Serenity:

Here's the classic example of a voiceover that turns into a conversation. Joss Whedon's big movie debut starts out with a whole cosmic theme, as a woman talks to us about how we (once again) messed up the Earth and had to colonize a new solar system. And then suddenly, we're in the room with the woman, and it starts a whole new scene. Which turns into something else, which turns into something else.

Mimic:

Here's another voiceover that turns into someone talking to us. Guillermo dell Toro's early classic starts off with a male narrator telling us about the awful plague that struck... and then we're in a hospital with him, uncomfortably close to those plague victims. Aaaaa!

Megiddo: The Omega Code 2:

I love this Godsploitation movie's beginning so much. It starts out as an echoey ominous voiceover, with some guy reading Scripture, and then it turns into a sweeping apocalyptic montage, with that voice droning over it... and then suddenly, we're hanging out with that guy, and he's just having a regular conversation. He just happened to be quoting scripture and droning ominously in the course of his chat. To be fair, this is Satan.

What Planet Are You From?

And then, we effortlessly segue into our comedy voiceovers portion. This Garry Shandling movie feels the need to start off with a deep booming voice, letting us know Garry Shandling has no penis. It's important information that we'll need for the rest of the movie, so it's good to get it out there right away.

Morons From Outer Space:

And then finally, there's this cheesy British space comedy, which tries to play up our expectations that visitors from outer space will be brilliant and noble, so the movie can shatter them. (Of course, we already know we're watching a movie called Morons From Outer Space, so good luck with that.)

Heavy Metal:

Somehow, I remembered this opening monologue being longer and more crazy, but I guess they're saving that for later in the movie. As it is, you could almost be fooled into thinking you're watching a serious space epic.

Monster High:

I almost didn't include this one, since it's so short and kind of meh. (I already had 50 voiceovers, without this one.) I think the "imagine the furthest point in the universe. Our story begins just a couple blocks past that." I think they're trying for a Douglas Adams "space is big" vibe... and then they just give up and go home.

Re-Animator

This adaption of Lovecraft's short story stars SF-favorite Jeffrey Combs as Dr. Herbert West, a Miskatonic University medical student obsessed with curing death. Classic mad scientist territory. When his radical theories are met with resistance by the dean, he does what every good scientist would do - a series of secret experiments in his basement. After bringing his roomie's girlfriend's dead cat back to some semblance of life, clinical trials begin at the local morgue (with predictably gruesome results).

With the exception of one particularly disturbing scene (you'll know it when you see it), the film is gleefully gory. West dispatching a faculty member bent on stealing his work with a shovel to the head is par for the genre. Venomously hissing "plagiarist!" as he swings? Comedy gold.

While the dead aren't likely to shamble from their graves anytime soon, advances in resuscitation including therapeutic hypothermia have pushed back the medical point of no return, and recent evidence shows that perhaps much of the damage done to oxygen-starved brain cells is caused more by the sudden reintroduction of oxygen during a medical intervention than its deprivation. Rather than jump start an oxygen-starved brain with pure oxygen, we may instead want to more gently awaken the cells with gradual oxygenation. It'll have to do until West's glowing serum is perfected - "mindless homocidal madness" is one of those side effects that the FDA really frowns upon.

Mimic

Disease-fighting bioengineered insects that rapidly evolve into human-sized superbugs capable of mimicking humans. What's not to like? Mimickry is a survival mechanismrelatively common in nature. While it's extremely doubtful that such rapid changes could occur, I have to give them points for originality.

Alien

The life cycle of a xenomorph - egg, facehugger, chestburster, and fully-grown alien warrior - might seem needlessly complex, but there are parasites here on earth that make exploding out of John Hurt's chest look easy by comparison. Clonorchis sinensis, the liver fluke, passes through a snail and a fish before ending up inside one of us.

As unpleasant as an egg-implanting facehugger might be, at least it puts you to sleep. When the wasp Ampulex compressa finds its chosen prey, a cockroach, it uses its specially-designed stinger to perform a gruesome bit of brain surgery after an initial sting. The roach ends up with a dose of venom delivered directly into the part of its brain responsible for flight reflex. Once this is done, the roach is as docile as a lamb - the wasp grabs hold of its antenna and guides it home, where the roach gets a fatal wasp larva implantation. Facehuggers may be rather forward, but at least they don't ride you around like a sacrificial pony.

If you think that sort of behavior-tweaking couldn't happen in humans, keep in mind that quarter of Americans are infected with Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite capable of making rats think that seeking out cats is a good idea. The parasite wants to get into the cat's stomach and doesn't much care how it gets there. Some research suggests that toxoplasma-infected humans are also affected - men become less intelligent and more withdrawn, while women become more outgoing and promiscuous.

It might also explain why Chekhov seemed so mopey after Khan stuck that worm in his ear.

While some of the essay is a bit of a stretch, author Tim Mitchell does raise a number of interesting points for genre hounds. He explains why it's significant that the Mimic movies are located in an urban environment (vs. the deserts of Tarantula and Them!), and he has a lot of terrific observations about how the Mimic movies express fears about transgenic animals and crops. And, of course, how they express fears about other things too:

In “Mimic 2,” Remi cannot find a boyfriend who understands her but nevertheless cannot shake the sexual designs of a male Judas Breed insect — a suitor that Remi understands better than her human suitors because of her background in entomology.

Check it out.

Pictures of Insect Men [via PopPolitics]

What could be scarier than a bunch of new agey doctors giving you weird drugs while you're pregnant with Satan, or maybe an alien? Watch Mia Farrow try to cope with city life while pregnant with . . . something. It's all just typical New York stuff in Rosemary's Baby (1968), the ultimate urban mom horror-scifi monsterfest.

Speaking of scary babies, the man who brought you the ultimate evil baby movie It's Alive, Larry Cohen, made one of the great early-80s NY monster movies: Q the Winged Serpent (1982). Not only does it feature amazing stop-motion work on the monster — some sort of resurrected Aztec god — but you simply cannot beat a movie where a semi-naked lady sunbathing on her NY rooftop is snatched up and eaten by a winged lizard.
V, the Miniseries (1983) featured seemingly-nice aliens who came from a ship hovering over New York, but who would later rip off their human skins to reveal their hideous, reptile faces and evil natures. Though they claimed that they wanted to be friends with humans, it turned out they just wanted to eat us, turn us into soldiers, and use us as slaves. Much of the miniseries takes place in New York, though the human resistance to the aliens is located (improbably) in Los Angeles.

In response to rumors that alligators and other nasties were turning mutant in New York's sewers, a band of filmmaking geniuses brought you C.H.U.D., (1984) a tale about "cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers" who come out at night to eat New Yorkers. Now let's not get too picky about details, since if these creatures aren't human it's not exactly cannibalistic for them to eat people. One of the best B-movies of the 80s, if only due to the frantic efforts in movie ads to tie the flick into "current events."

And then, of course, there's the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man who almost destroyed New York in Ghostbusters (1984). Best giant monster ever.

In 1985, Greg Bear gave us the first nanotechnology "gray goo" scenario in his memorable novel Blood Music. In it, an experiment with nanotech goes horribly wrong after a Jekyll-ish scientist injects the nanites into his bloodstream and they become self-aware. After disassembling the scientist's body, they go on a global rampage, turning humans into the raw materials for their new cities. There's an amazing scene where a character looks out over New York City after its conversion to nanotech and says most of the city "looked like it was covered in brown and black blankets."

One of the best monsters ever to hit New York starred (not surprisingly) in a mostly-forgotten movie by Guillermo Del Toro (director of Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth) called Mimic (1997). In it, giant cockroaches (you can see one in the top image) from the NY sewers learn to emulate human form in order to camouflage themselves, hide in the subways, and EAT PEOPLE. Seriously great human-size monsters here. Mira Sorvino stars as the detective on their trail.

We try not to speak of Roland Emmerich's U.S. version of Godzilla (1998), but there it is. The movie was made; it had a really lame CGI version of Godzilla in it; New York was attacked. There, I admitted the movie exists. Now I will close my eyes and start chanting again.

And of course no list of NY monsters would be complete without at least a cursory nod to the Fantastic Four, since pretty much every Marvel hero lives in New York anyway. That's why Galactus attacked New York in the most recent Fantastic Four movie. Galactus is just a scary cloud in the movie, but looks more like a regular giant monster or maybe a giant robot in the comic books.

And the outlier: A giant chicken terrorizes Hoboken in Daniel Pinkwater's young-adult novel The Hoboken Chicken Emergency (1977). Later made into a movie, the novel is great stuff — goofy and smart — plus it's the only story we can think of about giant chickens set in New Jersey.

• Danny Boyle chose to make Sunshine instead of the sequel to 28 Days Later, because he's not a custodian, he's an innovator. (Although he's hinted lately he may make 28 Years Later.) Boyle has alternated between science fiction movies and "realistic" films with surreal touches. Trainspotting and Shallow Grave are both set in the real world, but a veil of unreality clings to both of them. (Not just the ceiling baby, but Ewan McGregor's unraveling characters in both films.) Zombie movie 28 Days Latermanages the near-impossible: it actually manages to feel post-apocalyptic without killing off its entire cast in the first half hour. But Sunshine is Boyle's greatest achievement. The story of a small crew on a desperate mission tor reignite the sun, it manages to blend the horror thriller with the trippy cosmic film. But both genres have a steel underpinning of hard science and psychological complexity, and everything feels like it's happening for a real reason. Upcoming project: Boyle's next film is Slumdog Millionaire, about an illiterate kid who tries to become a contestant on a Hindi game show.
• Guillermo Del Toro is best known for the acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth, one of the most powerful — and darkest — explorations of escapism ever filmed. But he also made two of the best genetic-engineering thrillers of all time: Blade II and Mimic. (Mimic was originally supposed to be a 30-minute segment in an "anthology" film featuring a segment from Boyle.) Both films feature monsters created by science. In Mimic, a scientist creates a super-insect to destroy cockroaches that are carrying disease. But the super-insect evolves into a giant monster that can assume human form. And in Blade, vampires hack their own genome to create near-invincible creatures. Upcoming projects: Del Toro is filming Hellboy 2. He's also working on 3993, a ghost story about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and At The Mountains Of Madness, an HP Lovecraft adaptation set in Antarctica.

• Charlie Kaufman has only been a writer up to now. But he's managed to create a more consistent vision in his films than most directors. Films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovitch have a shared set of surreal concerns: characters journey into someone's head and discover, to your horror, that identity is always a first draft. Kaufman's characters are always revising their personal narratives and confronting different versions of themselves, like Kaufman and his twin in Adaptation. It's also worth hunting down the little-known Human Nature (directed by Eternal Sunshine's Michel Gondry) in which a mad scientist tries to train a mouse to use a salad fork. Upcoming project: Kaufman's directing his first film, Synecdoche, New York, due out next year. (It's about a director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his cast, creating ever-stranger New York stories inside a theater which is a scale model of New York.)
• Kathryn Bigelow. Her best-known science fiction film is 1995's Strange Days, about a former cop who sells bootlegs of people's memories on data discs. And then one of those discs turns out to contain someone's memories of murdering a prostitute. But Bigelow's CV is full of claustrophobic thrillers with weird touches, from 1987's vampire romp Near Dark and 1990's cop drama Point Blank to 2002's K19: The Widowmaker. As with Boyle, even her real-world stories are so unnerving they feel like alternate reality. Upcoming project: Her next film is an Iraq war drama, The Hurt Locker.