The 5 Most Half-Assed Monsters in Movie History

5

The Gingerdead Man

The Monster:

Pastry.

Why it Could Have Been Scary

Six words: Gary Busey is the Gingerdead Man. Picture it: Busey dressed up in a gingerbread man costume, hacking, slashing and making pastry-based puns along the way. You can't imagine the amount of money we would have paid to see that. Actually, you probably could have imagined it (it's four dollars).

"I don't know where I am right now!"

Why it Wasn't

Well Gary Busey is the Gingerdead Man, kind of. Gary only appears in the movie's first five minutes as the world's worst robber: He enters a diner, riffles through the cash register but takes no money, shoots people instead, gets caught and, in the end, is sent to the electric chair. So what we get from then on is a very, very shitty puppet voiced by Gary Busey.

And to transform Gary Busey into said puppet, we have to take one hell of a deus ex machina roller coaster: Busey's corpse is cremated and then his evil mom mixes the ashes into a gingerbread mix which she delivers to a local bakery. There, a worker accidentally cuts himself and bleeds a gallon of blood over the mixture that he bakes anyway, and then the oven is hit with a power surge causing the mixture to turn into the Gingerdead Man.

Not all that realistic, according to the experts we talked to.

Most Pathetic Attempt at Horror

Allow us to take you to the film's climatic showdown (WARNING: SPOILERS!). We see Gingerdead Man's absolute failure as a movie monster demonstrated:

In order for him to be scary, they had to arm him with a revolver.

Though we do have to agree this was probably the only ending possible ("Why don't we just have one of the good guys eat him?"). Still, when you use "Got Milk" as a pithy bon mot in your screenplay, you officially must turn in your Writer's Guild Card. It's true, look it up.

4

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats

The Monster:

Yes, a bed that eats people.

Why it Could Have Been Scary

Successful horror often makes us afraid of everyday, mundane things. Jaws brought terror to swimming in the ocean. The Blair Witch Project spooked us out of any future camping trips. The Ring exploited our natural fear of wet children. So the people behind Death Bed must have thought, "What's something people do every day? Sleep! Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. It's like Hannibal Lecter meets IKEA. Bang, done. Someone pass the cocaine."

Why it Wasn't

To capture its prey, the bed possesses all the wily powers of, well, a bed: cuddliness, soft pillows and 1,000 thread count sheets. Luckily for the ravenous bed, a bevy of horny, and somewhat unattractive, youngsters come upon its spooky old mansion and say, "See that run-down, abandoned mansion stinking with the smells of death and demonic digestive juices? We should totally FUCK in there!"

3

The Mangler

The Monster:

A laundry folding machine.

Why It Could Have Been Scary

The Mangler is based on a Stephen King short story, and everybody loves Stephen King. Maybe too much; there was a long stretch in King's career where he'd just shit into a fax machine and send it to his publisher with a note reading, "Print this!"

2

The Lift

1

Night of the Lepus

The Monster:

Giant bunnies.

Why it Could Have Been Scary

The movie is based on a book called The Year of the Angry Rabbit (we shit you not) written by an Australian guy named Russell Reading Braddon. Amazingly, Braddon wrote 31 more books; including The Naked Island, a chronicle of his four years as a Japanese prisoner of war during WWII that sold more than a million copies.

All we can say is what those Nazis did in their prison camps can't compare to what the Japanese were doing if they managed to warp a celebrated writer into a man who wrote a book called The Year of the Angry Rabbit. Hell, they could have made a scary movie about that instead.

Why It's Not Scary

Let's just state the obvious: A giant rabbit doesn't sound like a monster, it sounds like next year's must have Christmas gift. Fuck that animatronic triceratops toy. We want an enormous Mr. Fluffers! We want to ride him around!

The studio must have had a hunch their monster was pretty lame, because they didn't even feature it in the trailer. "Wow that movie looks scary. I gotta find out what the monster is." That's what filmgoers back in the 70s said when they were exposed to this trailer. We're picturing a guy running out of the matinee, waving his arms at the people standing in line. "IT'S RABBITS! DON'T GO IN THERE! THE MONSTERS ARE BIG FLUFFY RABBITS! SAVE YOUR GODDAMNED MONEY!"

Most Pathetic Attempt at Horror

The first 40 seconds of this attempt at terror is cuter than that hamster on a piano video. Look at the herd of huge, adorable bunnies with their big twitching noses!

Then, it turns right into the rabbit attack scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, complete with the ridiculous splatter of blood around the neck as the rabbit claws out her throat for no fucking reason.

Holy shit, you thought we wanted to own one of these before? Science, get to work on making these things. We've got a town we want to terrorize, from the back of our huge, killer bunny.

[Just to pre-empt those of you who are about to ask why we didn't call out The Day of the Triffids and its ridiculous huge, lumbering killer flowers, we already did that in this article. We didn't want to seem like we were piling on.]

For movies that are depressing for a whole other reason check out 5 Awesome Movies Ruined By Last-Minute Changes. Or find out if there really is a killer elevator out there, in 6 Bizarre Real World Versions of Fictional Monsters.

And visit Cracked.com's Top Picks to find your very own giant killer bunny.