THE EDGE magazine | TV | Monsters (US TV series)

Monsters (TV)
Castle Video
Review by David Clark (1991)

Based on the preview cassettes and accompanying press material, Monsters is a three-year-old American TV horror series, now available on video in the UK, the form of which appears to be ‘monster of the week’.

The series consists of 20-25 minute episodes cheaply produced by, mostly, the same team. Each episode was allotted just one week’s pre-production time and four days shooting, and then further confined to a maximum of just two interior sets. However, this economy and speed doesn’t detract; despite a few plot weaknesses the scripts hang together well, and the fluent direction and polished, slick production keep things moving along nicely.

All five episodes here are well made and competently acted, and the make up effects, on which much of the impact hinges, are first class. These were by a team led by Dick Smith, who worked on Altered States, Scanners and The Hunger (‛Series Special Effects Make Up Consultant Dick Smith’, proclaim the opening credits immediately after the principals’ names have flashed up.) What Smith actually did was to analyse the scripts and make recommendations, select a few artists and do the occasional design himself.

The first cassette, or what appears to be the first, leads with La Strega. This is a downbeat, subtle fable, symbolic and full of twists and turns, based on a Richard A Russo story. I’m not going to give the plot away, but the story concerns love, sex, witchcraft, death and marriage, and is perhaps a little too complex for its own good. The short story itself (I haven’t read it) may well be the best way to experience the story. The second episode, Mannikins of Horror*, is in more familiar mode, a psychological thriller taken from a Robert Bloch story featuring Glynis Barber as a compassionate psychiatrist who comes to a nasty end. Again, the episode is detailed, complex and multi-layered, and neatly rounded off at the end, a trait that seems to be true of the series as a whole. The third episode, The Cocoon, is perhaps the best, a haunting tale of an amnesiac and beautiful accident victim, a policeman and his psychic lover, with a powerful central image. It’s a fable of immoral ambition leading to destruction on one hand and the gaining of power by a victim on the other.

The second tape consists of two comedies. Where’s The Rest Of Me? spotlights Meat Loaf as a doctor with a preserved body in the basement and a serum which makes transplant parts compatible (which is pretty rotten SF) and turns out to be capable of reviving the dead. The drug gets spilt and the doctor and three former transplant patients die horribly. My Zombie Lover is slightly better; a zombie comes a-courting on the night when the dead wake, there are various jokes and ludicrous lines concerning improved race relations between humans and the Living Dead, and there’s a hokey happy ending but on the whole, the comedies don’t come up to the standard of the first tape.

Monsters is nothing special. Technical excellence alone is never enough. There are no especially good ideas, nothing revolutionary in TV terms, and on this evidence there’s nothing particularly notable to be said about the series overall. None of the episodes on these tapes really hit; they just go past. Monsters is about as good as you’ll get from a horror show on American TV. Moderately decent stuff on the first tape, and certainly better than the Nightmare On Elm Street series. •

*The episode titles given above are the ones I gave when I wrote this review. I would have checked the titles appearing on-screen against the information provided, being the press pack, anything written on the preview cassettes themselves, and video sleeves (if I was sent any; the review was written before the VHS release date) and noted any contradictions in the review. I have always done this. The spelling of Mannikins of Horror is slightly unusual (though 'mannikins' features in at least one online dictionary) but that is the title of the episode I saw. Where the sometimes-given Mannequins of Horror variant comes from I don't know - TV Guide? - but it certainly wasn't on the video screen or the material I had, and it's been noted elsewhere that this is indeed the on-screen title.

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