Monster #7—Rat Bat Spider

One of my favorite sub-genres (I have a lot of favorite sub-genres) of movie is the "Astronauts journey to an alien planet and explore it and encounter monsters on said planet." There haven't been many movies made with this plot lately. "Avatar" is probably the one that comes the closest most recently, but "Pitch Black" is more what I'm talking about. The height of this genre's popularity, though, was back in the '50s, it seems, with movies like "First Spaceship To Venus" and "Journey to the Seventh Planet" and, of course, my absolute favorite of all in the genre, "Angry Red Planet."

The thing I love about this movie is that, despite its low budget, it just doesn't care. It's not content with having monsters that are just people in alien suits. No siree. The monsters of "Angry Red Planet" are big, bigger, and enormous. The fact that all the Mars scenes (yes, that's the Angry Red Planet the astronauts visit) are filmed in "Cinemagic," which makes all those scenes appear all solarized and red makes the whole thing so surreal that the low budget sets actually kind of end up working in a bizarre sort of way. Of course, I'm certainly looking at it with a giant dose of nostalgia.

ANYway.

The reason I'm talking about it for Monster Day is the Rat Bat Spider.

You've seen what the thing looks like in the pictures here already, but make sure you watch the movie below. The thing is HUGE! And not only that, it's a completely freaky weird monster unlike anything I've really ever seen in movies before or since. Heck... it's got enormous pincers, so the fact that the Internet calls it a Rat Bat Spider isn't even right... it should be a Rat Bat Spider Crab. Except that it's the size of a house.

Man... this is one movie that someone needs to remake JUST for ME.

Recommended Viewing

• Angry Red Planet, dir. Ib Melchior