Scary Monsters You’d Super Freak

Not unlike Natasha Henstridge in “Species,” May – an ethereally beautiful brunette – spends most of this movie walking around naked. She is smooth and flawless and coldly come-hither. And all she wants is to press her beautiful alien body against yours and kiss you. So she can drain you of your life’s essence and turn you into a hideous, shrunken husk of your former self. In my opinion, this Tobe Hooper sci-fi/horror gem is pretty underrated considering it has it all: vampires, who are from space, who create zombie hordes. Very forward-thinking.

I had a thing for him from the start. He was reedy and craggy and coarse and British and he prowled in a manner altogether different from the rest of the immortals beautiful in Bon Temps. And anyone who helps serve up a good racist-redneck beat down gets at least a half-grade bump from me in any setting. But of all the alluring monsters in Alan Ball’s delicious gratuitous sex-and-gore soap opera, Franklin gets my highest rating. Why? He’s so bad he should be in detention. He’s turned on by violence. He’s deranged and obsessive. He’s jealous and unstable. I’m no shrink, but he seems a tad manic depressive (which is, let’s face it, very Goth) with a syrupy smattering of psychopathy. Mmmm, delicious. On top of all that, he’s extremely well hung in the fang department, rendering him far more menacing whether he’s tearing your throat open or fucking your lights out.

Remember when Prince Charles told Camilla Parker Bowles he wanted to be her tampon? We may have found him a true slice of retro-eHarmony with Nancy Archer, five stories of uncompromisingly sexy, full-figured, pin-up glamour served with generous sides of uncompromisingly bad continuity and campy special effects. This was the sort of “Men, be faithful or else!” movie the director of Teeth would have been forced to make before our society devolved into creatures who enjoy watching vagina guillotines castrate men on-screen for real. When the towering, alien-mutated Nancy finds her philandering husband in the arms of the town floozy, a Godzilla-like rampage — the likes of which the cheated-on among us can only fantasize about — ensues. That is some tasty, tasty vengeance. Buxom and leggy, too. (Creepy related trivia: Yvette Vickers, the former Playboy Playmate who starred alongside Hayes in this cult classic, was found mummified in her Los Angeles home earlier this year. She was 82.)

Say what you will about High Priest Imhotep, but he was devoted. And ballsy. And like so many adulterous men, careless. He smeared the paint on the Pharaoh’s favorite ride, the slinky Anck-Su-Namun (a gilded vision in Egyptian-style chainmail that was perhaps inspired by the non-outfit Rose McGowan wore to the 1998 VMAs). Anyway, as is often the natural course of forbidden love, they got busted. They slaughtered the jilted king, she committed suicide and Imhotep swore to resurrect her. And he might have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling palace guards. They cursed him, cut out his tongue and damned him to eternal suffering in a sarcophagus full of carnivorous beetles until a bunch of tomb raiders brought him back to life. Why is he sexy? His waking thought was of his beloved. What a romantic. And clearly a generous lover, since the first order of business was getting his tongue back. I know he’s got a kind of Mr. Clean thing going on, but I don’t care. I think he’s hot.

I think about Dren in a way that conjures those old Frosted Mini-Wheats commercials. The moral compass in me finds this intelligent creature’s depressing, confined life as a purposefully generated lab rat reprehensible, but the Cronenberg-worshipping freak in me wants to see Adrian Brody have sex with it again. Besides, if the basement-dwelling Comic Con hordes can jerk it to the blue girl from Avatar — as they most assuredly do — why not Dren? Dren’s body is supple and sexy. Dren’s eyes are soft and sympathetic. Dren has a long, pointy tongue and hand-like feet and a sort-of hare lip. Not the Tobe Hooper circus-freak kind, the sexy Joaquin Phoenix kind. If Joaquin Phoenix were a weird, catlike hermaphroditic monster with lovely, petite breasts and ripe, red lips and a deadly-venomous tail stinger. Have I mentioned the hand-feet? Those could be fun.

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She is searingly hot to the touch, exceedingly sadistic and she lactates fire. And when she’s not molting into an undulating, bubbly-fleshed blob, or baring a mouth full of needle teeth, or screaming in that deep, terrifying Linda Blair demon voice, she’s really quite fetching. Callie is the daughter of the Devil, an unholy succubus who works at the Department of Integration in the very twisted New York of this animated Comedy Central series. Callie is sexy for all the obvious reasons, but she’s also a beautiful amalgam of evil invincibility and human frailty. Also, she can suck your soul out through your urethra if she wants to. Cool.

He wasn’t the sleek, sinewy, early-model alley cat of “Easy Rider.” In fact, his charms often came in the form of smarmy observations and body language that was anything but. Cher’s witchy character, a beautiful artist, calls it as she sees it: “You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid….” Plus he smells. This doesn’t stop her (or Susan Sarandon or Michelle Pfeiffer) from sleeping with him and discovering their dormant arsenal of Wiccan capabilities. Supernatural devil-men just have a way about them. I saw this in the theater when it was released and my 17-year-old best friend, not unlike the conservative schoolmarms of Eastwick, was inexplicably crazy-hot for him — paunch, wrinkles, creepy, leering Joker smile and all. That’s animal magnetism for you.

Maybe it’s Nastassia Kinski’s infinite sexiness overflowing onto her incestuous were-panther brother. Maybe it’s David Bowie’s wanton crooning on the film’s fiery theme song. Or maybe it’s just his ass in those khakis and the feline bounce in his step and the memory of his charismatic turn as a jubilant, Beethoven-loving, thug-rapist in thermals (not to mention Caligula), but there’s just something about Malcolm McDowell. He’s intense, with an energy that seems ready to explode — like a rubber band stretched to its ends. And his characters, like the stealthy, graceful Paul, are notoriously off-balance and often dangerous. To be entirely honest, I also thought he was cute as H.G. Wells in Time After Time, so what do I know?

How daring are you? Adapted to the silver screen along with her brethren from the pages of Clive Barker’s Cabal, Shuna is covered with a Ginsu-level warehouse of poisonous porcupine-like quills, bringing the oft-merged ideas of beautiful and deadly together with pointed precision. Her comic-book back-story has her coming to the underworld of Midian from the bordellos of New England, where she was the favorite of a few exceptionally adventurous clients. Shuna was said to be well worth the risk – if you lived to rate her performance. My opinion: Unless you’re unusually nimble, you should probably opt for a hollowed-out pineapple.

Leather-clad lycan of the highest order, Elisabeth Brooks was lithe, lascivious and long in the tooth — which is precisely how I like my werewolves. This film has some camp and black humor to it, but it was genuinely creepy and the effects were pretty impressive at the time. I still love the hulking wolf-creatures and their gargantuan hackles. They may have had other massive attributes, as evidenced by Brooks’ fireside sex scene which begins sweetly enough, but culminates in the couples’ transformation mid-climax. Or maybe they’re just howling at the moon. I really can’t tell. Open P.S. to Alcide the Werewolf: This is how you do it. And while I’m not merely alluding to the gorgeous Ms. Brooks’ effective use of full-frontal nudity to showcase her lupine lustiness, feel free to steal from her playbook.