Blog Archives

Monster Gallery: Ghostbusters (1984)

The Gatekeeper and the Keymaster

Among the vast array of creature effects that Entertainment Effects Group had to arrange for Ghostbusters, a rather large role had to be filled by the Terror Dogs: Gozer the Gozerian’s loyal servants, whose purpose is to open the portal that allows the travelling entity to set foot on a new world to conquer.

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Monster Gallery: Men in Black (1997)

Scum of the Universe – Men in Black, Part 2

It was during production that both Sonnenfeld and the producers realized that the MIB headquarters looked empty — as in they lacked a consistent alien presence. As originally envisioned, the headquarters had to represent a 60s airport or way station, and yet the footage shot up to that point only displayed few alien characters. The producers thus decided to introduce more exotic creatures into the scene — in the style of the iconic Star Wars cantina sequence — and commissioned additional creature effects.

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Monster Gallery: Predator (1987)

Hunter — Predator

“A monster from another planet that kills for sport.” This is the brief, poignant description of the Predator given by producer Joel Silver in a promotional interview. Shortly after the release of Rocky IV, a joke made its way in Hollywood claiming that, since Rocky had run out of Earthly opponents to fight, the next one should come from another planet. Said joke unwittingly inspired the Thomas brothers — Jim and John — to write their first script: Hunter, later retitled Predator. “We had an idea about doing a story about a brotherhood of hunters who came from another planet to hunt all kinds of things,” Jim said, “but we realized that wouldn’t work very well, so we picked one hunter who was going to hunt the most dangerous species — which had to be man, and the most dangerous man was a combat soldier.” The first-time writers, devoid of agents, slipped the script under the door of Fox executive Michael Levy – who shared it with John Davis and Joel Silver, the future producers of the film.

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Monster Gallery: Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Monsters in Chinatown

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To bring to the screen the creative Monster effects of his long-sought martial arts film, John Carpenter hired Boss Film Studios, headed by Richard Edlund. “Twentieth Century Fox had a very good relationship with Richard Edlund and Boss Film,” Carpenter said, “and I’ve always been impressed by their work — so we decided to go with them. When Richard — who is an extremely professional, extremely talented man — and his people came in, their ideas and input melded together with mine and we were in business.”

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