Tag: giant animals

Snake Outta Compton is the type of movie about which it seems safe to assume the title came WAY before a single word of the actual script was written. It's a punny, grade-school-level concept that's indicative of the humor within, but thanks to its relentless, all-in goofiness, the film...

It should go without saying that portrayals of black characters in horror movies can stand to improve, but on the bright side, they aren't as bad as they've been in the past. Compare the original King Kong to 2017's Kong: Skull Island, for instance (acknowledging that films like these...

The prototypical "wilds of Africa" horror film (although Skull Island isn't supposed to be in Africa), King Kong features wild, black natives (led by chief Noble Johnson) jumping around and going "ooga booga," kidnapping white women, worshiping Kong and proceeding to get stepped on by the monster from aforementioned...

Along with Mighty Joe Young, Konga, also known as Attack of the Giant Ape from the Land of the Black People Part IV, illustrates the evolution of minority roles from older giant ape films like King Kong and Son of Kong. In the more recent flicks, the black natives...

Mighty Joe Young is basically "King Kong lite", from its tone (decidedly lighter) to the size of its gorilla (decidedly smaller) to the role of its black cast (decidedly less important). Like King Kong, the role of the black people in Mighty Joe Young is peripheral -- natives sharing...

A space ship containing giant wasps, mutated by American tests with cosmic radiation, crash lands in Africa, which can only mean one thing: a whole lot of dead black people! Our "hero" is Quent Brady (Jim Davis), a pompous caricature of idealized '50s American manhood: a barrel-chested, chain-smoking, take-charge...

The marketing campaign for Primeval was intentionally vague as to the identity of its villain, thus likely prompting more than a few groans from moviegoers who discovered too late that "the most prolific serial killer in history" was in fact a giant, digitally rendered crocodile. Crikey! But the marketing slant...

A rushed, inferior (and pretty darn goofy) sequel in all respects, Son of Kong clocks in at barely 70 minutes, leaving little room for the menacing natives of the original. Although the movie posters show a rain of spears threatening our heroes, the Skull Islanders here are allotted all...

Representations of Africa in Horror Movies When Toto sang about Africa back in the day, it sounded so much more inviting than what we see coming out of Hollywood. Horror movies in particular have been guilty of perpetuating the image of “darkest Africa”, filled with ravenous animals and wild-eyed natives...

This otherwise laughable giant spider movie is notable in that it features a black heroine, Chandra (Irene Joseph). Granted, Chandra is just as laughable as the rest of the film, but hey, she's there. The entire cast, Joseph included, acts as stiffly as understudies in a high school play,...