9 Extremely Lame Horror Movie Monsters

There are perfectly decent horror films let down by their monsters; there are also perfectly decent monsters let down by their horror films. And then there are the films conceived with such spectacular stupidity that you wonder what the filmmakers thought they were doing. Was this ever going to be scary? Was it intended to be stupid? What are they thinking here?! As Halloween approaches, we look into some of the less scary creatures to pop out of our screens. There's nothing more disappointing than a monster who turns out to be totally lame, right? So, on that note, join us as we count off nine extremely lame horror movie monsters. Trust us, these are films that you'll definitely want to avoid this Halloween. 1) Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977) Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is a film that must be spoken of using its full title, because it’s the best title ever. This is a movie which does exactly what it says on the tin: it’s a movie about a bed, a bed that eats. Said bed is located in a stone edifice in the middle of the woods, accompanied by a guy imprisoned in a painting (I think) who holds constant conversation with the bed. The usual parade of stupid people come in and out to be outwitted and eventually consumed by our hideous monster - although some of them don’t seem terribly concerned about their flesh being eaten away. It’s not terribly clear how the bed manages to consume things, as it appears to have both the powers of stomach acid as well as teeth, and we hear sucking and crunching noises every time some poor soul dares to take a nap. The problem with making a bed the monster of your horror movie is that people pretty much have to feed themselves to it. It can’t stalk anyone through the dark woods, it can’t sneak up on you in the middle of the night and it can’t open doors. It just sort of sits there, being a bed, with all the cunning and audacity one would expect from a piece of furniture. I think the best example of how lame this "monster" is is in the opening sequence, which features the bed devouring a bucket of fried chicken right before sucking its victims into its soft, luxurious depths. Diabolical! 2) Jeepers Creepers (2001) Jeepers Creepers is a film of two halves. The first half of writer-director Victor Salva’s movie is a disturbing and genuinely scary sequence, in which two siblings – played by Gina Philips and Justin Long – travel by car along deserted Florida highways, going home from college. They encounter an old rusty truck, whose driver is obscured from view, and it tries to run them off the road before taking off ahead. Shaken, the pair press on until they spot the dangerous truck parked next to an old church. Slowing down, they notice a man sliding what seems to be a corpse out of the truck, and depositing it down a pipe. The driver spots them and gives chase, but loses them. The brother and sister team return to the church to investigate the pipe, and find that it leads to a chamber containing many mutilated, badly sewn-up bodies – but when they flee to a remote, local house to raise the alarm, they are again attacked by the driver. As they make their escape, the duo hit the driver with their car, repeatedly running over him to make sure he is dead. And that’s the end of the good half of the film. As they gaze upon the broken body in the road, a giant wing suddenly rips through the driver’s trenchcoat and reveals him to be some kind of avian monstrosity, which then takes off into the sky. Later they discover that their attacker is known locally as The Creeper. It is described as an ancient, fear-smelling creature that hunts every 23rdspring, for 23 days, to take human body parts for its own use. The lesson of Jeepers Creepers is a simple and clear one. If your horror movie villain remains shrouded in mystery, but seems to be human, then your film is potentially terrifying. If you suddenly, and inexplicably, reveal your villain to be some kind of fantastical creature – albeit one that needs human internal organs – then your film loses its tension and becomes laughable. Unless you are making a space-horror - like 1979’s Alien – keep your villains real. Otherwise, they’re just lame. 3) The Happening (2008) Deadly plants can make great horror movie villains – as ably demonstrated by The Day Of The Triffids in 1962. Even The Little Shop Of Horrors carried it off effectively – twice (1960 and 1986). But, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening just dies on its feet, so to speak, thanks to the utter futility of its foliage. The premise of the film sees a terrible incident occur in Central Park, New York City, during which a large number of people become infected with some kind of neurotoxin that causes them all to kill themselves. Once biological terrorism at the hands of humans has been ruled out, and the condition begins to spread across the country, it becomes clear that it is, in fact, the world’s vegetation that is doing the air-borne poisoning. It seems that our plant-life has got sick of our destruction of the environment and the planet, and has decided to retaliate by attacking large groups of people with spine-tingling passive-aggressiveness. Of course, we need lead characters to invest in, and Shyamalan asks us to do so with Elliot (Mark Wahlberg), and Alma (Zooey Deschanel) – but there’s not much to care about. We feel little interest when the life-threatening situation worsens, the plants increase their attack, and it looks as though all is lost. Elliot and Alma – along with a friend’s young daughter – embrace in the open, convinced they are in their last moments, only for the botanical bad guy to change its mind and just stop. It literally just stops. There’s no showdown, there’s no fight-back or attempt at conflict resolution. It just stops. It is the lamest of denouements for a lame horror movie villain. 4) The Blob (1958) The Blob has long been considered a B-movie classic, even managing to finagle itself a release from the Criterion Collection. But, even that kind of laudable treatment does nothing to make its central monster anywhere close to being scary. The movie features a 28-year-old Steve McQueen playing a teenager out for a night of necking with his girlfriend; the very night when an alien life-force has crash-landed in his town to wreak havoc on some of the dumber inhabitants. The Blob begins its reign of terror after being poked with a stick - like ya do - and proceeding onwards from there, consuming hapless idiots and growing larger every minute. No one believes Mr. McQueen and his girlfriend, try as they might to warn of the encroaching terror of the Blob, which naturally results in our monster growing bigger and meaner. The Blob is one of those monsters that tries to creep up on you as an apparently innocuous substance, and as such sustains itself for the first ten minutes of its appearance. Why would anyone suspect such nice ooze? At first, the film has a sort of B-movie charm to it - check out that opening theme song - until you realize that the central monster is a massive hunk of moving Jello. Very slow-moving Jello. As with many of the monsters on our list, you have to be pretty damn stupid to get eaten by The Blob. When you can avoid a monster simply by walking away, there’s a serious problem. 5) Leprechaun (1993) To be fair, this film series is categorized as a horror-comedy - but even so, Lubdan the evil Leprechaun is pretty lame. Leprechaun currently consists of six films, taking the titular character from Ireland, to North Dakota, to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, outer space and back to LA again – all the while seeking revenge against those that take his stuff. In the beginning – 1993, to be exact, the first film revealed that Lubdan had been captured in Ireland by a man from North Dakota, who subsequently relieved him of his pot of gold. Stowing away in his luggage, Lubdan arrives in the US and kills the man’s wife with a nudge down a flight of stairs. In retaliation, the man traps Lubdan in a crate in his basement, and sets a magical four-leafed clover to guard it. When a new family arrives, ten years later, a young boy unwittingly releases the Leprechaun, who goes on the rampage, giving chase to his victims on a tricycle. This Leprechaun bites and kills people with pogo sticks, bear traps and rammings from his specially made car. Though he meets a terrible demise in each franchise installment, he always returns – seeking a bride in Leprechaun 2, returning from a statue-state in Leprechaun 3, abducting and ‘courting’ an alien princess in space in Leprechaun 4, fighting to retrieve his stolen magic flute in Leprechaun 5, and trying to avenge the theft of his gold to build a community centre in Leprechaun 6. This year saw the re-oot of the franchise with Leprechaun: Origins, featuring WWE Dylan Post (aka Hornswoggle) as Lubdan. Still lame, though. 6) Night Of The Lepus (1972) Gigantic animals running amok are a staple of B-horror movies. From the Atomic Age ants in Them! to the king-lizard of Godzilla, these gigantic creatures take the cruelty of nature (and what human beings do to it) and multiply it by a few hundred. There’s nothing more terrifying than very large animals doing what very large animals do, right? Then there’s Night of the Lepus, in which Janet Leigh and DeForest Kelley face off against ginormous, man-eating bunny rabbits. This occurs because an enterprising farmer wants to limit the rabbit population without resorting to killing them outright, prompting two researchers (Leigh and Stuart Whitman) to develop a serum that will interfere with the rabbits’ breeding cycles. When one of the bunnies escapes, things go horribly wrong as the rabbits grow, breed, and develop a taste for human flesh. Need I explain why this film has difficulty summoning terror? The premise itself is already funny, made more so when we see how the filmmakers attempt to make big bunnies scary. Releasing household pets onto tiny model sets, smearing rabbit teeth with blood, and having Janet Leigh scream in horror at the sight of Fluffy the Were-Rabbit just does not a great horror movie make. Both Monty Python and Wallace & Gromit did killer bunnies better. 7) The Killer Shrews (1959) Speaking of gigantic, man-eating animals: shrews. If there’s anything less dangerous than a bunny, then I think shrews would qualify. That doesn’t stop filmmaker Ray Kellogg, though, who thought that this most terrifying rodent would make a good subject for a B-grade monster movie. The action takes place on a remote island where Thorne Sherman (James Best, of Dukes of Hazzard fame) and his first mate Griswold dock to deliver supplies and wait out a storm. There they discover a small group of scientists living in a compound, who invite them in for cocktails. As with The Night of the Lepus, the scientists are trying to do good for humanity, performing experiments that will help to stave off world hunger by shrinking people, using shrews as test animals. Guess what? THINGS GO HORRIBLY WRONG. The shrews are now gigantic, have eaten their entire food supply on the island, and plan to snack on the scientists and their new friends. Will our heroes be able to stay sober long enough to escape the killer shrews? Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds managed to take the nature gone mad story and make it frightening and effective; not so much The Killer Shrews. Some of this has to do with the low budget of the movie, as the shrews are less gigantic rodents and more poodles with masks stuck on their face. The horror is slightly amped up by some speeches about the formidable and evil shrew, along with a hefty dose of scientific mumbo-jumbo, but even if the filmmakers had managed to conceive of better practical effects, they would still be asking us to fear shrews. Killer shrews, but shrews nonetheless. 8) Jack Frost (1997) Not to be confused with the awful Michael Keaton family film of the same name that was released the following year, Michael Cooney’s Jack Frost is a horror comedy that sees convicted serial killer Jack Frost on his way to execution suddenly merge with the winter snow in the imaginary town of Snowmonton, thanks to a terrible road collision with a truck carrying DNA material suspended in acid. Because in this movie, the human soul has been found to be a specific chemical, and someone had the idea of containing DNA in an acid, in case of nuclear holocaust. Of course, this acid is transported by tanker truck – how else do you expect them to move it? Serial killing Jack Frost thus becomes an aptly named evil snowman who goes on the rampage through the small US town, seeking revenge on the man who finally put him behind bars – the local sheriff. Ultimately, after plenty of comical carnage, the serial killing snowman created by DNA-laden acid is no match for another, more readily available chemical – anti-freeze. He is melted down, poured into containers, and buried deep underground. He is, after all, a snowman. As he begins to bubble to the surface once more, however, we witness the scariest moment of the entire movie - the set-up for a sequel (Jack Frost 2: Revenge Of The Mutant Killer Snowman). 9) The Village (2004) It is no mistake that our list includes two M. Night Shyamalan films. Never has a filmmaker started so high and managed to fall so low in the creation of exciting, frightening thrillers with sub-par monsters at the heart. What’s most maddening about Shyamalan’s works is that they begin with such promise and end with such stupidity. But few films have angered me more than The Village. The film introduces us to an intriguing premise: it takes place in a small 19th Century village whose inhabitants are unable to venture beyond the borders for fear of strange and evil creatures, referred to only as Those We Don’t Speak Of, who live in the surrounding woods. The governing council of elders attempt to keep peace among their children, but trouble is afoot when disease threatens the villagers. Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) asks permission to travel through the woods to find medical supplies at the towns beyond. The creatures are apparently angry at the invasion of their privacy and seem to warn the villagers not to venture into the woods again. The Village has all the earmarks of a truly scary folktale, down to the “don’t go into the woods” theme and creepy setting. But as with too many Shyamalan films, the reveal of the “truth” about the creatures in the woods demonstrates both a lack of narrative consistency and the filmmaker’s love of jerking his audience around. The action actually takes place in the 21st Century, the village was constructed by the “elders” as a refuge from the evils of the modern world, and the creatures were created as a story to frighten the children. This is all conceived in an attempt to allegorize the fear-mongering following 9/11, but the twist is at once stupid and predictable, making the the audience feel as though they have been deliberately duped by a filmmaker who thinks he’s clever. Scary creatures living in the woods? Brilliant. Old people in costumes? Not so much.