Craziest Kaiju Countdown

Over the next month, Undead Backbrain will be running a special feature put together by Kaiju Search-Robot Avery. The Backbrain has a propensity for lists and that’s what Avery has created — a Top 20 list that has sparked his imagination and will hopefully spark yours. Follow the progress of the list as we work our way toward Number 1 on the hit parade — and stay on the look-out for a competition the Backbrain will be running in conjunction with it. Welcome to:

Introduction by Kaiju Search-Robot Avery

What scares you? This is a question that cinema has been asking since the lights first dimmed and the celluloid started to roll. Perhaps you’re most afraid of a vengeful spirit, or a corpse resurrected from the dead and craving the taste of human flesh? Maybe it’s an incredibly charming Count with an unnatural appetite for human blood? Or the hideous creation of a mad scientist, brought to life through the use of body parts from the deceased and a good dose of electricity?

Or is size the thing? Perhaps massive scale scares you — the helplessness that comes from feeling small and insignificant? What of the giant that could stomp his massive foot and destroy with ease the very place that you so fondly call home, your safe haven? What of the huge monstrosity that, with the slightest flick of its humongous tail, could reduce an entire city block to rubble? For such a beast to appear anywhere would cause the masses to flee through the streets in panic, trying to escape its unnatural hugeness. Over the years filmmakers have exercised their creative talents in bringing these fearsome gargantuans to life using the SFX magic of cinema, whether it be a giant hairy ape or a skyscraper-sized scaly reptile. Cinema offers the perfect means to create the illusion that such creatures are possible and, given half a chance, the filmmakers went for it, claws and all!

At times, though, some of these creative scaremongers have let their imaginations run riot and have brought to life some very ‘unique’, if not insane, monsters.

The Top 20 Craziest Kaiju Countdown is a list that pays tribute to the most bizarre behemoths, honours those over-sized creations that display an excess of imagination (or a massive amount of drug use). Whether head-shakingly outlandish or mind-bogglingly inconceivable, some of cinema’s most awe-inspiring goliathan stars will be showcased in the coming days.

However, in order to keep the list manageable there had to be rules. This is a list to honour those monsters that have graced the big screen and towered over us as we cringed in fear at their massive size. Hence, I have included only big screen stars — no TV titans. Those small-screen giants deserve a list all in their own, but for the sake of this particular exercise I decided to leave them out. Also these are the daikaiju that carried their own starring vehicles or were able to steal the show in their on-screen cameo debuts; no supporting nemesis that took second billing in another more upmarket daikaiju’s film. Again, this list is to honour ‘creativity’ and ‘inventiveness’ on the filmmaker’s behalf, not to reward those that simply took a pre-existing idol or myth and used its design in creating their own monster. Hence, I have included only original creations.

Most importantly, you should remember that we are not evaluating the artistic value or significance of particular films here. This isn’t the Top 20 Best Giant Monster Films, or the Top 20 Most Important Kaiju. I wanted to probe the heights of the Bizarre, to spotlight the Weird and the Wonderful…

This is Kaiju Search-Robot Avery’s Top 20 Craziest Kaiju Countdown.

Enjoy!

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• Crazy Kaiju Number 20!