

 

1. Return of the Living Dead 3

Known for its super sexy zombie girl Julie, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 has been surprisingly hard to find for years. It was recently released as a limited edition blu ray, like a lot of the movies on this list, but also like a lot of those blu rays is extremely over priced and will probably be out of print soon.

What’s often overlooked about this flick, though, is just how amazing the zombie monsters are. From the gang leader having his spine stretched up into some kind of horrific snake-like creature, to the homeless guy who gets screwed into a metal exoskeleton and the Trioxin barrel zombie who rips half its own face off crawling out of the barrel, this flick is LOADED with great gore and even cooler zombie monsters.

If you think zombies ended with Romero or the first ROTLD, you’re playing yourself. I put ROTLD 3 above almost any other zombie flick in terms of monster factor. This one is the business!

 

Kevin Strange’s Top 6 Japanese Splatterpunk Movies

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One of my favorite sub-genres of horror, and a HUGE aesthetic inspiration to my movies and books is the little-know wacky genre known as Japanese splatter punk. This type of movie has been around for some time, but didn’t really kick into its current batshit crazy incarnation till the mid 00s when a group of Japanese filmmakers raised off ultra-violent 80s anime and the “video nasties” era of 80s gory horror movies in America came into their own.

See, every generation builds off of the craziness of the last. It’s why I love bizarro fiction so much. It’s an answer to the splatter punk fiction of the 90s which was an answer to the rise of horror fiction in the 80s. Same is true for Japanese splatter punk. How do you answer ultra-violent anime? You turn it live action and add even MORE blood and guts and crazy monsters. That’s how!

So with that in mind, here are my personal 6 favorite Japanese splatter punk flicks:

6. Ichi The Killer (2001)

You can’t talk crazy Japanese movies without mentioning Takashi Miike, the veritable master of Asian weird cinema, so we’ll start things off with him. My favorite Miike flick is the off-the-wall gorefest known as Ichi the Killer.

This flick is interesting for a lot of reasons but one of them is that the main character, and the character used in the marketing of the movie isn’t Ichi at all. It’s the villain of the film, Kakihara.

Ichi came out right at the tail end of the body modification craze of the late 90s when absolutely everyone (myself included) was getting tatted up and experimenting with extreme piercing, branding, scarification and skin suspension.

Ichi has a little bit of all of that, but Kakihara in particular is a shining example. He’s had his cheeks split open so that his mouth opens extra wide. This is a type of ritual punishment in some gang circles, but Miike makes it extra cool by keeping the wounds open and holding them together with piercings. This, in addition to Kakihara’s extensive facial scaring makes him a unique and unforgettable character from the first time we see him on screen.

Ichi, for his part, is a deranged violent psychopath who’s given a pair of bladed boots which he uses to kick/chop his way through a veritable cornucopia of gangsters throughout the flick.

The violence and depravity builds to an insane creshendo which includes dipping people in human feces, suspending them from their back skin and, at one point, Kakihara even cuts off his own tongue for failing his gangster boss. This ain’t one for the squeamish, folks. Highly recommended. 4/5 Strangeheads

5. Tokyo Gore Police (2008)

This is the movie that turned me on to the fact that there was a group of filmmakers in Japan creating ultra-violent live action homages to 80s and 90s anime utilizing mostly practical gore and monster effect.

And MAN does Tokyo Gore Police have some monsters and gore in it! What little plot there is involves a scientist who creates a virus which turns those infected into monsters who sprout huge weapons from any wound they receive. How fucking cool is that?!

The monsters in this flick include a girl with a crocodile mouth for a lower half, a girl with arms and legs made of katana blades, a girl with eyeball stalks and a snail shell and a girl with penises for hair. Yes you read that correctly.

This is the movie that normalized gratuitous amounts of practical blood and gore and ushered in the Japanese splatter punk genre, but, to be honest, it’s mostly just an incomprehensible mess.

The story involves a female cop out for vengeance for the death of her cop dad. There’s a special task force to kill the infected “engineer” monsters, and of course the mad scientist who’s pulling the strings of the whole thing, but all of this is merely an excuse to put as many cool looking monsters and sexy mutant girls on screen next to brutally over-the-top gore as possible. And really, what’s wrong with that? 3/5 Strangeheads

4. Robogeisha (2009)

Robogeisha is the flick I most often show to people when I want to introduce them to the Japanese splatter punk genre. Not because it’s necessarily the best or goriest of the genre, but because it’s one of the lightest and most fun.

We have robot geishas who have machinegun tits, asshole katanas and a whole lot more surprises along the way as two sisters named Yoshie and Kikue Kasuga are transformed into cyborg assassins by an evil corporation.

Of course one of them remains good while the other turns evil and sides with the maniac who runs the company that turned them into killer machines.

The insanity reaches its peak when the big bad actually transforms his castle into a giant robot and scales Mount Fuji in order to drop a bomb inside that’s “17 times more powerful than an atomic bomb.”

The two sisters make up and actually form a two-bodied kick-ass robo assassin to fight the robo-castle. Yeah, my kinda flick. 5/5 Strangeheads

3. Meatball Machine (2005)

This flick is extremely derivative of a classic body horror flick that for sure has served as an inspiration to the entire Japanese splatter punk genre. That film is Tetsuo: The Iron man which, in short, is about a couple who grow machine parts, including a drill-dick, and proceed to spend the movie fighting to the death.

THIS movie, Meatball Machine, takes that premise and turns it up to 11 by making a series of small puppet-aliens which infect human bodies, turning them into mindless meat-robots whose only purpose is to wreak havoc and destruction in their attempt to kill any other aliens present in the vicinity.

The aliens infect an awkward boy who has a distant, weird crush on an even more awkward girl who works in the same factory who also gets herself infected with a puppet-alien.

The ensuing carnage is both beautiful and heart wrenching as the minds of the boy and girl fight against their meat-metal bodies as the aliens inside of them seek to destroy each other. It’s actually a REALLY sweet love story if you can get past all of the decapitation, dismemberment and horrific, twisted body modification.  4/5 Strangeheads

2. Vampire Girl Vs Frankenstein Girl (2009)

This is one of the craziest movies I’ve ever seen in my life. And that’s saying something A. coming from Kevin Strange and B. coming from Kevin Strange’s list of some of the craziest movies ever made. Yes, Vampire Girl Vs Frankenstein Girl might be the weirdest monster movie ever made, and I’m gonna tell you why.

First, in lieu of trying to explain the almost incoprehensible plot, I’m just going to refer to the wikipedia plot synopsis:

In a typical Tokyo high school a perpetually teenage vampire named Monami (Yukie Kawamura) falls for her classmate, Mizushima (Takumi Saito), who happens to already be the reluctant boyfriend to the vice principal/science professor’s daughter, Keiko (Eri Otoguro), a leader of a Sweet Lolita gang. The ensuing love triangle leads Keiko to seek the assistance of her father who, unbeknown to his daughter, moonlights as a Kabuki-clad mad scientist with the school nurse as his assistant. The pair experiment on students in the school basement hoping to discover the secret of reanimating corpses (akin to the work of Victor Frankenstein). Their hopes are answered when they discover a solution of Monami’s blood holds the properties to bring life to dead body parts and inanimate objects.

Yeah, so. We have a vampire girl just because we do. Her blood reanimates body parts. Even severed ones. The girlfriend of her crush is actually in a gang of girls who slit their wrist for fun AND in an aesthetic turn that would have the filmmakers put in front of a cultural firing squad if the film had been made in the US, her gang features Asian actors in BLACKFACE who RUN VERY FAST as if the blackface itself wasn’t offensive enough!

And their teacher happens to moonlight as a mad scientist with a lab in the basement of the school. Yeah. That’s the movie. The blood gushing sequences here are among the BEST I’ve ever seen in a movie. When Vampire Girl bites the neck of her victims, the blood spews out and up so far and so hard that it creates a blood rain above the girl.

There are several beautiful sequences where she’s dancing in slow motion underneath the torrent of blood and gore until she’s been turned completely red from the sheer amount of bodily fluid raining down on her. If you’re a gore freak like me, that’s heaven.

So blah, blah, blah, shit happens, the jealous slit-writ club girlfriend throws herself off a roof, dies and is reanimated by her mad-scientist father as Frankenstein Girl and the two monster girls proceed to fight and fight some more. It’s a fight that features a helicopter helmet made of body parts and a blood-spike armor suit.

If you like your gore mixed with a healthy dose of WTF!?! then this flick is for you. 5/5 Strangeheads

1. Helldriver (2010)

This isn’t the movie I start people with when I show them the Japanese splatterpunk genre, but it is my favorite. Follow me here, it’s gonna get weird REAL quick:

Kika’s mother and uncle are SERIAL KILLER CANNIBALS who set Kika’s father on fire and get set to killer her too when a METEOR FALLS FROM THE SKY and plunges through Kika’s mother’s chest, obliterating her heart.

She then RIPS OUT KIKA’S HEART and, as if all of this wasn’t absolutely, totally insane right from the jump off, Kika and her mother then BECOME COCOONED do to the magical powers of the meteor.

Also as an effect of the meteor, a black ash covers the top half of Japan turning half the country’s population into zombies. But not just any zombies. Zombies with weird forked stalks that jut out from their foreheads. And those stalks? Yeah, they’re EXPLOSIVE.

Kika is found by a group of people who give her an artificial heart while her mother breaks out of the cocoon and becomes THE QUEEN OF THE ZOMBIES. Absolute and total insanity results and Kika is outfitted with a badass, form-fitting leather costume and CHAINSAW SWORD with which she fights off the zombie hordes lead by her deranged uncle and zombie queen mother.

As if all of THAT wasn’t totally bonkers enough, this movie features a car chase with a car made entirely of zombie body parts, a sword fight featuring a zombie with 20 arms, and features a climax with the zombie queen controlling a giant zombie made of zombies which transforms itself into a jet by grabbing hold of two nuclear missiles.

This is by far the most imaginative and insane of all of the Japanese splatter punk flicks and for sure my top recommendation. 5/5 Strangeheads

Kevin Strange’s Movie, TV and Comic Book Reviews

A wise friend ofSnapchat-6858734831345374570 mine told me this week that if social media dorks were getting me so worked up, I should focus on my website where all the social media traffic is coming anyway.

So I started looking around here, kicking up the cobwebs and doing some virtual inventory. I realized I’ve been doing quite a few movie reviews and cool lists lately, but there’s no actual archive or database here to look those up! You either see them in the news feed when I post them, or they vanish forever. That’s not how a website is supposed to work…

So I created a new page here at the ole KevinTheStrange.com called “Reviews.” Here you’ll be able to access every movie review or cool cult movie list I create, with the newest review appearing at the top of the page, and then chronologically in order after that. Why I didn’t do this from the very beginning is anybody’s guess.

But that’s not the only change coming to the site. I used to work very hard at maintaining one of the best, most up to date websites in the cult underground. And while I do post here often, I don’t think I’m utilizing my internet space to its full potential.

In the coming weeks and months, I’m going to add a “Stories” section. Here, I’ll post free stories from my short story collections and create new free flash fiction pieces from time to time that will be website exclusive. I may also do a serialized novella or novelette if the mood strikes me.

But what’s really got me excited is the idea of a paid portion of the “Stories” section where I post hot and steamy original erotica stories. I don’t know what I’ll charge yet. Probably like 5.99 for a month of access to the entire paid story archive. I don’t know. I’m going to play with it first and see what happens.

Either way, expect a lot more organization and a lot more content to appear here at KevinTheStrange.com as we move forward, and a lot less activity from me on dork central social media. Your boy Kevin Strange just doesn’t have time for that nonsense.

Oh, and did you notice the new site banner? All The Toxic Waste From My Heart: Stories by Kevin Strange, bitch. September 17th, only from KevinTheStrange.com!