Announcing Monster Week 2013

Monster Week is returning to Nuketown. In honor of Guillermo del Toro’s giant robots-vs-giant monsters flick Pacific Rim’s release on July 12, we’re going to be talking monsters — and nothing but monsters — for a solid week. The event will run from Sunday, July 28 through Saturday, August 3, 2013.

As with our last Monster Week, we’ll be featuring reviews of classic creature features augmented by commentary, news, and RPG segments … and we’ll be looking for folks to join us.

Last time around we looked at Jaws, Slither, Predator, Deep Rising, Cloverfield, and Lake Placid We also documented the rules of the creature feature which is essential should you find yourself in one. Meanwhile, our friends over at The Secret Lair dedicated a podcast episode to Monster Week and ran down the sub-sub-genre of shark monster movies.

So what are we going to talk about this time? I have a few ideas, but I’m looking for feedback from the Nuketown readership. I’d also love to have some guest writers join us for the event and review your favorite creature features.

Here’s my shortlist:

  • Alien: The ultimate space monster movie.
  • The Blob (1958): I think we should have at least one classic monster movie on this list. The Blob fits the bill.
  • Deep Blue Sea: A worthy follow-up to Jaws, in that they’re both about sharks eating people. Only in this case, they’re genetically engineered super sharks!
  • Eight-Legged Freaks: You know the equation: chemical waste + arachnids = giant, man-eating monsters!
  • The Thing: Surprisingly there’s no review of John Carpenter’s masterpiece on Nuketown; I think I wrote a DVD review back in the 1990s, but that was long, long ago. It’s the pinnacle of physical effects and shows you just how far you can go without CGI. Plus it’s creepy as all hell.
  • Prometheus: Some would say it doesn’t deserve a spot on the same list as Alien, but this film’s problem is that it’s nothing but creatures. One monster after another, only vaguely connected, with uncommunicative, unsympathetic characters and massive plot holes.
  • The Relic: A horrible, hungry monster escapes from an ancient relic to terrorize a museum. If that doesn’t scream “Call of Cthulhu” scenario, I don’t know what does.
  • Tremors: Giant sandworms attack a small town. And it has Kevin Bacon.
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