Shark Week: We Only Come Out At Night

There are ways to tell what kind of movie you're going to watch even before the movie starts. Sometimes you know an actor or a director and the kind of movies they make. Other times it's the subject matter. Still others it's from what people of have said about a movie. It's rare though that you get a warning from the DVD itself...

Oh boy. This should be awesome. You'd think I was watching the newly discovered footage from Metropolis or something. Not some shitty shark movie from 1987. A movie I picked up to review for last year's Shark Week but never got around to. A movie staring Treat Williams and Antonio Fargas. Yeah, THAT Antonio Fargas.

Let that sink in...IT.HAS.FUCKING.HUGGY BEAR.IN.IT.


I'd like to tell you what it was about, but to be honest, I'm not sure. I'm not sure the writer or director are sure either. I'm not sure Treat Williams knew what the hell was going on. Something about a cd and wire tapping. And some business types who wanted to kill a guy because of the wire tapping. And some diamonds. And a cd. Oh, I mentioned the cd already. And there was a shark. The shark was kind of secondary though. It was there, but the story, if it can be called that, wasn't about the shark. And Huggy Bear was in it.

Did I mention that it didn't make any sense? That's on top of it just being plain bad. Not the good kind of bad either. Not Death Bed bad. Not Octopus 2 bad. No. This was the kind of bad that can't be described with words.

It's kind of like this:



Yeah. It's a lot like that. The entire movie. Its only real redeeming quality is a molotov cocktail fight near the end. Which sounds cooler than it really was. 3 one eyed sharks called cyclops with a cd in their bellies out of 10.

I'm not sure why, but I expected better

Look, contrary to what you may have been told, I'm no idiot. When I put in a movie like Monster, I typically know what I'm getting myself into. Bad acting, bad effects, nonsensical plot, etc. I know not to expect to be mentally fulfilled by movies like these.

Still, it's not many movies that can leave me with my jaw dropped in awe of just how bad it is.

Monster is the 'story' (I use the quotes because it's presented as Blair Witch style fact) of two girls who travel to Tokyo to make a documentary about global warming. During their interviews something happens. At first, everyone thinks it's an earthquake, but no, soon they discover that it's something more ALIVE. It turns out that it's some sort of giant tentacled beast. I say 'some sort' because you never get a clear shot of the creature, just some flailing arms.

In other words, we're supposed to believe that two documentarians would debate amongst themselves how big a story this is and then, every time the monster was nearby, they would only use the video to get shots of each other, not the titular monster. Fine. I'll but that, I guess.

Actually, that's not even that big of a problem to me. I'll be the first to admit that the imagination is scarier than anything that can be put onto a tv screen. No, my biggest complaint is with the editing. And, according to the credits, that means I'm choosing to blame David Michael Latt for this debacle. It's meant to be the 'raw footage' from the event, but it just feels...not raw but boring. If this had been a real event, there would have been much more interesting events on the tapes. For example, over the credits they play these little 'man on the street' type interviews. Where were these during the movie? They were by far more interesting than anything uttered by our main characters. Large gaps in the film, as shown by blank screens, just kept taking you out of the movie. And, I still want to know what kind of camera they had to shoot this thing because it had to have been the cheapest piece of junk they could find.

I can deal with a movie that's bad. I can deal with a movie that has no budget. I can deal with a movie that is a little light on story. I can't deal with a movie that's boring though. And Monster for all it's craptasticly cheesy promise was BORING. I'm not going to blame the duo of Sarah Lynch and Erin Sullivan, I think they did okay with what little they had to work with. Hell, considering the budget, even the effects were ok. No, like I said, this falls squarely on David Michael Latt and director Erik Estenberg. Tighten the editing up a bit, get rid of some of the 'failing camera' gimicks and Monster would make for an almost enjoyable bad movie.

Someday, I will have to give a movie a 1, but not today. Monster gets 3 video cameras that they could have looted while wondering around an abandoned Tokyo that would have been a vast improvement over the one they started with out of 10.

Milla, what happened? You used to make such good movies...

I really wanted to do something special for my 300th post. Why? I don't know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Boy was I wrong.

I decided I wanted to see a brand new movie. Something at the old cinema. Something I could overpay for and watch among strangers. And, since I was in Atlanta, and away from my dvd player at home, it seemed like a reasonable plan to go up to Atlantic Station to see Resident Evil: Extinction.

What a piece of shit.*

No, I'm serious. Total garbage.

Look, I really liked the first movie. I thought that it had some really good moments and worked well as a zombie movie. And then came the sequel. Which, I enjoyed. It was a good action movie, I wished they'd done more with the zombies, but Nemesis was cool. The third one though, I just can't explain.

It's at this point that I would normally give a rundown of what happened. The problem here is that...well, NOTHING happened. For 95 minutes, no one did anything, and nothing was accomplished. This was supposed to be Milla's last turn as Alice, the genetically mutated zombie killer, and they left the whoel thing wide open for a fourth movie starring Milla.

"What's going on here? I have no idea..."

I'm going to give you a bit of a spoiler here. Alice's blood is the key to curing the T virus outbreak, and at one point she is in a facility with everything she needs to make the cure, so what does she do? Does she make a cure? Who the fuck knows! They never tell us. She raises an army of Alice clones to go after the CEO of Umbrella. End of movie. That's it.

The movie exists almost entirely to kill everyone off. Carlos and LJ return and are a part of Claire's convoy, cruising around the desert aimlessly. They're looking for supplies, but have no base, and no destination. Until Alice comes along with a journal from a dead guy who claims that their might be safety in Alaska. They go to Vegas looking for gas, at which point everyone dies. Well, most everyone. Well, most everyone except for the people who had just been killed by the zombie crows.

Oh, and Alice has mind powers.

Things just happen for no reason. Nothing is explained. And in what should be the closing act of your saga, nothing is wrapped up. The movie itself is an exercise in futility. There is nothing to become emotionally invested in. It's a group of entirely one dimensional characters. There is no real conflict in the movie. And there is nothing for them to do. I'd say it was the epitome of banality if I knew what banal** meant.

Rather than showing any real action, director Russell Mulcahy uses quick edits to give the appearance of action. This is a lazy technique used by incompetent directors everywhere. It's a way for implying action when you are incapable of actually showing anything. It's a cheap trick.

And good old Paul WS Anderson goes on, once again, to show what a fucking hack he is. The only thing he's worse at than writing seems to be directing. So, I guess it could have been worse. Can someone please tell me why Hollywood keeps letting this guy work?

The upside of the entire experience was seeing the trailers for Iron Man and 30 Days of Night. Both of which look pretty fucking sweet.

Resident Evil: Extinction gets 3 zombies swarming around the compound until the fence is blown wide open and the mysteriously decide to stay out of the compound of their own volition out of 10. And, I'd like to add a simple plea...please stop. Let this be the last movie. I don't think I can take much more.

*In all fairness, I reacted the same way after seeing Episode 3 for the first time. I now love it.
**I know what it means.

Those shoes aren't red!

Sometimes, it's fun just to go to Best Buy and look at movies you've never heard of and try to find something good in that barren landscape of anonymity. Like finding a needle in a haystack. Sometimes you find something amazingly fun, like Kamikazee Girls the rest of the time, you pick up something like The Red Shoes.

The Red Shoes is a South Korean movie written and directed by Yong-gyun Kim. The only description that the back cover has is "Mysteriously abandoned on a subway platform lies a pair of red shoes... to die for" The front cover just has the title with the tag line "one size kills all" and a bloody shoe with a decomposing foot still in it. At this point, I'm thinking "wow, this looks pretty sweet."

So, I take it home, where I decide to watch it. The movie starts on a subway platform where a young lady see an abandoned pair of shoes. She goes to grab them and put them on, but another girl saw them too. And they fight for them. And the second girl wins and walks off, wearing the shoes. As she's walking away, the shoes eat her feet!

And at this point, I'm thinking "wow, this looks pretty sweet." I was so wrong. The movie didn't make any fucking sense. The mom finds the shoes next, and her husband is cheating on her, so she turns on the humidifier and goes to find a new apartment with her daughter. Then, apparently, she meets an interior designer/squatter who is designing an office. Then the mom and daughter are fighting over the shoes, and I mean FIGHTING. And then the mom falls in love with the designer or something. And then, her friend takes the shoes and has an "accident" and gets her feet cut off. And then...I don't know, man, this movie had holes Hannibal could lead his army though. The mom really did sum the whole thing up at one point...

Yeah, what are you talking about? What the hell is going on here? The most interesting thing about this is that it feels like there's a whole Lord of the Rings thing going on. The shoes are the One Ring. The mom is Frodo, the daughter is...well, not Sam, maybe Boromir? The designer could be Sam though. And the subway is Mount Doom. In that regard, it's kinda interesting. It's like this epic quest to destroy a pair of shoes. Except, no one is looking to destroy them.

The movie wasn't very good. And, the shoes weren't even red! They were pink. All in all, I'd say it's something like 3 lone sneakers on the side of the road out of 10.