Dean's World

weak. where is the blob? where is cronenberg's character from nightbreed? jigsaw and jaws are essentially jokes (especially if you've seen jaws 4: the revenge), and the alien sequels only served to make the alien(s) less and less scary and less and less unique.

Kevin,

pretty bad, IMVHO. I mean, come on, the climactic scene was laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Although there's another movie monster i forgot to mention, the mutant baby from It's Alive. Now THERE'S something to mess you up.

Kevin,

I'm the same age, actually, but I still feel there were contemporaneous movies and some that even predate jaws that still don't get as hokey as jaws does (Texas Chainsaw is one, for example). Entertaining, absolutely. I mean, don't get me wrong, I am a huge Jaws fan. I just don't find it scary. To be fair, though, it's not even really a horror movie, and I don't think Jaws was intended to be a "movie monster" in the same way that, say, Leatherface was.

The ultimate fright film was the Quatermass Experiment (mid 1950s, with Brian Donnelly as Quatermass, the scientist who endangers the world by sending out a spaceship with a crew of three.

The one scene I never forgot was the ground crew of the spaceship launch station playing back a film taken inside the space vessel, after the ship returns to earth with only a single living occupant.

The film show the scene in the crew compartment, as one by one, some invisible alien life form invades the bodies of two of the crewmen, devouring them so completely that nothing is left but the empty space suits, which the surviving crewman lifts up and inspects in an atmosphere of soundless but growing horror.

The surviving crewman, obviously sick with some unknown malady, is hospitalized. When released, he is all but a stranger to his own wife. And when the two of go to visit a local zoo, the animals there are perturbed by his presence near their cages.

Bit by bit, the surviving crewman morphs into a creature resembling an octopus (which I think was the animal used in the photography of the final scene, when the creature -- trying to escape from all the now-hostile and frightened humans -- is trapped atop an archway inside Westminster Abbey.

Ater the destruction of the creature, Quatermass is shown in full persistence, in charge of yet another government-funded project to send more such manned ships into space, while the background music plays ominously.

And no, I don't think Roger Ebert ever reviewed this one.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI