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Ugly, huge and hungry as hell, the monsters are coming, from outer space, the ocean depths and even underground. To terrorise and chase us. To squish and chew us. To remind us never to get too big for our boots. That we may not always be at the top of the food chain. To celebrate the release of Peter Jackson's epic re-telling of King Kong, Blockbuster.co.uk's Marshall Julius pays homage to the greatest, scariest, craziest movie monsters ever unleashed.
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Name: Kong
Quote: "Oh no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast."
Life and times: Plucked from his position of power as the alpha ape of Skull Island and shipped to New York as a colossal curiosity, thirty-foot gorilla King Kong takes an enormous bite out of the big apple.
Survival advice: Don't eat bananas on the street, avoid taking flash photos of the beast, and if you're an attractive blonde you'd best stay indoors and wait for the bi-planes.
Trivia: For the '33 original, King Kong's signature roar was created by combining the roars of a lion and a tiger then running them backwards.
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Name: The Thing
Quote: "Please doctor, I've got to ask this. It sounds like, well, just as though you're describing some form of super carrot."
Life and times: An alien shapeshifter who crash lands in the Arctic and works its way through a doomed group of scientists, The Thing has a flair for horrifying transformations and messing with people's minds.
Survival advice: Avoid remote, snowy areas. If you find a spaceship, run in the other direction. And trust no one.
Trivia: Howard Hawks, esteemed director of the original version, asked the US Air Force for assistance in making the film. He was refused because the top brass believed such cooperation would compromise the government's official stance that UFOs didn't exist.
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Name: Godzilla
Quote: "When mankind falls into conflict with nature, monsters are born."
Life and times: Revived by nuclear testing, a fifty-foot reptile with radioactive breath named Godzilla stomps on Tokyo to register his displeasure. For the next fifty years he kept himself busy running rampage through city streets and battling a stream of over-sized mutants and aliens.
Survival advice: Avoid coastal towns, capital cities and the ocean in general, and Japan in particular.
Trivia: Gojira's name is a combination of the Japanese words for gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira).
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Name: The Blob
Quote: "How do you get people to protect themselves from something they don't believe in?"
Life and times: Falling to earth in a hot little meteorite, alien jelly thing The Blob ingests every living thing it slimes over, growing larger all the time. Though it doesn't appear to have any kind of personality, it clearly enjoys eating teenage girls the best.
Survival advice: Blob hates the cold, so hide in an industrial freezer with a bomb full of liquid nitrogen in case it comes calling.
Trivia: Long before it was named The Blob, the creature was known as The Mass and later The Glob.
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Name: Jaws
Quote: "You're gonna need a bigger boat."
Life and times: An uncommonly aggressive great white shark, Jaws is a 25-foot killing machine who quits eating seals in favour of more human-shaped morsels. Hobbies include ramming and chewing.
Survival advice: Get out of the water!
Trivia: Nicknamed Bruce, the notorious mechanical shark built for the movie rarely worked. On the first day of filming it sank straight to the ocean floor.
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Name: Gremlins
Quote: "How come a cute little guy like this can turn into a thousand ugly monsters?"
Life and times: What begins as a cute and fluffy, teddy-like creature called a Mogwai, transforms into a grotesque, green and slimy mischief-maker called a Gremlin - if you feed it after midnight. Get it wet and it reproduces. Formerly the scourge of the US Air Force during WWII, the Gremlins descend to wreak havoc, first on smalltown America, and later New York City.
Survival advice: Don't get them wet or there'll be too many to handle. Don't feed them after midnight or they'll turn into monsters. And when all else is lost, try hitting them with sunlight.
Trivia: In Cantonese Chinese, mogwai means gremlin or demon. The Mandarin pronunciation is mogui.
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Name: The Alien Queen
Quote: "Get away from her, you bitch!"
Life and times: Mother of a race of bug-ugly alien xenomorphs with armoured bodies, piercing tails and acid breath, the Alien Queen produces more eggs than the Easter Bunny. Mess with her kids and she'll get medieval on your ass.
Survival advice: Avoid untested colonies on uncharted planets. Pick a profession other than space marine. Keep your mouth closed when face huggers are about. And don't forget how clumsy Aliens are around airlocks.
Trivia: As many as 16 operators were required to bring the Alien Queen to life.
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Name: Graboids
Quote: "You'd think after eating all those sheep they'd have to take a dump someplace."
Life and times: Massive, worm-like bitey creatures who live underground and burrow at incredible speeds towards anything with a heartbeat, the Graboids favour remote desert towns.
Survival advice: Since the Graboids respond to even the faintest vibration, stay off the ground, keep as still as you can and never raise your voice. If you can do all that, and you happen to have a rocket launcher handy, you might just make it.
Trivia: Actor Michael Gross, best known as the dad in Family Ties, is the only actor to appear in all four movies and even the short-lived TV spin-off.
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