The God Monster of Indian Flats
Killer Sheep!
The New Zealanders came up with a Killer Sheep movie, too, but its monsters don’t look as wonderfully ludicrous
Of course, it’s hard to beat the Killer Condom
Oh yes, I did. I’ve always wanted to see this scene after first hearing “Roxy And Elsewhere”, and about 10 or 15 years ago, I hunted down the movie at a file sharing site and downloaded it. I watched the whole thing, and I spotted the scene Zappa referred to, but I also wasn’t able to see the 2x4. All the other parts were correct, the “inverted ice cream cone with teeth around the bottom”, “…they pull out a little revolver to shoot the monster with” and “the weaker sex falling down and twisting their ankle”. Greatest surprise for me was a young Lee Van Cleef in the main role.
“Q” from the movie of the same name. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it but I seem to remember all they ever show of the monster is a giant claw.
Not really true. It’s been a while since I saw it, but you actually get to see the full flying creature, depicted through painstaking stop-motion animation. There’s alsio a full-sized head prop, besides the claw.
Here’s the whole movie. Look at 44:38, for instance
I agree with you that the film itself is weak. But my God, when I was a kid the trailer for that movie absolutely terrified me. Every time I saw a movie around that time, I used to pray that Prophecy would not be one of the trailers that they showed!
This one got to me when I was a kid.
Thank-you again, CalMeacham, for yet another cavalcade of unacceptably bogus awesomeness!
Monster A Go Go. Because there was no monster. And there’s nothing lamer than watching a crappy movie for no monster at all.
Ohhhh…I couldn’t wait until it came out on video and loved it! My girlfriend, who never watches horror movies with me, took a glance and couldn’t understand why I was laughing!
Oh, man. They were trolling us before trolling was cool. I mean, seriously, come on!
I know what new T-shirt I want for my birthday.
That must be a classic, it stars Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane as the hero!
Classic for sure. C’mon, Steve McQueen fighting a terrifying blob from outer space. What more could one ask for at your local drive in!
Did you see Arnold Voosloo in The Mummy?
The creature effects from It Conquered The World were Oscar worthy compared to the ones used in the made-for TV remake, Zontar, The Thing From Venus.
Apparently it was intended that they would use stop-motion animation but their budget fell through, so a puppet had to be substituted. Leading one reviewer to compare the monster to Beaky the Buzzard.
The title alone is a wee bit hyperbolic. The IICC didn’t exactly “conquer the world”; it managed to “conquer” a cave only as long as it stayed there. The minute it came out it was easily killed with an oversize cigarette lighter.
While not visual, there’s a very interesting book I read recently called “Paperbacks from Hell” which is primarily about pulp horror novels from the 50’s to 90’s and talking about the trends of pulp horror decade by decade. While the book is way too light on specifics and details for my liking (mainly focusing on just showing you the covers of pulp horror books with brief synopsis) there’s a few horror monster concepts the book mentions that seem more hilariously gratuitous than abject horror. One novel I believe was called “Toro” is about killer bulls run amok, after a large group of bulls eat some hallucingenic mushrooms in a field and break out and wreck havoc on the Spanish countryside predictably ending in a slaughter at a “Running of the Bulls” event. Of course since this is a pulp horror novel, the bulls also proceed to rape women along the way. Yes, a fairly typical “Normal animal turned killer” horror novel decided that just getting gored to death by a bulls horns isn’t bad enough, but normal bulls raping human women is what REALLY makes the concept terrifying. Takes the sting right out of it when you know the book is just being edgy for the sake of edginess.
Another really bizarre horror novel monster was a book I forgot the title of but basically the idea was a Gay Native American Shaman really hates the white man for taking his land, so his vengeance is to reanimate the skeletons of all his Native American brethren to get revenge on the white man (yes, they are literally just skeletons running around reanimated absolutely no skin or tissue among them) but what makes this over the top is that the skeletons proceed to also rape men and women alike. How exactly does a bare skeleton rape someone? I don’t know either.
Being boned by a skeleton would wreak havoc on me too! 
Paperbacks from Hell is a hilarious book, and it did introduce me to the single best book I read in 2020: Blackwater by Michael McDowell. I’d never heard of McDowell before.
A skeleton can still get a boner.
You’re not quite accurate with this. It actually stopped all electricity on Earth (like Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still), except at Lee Van Cleef’s house. And it was a blowtorch, not a cigarette lighter.
The “Cucumber Monster” (That’s what it was widely called at the time) was the creation of the legendary Paul Blaidell, who created a host of monsters, mostly for poverty-row American International Pictures. They were all done on the cheap, but impressive given the small amount of money he had to work with. And they weren’t all awful. His creatures for Invasion of the SaucerMen were the epitome of little green men awfulness.
His She Creature was pretty impressive, and filled with visual jokes (she has massive monster boobs, and a flip Mary-Tyler-Moore hairstyle, albeit in really thin and sparse tendrils)
And his masterpiece has to be the Martian creature from the Ur-Alien movie, It! The Terror from Beyond Space
A measure of his genius has to be that when Larry Buchanan remade several of these AI films for TV, also on a miserable budget, the results were incomparably awful – Zontar the Thing from Venus (remaking It Conquered the World)), Attack of the the Eye Creatures (remaking Invasion of the Saucermen), and Creature of Destruction, with its ping pong ball eyes (remaking The She Creature).