"Queen Crab" - More Joe Young than Kong, but Super Fun!

"Queen Crab" kept popping up in my suggested movie list on Amazon Prime.  So did a much older giant crab creature feature, "Claws".  I have seen most of "Claws" (keep falling asleep on it), and was confusing it with "Queen Crab" for a long time.  So, I skipped the newer film.  Finally, I saw the art for both on my T.V. screen at the same time.  This was my big clue that they were different movies.  Still, I had little interest in seeing a giant CG crab eat up a small town.  Finally, reading the IMDB page, I found out the F/X were done with stop motion.  I decided to give it a watch and I'm so glad I did.

Let me get this out of the way right here.  If you are looking for cutting edge special F/X, Oscar worthy performances or a deeply emotional and heart wrenching story, keep scrolling your movie list.  This is a creature feature throwback with all of the flaws and fun that entails.

"Queen Crab" is one of those movies with a very uneven tone.  It opens like a kids' movie.  The music, the cute little crab, the dancing child, but this is all set-up for what's to come later.  Make it through that first act, much like sitting through the bartering session at the beginning of "Mighty Joe Young", and you'll be rewarded with a monster movie for the rest of the film.

Once Melissa Webber (played as an adult by Michelle Simone Miller) becomes orphaned, the movie's tone becomes the one we expect.  Strange deaths, a mysterious young hermit of a girl, bumbling local police and some monster fodder characters who are just there to be torn to pieces.

Director, Brett Piper, actually does an excellent job of creating sympathy for our rampaging titular creature.  And she does rampage.  There is some nicely done gore for fans of that sort thing, a tank, fighter jets and farmers with shotguns and other assorted weapons.  In fact, the poster above is pretty accurate in portraying what happens on screen.  It may be a bit more spectacular on the poster, but it's far less exaggerated than some monster movie posters, such as the Poster for 1958's "The Blob" when it was released in France a couple of years later.

The F/X are an old movie fan's dream.  There are, of course, some digital moments that are easy to spot, like a hole in the side of a barn that clearly wasn't actually destroyed, but the stop motion is very high quality for a film of this nature.  If you like the monster work in "The Black Scorpion", you'll like this.

Stop motion is a painstaking process.  I only use a few moments in films like, "Lumber vs Jack" and "Jack vs Lanterns" , but even I know it can take hours to get a few seconds of decent looking animation onto the screen.  Season 2 of "The Simplest Things" only has a couple of dinosaurs and I had to loop some shots as a time saving device.  For that reason, a lot of independent movies avoid stop motion, or when they do use it,  you don't get to see a lot of the creature.  I never felt cheated out of monster time while watching "Queen Crab" and every time she made an appearance I would giggle with delight. (Seriously, Chaya, my dog, was looking at me like I was nuts.  She watches all of these movies with me.) It was magical.

I mentioned the acting earlier.  It's the typical B movie standard.  Performances range from, "Hey, Bob wanted to be in the movie so we gave him some lines" to professional grade performances.  One farmer can barely hold back a smile as he describes his cow being eaten.  Overall though, the best performances were by the leading characters and so the story holds together and moves along.  There are human interactions to develop characters and keep the pace moving, including a very awkward fight scene or two.  A hint to low budget filmmaker from one indie to another, keep a really junky car around so you can have it parking lot scenes when there's a fight.  Talent holding back so they don't scratch another actor's car is kind, but with GRIM, the Jeep from the "Jack" movies, I never have to worry about that.  I have covered that thing with slime, hit it with branches and driven it over a pile of crusher run.  It's mine and I keep around to do all of the thankless work my life requires.

The relationship between Melissa and Goliath (as the crab becomes known) is a sweet one.  It's the not the romance from "King Kong", but closely resembles the friendship from "Mighty Joe Young".  If you're a fan of monster movies with sympathetic, nearly heroic monsters, give this one a watch.

"Bog" - A Monster Movie Too Intelligent for its Own Good

"Bog" (1979) is an old school, B-title monster movie with a lot of the right elements and a few of the wrong ones.

On the side of "Creature Feature Right", the movie had a big, humanoid, lumbering monster with odd shaped claws that tore through doors like so much balsa wood and which could shake off bullets the way a bear shakes off honey bees.  We're treated mostly to extreme close-ups of the most impressive parts of the creature costume and left with poorly lit or extremely far away shots of the full costume.  This leaves our imagination to put together the full image.  I like that they covered what were likely short comings in the suit in the way most low budget movies did, by not giving us a good look at it, but they missed an opportunity to give us a good idea of what it looked like when a sketch artist draws a picture of it.  The characters pass around the sketch pad and look at it, each reacting to the horror on the page, but the audience isn't even given a brief glimpse of the monster's penciled image.  Even I let people catch a glimpse of "Cat-man-Do" in "Indiscretions" after Old Tom (Mike Christopher) sketched him.  And we hid the actor's/creature's face nearly the whole movie because we only had make-up for him on one day.


Another "right" is the cast.  These aren't big movie names that everyone will know, but all recognizable faces if you watched TV at the time.  They were seasoned actors (there's not one leading cast member who was under 40 at the time of filming.).  And this is where the cast becomes a bit of a "wrong" too.  I have nothing against adults playing adults, but movies like this tended to be for younger audiences and there was nobody for them to connect to in this flick.  As for me, it made for a lot of characters I could relate to and I enjoyed that for a change.  In recent years watching teenagers be stupid in the face of danger has gotten more annoying than entertaining.  So, it's a solid cast, but a mixed bag on the fact that some audience members may find nobody relatable to root for.

There was also an odd love story included between the two doctors.  Not odd in a real world sense, but unusual to have two mature characters actually be the central romantic characters in a horror movie.  Usually you see that more in a Western.  The other problem I had with the love story is that is sort of drifted in just to create a damsel in distress situation later.  It wasn't necessary enough to warrant slowing down the action.

And that's this movie's biggest failing, even though it's one of the things I enjoyed the most about it.  It got bogged down in the science.  The two doctors were constantly discussing the creature's physical characteristics.  How and why it sucked blood.  Where it may have come.  What animals it was like.  I love science in my sci-fi, but this script had two problems.  One, creature features generally have a very lose sense of science to keep the action moving.  They don't get tied  up in a lot of details.  T.V. and low budget movies may use this dialogue as filler ( I know I have ) and that's okay IF, in the end the science all leads to at least one of two things:

1. Where the creature came from.
2. An effective method to stop it.

If either of these things resulted from the science talk, I missed it happen.  So, while interesting in each incident, it built  up to very little. So, too much science for a B-monster flick AND it turned out it was pointless science that didn't even help to resolve the problem.

The final and big "right" this B-monster flick had going for it?  It seemed like one of those movies the whole town was in on shooting.  Police and fire trucks were involved.  We got a big confrontation between the monster and the townspeople.  It gave the movie a scale that a smaller production like it may not of had without support from the town.

Overall, it makes for  good late night or rainy day viewing if you like old school monsters.  No flashy CGI here.  Just a guy, in a suit, which you don't see much of, sucking blood out of townspeople and carrying off women.

This trailer is actually a pretty accurate representation of the movie.  They do spend a lot of time asking, "What is it?" and never answering that question.

And the trailer for "Indiscretions", mentioned above.

If you like cheesy monster movies, we've got one for you!

Grab your DVD copy at www.hocfocprod.com/jackvslanterns