What happened to monster movies? Specifically, the “nature gone wrong” genre.  Growing up, I had all kinds of movies about various parts of nature going crazy and eating everybody.  Sure, some of them were pretty terrible, but they were still fun movies.

While some of them did devolve into rather goofy sequels, these films were all great. Even the ones with a goofy premise told great stories without falling over themselves for jokes. These day though, we have a different type of movie.

The genre (much like the rest of the stuff churned out by Hollywood) has just become a parody of itself. Instead of making an interesting movie, they just relied on how gimmicky they could make it. You liked Mega Shark? Well, now we added Crocosaurus! You like aged 80′s pop stars? Well we got Debbie Deborah Gibson and Tiffany! And look, it’s David Hasselhoff! Still not convinced? Here’s some terrible CG effect of the giant whatever eating a tank!

I’ll be honest, I”m a fan of bad movies.  There is a difference between a good “bad movie” and the crap that shows on SyFy these days.  You see, a good bad movie was mad by people who wanted to make a good movie.  They worked on a script that was more story than jokes.  They worked within their budget instead of blowing it on cameos.

Take Evil Dead for instance (OK, wrong genre, but I’m guessing it’s a little more well known than Slugs), there was a lot of heart that went into that movie.  Sure they didn’t have a budget, and the effects weren’t that good, but they did their best, and it shows.  Compare that to any of the movies put out by The Asylum, the actors are barely phoning it in, and the effects look like they were done in a weekend by high school students looking for extra credit, with a script that reads like two stoners talking about which two animals would win in a fight.  There just isn’t any heart in it any more, instead of trying to make a movie people will like, they just want something that you’ll watch because it sounds cool.

I don’t really know what to say anymore without sounding like some old man on a porch talking about kids these days and their loud music, so instead, I’ll just recommend that you watch some of these classics.

They really don’t make movies like this anymore.