Jason – Friday 13th Part VII
Easily the best Jason look of all ten films. Also one of the best Friday films, in my opinion. Jason was given a very bedraggled look with torn clothes, chunks of flesh missing and bits of bones showing – obviously the fishes of Crystal Lake enjoyed Jason. But it got better when the mask came off. We see Jason with hatchet marks on his noggin, missing teeth and a face only a mother could love, and she’s long dead…

HR Giger alien – Aliens
H.R. Giger turned creature creation on its head with his creation for the movie Alien. Blessing it with no eyes, a super-model figure, lightning speed and acid for blood, space-alien movies would never be the same again. Alien may have been the spring-board for the franchise, but Aliens (the sequel to Alien) will always be the best in my eyes. Let’s just pretend 3 and 4 never happened. Or AVP. Or AVP2…

Predator – Predator
Taking Masai warriors as source material, Stan Winston came in to the project, recreated the alien, thus making what was, quite surely, one of the ugliest creatures of the 80′s. Keven Peter Hall, standing at a touch over seven foot tall, wore the suit and breathed life into the alien hunter. Apparently we will be blessed with a remake titled, wait for it: Predators, bet that took a while to think up…

Werewolf – American WW in London
Once again on-set special effects were taken to a new level by Rick Baker. His effects work on the movie earned him the first ever Academy Award to a special effects artist, and rightly so! Legend has it that the look of the werewolf is actually based on Baker’s dog! I dread to think what breed of dog he had…

Greek Mythology – Ray Harryhausen films
Ray Harryhausen is surely the master of stop-motion animation and the man behind many of your childhood favourites such as Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts and many MANY others. The guy is a genius and apparently animated everything himself, whether it be several skeletons, the hair of Medusa or the many heads of the Hydra. If you’ve never seen a Harryhausen film then you are an empty shell of a person and you must rectify this NOW!

Spider Head – The Thing
Again, another landmark movie in special effects. John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing used the most bizarre and outlandish ideas, the most well known being the ‘spider head’ sequence where an infected guys head oozes off it’s own body, sprouts long spider-like legs and makes a run for it. And all of it had to be done on-set, no CGI jiggery-pokery there, thankfully!

Zombie Soldier – House
This is one that probably a lot of people don’t know about as House wasn’t exactly a massive hit, but near the end of the movie is the most amazing, frighteningly tall, zombie soldier (from Vietnam no less). It looks absolutely amazing, even now. Equally frightening is the lead characters dress sense, watch it and see…

Godzilla – Godzilla
I’m talking THE Godzilla, not the God-awful US remake/bastardization. What’s not to love about the big guy? He comes in, kicks ass, annihilates a city, returns to the murky depths and returns to do it all again time after time. Ya gotta love it!

Legless Chick – Tokyo Gore Police
Oh how I love Tokyo Gore Police. I can easily explain it in just a few words: fucked up. It’s a completely bizarre gorefest from Japan. My favourite creature from TGP is the chick who has a large gaping mouth for a lower half. Second choice was the peeing chair. No, seriously, TGP has a chair that pees on people. Trust me, you NEED to see TGP!

Darkness – Legend
This film sucked ASS, and to cement the fact: it has Tom Cruise in it. I rest my case. But the makeup work for the character Darkness is awesome. With giant black horns, red skin, a long, thin, distorted face and goat-like legs – this is what I think of whenever I have to envision the Devil. Which is usually quite often…

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Honorable Mentions

Erik – Phantom Of The Opera
Wow, what can I say. Scary, that’s what I’ll say. I’m talking about the Lon Chaney, silent, classic. Apparently Chaney did all his own makeup distorting his features using a type of transparent fish skin! Seems he had various set-ups for a particular facial look, since he couldn’t really move his face while wired up.

Freddy – Nightmare On Elm Street
Ol’ pizza face would have to be on the list, but only an honourable mention? This is due to him probably being on most peoples lists, and future directors taking a seriously scary Freddy (part 1) and turning him in to a comedy act.

Pinhead – Hellraiser
The human pin-cushion surely deserves a mention. Not on my top list as, like Krueger, he’s definitely main-stream (I made Jason VII the exception as it looks great) and because he likes his BDSM a bit too much.

Spheres – Phantasm
Not so much a creature but a prop, but I’d still poo my pants if a shiny ball with spikes flew at my face!

Audrey – Little Shop Horrors

Not a horror film as such, but the look of the carnivorous plant was awesome. With big teeth, rubbery lips, and nice colours, Audrey was not a plant to be messed with!

Tod Browning's Freaks

Freaks is an old black and white movie from 1932, but don’t let that fool you. There was no political correctness in those days, and it certainly shows in this movie, but not in a bad way.

A beautiful trapese artist in the travelling circus falls in love with Hans, a midget. Coincidence that he is to come in to a large inheritance? We think not. The other midget in the circus warns Hans that she’s after him for his money but he isn’t convinced. Later Hans falls ill and the rest of the travelling circus are suspicious of the trapese artist and her sneaky lover Hercules. They find out she’s been poisoning Hans and gang up on the money grabbing pair, turning the one lovely trapese artist into a freak like them. As the narrative in the movie says, if you insult one freak, you insult them all…

Special effects are zero, all the freaks in the movie are genuine human oddities. There’s everything from midgets, dwarves, people with odd shaped heads, human skeletons, and watch out for the ‘caterpillar dude’ (TM, Ronnie) who is just a torso with a head, no seriously… he has no limbs what-so-ever and just crawls about like a caterpillar, VERY spooky. As if that’s not bad enough there’s a guy with no hips/legs who runs using his arms and hands! It is easily the spookiest thing I have ever seen in a film. At one point in the film he’s ‘sitting’ on the ground, but it just looks like some dude thats been buried up to his waist.

Cleopatra (the trapese artist) and Hans (the perv)

It (unfortunately) wasn’t in the version I viewed, but apparently there is an alternative, now considered lost, ending where Hercules is castrated and ends up as a castrato. That ending would have been the icing on the cake for this film, I want it found and restored!

one of the ‘pinhead’ kids

Other than the freaks themselves, the ending (below) is extremely creepy, it’s like a miniature/deformed Dawn of the Dead with midgets walking, toward Hercules, through the rain with nothing but evil in their eyes.

Run away! It’s a ginormous wagon wheel!

I’m not quite sure how this managed to get a DVD release, as I’d have thought the PC freaks (pun intended) would have interjected and demanded a ban, but no, and thank God for sense and reason! Although apparently it was banned for thirty years in the UK, hardly a surprise for the UK.

Freaks is a good film, the ‘people with unusual physical characteristics’, while in a circus, are shown living (relatively) normal lives and seem to enjoy what they’re doing. Although one actor did denounce the movie as offensive. But I’m sure he/she still accepted their wage. Freaks is a classic movie, and deserves at least one watch for it’s curiosity factor.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022913/]