Damian Lee is a Canadian filmmaker responsible for Ski School and Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe, as well as writing Watchers. H.G. Welles may not have made a sequel to his book, but that didn’t stop Lee or writers Richard Bennett and Mike Werb.

Bobby could never grow, so he was given an experimental serum from Dr. Kate Travis (Jackie Burroughs) that instantly made him a full grown and super violent adult. Travis’ student Dr. Neil Hamilton (Paul Coufos)  is trying to find a cure, all while animal activists that include his girlfriend Alex Reed (Lisa Schrage, Mary Lou Maloney herself!) and Mark Hales (Réal Andrews) are protesting Prof. Edmund Delhurst (Colin Fox), who is trying to cure baldness with animal experiments.

Of course the rats get huge just in time for protestors to unleash them on the world. Dean White (David B. Nichols) has his Amity Island moment and refuses to shut down the college, all while big rats are just straight up gnawing — yes, this was also called Gnaw — humans.  “But the swim competition,” you hear him yell and yes, you knew it, the rats descend on the swimmers and have a smorgasbord.

The end of this movie is amazing, as they use a rat in heat to lure all the male rats into the open and kill them in the least original way ever: machine guns. But what of Bobby? He’s even bigger and angrier. He kills Dr. Travis and escapes, setting up…well, nothing. There’s no Food of the Gods III.

Eww, look — that rat has a woman in its mouth,

Man, what a poster.

Directed and written by Bert I. Gordon, The Food of the Gods was ever so loosely based on H. G. Wells’ novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth.

The food of the gods does indeed appear to Mr. and Mrs. Skinner (John McLiam and Ida Lupino), who feed it to their chickens. Bok bok, those things grow bigger than a person, but so do the rats, wasps and even worms that eat it, so soon enough their island near British Columbia is filled with dangerous human-sized creatures.,

Meanwhile, professional football player Morgan (Marjoe Gortner) — wait a second here, what position does Marjoe Gortner, no offense, play in American football? Punter? — is hunting with his friends when one of them is killed by a giant wasp. He’s so into this that he comes back to see even more, meeting up with a dog food CEO named Jack Bensington (Ralph Meeker) who wants to sell these gigantic animals for food, his assistant Lorna (Pamela Franklin) and the pregnant Rita (Belinda Balaski) and her husband Thomas (Tom Stovall).

Giant rats killed almost everyone, but then Marjoe drowns them all because they’ve become too big to swim, which is the most BS science ever, but sure, why not Bert I. Gordon. Of course, man screws up again and lets cows use the formula and they get huge and so do the kids, eventually but not in this, that drink their milk. Doesn’t pasteurization take care of giant drugs?

This did so well for American-International Pictures that they decided to make H.G. Welles movies, such as Empire of the Ants and The Island of Dr. Moreau. They were lucky Welles was dead, because if he were alive, they’d also have to pay for using a lot of his book Mysterious Island in this, not just the source book of the same title.

Thank you Keith Li for reminding me that I still can get physically sick while watching a movie. I thought that I had become numb to such a thing and then i watched your 1982 blast of insanity, Centipede Horror.

Centipedes may not get much love — well, they did get a video game back in 1980 — but they’re pretty horrifying. All centipedes are venomous, most are carnivorous and they can inflict painful bites that inject poison through their pincers. And they don’t just have a hundred legs. Nope, they can have anywhere from 30 to 382 legs.

A rich young woman named Kay goes to Thailand, despite her grandfather warning her to never visit there. Of course, as you can guess from the title of this movie, she’s assaulted by hundreds of centipedes, which causes her wounds to fester and bubble as only a category III would can become. She dies, which brings her brother Wai Lun to Thailand to watch her die and then get on the case of who did this to her.

If only she had worn the ugly necklace that was to protect her from centipedes! Yet as we all know, fashion can be dangerous.

Wai Lun brings his friend Yeuk-Chee along to figure out how they can make up for the crimes of his grandfather and stop a wizard’s curse. A wizard who curses and uses ghost children in his nefarious plans! This movie has it all and by all, I mean thousands of centipedes, including Margaret Li — who plays Yeuk-Chee — being an absolute trooper by sitting there with a mouthful of live centipedes crawling around her mouth waiting for Keith Li to say action so she can throw them up all over the place.

So yes, the pace is slow, it even drags until we get to the sorcerer battle at the end. But a reanimated chicken skeleton shows up and, yes, we have the heroine blowing centipede chunks and how can you ask the filmmakers to give us more than that?

Directed by Krsto Papic, who wrote the script with Ivo Bresan and Alexander Grin (who wrote Morgiana), The Rat Savior is the tale of writer Ivan Gajski (Ivica Vidovic). He’s been evicted from his apartment for failing to pay the rent, as he has no money as no publisher will buy his novel about a plague. He goes to sell his books in the streets and is eventually sent to a collapsed bank to spend the night. Inside, he discovers a rat-like opulence who feasts on cheese and plot to kill the professor father of his new love interest, Sonja (Mirjana Maurec).

The professor is the only other human who knows of these rats and believes that a rat savior exists, a rat who can look human and the one who will lead them to power over the humans. Ivan tries to do the right thing and goes to the mayor and learns that he’s done exactly the worst possible thing, because he’s the titular savior and even worse, a rat is now passing as Sonja and Ivan kills it. Or her, we’re really not sure.

There is a concoction that when splashed on the rat humans reveals them like sunglasses being worn by Roddy Piper. And that seems to put the rat people down for some time, but then again, an even worse dictator is in the wings, one that will lead Germany all over Europe soon enough and have way worse plans for humanity than these rat folk and their divine leader.

And if you get bitten by one of these rats, like vampires, you become one of them. But then again, they seem like the only ones who are happy and actually have something to eat.

Not my favorite human rat movie — Bruno Mattei’s Rats: The Night of Terror forever — but this is pretty wild.

The butler did do it.

Ella Venable (Catherine Lacey) has been murdered by Andrew the butler (Andrew Crawford) and her body buried on her estate, a plot concocted by him, Ella’s husband Walter (André Morell) and Clara the maid (Freda Jackson).

They didn’t count on Tabitha, Ella’s cat.

The only witness to the crime, she instinctively knows that Walter had her master killed. So this gang decides that they have to kill the cat and find the old will, the one that said that her husband would get none of her money.

Even after Tabitha gives Walter a heart attack, he brings in his family to find and kill the cat. Let me tell you, as the owner of a tabby, you have no idea what a cat can do once it sets its mind to doing it.

Directed by John Gilling (The Plague of the Zombies) and written by George Baxt (Burn, Witch, Burn), this is a Hammer movie that doesn’t have classic monsters in it. Well, it’s credited to BHP Productions, but it’s a Hammer, right? Cue people leaving comments telling me how wrong I am. But anyways, Barbara Shelley is quite cute in this and she and the cat are the only good people in a plot full of people willing to kill one another.

This movie is why I keep on writing.

Take King of Snake, also known as Da She Wang, a movie directed by Yu-Lung Hsu and starring Danny Lee — Infra-Man! — as Dr. Ling, an inventor who makes R19, a drug that can transform organic matter into gigantic things. Maybe that would be a good idea for fruit or vegetables.

But then a snake gets into it.

Yet in this version, remixed and remade by Godfrey Ho, there’s also a hardass government agent named Ted Fast (Pierre Kirby) who is tracking down some terrorists while the world explodes all around him as a gigantic snake named Moser and his human friend Tingting just try and be a snake and his little girl, except he gets too big and starts killing hundreds if not thousands of people.

As Ted Fast comes after his enemy Bob Solomon (Edowan Bersma), who wants to use the formula to grow giant food and take over the world’s need for groceries, he has only the losest of ties to the reality of the other movie, as always united through one conversation over the telephone.

There’s a moment at the end of this, as Moser lies dying — it breaks my heart just as much here as it does in King of Snake — Tingting loses her mind and starts shrieking at the military about killing her snake. Oh Tingting. Your snake just killed an entire city and some people will never recover from this and most of it is your fault.

As with all movies directed by Godfrey Ho, the soundtrack to this is so much of the reason to watch. There’s “Isadora,” “Catedral de Sal” and “The Night” by Azul y Negro; “Never Land” by Sisters of Mercy; “Sister Surprise” by Gary Numan; “Dance II” by the Duretti Column; “Phaedra,” “Kiew Mission,” “Logos (Part 1)” and “Rubycon (Part 1)” by Tangerine Dream; “Let It Rock” by Bon Jovi; “Better and Better” by A Flock of Seagulls; Richard Band’s Re-Animator soundtrack; “Heartbeat” by Chris and Cosey; “Rendez Vous V” by Jean Michel Jarre; “Agonized by Love” and “Lorretine” by Clan of Xymox; “Witches’ Multiplication Table” by Holger Czukay; “Part 1 (Alien)” by Don Preston and Michael Mantler; The Human Vapor soundtrack by Kunio Miyauchi; a song from Miyauchi Kunio’s Ultra Q soundtrack and part of the Starman score by Jack Nitzsche.

There are reviews of this that talk about how bad it is, how cheap it is and how they wasted time watching it. Anyone who wrote one of those is someone you never want to be friends with. They have a lack of vision, an inability to love life and just are robots sleepwalking through life.

Open your heart and let Moser inside.

You can watch this on YouTube.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

Island Claws was made in the post-Jaws era – a time when killer animal movies were all the rage – but features a storyline, characters, and giant creature right out of ‘50s sci-fi films like Tarantula or The Deadly Mantis. 

The movie opens with lots of lingering shots of hundreds of crabs wading in the ocean against a backdrop of sunshine and easy listening jazz. Right away, I was hooked. 

The island’s residents are absolutely the kind of people I’d like to drink with. We have the Irish Moody (Robert Lansing doing a decent accent), the young, handsome Pete (Steve Hanks), and a bunch of fishermen who basically hang out at Moody’s bar run by the lovely Rosie (Nita Talbot), 

Jan Raines (Jo McDonnel) is a young, plucky photojournalist, sent to the National Marine Biology Institute conducting experiments on crabs using growth hormones to help solve world hunger.  There she meets Pete and the two begin dating. 

Because Jan’s father Frank (Dick Callinan) is the owner of the adjacent nuclear power station that has recently experienced a significant spill, Moody is skeptical of Jan. Moody had a long-time friendship with Jan’s father as well, but Moody is not telling Pete that Frank was the one who killed Jan’s parents by drinking and driving. 

While all this is happening, people are now being attacked and killed by (normal-sized) crabs everywhere and Pete discovers a giant shell, foreshadowing what’s to come. One guy dies in a fire in his makeshift school bus home. Many residents attribute this to a boatload of Haitian immigrants who entered the country illegally. They take up pitchforks, but Moody calms them down. Then, the big crab shows up and all hell breaks loose. 

Robert Lansing really brings it home in this movie. Especially in the scene where he finds his beloved old dog at death’s door after having been attacked (offscreen) by the crabs. 

I love that an older actor like Lansing gets to ride the monster’s giant claw in this film like a horse. John Agar should have done that in Tarantula, but I don’t think that movie had the budget that this one did. 

Made on the old Salty the Seal sets in Key Biscayne, the giant crab, built by Glen Robinson, cost a million bucks to create. It really does look good for its time, although it didn’t function as expected, necessitating a lot of dark medium shots and close-ups. The eye movements are especially cool. 

First-time Director Hernan Cardenas, who never made another movie, does a pretty good job overall. It’s a bit of a slow burn, with a pace like a Made-for-TV-Movie of the same era but it doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. The Scorpion Releasing Blu-ray print is beautiful, but if you can’t track that down, you can watch an old grainy VHS rip on YouTube. 

And here’s that jazzy soundtrack I referred to in the opening paragraph for your listening pleasure: