When I was growing up, television shows called creature features were a mainstay. Our local creature feature show featured Dr. Paul Bearer as a host and showed movies that featured at least one or two monsters of some kind. Dr. Paul Bearer was host from 1973-1995, one of the longest running creature feature hosts in the country. (1) Watching the show was a weekly ritual with my father that instilled a love of corny B-movies that persists to this day.
Every Saturday afternoon, I eagerly anticipated the next movie where the hero wrestled an obviously rubber python or the monster that was clearly a person in a rubber suit. The following is a carefully curated list of creature features that are sure to entertain. Click on the images or links to bring you to the item in the catalog, where you can place it on hold to pick up at your neighborhood branch and host your own creature feature.
What the heck did I just watch?! These movies are so bad they are good:
Godzilla vs. Gigan: It has Godzilla! It has kaiju (Japanese for 'giant monsters') galore! It has (spoiler alert) humans that are aliens that are actually giant roaches!
Attack of the Giant Leeches: The leeches are the aforementioned people in rubber suits.
The Stuff: Marshmallow fluff run amok.
Planet Terror: A former assassin, a one-legged go-go dancer with a machine gun for a leg, a BBQ restaurant owner, and a sexy anesthesiologist battle creatures created by a government experiment gone awry.
Sharknado and the sequels: Sharks in tornadoes. No further explanation necessary.
These monster movies are tried and true classics:
Frankenstein: Play God and rue the day.
Dracula: Bela Lugosi is iconic (and unintentionally hilarious) as Dracula.
The Wolf Man: Beware of wolves that attack on the full moon. They may just change you into a monster.
King Kong: Greed is not good. It may just end with a rampaging giant ape kidnapping a girl and taking her to the top of the Empire State Building.
Creature from the Black Lagoon: Falling in love with a human could prove to be a fatal mistake for an amphibious humanoid creature.
Well-done creature features may seem like an oxymoron, but trust me, these are good:
The Descent: A group of women out for an adventure discover that, even though they are a mile under the surface, they are not alone.
Attack the Block: Aliens fall from the sky in South London, and it’s up to a group of teenage thugs to save the neighborhood.
A Quiet Place: Don’t make a sound or they will get y…aaaaaaaaaaaagh!
The Cave: Another cautionary tale of caving gone terribly wrong, but this time the creatures are contagious.
Cloverfield: A giant, man hungry alien eats its way through New York City.