One month and one day ago, the Brooklyn blogger known as the Self-Styled Siren posted a list of Hollywood actors she does not like.  The post generated something like 130 responses which, if you’ve seen the modest feedback here, is pretty impressive.  So in that contentious vein, and given my own particular slant, I’d like to offer a list of movie monsters who just don’t do it for me.  In no particular order…

PINHEAD (Doug Bradley).  I can’t say in all honesty I’ve really followed the HELLRAISER (1987) mythos from collar to cuffs but I’ve seen a few of the movies and scenes from some of the sequels, enough to say definitively that it’s not my cuppa Joe Meek.  Maybe if I were the type of person who puts a lot of consideration into my next tat or into where I should pierce myself next (and I hasten to add that I am not that guy) I might be able to allow myself to be swept up in the whole “exquisite agony” thing… but sitting through a couple of these movies (there’s a lot of them) is all I need of Hell and Pinhead looks about as threatening to me as a French tickler or a toilet wand or I don’t even know what.  I can’t say if Doug Bradley will return in the role for the planned 2009 remake of the original film… because I won’t be there.  Let me know how it goes.   

THE CANDYMAN/DANIEL ROBITAILLE (Tony Todd).  Based on a thumbnail description of the plot, I wanted to like CANDYMAN (1992), both the movie and the character (Tony Todd), I really, really did … but this bee-stung boogeyman is one of those contemporary movie monsters who just doesn’t know when to shut up.  Just listen to him: The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite.  (Oh, get off it already, Clive Barker!) As for our deaths, there is nothing to fear. Our names will be written on a thousand walls. Our crimes told and retold by our faithful believers. We shall die together in front of their very eyes and give them something to be haunted by. Come with me and be immortal.   Seriously, he drones on and on like Barry White coming off an Amaretto bender.  Less is more, Candyman!  Two sequels followed.   

BUB (Howard Sherman).  Though it may be horror blasphemy to say this, I just can’t get behind Bub, the “intelligent zombie” of George Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985), the second sequel to Night of the Living Dead (1968). Bub’s got a lot of supporters out there and he’s been plastered across the fronts of a million black tee shirts – and he seems like a genuinely nice guy – but I think this is where Romero started to go wrong with his “Dead” films.  The notion of the living dead retaining some basic level of intelligence and being able to use crude tools doesn’t make them scarier to me.  Their lumbering negative capability and their need for nothing more than teeth and fingernails to reduce any one of us to pulp is what made them so indelibly terrifying 40 years ago. 

GHOSTFACE (Various Artists).  I realize I’m voicing a minority opinion here but the Munch-maked killer(s) of SCREAM (1996) and its two sequels never won favor with me.  I found the satire of Wes Craven’s original to be labored and obvious when not just clubfooted and too many of the actors were dialing their performances up to 11 because Craven told them (when really he shouldn’t have) that they were making a comedy.  A new generation of horror fans grooved to this “deconstruction” of the hoary tropes of the slasher movies of the previous decade but for my money (and to be honest, I saw this at a bargain matinee in Kansas, so I think I laid down $1.50 tops) Kevin Williamson’s script is guiltier of more contrivances than any of the slashers to which it thinks itself superior.  Back to the dime store with you, Ghostface!

HOCKEY MASK JASON (Various Artists).  Ever since Jason Voorhees stole fat Shelly the comic relief camper’s hockey mask in FRIDAY THE 13TH, PT. 3 (1982) he’s been losing ground with me.  Jason was so superbly creepy in FRIDAY THE 13TH, PT. 2 (1981), with his lithe swimmer’s physique (well, failed swimmer’s physique, I guess we should say), his ordered-from-a-catalog bib overalls and his make-do flour sack mask with the one eye hole (which looked like it was bitten out rather than cut out) - he was both palpably human (even a little frail) and tremendously threatening and his determination was impressive.  That one good eye really imbued him with a singularity of vision and of purpose.  The parade of barrel-chested stunt men who followed in the role robbed Jason of any real texture.  I didn’t mind so much 20 years ago but now I have no interest in any F13 movie made post-1982.  

NON-GUNNAR HANSEN LEATHERFACE (Various Artists Who Are Not Gunnar Hansen).  Let’s be clear about this: there is but one true Leatherface and he wore the mask but once, in the original THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974).  But the mountainous Hansen was more than just a scary face… he was a walking, not-talking, skull-crushing, spinning, spinning, spinning philosophy.  Something magical happened when Hansen put that mask on, although the grueling shooting conditions and a love-hate relationship with director Tobe Hooper probably helped that alchemy.  Every Leatherface since then has suffered from the filmmakers’ need to gussy up Leatherface, to make his mask more grotesque (like putting visible ears on it) or to give him backstory (oh, so it was impetigo that made him do it).  Like George Romero’s “intelligent zombies,” tragic Leatherface is a bad idea.  Leave the subtext to Hamlet and pull the freaking ripcord!

THE CRYPTKEEPER (Voice of John Kassir).  I don’t have a lot of deep-think to share about The Cryptkeeper, host of the HBO anthology series TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1989-1996), two subsequent theatrical releases – TALES FROM THE CRYPT: DEMON KNIGHT (1995) and TALES FROM THE CRYPT: BORDELLO OF BLOOD (1996) and the animated series TALES FROM THE CRYPTKEEPER (1993-1997)  He’s just irritating as all Hell.  Maybe that’s in keeping with the spirit of the old EC comic from which the series and the movies take their name but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to bear.  It’s fingernails-on-a-chalkboard stuff.  Kassir is a former stand-up comic who beat out Sinbad on STAR SEARCH and is a much in-demand vocal artist these days but his delivery is too Howie Mandel for my taste.  No deal!

THE CREEPER (Jonathan Breck).  Victor Salva’s JEEPERS CREEPERS (2001) got a lot of buzz seven years ago and a well-regarded cash-in sequel, JEEPERS CREEPERS II (2003), followed two summers later, but it’s pretty weak tea for any true monster fan.  Most of the original film’s best stuff was cribbed from other souces, namely DUEL (1972), THE TERMINATOR (1984), STORM OF THE CENTURY (1999) and a 1991 episode of UNSOLVED MYSTERIES that effectively gave Salva his entire first act (and, if you’ve seen this episode, it’s actually creepier for all its grubby verite).  Even these substantial debts to stronger material could be forgiven but the Creeper just seems like one of the GARGOYLES (1972) wearing the raincoat of THE HITCHER (1986)… and what’s with the sixpack?  

FREDDY KRUGER (Robert Englund).  Again, I fear I stand alone on this, as Wes Craven’s zebra-striped child molester killer became a full-blown American Idol in the wake of the success of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984).  I think the original concept was brilliant but the follow-through sequels made hash of that and even the first film felt guilty of trying to back peddle from its own unpalatable logline.  Freddy Kruger begat a new generation of wisecracking supernatural villains and horror has been poorer for it ever since.  I keep trying to tell myself it was only a movie but it’s not working. 

THE FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER (Charles Ogle).  Okay, I know it was 1910 and all and most people were still going to the bathroom in outhouses but what were the makers of the Edison Company’s FRANKENSTEIN thinking with this monster makeup? Were they on absinthe or something?  I realize the monster is supposed to be a patchwork creation and his pitiable physical presence is supposed to evoke equal parts of horror and sympathy… but ye gods he looks like a damned girl.  Look at him!  What’s with the hair?  What’s with the Liza Minelli eyes?  And why is one hand Original Recipe and the other Extra Crispy?  This sorry imagining reminds me of The Worst Halloween Ever, when my parents neglected to get me a proper Halloween costume from a box and tried to cobble something together at the last minute from their closets.  They put me in a black bandit mask (why did my parents even have this?), a flannel shirt, a black wig, penciled in a moustache and stuck one of my Dad’s corncob pipes in my mouth.  They even took a picture of me standing out on the back steps and in it you can clearly see that I have no idea what I’m supposed to be.  I’m just standing there looking miserable and on the verge of tears because I didn’t know what I was.  How can you trick or treat if you don’t know who you are?  At the very least, I learned a valuable lesson that Halloween… make sure your costume is set in stone well before Happy Hour.

But I digress.