How to make a monster 2001

User Reviews

After sitting through four of these distinctly lacklustre ‘Creature Feature’ movie remakes that were made for television back in 2001, it pained me to watch the last, HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER. Each film has an interesting premise and plenty of potential, but these elements were usually wasted in favour of the mundane. HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER isn’t a perfect film by any means but the key difference is that it’s actually entertaining for once. From the word go, the story of computer nerds accidentally bringing a monster to life is a lot of fun, with plenty of larger-than-life characters and humour to keep things amusing; I went through a video game stage myself as a teenager (and have probably never really grown out of it) so much of the on-screen antics are also appealing.

Ironically, the first half, which is as usual the set-up, is the most interesting, before the second turns into a traditional monster-on-the-rampage flick. The low budget is evident in the use of one single set and the lack of any CGI effects, but the monster itself is a fantastic-looking beast that manages to scare. It assimilates body parts in a similar way to the Jamie Lee Curtis-starrer VIRUS and looks horrendous, which is the point. I loved the sword-and-sorcery edge the film has to it with the use of swords and axes rather than the weaponry which the usual clichéd soldiers-vs-aliens flicks have. The climax plays out as you might imagine, with a moral epilogue of a twist as well, and I sat through it all and found it amiable enough.

The cast is fairly interesting and wide-reaching for what is, in essence, a B-movie. Clea Duvall, who I found intensely irritating in the likes of THE FACULTY, is actually passable here; Steven Culp is the established actor of the piece but makes little impact. The three guys playing the nerds are having a lot of fun and are all fine in their parts, with particular note going to Tyler Mane, he of the massive build; Mane later went on to play the hulking hero Ajax in TROY and Michael Myers in Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN remake. There’s also a topless cameo from scream queen Julie Strain, which is the closest this film gets to modern-day B-movies. It’s no masterpiece, but I think it achieves what it set out to achieve, which was to create a B-movie for our times with similarities to ’50s flicks with added here-and-now updates.

I have several movieland people I follow because what they do is pretty interesting. I have a (much larger) list of people that I follow casually because they show promise, or have done something interesting in the past.

This little TeeVee movie popped up because it has three people on the second list.

George is still a hamfisted director, but he started life with a film about film. While unoriginal, it showed what interests him. Such folding in film interests me too. Here he wrote a story about something similar, the folding of film into «real» life and both into the virtual reality of a game. Been done before (the best is «eXistenZ»), and there isn’t much new here except for the fake moral on which he goofs.

The notion of the building’s floor plan being the same as the game’s dungeon was nice.

The second person on my list is Colleen Camp. Former party girl and cheesecake actress, she is an example of someone who worked her way up from buttwiggling to producing. And she has a history in folding as well. «Clue» is my favorite of hers. Here she is the producer of the movie and appears in character as the producer of the game, and with precisely the same charter. She’s red here. I’m sure that the insert of goofy nudity was her idea, and another fold: breasts with attitude controlled by others.

Clea DuVall strikes me as a particularly intelligent actress. She’s the real murderer in «Identity» and the real victim in «Thirteen Conversations» both pretty interesting experiments in novel folding. She knows what she’s about, and can annotate her own character which tends to be shy. She could have been the secretary in «Secretary.»

The final fold here is that she inherits the characteristics of the four people she «interns» for. Cool word that, and it provides the final twist, which I think may be more clever than it appears at first. Especially given who the new intern is.

Speaking as a game developer in real life, this was about the funniest movie I’ve ever seen! Here you have a Triple A title being developed by three guys (one sound guy, one AI guy and one weapons guy) along with a business manager and an intern. Bwahahahahaha. Oh my.

If you know anything about PC hardware, you’ll get a really good laugh about their «mainframe» and the rest of their «high tech» equipment. Their server room is a huge closet right out of the 70s and it looks like a rack of video cards and Cat 5 cables hanging there in disarray. Oh, and I love the fact that their entire network and game assets can be backed up on a single CD-ROM that takes hours to run a restore with. Priceless.

This movie could have seriously, SERIOUSLY benefited from a technical advisor. I’m sure any self-respecting game developer would have been happy to consult in exchange for lunch with Julie Strain. Odd, too, that Julie has contacts at Ritual Entertainment, who developed FAKK 2. I’m sure they would have consulted just for kicks.

Silliness aside, this wasn’t all bad. It’s a cool concept. Julie Strain is still nice to look at. Clea Duvall does really well, considering what she has to work with. Tyler Mane was also very cool and there’s some pretty good costuming, sets and gore as well.

This is no Citizen Kane, but it’s an enjoyable way to spend an hour and a half if B movies are your thing. If you’re an IT professional, you will absolutely LOVE this movie! But you’ll see it as a comedy. This would be great entertainment at an IT professionals conference.

Four web designers and a trainee are gathered in a computer company for a challenge: if they succeed in developing a scary game within a month, they will earn a bonus of US$ 1,000,000.00. The group does not have sense of teamwork and all of them are moved by greed only, generating an uncontrolled monster and being destroyed in the end. The trainee learns how to become a monster worst than the existing one, wins the prize and becomes a businesswoman. I believe the intention of the writer of this story was to create a metaphor of the real business life. The title `How to Make a Monster’ has a double sense with the creature and the trainee. There are many messages between lines in some dialogs and situations. Unfortunately, although having reasonable special effects in the movie, the screenplay is very silly and is only recommended for killing time. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): `A Criação de um Monstro’ (`The Creation of a Monster’)

When a slight bit of nudity is the highlight of a whole film, you know it’s dire.

The film was incredibly predictable (apart from who’d stolen the back-up disk) and it was pretty obvious Clea Duvall was going to survive.

One thing I wasn’t sure of, whose head she’d seen when she was thrown down the hole (I assume it was her boyfriend or Hardcore?).

that was unbelievable!

i was shocked at how bad this film was

i wish i could burn it, and everything that has anything to do with it.

i laughed once, when that guy beat up the monster thing, and that wasn’t supposed to be funny.

if anyone says this is good, please, don’t believe them, because they may be trying to trick you, or they may have fell asleep half way through.

the kind of film you would even be annoyed if you bought it for 50p.

This is one of the most terrible movies I have ever seen. Even for a TV-movie, it’s bad. After throwing all shreds of realism out of the window (3 programmers creating a game in a matter of weeks?), they have a few short action sequences before bringing the movie to a close. It felt like some scenes has been cut out of the movie, as Laura immediately going back on her decision was unlikely, to say the least. Horrible acting, bad video game sequences (it felt like Doom or Quake by the graphics and gameplay, which was probably the idea), and a fundamentally flawed idea made this go from a bad movie to a terrible movie very quickly.

I wouldn’t recommend it, in fact, I’d recommend just about anything else if you were to choose.

Written & directed by George Huang I personally thought How to Make a Monster was a very poor attempt at horror. The script has no relation to the original How to Make a Monster (1958) apart form it’s title, there are so many things fundamentally wrong with this film it’s untrue. The whole concept sucks & Huang obviously doesn’t know anything about technology as How to Make a Monster has no factual basis or notion of reality at all, motion capture suits coming to life? How can it walk & operate before it kills Sol? How can the mainframe computer control it with no visible wires? Radio control, I don’t think so. Only three people to program one game? These days it takes dozens of talented programmer’s to develop a good game & a hell of a lot longer than a month. I could go on, but I won’t. The title How to make a Monster refers to the films hidden meaning, the moral message if you will. You see How to Make a Monster is all about people turning into monsters because of greed, jealousy & ambition. I bet Huang thought he was really clever coming up with that double meaning title. The characters are uniformly unlikable & clichéd, Sol & Bug in particular are highly irritating to endure. Technically How to Make a Monster isn’t too bad considering it’s TV limitations, director Huang fails to create any sort of tension or atmosphere which is what a good horror film is all about. The kills are all off screen & have no build up whatsoever, when at the end it finally looks as if we might get a decent sequence involving the monster the film keeps cutting to awful in game computer footage, maybe to save money? It breaks up & dilutes any sort of excitement the climatic fight might had, very poor. There are a few computer game/film references, an Evil Dead video game poster keeps turning up in the background, a Tales From the Crypt pinball machine & a scene where the monster rips someones head off complete with dangling spinal cord which obviously is meant to pay homage to Mortal Kombat & it’s infamous gory ‘Fatalities’. As a whole the violence is restrained with the aforementioned head & spinal cord ripping, another severed head & a cut off hand. The monster itself as it adds bits of human bodies to itself looks pretty cool but is barely used, it’s past the 40 minute mark before it does anything. The acting is poor from all involved & watch out for actress Julie Strain who complains about having to go nude, again considering her other work I suppose director Huang thought this would be a funny in joke of some sort. It isn’t. Overall there really isn’t anything by which I can recommend How to Make a Monster & in actual fact I think it should be retitled to How to Make a Monstrosity of a Film. One to avoid.

How to make a monster 2001

It’s finally that time of year! AMC is going wall to wall with scary movies as Fearfest 2017 kicks off today with a Halloween marathon! Check out the full schedule of what’s in store below, and continue reading:

Monday, October 23, 2017

9:00 am Halloween

3:00 pm Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers

5:00 pm Halloween H2O: 20 Years Later

9:30 pm Halloween

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

3:30 am Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers

1:30 pm Halloween H2O: 20 Years Later

6:00 pm Child’s Play

10:00 pm Cult of Chucky

Horror Highlights: The Wraiths Of War Exclusive Excerpt, The Shelter, IFC’s Horror Marathons, 360 Degrees Of Hell, Slimer & Sloth Pins

The Wraiths of War hits shelves from Titan Books tomorrow, October 11th, so we encourage our readers to continue reading today’s Highlights for an exclusive excerpt from Mark Morris’ new novel. Also: a new trailer for The Shelter, IFC’s «Wake Up and Smell the Evil» Marathon, 360 Degrees of Hell Vr experience, and photos / release details for the Slimer and Sloth pins.

Exclusive Excerpt from The Wraiths of War: Synopsis: «Alex Locke is desperately trying to hold onto the disparate threads of the complex web of time he has created. He travels to the First World War, living through the horrors of trench warfare in order to befriend a young soldier crucial to his story; then to the 1930s to uncover the secrets of a mysterious stage magician. He moves back and forth in time, always with the strange and terrifying Dark Man on his heels, gradually getting closer to

Red Sea Media to sell Aip genre slate

Exclusive: Roman Kopelevich’s La-based sales company has come on to handle international sales on a reboot slate of ten American International Pictures genre classics from the 1950s.

Cinedigm will distribute the films in the Us and producers Lou Arkoff and Hal Sadoff have lined up a September start on back-to-back shoots for the entire roster.

Cast and directors are expected to be announced shortly on the slate, which the producers aim to turn into an R-rated comic book-style cinematic universe with interconnecting characters.

Former New Line and Fox executive Jeff Katz wrote each script and the ten individual stories will feed into one overarching narrative. Sadoff is the former head of international and media

Fantasia 2014 Award Winners Include Cybernatural and Closer to God; 2015 Dates Announced

This past Wednesday, August 6th, saw the close of the 18th edition of Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival; and now that the dust has settled, we have the full list of this year’s award winners plus the Fest’s dates for 2015.

From the Press Release:

Returning to its home at Concordia University after the location’s massive 2013 renovations, the acclaimed Fantasia International Film Festival, North America’s longest-running genre film fest, benefited from having three theaters in which to screen its record 160+ films.

Among the numerous highlights that took place during the three-week festival were the crowd-pleasing, revelatory world premieres of Leo Gabriadze’s Cybernatural (review here), Sarah Adina Smith’s The Midnight Swim, and Bennett Jones’ I Am A Knife With Legs. Also of note were massively successful screenings of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, James Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, Lee Su-jin’s Han Gong-ju, Keishi Otomo’s Rurouni Kenshin – Kyoto Inferno,

Matt Smith leaving “Doctor Who” at Christmas, Internet asks for tissue

The BBC announced officially this weekend that Matt Smith, current star of Doctor Who, will be leaving the series in the Christmas episode.

Both Matt and showrunner Steven Moffat have already been quoted heaping glowing praise on each other, and rightly so. Doctor Who fandom has already kicked into overdrive, showering tumblr and other blog pages with a deluge of tribute graphics, please to remain, and other spontaneous eruptions of raw emotion.

Doctor Who fans will now once again pass through the seven stages of grief, a process that some have never experienced, being new to the show, some have already seen once or twice, or for older fans (raises hand), seven, eight, or as many as eleven times.

One of the most amazing things about Doctor Who is this process of regeneration. While other actors have been replaced on television shows, Doctor Who invented a process that made it a part of the narrative.

Secrets of making a modern day monster: John Cox’s latest exhibition

Cox is renowned for being one of the most talented practical effects experts in Australia, having won an Oscar for creating the animatronic sheep, puppies, mice and dog in Babe. He also won an AFI Award for the mechanical crocodile he produced for Rogue.

His interactive show, How to Make a Monster: The Art and Technology of Animatronics, first opened at the Queensland Museum during Christmas in 2004, which quickly became the second most successful exhibition ever staged in Australia (after Tutankhamen).

The following year, it was shown at Sydney’s Australian Museum in 2005, where it also received rave reviews. Since then, it has been the top three exhibition at almost every other venue it has visited, and the number one show at most, including its tour of the U.S. in 2008 and 2010. The latest version of the exhibition set sail for the U.S. again in February, which includes a

Coming Soon: «Ray Harryhausen: Master Of The Majicks» Volume 1 By Mike Hankin

Volume 1: Beginnings and Endings

Finally Completed and off to the Printer!

Vol. 1 is planned to ship in early Summer, 2013.

Written and produced over the past 10 years with Ray Harryhausen’s cooperation and support, the complete 3-volume definitive 295,000-word career/biography features interviews with Ray and his colleagues and is profusely illustrated with several hundred rare photographs, artwork, and illustrations (many of which have never been previously published).

We published Volume 2 («The American Films») first, then Volume 3 («The British Films»), and are now wrapping up the set with Volume 1 (“Beginnings and Endings”).

Chapters in Volume 1 extensively cover:

Ray’s Early 16mm Experiments, The Influence of Willis O’Brien and King Kong, George Pal’s Puppetoons®, Ray’s Film Work During World War II, The Fairy Tale Short Subjects, Ray’s Retirement Years (including tributes,

The Full Cast of Holliston and Tyler Mane Coming to Rock and Shock

The big names keep coming! Rock and Shock, the kick-ass Worcester, Mass., horror/music festival, has just announced that the entire cast of FEARnet’s show «Holliston,» as well as actor Tyler Mane, have been added to the guest list for this year’s festival.

This is a very exciting announcement as the cast of «Holliston» (which includes Adam Green, Joe Lynch, Dee Snider, Dave Brockie, Laura Ortiz and Corri English) and Tyler Mane are now added to a fun group of celebs that already includes unique names like Danny Trejo, Anthony Michael Hall and Peter Criss. Also a bunch of genre favorites will be there like Bill Moseley, Sid Haig, Michael Berryman and Jack Ketchum. More names are being added all the time. And don’t forget Gwar, The Misfits, Shadows Fall, DevilDriver, Mongrel and many other bands will be playing.

For more visit the official Rock and Shock website, «like» Rock

Manchester Monster Convention Happening in the UK April 14th and 15th

On April 14th and 15th here in the States, we’ll be thinking about taxes while our friends across the pond have the chance to attend the Manchester Monster Convention, devoted to all things monsters and horror with displays and talks from artists, writers, designers, and more!

It takes place at the Sachas Hotel in Manchester, running 10am-5pm each day, with a «Monster Movie Triple-Bill» taking place April 14th from 6pm til «late», sponsored by our friends at Grimm Up North. Tickets are just £10 for full weekend access to the convention, including all talks (the Saturday night movies cost extra).

Saturday 14th April

Late Night Howl – The History Of Werewolf Movies

Halloween evokes imagery of all of the great myths and monsters. Witches cackling on broomsticks, Vampires screeching as they turn into bats and the ominous groan of the ever-loved Frankenstein‘s Monster. But is there anything so chilling as the stop-you-in-your-tracks anguished howl of a werewolf? A man reduced to his most base instincts. An unwilling killer. A victim.

Ever since I was a kid I have wanted to be a werewolf. They have always been my favourite monster and any Psychotherapist worth their degree would probably track it all back to the issues of growing up as an outcast, puny Geek. And they would most likely be right.

I don’t care. Issues or no issues, having the sheer raw ferocity to rend limb from limb always seemed quite romantic to me. Clearly I have missed the subtext of the human cursed, a murderer but not by choice. Maybe I do have issues.

Movies About Movies + Win The Stunt Man on Blu-Ray!

Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man comes to Blu-Ray. It’s glorious and stacked and one of the great movies about movies. You could win one courtesy our friends at Severin Films!

I got my hands and eyeballs on The Stunt Man Blu-Ray earlier this week and, I have to say, it’s really fantastic. Peter O’Toole is a total madman, Steve Railsback crushes every scene he’s in and Barbara Hershey’s just gorgeous. Richard Rush’s head-spinning, often hilarious, quite subversive littler thriller about stunts and moviemaking and love and death and all the other things that make life important is a classic. We’re really hoping to get Richard Rush to join us on the site and, hopefully, that will happen soon.

Until then, if you haven’t seen this or if you’re still stuck with the 2001 DVD release, you need this Blu-Ray. It’s positively stacked.

Creating a Monster

Horror Business director launches Cottonmouth.TV

Filmmaker Christopher (Horror Business) Garetano just let Fangoria know that his new website, www.cottonmouth.tv is online an fully operational. Featuring the original short film Cottonmouth (which we last told you about here), along with over twenty other horror-themed shorts and featurettes, Garetano and crew are also seizing the opportunity to raise money for some good causes.

Based on the comic book Gore Shriek, by former Fangoria/Gorezone contributor Steve Bissette, Cottonmouth stars John David Brodie, Fangoria Radio’s Debbie Rochon, Monique (Satan Hates You) Dupree, Megan (Horrors Of War) Pillar, with Michaelle Brachfield, and featuring the voice of Malea.