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!

 

Watching With Strangers Episode 0: Meet The Strangers

 

Blam! Just like that, gang. The Strangeville podcast network gets another brand new show! Watching With Strangers is our cult movie review podcast featuring the brain pieces of our two biggest resident movie nerds, Kevin Strange and his highly educated film buff buddy, Travis!

Together they’re going to 100% school you on the best AND the worst flicks that the vaults of cult cinema history has to offer! In this introductory episode, the weird movie duo talk up each other’s film knowledge and flex their sweet street cred.

They don’t review any movies on this episode, but they do find the time to bust out some dope knowledge bombs about a choice few flicks before they go! Stay tuned for the FIRST episode where the boys will review MAD MAX: FURY ROAD! If you love weirdo movie, you do NOT want to miss THAT!

If you like what you hear on WATCHING WITH STRANGERS please consider becoming a Patron of the Strange by pledging as little as 1 dollar per month to Patreon.com/KevinTheStrange.

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!