Something is causing the rattlesnakes in Southern California to mutate to enormous sizes, and it’s up to Dr. Kaye (Mercedes Peterson) to stop their growth before they destroy Los Angeles. And yes, Dustin Ferguson already made Rattlers 2, but sure, he’ll make it again.

Most of the cast of the Ferguson movies show up. Dawna Lee Heising and Shawn C. Phillips are killed during a 4th of July party, and Brinke Stevens gets into a bathtub full of snakes, which soon kill her. 46 minutes or so of snake mayhem follows, including a big snake, and then ends with nature footage. And no real ending. You expect that by this point. But did you expect nearly ten minutes of nature footage?

Take a look at the box art. You’re about to make fun of it. Well, you’re not the person that this movie is for. Judge accordingly.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Birth of Japan was produced by Toho as their celebratory thousandth film. At the time, it was the most expensive Japanese film ever made. Based on the legends of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, and the origins of Shinto, it was released in America as The Three Treasures and in the rest of the world as Age of the Gods. That said, those versions are 70 minutes shorter.

Directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and written by Toshio Yasumi and Ryuzo Kikushima, with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya, this stars Toshiro Mifune as Prince Yamato Takeru and Susanoo. That second name is essential, as most of this film is about the battle between Susanoo and the legendary dragon Orochi. In fact, this film is a series of legends told by an old woman to her village, such as the story of how marriage was invented.

I wonder what American audiences thought of this, a movie undubbed with subtitles, a film in which the hero dies only to be transformed into a bird that causes a volcano to kill all of his enemies, and where women drown themselves to please the gods.

While I watched this as a kaiju movie — and yes, it has giant monsters — this is an epic movie. From Japan’s creation to the symbols of the emperor, this is a very symbolic story. 

Toho would later remake this as Orochi the Eight-Headed Dragon.

Confusion at the start of this.

This was first released in 1936 as The Great Manta and shown in Great Britain as The Sea Fiend. Also, a Spanish-language version, El diablo del mar, directed by Juan Duval using some of the same actors and footage, was released in the United States.

Ten years later, it was re-released with a little something for daddy: stock footage inserts of topless native girls. But what about the Hays Code, you may ask? Well, they tolerated partial nudity in native scenes, so this was all good for them.

This is filled with stock footage of nature, fishing and even more nature. Somewhere in here, a giant manta ray is attacking villagers. They tell us it’s big, but we never see it at the same time as humans, so who are we to say?

Barry Norton, the hero of the Spanish version of Dracula, is the lead. And the Spanish-language version has Movita in the cast. She was married to boxer Jack Doyle and to Marlon Brando, who left her for another actress in Mutiny on the Bounty with both of them, Tarita Teriipaia.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

Jim Wynorski gets the assignment.

In the sequel to Attack of the 50 Foot CamGirl, Beverly Wood (Ivy Smith) is working to repay all the damage she did in the first movie. She even has a boyfriend, Mike (Brian Gross), the foreman in the quarry where she works. However, a chance to repay all of her debts comes when Anna Conda (Masuimi Max) is super-sized to fight her on a pay-per-view, with $50 million to the winner. She’s been given her powers by Brian (Steve Altman), the father of the ex-boyfriend whom Beverly killed back in that first movie.

Yes, continuity. Lisa London and Frank Cullen also return as their characters from the first movie.

But wait! Aliens get involved, as Spa-Zor (Kiersten Hall) from the planet Buxomus, a place where they’ve obviously all seen Star Trek, because they repeat dialogue from the episode “The Corbomite Maneuver.”

I do love how IMDB nerds—well, like me—leave goofs on movies. This one seems ridiculous. “While Anna Conda and Spa-Zor have their first battle, the number of times their tops are on and off keeps changing.” Come on. Do we expect this?

This is way better than you’d ever think it could be: a goofball, less than an hour giant woman as kaiju romp that recalls the softcore of the past. Is there still a market for that? Well, I watched it!

You can watch this on Tubi.

A remake of Yongary, Monster from the Deep, when you look at the poster art for this, you can see that they were trying to get ahead of the Godzilla remake. The 1999 version has never been released in the U.S.; the U.S. cut is taken from the 2001 remix, Yonggary: 2001 Upgrade Edition. Why it wasn’t released under that name—the original played on American TV—is a mystery.

Dr. Campbell (Richard B. Livingston) and Dr. Hughes (Harrison Young) find an alien corpse, a dinosaur skeleton and a diamond inside a cave. A few years after that, a UFO appears and starts destroying satellites. This brings in a soldier named Parker (Briant Wells), General Murdock (Dan Cashman) and a journalist, Bud Black (Brad Sergi), who wants to find out exactly what happened in that cave.

Everyone thought Hughes was dead, but he’s been detained by the government. He appears at a new dig, surprising Campbell and his assistant, Holly (Donna Phillipson). She doesn’t believe his stories of aliens and a reanimated dinosaur until Yongary shows up and kills almost everyone. The rest of the film finds the aliens sending their kaiju all over the world to smash cities and kill humans, which means the U.S government decides to drop nukes on them. Well, they would, but the aliens lose control of Yongary and send another kaiju, Cycor, to fight it. 

If they had two kaijum, why didn’t they just send both?

This was the most expensive Korean movie ever made, but it had plenty of help. Financial support came from Hyundai Capital Corp. and Korean Technology Finance Corp., and technical support from the Korean government, which gave filmmakers access to military bases, hardware, and locations such as the Historic War Museum in Seoul. Initially, they were going to use rubber suits, but they replaced all of that with CGI, then redid that for the 2001 version.

Director Shim Hyung-rae would go on to make an even more expensive kaiju movie, D-War, the first Korean movie released in America in thirty years. There was a plan to have Bud Black create a Mecha Yongary for a sequel, which was never made. As you can see when you watch this, it has nearly all Western actors in it, in the hopes of being a worldwide success. It only offered video and cable in the U.S. and was not well-received.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Jim Wynorski, working with writer Kent Roudebush, is still out there, making the kind of movies I’d stay up to 1 AM on a Friday for on Cinemax. Attack of the 50 Foot CamGirl places Only Fans star Beverly Wood (Ivy Smith) being rude to her boyfriend and manager, Bradley (Eli Cirino) and assistant Fuschia (Christine Nguyen) when she isn’t getting naked on camera. But ah, when she meets Dr. Rhodes (Lisa London) — and of course, has the kind of male gaze softcore Sapphic romp you’d expect with her, but let’s just enjoy things and not obsess, right? — she starts to grow into a giantess.

Bradley and Fuschia have been plotting to get rid of Beverly, but now, this messes with their plans. And if Fuschia ends up becoming a giant, giving us a girl-on-girl catfight, we won’t complain. And we don’t.

This is pretty much a winner: the ladies are attractive (and yet fun and own their hotness), Becky LeBeau even shows up and sings two songs, the humor is corny, and the sets are actually pretty good. Sure, it’s an hour-long streaming Full Moon movie, but it made me wistful for the past, a day when this movie would have definitely played on Cinemax and Showtime, when it would be on the shelves at my mom and pop video store, and I would have been too young to rent it.

You can watch it on Tubi.

According to Letterboxd, I have seen just 7% of all of Dustin Ferguson’s movies. Keep in mind that’s 15 movies out of his 206 films, which should be 211 by the time you finish reading this. 

Two scientists are trying to kill the Angry Asian Murder Hornets, but then some Big Freakin’ Snakes show up, as well as Ebola Rex and Cocaine Cougar. 

Yes, it’s Dustin Ferguson’s Destroy All Monsters. 

Lisa London, Rocky from Savage Beach, is in this briefly, and yes, I can’t lie. That’s why I watched it.

There are just two Rotten Tomatoes reviews. One is five stars: “Truly a masterpiece, A modern twist on the horror elements of Jurassic Park that makes you shed a tear,” and the other, one star: “This is one of the most stupid movies I’ve ever watched.”

In this movie, you will hear three people get killed off-camera by giant snakes. Several will be eaten or stabbed by murder hornets. Cocaine Cougar will eat many others, both on and off-screen, as well as killing the murder hornets, before he’s devoured by Ebola Rex, who gets killed by a helicopter with missiles, because America.

In case you wondered: Hornet < Snake < Cougar < Ebola Rex < the military industrial complex.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by J.R. Bookwalter and written by Todd Brown ad Jon Killough, this uses stock footage from  1977’s Planet of the Dinosaurs — so does Wizards of the Demon Sword, The Phantom Empire, Time Tracers, Teenage Cavegirl, Beach Babes 2: Cave Girl Island and Shandra: The Jungle Girl — this was shot on Super-VHS and none of the three day new footage matches with the old stuff. But who cares? We’re here for dinosaurs.

This was released by Tempe as part of their Bad Movie Police series, as Ariauna Albright and Lilith Stabs were dressed like cops and took the film to task.

Other films in the so-called SOV Six-Pack include Kingdom of the Vampire, Humanoids from Atlantis, Chickboxer, Maximum Impact and Zombie Cop. 

Can Mogadore, Ohio — right outside Akron — be a prehistoric planet? Depends on your imagination. And cheap footage. But mostly your imagination.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Kenneth Hartford (with uncredited co-direction from producer and writer Herbert L. Strock, who also directed The Crawling Hand, Gog, and so many more), this was filmed as Monster before also being known as Monstroid: It Came from the Lake and The Toxic Horror. 

Years ago, a woman in Colombia watched as a monster ate her husband. Now, Durado Cement has sent troubleshooter Bill Travis (James Mitchum, who we can debate is better or worse than his brother Chris) to their plant because anti-corporate people like Victor Sanchez (Aldo Sambrell) have been using fear of the monster to get workers to quit. After all, the lake and the fish have been poisoned. 

How do you solve a problem like Maria? I ask that because the villagers think she’s a witch. And oh yeah, there’s also a pesky reporter, Patty (Connie Moore), snooping around. Somewhere in all this drama, plant boss Pete Anderson (Anthony Eisley, I should have known) ignores his kids and their warning that there’s a monster in the water, which leads to his secretary Laura (Coral Kassel) getting eaten, just in time for him to make time with another woman, Juanita (Maria Rubio). I mean, Laura was even skinny dipping, at which point he just ghosted her before she got snuck on.

Glen and Andrea, Pete’s children, get photos of the monster, just as the villagers decide to burn Maria. Yes, she somehow survives being burned at the stake, just in time for Travis to fill a goat’s dead body with explosives and blow up this plesiosaur real good. And then the Andersons are having a picnic when their dog finds an egg that hatches, unleashing a new monster. 

Production began in 1971, but personnel, logistical, and financial problems — Keenan Wynn’s name was even on some press pieces, even though he had long ago dropped out — led to its shutdown. It was finally completed and released in 1979. And man, I nearly forgot that John Carradine shows up as a priest! There are so many people, so many unnecessary plot points and yet, I have a soft spot for this.

This is also based on a true story. Sure.

Check out what Bill Van Ryn had to say about this movie.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

The first film produced by Roger Corman, directed by Wyott Ordung and written by Bill Danch, making it a notable entry in cult cinema history. It was like remade as Sharktopus. Corman is all about being green.

Julie Blair (Anne Kimbell), an American artist on vacation in Mexico, meets marine biologist Steve Dunning (Stuart Wade), who dismisses the sea monster until she provides a tissue sample from an oceanic amoeba, prompting him to attack it in his submarine. 

In fact, that sub was a real one and used for free. That’s why the credit Submarine built by Aerojet General shows up.

There’s a moment in this where the scientists talk about pterodactylus, and Steve says he found an actual egg at one point. This is glossed over, and you may react as I did: Why are we here looking for an amoeba when there are actual dinosaurs alive and in the world?

You can watch this on Tubi.