Creature Triple Feature yesterday:
The Criterion Collection digital restoration of Godzilla (1954). I'd forgotten how different Mr. Thunder Lizard looked in the original. I think I prefer the later iterations, visually. The sound was pitch-perfect right from the beginning, though. That iconic bellow-shriek was there from the beginning and has never been improved upon. The acting is very 1950s, which is to say a bit wooden to these 21st-Century eyes, but as long as you know what you're getting into, it's not a big deal. (Speaking of the cast, though, it occurred to me that every single person working on this film had to have experienced WWII. I wondered if making this movie was therapeutic or re-traumatizing.) The B&W was alright. I'm not a big B&W fan, I usually feel like a B&W movie or photo is just flat, but it didn't irritate me here and it might have made some of the FX easier to pull off. Speaking of the FX, they were actually pretty remarkable, considering when and how it was made. The set design and miniatures work was outstanding. You still have the problem of fire and water looking too big, because fire and water do what they do and you can't make them smaller, but even those environmental effects were impressively handled. I'd also forgotten that Gojira was a creature out of Japanese folklore (in the movie, at any rate - I don't know about irl). The fishermen knew about the giant beast that comes out of the sea, well before anyone in the movie ever sees it; they know what it is just from hearing about the ships going missing, and seeing wreckage and survivors wash up on the beach.
Tremors (1990) is a classic of the "Improved B-movie" subgenre that had a moment in the '90s and early '00s. In fact, it kind of kicked it off that whole wave of them. I'm thinking of things like Eight-Legged Freaks, Lake Placid, Starship Troopers, Deep Blue Sea, and Slither, all of which came after Tremors. Some of the movies that came before it were "B-Movies, Taken Seriously", like Cronenberg's The Fly and Carpenter's The Thing. This isn't one of those. It definitely doesn't take itself too seriously. It's not quite a laugh-out-loud comedy, but it has a wink-and-nod sense of humor. (Now that I'm thinking of Carpenter, Big Trouble in Little China could perhaps have been the 'starting gun' for this spree of "Improved B-Movies.")
I think Alien 3 (1992) is better than its reputation would have you believe. Of course it followed two of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made, so it was never going to live up to its legacy. Still, I enjoyed it on its own merits. Probably the least-scary of the three, but it had some cool moments. The setting was good, and the third group of people exploited by The Company was a good choice (blue-collar workers in the first movie; soldiers in the second; prisoners in the third). I liked the subtle changes to the xenomorph, with the implication that the animal it gestates inside influences its form, and the adoption of Sam Raimi's POV "demon cam" as the creature dashes through the corridors. I'd forgotten how deep the cast was. Sigourney Weaver, of course, but also Charles Dance, Charles Dutton, Pete Postlethwaite. Sharp eyes might catch Holt McCallany and Phil Davis, mentioned in passing in yonder thread (Mindhunter and Whitechapel, respectively), but I'm not sure either of them got any lines here before they got taken out for lunch.
