Ugly Pageant: Movies

Who's the foulest of them all? Part 2

In pretty distractions: this week there was a hilarious Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York City, for which multiples of young curly-mopped boys (including a brief cameo by the real Timmy) competed for a six-foot trophy, $50, and candy, only to be dispersed to another park location when the cops busted the organizer for not having a permit. One fan favorite, according to this cheeky article in GQ, was lifted over the crowd who chanted, “The people’s princess.”

Which brings me to the pretty palette-cleanse past-time in our household, where we have been catching up on The Crown series and I again find myself grieving the untimely loss of gorgeous Diana through episodes surrounding her fatal paparazzi chase in Paris vs. the Queen’s stoicism.

But this is not what I signed up for when I declared a three-week Ugly Trilogy surrounding Halloween, so my daughter just suggested another Netflix for me to watch—not because it’s good but because it fits the theme. “The Uglies” is a movie adapted from a YA dystopian novel—“superficial” she aptly called it—whose premise is that any kids up to the age of 16 are officially dismissed as “Uglies” until they come of age and can get the required surgeries and procedures to plasticize their natural looks into “Pretties” who get to party in a nicer place. Quite a statement, if done better, on our contemporary culture of selfies and striving for more of a Kardashian lip and fake face with new eye color options, etc. (One girl really wants hers to be gold.) But a Reddit user says (and my teen agrees):

The acting is terrible, the pace all over the place, the positive message of ‘pretty on the inside’ completely undermined, everything is entirely by the numbers and predictable, the effects are awful and the world building and lore is just stupid and heavy handed.

So if we’re going to do ugly, let’s not pussyfoot around it.

Last week marked segment one of an audience-judged contest to find the Foulest in the Land. Our first vicious contestants hailed from the districts of Toys. The clear losers with the most votes in our hideous poll are (so far) the Boglins at 50%, with runner up Madballs at 25%, and an equal third at 13% for Fugglies and My Pet Monsters, with none for overly cute underdog UglyDoll.

Now onto the badboys of Cinema, complete with horrible footage to prove it. These celluloid monsters benefit from the ingenuity of mostly b-budget special effects to uglify them farther than any touchable concoction for a playroom ever could go. I dug through many a disgusting forum and film clip to find the final contenders. Certainly missing here are countless others I’m sure you can help me list in the Comments. Nosferatu seems handsome compared to these freaks. The characters that people online seem to get the most skeeved by seem to be those who lack skin. The common look they are going for is: gelatinous flesh. So sit back in your Barcalounger with a frothing cup of something bad for you, ideally with indefinable chunks, and enjoy the shit-show.

THE FLY

As I wrote in an infested former post:

In Cronenberg’s Fly (1986), scientist Dr. Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) has the hubris to put himself in his teleportation machine, unaware there’s a fly in it. Getting reconstituted and fused with fly at first makes him viral, sexy and strong, which his girlfriend Veronica (Geena Davis) initially finds appealing were it not for those few harsh hairs sprouting from his shoulder blade. But soon it’s too much for her to bear when the transformation degrades him into a disgusting mass of humanoid raw hamburger—ultimately resembling his first failed experiment that seemed to turn that poor monkey inside out.

Experience this film’s awful final scene here when anything once resembling Goldblum is fully converted into totally gross:

PALE MAN

Remember the naked white-skinned thing with eyes on his palms in Pan’s Labyrinth whose favorite hobby is child-eating? Indeed, who can forget the brilliant Guillermo del Toro’s chilling fable and his wretched Pale Man. From a great look into this monster’s amorphous creation on LitHub.com:

The earliest take on the Pale Man, from Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), was of a wooden man with drawers in his chest. Inside one of them is a dagger that Ofelia has to find, but if she opens the wrong drawer, there’s a thin, long, slimy tongue that licks her face.

Guillermo was like, “No, no, no. We need something else.”

Next, we came up with a fat, old man, sitting at the banquet table, who suddenly becomes very thin.

Again, Guillermo was like, “No, no, no. Let’s change it.”

He wanted the Pale Man to be stick-thin with hanging skin, and for reference he gave us that Salvador Dali painting of melting clocks.

But he’s like, “I still don’t like it… Remove his eyes.”

I was like, “Remove his eyes? What the hell? But OK.”

Poor Ofelia meets this creepy dude here:

THE KENNEL-THING AKA DOG-THING

The unnameable creature from The Thing (1982) movie, campy cult favorite of many, burrows into your imagination with its tentacles, claws, and oh, is that a flower emerging with teeth? From Fandom, what starts as an ordinary dog takes a dark turn:

The creature splits open, developing a prehensile tongue, several spider-like legs and tentacles. Eventually, it develops a second head and becomes bloated and immobile. Bloated and pulsating, the Thing develops a pair of claws and escapes to the ceiling. Its flesh rips open to reveal a flower-like appendage composed of canine tongues and teeth.

No words for what we can only call The Thing:

THE SLITHER ALIEN

The Slither alien organism in its final form is arguably the worst version of many bad things accruing icks in this gross abomination of comedy-horror, but I prefer the woman pregnant with a million wormy babies, or as YouTube calls it, the scene when The Big Fat Breeding Alien Explodes. Says Rotten Tomatoes:

A slimy, B-movie homage oozing with affection for low-budget horror films, Slither (2006) is creepy and funny—if you’ve got the stomach for it.

THE FROM BEYOND DOCTOR

This 1986 atrocity features a mad scientist, Dr. Pretorius, who, like our dangerous genius in The Fly, makes a contraption, The Resonator, which of course goes runs amuck. The bad Dr. gets decapitated but that’s just the beginning of his troubles. From The Guardian:

When the contraption is switched on, From Beyond transforms into a queasy, heliotrope nightmare. The doors of perception are opened and the group discover that, far from being dead, Pretorius has crossed over into the “beyond.” He reappears through a glow of psychedelic mauves as a lumpen shape of greasy, gelatinous flesh, hell-bent on bringing everyone over to the other side. The group pull the plug, only to find they have become addicted to the pleasurable effects of the other dimension…

Pretorius is an increasingly libidinous, sludgy monstrosity, while the team face attacks from insects, eels and saw-toothed worms that look as though they were dredged up from Frank Herbert’s worst Dune nightmares.

Oh my, however will you choose from such outstandingly grotesque company? Weigh in on the homeliest here and return for the Myth monsters next time: