This trio of flicks from my streaming watchlists definitely delivers cool creatures, but only one of the three films had a story that drew me in.
MONSTER ISLAND (2025)
Two men trapped on a deserted island with a reptilian monster? It would be awesome if it were Brokeback Mountain meets Creature from the Black Lagoon, but these two dudes are enemies and never rise to the level of sexual tension. So, it’s more like Creature from the Blue Balls Lagoon.
During World War II, a Japanese slave ship is torpedoed. An American soldier and a Japanese soldier escape the explosion and wash up on the shore, with one catch…they’re handcuffed together. Sexy.
This movie doesn’t hesitate. The two enemies get into a fight in the surf (again, sexy), but their fight is interrupted by a creature that emerges from the water!
The game becomes survival, but the men don’t stay attached at the wrists, which would have been, you know, sexy. It also would have made their struggle to survive much more challenging. Hell, they even become separated for a stretch of the movie. Plus, neither of them ever gets shirtless. Blah.
The monster is cool and classic, the attacks are vicious, and there are some bloody moments, plus the final battle is intense, making for a fun popcorn flick.
WHERE THE SCARY THINGS ARE (2022)
Little Shop of Horrors meets Deadgirl in this mean-spirited flick. Based on the trailer, I was expecting something along the lines of Stranger Things, with a group of curious young teens getting themselves into a monstrous predicament. Instead, I got a film about monstrous kids who will do anything to go viral. Ugh.
Our group of unlikable friends regularly sneaks into a haunted attraction that’s closed until the scary season. With hormones raging, they are full of angst and on the verge of their sexual awakenings…which is unfortunate for a swamp-like creature they thought was only an urban legend but turns out to be real.
Conveniently, the kids were given a “create your own urban legend” assignment in school, so they fricking imprison the creature in the haunted attraction and exploit it—filming themselves regularly torturing it.
Just when they think they’re becoming internet famous thanks to their video content, they discover viewers are dismissing their videos as fakes. Sooooo…they begin luring people they hate to the haunted attraction and feeding them to the creature to make the impact of the legend all the more real.
The creature is awesome, but considering it’s the real victim here, this isn’t a frightening movie. It’s simply disturbing and cruel, not to mention rather slow. The most satisfying part is when the kids get what they deserve in the end, along with the irony of them becoming part of an urban legend they were trying to create.
FIRST MOON (2025)
Talk about beating a concept to death. This 98-minute werewolf movie waits until the final 17 minutes before having the werewolf transform.
So what happens before that? A young woman is abducted by a religious cult that believes she may have been infected with lycanthropy through sexual intercourse. They keep her imprisoned and torture her in an attempt to make her angry enough to unleash the beast inside her so they can kill it. That’s most of what happens for the entire movie.
Other than that, the girl also seems to astral project to recount what led to her possibly being infected, as we see a ghostly version of her spectating inside of flashbacks. Weird.
In the meantime, there are also several other possible werewolves killed by the cult.
When a werewolf is finally unleashed, at least it delivers a satisfying series of attacks, but this isn’t a classic hairy werewolf transformation. Cool creature design though.
