6 Movie Monsters That Just Wouldn't Work

6 The Facehugger

As seen in: Alien

The Facehugger was just one of several horrific stages in the life cycle of the alien race in Alien. Basically, the thing was an octopuss-looking abortion of squirming slime, whose whole purpose was to implant the next phase of itself into a host. And it did so by facerape.

It latched on to a guy's mouth and pumped its offspring down his throat, which later burst out of the poor fool's chest.

Why We Call Bullshit:

What do aliens eat? Do the movies ever establish that? Well, they'd better eat the exact same damned diet as humans, since their offspring apparently have to survive on the exact same nutrients found in a human body. After all, a human embryo/fetus requires an incredibly specific set of nutrients, so much so that artificial wombs are still science fiction. And keep in mind, this species didn't evolve specifically to use humans as hosts--as far as we know, they had never encountered humans before the events of the first film.

Alien tries to bullshit its way around this by saying that the Alien's DNA merges with the host; this becomes totally ridiculous when you realize that, despite sharing a good 99.9 percent of our DNA with chimps, we're still genetically incompatible with the fuckers. Since the Alien is way, way less like us than the chimp, this would be like saying a Komodo Dragon could successfully impregnate a human.

But even that analogy breaks down when you realize that the Alien was not only completely different from humans, it was completely different from every living creature on the planet. Yes, unlike carbon-based life (a.k.a. fucking everything), the Alien was a silicon-based creature: At one point in the movie, we see it replacing its exoskeleton with polarized silicon, which would be like if you replaced your skin with glass.

To update our comparison, the Facehugger's reproductive method would be like if your window came to life and made passionate love to you, and then a week later you gave birth to shot glasses.

5 The Sarlacc

As seen in: Return of the Jedi

The Sarlacc, for the zero of you who've never seen Return of the Jedi, was a desert creature that strongly resembled a sandy, tentacled anus. It lived mostly underground, except for its gaping pothole of a mouth which, along with its 37,000 layers of teeth were exposed in the hopes of securing some clumsy grub.

Why We Call Bullshit:

There's no way the Sarlacc could get enough sustenance to survive.

First off, the creature you saw in Return of the Jedi--presumably an adult--was completely immobile and relied on prey just rolling down into their mouths, sort of like the pitcher plant. Except the pitcher plant (A) can blend into its surroundings since it looks like another plant and not like a massive hole in the ground, (B) it doesn't live in a fucking desert, so there are actually plentiful insects for it to trap and (C) is a plant, so it has sunlight and photosynthesis going for it. The Sarlacc has none of that.

Also, the pitcher plant isn't fucking enormous. You can't run the metabolism on a creature that size without a massive amount of food. "But wait," you say, "it's never really clear how large the Sarlacc is - it was buried in the sand, for God's sake!" This is Star Wars we're talking about here. Professor Wookiee Hans Deetoo has it covered:

See that tiny bit up there with the tentacles? That's the part you saw in the movie. Turns out the vast majority of the Sarlacc is underneath that, sort of like an iceberg--except icebergs don't need to eat.

According to that image, the mouth is three meters wide; assuming it's to scale, the damn thing was roughly 45 meters long, making it way bigger than even the blue whale, an animal that needs up to four tons of food daily.

Wookiepedia tries to bullshit their way around that by saying that the Sarlacc digested its food over a thousand years, which would be like saying that you could survive on a single Oreo for your entire adult life as long as you ate it slowly enough.

4 King Kong

As seen in: King Kong, duh

Aside from a truly stunning view of Naomi Watts's cleavage and yet another reason why Jack Black should stick to comedy, the 2005 remake of King Kong's biggest contribution to film was finally giving audiences a look at the big ape as he would really appear, instead of just a guy in a rubber suit. Or at least it would have, if Kong was even remotely possible.

Why We Call Bullshit:

Gravity.

Hint: There's a reason you don't see animals this size wandering around on land. Kong's frame couldn't have supported his own weight, much less been a threat to anyone he couldn't reach from a seated position.

When you "scale up" an animal--or anything--every time you double the size, the mass is multiplied eight-fold. In Kong's case, increasing his height to 25 feet tall (seven times the height of a gorilla) would make his weight 60 tons, roughly 270 times the weight of that same gorilla. There's simply no way to support that kind of weight on two or even four paws; trying to do so would be like trying to balance a space shuttle on its nose.

A researcher at the Institute of London who apparently had nothing better to do concluded that in the best-case scenario, Kong wouldn't be able to run, jump or tackle anything without crumpling up into a heap of broken bones. In the worst case scenario, he wouldn't even be able to stand at all. So, going by science, the climactic final scene of the film should really consist of the giant monkey slowly shuffling towards the Empire State Building before tripping, falling and destroyed every important organ in his body.

3 Clover

As seen in: Cloverfield

"Now, hold on Cracked," you say, "there is no way anyone could figure out what the Cloverfield monster looked like from that shaky cell-phone-camera footage they called a movie." You obviously haven't seen the licensed Clover doll.

Or the painstakingly detailed (fictional) background created to promote the thing. And if you did, you'd know that Clover came from the bottom of the ocean where it laid dormant for thousands of years before it was disturbed by a corrupt Japanese corporation, who were also the ones accidentally feeding it the steroids that got it so big. So, basically, Clover is like Sleeping Beauty, if Sleeping Beauty awoke in the ocean with a bad case of 'roid rage and the munchies.

Why We Call Bullshit:

If it could survive at the bottom of the ocean, it sure as hell couldn't wreak havoc on dry land. Hell, it couldn't have even made the swim.

First of all, this creature had literally never lived anywhere else up to the events of the movie, so suddenly emerging from the sea and tromping around Times Square would be the equivalent of a newborn human baby surviving on the surface of Mars without a space suit. Even if the thing is built like a crab (which breathes water but also has the ability to survive for long stretches out of it), those air-breathing parts haven't gotten used for millennia.

But all of that is moot, because while the New York Harbor is pretty disgusting what with all the dead hookers and toxic refuse, it doesn't come close to being salty enough to be livable for a deep-sea behemoth. If they had just shot this movie on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic or something, there would be no problem--but apparently they just couldn't pass up an opportunity to destroy the Statue of Liberty yet again.

2 The Alien Bugs

As seen in: Starship Troopers

The Bugs in Starship Troopers are an alien race, sometimes known as Arachnids, even though they have no resemblance to Earth arachnids, but whatever. The point is, they're hostile and they're huge. The warrior bugs were the ones we see the most in the movie and they were nine feet long. The brain bug was bigger, but it didn't look much like a bug at all...

Why We Call Bullshit:

Bugs could have never evolved to that size on their planet.

You might be wondering why giant bugs are so impossible, seeing as how pretty big ones existed on Earth in prehistoric times. Here's the deal: Several million years ago, the oxygen content was a good 50 to 60 percent higher than it is now, which is important because as you increase the size of an insect its trachea (breathing tubes) grow exponentially faster than the rest of it, until they take up too much of its body mass for it to function.

Now, since the humans in the movie don't wear any sort of breathing apparatus while on the Bug planet, Klendathu, we can assume they also breathe the same nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere we do. And since humans can't breathe higher oxygen concentrations without side effects like lung damage and blindness, the oxygen level on the Klendathu must be around modern-day levels. Which in turn means that the soldiers should actually be fighting six-inch long bugs.

Then again, it's possible that the soldiers were wearing some sort of Darth Vader-esque respirators under their skin. If that's the case, then all they would need to defeat the Bugs would be a single soldier, a pile of bricks and a good throwing arm.

For the same reason that a drinking straw gets easier to bend if you put a kink in it, bugs have exoskeletons that will buckle if you hit them with enough. So if you loft a cement block or two at one of the Bug's legs, it would collapse faster than a house of cards on the deck of the Titanic. Suffice to say that the war (and Casper van Dien's career) would be over in a matter of days.

1 Everything on Pandora

As seen in: Avatar

Unlike Sarlacc up there, the Na'vi of Pandora look like something you'd maybe want to get to know. Or at least wouldn't run from in pants-wetting terror. In fact, everything on Pandora has a vague Earthy look to it. Probably to secure the viewers' sympathies, not because James Cameron couldn't come up with more original looking creatures. Totally not that.

Why We Call Bullshit:

Because the idea that an almost identical humanoid organism could independently evolve on another planet is ludicrous.

Out of the millions upon millions of species that exist on Earth, there was only ever one intelligent bipedal primate: humanity. Finding a race of whatevers who look almost exactly like us plus a few extra eyes, some body paint and smoking hot bodies isn't just wishful thinking, it's plain stupid. And especially if you're an amazingly popular and powerful director with access to billions of dollars worth of cutting-edge CGI so there's literally no limit to the creatures you can come up with.

They could look like anything. Monkey-faced bar stools. Spleens with Care Bear icons for mouths. Anything! But why bother with all that originality business when you can come up with something that looks exactly like goddamn humans, albeit ones who have been dropped in a vat of blue dye and then undergone horrific plastic surgery to look more like cats.

Not content with this bit of biological plagiarism, James Cameron also applied the same "take two Earth animals and combine them" principle to every other creature on Pandora with equally absurd results.

In the final analysis, though, we can understand why Cameron decided to go for the unrealistic Earth-based approach. Sure, it may have made more biological sense for Jake Sully to fall in love with, say, a sentient ball of tar. But that would have deprived the viewing audience of something far more important than scientific accuracy: alien boobies.

But all he needed to do was add about two sentences in the script. Here:

SULLY
You know, it's amazing how 100 years ago we humans populated Pandora
with species really similar to what we had on Earth, as an experiment.

COLONEL MILES
And now we gonna' kill 'em all!

There. Plot hole plugged, geeks are happy. Then you might have a movie that would make some money.

Want to write articles like this for Cracked, become internet famous and make cash? Go here and say you want in. No experience necessary, but you must be awesome.

In case you want more of your favorite sci-fi flicks ruined, check out 5 Awesome Sci-Fi Inventions (That Would Actually Suck). But don't worry, you can get high to kill the pain by checking out 5 Real Ways to Get High Straight Out of Science Fiction.

And stop by our Top Picks (Updated today! Shit!) to see why Brockway's liver shouldn't exist.

And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get dick jokes sent straight to your news feed.