MONSTER MATCH-UP
IS THE SCARIEST OF THEM ALL ON FILM? As King Kong returns in a film that brings a formidable new threat, we look at some of cinema’s deadliest SKULLCRAWLERS
IT’S one of the original movie monster greats.
King Kong is coming back to cinemas this week in star-studded blockbuster Kong: Skull Island, which features a group of explorers searching for the mega-ape and meeting mutant dinosaurs called skullcrawlers.
As the film, starring Brie Larson, Tom Hiddleston and John C Reilly is launched, Scotland’s leading expert on the planet’s most fearsome non-fiction monsters has given us his verdict on the greatest fictional beasts form down the years.
Palaeontologist Dr Steve Brusatte from the School of GeoSciences at Edinburgh University, advised on Walking with Dinosaurs and has been part of some of the most exciting new dinosaur finds in recent years.
Here is his verdict on some of the most famous movie monsters of all time.
Here’s one you can convince yourself could actually exist. For centuries, seafarers have reported legends of giant sea monsters with an unholy number of tentacles. These stories are probably based on giant squids — and we know that some squids can grow to longer than 45ft, bigger than a T. rex. Squids and other animals can get really big in the water because they don’t have to worry about holding themselves up against gravity.
I love it. All of the slimy, squirmy tentacles, slithering up out of the water and whipping and grabbing people. Makes Jaws look like a yelpy chihuahua.
SCIENCE FACTOR: The first thing that struck me was they seemed to move a little oddly. They were outracing humans, charging along at motorway speed. But their legs sprawl out to the sides. Most animals with sprawling legs — such as lizards and crocodiles — can’t move very fast. It’s mammals and birds — with their legs directly underneath their bodies — which can race along like champs.
We’ll see what people think in a few days when the movie is released but, when I saw the trailer, I was pretty frightened. SCIENCE FACTOR: This monster is huge. I don’t think an animal so large could hold itself up. Its skeleton would need to be impossibly strong, and its muscles impossibly large. Even if it could exist, it would waddle around like a building-sized barrel, trying not to tip over.
With monsters like this one, you want to forget about the science and just enjoy the spectacle. Imagine if something so big and nasty could actually exist…