If you've ever taken a film class, then you've heard of the auteur theory. If haven't heard of it, auteur theory holds that just like a written work has an "author," so does a film. Now, if you know even the barest amount about movie making, you know that just one film--from the cheapest indie production to a Hollywood mega-blockbuster--is a hugely collaborative effort. Still, auteur theory usually holds that a film has an author and that author is the director.

Now, there are some outliers. Some will argue, as you might expect, that the screenwriter is the auteur, or maybe the executive producer, or the cinematographer--you know, the person who is responsible for how a film looks. And obviously some directors are easier to argue as auteurs than others: John Carpenter is an auteur because he writes, directs, and often composes the music; Stanley Kubrick was an auteur because you know when you're watching a Kubrick film; Joe Dante is an auteur because his works so often touch on the same themes and motifs.

Meanwhile, almost nobody would call Tobe Hooper or Jonathan Frakes an auteur. That's not an insult to Hooper or Frakes, because being an auteur doesn't automatically make you a good director or mean that your movies are always going to be good. It just means that, as a director, you don't have any quality that can make an audience go, "Yes, truly, this is a Jonathan Frakes film!"

So right about now you're wondering, "What the hell does auteur theory have to do with Godzilla, you pompous twit?" Well, first of all, Godzilla movies are still movies. Just because the Academy will never recognize one for an award, because they're too busy heaping praise on white guilt assuagers and the occasional rock-stupid blockbuster that has a "legitimate" director behind it, doesn't mean that Godzilla movies just pop out of the ground fully-formed like potatoes or Uruk-hai. Which means there is actual potential for an auteur to appear in the genre.

Oh, sure, it's still rather a rare event. Ishiro Honda is an obvious auteur. You could always tell when he was directing, even when it was something seemingly outside of his usual wheelhouse like Godzilla's Revenge. Jun Fukuda, on the other hand, is more of a default assumption. "Oh, Honda didn't direct this one? Must have been Fukuda, then." After the series' revival in 1984, forget it. Can you tell the difference between a Takao Okawara film and a Kazuki Omori one? I'm obsessed with Godzilla and I sure as hell can't.

However, there were still some auteurs waiting in the wings. I'm not talking about Shusuke Kaneko or Ryuhei Kitamura: those two were brought on as directors for the series specifically because of the kinds of films they were known for, so I don't need to argue for their status. No, I'm talking about Masaaki Tezuka.

Tezuka came onto the Godzilla series with today's film, and he delivered two more after that. All three films share common themes such as a strong female protagonist, the misuse of technology, the need to prove one's self, and the sins of the past being put right. All three films feature the music of Michiru Oshima--the first woman composer of the series, to my knowledge--and a recurring collaboration with a composer is a common aspect of an auteur.

However, as I said before, just because someone is an auteur does not mean that they automatically make good movies.

As with any Godzilla movie, Godzilla vs. Megaguirus needs to start by making sure we understand what continuity we're following. Well, actually, this film was probably the first one that had to do that. The Showa films all basically followed the same continuity from 1954 until 1975, excluding the bizarre outliers Destroy All Monsters and Godzilla's Revenge. When the series was rebooted in 1984 for the Heisei series, it ignored all but the original 1954 film and then continued on in its new continuity--the only monkey wrench in the works being the fact that a time travel plot in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah made the following films' continuity nigh incomprehensible because not every film remembered that plot line.

However, the third distinct series of Godzilla films, the Millennium series, was kicked off in 1999 by Godzilla 2000 as a desperate bid to erase the first American fiasco from public consciousness. It was supposedly another reboot, but the film's plot in no way required that you read it that way. It could just as easily be a direct sequel to Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. For some reason Toho decided that the film's follow-up should be another reboot. In fact, every film in the Millennium series is a reboot--with one notable exception.

Sadly, Sony didn't copy this model with their second Spider-Man series or we might have been spared The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Well, naturally, if you're going to go the route of just throwing out continuity whenever you feel like it, you need to establish what continuity you do have. Usually the answer is just, "Well, in 1954 Godzilla destroyed Tokyo and was killed, but now we have another one to deal with."Godzilla vs. Megaguirus proves to be the first to do something slightly different. By which, I mean they recreate some of the footage from the original Godzilla with this movie's suit--which is the same as the Godzilla 2000 suit, although there do seem to be some subtle differences that I can't put my finger on--and use that as a set-up for a big exposition bomb.

"I'm not addicted! I can stop eating these things any time I want!"

This is all delivered, in easily the best part of the film, via mock Newsreel footage. The Newsreel explains that Godzilla came ashore and wrecked Tokyo, before returning to the ocean. There was apparently either no Oxygen Destroyer in this continuity, or Dr. Serizawa actually kept his secret, because Japan decided to just rebuild Tokyo and move the capitol to Osaka--and I mean that literally, as we see the Diet Building is easily visible from Osaka Castle--and leave Godzilla the hell alone.

Apparently this worked, until 1966. Then Japan built their first nuclear plant in Tokai. Godzilla promptly appeared and destroyed the hell out of that. Somehow Japan's government correctly interpreted this to mean that Godzilla was attracted to nuclear power and would destroy any source of it within his chosen territory. Japan then fulfilled every hippy's dream by outlawing nuclear power and switching to wind, water, and solar energy.

Sadly for the hippies, it was not sufficient to meet Japan's increasing demand for energy. So, in 1996 an experimental form of "plasma energy" was set up in Osaka, which we see government official Motohiko Sugiura (Masato Ibu) gleefully announcing. Everybody was very excited about this, since it as a clean energy that could still do the work of nuclear energy. Who could be opposed to that?
The film proper opens in Osaka in 1996, as a squadron of troops commanded by Takuji Miyagawa (Toshiyuki Nagashima, who had rather a more significant role as Colonel Watarase in Gamera 2: Advent of Legion) is being deployed to stop Godzilla before he reaches the experimental reactor. So what awesome experimental weapons are this squad carrying that will allow them to take out Godzilla? Bazookas. No, not laser bazookas, not bazookas with drill rockets, or even homemade bazookas that shoot diamonds--these are regular bazookas. Understandably, the squad needs some serious pep talk from Miyagawa, and he especially focuses his pep talk at Kiriko Tsujimori (Misato Tanaka), who actually seems less "terrified out of her wits" and more "lost in thought" when he calls her to attention.

Well, the pep talk somehow holds even when the squad sees the beast they're supposed to be chasing after with the equivalent of pea shooters. Miyagawa advises them to aim for the legs and for a moment you begin to see the potential wisdom in the strategy. I mean, tanks have no hope of dodging Godzilla, but in theory a small group of infantry should escape his notice and have an easier time dodging his wrath.

Theory does not translate to practice. Human legs are not fast enough to get the troops to safety when Godzilla responds to their attacks by knocking buildings over on top of them. (This is where we get a good idea of how inconsistent the film's effects are--much of this sequence is great, but there's a shot of Godzilla's footsteps knocking over two garbage cans that is just sad) Most of the troops are crushed by Godzilla, succeeding only in delaying the great beast by making it stop its advance just long enough to kill them. Tsujimori waits near the building that is housing the plasma reactor. When Godzilla appears she fires a rocket, in a dramatic shot that leads up to--the rocket exploding harmlessly against Godzilla's chest. He sure looks pissed off as his face appears through the resulting smoke, but this suit always looks pissed.

Tsujimori prepares another rocket, just as Miyagawa appears to drag her away from the hopeless task. She insists on one more shot and it is only by directly ordering her that he gets her to abandon her post. It's too late, however. Godzilla smashes into the building they were defending and a chunk of scaffolding plunges towards them. For some reason, Miyagawa decides to shove Tsujimori out of the rubble's path, but then remains standing in place so he can be crushed by himself. (And despite the significant close-up on the plunging scaffolding in the miniature shots, Miyagawa is crushed by chunks of concrete) Tsujimori recovers his dog tags from the rubble and, having activated her vengeance-driven backstory, she goes ahead and takes that last shot at Godzilla as he continues to tear the building to pieces.

I'm sure Godzilla would probably say it tickled slightly.

Flash forward to 2001, this film's present. Tsujimori, now a Major, is leading a group of official-looking folks through a busy mall in Akhihabara. Their destination is a shop run by a long-haired goofball in a backwards baseball cap named Hajime Kudo (Shosuke Tanihara). He is currently dazzling a group of schoolkids with a magic trick, where he puts a bunch of ingredients on a table next to a spoon, covers the ingredients and spoon with with a bowl for five seconds, and then removes the bowl to reveal a spoon full of curry on rice. Tsujimori ruins Kudo's trick by revealing to the kids that the bowl is actually a microwave oven that contains three tiny robots that mix the ingredients while the bowl cooks them.

In a result that I can only attribute to this being set in Japan, the kids immediately lose interest in Kudo's shop after discovering it was robots all along. They probably see five robots before lunch, but magic is hard to come by. Kudo angrily asks who Tsujimori thinks she is, ruining his street cred like that. Tsujimori advises that she's with The G-Graspers, which is officially the dumbest anti-Godzilla group name in the series' history. I mean, they may be silly, but at least "The Anti-Megalosaurus Force" and "Japan Counter-Xenomorph Self Defense Force" actually sound cool. "G-Grasper" implies you're going to, at best, give Godzilla a purple nurple.

At any rate, The G-Titty Twisters need Kudo's miniature robotics skills, so he is whisked away to their headquarters. There we note that Sugiura is hanging around, brooding over a chess set, and Kudo is introduced to a familiar face--his mentor, Professor Yoshino Yoshizawa (Yuriko Hoshi, better known as the photographer Junko in Mothra vs. Godzilla and reporter Naoko in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster). It's a rather uncomfortable reunion, as Yoshizawa asks Kudo how he feels about joining her team and he makes a joke about not wanting to die young. See, Yoshizawa and her team were inside that building in Osaka that Godzilla was so keen on destroying in 1996, and she's the only one who made it out. Kudo apologizes for being a colossal dick, but Yoshizawa shrugs it off and focuses on her sales pitch.

The G-Gropers have stumbled upon a perfect plan to eradicate Godzilla. Kudo is skeptical. As he sees it, why would they even need to destroy Godzilla? As long as they stop doing shit Godzilla doesn't like, the creature will stay sleeping in some ocean trench indefinitely. Tsujimori and Yoshizawa are both sick of that approach, however. No, they're going to get rid of Godzilla with the greatest secret weapon ever devised, Dimension Tide: an artificial black hole, launched from a satellite-mounted cannon. As Yoshizawa explains, not even light waves can escape a black hole so Godzilla will be unable to avoid being sucked into the singularity and no longer be a problem.

Kudo somehow reacts to this plan--of launching possibly the most destructive force in the universe at planet Earth to kill a creature that can destroy, at most, one city a day--with enthusiastic approval. Yosihizawa explains that they need Kudo because, while they can create the black hole, they have no idea how to make it small enough to be launched from a satellite. Yes, that is clearly the trouble with this strategy.

Honestly, this whole plot line is hilariously indicative of how much pop culture can change over the years. In the original Godzilla, Dr. Serizawa agonizes about the device he is created that could reduce a large body of water to a lifeless void because he fears the destructive power of the thing falling into the hands of governments who would only see its marvelous potential as a weapon of mass destruction. He is reluctant to use it against Godzilla because he fears it is more terrifying than  the beast itself. Obviously, it's as much a nuclear allegory as a plot device--what if we could prevent nuclear weapons, but the weapon that replaced them was even more horrible? Meanwhile, just under 50 years later, this film give us a bunch of doofuses who have created a black hole cannon, which could destroy the entire planet, and nobody ever seems bothered by that in the film. It kind of goes to show how even nuclear weapons, the most destructive force humanity has ever created, have stopped actually scaring anyone--even in the one country that knows their true horror.

Anyway, Kudo joins the project. It's not a moment too soon, as a satellite monitor indicates Godzilla is stirring in the ocean trench he calls home. Sugiura urges Yoshizawa and Tsujimori to get that project ready in a hurry.

They get it ready in a hurry, all right, and set up a test firing outside a small village in the countryside. For some reason, they have decided this test will be top secret. I mean, it's not like Godzilla is going to catch wind of it and the rest of the world will probably be a bit irate that Japan has developed the most destructive weapon ever in total secret. Still, that's the plan and they block off the roads. Unfortunately, they didn't factor in...The Kenny.

Well, in this case his name is Jun (Suzuki Hiroyuki), but he's a Kenny. His mother is busy packing for their upcoming move to Tokyo, but like most kids Jun decides a better use of his time is running off to show a friend his bug collection. A road block doesn't stop him from going through the woods and watching as the G-Graspers point their huge Black Hole Cannon at what appears to be an abandoned school building. (Cue Alice Cooper) As everyone is getting set up, Yoshizawa and Sugiura have a significant exchange about how plasma energy made Dimension Tide possible and after Godzilla is destroyed it is vital that no trace of plasma energy remain. Sugiura gets a bad case of the shifty eyes at this.

Kudo excitedly gives the trigger to Yoshizawa, saying she'll go down in history. And how! Everyone puts on protective glasses--except for Jun, obviously--and the Dimension Tide is fired. Naturally it's all glowy and bright, despite sucking in all light waves. Also, somehow the black hole goes to the exact target, strafing the ground, and after it obliterates the building it vanishes, leaving behind a crater. How they guaranteed the black hole would A) travel, B) stop at its target, and C) cease to exist once it destroyed the target is never addressed. It's probably for the best, since any attempt to apply actual physics to this movie is madness.

Well, the black hole actually leaves something else behind: a shimmering in the air that Yoshizawa identifies as a wormhole, or a rift in time and space. Everyone marvels that such a thing exists, and once it seemingly vanishes they forget all about it. Never mind the terrifying implications of tearing a hole in the fabric of reality! Tsujimori is called away because a guard has found Jun. Her response is to tell Jun to keep this their little secret. Sadly, she sticks to that approach instead of a bullet to the skull even after Jun asks why a woman is fighting Godzilla.

You might think I'm being harsh by suggesting this kid should have been killed. Well, I'm not. See, that night Jun sees a strange shadow pass over is window and goes into the woods to investigate. The shadow belongs to a giant dragonfly, 2 meters long, which Jun watches fly back through that wormhole nobody gave a crap about. Jun discovers that the dragonfly laid a huge egg in a puddle--and takes the egg with him. And by with him, I mean for the move to Tokyo. In his family's new apartment, Jun notices that the egg is getting slimy and decides to...put it out for the garbage. When a neighbor foils that plan by telling him he has to bring garbage down tomorrow, when there's actual collection, the little twerp dumps the egg down a storm drain.

Remember how I said the egg's mother was a dragonfly? Well, where do dragonflies like to lay their eggs? That's right, in water. And it turns out that the egg is actually an egg case, and smaller eggs bud off after it sinks to the bottom of the sewer...

Kudo, meanwhile, is bothering Tsujimori when she's trying to work out by hitting on her. He also offers her a special round that he claims is a standard ammo round, but with a satellite tracker in it. In an emergency, she can just shoot it at something and the cavalry will come running. However, Kudo notices Miyagawa's dog tags and that kills any attempt at conversation. One of the grunts in the gym explains to Kudo that he was part of the doomed bazooka troop at the beginning, and that Tsujimori has sworn vengeance on Godzilla. Tsujimori then tests the tracking bullet by loading it into what appears to be a Very pistol (so much for being a standard round) and shooting it at a free weight.

Meanwhile, a strange flooding has started in Tokyo. Jun notices it in a back alley during the day and seemingly begins to realize he may have doomed the world. That night, a pair of bumbling Abbott & Costello-esque public works guys are investigating a similar sot where the payment is cracked and water is bubbling up. As they argue about overtime and the need for an excavator, they fail to notice a gigantic bug about 2 meters long, which we will later come to know as a Meganulon, watching them hungrily from its perch on the wall of a nearby building. Unfortunately, the bug decides it doesn't want to eat them and retreats.

Unfortunately for a young couple happily walking down the street, they appear more appetizing. The young woman goes to buy them a beer and the man waits for her in an alley listening to his headphones--and the Meganulon strikes. It's a rather shockingly brutal attack, too, presented in quick cuts. The Meganulon spits some kind of green liquid at the guy, which makes the sequence seem rather bloody when in fact the gore is actually all implied. When the woman returns, she finds his slimy headphones before the Meganulon spits in her face and drags her behind a fence to discretely kill her offscreen.

"I'm your boyfriend now!"

We next see ther Meganuon as it climbs up a building and sheds its skin like a cicada, to become the kind of giant dragonfly we saw earlier--which we'll soon learn is a Meganula. More on that in a minute, first I need to address the Meganulon.

Now, if the name "Meganulon" means anything to you, then you're exactly the same kind of nerd as I am. If it doesn't, well, allow me to explain: the Meganulon was introduced in Rodan, the 1956 film that also introduced the giant pterosaur we all know and love. There, they attack a town of coal miners before a pair of Rodans hatch and devour the killer insects that they tower over. The Meganulons never made another appearance, but they were very memorable and thus remained very popular in the Godzilla fandom. The original creatures looked something like a caterpillar and a scorpion got involved in a teleportation accident.

Meganulon, original recipe.

Well, when Godzilla vs. Megaguirus was announced, a lot of the early press was about how Godzilla's foe would be derived from the Meganulons. It would be an exaggeration to say it was a major selling point, but it was definitely a selling point. So you'd think this new, improved Meganulon would get a fair amount of screentime.

Meganulon, extra crispy.

However, I've just described to you the extent of the Meganulon's appearance in the film. You can barely see it--in order to make its attack on the couple more horrifying--and it's little more than a cameo. Like I said, though, we're talking about a creature that was little more than a way to get the plot in motion in its original film, so it's not like this alone would be enough to ruin the film. It's just a very bizarre way of going about things.

At any rate, the Meganula that hatched buzzes Jun's new apartment and the little twerp finally realizes that maybe he should call Tsujimori. Tsujimori takes the path of assuring Jun that it's not his fault that he brought an egg he new belonged to a giant monster to a crowded city and dumped it into a sewer so it could hatch and kill people. Jun shows her a book he has about prehistoric animals and explains the creature is a giant prehistoric dragonfly called Meganula. (I will note here that Meganuon and Meganula are derived from the name of an actual creature, Meganeura, that was a giant dragonfly--though obviously nowhere near as large) Tsujimori thanks Jun for letting her know about the Meganula...

...and then does nothing about it until a satellite photo shows an annoyed Godzilla firing his flame breath at a giant dragonfly. Tsujimori and her G-Grasper crew take the Griffon, a super-advanced fighter plane, out to where the confrontation took place. Godzilla apparently went right back under the ocean after killing the Meganula, so Tsujimori and another crew member head down in a raft to take samples from the dead dragonfly.

And then Godzilla rises back to the surface, directly beneath them. Tsujimori stays with the raft after sending her underling back up. Godzilla surfacing knocks Tsujimori into the water and, in one of the film's coolest sequences, she swims over to Godzilla as the creature cruises through the waves like an enormous crocodile. I can't adequately express how ecstatically happy it always makes me to see Godzilla swimming this way.

"Target Locked. Fire missiles to commit suicide."

Now, you may ask why the hell Tsujimori has decided to become the first person to ever climb on Godzilla's back. (In the actual films, at least) After all, even her Radiation "Alart" [sic] badge is loudly beeping at her to say how bad an idea this is. Well, it turns out she has decided to shoot Godzilla with Kudo's tracking bullet.

That's right, she risked radiation poisoning to tag Godzilla. Godzilla. The 55-meter tall radioactive dinosaur that they can clearly follow by satellite already. Boy, that sure was a good reason to risk your life, Major.

In fact, a SGS ("Search Godzilla System"--yes, really) device is dropped by the Griffon to follow Godzilla under water after Tsujimori is knocked off his back and it seems to have no trouble following him with or without the tracking bullet. Well, her decision sure looked cool, at least. Back at G-Grasper HQ, a Scientist explains that the creature Godzilla killed was definitely a Meganula. This Scientist has clearly stepped out of a Showa film--though more likely Showa Gamera than Showa Godzilla--as he looks vaguely like Colonel Sanders and makes pronouncements about prehistoric animals he has no way of knowing. Like that Meganula lived in huge swarms (a reasonable assertion) and was extremely aggressive (which he could not know based on fossil evidence alone).

Despite his impressive knowledge, even he's a bit shocked when someone rushes into the room, pulling a "Quick, Turn On The News" and they discover that the Shibuya district of Tokyo has flooded. And I mean flooded up to a god five stories. Somehow, the Meganula are responsible for this. Kudo confirms this when he provides a mini-SGS device to the military and its camera sends back footage of huge batches of eggs under all the water.

Meanwhile, Dimension Tide has been launched into space and Tsujimori and Sugiura have made a presentation to the top brass assuring them that they are ready to lure Godzilla to an uninhabited island (because they are uncertain if a black hole will work through water, for some reason) and kill him with the weapon. This is news to Kudo and Yoshizawa, who confront Tsujimori and Sugiura when they return to HQ. DT hasn't been fully calibrated, they argue, but their objections are overruled and the plan goes ahead.

Griffon and several ordinary fighter planes--F-22s, I think--antagonize Godzilla with torpedoes until the creature pursues them. Honestly, I think Griffon should have done the job alone, since it's so much more manueverable than the other fighters that it ends up dodging the inevitable return fire--and thus gets most of the other planes destroyed and their pilots killed when they can't dodge it. Ignoring the death of their comrades, Griffon successfully lures Godzilla to the island with blasts from their photon gun.

Well, there's about to a be a major fly in the ointment--a dragonfly to be precise. Back in Shibuya, a boat full of soldiers carrying dynamite in order to blow up those eggs has discovered that their quarry has already hatched and entire buildings are covered with Meganulons that are busy hatching into Meganula. I'm not sure if the film wants you to remember the fact that one Meganulon earlier had to eat two people before it could moult into an adult, but if so that means that Jun is now responsible for the deaths of thousands of people even before you factor in anybody who was surely killed by the rapid flooding. Good job, Kenny!

While some of the Meganulons and Megaula are killed by the soldiers' gunfire, the vast majority successfuly moult and take flight. However, it seems that unlike their nymph stage they have no interest in human flesh as they don't attack the soldiers, although the force of their wings knocks some of the soldiers out of the boat, but instead the Meganula just fly out to sea. You can guess where they're going. Sure enough, they're going after Godzilla.

In fact, the swarm arrives just as Godzilla is getting into the perfect position for Dimension Tide to lock on to him. Somehow the dragonflies make establishing a target lock impossible, despite the fact it's a visual lock and Godzilla is still clearly visible through the swarm. Well, after Godzilla decides to blast several of the Meganula out the sky, the swarm descends on him.

"OH GOD, GET THEM OFF ME! GET THEM OFFFFF!"

This sequence is not exactly original. In Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, several small Destoroyahs swarm over Godzilla--but the sequence here is much closer to Gamera 2: Advent of Legion where Gamera is swarmed by the insectoid Legion soldiers and gets the bejesus stung out of him. Godzilla fares somewhat better here. The Meganula sting him all over, yes, but they are doing so in order to drain energy from him and they don't thoroughly cover him like the Legion did to Gamera. As such, Godzilla has an easier time squashing them with claws, feet, tail, and jaws--and then the radiation from his glowing dorsal plates fries several of them before his flame breath kills hundreds more.

I'm going to warn you now, this is the best fight in the film.

Godzilla doesn't get to gloat too long over his victory as he has cleared enough of his foes for a target lock to be effective. DT is fired and Godzilla gets one hell of a surprise when a Black Hole strikes the island. After the singularity vanishes--no doubt having this time unleashed a school of voracious giant sea scorpions unto the world--Griffon crusises over the crater and hordes of dead or stunned Meganula to confirm the kill. Unfortunately, it turns out that even the most destructive force in the universe is worthless if you miss the target. That's right, a very angry and bewildered Godzilla bursts out of a pile of fall rocks. DT takes an hour to cool down, so there's no chance of firing again. After a significant glance back over his shoulder at Griffon, Godzilla follows the swarm of Meganula as they fly back to Tokyo.

Tsujimori blames Kudo for the foul-up, he blames her for not listening to them when they told her they weren't ready. He'd have a much stronger case if he didn't follow this up by trying to put a hand on her, which triggers her self-defense training to shut him down. Luckily, Yoshizawa breaks it up or Kudo would be missing an arm. Yoshizawa advises that next time it will work.

Now, despite the fact that it would seem safe to assume that Godzilla is following his foes back to their lair to retaliate, Tsujimori suspects that he's heading to Tokyo for another reason. Like maybe somebody's been working on plasma energy in secret. Yoshizawa looks to Sugiura, who gets a bad case of "WE'RE NOT HIDING ANYTHING" and excuses himself. Sugiura makes a phone call to some anonymous shady government official, saing he thought that the plant had been shut down and assuring the person on the other end that it won't come back on them. He then hangs up and agrily knocks all the pieces off his chess set--which appears to be the exact reason he keeps it around.

I should do that. It must be very cathartic until you have to pick up the pieces.

In Shibuya, the Meganula dive under he water and swim down to what appears to be an enormous Meganulon, 50 meters long. This Meganulon is pretty much immobile, and the Meganula sting it in order to feed the energy they harvested from Godzilla. Once the energy is all transferred, the Meganula float to the surface, dead. The huge Meganulon then begins to moult...

That night, Kudo is at the camp for a bunch of soldiers just outside the flood zone. The mini-SGS devices that he gave them are all malfunctioning, and Kudo can't figure out why. It suddenly occurs to him that maybe it's something magnetic under the water: just as the surface of the water begins to churn. As Kudo and the soldiers watch, the water explodes--and a giant dragonfly appears, hovering above the water. The emphasis here is far more on dragon than fly.

"Sir Small can't save you now!"

We'll shortly learn this is Megaguirus. It takes no time at all, though, to learn that Megaguirus is not a very good monster. She's basically an enhanced version of Battra, which is is cool on the surface--except she is supposed to be an enormous dragonfly, but she flaps her wings leisurely like Mothra. She's also an incredibly stiff puppet and even when the wires holding her up are actually obscured, she still wobbles awkwardly on them.

Worst of all is that, occasionally, she flaps her wings rapidly. This causes some kind of sonic attack (?!), but the effects are terrible. Somehow the rapid flapping effect for the Meganula was just fine but the effects artists just could not make it work for Megaguirus. Well, she uses her sonic attack to bring half of Shibuya down on the soldiers and Kudo...

...but Kudo wakes up in the G-Grasper's hospital wing with only a fractured arm in a cast and some miscellaneous bandages. The all-knowing scientist decides only now to explain that the Meganula species has a queen called Megaguirus. Thanks a lot, jerk. However, the G-Graspers aren't really all that concerned about the species of rapidly reproducing, man-eating giant insects that can now destroy cities. This is mainly because Godzilla is now in Tokyo Bay.

Tokyo is evacuated, Griffon is scrambled to intercept--in a really cool bit where Godzilla's surfacing is counted down by the amount of meters to the surface and his rising from the ocean is accompanied by Akira Ifukube's classic Godzilla theme--and DT is geared up for another shot. Yes, they're going to fire a black hole on Tokyo. Well, at least that's the plan before Megaguirus reappears from wherever she buggered off to earlier, dramatically flying over Griffon. Megaguirus starts off her fight with Godzilla by attacking with her sound wave attack. This somehow forces Griffon out of the air, overloads the power at the G-Grasper HQ, and wreaks havoc with the DT satellite. Yes, the satellite that's in space. No, I don't get it, either.

It also somehow crashes the DT computer system and wipes out all of the backups. Did Megaguirus give their system a virus?! And then the DT satellite just starts to drop out of orbit. By which I mean straight down. That's...that's not how orbit works. That's not how any of this works!

Luckily, Kudo comes to rescue even in his injured state. He plugs in his laptop and sets to work with his self-made anti-virus program, which for some reason involves a chibi sexy nurse animated graphic. Now that repairing system paths is required, the nurse turns into--a sexy chibi animated graphic of Tsujimori with a jet pack and a laser blaster. Yes, he based his program on a woman he works with and has a crush on. No, that's not creepy at all.

"You brute, you brute, you brute!"

Meanwhile--oh, God. *sigh* Meanwhile, easily the candidate for worst kaiju battle ever is taking place. Where to even begin? Most of the fight is a badly animated Megaguirus using her buzzing wings to dart in and out of frame, occasionally smacking Godzilla before dodging his flame breath. Eventually, she stings him in what appears to be the crotch (ouch!) and begins draining energy from him, which prevents him from using his flame breath on her. She then throws him into a building and then--her lipless mouth curling into a smile via bad digital manipulation--knocks the rest of the building onto his head. This causes him to stand up and shake his head to clear it, like Ash shaking off his cartoonishly stretched face in Army of Darkness after picking the wrong book.

Godzilla turns the tide by cutting off one of her claws with his plates, before planting her tail into the ground and...*sigh*...leaping a mile into the air and body slamming her. Did I wander into "Godzilla vs. Charles Barkley" by mistake?

It's less hard to believe Godzilla actually flying.

Megaguirus retaliates by channeling the energy from her opponent into a fireball and launching it at him. Godzilla does a double take at this, then falls over after it hits him. However, when Megaguirus tries to sting Godzilla one last time, he catches her stinger in his teeth and dramatically bites it off. It takes just two blasts of flame breath before Megaguirus goes up in flames and then blows up spectacularly.

Well, at least that's over.

Big Bug-Da-Boom!

Godzilla is on a mission, however. He continues on through Tokyo, including a shot that "comically" implies that Godzilla just casually walked across a now-crumbling suspension bridge. Oof.

Eventually, Godzilla finds his way to one specific building and begins smashing it. Tsujimori and Yoshizawa confront Sugiura on a rooftop overlooking the carnage. Yep, Sugiura knew that plasma energy research was still going on in secret. Tsujimori slugs him for his duplicity, but then Kudo reaches her via radio and lets er know that DT is back up and running. They have just enough time for one shot before it burns up in re-entry. Unfortunately, they can't lock onto Godzilla. Tsujimori takes the controls of Griffon and tells Kudo to lock onto Griffon's signal after she flies high above the city.

Once the target is locked, she sends Griffon into a dive bomb and orders Kudo to fire just as she ejects. Poor Godzilla gets hit with an exploding super-plane and set on fire. (And I do mean on fire: there's behind the scenes footage out there of suit actor Tsutomu Kitagawa immediately falling to the ground as technicians hurriedly rush over to extinguish the flames before they urn through the suit) DT fires and the satellite is blown to pieces. Godzilla sees the black hole coming and tries to use his flame breath on it--but this time, it hits him directly.

The smoke clears, Tsujimori lands safely, and everyone rejoices: Godzilla is gone. ...Or is he? The film ends with Tsujimori visiting Kudo at his old shop because mysterious seismic activity has been reported that could suggest Godzilla somehow broke out of the Black Hole. Well, that or they missed again. It could also be that they released Cthulhu. At any rate, we get the comedy freeze-frame ending after Tsujmori bumps Kudo's broken arm...

...and then at the end of the credits, we see Jun at school. Apparently, there is some justice in the world because this credit cookie implies that Jun witnesses Godzilla breaking free of the ground. I say justice because we freeze on Jun's face as Godzilla's roar echoes and I choose to believe Godzilla then squashes the little turd.

"Hadouken!"

There's a rather old saying, "Sex is like pizza: even when it's bad it's still pretty good." If you have ever had bad sex or bad pizza, you know that saying is full of shit. However, I bring it up simply to say that even when a Godzilla movie is bad, it's still pretty good.

See, every Godzilla movie--with one notable exception--has a notable advantage over any other movie in that it contains Godzilla. That automatically elevates even the worst Godzilla movie over dreck like Transformers: The Dark of the Moon. So, while Godzilla vs. Megaguirus is very bad indeed, I have still seen the damn thing numerous times and would happily see it yet again if someone asked me immediately after I finished this review.

It has Godzilla in it.

Truth be told, Godzilla vs. Megaguirus gets a lot right before it suddenly begins to get everything wrong. Sure, the Dimension Tide is fucking ridiculous, but if the rest of the film was as enjoyable as about the first half, I could roll with it. I mean, the first half has the recreation of Godzilla's 1954 attack, some neat world-building, and a good set-up for its characters and their mission. Hell, as awful as the trope of "the kid who dooms the world by playing around with monster eggs" is, even the way the Meganulons/Meganula are introduced is pretty great.

But then Megaguirus shows up and everything takes a nose dive. Not only is Megaguirus not horribly convincing as a puppet, but the flying effects for her during the fight look like something out of a Terry Gilliam cartoon with photo cut-outs banging into each other, Also, it's after her introduction that the film suddenly switches from a serious film with a serious Showa influence to...to...

I'm actually not sure what to call it. A parody of the silliest Showa films, like Godzilla vs. Megalon? A slapstick comedy with giant monsters? We're talking a film that features a young couple brutally devoured by a giant nightmare water bug, but then suddenly has Godzilla doing a Three Stooges routine. Given that the rest of the film seems to actually be serious, I'm left to wonder if the final fight's bizarre tone is a result of the filmmakers realizing that the effects for the sequence were subpar and deciding to play it for laughs.

Though really the incongruity of the tone for the final fight is indicative of Megaguirus herself. There's a concept called "The Sexy Lamp" that tests how disposable a film considers its female characters by asking if anything would change if the female character was replaced by a sexy lamp. Well, given that she's an enormous insect, Megaguirus isn't exactly what the concept has in mind, but honestly replacing her with a sexy lamp would improve the film.

Consider for a moment exactly what Megaguirus contributes to the film. Try to think how the film would be affected if she weren't in it at all, if this was just the story of the JSDF trying to use a Black Hole Gun to rid the world of Godzilla and there was no other monster. Oh, there'd have to be an explanation for why Dimension Tide wasn't working after Godzilla arrived in Tokyo, but that's about the only thing Megaguirus truly brings to the film. There's never even a moment where the G-Graspers have to consider that Megaguirus is a bigger threat than Godzilla or see her as an unlikely ally. She's just a thing that shows up, messes with their equipment, and then gets killed by Godzilla. Again, the most rewarding battle in the film is Godzilla versus a swarm of bugs, while the fight between Godzilla and their queen is absolutely terrible.

Well, terrible to my tastes. My one-year-old son seemed bizarrely delighted by that final fight. However, he also tries to eat napkins so his taste is questionable.

So the main villain monster is an utter disappointment, how do the rest fare? Well, the practical effects for the Meganulons and Meganula are pretty good, even if the miniature ones are very obviously miniature. The CGI versions are hit or miss. It's more miss than hit, but they still look better than the digital effects for Megaguirus. Godzilla looks great, however. Sure, it's just the Godzilla 2000 suit being reused, but that was a great suit. The CGI Godzilla that shows up in some of the ocean scenes is way better than the one in Godzilla 2000, however.

The human characters are adequate at best, really. With the exception of Jun, who is well-acted but a horrible character, none of them make much of an impression whether good or bad. Misato Tanaka does a fine job as Tsujimori, but while she brings a lot of charm to the role the character is ultimately just too flat. The rest of the central characters are even blander, and bordering on creepy in Kudo's case. However, they do fulfill their job as filler between monster scenes.

The score by Michiru Oshima is wonderful, which is a major point in its favor.And Masaaki Tezuka would get two more tries at helming a Godzilla movie after this. Luckily, he showed that he can do much, much better than this. But that's a tale for another time.

I certainly can't recommend Godzilla vs. Megaguirus to a non-fan, but I'm honestly a bit hesitant to recommend it to anyone. As Godzilla films go, I might not put it at the very bottom of the barrel but it is damned close. However, despite its myriad flaws it still has the most important thing going for it:

It has Godzilla in it.


This is my first entry in the June Bugs roundtable. The other entries are below.

Checkpoint Telstar:
The Naked Jungle
The Deadly Mantis

Cinemasochist Apocalypse:
Skeeter
Caved In: Prehistoric Terror

Micro-Brewed Reviews:
Them!

In the impressive pantheon of Godzilla's friends and foes, there is no more controversial a kaiju than Mothra. If there's a holy trinity of Toho kaiju that everyone outside the kaiju fandom knows and even loves, it's Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan. Like Rodan, Mothra made her debut in her own solo film and then crossed over into the Godzilla series. She's also easily the monster that has appeared the most in the series. Not counting stock footage (or related characters like Fairy Mothra), she has appeared in eight of the 30 Godzilla films to date. Compare that to Rodan's five and King Ghidorah's six (some people count Keizer Ghidorah in Godzilla: Final Wars as a seventh appearance, but that's stupid because it's a totally separate character--it's like considering Battra the same thing as Mothra). She's also been announced to feature in the sequel to Godzilla due in 2018, along with those slackers Rodan and King Ghidorah.

Also, unlike Rodan, she was actually deemed popular enough to get another shot at solo films in the 1990s. We'll get to that shortly, of course, but you may notice I said she was the most controversial kaiju. That's because a huge percentage of Godzilla fans hate Mothra.

I do mean hate, too. Many of them positively loathe Mothra. This is despite the fact that Mothra has been a part of many of the best entries in the series, and the original Mothra is also a classic in its own right. So why is Mothra so reviled?

Well, there are two main reasons*, in my opinion--and both are pretty silly in different ways. The biggest reason, and the reason I went from loving Mothra as a kid to hating her from my teen years to my mid-twenties, is because Mothra is the only monster to consistently defeat Godzilla. This is a bit like Batman beating the crap out of Superman, but the point of these confrontations is almost entirely about how Mothra manages to beat incredible odds to defeat Godzilla and save the day.

Because unlike the upcoming legal drama Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, if Mothra is fighting Godzilla it's because Godzilla isthe bad guy.

The other reason is a bit more insidious because I'm pretty sure most people who hate Mothra for this reason aren't actually aware that they're doing it--plain and simple sexism. See, Mothra is one of the few explicitly female kaiju in canon. You may think I'm just being a Social Justice Warrior (why thank you), since after all almost nobody hates on Biollante, Megaguirus, Jiger, or Otachi just because they're explicitly female. There's a few key differences, though.

For starters, Mothra is like a Lisa Frank trapper keeper turned into a kaiju. She is the most traditionally "feminine" of kaiju--yes, even more than Biollante who is a giant flower--and she's also easily the most popular kaiju among women. I don't think this means that every Mothra hater is knowingly hostile to the creature because women dare to love her, but it's not like the geek/nerd community is well-known for being welcoming to women.

[* Some would argue it's because the concept of Mothra is "silly." To which I reply that if you can accept "giant electrified gorilla,""three-headed space dragon that spits lightning", and "humanoid robot programmed with punch cards that can teach itself how to increase in size" but draw the line at "giant insect goddess," then I am concerned about your suspension of disbelief]

Now, those reasons for disliking Mothra are silly. However, I have to say if your first exposure to the character was the 1990s Rebirth of Mothra trilogy, which starts off with today's film, then I would understand. See, someone decided that a new Mothra spin-off should be "for kids."

You are absolutely right to cringe.

Now that I'm a father, I'm steeling myself for the karmic retribution I'm about to receive for all those awful kids' movies I convinced my parents to watch with me. And that's just for the movies I thought were good, not the ones that came after I embraced the wonders of terrrible cinema. The simple fact of the matter is that, in virtually every film industry in the world, making a movie "for kids" usually means that nobody cares if it's terrible. It means lazy writing, lazy directing, terrible jokes, and bad acting--especially because it's assumed that kids only want to see other kids, and not every child actor can be Quvenzhané Wallis at six years old.

So, well before I ever saw any of them--and beyond my reticence, there was the fact that it took years for them even to be available in the US--I knew the 1990s Mothra trilogy by reputation. It was not a good reputation. Still, they were kaiju movies and I love kaiju movies, even when they're terrible. What's more, there's one thing that virtually all movies aimed at kids in the last 40 years have in common--and that's the desire to sell kids toys. Toys need inspiration, and in the case of a monster movie that means more and cooler monsters. And whatever else I could say about these films, they had cool monsters--and Mothra even obligingly found multiple forms to transform into in order to provide more.

Yes, okay, I am forever sad that I do not have an "Aqua Mothra" figure on my shelf.

Yeah, a more intelligent person might conclude that I should just stick to the toys. After all, while I've never seen a kaiju film that is as dishonest with its toy as the average Hollywood film--just look at freaking Dragonheart--there's no question that you can appreciate any awesomeness inherent in the monsters in toy form without sitting through the painful film around them. Still, I felt I had to give the films a chance, and even after I'd seen the first two, I bought the recent Blu-ray of the trilogy because I wanted to see them all and fairly evaluate them.

So exactly how masochistic was that decision, you ask? Well...

The film opens with a fully grown Mothra perched in what we can assume is her temple on an island. I'm gonna call it Infant Island, per Mothra tradition, but I don't believe it gets a name in the movie. Mothra begins summoning some glowy particles that converge in front of her and suddenly form--an egg. Yes, apparently Mothra eggs aren't laid, they are called into being. It's a bit ridiculous, but then it's always been a bit hard to believe that Mothra laid the eggs in previous films that were as big as she was--though the Showa films oddly explain this by suggesting that the eggs grew, which is equally ridiculous.

I'm gonna pause for a moment to answer a question thrown around about this trilogy a lot: Are these films following the continuity of Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle For Earth? The answer is pretty clearly, "No," and you'll see why as we go on.

Anyway, I hope you like that Mothra has been established as a thing that exists, because that's the last you'll be seeing of her for about 40 minutes. (Mothra is a cameo in her own movie!) The movie now shifts to introducing its main characters, the Goto family. Mr. Yuichi Goto (Kenjiro Nashimoto) is a foreman for a logging company clearing forest in Hokkaido and is struggling with his bosses breathing down his neck for more production, environmentalists stalling production, and that bane of working parents everywhere--the "you spend too much time working instead of with your children" guilt trip call from his wife, Mrs. Makiko Goto (Hitomi Takahashi).

Yes, that's right. It's one of the most annoying, and classist, of Hollywood tropes--the idea that working hard to make sure your family is take care of makes you a bad parent. It's not any less egregious in Japanese films, and the fact that Mrs. Goto appears to be a stay-at-home mother makes it even worse, somehow.

Anyway, the guilt trip about the fact that he's working instead of spending time with his son, Taiki (Kazuki Futami), and daughter, Wakaba (Maya Fujisawa) is interrupted by a commotion at the dig site. One of the bulldozers has uncovered what looks to be an ancient artifact of some long-lost civilization, like a small platform or stone table. Mr. Goto notices that there's a fancy seal on the object and pries it loose with a screwdriver, intending to take it home as a gift for Wakaba. Like reading the Latin in a creepy notebook, this is a bad idea.

Removing the seal sends out a disturbance in The Force that gets the attention of the Elias sisters: the benevolent Mona (Megumi Kobayashi) and Lora (Sayaka Yamaguchi) are horrified, while the wicked Belvera (Aki Hano) is delighted. And of course we know she's wicked, because she dresses all in black. Of course, Belvera also rides around an adorable little dragon called Garu-Garu (or "Gagaru" in the dub) while her good sisters ride around on Fairy, a tiny version of Mothra.

I dunno about you, but if I'd seen this as a kid I'd be rooting for Belvera. Dragons are awesome.

Yes she wants to doom the world, but dragon!

You may have noticed that Mothra's fairies are way different in this film than in any previous or, for that matter, any to follow. The fact that they're now called the Elias isn't all that weird, but they've never had individual names before. As you might expect, this also means they behave a bit differently. They don't speak their lines at the same time, nor do they seem to think in unison. Hell, they don't even seem to be twins--by which I mean they aren't pretending to be, since after Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster it's been pretty clear that none of the actresses hired were twins.

Anyway, Mr. Goto brings the seal home and puts it on a chain to give to Wakaba, after he and Mrs. Goto have a clearly recurrent argument during which we learn how much Mrs. Goto prizes her display of plates and china. Mona and Lora take Fairy to the site of where the seal used to be. Mona is horrified that the seal has been removed, while Lora suggests with extreme revulsion that it must have been humans that removed it. They're alarmed because Belvera may already be trying to find a way to free the creature locked away by the seal and place it under her control.

She is, and she's way ahead of her sisters because she's already tracked down the seal to Wakaba's bedroom. In a bit that shamelessly rips off Close Encounters of The Third Kind, Belvera flying through wakaba's room brings all her electronic toys to life, glowing and bouncing around before Wakaba wakes up and greets her visitor. We aren't privy to what happens next, but in the morning it turns out that Wakaba has been granted telekinetic powers (!) and uses them to torment her older brother as payback for him being mean to her earlier. And I mean she throws him all around the room, drags him across shelves, and causes all kinds of havoc. Their parents don't notice any of this, somehow.

Mr. Goto, however, does notice the report on the news about how his company has been hiding their discovery of a priceless relic and has plans to to blow it up. Not about to stand for such an...honest portrayal of his company, Mr. Goto rushes off to fly back to Hokkaido, (Do not go to Hokkaido!) Mrs. Goto is too caught up in worrying about that to notice her terrified son rushing out the door for school. Later, when some of his school chums see Taiki cowering and he explains he's waiting for his sister, they laugh at him and call him a sissy.

Of course, Taiki has good reason to be afraid. When he gets home he spies his sister inside their house watching TV and eating loads of sweets--and then Belvera appears behind him, riding on Garu-Garu. She asks him if he hates his sister as much as she hates hers, while gloating about having wakaba under her control. Belvera then tells him to take a look at who's behind him now: a large German Shepherd or similar breed. The dog chases the terrified Taiki up a tree. This scene is oddly played for a certain amount of comedy, when it should be terrifying--though maybe the decision was made to play it as silly because the dog refused to look menacing for a moment. It's all lolling tongue and wagging tail the whole time, despite what the sound effects try to tell you.

Well, inside the house we see that Mrs. Goto has been tied up with power cords and gagged. Belvera attempts to help herself to a can of beer by stading on it and yanking the pull tab, which results in her getting a geyser of foam to the face. (This is a really awkward effect, but I can appreciate what they were trying for) Belvera then notices a report about the artifact in Hokkaido on the TV, which Garu-Garu decides to hover in front of--to Belvera's great annoyance.

Luckily for Taiki, the good Elias sisters show up and drive the dog away. Of course, given he was just almost killed by a tiny woman on a flying steed, Taiki's reaction to being greeted by two tiny women on a flying steed is to tumble out of the tree. The Elias use their telekinesis to save him from a concussion, though. They also agree to help him free his mom and save his sister from Belvera's mind control.

Combat strategy is not Mona and Lora's forte, however. Like me playing a video game, they just fly Fairy Mothra straight through an unopened window and begin wildly firing laser blasts from her antennae at Belvera. Belvera responds by hopping on Garu-Garu and returning fire with laser blasts from his mouth. Taiki dodges stray laser blasts and unties his mother, who is left to scream in horror as her precious...everything is destroyed by a bunch of asshole fairies. Goodbye plates, china, piano, and refrigerator. I think the TV is only spared because they need it for plot purposes.

Belvera turns the tide by snatching the seal away from Wakaba, who is basically catatonic through all this. Turns out the seal does more than keep ancient evil kaiju imprisoned, it also reflects laser blasts while magnifying their intensity. Garu-Garu finally gets a lucky shot in and strikes Fairy, causing the moth to shake Mona and Lora loose before crashing onto the floor. For some reason, Fairy's eyes go dark before she shrivels up like a dollar bill that went through the dryer. This doesn't kill Fairy, but it renders her useless as a steed. Taiki bravely tries to catch Belvera in a butterfly net, but Garu-Garu is a strong little bastard and nearly carries Taiki off, even with Mrs. Goto holding him by the leg.

Taiki loses his grip and Belvera escapes by breaking another window. Regrouping, Mona and Lora see the TV report and realize that Belvera is heading for Hokkaido. She wants to wake up the creature locked away there, the extraterrestrial monster that was locked away 65 million years ago after killing off all the dinosaurs. The fiend known as...

Okay, so normally I go by the official English spellings of Godzilla monsters' names that Toho has standardized since the mid-1990s, even if they don't match how I learned them. I say Anguirus instead of "Angilas", for instance. But I refuse to go by the official name for this creature because it's dumb. When I first heard of this movie, everyone was in love with the awesome villain kaiju known as Death Ghidorah. Why wouldn't you be? Well, because if you listen to the dub or the official spelling, the creature is Desghidorah.

You know what makes that extra dumb? "Des" is what you get when a language that does not have a "th" sound borrows the English word "death." So when you hear "Desghidorah" in Japanese, it's because it's supposed to be "Death Ghidorah." So I am calling it Death Ghidorah.

Well, hearing how awful Death Ghidorah is convinces Mrs. Goto that the family needs to book a flight to go see Mr. Goto at once. Mona and Lora are disguised as dolls for Wakaba on the flight, while the emaciated Fairy is passed off as a plush toy. (The latter is obviously a far more convincing "disguise") Unfortunately, Belvera has beaten our heroes to Hokkaido and wastes no time at all in putting the mind control whammy on Mr. Goto. At her bidding, he drives a bulldozer covered with dynamite up to the spot where the seal was found.

The rest of the Goto family arrives in time to see him fall out of the bulldozer just before it reaches its destination and Belvera blasts the dynamite. A massive explosion follows and the mountain bursts open. From the swirling flames and smoke emerges Death Ghidorah--and he is, indeed, as awesome as that sounds. Basically, if you made King Ghidorah into a quadruped, you'd have Death Ghidorah. And unlike the later Keizer Ghidorah, the effect actually works because it's not two guys doing the "horse" routine in a suit that looks like it was built ten minutes before filming.

Don't worry, we have a giant moth to protect us from this unstoppable avatar of death!

Death Ghidorah's heads spew red lightning bolts, but his center head breathes fire. This is a nice touch since there really hadn't been a kaiju with a flamethrower installed in its suit since Gamera's first (forced) retirement in 1980. And when Gamera came back in 1995, he spat fireballs instead of breathing fire. Speaking of Gamera, the one issue I have with Death Ghidorah is that his roar seems to be derived from the same elephant sound effects that gave Gamera his roar and it doesn't really fit the creature.

Mrs. Goto and the kids get separated as they try to find Mr. Goto. The Elias manage to get the seal back, thanks to Belvera's clumsiness, which they use to revive Fairy. The kids worry that Death Ghidorah will kill them, but the Elias advise it doesn't work that way. Death Ghidorah feeds on life and humans don't live long enough to really satisfy it: it's going to start with the trees around it that live for hundreds of years. I have to say that is a neat idea.

Well, Mona and Lora try to guide the Gotos back towards each other--and in an actually amusing bit, Mr. Goto is completely baffled by his wife casually talking to two tiny women on a moth like they're old friends--but Death Ghidorah's escape has begun to alter the forest around him, including forcing Taiki and Wakaba to flee from lava with zero explanation. While the kids could definitely use some more fairy help, the Elias are busy trying to figure out what the hell to do about the unstoppable ancient evil that is preparing to wipe out all life on Earth.

Amazingly, despite the fact that it was the first thought of everyone watching this, Mona suggests they call Mothra. Lora, meanwhile, is horrified at this suggestion. Mona points out that Death Ghidorah was originally defeated by Mothra, but Lora counters that that was back when there were many Mothras--now there's only one and she is near the end of her life and weakened from laying her egg. (Though one would imagine simply conjuring your offspring into being, rather than having to push them out of your body, would dramatically increase your recovery time)

Mona is adamant that they have no choice, so it's time for the inevitable part of virtually every film featuring Mothra, and the part that every Godzilla fan either loves or dreads--The Mothra Song. I'm very much in the former camp...usually. Unfortunately, the makers of this trilogy decided it was time to fix what wasn't broken. It's not that they rearranged the song and gave it a bizarre Calypso feel, that isn't all that weird. No, it's that when they go to sing the song to summon Mothra, the film throws out a flurry of terrible digital and rear projection effects that look like the Elias wandered into a karaoke bar.

This is not a bizarre production still, it's an actual screenshot.

Well, Mothra oblingingly flies to Hokkaido to take on Death Ghidorah as the creature continues its rampage through the forests.  Oddly, at no point does the JSDF ever get involved in trying to stop the monster, so I guess the filmmakers correctly assumed we would just accept that Mothra is the world's only hope. Belvera is shocked to see Mothra, which doesn't make much sense--did she think Mothra wouldn't show up to protect her planet? Belvera, who seems to think she has control of Death Ghidorah despite that not appearing to be the case at all, yells to the creature that Mothra is old and weak and will be easy to defeat. Of course, even with all the antennae lasers, energy scales, and lightning blasts from her wings, Belvera is correct--Mothra is hopelessly out-classed by her foe.

To Mona and Lora's alarm, the baby Mothra senses her mother's brutal beatdown and hatches early to swim to Hokkaido. To make things a little less confusing, I'm going to call this baby Mothra by her official name (which is not actually used in the films), Mothra Leo. Side note: as someone whose favorite form of Mothra is her larval form, it's extra disappointing that Leo will only spend a portion of this first film in her larval form. Though, at least we actually get to see her larval form in this film for more than five seconds, unlike Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. (I'll have even more harsh words for that film whenever I evetually decide I want to get a lot of Godzilla fan hate mail)

As they flee from lava, Taiki and Wakaba are menaced by Belvera who tries to grab back the seal from them. Luckily, the fallen Mothra is sitting nearby and she uses energy tentacles to knock the seal from Belvera's grasp. Belvera, not wanting to find out what happens if Mothra decides to do something harsher, flees. Wakaba suggests that Taiki use the seal to give energy to Mothra like the Elias did for Fairy. Surprisingly, it works, and Mothra returns to the air as Leo arrives.

"We have to fight that thing? Is it too late to negotiate a truce, mom?"

Now, the previous incarnation of Mothra's larval form in the Heisei series had corrosive silk--or at least it burned Godzilla slightly before thoroughly pissing him off--but was otherwise still the classic "giant caterpillar." Leo, on the other hand, has silk that glows and flashes like a silly string rave and has a move where she rears up and fires an energy blast from her belly. You'd think the combined attack of Leo and her mother would then turn the tide, but not so much. Especially since Death Ghidorah listens to Belvera's advice and turns his attack toward Leo and pins the poor larva beneath his foot. Then, in a moment that reminds you that the Japanese have some very different ideas about what is acceptable for kids, Death Ghidorah lifts Leo up in two of his mouths as she gushes yellow blood from her wounds.

Luckily, Mothra intervenes before Leo can be torn in two and the worm uses another of her abilities--a cloaking device that turns her into a transparent outline. The film claims it's "camouflage" but we're talking Predator-style, not anything you'd see in nature.Unfortunately, when Death Ghidorah uses his flame breath to set the forest ablaze it renders that disguise useless. Mr. Goto, meanwhile, rescues his children from the ledge they're trapped on even as his feet catch fire.

Mothra and Leo are losing badly when they finally lure Death Ghidorah over to a dam. A stray lightning blast from their foe destroys the dam and Mothra carries Leo to safety as the wall of water sends Death Ghidorah tumbling ass over teakettle. Unfortunately, once they're out to sea Mothra rapidly loses altitude until mother and daughter crash into the ocean. Leo tries to lift her floundering mother up, but it's no use. As Leo, the Elias, and the Gotos watch mournfully, Mothra sinks beneath the waves and disappears into the murky depths of the Pacific Ocean.

It's the first time adult Mothra and baby Mothra have ever seen each other face-to-face before the adult dies, and while the sequence doesn't tug at the heart strings as much as it wants to, I will give credit to the scene for trying.

Leo swims away in front of the setting sun, before making landfall on a heavily wooded island. Meanwhile, the Gotos make their way to the nearest hospital. At the hospital they watch a news report. While talking about the effects of Death Ghidorah, the newscasters announce that Leo has been sighted on Yaku Island, which is known for its trees that are thousands of years old. Then we see the obnoxious reporter from earlier is also at the hospital, talking on his clunky 1990s cell phone about how it's become hard to breathe in the area thanks to Death Ghidorah's movements. When a nurse tries to get him off the phone because it's against regulations, it starts a scuffle that ends with a doctor confiscating the phone like the reporter is a naughty student. The reporter then recongnizes Mr. Goto and tries to attack him for letting the monster loose, but Mrs. Goto and another doctor pry him off. Taiki shames the guy into stopping his whining about, "We're all going to die," by telling him Mothra is going to save them.

Another news report then comes on that shows that Japanese newscasters are precogs as they announce that Death Ghidorah has taken to the skies. We then cut to Death Ghidorah sprouting wings via an energy blast (does any creature in this trilogy not require a needless animated effect to do anything?!) before taking flight in the typical Heisei Toho kaiju glide to blast more forests with his lightning bolts.

Leo spins herself a glowy, glittery coccoon around an ancient tree in order to gain energy from it. Her silk crackles with lightning as Mona and Lora sing her a motivating song (that's original  to the film, as I've never heard it before this film) as Fairy and some very confused monkeys look on. The coccoon glows and pulsates creepily, before disgorging millions of glowing moths that coalesce into the adult Leo, which is defintely the fuzziest, cuddliest Mothra ever designed.

The poodle moth looks like the Alien by comparison.

She immediately takes off for Hokkaido, with Fairy in pursuit. Mona and Lora are giddy because Leo is even faster than her mother. When the Gotos see the news report, Mrs. Goto asks the question that most people are probably wondering--sure, it's big, but it's still just a moth, so what can it hope to do against Death Ghidorah? Taiki replies that more people are killed by bee stings each year than by snake bites (and given this is Japan, he might actually mean by hornet sting), so you shouldn't write off an insect. Well, that took a dark turn.

Anyway, Taiki and Wakaba stupidly run off to watch the battle as Leo arrives to confront Death Ghidorah in mid-air. Belvera has only a moment to realize her plans have gone in the crapper before her sisters are chasing around the flying combatants. Leo, improving on her mother's powers, now fires a massive laser beam from three tiny eyes on her "forehead" instead of her antennae. Somehow, one of these blasts hits Garu-Garu and rather than vaporizing the little dragon and its rider as you would expect, it just causes them to crash to the forest below.

And now we discover that Leo has unlocked God Mode. It gets to the point where you begin to feel bad for Death Ghidorah as this final battle consists mainly of him repeatedly exploding as Leo hits him with laser beams, wing lightning, and huge blasts of light that shoot up from the ground. There is never a moment when Leo is not winning, even when they collide in mid-air.

These two collide and it ends badly for the dragon.

Leo also whips out the ability to turn back into a swarm of tiny moths and uses that to make Death Ghidorah explode some more. Meanwile, we see that the downed Garu-Garu is actually a robot, with its mechanical guts hanging out. Belvera doesn't have time to mourn her robotic steed before Mona and Lora swoop in so Fairy can carry her off in her claws ahead of a massive fireball. Meanwile, Leo flies straight up into the air using energy flowing off her abdomen to seal Death Ghidorah away--which really just looks like she is blasting him to smithereens, but the sound effects insist he's still alive.

Mona and Lora call for Taiki to toss the seal to them, so he throws it into the air and some glowly stuff happens before a huge glowing Mothra symbol (the one that looks like a giant cross surrounded by sunlight) appears hovering above Death Ghidorah's tomb. The symbol descends to the ground, and the Elias gleefully tell the kids that Death Ghidorah has been sealed away again. Taiki turns his eyes to Belvera dangling from Fairy's claws and wonders what to do wih her. Belvera solves that dilemma by shaking herself free from Fairy's grip.

Taiki, wakaba, and the Elias give chase as Belvera runs over to a stump. She spits at the Elias that they're stupid to trust humans because humans are destroying the Earth. That might mean more if it wasn't coming from the mouth of the person who deliberately set a planet-destroying monster free. At any rate, she turns and disappears through a knot in the stump. When Taiki goes to grab her, Mona and Lora tell him to stop. They reveal now that Belvera is their older sister and they love her, even if she causes trouble from time to time. Yeah, trying to destroy the world, what a scamp!

Mrs. Goto then appears pushing Mr. Goto in a wheelchair (!) through the ruined forest. When Leo lands nearby, Mona and Lora tell Taiki and Wakaba that they can ride on her. Somehow, Mr. & Mrs. Goto are okay with this and next thing we know the kids are standing on Leo's head as she takes flight. Mr. & Mrs. Goto view the scorched wasteland all around them and talk about how it's going to take years and a lot of hard work to restore the land to its original beauty. They blame humanity for it being destroyed in a matter of minutes, even though humaity is not a three-headed dragon from space. Still, they're hopeful that future generations will learn from their mistakes and treat the environment with respect...

...and then Leo flies around using her glowy powers to restore all the trees and grass to exactly where they were before. Welp, so much for that moral. Somewhere in this film's America (or perhaps, Rolisica), a politician is arguing down climate change with, "Why do we need to worry about global warming? Mothra will just fix it for us!"

Also, man, the ancient Mothras were terrible at their jobs if they weren't able to stop Death Ghidorah from wiping out the dinosaurs and apparently couldn't just restore all plant life, when one Mothra was able to do it.

Leo lands so the Gotos can re-unite on a grassy hillside and then Leo, Fairy, and the Eias fly off into the blue sky as a crayon rainbow (?) is animated across the sky. The End.

"Ruin the planet again, I dare you!"

Once upon a time, in the dark days when the only way to get new Japanese monster movies was to get your hands on bootleg copies, most of the Heisei films were but legends on this new-fangled thing called "internet message boards." At that time, those chosen few who had actually seen the films could argue back and forth while the rest of us could only gather around in wide-eyed wonder. During this time of great hardship, I read an argument about the merits of Shusuke Kaneko's Gamera films.

One person, in flagrant disregard of the opinions of 99% of the kaiju fandom, did not enjoy the films. The reason he gave was that it was like playing toy soldiers with a kid who refuses to lose. You know, "You dropped an H-Bomb on me? Well, my soldiers are wearing nuke-proof armor!" After all, Gamera always pulls the stops out to win impossibly at the last minute, right?

Well, he's not wrong. However, I would counter that Hesiei Gamera has nothing on Heisei Mothra when it comes to winning by pulling the impossible victory of of your ass. In every movie in the trilogy, Mothra gains more and more ridiculous powers to the point that the films no longer provide the suspense of, "How can she win?" Instead, you can only watch the films and ask, "How can she lose?"

This, to me, is the big reason why these movies are just not very good. (With the exception of Rebirth of Mothra II, which is so out-and-out terrible that not even the awesomeness of Aqua Mothra can save it) It's not merely that they're made for kids, that they're unoriginal, or that the human characters are so annoying. That would be bad enough, but the biggest sin of these movies is that they don't get Mothra.

Like many people when they finally saw the Heisei Godzilla films, I loved that when Mothra emerged as an imago in Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle For Earth and confronted Godzilla and Battra in Yokohama, she suddenly has beam weapons. Looking back on it now, it's already kind of ridiculous, but even in that film it isn't overdone. Mothra still needs Battra's help to defeat Godzilla, after all.

Along comes these films, and as I said before Mothra starts off in God Mode and if that ends up not being enough she transforms into whatever is necessary to kill the other monster. Mothra was always technically a Goddess, but now she is an immortal, all-powerful entity that cannot be stopped.

That is not Mothra.

Mothra wins because she keeps fighting, even when she cannot win. She fights against monsters that can breath radioactive fire, spit lightning at her, blast her with laser beams, or slice her up with blades when all she has going for her are the powers of a giant moth. She wins because she never gives up. She wins because she uses strategy. Mothra overcomes utterly impossible odds to win and save the day.

Mothra Leo? She wins because she pounds the other monster with one punishing blow after another. Even Godzilla stumbles in the final fight. Even Godzilla doesn't spend the entire climactic fight winning. Of course we should want Mothra Leo to win. We saw what that three-headed bastard did to her mother. However, it's not very engaging if she spends the entire battle winning, now is it?

If David defeated Goliath by beating him to death with his bare hands, I'm not sure that the story would really have retained its relevance all these years.

All that aside, this film honestly isn't that bad. It's definitely not good, however, and it would be fine fodder for a group of friends to gather together and riff mercilessly. However, it's not quite as bad as its reputation would suggest.

For one thing, while its child actors are not very good they're still far from the obnoxious horrors that plagued the later Showa Gamera films like Gamera vs. Zigra. The Goto family, while mired in cliches that Hollywood loves, are actually fairly engaging. And Mona, Lora, and Belvera are actually a lot of fun: although as someone who used to be a kid who often had kind of a thing for the lady villains, I wish Belvera was given more to do.

The monsters, which are the real reason we're here, are also pretty good. The adult Mothras both look vaguely like parade floats come to life, but the larval Mothra is a step-up from the 1992 version (which is actually one of my favorites) and Death Ghidorah is awesome, even if his roar doesn't fit his character and his wings are a bit underwhelming.

The special effects, directed by the late Koichi Kawakita, are a mixed bag. The miniature sets are really good, even if the only building destroyed in the film is a dam, and there's overall a petty decent mixing of the Elias and Belvera with the regular-sized world--even if it's not as good as earlier films. The various beams and explosions look pretty great as well. However, there are also some truly abysmal green screen shots. Bert I. Gordon-style big, black outlines around the characters might actually look better.

All in all, the film will probably delight its target audience, which is good. Anyone over the age of about ten is probably going to be left somewhat wanting, but I've certainly seen worse. In the end this is just a rather middle of the road film. It's not painfully bad, nor is it exactly good--it straddles the line between the two, occasionally threatening to drift one way or the other but refusing to actually commit.

Like a moth that won't come out of its cocoon.


This is my second contribution to the June Bugs Roundtable. Check out the other entries below!

Checkpoint Telstar:
The Naked Jungle
The Deadly Mantis
Starship Troopers

Cinemasochist Apocalypse:
Skeeter
Caved In: Prehistoric Terror
Millennium Bug

Micro-Brewed Reviews:
Them!
Bug

June 2015 began with some of the worst possible news for any film fan: Sir Christopher Lee had passed at the age of 93. It seemed impossible that the man should ever actually die. After all, he didn't seem to age at all from about the mid-1990s until his death, and the man played Dracula eight times--surely he was just as hard to kill as the creature he portrayed?

Sadly, despite all the superhuman things Christopher Lee had done in his life--which I won't detail here because there are simply so many--he was just a man. Some day we were going to have to say goodbye to him, and content ourselves with the fact that he left behind 278 acting credits because he had spent a long life doing precisely what he loved.

Even if doing what he loved did occasionally mean that he felt it necessary to do things like introducing himself to Joe Dante by apologizing for having starred in The Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf.

Well, naturally my fellow Celluloid Zeroes and I couldn't let the month pass without paying tribute to Sir Lee. I'd already done a review of Lee's favorite role, and just reviewing one of his random Dracula films didn't feel right. So I thought I would take a look a one of his slightly more obscure roles--and a role as a hero, which is not a part he usually played.

It's also one of my favorite Lee roles, as a heroic Victorian scientist who is still a bit of an arrogant prick just the same.

I don't always start off by adressing a film's credits, but these are especially ill-conceived so I feel I must. While the film's haunting theme music and train sound effects provide the audio part of this sequence, the visual component is a bright light moving randomly through darkness. Having a bright light flickering behind white letters means that several of the credits are utterly illegible.

I choose to believe any obscured credits belong to people who displeased the director.

The film the opens with a view of a frozen mountain that an on-screen title informs us is in the Szechuan Province of China in 1906. Our hero Professor Alexander Saxton (Sir Christopher Lee, of course!), then narrates, "The following report to the Royal Geological Society by the undersigned Alexander Saxton is a true and faithful account of the events that befell the society's expedition in Manchuria. As the leader of the expedition, I must accept the responsibility for its ending in disaster. But I will leave, to the judgement of the honorable members, the decision as to where the blame for the catastrophe lies." So obviously the expedition didn't go so well.

Saxton himself then appears before us in a cave, with Lee rocking a mustache this time around, as he follows a native guide through the cave's twists and turns. Suddenly, a haunting wistling is heard. Saxton shines his light on the guide, but it isn't coming from him. Just as suddenly Saxton sights his prize: a hominid frozen in ice, almost perfectly preserved with its one intact eye staring outward at the world that moved on without it.

"Close the door! You tryin' to refrigerate the whole neighborhood?"

Saxton has the hominid loaded into a crate and wrapped in a tarp and chains for travel before you know it, and next we see the crate it's waiting to be loaded onto the Trans-Siberian Express in Peking (or Beijing, if you want to be all correct about it). To the film's credit, most of the extras do appear to actually be Chinese since even in 1972 I wouldn't put it past a Spanish-British co-production to just use yellowface.

Saxton, meanwhile is having rather a lot of difficulty in the ticket office, as it appears that the reservation aboard the train that he telegrammed for has not been set aside. The ticket officer brushes him off, and then Saxton makes the unpleasant discovery that a professional rival, Dr. Wells (Peter Cushing!), is waiting to board as well. Wells introduces his assistant, Miss Jones (Alice Reinhear), and it must be noted that Saxton is able to shift from barely contained annoyance at Wells to polite pleasantries with Jones without missing a beat.

Meanwhile, a thief who never learned subtlety manages to distract the guard away from Saxton's crate and goes to work at picking the lock. When the guard returns, he finds the crate unlocked and partially pried open--and the thief lying dead nearby, his wide eyes bone white and pupil-less.

Saxton's annoyance grows even more when Wells successfully bribes his way into tickets for himself and Jones. Saxton disapproves of bribery and opts for trying to intimidate the ticket agent by smashing everything off the fellow's desk. And then some British troops arrive, having apparently been sent to assist Saxton. This sells his intimdation routine much better and he gets his ticket.

At Saxton's crate, a Russian monk named Father Pujardov (Alberto de Mendoza), who looks more than a little like another Russian monk, is praying over the thief's course. A Russian policeman, Inspector Mirov (Julio Peña) arrives and scoffs at the idea of redemption for a notorious thief. Pujardov is confused by Mirov's account of the man in life, for the man he is praying over is surely blind. Mirov laughs the monk's observation off--until he sees the body. "I'll be damned," he mutters and Pujardov stiffens and responds in the best possible B-Horror movie way, "The Work of The Devil!"

When Pujardov tries to break open the crate, Saxton intervenes. Unsurprisingly, he is unconcerned about the death of someone trying to steal his precious fossil and rather brusque in giving Mirov the brushoff. Until Pujardov gets everyone's attention by announcing, "Where there is God, there is always room for the cross," before drawing a cross on the floor with chalk. "Where evil is, there is no room for the cross," he intones before trying to draw a cross on the crate...and no mark is left. "A conjurer's trick," Saxton spits disdainfully. But Mirov is not so sure.

Once the crate is loaded onto the train, its occupant makes suspicious groaning noises that Saxton opens it to investigate but then chooses to write off as its gradually melting contents shifting. Wells tries to get Saxton to reveal its contents but Saxton refuses to budge on that score. (There is some delightful Cushing and Lee banter here) So Wells takes the train's porter aside and slips him some money, requesting with typical Cushing charm that the porter break into the crate that night and report to him what's inside.

Meanwhile, Countess Irina Petrovski (Silvia Tortosa) arrives in the baggage area carrying a small dog. She has something valuable for the porter to place in the safe, but naturally her dog begins to get agitated at the presence of the frozen creature. The "here's our love interest" music begins as Irina gets Saxton's attention, asking what is in his crate that could be frightening her dog. Saxton visibly warms up as he assures her that there's nothing in the crate that would interest her dog. The two flirt over a mutual respect for England and Poland, even when she casually mentions her husband. But when she tries to investigate the crate, Saxton deliberately diverts her by offering to escort her back to her carriage.

Along the way to his own carriage, Saxton makes the acquaintance of a peculiar gentleman playing chess by himself. The chess player advises he is an engineer and has confirmed that Pujardov's chalk was genuine. Saxton writes it off as, "Hypnosis. Yoga," and moves on. Meanwhile, a mysterious redheaded woman, a stowaway, has found her way to Wells' compartment and begun pleading with him to help her. It's bad timing, then, the it turns out that Saxton's compartment is the same as Wells'--he's the top bunk. And I have to enjoy a little giggle at the mental image of 6'5" Christopher Lee attempting to fit into the bunk displayed here, since he can barely fit when he sits on the edge of it.

While Saxton ignores Wells' attempts to convince him to find another compartment without an attractive, desperate redhead in it--the porter sets to work undoing a few screws in the crate so he can glance inside. He's whistling that same tune from earlier as he does it, but when he goes to fetch more light--a hairy arm reaches out of the crate and attempts to break the chains. That doesn't work, so the arm grabs a nearby nail and bends it, before picking the lock on the chains--almost as though it had absorbed the knowledge of a thief who had been an expert at doing the same. When the porter comes back and desperately tries to stop the creature breaking free, he makes the mistake of looking into its glowing red eye.

"Yeah, I know, my blinker's been on since the Miocene!"

The porter bleeds profusely from his eyes and nose, and his eyes go pupil-less and white, before he falls dead. The whistling tune begins again as the hairy fiend frees itself from the crate. Meanwhile, Pujardov waits in the cabin of Count Marion Petrovski (George Rigaud). The small dog is frightened again, but neither Petrovski nor Irina are all that concerned, while Pujardobv is torn between being alarmed at the dog's fear and being disgusted by the fact that Petrovski and Irina are discussing which dress she should wear when Saxton inevitably calls on her. I'm pretty sure the Count and Countess have an open relationship, but the movie doesn't come right out and say it. Petrovski teases Pujardov for forgetting his place, enjoying tormenting the mad monk with joking threats of unemployment. When Irina stops playing the piano, a voice whistling the tune she had been playing echoes through the train--amusing her and terrifying Pujardov.

Mirov summons Saxton and Wells to the baggage area. The porter is missing and he thinks they know something about it, especially since the evidence suggests he was interrupted breaking into the crate. Saxton is outraged and when Mirov threatens bodily harm to him if he doesn't hand over the key, Saxton tosses it out the window of the speeding train. So the conductor opens the crate with an axe--and the porter's dead body is inside. Saxton immediately accepts that this must mean that, impossibly, the 2-million-year-old ape man he found must be alive and loose. Wells is incredulous, "You mean to tell me that a 2-million-year-old half-man half-ape, broke out of that crate, killed the baggage man, put him in there, and then locked it all up neat and tidy?" Mirov, however, opts for a middle ground between belief and skepticism--he orders Saxton locked up and sets his men to searching the train for a zombie man-ape, while pledging to keep it quiet to avoid panic.

Well, the zombie ape-man eludes Mirov's men easily enough, creeping through compartments. Eventually it ambushes one of them and kills him with its glowing red eye trick, before giving his partner the impression that it jumped off the train to escape. (We get entirely too good a look at the half-rotted ape suit in this sequence alone. It was definitely not a suit that was built for more than quick, barely-lit glimpses) Wells, meanwhile, is at dinner with the redhead but completely lost in thought. He barely notices when the chess-playing engineer joins them, and recognizes Wells' companion from a party held for the honor of one General Wang. She pulls the classic terrible spy trick of angrily telling him he's mistaken. Wells is momentarily distracted when a fish on a tray rolls by, and he observes its eye is white. "Well, naturally: it's boiled," the engineer helpfully replies.

Mirov then interrupts their dinner to enlist Wells' help with an autopsy of the porter, as well as letting slip about one of his men being dead and the creature having escaped. He does this in full earshot of the engineer and the spy, then tells the engineer to keep his nose out of it. Good job keeping everything hush hush, Inspector. Wells goes to Miss Jones' table and advises that he needs her assistance. "Yes, well at your age I'm not surprised," she replies, glancing at the spy and engineer. Wells' eyes go wide when he catches her meaning and he hisses, "With an autopsy!"

Bet you didn't expect a joke about Peter Cushing group sex in a Hammer knockoff! And oh, I hope I see that combination of search key words bring somebody to this blog, now.

While Wells and Jones set to work cutting open the porter's skull in the baggage car, Irina comes to visit Saxton in the compartment he's being held in. (She chose the blue dress instead of the red, for those who wondered) Saxton was already dining alone, so she keeps him company as he does. She teases him for being in a bad mood because he's lost his "box of bones." Saxton counters that that box of bones could have revolutionized science by providing incontrovertible proof of evolution. "I've heard of this evolution," Irina stammers, "it's--it's immoral!" Saxon responds with one of my favorite of all Lee's lines, "It's a fact. And there's no morality in a fact."

Meanwhile, Wells and Jones discover that the porter's brain is completely smooth. When Mirov asks what that means, Wells explains that as memories are stored in the brain, they leave a mark behind--resulting in a wrinkled surface. The porter's brain has been drained of all knowledge and memories. Naturally, this is total bullshit, but it fits with the Victorian-Era theories of science. The three leave the autopsy to get cleaned up--and as soon as they're gone the door to the baggage car slides open and the ape creature climbs back inside, closing the door behind itself.

After Wells gets cleaned up, he advises the spy in his cabin that the washroom is all hers. Of course, she immediately sneaks into the baggage area. She's after the safe, and after she cracks it she grabs the package that Irina had the porter place in the safe. She doesn't get anywhere, however, because the monster sets upon her and gives her the brain drain. When Wells realizes she's been gone an awful long time, he goes to investigate and finds the washroom empty--and the ape monster grabs him by the wrist when he opens the door to the baggage car. Luckily, Mirov appears and shoots through the door, barely missing Wells. When the door swings open, the wounded creature locks eyes with Mirov. Mirov sways, blood dripping from his nose, but he manages to put a fatal bullet into the monster before he collapses. The monster, dead for real this time, falls beside its last victim.

(And I must note that throughout this sequence we never see a clearly lit shot of the full creature. Why they couldn't keep it in the shadows during its earlier appearance is beyond me)

Mirov comes to, in bed, later. He moves a little oddly as he examines his right hand. When he sees is left hand under the covers he reacts with shock and is sure to keep it hidden from view when Saxton enters. Saxton is rather pleased that he has his fossil back and glad to see that Mirov is doing well. He explains to Mirov that he and Wells examined the murdered spy and confirmed she died the same way as the porter. Their hypothesis is that the creature used its eye to drain knowledge from its victims through their eyes, adding their intelligence to its own with each feeding. Saxton is a little troubled because he doesn't know if a creature capable of doing that could truly die.

When the conductor arrives with the item the spy was trying to steal, which was found in the creature's possession, to Saxton's astonishment--and Mirov grabs it while stating it belongs to Count Petroviski. He claims he knows because he saw Petrovski put it in the safe, but Saxton is quietly suspicious. Mirov and the conductor go to return the item to Petrovski, where Petrovski happily reveals that it's a bar of a new alloy--steel harder than a diamond. Everyone wants the formula, but Petrovski boasts that it's safely kept in his head. (Whoops) Pujardov observes that Mirov keeps his left hand in his pocket the whole time, but when he speaks it is to insist that the creature is not dead.

When Mirov scoffs that he put four bullets into the creature, Pujardov teasingly replies, "Do you think evil can be killed with bullets?" Perhaps exercising some previously unknown telekinesis, Mirov seems to cause a candle to snuff out and a holy image to fall from the wall to screw with Pujardov. Meanwhile, Saxton, Wells, and Jones remove the eye from the dead ape creature and begin poking it with needles to draw out the eye fluid. When viewed under a microscope, the eye fluid reveals something bizarre--an image of Mirov gunning it down. Saxton is pleased to have proved his hypothesis that the creature stored its visual memory not in its brain, but in its eye.

Yes, that absolutely makes no sense, but run with it.

Extracting more of the eye fluid reveals images (clearly drawings) of a Brontosaurus, a Pterodactyl, and finally the Earth seen from space. When Irina comes to visit the trio she finds them in a grand mood because of the find and when Saxton shows her the image of Earth--she calls for Pujardov. He'd been attempting to secrectly follow her, you see, but not very successfully. Seeing the image and being told it came from the eye only convinces Pujardov even more that the creature is Satan. After all, didn't Satan look down upon the Earth from Heaven before he was cast down?

Even Saxton is at a loss for a good counterargument to that. Though you'd think he'd have already realized the visual memories can't all belong to a 2-million-year-old hominid if they contain dinosaurs. Unfortunately, the darkness following a trip through a tunnel allows Pujardov to steal the eye and disappear. The group splits up to find him and Jones heads to the baggage car. Well, that is where Pujardov is hiding. However, before she can find him, Mirov finds her. Mirov asks her why the eye that Pujardov stole is important. She reveals that the eye contains images of ancient Earth and Earth as seen from space. She also happily tells him who else has seen the images, before Mirov reveals that his left hand is now the hairy, clawed paw of the ape monster--and he claps that paw over her mouth before shutting off the only source of light in the car. Now Mirov's eyes glow red (a practical make-up effect, but they really should have sprung for animation) and Jones falls dead, her eyes white.

"Oh, God! The Visine does nothing!"

Pujardov reveals himself to Mirov, offering up the eye, and begs for mercy. Mirov takes the eye, tosses it into a stove and begins to leave. Pujardov asks if Mirov is going to kill him, too, but Mirov scoffs that there's nothing worthwhile in the monk's brain. Before he can exit the baggage car, the door opens and Saxton and Wells arrive. Mirov casually declares that there's been another murder and shows them Jones' corpse.

The passengers raise an uproar later as the news gets around, but Mirov threatens to shoot anyone who tries to leave the train. He also eyes Wells, Saxton, and Irina as Jones' voice naming them as having seen the eye fluid's images echoes in his mind. As Saxton asks Wells who could have killed Miss Jones, Mirov wanders past and asks if Saxton knows. Saxton replies in the negative, but informs Mirov that he's already told the conductor to stop the train at the next stop. So Mirov's first order of business is to go to the conductor's office, dim the lights, and get his eye-glow on.

As Mirov is opening a window to chuck the conductor's body out, Pujardov suddenly appears. He's practically got heart eyes as he begs to know who Mirov is and eagerly offers to serve him. Mirov just tries to shove him away, but still doesn't kill him. Out the window goes the conductor, and Mirov walks off. Pujardov stares after him like an obsessed schoolgirl.

Wells, Saxton, Irina, and Petrovski discuss the deaths and begin to wonder if it's some kind of disease. Saxton ponders what the symptoms would be and Irina brings up the eyes. So they examine every passenger's eyes with a magnifying glass, but the last patient is Mirov and nothing unusual turns up. The engineer suggests maybe they should test for radiation or X-Rays, but Saxton points out they have no way of testing for that. Saxton then suggests that Mirov order all passengers to stay in groups so that no one is ever left alone.

Naturally, Saxton immediately ignores his own edict to search for the conductor, but at least he establishes that the man is missing. Further up the track, a group of Cossack soldiers are waiting for news of the train. Their telegraph operator advises that the train will arrive at their station in fourteen minutes. "Fourteen minutes," says a deep voice from beneath a fur blanket--and then the movie's oddest character emerges from beneath the blanket, Captain Kazan (Telly Savalas!). As he orders his soldiers to be ready outside in full pack, Kazan goes on a bizarre rant to the telegraph operator. Nothing he says seems to follow anything else, culminating in, "Send a telegram: Tell them that Captain Kazan: he knows that a horse has four legs, a murderer has two arms...but still, the Devil, must be afraid of one honest Cossack, hmm?"

If you say so, Kojack.

Back on the train, Mirov goes to visit the engineer. The engineer's companion, an American passenger, has fallen asleep. Mirov asks if the engineer knows how to measure Earth's gravity and more importantly how to escape it. The engineer helpfully replies that it's not possible to do so yet, but he was taught by a man named Tsiolkovsky who did have some theories on how to do so. But, anyway, why is an Inspector so interested in rocket physics and why is he turning off the light with his strangely hairy hand...

Mirov then visits Saxton, who is alone again. Saxton reveals his hypothesis about the creature: millions of years ago, some intelligent life form came to Earth from another planet. In order to adapt to our atmosphere it entered the body of creatures living on Earth. Its latest host was the frozen animal that Saxton found. After its host was killed, it transferred to a new host--someone on the train. Wells arrives with a shotgun before Mirov can decide to make a move on Saxton, and Mirov asks what they intend to do if one of them is the monster. Wells replies in what is easily this film's most famous line, "Monster? We're British, you know!"

Wells, Saxton, and Irina soon find themselves in the dead engineer's compartment. The American woman tells them that the lights were on when she fell asleep and when she woke up again they were off--when she turned them back on, she found the body. Saxton realizes they tested everyone's eyes when the lights were on. Meanwhile, Pujardov leads his new master Mirov to his previous master, Petrovski. Petrovski is fiddling with a revolver when they arrive. Mirov asks what happens to the Count's new steel when it is exposed to high temperatures. Petrovski replies it gets stronger, but that depends on the temperature. Mirov is satisfied and makes his move towards unlocking the metal's formula--when those fourteen minutes finally run out and the train skids to a stop.

Cossacks board the train and round everyone up in the main car before the train starts back up again. Irina angrily shouts that she'll have Captain Kazan sent to Siberia, to which he dazedly replies, "I am in Siberia!" Still, after finding out who they are he has the Count and Countess escorted back to their car while he hollers, "Peasants! Peasants!" at the other passengers like he's in the middle of a Tumblr rant. He hollers that everyone is under arrest, including Mirov. "Who are the killers, who are the troublemakers? Who are the foreign influences, huh?!" he hollers as he accosts various passengers. Combine those lines with Telly Savalas being apparently uninterested in attempting a Russian accent and Kazan begins to sound like a Fox News host.

Saxton and Wells get a bit too uppity for Kazan's taste so they get a taste of some rifle butts. Meanwhile, his manhandling of Mirov while raving about "filth" sets off Pujardov. He threatens the Cossacks with a cross, which one of them declares to be "the evil eye." It doesn't work on Kazan, though. He takes the cross from Pujardov, borrows a cat-o-nine-tails from one of his underlings, and begins to whip the mad monk. Wells insists they stop it, but Saxton holds him back. Kazan asks why Pujardov was protecting Mirov, but Mirov dodges the question until Saxton makes his way back to the light switch...

...Mirov's eyes glow red in the brief darkness and he pulls out his hairy hand in alarm. He slashes one Cossack with his claws, but Kazan puts a dagger in his back and then two bullets to go with it. Mirov staggers out of the car. Kazan moves to follow him but Saxton stops him, warning how deadly those eyes of Mirov's are. Pujardov follows his wounded master, and offers his body as a replacement vessel, begging, "Come into me, Satan!"

"Noticeme, Satan-Senpai!"

Well, Satan don't need to be asked twice. While Kazan gives orders to shoot anything that comes out of the doorway the two went through and has his men move the "peasants" out the other door, Mirov turns his glowy eyes to Pujardov and then dies. Pujardov goes all dreamy-eyed, collapses, and then rises with his own glowing eyes. And holy shit, the make-up effect is even worse on him than it was on Mirov.

"Senpai noticed me!"

Pujardov cuts the power to the lights. The Cossacks fire blindly at the door frame as Saxton and Wells herd the passengers back to the baggage car. The Cossacks meanwhile are finding that a dozen Cossacks are no match for one red-eyed monk. The white-eyed bodies pile up in the terrified confusion. As the passengers crowd into the baggage car, Saxton and Wells prep a bright lamp as a defense against the creature. It's too late for the Cossacks, of course. Kazan is the only one left alive at this point. He puts on a brave fight, struggling to stand, but finally he collapses just as dead and pupil-less as his men.

Finding a car full of dead Cossacks, Saxton sends Wells back to take care of the passengers. He takes the shotgun and the powerful light and goes on ahead. See, Petrovski and Irina are still in their car and that's just where Pujardov is appearing now. He swaggers into the car and muses aloud that in spite of everything, his old self liked the Count even as Petrovski humiliated him repeatedly. Pujardov turns out the lights and drains the formula right out of Petrovski's brain. Irina attacks him in anger, but she is no match for the creature he has become. Pujardov implies that his old self lusted after her--just as Saxton arrives with a bright light to stop him from using his brain drain on her.

Saxton traps Pujardov in a corner with the bright light and shotgun trained on him, demanding answers. Pujardov explains he is an energy being from another galaxy, who visited Earth with others of his own kind millions and millions of years ago, but was accidentally left behind. The creature then survived in various forms of life, going all the way up the evolutionary ladder as Earth grew. Pujardov appeals to Saxton as a scientist--surely he couldn't kill such a creature and can see that it should be allowed to go free. But Saxton is unconvinced.

Pujardov tries the "I can teach you how to cure all disease and advance your civilization" approach and nearly gets a face full of buckshot from Saxton, who has heard enough. However, Pujardov does succeed in making Saxton wait just long enough for him to start swaying--which is his way of bringing all his victims back to life as zombies. Zombie Petrovski shoots out the light before Irina can warn Saxton, but Saxton easily shoves off Pujardov as he and Irina flee...

...into a car full of zombie Cossacks. Luckily, these zombies can be out down with the same means as you'd kill a normal human and they're up against Christopher fucking Lee here, The zombies don't stand a chance, Saxton and Irina flee back to the baggage car as Pujardov drives the train, having killed its engineer, Wells and Saxton set about separating the baggage car from the train as whatever zombies Saxton didn't put down slowly advance on them.

Ahead on the tracks, the order has come through from Moscow to use the switching station to stop the train. This translates to diverting the tracks so that they head right off a cliff. I'm not sure why that was ever a contingency plan, but there you go. The telegraph operator assumes that they're being ordered to kill everyone on the train this way because there must be a war. That's a hell of an assumption, but then again it's not like anyone guesses "killer alien entity" on their first try.

Wells and Saxton unhook the baggage car just in time. The speeding train goes off the cliff as Pujardov screams, and the baggage car safely slows to a stop right at the edge as Saxton, Irina, and Wells watch the rest of the train exploding below them. Hopefully those guys at the station don't assume they have to murder the passengers now. But we won't find out, because as the more funkified version of the film's haunting theme kicks in, we pull away from the burning wreckage to view the Earth from space. The End.

"I feel like I should say something smart.""You don't have to say anything."

There are few treats for a genre fan quite like a film where Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing appear together. Beyond being longtime friends off camera, the two always played wonderfully off of each other regardless of whether the movie they were in deserved it.

Horror Express is no exception, and I am willing to go out on a limb and declare that it does deserve the full gravitas of Cushing and Lee.

It might be stretching it a bit to call this film an unsung classic, but it sure is a delightful horror story. I always have a certain fondness for films that try to tell a story well beyond their means. This film definitely falls into that category, but to its credit the cheapness of the film only rarely shows itself. If not for the scene we get of it in bright light, the ape monster would be a truly creepy monster and the miniatures used for the train only become painfully obvious during its destruction. And frankly the film is smart enough to spread its money around--there's never an effect that is so painfully bad that it draws you out of the film because everything else is too good, nor one inexplicably great effect that throws the awfulness of the rest into sharp relief. Everything balances at just the right level of competence.

And that's impressive in and of itself when you consider that this is a film about a missing link coming back to life to go on a brain-draining rampage on a Victorian train, only to turn out to be an ancient evil entity that can hop from body to body because it's an an energy being from another galaxy. If that's not enough, you have a mad Russian monk and zombies. This film crams a lot into its plot, even if that does occasionally mean its plot has a complete dead-end like the Cossacks boarding the train to seemingly do nothing aside from upping the body count.

Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are both wonderful. Lee sometimes had a tendency to let his contempt for a project show through in his performance, but that doesn't happen here so clearly he felt the project deserved his respect--though it could be that he was playing off of Cushing, who always gave a film his all. Saxton is a thoroughly engaging anti-hero, as a scientist who is more concerned with his great find than the mysterious deaths surrounding it but who still knows that evil must be stopped--and Saxton is made so engaging by Lee's wonderful presence. Cushing meanwhile is clearly having a blast with Wells, who is clearly self-interested and corrupt in many ways but also is just as determined to do the right thing.

The rest of the cast acquit themselves well enough, even though most of them are clearly dubbed. Thankfully, most of the dubbing actors seem to actually bother to act. Nobody really stands out as terrible, as much guff as a give him for not faking an accent even Telly Savalas does well as the inexplicable Captain Kazan,

The film also has a wonderful soundtrack. The haunting whistling that appears over and over stuck with me in full clarity, even though prior to this review it had probably been close to ten years since I'd watched it.

The film isn't perfect, of course. Sometimes its low budget betrays it, its pacing could sometimes be tighter, and there are some truly bizarre editing choices. In particular, most of the monster's attacks are full of subliminal images of the frozen creature, quick cuts of the train, and far too lengthy shots of the victims gradually dying that kind of undercut the actual horror of it. That would be fine if it was just the porter's death that we see rendered that way, but the grand majority are shown to us in far too much detail. Pujardov massacring the Cossacks is easily the best attack in the film because the deaths are forced to quick instead of drawn out.

Still, if you're a fan of Hammer-style horror films Horror Express is an absolute delight. It certainly spent a lot of time in my VCR after I happened across it in a bargain bin in high school. That isn't very surprising, of course. A wonderful monster concept, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing  having a blast, and a mad Russian monk. What's not to love?

All that and furry hats!

The Terrible Claw Reviews and my fellow Celluloid Zeroes have come together to honor the late Sir Christoper Lee with a roundtable in his honor.

Checkpoint Telstar: The Gorgon

Micro-Brewed reviews: The Devil Rides Out

Cinemasochist Apocalypse: Rasputin The Mad Monk

It's pretty clear that it has always bothered white people to discover that other races they deemed "primitive" had thriving advanced civilizations thousands of years ago, while their own ancestors were busy shitting in their own water supply up until about the 19th century. How could this be?

Somewhere around the mid-20th century, a growing movement concluded that of course those brown people didn't make their own civilizations. They had help from "ancient astronauts"--advanced creatures from outer space that apparently decided it would be fun to teach humans how to stack rocks. And for some reason they just didn't like Europeans as much as the rest of the world, because they only taught them how to make Stonehenge.

It's sadly unsurprising that this idiotic hypothesis has held on as long as it has--after all, people still think the moon landing was faked despite the process of faking such a thing convincingly in 1969 would be more difficult than actually landing on the moon. Just turn on almost any "educational" channel and you'll see a guy who looks like a Babylon 5 extra presented as "expert testimony" while he claims space geckos built Angkor Wat.

Wait, maybe he actually does know what he's talking about...

I'm no expert on this phenomenon, but it seems like the biggest catalyst was the 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken. Unsurprisingly, the book led to today's film, a "documentary" that was actually nominated for an Oscar.

The film opens with generic credits over a star field, while a song that I swear wants to be "Telstar" with all the soul sucked out of it plays. We here learn that this is actually based on two of von Däniken's books, Chariots of the Gods and Return to the Stars. I'm sure neither is actually intended as fiction but still contains less truth than the average pulpy sci-fi story. There's also credits for special effects, so I'm anxiously awaiting some ridiculous re-enactment sequences.

Interrestingly, the producer and director both have "Dr." before their names, no doubt to lend credence to this whole charade.

The film opens with a dramatic zoom into an image of a galaxy, before cutting to footage of an observatory in California accompanied by music that convinces me I was right in my earlier accusation of ripping off "Telstar." Our narrator for the evening drones on about the special road built to transport the telescope's mirror, and expresses how many zeroes there are in the expression of mileage for light years, before he finally gets to his point--the ages old question of how many of the billions of observable stars in the universe may have life on the planets orbiting them.

And the narrator makes his thesis statement: there are 50 million stars in the Milky Way alone that could support life, so it's entirely possible that some time in our planet's past we had visitors from one of these worlds. "Possible" does not mean "likely," but I'm sure the narrator doesn't care. We get more "ooh, ahh" shots of galaxies before the narrator begins quoting from random scientists whose statements back up the central thesis. My favorite being a quote from Hermann Oberth claiming that, "Scientists are quick to adapt a negative attitude toward new ideas," and using an obsolete fear of the dangers of train travel as an example. Because somehow "aliens did it" is supposed to be as revolutionary an idea as trains were and we all know scientists are big sticklers for never doing anything new ever.

This bit ends with them apparently ends with them accosting a Russian scientist outside in the cold, where the translation assures us he is saying that aliens definitely visited Earth because of the evidence they left behind. He then gestures at the spires of a cathedral, thanks to the mismatch between the translation and his gestures. Jesus confirmed as space alien!

The narrator then talks of how man has always wanted to reach the stars, and that learning to fly was never enough. This is followed, for some reason, by footage of rockets blowing up during takeoff. It kind of undercuts the narrator's assertion following these failures that mankind will be on Mars within the 20th century, and Venus by the 21st.

Sadly, we all know this film's predictions for the future are as full of crap as its claims about the past.

The narrator then asks, if human astronauts ever land upon a distant star, "will they be treated as enemies or as gods?" What? Why are those the only two options?

The film then asserts that we have seen this happen virtually every time an advanced civilization met a primitive one, which is how it segues into talking about Cargo Cults in the South Pacific during World War II. This includes a recreation with "natives" building wicker planes and crude runways. The natives almost look authentic except they're all wearing really damn obvious wigs. The film explains the idea of cargo cults and then explains that it's possible all Earthly religions started the same way.

So I guess I wasn't far off with the Space Alien Jesus joke.

The film proceeds to get even more inadvertantly hilarious as it asserts that all over the world religions are based around visits from advanced astronauts. 'They don't call them that, of course," the narrator admits. Yeah, funny how that works.

The narrator talks of so-called descriptions of spaceships and rocket launches to be found in the ancient scrolls of Tibet, the epic of Gilgamesh, and then hilariously talks about the destruction of Sodom and Gamorrah. After leading in with how Lot and his family were led to safety in the mountains, the narrator says, "We know now that mountains can protect against radioactivity [!]," before suggesting that the destruction of the two cities was describing an atomic explosion.

Well, assuming that the "angels" are actually "aliens" and that the Old Testament tells us the cities were destroyed at least partially because its citizens were trying to sexually assault the angels that visited Lot...then I guess the aliens decided the appropriate response to attempted anal probing was to take off and nuke the site from orbit. Only way to be sure.

We then see a fresco of Jesus on the cross, and the music--perhaps to make you so disoriented as to have no choice but to agree with the narrator--goes absolutely bonkers, loud and ill-matched to the footage as the narrator claims the two figures in the top corners of the fresco are clearly men in spaceships. If that's the case, they're engaged in a space battle or a drag race, which is a very rude time for them to choose to do that, what with the Savior slowly dying and all below them while his followers mourn him. The narrator directs us to look at the onlookers averting their eyes from the spaceships. The "onlookers" shown have angel wings, so either the narrator has lost the thread of his argument or these are aliens who are just appalled at the actions of Gleegark and Phil, Also, one is holding his nose so either rocket fumes stink or he's about to sneeze.

This is why nobody ever invites Gleegark and Phil to a crucifixion.

We next see a cave painting in Italy, which we are to interpret as showing two guys in "overalls" and helmets with antennae on them. Maybe it does, but it's so faded that it could be two Roman Emperors having a dance-off. The film quickly moves to Istanbul, where it claims some maps there from "the Orient" show things that could only be viewed from space at the time they were drawn, like a landmass the narrator assures us is Antarctica.

The film then lets the musicians freestyle a little before it gets to that favorite argument spot of ancient astronaut theorists: the Pyramids of Giza. (The narrator pronounces it "Gizz-uh" instead of "Geez-uh", so he's clearly lost all credibility) Now, as usual, the narrator argues that the pyramids would have taken 600 years to build with existing techniques. Even though, it's been figured out that the way the Egyptians transported the stones was by wetting the sand--in fact their hieroglyphics show them doing this but archaeologists assumed it was just a picture of a "ritual."

True hilarity results when the narrator tells us that, "if you multiply the height of the Pyramid of Cheops by one billion, it equals almost exactly the distance from the Earth to Sun; a mere coincidence?" Um, I'm gonna have to say a firm "yes" on that, Sparky.

"Tyrannosaurus Rex had two fingers. If you multiply that by 375, you have roughly the average number of legs on a milipede; a mere coincidence?!"

Leaving aside the fact that it's a totally arbitrary figure, the narrator tells us that the pyramid is 455 feet high. You multiply that by a billion and you get 455,000,000,000 feet or around 86,174,242 miles. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is 92,960,000 miles. So you're only off by around 6 million miles. That is not "almost exactly," but why are we assuming that ancient Egyptians and their alien buddies used the Imperial System of measurement in the first place?

Yeah, nice try, Sparky.

Of course, he then claims the pyramids sit exactly at the longitude dividing Europe and Africa, and if you divide the width of the base by the height of the pyramid, you get "exactly the figure Pi" centuries before a European mathematician discovered it. This is supposed to awe us, but--I'm sorry, "exactly the figure Pi'?! First of all, here's the first 100,000 digits of Pi--and keep in mind the reason Spock trapped the vengeful ghost of Jack the Ripper in the ship's computer by telling to calculate Pi out to the last digit is because we have no idea how it ends!

Even if the narrator means 3.14159, that's not that impressive because Pi or very similar concepts to it have been used for centuries--confirmed records of it in ancient China and, yes, Egypt, date back at least as far as 1850 B.C. So am I supposed to be surprised that a white guy discovered a concept in the 15th Century that even Archimedes had used and, coincidentally, is the height and width of a pyramid divided?

Also, you'll be amazed to discover that the height/width division does not equal 3.14 at all. It seems that all the facts presented in this documentary could only have passed the smell test in an age before Google. Mere coincidence?!

The film goes on to talk about actual history, including burial chambers that were painted by sunlight through the use of mirrors to reflect light deep into tunnels. But then it gets stupid again, by advising that the mummification process was thought to be a religious ritual until it was recently discovered to be Egyptians unsuccessfully attempting to recreate a physical preservation method used by their alien visitors.

And by discovered, the narrator means that someone pulled that "fact" out of their ass.

Seriously, if ancient Egyptians were supposedly imitating the process of preserving a body for later revivification--as the narrator is suggesting--then their alien visitors didn't bother to explain to them that you need your brain and internal organs in order to come back to life. One of the frst steps of mummification, remember, was pulling the brain out through the nose with a hook and then discarding it. Implying this was the Egyptians poor imitating advance alien visitors is pretty insulting, on several levels.

The film then talks of various structures that could not have been moved by ancient Egyptians because in the 20th Century it took modern man 3 years to move them when they had to be relocated for the construction of a dam. I guess it's impossible that the Egyptians could have just simply taken longer? Also, if you take a shot every time the narrator says, "No one knows how," in this sequence, you would probably be pretty buzzed before the film gets bored of Egypt and moves on to Greece.

However, rather than wondering how the Greeks built their buildings, the narrator observes that the buildings were built on top of an even more ancient terrace. So, naturally, this terrace was the landing pad for spacecraft. Because of course it was.

The film drifts over to Djanet in Algeria to some cave paintings that the narrator insists are aliens. The music drops the harpsichord it's been tinkling on since Greece so someone can slow jam the main line of "Telstar" on an electric guitar. This does not convince me that I am seeing aliens and spaceships, especially since one drawing is clearly a stylized snail. Even the narrator admits there are other explanations, as if that makes his argument stronger.

There are much talk of cave paintings that "clearly" show astronauts, which just makes me wonder why the filmmakers are so convinced that ancient astronauts would look so much like modern ones? Why are we assuming that they would have the exact same configurations of legs, arms, and heads that humans do? What if the aliens were giant tardigrades?

Hey, look, an astronaut!

Then the narrator gives up doing his job, which is speaking, when we next see an ancient ruin in Zimbabwe where he trails off in the middle of what is clearly a "Was it thing A, thing B, or thing C?" line in a such a way that leaves you waiting for the "or thing C" that won't be coming. Also, clearly aliens built that ruin because no human could stack bricks like that.

Next up, it's time for the Aztecs to get their intelligence insulted as the narrator ponders if they had extraterrestrial help in creating their damn calendar. Seriously, you may have picked up on it by now, but this film's thesis is literally "if I don't completely understand it, that means aliens did it." Pretty ironic given that they're suggesting Earthly religions are all cargo cults, but their evidence is just as baseless as "if I don't completely understand it, God did it."

Next, the narrator tells us the pyramids of Mexico were clearly influenced by the intervention of Quetzalcoatl, whom the narrator describes as a light-skinned bearded man (of course) from the stars who taught the Aztecs everything they knew about anything of value before returning to the stars after promising to return one day. Never mind that, in many myths--Quetzalcoatl being one of those Gods who really got around--he killed himself, usually for the betterment of humanity. The narrator mentions the fact that Quetzalcoatl is always portrayed as a feathered serpent but does not offer any bullshit explanation for this. Sadly, I doubt this means the film is suggesting an actual feathered serpent came down from the stars to aid humanity.

Maybe if David Icke had been involved.

The filmmakers are also basing their description of Quetzalcoatl as a space honky on the claims that the Aztecs believed Hernán Cortés was the return of Quetzalcoatl. You'll be totally shocked to know that historians now mostly believe that a self-important, greedy mass murderer might have been making shit up to make himself sound more awesome. Especially since the Aztecs didn't actually have any doctrine that claimed Quetzalcoatl would return. But that's inconvenient to the thesis here.

Next we see some statues that the narrator insists appear to be wearing strange helmets, have boxy control units on their chests, and are carrying tools or weapons unknown on Earth. The filmmakers clearly have no concept of artistic license or stylization, and would go mad if presented with abstract art.

"Could Duchamp have witnessed a rebellion at an alien robot factory? How did he create this image without a computer to digitize his colors onto the canvas? No one knows how."

We've insulted the Aztecs' intelligence enough, now time for the poor Mayans to get it. After assuring us that a building is a Mayan Observatory and looks nearly identical to a modern day one, the narrator points out a figure that he claims is pulling a lever and wearing a helmet with antennae. It does not look like that at all, but thanks for playing!

Next the narrator points out a deep well that Mayans supposedly threw sacrifices into, and claims that the perfectly round cylinder that the well forms proves it was not natural--and therefore the product of an enormous rocket firing. So our ancient visitors were incredibly careless with their massively destructive rockets? Hot-rodding assholes.

The mysterious collapse of the Mayan civilization is brought up, but oddly the film drops it almost immediately. The mysterious stone heads in the jungle, that are 80 miles from any known quarry, are also quickly glossed over. That's two actual, unexplained mysteries that the movie quickly skips over so it can try to sell you on the stunning find of "The Winged God of Palanque," a mural it is increasingly desperate to sell you on as a representation of a man in a rocket capsule. This includes claiming he is wearing a jacket that fits tight at the wrists, when anyone can clearly see the figure is not wearing anything above the waist and the "cuffs" are bracelets.

"Look, you can plainly see his arm says 'NASA' on the bicep!"

At this point, I just feel embarrassed for the narrator. However, it's now time to go use Easter Island as evidence. Per our narrator, the famous stone moai could not have been made by humans, there are legends of priests who could manipulate mana, the island is strangely magnetic--it's just boring by this point so the film even stops to play you more knock-off "Telstar" over footage of the moai.

Why was somebody credited with special effects, again? Because there haven't been any to speak of.

We now go to Cuzco so the narrator can insult the intelligence of the Incas by telling us that the bricks left behind by their ancient cities could not have been made with anything less than modern technology. Worse, he once again trots out the interstellar cracker hypothesis when he says that the Incas told Pizarro that the masons were light-skinned, bearded, red-headed men. Look, as a ginger, I am well aware that my people seem to be ill-suited to the planet Earth, but this is all proving my original point far better than I expected.

It's not enough for the filmmakers to declare that aliens helped ancient brown-skinned civilizations to be awesome. No, those aliens must not only be humanoid but white. Because surely only white people are allowed to be technologically resourceful.

After assuring us that Machu Picchu was also supposedly built by these astro-gingers, the film dawdles a bit in a temple on the shores of Lake Titicaca without actually bothering to do more than say, "Hey, isn't that carved figure odd-looking?"

Then it's time for a brief stop-over in Australia. Here the film talks about a rock painting of a Goddess who supposedly came from the stars to teach humanity her wisdom. Despite the fact that even the few paintings that we see of the Goddess don't match each other, the narrator wonders who the model for the painting was and why so many representations look like her across the world. Never mind that even the brief cutting between the various "aliens" we've seen so far doesn't disguise the fact that none of them look alike. If we're supposed to be convinced that the similarity of figures all over the world means aliens visited us, maybe they should actually look alike?

We then see a figurine called a Dogū from Honshu, Japan, while the crazed Russian who collects them is translated for us as he explains that the Dogū clearly show people in space suits with "Eskimo"-like slit goggles and mechanical claw hands. The Russian has an answer for those who object that the figure is just a God, by asking how the sculptors could have created all the details on the figurines "without seeing the model?"

Did he just ask how Japanese sculptors could have sculpted something without having something just like it to base it on? Does he think the ancient Japanese didn't have imaginations? I mean, two can play at that game. Clearly Godzilla was real because how could the Japanese have designed him without seeing the model, huh, smart guy?!

Next up, the narrator brings our attention to the ol' ancient battery in a clay pot and a polished lens that was cut with some precision instrument. Again, these are proof of aliens because Europeans didn't discover how to make these things until centuries later! Clearly, if it happened before white people did it, the only explanation is aliens!

Next, we see another crazed Russian who claims to know of two relics that are astounding in their implications. One is an ancient bison skull that the narrator claims was killed with a bullet. I have my doubts that "round hole in skull" equals "bullet" and that's all the visual evidence we are given of this claim, but okay. The other is supposedly a cave painting from Uzbekistan, but when we see it--or what is supposedly a copy of it--it is so obviously bogus as to make you laugh aloud even before a quick Google tells you it's several different kinds of phony. I'm just shocked that these people would lie to me, man.

Aliens take chess very, very seriously, man.

The film does a quick rundown of the various sites they've taken us to thus far, perhaps to distract us from obviously fake that cave painting is. Then it randomly shows us a supposed cave painting from Japan of the Futurama space ship that looks no more authentic than the Uzbeki-beki-stan-stan job. Then we see a gold sculpture of a "flying machine" that is supposedly aerodynamic--but it sure looks like a shark or skate to me.

Incredibly, the narrator assures us there is still more evidence. Oh God, why? The evidence he means are the Nazca Lines in Peru. While it is true that the patterns can only be seen from the sky and no one knows why, the narrator's assertion that it was clearly a landing field is pretty laughable. For one thing, if that was its intended purpose then whomever built it would have made it durable enough that Greenpeace's recent little climate change stunt wouldn't have resulted in them facing criminal charges for defacing it. Meanwhile, the narrator earlier claimed alien rockets could cut holes in rock, so...

After assuring us that "we may doubt the conclusions, but we cannot ignore the evidence," the film does a final montage to the knock-off "Telstar" theme. The narrator concludes the film as we watch a spinning galaxy effect, by trailing off with with the mind-numbing, "Were the Gods astronauts? Do you suppose, once upon a time...once upon a time...once upon a time...?"

Because nothing sells your super-serious documentary like fairy tale language.

I came into this film convinced it was full of shit, but you know, when I left it I was convinced it was really, really full of shit. I mean, from willful misrepresentation of evidence to outright lying, this film couldn't be more amazingly pathetic in its attempt to convince me.

Naturally, like most proponents of "ancient astronaut" theory, it doesn't bother to offer any explanations or even hypotheses for why. I mean, why did its proposed star mayonnaise people come to Earth, teach us how stack rocks and draw them, and then return to the stars--never to be seen again? If they came all that way, influenced cultures all over the world--apparently for long periods of time--why did they then just bugger off forever?

As a "theory" there's nothing to it beyond a little bit of "how did they do that awesome stuff before white people did it" mixed with "wouldn't it be cool if..." and a touch of "a wizard did it." I could just as easily argue that the ancient Egyptians had telekinetic powers but lost them due to breeding with mundane humans. There's as much evidence to support that claim as there is to support, "aliens did it," and it's no less ridiculous.

Still, even a dumb concept can at least be entertaining. This isn't. The film makes a lot of pretense of it being a part of an expedition and revealing stuff for the first time, but it doesn't feel that way at all. There's also no focus. It jumps back and forth between continents with no rhyme or reason. There's not even an attempt at, "If you look at this, it makes sense of that!" It manages to have a short attention span and drags on past the point of any interest.

The music is at least trying to be interesting, but not only does it seem weirdly derivative, its very attempt to be interesting means it feels more out of place than the soundtrack to a Jess Franco film.

I suppose if you find loony conspiracy theories fascinating or hilarious, you might get a kick out of this. For me this film felt more like having to watch something for homework than a lot of the truly awful films I've subjected myself to over the years. I can't even call it terrible, just boring.

It's not really the film's fault, but in a world where we have channels that can devote an entire broadcasting day to shows based on these silly conspiracy theories, there just isn't anything that stands out about it. Maybe someday we'll move past this obsession and this crap will all seem new again.

Was there a time when we weren't bombarded with this crap? Do you suppose, once upon a time...once upon a time..once upon a time...


Take a look at the other true bullshit that the Celluloid Zeroes dug up for you!

Checkpoint Telstar watched something good Without Warning.

Micro-Brewed Reviews hasn't been seen since he visited The Bermuda Triangle.

Cinemasochist Apocalypse looked into whether there's any truth to the Legend of Chupacabra.

One of the strangest things about classic works and pop culture mainstays, is realizing that at one new they were brand new and untested. Jaws and Star Wars were expected to be huge bombs, James Bond was originally adapted to be an American CIA agent named "Jimmy Bond" for an episode of an anthology TV show, and once upon a time Godzilla's name was not considered enough of a box office draw in the very land that gave birth to him.

In 1962, and the following International releases in 1963, King Kong vs. Godzilla proved to be a huge hit. Toho had clearly made the right decision in licensing the character of King Kong and using him to bring their homegrown monster back to the big screen after a 7 year absence. For the first time since 1955's rushed sequel, Godzilla Raids Again, Godzilla was seen as a viable franchise property at a time when franchises were not the norm.

(For more evidence of how unusual franchises were at that time, remember that Godzilla Raids Again became "Gigantis, The Fire Monster" in the US because the studio assumed audiences would be more likely to go see a new film than a sequel)

Well, Toho may have seen the franchise potential in Godzilla, but they clearly weren't all that sure of his name value yet. When it came time to follow up King Kong vs. Godzilla, Godzilla was once again the second-billed monster. Clearly 1961's Mothra had been enough of a success that Toho felt audiences would see Mothra as the draw and cast Godzilla as the sinister foil to her heroic role.



Man, I would love to know the story behind this wacky publicity still.

In the US, however, that sentiment was much the opposite. While this entry is easily one of the least altered Godzilla films to make it to US theaters, the title and poster art promised an entirely different film: Godzilla vs. The Thing. Gone was even the barest mention of Mothra in trailers and promotional materials--and even in the film, characters inexplicably refer Mothra by her proper name and as "The Thing," interchangeably. On posters, Godzilla was shown facing off against a big question mark or, in the case of the astoundingly dishonest poster above, wrestling with a tentacled monstrosity so horrible it has to be hidden behind a "Censored" panel.

I really, really wish there was more available press from the time of the film's release because I seriously must know how many people walked out of the film feeling ripped off.

I would like to believe that some of the sting was taken out by the fact that the film they did see was amazing.

We open with the most famous of Akira Ifukube's themes, and the theme that became as inseparable from Godzilla as tapping two piano keys became from killer sharks. For Japanese audiences, this would actually be the second time they heard this theme, but producer John Beck tragically deprived Western audiences of it when he was chopping King Kong vs. Godzilla to pieces. The theme is a prelude to a raging typhoon that obliterates a seaside industrial area we'll later discover is Kurada Beach. Say what you want about how obvious the miniatures are in this sequence, the scale of destruction rendered is impressive.

The next morning, huge pumps are hard at work flushing the water back out to sea. An unnamed politician (Kenzo Tabu) arrives to bloviate about how successful he cleanup has been and, in what I am convinced is not an accident, he has a Hitler mustache. The press shows up in drives and we focus on journalist Ichiro Sakai (Akira Takarada!) and his photographer Junko Nakanishi (Yuriko Hoshi!). Sakai is rather unimpressed that Junko hasn't instantly begun taking photos, but he's distracted from haranguing her by the politician singling him out. It seems Sakai has been critical of the politician's progress in cleaning up after the typhoon.

Sakai escapes having his ear chewed off by the politician because the man is too busy using the crowd for self-promotion to actually keep an eye on the man he was just angrily confronting. Sakai, meanwhile, finds Junko setting up for a shot and is annoyed when he finds out it's her first. (Sakai is kind of a jerk) However, when he sees what she's shooting he's stunned out of his lecture on how easy photography is--floating among some wreckage is an object the size of a hubcap, rainbow colored like oil on water. And then Sakai picks it up, ruining Junko's shot.

Meanwhile, back at the newspaper they work for, a call comes in to the chief editor, Murata (Jun Tazaki, here not playing a general). In the first instance of a running gag, the news Murata gets causes him to prevent Nakamura (Yu Fujiki) from finishing eating a egg--at a beach near the site of the typhoon, an enormous rainbow-colored egg has been sighted floating offshore.

The fishermen of the village are scared of the egg, but the head villager (Akira Tani) tells them that it's a great opportunity for the village and the priest (Ikio Sawamura, the old man in practically every Ishiro Honda film I've mentioned before) assures them that the Gods will protect them from any curse upon the egg. Well, that's good enough for the fishermen and they row out in their canoes and somehow bring the egg ashore.

Sakai and Junko are naturally quick to make the scene--though not quick enough that we don't get a spinning newspaper announcement of the egg's discovery first. The egg is surrounded by scientists taking samples, lead by Professor Miura (Hiroshi Koizumi, who sadly passed away earlier this summer). Miura is not interested in answering questions, but despite her accidentally blinding him with a flashbulb even he can't resist Junko's cuteness and relents to answer one question at her urging. Sakai then blows this opportunity by asking if the egg will explode.

Sorry, Sakai, you're thinking of beached whales not beached eggs. (Don't search YouTube for footage of exploding whales unless you have a strong stomach)

Well, Miura doesn't get to take many samples because suddenly the head villager arrives with Kumayama (Yoshifumi Tajima, last seen here being eaten by an H-Man), a sleazy businessman with a Hitler mustache. Again, I don't think this was accidental. Kumayama's company, Happy Enterprises, has purchased the egg from the villagers and, in an amusing bit, we find out the price was determined by multiplying the wholesale price of one chicken egg by how many chicken eggs this monster egg is equal to. At any rate, over Sakai, Junko, and Miura's objections Kumayama has the scientists driven away--but promises to let them study the egg for the same fee he's going to charge everyone else to see it. And then he asks unko to take his picture and deliberately ruins the shot by blowing smoke at her.

Presumably the scene of him kicking a puppy was cut for time.

At a nearby hotel, Sakai, Junko, and Miura are all together, discussing the issue. All three agree that Happy Enterprises shouldn't be allowed to keep the egg. However, none of them know what to do about it. Miura scoffs that the government would need too many committee meetings to even decide it's worth discussing, while Sakai can only offer his role as a journalist to try and sway public opinion against Happy Enterprises.

As the three are exiting the hotel, presumably to go to dinner, they see Kumayama coming in and asking the front desk if a certain party has arrived. Sakai gets the feeling that maybe Kumayama isn't in charge after all, and this might be a chance to see who's pulling his strings. Sakai is right, for Kumayama is meeting Jiro Torahata (Kenji Sahara!) in Torahata's room. As he lounges in sunglasses at night and chews on a fancy cigar, Torahata discusses the wonderful profit potential of the monster egg--and the two pore over a blueprint of the giant incubator they'll build for the egg.

Now, you might think that the Japanese government might come down swiftly on any corporation incubating a kaiju egg on Japanese soil--especially since, in King Kong vs. Godzilla, they wouldn't let Tako's company bring King Kong to Japan. However, this is never addressed in the film and I'm fairly certain that is a part of the film's satire of Japanese corporate culture. Especially since, in the original Japanese version of King Kong vs. Godzilla, King Kong is blocked not because he is a public menace--he's blocked because Tako hasn't paid the import taxes on him!

At any rate, as Torahata congratulates himself on a wonderful plan and draws on his cigar, a tiny voice objects that is plan is wrong. I mean a literal tiny voice. Two tiny voices, actually. Torahata assumes the voies are corporate spies after the plans and shoves them into a locker full of cash--which Kumayama almost literally drools over. However, the two men soon discover the source of the voices is on a nearby shelf, where the twin fairies or Shobijin (Emi and Yumi Ito, or "The Peanuts", reprising their roles from Mothra) are standing in order to implore the two men to return the egg.

It doesn't go well.

Torahata and Kumayama immediately think that they should follow in the villainous Nelson's footsteps in Mothra (apparently unaware how badly that ended for Nelson) by capturing the fairies and displaying them with the egg. Unfortunately, the Shobijin have learned some tricks since their last visit to civilization and easily elude the two men. Sakai uses the sound of their struggle as an excuse to rush into the room. He's quickly ushered out, but now he knows Torahata is involved.

Sakai meets with Junko and Miura in the woods behind the hotel. As they discuss ideas for how to deal with the issue, they are addressed by two tiny voices imploring them to return the egg. Junko spies the Shobijin on a tree branch. Our heroic trio is, naturally, far more willing to listen to reason. Especially once the fairies reveal that the egg is Mothra's and, in flashback, explain that the egg was washed away when the tidal waves caused by the typhoon wore away the cliff face it was buried in. If the egg is not returned before it hatches, the larva inside might cause great damage in its search for food. The natives of the island have been praying for the egg's safe return for days, but the Shobijin caught a ride to Japan on Mothra.

What's that? Oh, yeah, Mothra is sitting right over there on a nearby hill. Her attempt to "wave" hello nearly blows the poor humans away with the force of her wings.

In the hopes that, together, they might be able to succeed where separately they had failed, our heroes bring the Shobijin to a meeting with Kumyama and Torahata. Hilariously, being told that the egg belongs to a giant moth that had leveled Tokyo and New Kirk City only three years earlier, just makes Torahata joke that they should come back with whatever lawyers Mothra can provide. Seeing that Junko has the Shobijin inside the box she's carrying only makes the two sleazeballs offer to buy the twin fairies. So much for that plan.

Regrouping at a restaurant, Sakai, Junko, and Miura take turns despairing of how hopeless it is. They've simply done all they can. And then they notice the Shobijin have vanished. The three quickly realize that the fairies must have gone back to Mothra. It's too late, though, as they hear the voices of the fairies thanking them for their efforts, but they're going back to Infant Island--and then Mothra nearly blows them away on take-off.

Mothra is taking a noticeably more diplomatic approach to retrieving her young than she did to retrieving the fairies in her last outing.

Since this is a film from 1964, Sakai and Murata discuss the best way to sway public opinion via their newspaper. However, while their articles do unsettle the villagers enough to force Kumayama to borrow money from Torahata to keep them happy, Happy Enterprises still goes ahead with activating the furnaces that power their incubator. So far the free press is powerless against the corporate juggernaut.

Well, soon that monster egg will be old news. Junko fetches Sakai because Miura left a message for them. After insisting the two go through a decontamination chamber, Miura informs them that the weird object they found in the typhoon wreckage at Kurada Beach is radioactive. They go back to test the area, now clear of water, for residual activity. Unfortunately, the politician from earlier tells them to get lost when he discovers they aren't there to praise his efforts. Except when Sakai goes to collect Junko, she points out to him that she has been unable to get a good shot of the industrial area because the land is moving.

Sure enough, the land is rising and falling like something is pushing up from underneath it. A srage fountain of mist erupts from the ground, which sends Miura's geiger counter into fits. And then, in the greatest moment in film history, Godzilla bursts up through the ground.



"... I am never drinking again."

Having been buried there by the typhoon, Godzilla is in a foul mood when he wakes him. He advances on Nagoya, destroying a refinery before wandering through the downtown area. In a sure sign of how groggy the big brute is, he gets his tail caught in the base of a tower and proceeds to wrestle with said tower after he knocks it over onto his back. He wanders over to Nagoya Castle and proceeds to stumble on the castle moat and fall into the castle, which he then destroys as if he totally meant to do that, folks.



"You take that back, my mother was not a skink!"

In the US version, we get an unusual sequence in that it was shot by Toho exclusively for use in the American release. The US Navy helpfully offers to aid Japan by engaging Godzilla with their shiny new Frontier Missiles. The fleet finds Godzilla just fine and bombards the beach he's on, but as you might expect all those fancy missiles do is momentarily knock Godzilla down a cliff--which, given how clumsy he's been so far, he might have done regardless of their involvement.

In the newspaper office, Sakai, Junko, Miura, and Murata try to decide what the hell anyone can do about Godzilla's return. Nakamura arrives, having been forced to leave the area where the egg is housed due to Godzilla being at large. Murata is annoyed that he didn't stay behind and risk being stomped by Godzilla, but then Nakamura suggests that maybe Mothra could be persuaded to help. I mean, she is a giant monster and her egg is currently in the country being torn apart by Godzilla, so it could be in danger, too. Sakai, Junko, and Miura reluctantly agree that it is worth a shot.

The trio are airlifted to Infant Island, but land in an inflatable dinghy. They survey the radioactive ruin that is much of Infant Island, strewn with skeletons--check out the oddity in the background that is referred to as "Skeleturtle" by the fandom: it looks like a skeleton, but bobs its head and blinks at random intervals.



"Maybe Skeleturtle will fight Godzilla?"

The natives find them and bring them to the island's temple. The island chief (Yoshio Kosugi, here wearing red paint and a white beard instead of black face as he did in King Kong vs. Godzilla, where he also played a native chief) makes sure the strangers drink the radiation-curing juice estabished in Mothra and then demands to know what they want. Understandably, an island used for nuclear tests is not exactly trusting of outsiders and hearing, "Hey, we want to borrow your God so she can fight Godzilla," goes over like a lead balloon. Hearing the voice of the Shobijin singing leads everyone to a beautiful garden oasis, where the twin fairies are waiting. They cheerfully explain that they know what the trio wants, thanks to their telepathy, but they will not help.

It then falls to the trio to take turns making impassioned pleas for why Mothra should help, oddly none of which is, "If she doesn't, Godzilla might decide to make her egg an omelet." Well, Mothra is persuaded and cries out, so the Shobijin lead the trio to the temple where Mothra is perched. Mothra has agreed to help, but given her age and waning strength there's not getting around it: Mothra will not survive this battle, win or lose.



"What if we gave her a really big sweater to eat?"

The next day, the trio returns to Japan near the giant incubator, whee Mothra has been promised to arrive. Unfortunately, Godzilla has made his advance towards the same area. In the nearby hotel, Kumayama confronts Torahata because it seems the money he "borrowed" was actually his own: his business partner has been cheating him. Kumayama beats Torahata bloody and breaks into the money locker. Torahata, seeing Godzilla advancing on the hotel,  pulls a gun out of his desk and shoots Kumayama in the head. Unfortunately, the time it takes to gather up his money means Torahata is still in the hotel when Godzilla casually strikes it with his tail.
And my inner commie is delighted to see the two corrupt capitalists kill each other before being stomped on by Godzilla.

Godzilla proceeds to smash the incubator to get at the egg, which is the point when Junko finally realizes that it would be a bad thing if Godzilla got to the egg. While Godzilla decides on "scrambled" or "sunny side up," Mothra arrives and wastes no time in savagely attacking Godzilla. What follows is one of the only times anyone has successfully come up with a satisfying answer to, "What's a giant moth going to do against Godzilla?"



"Ow! OW! Oh God, GET IT OFF ME!"

Mothra is faster than Godzilla, so she swoops in and stays constantly in his blind spot. She claws him with her feet, beats him with her wings, and ultimately knocks him into a ravine where she douses him in a yellow powder--a form of poison that is the last weapon in her arsenal. Unfortunately, while she puts in a good show, Godzilla eventually gets an opening and blasts her in the face with his flame breath. That's all it takes and Mothra flies away, her last thought of her young as she wraps her wing around the egg and dies.

Godzilla decides to move on to the next target, as the military runs away to set up a death trap for him involving artificial lightning (Since electricity suddenly became his kryptonite in the last film) The Shobijin, however, don't see the battle as over. "Godzilla must die," they chirp. See, Mothra may be dead, but her egg is very much alive--and with a little bit of prayer it can be hatched so that the twin larvae inside can seek revenge...



"You killed our Mothra. Prepare to die."

A lot of folks who know me well may tease me for being a contrarian, and they're usually right. I think The Godfather is great but The Godfather, Part II is overrated. I actually liked Terminator 3. However, some opinions of mine are absolutely in line with the majority:

Mothra vs. Godzilla is my absolute favorite Godzilla movie, and the Godzilla suit used is my favorite version of Godzilla.

Honestly, I'm amazed when I find someone who doesn't like the film--and they exist, because ours is a cruel universe--because I can find so little fault with it. For one thing, the human characters may not be the absolute greatest in the series, but they are wonderful and completely engaging. The score by Akira Ifukube is amazing, Shinichi Sekizawa's screenplay is wonderfully engaging as both a kaiju film and a satire, and Ishiro Honda's direction is marvelous.

Of course, the monster action is where any Godzilla movie is often measured and this film excels there. While Godzilla doesn't actually cause all that much destruction compared to some of his earlier rampages, he does get to tear apart a few landmarks and melt the hapless military response. The monster battles are also unique, as you would expect. Mothra can't wrestle Godzilla like King Kong, nor can she really maul him like Anguirus. Instead, the adult Mothra battles him fiercely and the larvae--in a sequence I never get tired of--use guerilla tactics to wrap Godzilla in silk. It's exciting and dynamic, especially when we discover for the first time that Godzilla really hates it when you bite his tail.



"STOP LAUGHING AND GET THIS THING OFF ME!"

The special effects by Eiji Tsubraya, while certainly not flawless--for instance, the scenes of Godzilla superimposed onto location footage alternate between being blurry and being surrounded by obvious matte lines, and there's two "melting rocks" in the climax that just look dreadful--are still amazing. They're dynamic and exciting, which can sometimes be a better quaity for effects than "convincing" when used properly.

Seriously, that Godzilla is perfect. Sleek but powerful, with an unfriendly scowl--and I personally rather like the wobbling jowls. It was completely by accident that slamming into Nagoya Castle model knocked the lips of the mask free from their adhesive, but the result feels oddly organic. No wonder Tsuburaya and Honda kept those shots in the finished film.

It's also fascinating to realize that this film was, in a way, the end of an era. This would be the last time for 20 years that Godzilla would be the out-and-out villain of a film. After this point he would not stray far from the hero role introduced in the same year's successive entry, Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster until the series was first rebooted in 1984. And boy, did they retire the villainous Godzilla while they were ahead--just look at how stale Godzilla's character would become when he was not allowed to be anything more than villain or anti-hero from 1984 to 2004.

Bottom line, if you've enjoyed any Godzilla films and haven't seen this one yet, you owe to yourself to do so. Of the 30 films in the series, this is the only one I'd stand behind as being better than the original Godzilla, which is saying a lot. It's a classic, not just of the Godzilla series but cinema in general.

And it's a wonderful example of why Godzilla will never die. Sorry, fairies.

"Oh, this is yours? I just thought this was the complimentary breakfast bar."

Being a human is kind of boring. We can't fly, we can't beathe under water, we don't have fangs or claws, and worst of all we don't even have cool tails. I mean, what is that about? Tails are awesome.

It's unsurprising, then, that we should sometimes wish we could turn into something else. But as with most things in life, nobody wants to be transformed into something else without their consent. Sadly, mad scientists don't have much respect for the concept of consent.

Oh, sure, they ofen couch their efforts to turn a human into a gill man, a werewolf, or a king cobra in terms of "bettering humanity" or "helping humanity adjust to climate change." We've all heard that argument before, though, and it's no excuse. "I know you want it" doesn't sound any less awful coming out of a mad scientist's mouth than Robin Thicke's.

Oh, and I really would like to have a word with the person who decided on this film's title. I get the desire to make a title out of onomatopoeia associated with snakes, but it makes the movie really hard to discuss. First, there's the maddening task of remember just how many letters are in the damn title when typing it. ("How long do I just hold down the 's' key?") Second, it's impossible to figure out how to tell someone abut the movie aloud. The film's promo materials advise you, "Don't say it; hiss it!" Great, thanks.

"Hey what are you watching?"
"[Makes sound like air escaping]"
"I said, what movie are you watching?"
"I told you, it's [hisses]."
"Fine, don't tell me."

Yeah, I think the UK distributors made a wise decison by retitling it Ssssnake. At least there's an actual pronounceable word in that.

The film opens, in true huckster fashion, with a title card informing us that all the snakes were real and thanking the cast and crew for risking their lives to bring us this film.

After this, we see Dr. Carl Stoner (Strother Martin!) and another man in a tilted fedora loading a crate into a truck just before dawn. Whatever is inside the crate is moaning and whimpering in a vaguely human fashion. The man is Kogen (Tim O'Connor), the owner of a carnival freak show, though that's largely implied here, and he pays Stoner $800 for the thing in the crate. He also tells Stoner that he's a genius and will one day berecognized for it. Though Stoner makes a remark that it isn't often one is congratulated for one's failures, by which we can only assume he means the thing in the crate. Well, his failures sure make freak show owners happy.

We then cut to lecture by Dr. Ken Daniels (Richard B. Schull) about how to tell coral snakes and king snakes apart. One of his students, David Blake (Dirk Benedict, the original Starbuck himself!), is a bit distracted by being forced to pass notes from Steve Randall (Reb Brown, yes he is Big McLargeHuge!) to Kitty Stewart (Kathleen King). When the class is dismissed, we see Stoner waiting in the back. Daniels has Kitty stay behind and looks over the note Steve gave her, and strokes her arm in a clearly unprofessional manner--but one she is obviously accustomed to. However, Stoner interrupts their flirting to take issue with how Daniels delivered the old rhyme about telling coral snakes and coral snake mimics apart--"Red touch yellow, kill a what?"

Daniels dismisses Kitty and he and Stoner get to discussing their old grievances with each other, and to discuss Stoner's extension of funding since Daniels is chairman of the department. Daniels refers to Stoner being the foremost ophiologist, a herpetologist focused on snakes, but Schull says it more like "opthiologist" which isn't a thing. At any rate, Stoner's focus is venom research and it's clear that he's based at least somewhat on Bill Haast, a man bitten by so many venomous snakes in his lifetime that his blood could actually be used for anti-venom.

Well, Stoner isn't there to beg for funding specifically. He needs a grad student to assist him, since his previous assistant left suddenly--in the middle of the night, you might say, though Stoner is too classy to make sly references to the poor bastard's fate. Daniels is reluctant to entrust one of his pupils to Stoner, and Stoner pointing out that he's not "Dr. Frankenstein" just prompts Daniels to squint and say, "You are to me."

Daniels reluctantly admits there is one student who might be a good choice. Though Stoner may want to hurry because said student is obviously David Blake, and right now he's surrounded by Steve and his cronies. Steve blames David for getting Kitty in trouble and David's attempts to sarcasm his way out of it nearly gets him beaten before Stoner can rescue him.

"Call me Crunch ButtSteak one more time!"

David is quite eager to join Stoner in his work, though he is caught off guard when he follows Stoner to his truck and finds Harry waiting in the passenger seat. See, Harry is a red-tailed boa constrictor. Of course, he's quite tame and Stoner offers Harry some Kentucky bourbon (!) from a bottle in the glove box.

They stop for gas and while Stoner goes to get water for Harry, David manages to attract the ire of the gas station attendant--a hillbilly with missing teeth who doesn't like when people pump their own gas. He spills gasoline on David's pants when yanking the nozzle out and then gets an angry boa constrictor wrapped around his arm for sticking his hand into the truck. David gets to turn the man's earlier words about "teach you to ask before you touch" back on him as Stoner untangles Harry.

Back at the Stoner residence, Stoner introduces David to his daughter, Kristina (Heather Menzies!), who has just come back from visiting his other daughter who just had a baby. She's surprised to hear that Tim, the previous grad student, has left--and Stoner concocts an obviously bogus story about a dead relative. He then shows David his lab, first introducing him to its most harmless resident, a hognose snake--also the most adorable snake in the world. He shows David how the various snakes are tagged, from least to most deadly. He then pulls out a black mamba to milk it of venom--and I'm afraid that my knowledge of venomous snakes is too limited to tell you if Strother Martin is wrestling with a real mamba or a lookalike.

He shows David how to use a "feeder gun" to force-feed the mamba, since he asserts that many snakes will not eat in captivity. (That depends on the snake, obviously) Oddly, the first ingredient he lists off is milk and snakes can't digest milk since they're not mammals, so either the screenwriter dropped the ball on research in that bit or herpetologists in the 1970s still oddly subscribed to the patently false idea that snakes like milk. He then shows David where they keep the venom, which will then be sent out for use in pharmaceuticals. He then shows David to his office, which has a live mongoose (!) in it. He explains that his lab is a family operation and they do shows on Sunday.

Stoner gives David an injection that he claims is the first of several inoculations to help him resist snake bite. The sinister music tells another story. Once David puts his shirt back on, Stoner shows him the real attraction of the lab--an immense king cobra. And let me tell you, the sight of a king cobra is the closest I will ever come to being frightened by seeing a snake. You can't rival the terrifying look of malevolent intelligence in those eyes, nor the regal way it rears up to look at the humans eyeing it. Stoner points out that even after six years, the cobra still wants him dead--and makes reference to the fact that it will get another chance to try and kill him at the next Sunday show. Then, for David's benefit, he tortures the cobra by holding the mongoose close to its pen and the cobra hoods and rears back in horror.

"What the fuck is that? Keep it away!"

At dinner, Stoner rambles on about how the snake that tempted Eve was really Lucifer sent to do God's work. David scoffs at this, but then the effect of the inoculation begins to take hold and make him woozy. Stoner advises he's about to have one hell of a trip--cobra venom is a powerful hallucinogen, you see. Stoner and Kristina help David to bed and, sure enough, he has a bad trip involving smoke, flame, lava, drawings of hell, and...waves and close-ups of faces and body parts? Waiting at David''s bedside, Stoner decides that Harry is talking to him. He admonishes Harry that if God wants him to stop, well, there's a big honking snake downstairs that can make sure his work ends.

Kristina then comes in and chides Stoner for trying to turn Harry into an alcoholic. She notes that David is doing better and Stoner assures her the boy will be fine. Though poor David is rudely awakened the next morning by the sounds of the show starting outside. Kristina riles up the crowd with facts about how deadly the king cobra is, then introduces her father. She reminds everyone to refrain from flash photography as Stoner coaxes the cobra out into the show pen. And, again, it's quite a show when the stand-in annoys the cobra into threat posturing--which is made even more impressive by the, uh, less than adequate puppet Strother Martin interacts with.

Not an actual snake puppet, but an amazing approximation!

Of course some idiot takes a flash photo while Stoner is up close and personal with the cobra, and he nearly bitten. He still manages to grab the cobra by the head so Kristina can help Stoner extract the venom and force feed the cobra. She then urges the crowd to make donations on their way out, though David is thoroughly unimpressed when he discovers they only got $18 in donations later. He then asks Kristina if Stoner has ever been bitten, and of course the answer is yes though not by the cobra--which might be the only snake whose bite he couldn't survive. To illustrate this, we then cut to Stoner removing the black mamba from its cage--and it promptly sinks its fangs into his finger. So he calls it an "African bastard" (now that's uncalled for!) and tosses it back in its cage.

I still for the life of me cannot figure this scene out, because the snake really bites Strother Martin and it appears to be a black mamba--the inside of its mouth being the dark color that gives the snake its name--so I don't think they used a non-venomous lookalike. It's possible that the snake had been milked just before the shot and they had anti-venom on hand, I suppose, but holy crap my hat's off to Strother Martin.

Talking to Harry, Stoner reveals that his reason for his mad science is that humanity is burning up its natural resources at an alarming rate and soon the world will belong to the cold-blooded animals. I'm slightly distracted, meanwhile, by the decidedly un-snake-like squeaking noises Harry keeps making. Did they really think they needed to make Harry cuter? Meanwhile, David is discovering that his skin is peeling off like when you pour Elmer's glue on your hand. Stoner assures him it's a natural side effect and he's totally not turning into a snake. Nope, not that.

Stoner then gets a visit from Sheriff Dale Hardison (Jack Ging), who used to be a student of Stoner's. He jokes that he wasn't a very good one and Stoner delightfully replies, "Well, I see you found your calling--maintaining the status quo." Hardison then introduces Deputy Morgan Bock (Ted Grossman). After Stoner awkwardly jokes that Bock's name is not spelled like the composer, Bock jokes that maybe Stoner can find them a couple of girls--which Hardison briefly responds to with a perfect "the fuck is wrong with you?" look. They're there for a tour, Hardison says. In the lab, they come upon Kristina with a female reticulated python ("A couple of girls," Stoner jokes) that is apparently sick and not eating.

I have to give Heather Menzies great credit as an actress here. When Stoner enlists the sheriff and deputy's help is moving the sick python to isolation, the python tries to lunge at Hardison and Kristina doesn't break character to drop the angry python and flee.

The python is hauled off to the storm cellar for isolation from the others. Just leaving it loose in the cellar seems a terrible idea, but Stoner assures the men that the cellar door is secure enough. Hardison then mentions he's heard from Tim's aunt that he's been missing for months. Bock comments that kids these days just up and vanish, and for now he and Hardison seem content to leave it at that.

The mongoose is getting increasingly agitated as David gets his next shots. David, whilst eating an apple (subtle), is momentarily transfixed by the king cobra. Kristina then shows him a two-headed snake, and then some hatchling king cobras (which are very clearly not cobras). This segues into more hallucinations, which are conveniently set up as a montage of David's time with Stoner, Kristina, and the snakes.

Next, he and Kristina go to run an errand. On the way back, he stops beside a scenic lake. David ends up talking Kristina into skinny-dipping with him. It takes way less than convincing than you may have guessed. Hilariously, at some point after filming someone decided they wanted to go PG instead of R, so leaves have been awkwardly inserted into the frame via an obvious optical effect to cover the actors' naughty bits.Except for the shots from Kristina's POV, which are blurry because she's not wearing her glasses. The two frolic about, whilst joking about how cold it is.

Stoner records his notes on David's gradual transformation as he walks along a trail by his house. The changes are subtle at this stage--slight lowering of body temperature, flattening of the nostrils, and receding eyelids. He is sure the transformation will accelerate soon. Then he picks up a pigeon and releases it. ...okay, then. I kind of hope that was just Strother Martin being weird.

Kristina and David then go to a carnival. In a comedy bit, we see Bock and Hardison at a shooting gallery--Bock can't hit a thing, while Hardison knocks down all the little ducks. (No word on if he gets Bock the cuddly monkey) Outside a freak show, we see Kogen from the beginning listing his freaks, including a "snake man." Kristina begs off going inside--not because it's cruel and exploitative, but because they're usually fake. So David goes in and gets to see the Snake Man for himself. Boy, that Snake Man (Noble Craig) sure looks like he's the real deal, doesn't he?

"Hey, hey kid--you got any mice? Maybe a gerbil?"

While David is trading significant looks with the Snake Man, our old pal Steve is trying to put the moves on Kristina. For some reason, when David comes back Steve decides to attack him. David retaliates by biting him repeatedly, striking at his foe in as close an approximation to a cobra as Dirk Benedict can manage. Yes, this is setting up that he's already developing snake-like behaviors, but this movie would be much more fun if they expanded on that plot thread more and earlier. Hardison and Bock break it up, but Steve obviously has even more of a score to settle with David now and now knows Kristina is Stoner's daughter.

Meanwhile, Stoner is reading the same Walt Whitman poem to Harry about turning to live with the animals that we last heard Sir Christopher Lee reciting to copulating snails. He then hears Kristina and David pulling up and tells Harry to act sober, to which Harry responds with an admittedly adorable cartoonish hiccup. Trouble is brewing, however, because Steve is getting good and drunk and riled up at the carnival whilst watching a "Kootch Dancer" (Bobbi Kiger) dancing seductively. When her manager offers to let Steve and his buddies have some quality time with her for $10 a piece, Steve gets furious because he's never paid for it in his life. He's apparently still angry about Kristina turning him down and he storms away, over his buddies' objections.

He rides his motorcycle over to the Stoner residence. There, Kristina is settling in for bed after giving Harry some Alka-Seltzer.* Stoner is meanwhile tending to David, who is asking why he's losing weight and why it seems so cold in the lab.

[* Please do not give your snakes Alka-Seltzer. That cannot be good for them. Bourbon is also a bad idea, but I felt that was obvious]

Steve climbs up the wall outside Kirstina's window, clearly intent on sexually assaulting her. However, Harry was sleeping by the window and he quickly comes to his owner's defense. Steve falls out the window, Harry wrapped around his arm. (Odd that Harry doesn't ever use his mouth when attacking, like every angry snake ever) Before Stoner, David, and Kristina can intervene, Steve kills Harry (nooooooo!) and hollers that they're all a bunch of snake freaks before fleeing. Stoner asks if David knows the boy's name.

After a funeral for Harry that involves burning a box with him inside it, Stoner loads the black mamba into a bag and heads into town. David tries to comfort Kristina by telling her that Harry was "only a snake" (fuck you, dude), but Kristina is distracted from his douchiness by the fact that his face looks different. She says this after he suggests she "find another Harry," which has to have been intentional. In town, meanwhile, Steve and Kitty are basking in the afterglow on his water bed. She excitedly pounces on him, eager for round four, while asking if he was scared when the snake attacked him. I'm guessing he left off the part about being attacked during an attempted break-in and sexual assault.

Steve ends up throwing Kitty out, though, because he's in training for football and can't have another round of carnal delights right now. He then walks to the shower in his tighty-whiteys. (Ladies) Outside, Stoner pulls up and finds his way to Steve's apartment. After Kitty leaves, Stoner breaks in. Steve is in the shower and, in order to deprive us of Reb Brown's bare ass, his shower curtain is made out of the same optical effect David Lynch used for the personal shields in Dune. Stoner sneaks in and tosses the black mamba into the shower. In slow-motion we see as Steve accidentally steps on it, and it retaliates by biting his foot. Steve collapses, dead, and Stoner recovers the snake.

So, that was supposed to be the part where we cheer for the mad scientist, right? Because there's no surer way for a movie to get me to root for the so-called villain than having him seek out the man who murdered his beloved snake after attempting to rape his daughter, and kill that bastard with another snake.

At any rate, back at Chez Stoner, Kristina and David are cuddling in the afterglow under a painting of Adam and Eve with the serpent. (We get it already!) He tells her he loves her and she cries because without her glasses she can't see him say it. And clearly he hasn't gotten too snake-like yet, because even without her glasses I'd think Kristina would notice if he had two penises. (Enjoy that mental image, folks!) Stoner then pulls up to the house, delightfully singing "On Top of Old Smokey," which is what Steve was singing in the shower. Man, Strother Martin and the king cobra just steal the hell out of this flick.

Frantically our lovers get dressed and flee from the living room. They don't do the best job of cleaning up their clothes, however. Stoner goes to confront Kristina. He tells her, in no uncertain terms that she's inexperienced and she's throwing herself at the first guy to come along. It turns out, though, that Stoner is more concerned about the fact that David's...blood could have a negative effect on her. Kristina does not take well to being told not to sleep with David and the conversation ends abruptly.

David, meanwhile, has a troubled sleep--and when he awakes he recoils in pain after seeing his reflection in the mirror. Stoner keeps her from going in to see David, though, convincing her it's just an allergic reaction. David talking to her through the door helps, since he's just a bit puffy--although his hands have scales drawn on them! Stoner gets rid of Kristina by sending her to fetch the super rare snake they've just received. Stoner then gives David a sedative, but the poor lad is still freaking out. More injections don't ease his mind, but Stoner is interrupted when Daniels arrives to deliver the bad news that Steve has died of a heart attack--oh, and that the board has rejected Stoner's request for an extension of his grant.

Stoner barely reacts, focusing instead on dismissing Daniels and going back to check on David. David is complaining that his insides feel like they're being rearranged. It turns out that Daniels has decided that Stoner is hiding something and drives just far enough away to park and sneak back to the house--but Stoner sees him coming. Daniels sees David's scaly face through the window, but then Stoner cracks him on the noggin.

Daniels comes to in the cellar and realizes what he saw, but Stoner assures him of two things--one, the cellar is sound proof so his screams won't help him; two, he can find the key to his chains in one of the two tanks before him. As a little Saw-style test of Daniels' herpetological knowledge, one of the tanks contains the harmless Western hognose and the other contains a hognose pit viper. Stoner then leaves him to his choice. Of course, I'm going to assume it was an intentional joke on the filmmakers' part that both snakes are clearly Western hognose snakes.

Daniels grabs a key and unlocks himself, but it turns out that the python in the cellar is finally feeling a lot better. And she's decided that Daniels will make a perfect meal...

"No, please, I told you already! I don't know where Jennifer Lopez is!"

Kristina phones to tell Stoner that the snake isn't at the post office. David struggles to try and pick up the receiver where he's at to tell her what's going on, but he can only knock it off the hook and moan. Stoner dismisses it as a bad connection and Kristina, not realizing the rare snake was a ruse, agrees to stay until morning to see if it arrives. Stoner is free to continue his experiment in peace, as David looks up at him from the floor, helpless. However, the man behind the post office desk tells her she ought to check out the snake man at the carnival--she dismisses it as a fake again, until he mentions that the snake had blue eyes.

Stoner, meanwhile, goes to check on Daniels and sees the python with a foot in a fancy shoe disappearing down her gullet. The effect doesn't really work (especially since this particular specimen is definitely too small to have successfully swallowed Daniels whole) but I appreciate what they were going for. I really hope that swallowing that shoe didn't hurt the python, but this was the 1970s so they probably didn't care. Bastards.

Kristina comes into the main carnival tent, trying to convince Kogen to let her see the Snake Man after hours, but he refuses. On her way out, she sneaks into the freak show, though. She sees the Snake Man pitifully flapping the stump of his right arm--and recognizes that it's Tim. Or used to be. Now he's stuck somewhere between snake and man, with no right arm and no legs. She screams in horror as he whimpers pitifully at her and a single tear rolls down his cheek. She runs, screaming, the realization dawning on her as she speeds home.

At the sheriff's station, a tearful Kitty is confessing that she killed Steve by having sex with him three times. Hardison is obviously not taking her at face value, until she mentions Steve telling her he had killed a snake after he took Stoner's daughter home after she had made a pass at him. (So, in his telling of it he took another woman home after she came onto him, and then subsequently she threw a snake at him? And this made Kitty not question banging him like drum?) Then Bock reports that Daniels' wife has called him in missing after he went to Stoner's place. That seals it for Hardison--time to pay a visit to Stoner.

As Kristina speeds home, having driven all night--how far away was that post office?!--Stoner prepares the final injection fro David, already a scaly humanoid strapped to a table. David protests with inarticulate moans and whines, but it's no use. According to Stoner, the new species David is to become will survive pollution, plagues, and Holocausts that will make humanity extinct. Through the magic of cross dissolves and some adorably woeful puppets, David begins to transform into--a cobra. No, not a giant cobra, just a cobra. A cobra with blue eyes, sure, but why wouldn't he just be a man-sized king cobra?

"Yes, but think of the potential for weight loss companies!"

To be fair, while the effects for this sequence are hardly flawless, it's still pretty effective. (And it's not like CGI morphing in a modern remake would be any less clunky) For all I may kid this movie, the idea of being helpless to stop it as you are painfully and irreversibly transformed against your will is pretty harrowing stuff.

Even the mongoose went quiet to watch this transformation, but as Stoner intones, "Long live the king," before carrying snake-David to a nearby bath, the little monster goes apeshit again. Basking in his triumph, hubris strikes Stoner and he leaves his new creation to go tell the king cobra, "Your highness; I would like an audience. I demand it." And outside he goes, dragging the cobra from its cage so he can taunt it about being obsolete. The cobra decides to reward Stoner's insolence by biting him repeatedly. And what do you know, even Stoner's blood is no match for a cobra's venom. The satisfied cobra slithers back into its cage.

Unfortunately for David, Chekov's mongoose has broken out of its cage. It doesn't care that David used to be a man, he's just a cobra to it and cobras are food. Kristina arrives to find her father's corpse--and her screams at him, desperate to know what he did to David and horror at finding him dead, bring the cobra's attention to her. She barely escapes a bite and her cries to David are pointless because David is busy fighting for his life against a mongoose. Luckily for Kristina, Hardison and Bock pull up and Hardison blows the cobra's head clean off with his shotgun.

Only then does Kristina hear the mongoose. And in a serious 70s bummer ending, the film closes on a freeze frame of her screaming face as she watches the mongoose tearing at David's skull while Hardison and Bock hold her back. The End.

"No! He's gonna stain the linoleum!"

Snakes are a primal fear for a lot of humans, but they aren't a primal fear for me. As such, a horror movie about snakes needs to bring something more to the table than just, "Eek! A snake! Look, snake!" Whatever else you can say about Sssssss, you can't say that it doesn't accomplish that.

After all, while it falls on the PG-rated side of it, there's no question that a story about turning into something else is a form of body horror. The big difference between this movie and David Cronenberg's The Fly is that the transformation is by design--albeit someone else's--and the transformation is much cleaner. It may be just as horrifying in its own way, but it's a lot easier to watch while eating.

This is also, in a lot of ways, a werewolf story--which is why I chose it for this roundtable, obviously. This is, after all, a story of a man turning into an animal and losing his humanity. Which is why, as I alluded to earlier, I found it a little frustrating just how little that was explored as the movie went along. We saw David bite an opponent as though he were a snake, but that was the only time we saw his new serpentine nature taking him over until we literally saw him turning into a snake.

It's a truly wasted opportunity. Imagine how much more mileage this film could have gotten out of that? Imagine David developing a hunger he can't satisfy. What if giving into that hunger meant eating one of the rabbits that Stoner keeps in the lab? What if he was terrified of the mongoose and couldn't understand why? Hell, there isn't even a scene where he gets aggressive with Kristina for no apparent reason. Again, while Strother Martin is a hugely compelling scientist and is more dynamic than Dirk Benedict by a long shot, this feels a bit too much like The Beast Within where the character who should have been the focus ends up more of a McGuffin, Hell, when he turns into a snake he doesn't even go on a rampage of any kind--Stoner gets his comeuppance from the cobra he didn't create, and snake-David is distinguishable by both his blue eyes and apparently gentle nature. I mean, surely we could still feel sympathy for David even if he actually behaved like a ferocious snake!

Of course, saying that David isn't the focus when he should be makes it sound like the movie has a focus and it...kind of doesn't. The closest thing it has to a focus is Stoner's mad science, but the film could just as easily be read as a series of disconnected set pieces. Certainly, the film does a really good job of making them fit, but would the film flow smoother if the subplots involving Steve and Daniels weren't even a part of the script, and the focus was on the Stoner residence almost totally? It's hard to say. It certainly would allow the film the chance to make David's plight matter more to us, beyond the simple horror of what he is facing.

Perhaps to make up for that, this film delivers some serious spectacle. Just the use of real, live venomous snakes in so much of the film is astounding. And that king cobra is an amazing sight all by itself. Plus, while some of its set pieces may seem disconnected, they are unquestionably awesome set pieces and that more than makes up for it in my book.

In the end, while it certainly has its flaws, Sssssss is a pretty enjoyable movie. It's not some unsung classic by any means, but it is a very engaging horror film. Despite its lack of focus, it still delivers a cohesive whole and is certainly never dull. If you're terrified of snakes, it will most likely scare the hell out of you.

Now, someone get me a remake starring Katee Sackhoff, damn it!


The Celluloid Zeroes have banded together to bring awareness to that all too often forgotten affliction: turning into a freaky monster.

Checkpoint Telstar goes batty for The Bat People.

Cinemasochist Apocalypse gets the honor of Kibackichi.

Las Peliculas de Terror reaches deep and finds The Beast Within.

Micro-Brewed Reviews gets hit with The Curse of the Black Widow.

Psychoplasmics is over the moon for An American Werewolf in London.

Tomb of Anubis goes on the hunt with Romasanta.

Web of the Big Damn Spider has to go to Summer School.

It's that time of year again, kiddies! The leaves are changing color, kids are disemboweling a squash relative and carving holes in its flesh before shoving an open flame inside, and a bunch of foolhardy geeks known as The Celluloid Zeroes are settling in with their Blu-ray players to once more follow on Checkpoint Telstar's coat tails with the third annual HubrisWeen!

This year our ranks have increased by two, as Checkpoint Telstar, Yes I Know, and myself will be joined by Micro-Brewed Reviews and Web of The Big Damn Spider!

So join the bravest and/or most foolhardy of The Celluloid Zeroes as we bring you a horror or monster movie a day for every letter of the alphabet, starting with A on Tuesday, October 6th and going all the way to Z on Halloween!

Will we have to duplicate entries for Q and X? Will any of us avoid the curse of having to do a Zombie movie for Z? Who will be the first to crack after having to endure something no motrtal should ever witness? Tune in at 9AM Eastern/ 8AM Central each day to find out, dear reader!

Here's a little preview of what's coming:

Snakes don't scare me.

Oh, sure, if you put me in the same room with an angry cobra or a hungry reticulated python I'm probably going to be terrified, but that's not what I mean. I don't have a deep-down, ingrained, irrational fear of snakes. The mere sight of one does not make my hair stand on end and if I see one in the wild I'm just as likely to walk over for a closer look as run in the other direction--provided we're talking about just a harmless non-venomous snake, that is. I'm not an idiot.

A lot of this comes from my mother, who has always loved snakes. We had pet snakes all my life, from tiny garter snakes to a six foot long bull snake. I know that, most of the time, snakes can be very sweet-tempered pets. And, in general, snakes are unfairly maligned creatures with far more to fear from us than we have from them. In fact, many snakebite victims are people decided to react to the presence of a snake by killing it and karma got them when the dead snake's reflex actions made it bite them.

I'm sure that old fairy tale about snakes and apples doesn't help matters.

All of this is to say that if a movie wants me to be scared of a snake it has to really work for it. It's a futile effort, most of the time, but it's exceptionally Sisyphean in the case of movies about snakes eating people.

The reason for this is two fold. One, snakes generally don't eat people--or at least, not adult humans. An infant or small child is, unsurprisingly, at risk of being a snake's prey but there are very few verified cases of an adult human being eaten by a snake because there are very few snakes actually large enough to eat an adult. Our body structure also doesn't lend itself well to being swallowed whole, and snakes can't eat any other way. That's not to say that snakes don't try, often resulting in an adult being killed but not devoured: it's simply a case of their eyes being bigger than their stomachs. Or, in some unfortunate cases, a snake smelling a prey animal that the human was trying to feed them and grabbing the human instead.

For some reason, though, people seem to find the idea of just being killed but not eaten less horrifying than being a successful lunch. And few horror films are willing to be so transgressive as to have their monster snake devouring babies and children.

Secondly, even if a snake managed to eat an adult person, that'd be it. You know the old joke about, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you"? Well, if you're in a group of people and one of you gets grabbed by a python and eaten, then that's just too bad for Steve. The upside is that the rest of you will be perfectly safe from further snake attack because it's gonna take that python around an hour to eat Steve, and days to digest him.

So you see, if your premise is "one huge snake attacks and eats a group of people" then you're asking me to swallow a conceit slightly less ridiculous than "a pack of flying bush pigs devours people." (Somebody get SyFy on the phone!) Worse than that, the latter premise would assume you know it's impossible, while the former thinks of itself as "plausible." And while it may sound ridiculous to complain about lack of a believable premise in a monster movie, when it comes to suspension of disbelief I definitely subscribe to the school of thinking that says, "You can ask an audience to believe the impossible, but not the improbable."

Anaconda starts off with the improbable right away, by expecting you to believe that Danny Trejo encountering a hungry Anaconda wouldn't end with Trejo having a stunning new pair of boots. This is almost more unbelievable than the film's opening crawl that claims that anacondas grow to 40 feet in length--despite the fact that even the reticulated python, the longest species of snake in the world, has only ever been officially recorded at a length of 25 feet. Anacondas, while the heaviest snake species, are not the longest. In fact the longest ever recorded was 17 feet long, just about half as long as the film is claiming the species routinely grows.

Of course, anacondas also don't regurgitate their prey because they love killing and want to kill and eat again, which the opening crawl also claims. Snakes only vomit up prey for two reasons: One, they're stressed and that triggers a vomit reflex, and Two, the prey rots in their stomach before they are able to fully digest it. It makes no sense, biologically, for an animal to expend the type of energy required to kill and swallow an entire animal whole, just to vomit it all up and go back to hunting. The sole reason the film even makes this claim is to make it reasonable that the snake would stilll be after our protagonists after eating one of them.

Right, back to explaining why Danny Trejo is here. Well, Trejo is a poacher whose boat has become stranded in some tributary of the Amazon. While he hollers at his broken radio, an ominous POV cam stalks closer to his boat. Something rocks the boat, terrifying all the caged animals. Trejo nails one small board over the cabin door--only for something to smash up the floorboards beneath him. Now, despite launching him several feet into theair, our unseen assailant (the film wisely keeping the snake off screen at this time) fails to catch Trejo, so he makes his escape by yanking the board off the cabin door with his bare hands.

So, what exactly did he think that board was going to do?

The POV cam, having apparently busted through the floorboards, chases Trejo up on top of the cabin. Trejo fires his revolver at it but misses terribly. For some reason, he decides to climb up his boat's mast. He watches as the POV cam circles around him until it's right in front of his face, which would mean it was less than a foot from him. Rather than shoot his attacker now when he couldn't possibly miss, he takes the gun and blows his own brains out.

Even the heroes in The Mist would think this guy was giving up too quickly.

To his agent's horror, Trejo was serious about getting out of the movie by any means necessary

It should be pretty clear that Terri and Cale have a history that goes beyond professional almost immediately. Terri teases him about how disheveled he looks, and he jokingly claims he barely escaped a piranha attack while meeting with some potential guides. Already the movie is reminding me of better movies, as well as Amazon denizens more likely to kill you than an anaconda.

At any rate, Cale has hired Terri to film his encounter with a barely-known and nigh-legendary tribe in the Amazon. He claims he wanted the best director for the job, but later evidence will suggest that he's lying or else there was an implied, "...but they were busy, so I got you." Let's just say that Ava DuVernay she is not.

The next morning, the boat for their project pulls up accompanied by sinister music (!) because this movie is as subtle as a two-by-four to the face. Terri meets with her cameraman, Danny Rich (Ice Cube!), who is excited for her because, "Not every day my homegirl from SC gets to direct her own documentary." Wait, this is her first documentary directing gig, ever? So Cale was joking earlier. Speak of the ginger, he's arguing travel plans the boat's captain, Mateo (Vincent Castellanos), who is insistent they take a route 55 kilometers out of the way due to the rainy season approaching. Seeing Cale, Danny implies that Terri is using this gig as an opportunity to spend time with Cale.

Look, movie, we get it, already: they're boning. Let's move on, shall we?

Now we're introduced to our, ugh, comic relief: the documentary's narrator, Warren Westridge (Jonathan Hyde). Now, usually a documentary of this sort would just add the celebrity narrator in post, yet here Westridge is the David Attenborough analog. Except he's the sort of pretentious high class English stereotype that complains about not being in the lap of luxury, brings fancy wine along on a boat trip to the Amazon, and insults the production manager, Denise Kalberg (Kari Wuhrer!) by asking her to take his bags to his cabin. Oh, and Denise is clearly banging the sound man, Gary Dixon (Owen Wilson!) because it's that kind of crew.

Westridge is somewhat dismissive of Terri, but he does mention her short films so at least we know she does have some directing experience. The expedition gets underway and we get some exposition via watching Westridge's filmed narration: they are looking for "The People of The Mist" or the "Shirishama." After a pointless scene where Gary tells Denise that the jungle makes him really, really horny, a rainstorm rolls in.

Hearing someone shouting in the rain, they come upon a boat stranded in the roots of the trees. Danny films all this, and the film starts in with heavily sinister music even before the stranded man leaps aboard and turns out to be Paul Sarone (Jon Voight!), who exchanges a significant glance with Mateo because this film does not understand how to do dramatic irony without being really obvious about it. Sarone doesn't mind that they can't take him back to Manaus because he is certain the people in the next village can help him fix his boat.

The next scene is Sarone spearing a fish and preparing it for the crew. Hilariously, Terri observes that they'll have to film him doing it next time--despite the fact that he had to crawl out onto a tree limb to spear the fish, so there's no reason she shouldn't have already been filming him! Sarone reveals he is from Paraguay and was studying to be a priest when he decided he would actually prefer to catch snakes in the jungle to sell to zoos and collectors. When he finds out the crew are looking for the Shirishama, he conveniently claims to have seen them and promises to direct the crew to where they are. Westridge incredulously points out that any river captain would say the same after five whiskeys.

"Five whiskeys? That's breakfast on the ree-ver," Sarone replies.

Sarone also calls Denise "little baby bird" when she asks if salad would go with his fish, which isn't creepy at all. That night Denise dances seductively for Gary, Danny smokes a cigar (so, uh, kudos for not making the token black guy light up a joint, I guess, unless that's not really a cigar), and Cale and Terri discuss fireflies before locking lips. A menacing POV cam is watching the crew from the shore, and this film goes the Jaws 2 route since it decides to just fucking show us the anaconda on the shore.

Our first shot of the anaconda is the animatronic creature created by Walt Conti and I'm going to go ahead and come to the defense of Mr. Conti. This animatronic is usually maligned in most reviews, but I think it's actually quite well done. The only real issue is that it looks nothing like an anaconda. Oh, sure, the coloration is right, but anacondas have a very distinctive head with the eyes and nostrils positioned on top of the skull, like a crocodilian, and the head is kind of long and narrow. This creature's head is short and wide, and its eyes aren't in the right position at all.

The real deal...

...the wannabe.

I'm sure the average moviegoer is not going to notice the difference, of course. So really it's down to how convincingly the creature moves, and if you ask me it moves quite believably. Of course, that's because it has a CGI counterpart that...doesn't. We'll get to that in due time.

Instead of attacking the crew, the anaconda sets its sights on a black jaguar. Perhaps to make the animatronic snake look better, the jaguar is rendered via an obviously stiff prop or possibly even an actual jaguar borrowed from a taxidermist's office. The quick cuts in the scene do nothing to disguise this. The scene ends with a shot of one of the jaguar's eyeballs on the forest floor (!), which I can only assume is because this particular jaguar had a glass eye that it was always losing since the implication that the anaconda squeezed the cat so hard its eye popped out is too stupid for me to fathom.

The next morning, Westridge and Danny have an unfunny disagreement over Danny's rap music, before the group comes across a huge snake totem. Sarone claims it is a Shirishama totem because they worship giant anacondas. He waxes poetic about a legend of an impossibly huge anaconda, but Cole points out it's a legend of a tribe called the Maku. Sarone tries to claim both tribes have the same legend and that the Shirishama can be found down the next fork in the river. "I know this. I trap snakes for a living," he asserts, because trapping snakes and finding lost tribes are totally the same discipline.

Cole declares they're not going to take the route Sarone suggested because it doesn't make any damn sense. Terri tries to film Westridge in front of the snake idol but Sarone ruins the shot. Rather than ask Mateo to back up the boat and try again, she just accepts it as a loss. (Though I'll pretend it's because they get enough of an establishing shot that she can cut before Sarone jumps into shot and loop Westridge's dialogue in later with other footage of the totem, because I need to believe our heroine has some skill as a director)

That night, Gary and Denise go ashore to "get some wild sound," which is code for "record some audio, then start to get it on in the forest." As you would expect, they are interrupted by a rogue POV cam that chases them before Sarone appears with a rifle and seems to shoot at them. It naturally turns out that Sarone was actually shooting the wild boar that was after them. He drags it aboard so he and Mateo can cut it up for food. Danny finds the idea of a boar being food unusual, so maybe he keeps halal.

The next day, something finally sort of happens. For some reason the boat is dragging a rope behind it (?) and the rope gets caught in the propeller. Cale decides to dive down and cut it loose, despite Sarone asserting that "the ree-ver can kill you in a thousand ways," but all Cale is worried about is the candiru acu--the infamous little fish that swims up your urethra and lodges itself with spines. Of course, while Sarone leers at Terri topside, something goes wrong for Cale under the water. He's hauled up and turns out to have a wasp in his mouth. Sarone performs an emergency tracheotomy with a knife and a pen before Cale can suffocate.

Sarone suggests they need to get Cale to a hospital as soon as possible and, conveniently, the best way to do that is to take the route he suggested yesterday. Terri is suspicious but sees no other option. Of course, when the route brings them to a wall that Sarone didn't know would be there, she becomes even more suspicious. Sarone just happens to have dynamite with him--"Always good to be prepared" should not be the end of the discussion when someone reveals they brought dynamite onto your vessel--but Terri is reluctant because she's worried that blowing up the wall might upset the ecological balance of the river.

Does Terri think beavers made that wall?

Sarone's idea wins out, and he and Gary take the inflatable dinghy out to plant the dynamite. Several roving POV cams zero in on Gary in the water, but Sarone pulls him to safety and they light the fuses. Hilariously, nobody thought to move the boat back further and the resulting blast screws them in three increasingly idiotic ways: first, debris sinks the dinghy; second, the drums of spare fuel laid sideways on the deck and secured by a single flimsy rope are all knocked into the river when a branch falls on them; and third, a bunch of various species of small to medium-sized snakes lands on the boat. Everyone panics like a bunch of wusses while Sarone tosses handfuls of snakes into the water and Mateo sprays the poor things off with a hose. Hilariously, Sarone insists on calling all the snakes "babies."

Westridge somehow ends up with an animatronic baby anaconda on his finger that he doesn't notice until it starts swallowing his finger and I take back what I said about the film's animatronics not being that bad, as the attempt to show it swallowing his finger is embarrassing. Hilariously, Sarone just pulls the snake off of Westridge's hand, which would be an excellent way to tear the shit out of the man's finger and leave him full of snake teeth--snakes' teeth are basically hooks directed toward their throat, so you have to unhook their teeth by pushing their head forward first if you want to get them off with a minimum of damage to you. The cartoonish "Rargh!' sound the baby snake makes as Sarone tosses it off the boat is even more hilarious. As we'll soon see, this movie has no idea what a snake sounds like.

Westridge's accusation that Sarone "knew there would be snakes here" is even more hilarious. Snakes? In the Amazon? Why, I never! On ahead they go, until they come upon Danny Trejo's boat from the beginning of the film. The menacing POV cam decides to take on a Dutch tilt as it watches them approach, which suggests the monster is watching them with its head cocked quizzically to one side. Sarone suggests they investigate the wreck to see if there's fuel. For some reason, Danny follows Sarone and Mateo to film it but Gary doesn't go along for sound because...Teri is the best director, clearly. Aboard the vessel, Sarone hides a newspaper clipping with a photo of him, Mateo, and Trejo holding an anaconda before Danny can see it. Danny finds a rifle that has oddly been bent in several places because snakes hate guns, I guess?

Sarone has Danny help him carry a chest he finds, which Danny goes along with awfully quickly. Mateo, meanwhile, nearly falls through the hole in the floor. Mateo dallies a bit as Danny and Sarone float the chest back to the boat--with Danny's camera stowed inside--and then Mateo manages to somehow fall backwards off the boat like a moron. He is then ambushed by an anaconda in the only scene in the film where we see an anaconda almost hunting like an actual anaconda. I say almost because anacondas don't just squeeze their prey so hard that their ribs break and they definitely don't grab their prey by the head and twist to snap their neck!

This is also our first time seeing the CGI anaconda and while it's not nearly as awful as I remembered--perhaps years of SyFy Original Pictures and Asylum films have shown me what truly terrible CGI looks like--it's still very bad and probably why I'm less harsh on the puppet snake. For one thing, the CGI snake is not the same color as the animatronic, it doesn't blend into the physical environment it's been deposited into at all, and it moves way too fast and effortlessly for an animal as big as it is supposed to be.

"You made my mother into boots, you bastard!"

Also, despite what this movie may tell you, snakes don't scream when they're attacking their prey.

Hilariously, in the time it takes for the others to realize Mateo is not following and Danny to turn and wade back to where Mateo was last seen, both the snake and Mateo have vanished. Given that we last saw the snake opening its mouth and preparing to eat Mateo, this is fucking impossible. Maybe Danny is just very unobservant and didn't notice the 40-foot snake eating Mateo because he comes back with only the man's flashlight. Sarone explains where Mateo went by dramatically unfurling a snake skin he found in the trunk. It's supposed to be a shed skin, but it unfurls perfectly and appears to be thick as leather, which would not be the case.

At any rate, while I realize that Sarone is right about what ate Mateo, I come back to the fact that there are far more likely explanations than "eaten by a snake." Like assuming he was eaten by a caiman, or perhaps a drop bear. Indeed, Terri insists snakes don't eat people and Sarone counters with pointing at the scar on his face. Um, just because something bites people, doesn't mean it eats them. At any rate, Sarone goes on about how the snake could have easily sensed Mateo's body heat and then goes on to describe how anacondas squeeze you so tight your bones break and your veins explode.

Okay, if I stop and rant at every time this movie wrong this movie is about snakes this review will never get done. However, this is just as much bullshit as the idea that anacondas grow to 40 feet long and barf up perfectly good food just so they can go kill something else. What constrictors do is far, far creepier--they squeeze every time their prey exhales until the prey's lungs can no longer take in air and the prey suffocates. There might be some occasional broken bones or burst blood vessels, but they don't kill their prey by crushing them to jelly.

Sarone then makes his pitch: imagine if they could catch this monster snake alive. Of course, if it was really eating Mateo they could easily go capture it right then. Terri insists they wait overnight for Mateo. The only upshot of this is that Sarone manages to seduce Gary to the side of, "we can totally catch the biggest snake that ever lived since the Titanoboa went extinct and get a million dollars for it." Yeah, that's somewhat unlikely, but okay. I mean, sure, a 40-foot anaconda would be an amazing find, but how many zoos have the facilities to house a snake that large?

The next day the boat continues on without Mateo. Westridge is driving now, so maybe he's not totally useless. Sarone shoots a monkey for bait and then he and Gary reveal that they're working together now. Gary tries to explain it off as trying not to waste the documentary since now they can make it about the snake catching. But no one else is on board, so Sarone almost shoots Danny to make his point that they are going to catch this snake. Hilariously, that night we see that Sarone's plan for catching an anaconda is to attach a dead monkey to a winch and tow it behind the boat. I can think of a lot of things you'd catch that way in the Amazon--caimans, piranha, giant catfish--but a snake that hunts mainly by ambushing prey is definitely not one of them.

So naturally, Sarone's plan works almost immediately. Before you know it he has a shrieking anaconda on the line. As the snake makes hilariously un-snake-like "blarghle garble" Tasmanian Devil-style sounds (courtesy Frank Welker, of course), everyone but Gary insists Sarone let the snake go before they all get killed. Which is an...odd thing too be concerned about, really. Danny decides to try and shank Sarone with a knife he just happened to have, but the anaconda tail whips him and the knife goes in the river. It then also tail whips Sarone and breaks free of the hook, which oddly then detaches itself from the line and nearly impales Westridge. Everyone agonizes over where the snake is now, and because this is a movie it didn't just swim the hell away from the big, noisy bright thing that tried to attack it.

In slow-motion, which just adds to the hilarity, the anaconda bursts out of the water and spits the monkey carcass at Westridge. Sarone orders everyone not to move as he gets a bead on it with a crossbow (!) that has a tranquilizer dart for a bolt. Instead of listening, Terri runs for the cabin and naturally the snake smashes the window trying to get at her. Before it can lunge at her, Sarone shoots it in the open mouth with the dart--and hilariously you can see the white wires controlling the puppet as it writhes in pain after this. Somehow it spits the dart out (which would not mean it did not get tranquilized, as long as Sarone did the right dosage, but the movie apparently doesn't know that) and continues screaming, while writhing all over. It then whips a bench at Denise with its tail and knocks her into the water.

Hilariously, it quickly snaps its head towards the sound* of her hitting the water--and, again the vocalizations of the snake are hilarious and not even remotely believable in this sequence--and as Gary dives into the river to save her, the anaconda follows suit. Gary does help Denise out of the water and makes it back onto the boat as well, but unfortunately the anaconda is right behind him.

[* A few years ago, I'd have griped that the snake couldn't have heard her because snakes don't have external ears and can only sense vibrations through the ground. However, it is now known that snakes can hear sounds that travel through the air. Whether they can hear them well enough to have heard her hit the water that quickly is debatable, but sadly I have to concede the movie isn't being stupid in this one instance]

The CGI snake here is even worse. Not only does it obviously not belong to the same space as the man it's attacking, but the effects people forgot how important lighting is to a CGI creature. The anaconda is a couple F-Stops brighter than everyone else, so it might as well be glowing.

"I told the director, 'I'll only take the part if you light me better than everyone else.'"

The anaconda pins Gary to one of the pylons and snaps at the others as they try to free him. Terri grabs the rifle, but Sarone stops her because the snake is no good to him dead. Which is, of course, bullshit because even dead that'd be a record-breaking snake, but villain. The pylon gives way and the snake drags Gary off into the river. Terri consoles a weeping Denise, while Sarone makes a hilariously half-hearted gesture of tossing leaves into the river and mumbling a prayer for Gary's soul.

Denise attacks him, screaming, "You brought that snake here! You brought the devil!" Sarone brushes her off by saying that the devil is inside every one of us. Wait, in addition to Godzilla? We must all be very crowded. Sarone then demands Westridge load his equipment into the cabin, and when Westridge refuses Sarone slaps him around and then threatens him with his revolver. Satisfied, Sarone goes to the wheelhouse, while Danny goes to talk to Terri about plans.

The camera then goes below the water so we can see the film's single worst CGI effect: the anaconda swimming past, its body distended from Gary's body and--in the most laughable moment I've ever seen in a killer snake film--we can the outline of Gary's screaming face pressed through its belly. Apparently this anaconda lacks a stomach wall and the usual muscles on the belly required to move a snake along.

Is there really anything I could say that would make this more hilarious?

Okay, I take it back. A  more unbelievable scene follows as Terri dolls herself up and goes to see Sarone in the wheelhouse.She's there to, ugh, seduce Sarone. She talks to him while thrusting her breasts outward and, in the film's most hilariously misguided line, tells him, "This film was supposed to be my big break. But it's turned out to be a big disaster." And how!

She's pretending to have decided she wants to film Sarone capturing the snake to salvage the expedition, but she's using it as an excuse to appeal to his machismo. Well, poor Jennifer Lopez earns her hazard pay when Sarone buys the act and plants a big messy one on Terri. Unfortunately, he opens his eyes and sees Danny sneaking up on him with a bat--but he doesn't anticipate Westridge swinging a golf club through the window behind him. "Asshole in one," Westridge quips. Danny and Westridge want to throw him in the river but Terri objects and suggests they just tie him up.

Look, I get being squeamish about killing the guy, but surely there are other options than "keep him around."

When Sarone comes to, tied to one of the remaining pylons, Terri confronts him with the newspaper clipping. She's realized that somehow this was all one big set-up--and, again, a needlessly convoluted one because I can think of no reason why he even needed the film crew if he just wanted to catch a snake--and lists off the things he planned from the beginning. Sarone sneers and says, "How could you forget about the wasp?" Terri stage punches him in response. She then goes to check on Westridge and Danny, leaving Denise to exchange significant looks with Sarone. Westridge is giving Danny lessons in driving the boat, when they come upon a waterfall.

Now, there's lots of dialogue about how "beautiful" the waterfall is, but it's hilariously obvious that while most of the film was shot on location in a rainforest, this was shot on an artificial set. Danny runs the boat aground on a sandbar. So they have no choice but winch themselves free. This means Danny, Terri, and Westridge have to get in the water. Westridge quips about having to spend all night picking leeches off his scrotum the last time he was in water like this, because he's forgotten the earlier warning about the candiru.

While the three go about wrapping ropes around trees, Denise decides to threaten Sarone with a knife instead of either of the guns. This means she gets super close to him before he manages to make her resolve falter by telling her never to look in the eyes of those she kills--and then he somehow launches himself five feet straight into the air and wraps his thighs around her throat, somehow. He says a prayer as he strangles her to death and then kicks her body over the side. The others hear the splash but don't seem overly alarmed by it. Well, until Danny sees a ripple in a floating mat of grass and correctly interprets it as an anaconda approaching.

Danny and Terri make it to the boat, but Westridge distracts the anaconda and climbs up the waterfall. Sarone has used Denise's knife to cut himself loose and after Terri grabs the rifle, he attacks Danny. Hilariously, he then grabs the rifle in Terri's hands and throws her into the remaining fuel barrel, where the foley artist mysteriously decides Jennifer Lopez colliding with a barrel of gasoline should sound like the sound effect of two car fenders colliding. Sarone stabs Danny in the leg and Terri repeatedly fails to get a clear shot at him.

Westridge meanwhile, has hidden behind the waterfall, but when the snake--now hanging from a tree--finds him, he leaps from the waterfall. Unfortunately, his opponent has turned back into its CGI form and physics no longer apply to it. It strikes down at him faster than gravity and then reels him back up to the branch its wrapped around. Unfortunately, the added weight of a human somehow causes the tree to uproot and fall onto the boat. Everyone falls into the water and the impact shocks Cale out of his apparent coma.

Despite having a perfectly good meal already in its coils, the anaconda abandons Westridge's body so it can attack Danny as Terri is pulling him back onto the boat. Well, first Denise's body oddly chooses right then to float to the surface and then the anaconda attacks Danny. Once again, the anaconda takes the unusual tactic of letting go of Danny with its mouth after wrapping him in its coils--constrictors like anacondas always use their mouths to hold their prey in place while constricting--but this time it makes even less sense because it also decides to grab Denise's dead body in its jaws. Man, this anaconda's eyes are way bigger than its stomach.

Of course, the real reason it does this is so Terri can grab the rifle and shoot it in the head without risking shooting Danny in the process. This is sequence is really awkwardly, um, shot. We see Terri shoot the snake three times--and despite the rifle having a scope she just shoots from the shoulder and barely even looks down the barrel---and it's clear that the shots are the same squib effect from different angles as she shoots it through the right eye and blows its skull open. Yet, as the creature sinks into the river, dying, while shrieking like a pterodactyl--the only damage is that its right eye is gone and it's bleeding from the mouth. Naturally, Danny is somehow fine because the snake goes limp rather than crushing him into pulp with its death throes.

However, Sarone attacks them, hilariously screaming, "You killed my warrior snake!" Terri's attempt to get free by biting him does not work out, however Cale sneaks up and stabs Sarone with the tranquilizer dart. Hilariously, Sarone mutters, "The dart," before he puts thumb in Cale's throat wound in case we wouldn't figure out what Cale just stabbed him with. Danny then knocks Sarone into the river, but observes forlornly that the dart somehow dislodged itself and is floating on the surface. Of course, in reality Sarone was just drugged with a dose of tranquilizer meant to sedate a 40-foot long, probably one-ton snake and pushed into water. Unless he has gills he should be dead, but this movie is only 70 minutes in so I'm sure you've figured out he's fine.

Cale goes back to bed, having passed out again. Danny says the tree knocked them loose (!) and via the magic of running the film backwards (no, really, watch the waterfall) they back off the sandbar. Continuing on down the river, the boat--now making the cliche "engine running out of fuel" sounds--happens upon an abandoned boathouse. Assuming it might have fuel, Terri and Danny head inside to investigate. Oh, yeah, and despite being stabbed in the thigh, Danny is just walking with a slight limp. Walking up the plank to the boathouse they find axes and rifles strewn about. the two decide they don't want to know what happened there and just hope there's fuel, as an upside-down POV cam advances on the boathouse before doing a barrel roll to right itself.

Look, if your movie has been completely unengaging for the last 73 minutes, dumb camera tricks aren't going to suddenly make you Sam Raimi. Inside the boathouse they find some drums of fuel, but also a shed snake skin--which, admittedly, looks more realistic than the one from earlier--and then Sarone knocks them both out with his rifle. Yes, Sarone somehow beat them to the boathouse. Either he's a hell of a swimmer, or earlier Sarone pulled a Dead Alive and mixed up the tranquilizer and the stimulants. It would explain a lot, actually.

We see another POV cam approach the boathouse while doing a barrel roll, before cutting to Terri and Danny tied together on the floor. They come to just as Sarone finishes filling a bucket with monkey blood and then splashes said monkey blood on them. As has been noted, the shot of them being splashed with the blood is a really odd shot because it's in slow motion so we can tell that the two are already soaked in blood before the splash hits them, and the splash is clearly added in post. Sarone plays with some powder on the floor, explaining that it's what happens to human bones after they go through an anaconda. Well, yes, the bones would be powder but they'd also be mixed in with a pile of anaconda shit, not just artfully strewn about.

Danny and Terri then realize they're sitting on a net as Sarone heads up a ladder. And then another immense anaconda descends towards the two from the ceiling. So apparently this boathouse's ceiling beams are stronger than trees.

"Greetingsss, have you heard the good word?"

Danny and Terri try to run but the snake wraps its coils around them, tail-first. Which is rather like an ordinary human picking up a cheeseburger with their feet. Sarone then leaps down from hsi perch, using his weight to pull the net up and trap the snake. He then wraps the rope around a nearby valve so he can aim at the snake with his tranq crossbow. Of course, it makes no sense he'd A) use a projectile dart on a netted creature and B) that he'd keep acting like he can't get a shot. It doesn't need to be shot into its head!

Well, the pipe proves weaker than the ceiling beams and when it breaks the snake decides to abandon its prey and chase after Sarone, who tries to flee up the ladder only for it to chase him up the ladder and catch him. I still recall, when I first saw an ad for this film, that was the bit used as the closing "holy shit" shot and it immediately set me to giggling and I knew I had to go see this piece of shit. Do I really need to point out that a real anaconda moves on land like a giant earthworm, and couldn't outrun an able-bodied grown man, much less chase him up a ladder, too?

The ladder gives way, of course, but when Sarone tries to flee Danny somehow pulls the net up and delays Sarone long enough for the snake to recapture him. So, while Terri and Danny untie themselves, Sarone gets to hear his bones break and his neck swells (!) to, I'm guessing, indicate his blood vessels exploding. And then the anaconda begins to eat him, starting with the memorable shot from inside the anaconda as it swallows him.

"Welp, there's your problem: you've got a camera lodged in here!"

Naturally, as we watch a CGI anaconda swallow a CGI Sarone we can see that the effects people didn't bother to watch a snake eat. The beast just swallows Sarone like a crocodile or other large animal, rather than "walking" its way over his body with side-to-side motions of its head to use its teeth to drive him down into its throat. And, hilariously, despite the fact that Sarone is literally still in its throat, the anaconda still turns when Terri goes for the fuel and tail whips Danny before chasing after Terri.

This is rather like a human eating an entire large Chicago-style deep dish pizza by themself and then deciding to run down the delivery driver on foot so they can steal another one of his pizzas to also eat. So it's not surprising that, after Terri barges into a room full of actual anacondas, the big one smashes through a window beside her and vomits up Sarone. Yeah, you'd puke, too if you'd eaten an entire turkey and then did a hundred-meter dash right after. Of course, despite having been constricted, swallowed, and partially digested, Sarone is alive enough to wink at Terri with his remaining eye before finally dying. Oh, and Terri runs back to Danny to tell him with great horror that there's an entire nest of anacondas back there. Yeah, and? If you were being chased by a lion and you found a bunch of lion cubs, would you be horrified?

I might add that the nest bit is idiotic on several levels. First, the film should not have given us a good look at actual anacondas if it couldn't be bothered to make its fake ones actually look like the real deal. Second, they're trying to imply that these are babies, which makes no sense--the snakes in that room were at least five feet long or more, so they would be of breeding age and despite giving birth to live young, anacondas don't stick around to take care of their babies. Third, the film already had a baby anaconda attack Westridge, so why is it expecting us to not know that baby anacondas are not that big? I'm going to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume that they were implying the snake was vomiting up Sarone so she could eat Terri and not to feed her "young." Surely even this film isn't dumb enough to think that baby snakes could work together to somehow eat one adult human.

And I say "her," despite Danny referring to the snake as a "him" since female anacondas are larger than males. So the two snakes we've seen would have to both be female.

Danny suggests luring the snake into the smokestack and using fuel to blow it up. (You know, fuel they need to get the hell out of there) Terri volunteers to head up the chimney since she isn't injured. The snake pursues her, but oddly this forty foot snake is unable to catch Terri in a 50-foot smoke stack despite earlier climbing up a ladder in under a second. Danny uses a pick-axe to pin its tail toi the floor, then goes into the smokestack to tell Terri to climb out the top before he lights a fuse. Oddly, the snake does not turn back around and attack him despite having been stabbed in its tail.

An attempt at tension is made when Terri can't open the hatch at the top after Danny lights a trail of fuel--and how exactly he's blowing the snake up is never made clear--and the snake shakes the pick-axe loose. Terri finally gets the hatch loose and shuts it on the snake, then is forced to jump from 40 feet up as the smokestack explodes--but lands in the water instead of on the concrete she was dangling over a moment before. Of course, from that height water would snap her bones just as badly, but here not even the debris from the explosion bothers her. Well, until a flaming anaconda lands beside her.

Now, despite being on fire and presumably in a great deal of pain, the anaconda doesn't even submerge itself. It swims after Terri at the top of the water, completely on fire the entire time. I will grant that it's a cool visual, but it's also an incredibly stupid one. Danny pulls Terri up onto a walkway as the anaconda finally succumbs to burns and sinks under the water...only to burst up through the planks of the walkway so Danny can bury an axe in its skull and call it a bitch. Lovely. Anyway, as the film's hero sinks back under the water, axe still buried in its brain, the editor forgets what they just saw so we can watch Danny toss aside the axe that he shouldn't even still be holding.

Terri and the once again conscious Cale reunite, and then the crew happens upon the Shirishama after all. Cale observes that, "Sarone was right," but it's just as likely it's a total coincidence. The Shirishama also probably don't worship anacondas, so sadly we won't be seeing them massacre the surviving protagonists. Whatever, Terri got her movie after all. The End.

"OH GOD IT HURTS! IF ONLY I WERE COMPLETELY SURROUNDED BY SOMETHING THAT COULD PUT IT OUT!"

Revisiting this film for the first time since I saw it back in 1997--I don't recall ever watching it on video--I found that it definitely hadn't gotten any better. In a lot of ways, it was worse. Ironically, the effects that were mocked for being awful even at the time are one of the few things that haven't aged all that badly. I mean, sure, the CGI is bad but it's actually not nearly as terrible as I'd remembered.

No, where the film falls down is basically all the areas where subpar effects would be forgiven. The screenplay is bad, not only full of plot points and character decisions that make little sense but also dialogue that no person would say. Not only ridiculous lines, but ones that sound like the screenwriter just bought a thesaurus and wants to show off what he learned. The acting is also pretty unspectacular--Jennifer Lopez, Jonathan Hyde, and Eric Stoltz do just fine even if they end up with some awful material, but Ice Cube and Owen Wilson basically just say their lines, Kari Wuhrer is stiff, and Jon Voight is attempting to give the kind of scenery-chewing performance that he honestly just cannot pull off. He comes close a few times, but Brian Blessed he ain't.

The music for the film is pretty woeful, as well. However, where everything truly falls down is definitely in the direction. Luis Llosa cannot decide if he wants to present a film with straightforward, stolid direction or if he wants to deliver something more like a Sam Raimi film, with crazy angles and wild POV shots. He tries for both and ends up making a visually pedestrian film that occasionally tries way too hard and the scenes where it does just look out of place.

And honestly, crazy and energetic is what this film should be. Even the filmmakers seemed to realize that nobody was going to buy their titular menace as an actual threat, and yet they do nothing to try and at least liven up the film around it. This film should have been emulating Piranha with a huge balance of comedy to go with the horror, but instead there's no sense the film took itself anything but seriously. Of course, the few feeble attempts at comedy indicate that maybe that approach would have just made the film even worse.

Plus, the film is already hilarious without the filmmakers trying to make it so, An anaconda is just simply not a viable threat--we all remember the embarrassing circus that resulted when that moron tried to get one to eat him alive--and when you have to blatantly violate biology and physics to make it one, you need to give up and find a new monster. While I suppose someone with a crippling phobia of snakes might find some scenes in this film unsettling, I'm not even sure I believe that.

Anaconda is an awful film, simply put. It's the worst kind of awful, really, because it's only occasionally fun to mock and it never manages to be painfully bad, either. It's just bad. About the only thing I can say in its favor is that it's at least never boring. And yet, somehow a film this stupid and terrible managed to get a sequel that was even dumber and crappier. At least this film doesn't think anacondas live in Borneo!

That's a tale for another time, though.


Today's review brought to you by the letter A! Hit the banner above to see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for A!

Obviously, if you've been reading this blog at all you know by now that I can be a glutton for punishment. You also know that films about killer crocodilians are 95% awful and if you've heard of this film, I'm sure you haven't heard anything positive.

Well, there's a reason for that. However, that doesn't give you the whole story.

Oh, this film is very much not good. Don't get me wrong. However, that does not mean it is without merit. For one thing, it has John Carl Buechler on effects and we know how oddly fond of his work I am. For another, I always like seeing a monster movie that doesn't just take the lazy route of blowing up its menace.

That doesn't mean the rest of the film deserves any special credit, of course.

We open with a flashback / dream sequence as a man perched on the bow of a sinking boat watches as everyone else who all somehow ended up in the water are pulled under and replaced by spouts of blood. It's a very choppy sequence, full of quick cuts and an extreme close-up on an eye. It doesn't exactly endear one to the film to start off like this.

After the credits roll over tropical footage, a small sea plane flies in for a landing. Inside are Cecily Herrold (Kate Fischer!), Bog Hall (Dax Miller), Jeremy NoLastName (Joel West), and Zack Jardine (Matt Borlenghi). Bog and Jeremy are X-treme surfers, and Cecily and Zack are documentary filmmakers who are looking to film them doing something called "blood surfing." Apparently it involves surfing in heavily shark-populated waters while bleeding.

Two things pop out as interesting. First, Cecily and Zack are a couple but she's sitting next to Bog and talking flirtatiously with him, including Bog implying this whole dumb stunt was her idea. Also, despite the less ridiculous name, Jeremy is the typical surfer dude with blonde spiky hair, a space cadet attitude, and who has to reminded of what the title of Jaws is.

Upon landing, Cecily and Zack take the boat taxi and Zack tells Bog and Jeremy to wait for them to send the boat back, even though I see no reason they can't all fit in the boat. It's really just to set up a dick-measuring contest between Bog and Zack, though, since Bog clearly wants Cecily for himself. see, Bog and Jeremy decide to surf to shore and despite Zack's attempt to race them, they arrive first. Sure, Cecily notices a shadow in the water and we see a POV shot looking up at Bog's board from under the water, but it barely qualifies as a false scare because nothing comes of it.

Once ashore, Zack finds to his frustration that none of the local charter boats have ever been to the island they want to go, Lilo Kay, on account it being surrounded by sharks and dangerous reefs. However, there is one man who knows the island. That night at a local dive bar, while Cecily tries to fend off the advances of Bog and Jeremy spaces out, Zack tries to hire the services of one John Dirks (Duncan Regehr). Dirks is reluctant to go to the island, because he feels he'd be an accessory to murder. His much younger girlfriend, Arti (Taryn Reif)--whose relationship with him just constantly feels icky--is eager for them to take on the charter, however. When Dirks declines the offer, Arti objects that she'd like one night out occasionally, with a meal that isn't fish they had to catch and clean. This seems an odd objection to be raising when they're clearly already out.

Zack comes back to the group's table, defeated, but Arti decides to change Dirks' mind...by putting on music and dancing seductively. This gets the lascivious attention of every man in the bar, including Zack--to Cecily's great disgust. Look, I don't mean to disparage Taryn Reif in any way, but I have a hard time buying that a man dating a woman who looks like Kate Fischer would find her so much more enticing. I realize this is just one more way to show us that Zack is a self-interested creep, but seriously now--has he seen Sirens?! At any rate, Arti's sexy dancing somehow convinces Dirks to take the charter. Arti then goes and flirts with Bog, who flirts back but manages to completely whiff it when confronted by a woman who actually shows interest in him.

"Yes, honey, you're incredibly gorgeous and all that--but she's dancing! To a boombox!"

Later, a drunk Bog and Jeremy stumble down the docks to their boat, but Jeremy falls and passes out on the jetty. Bog then notices Dirks and Arti having sex on their boat. Now, what we see of the sex culminates in Dirks bending Arti over the edge of the boat and preparing to go at her from behind--while she locks eyes with Bog. This causes Bog to laugh at the intensity of her...lust for him, I guess? Then he also passes out. However, to me that was a look of pleading from someone trapped in a relationship they fear to leave. I have no idea if the movie realized how creepy that scene was, but I kind of doubt it,

The next morning, Jeremy is rudely awakened in a hammock on the deck of a boat by someone slapping him the face with a wet mop. The mop belongs to Lemmya Lofranco (Maureen Larrazabal), who quickly begins to mutually flirt with Jeremy. Well, there's no accounting for taste. As it turns out, the group didn't actually hire Dirks to take them to Lilo Kay, he just told them how to get there and they went with their original charter, who are Lemmya's parents, Sonny (Cris Vertido) and Melba (Susan Africa).

Precious Cinnamon Roll, Too Good for This World: Destined to be Eaten by Crocodile.

Bog, Cecily, and Zack return to the boat bearing containers of chum, and the group is on their way. The boat heads to Lilo Kay, passing Dirk's dingy old boat--where Arti is alternately sunbathing topless and swimming topless. Of course, Dirks can't enjoy his girlfriend's inability to keep a shirt on because he's too busy being plagued by more of those opening flashbacks since we now see that he was the captain of the boat who got to safety while he had to watch everyone else get nommed.

Jeremy awkwardly flirts with Lemmya some more, and then they arrive at Lilo Kay. Melba leads a prayer circle, then Lemmya gives Jeremy a pendant she promises will protect him from anything. Well, except her father's stern gaze, of course. Then Cecily dons her chain mail diving suit as Bog dishes out chum. And before you know it, stock footage sharks are swarming in. Cecily hops into the water while Bog and Jeremy cut the tops of their feet. Bog has to psych Jeremy up, but they quickly get in the water.

"Okay, now let's find out if you're The Thing."

Soon the two are dodging CGI shark fins and surfing through awkwardly composited stock footage sharks. They make it to shore and everyone cheers, until the sharks start nipping at Cecily. For no apparent reason, nobody planned this out so that she could be immediately extracted from the water. So Bog has to swim out on his surfboard to save her, while Zack oddly has Sonny pull them in to a jetty about a hundred yards down the beach. After seeing everyone is fine, Zack tells them they need to get right back out in the water and film some more. However, Bog has noticed the sharks are acting weird--and then an underwater POV cam zooms in on one of the sharks and apparently causes it to explode (!) based on the geyser of water that results. Well, Jaws The Revenge did teach us that sharks explode when killed. That bizarre sight makes even Zack agree to call it a day.

We then see Bog surfing at what appears to be sunset, but everyone else's footage is in full midday sunlight as Cecily wonders how he can go back out there after what they saw. Jeremy, meanwhile, mentions to Lemmya that her mother mentioned some ancient ruins on the island and they sneak off, while Zack and Cecily decide to start getting hot and heavy right there on the beach. Well, they talk about the footage first and then start moving on to the making out. At the ruins, Lemmya and Jeremy start making out until Lemmya jokes that she's 15--Jeremy freaks out until she takes her top off and assures him she's 19. This is the cue to him that it's okay for them to start having the kind of awkward, flailing sex in a pool of water that people only ever have in movies. I'm also not really sure where that particular shade of blue in the water came from, but sex in water isn't even a good idea when it's not a pool of water in ancient ruins on a tropical island.

Back at their boat, which is fittingly called The Picnic, Melba decides to take a quick swim over Sonny's objections. She doesn't notice the ominous shadow in the water, of course. Sonny feels something rub up against the bottom of the boat and hurriedly calls melba in just as the boat is rammed. She makes it safely aboard, but then the sinister POV cam grabs Sonny when he leans too far overboard. Dirks, overwhelmed by his conscience, chooses just then to radio their boat. Melba is a bit too busy just then to answer as she helplessly cowers in the boat just as it is rammed one last time. Did I mention that this was all intercut with Jeremy and Lemmya fucking? Yeah. It's about to get even more uncomfortable, because in the afterglow Jeremy asks Lemmya how old she really is. She casually replies she's 17, and he reacts with a pained groan--before perking up and asking, "Is that legal here?"

Gee, thanks, movie. Statutory rape jokes following a sex scene aren't incredibly discomforting at all.

Cecily and Zack never get past heavy petting because Bog comes back onto the beach from the surf and, rather than bugger off, sits a few yards away to visibly mope about how he isn't getting to bang Cecily. It kind of ruins the mood, as you might imagine.

The sun finally sets and Lemmya, still topless, goes to rinse her top in a nearby pool of water. Though, not the one she was just banging a surfer dude in. Unfortunately, she hears a sound and looks to her left to see an enormous crocodile watching her. We see her screaming face reflected in its eye before it eats her off screen. And let me just pause and say that this crocodile may just be the most adorable of John Carl Buechler's creations. Don't get me wrong, it's a well-made series of puppets, but this croc is, in no way, shape, or form intimidating. It looks like it ought to be playing the big jock antagonist in a Muppets frat house comedy.

"You're never gonna beat Sigma Kappa Croc, dweebs!"

Jeremy awakens from the sound of Lemmya's screams, but he must have heard the tail end of it because he starts looking for her, thinking she's hiding from him. And then he finds a dinosaurish footprint (!) with Lemmy's skirt sitting in it. He shows the others, but Zack writes it off as a joke...until they go down to the jetty and discover the wreckage of the boat and see a chunk of human flesh in the water. It's then that Zack remembers that the camera is on the boat and freaks out because they need the tape or else the whole trip will have been pointless. Bog actually agrees with Zack on that and dives in to the water to recover the camera. Um, could it not wait until daylight?

Bog recovers the camera, but in the expected Jaws rip-off moment, he's startled by the gnawed remains of Melba. He gets back to the jetty and gives Zack the camera--but then the crocodile uses its tail to smash the the wooden supports. Cecily rescues Bog and Jeremy while Zack flees, and then the jetty explodes behind them as they run down it, intercut with shots of a small crocodile puppet destroying an obvious miniature. And, much like Carnosaur, the full-scale croc puppet is pretty impressive, if adorable, while the miniature ones are...not.

Impressive, that is. They're still fucking adorable.

The group flees the crocodile, somehow never cottoning to what it is the entire time because they just refer to it as "that thing." Maybe they just didn't see it, I don't know. They reach a clearing and the croc apparently stops chasing them, but they soon realize they're fucked. Ah, but Zack brought a satellite phone...which isn't working. And then they're captured by pirates.

Yes, Lilo Kay is not only surrounded by dangerous reefs, "infested" with sharks, and a place locals give a wide berth to--it's also home base for some pirates. The head pirate (Archie Adamos), after preventing Zack from walking into a booby trap that would have impaled him, steals the satellite phone and points his guns in everyone's face. He demands to know what they're doing on his island, and when Cecily explains they were trying to get off the island because "a creature" was chasing them, he incredulously replies, "A creature? Like Godzilla?" And then he...does a monkey impression? No, mister pirate, sir, that is not Godzilla.

The pirates all have a good laugh, then the lead pirate takes Zack's money when he asks if they have a boat. They're all marched to the pirate boat where, somehow, Zack is surprised to discover they're now prisoners and not passengers. Somehow Zack thinks that yelling, "I'm an American," will make the situation better. And then the head pirate's brother leers through the cage they find themselves in and the head pirate says his brother always wanted an American--though to Zack's relief, he meant Cecily. (Though I'm sure if he agreed to have sex with the pirte to save all their lives, the movie would find a way to spin that against him) She objects on the grounds that she's Australian, but that's close enough. Zack is perfectly okay with his girlfriend being raped by pirates if it keeps them alive. Bog, on the other hand, now starts behaving like less of a jerk as he tries to convince the pirates that Australian girls are awful in the sack.

It doesn't take. Cecily is dragged off to the top deck of the boat, where the pervy pirate rips her top open. (Her bra at least stays in place) Her decision to slap him results in her getting backhanded, but luckily this crocodile is no different from any other movie monster--and it hates rapists. After bumping the boat, the croc leaps out of the water (in a CGI effect that has, bizarrely, aged no worse than modern SyFy Channel movies) to grab the rapist and chomp him to death. And I have to say, this is maybe the least ridiculous scene of its type in a killer croc film that I've seen. It didn't leap over the boat, and most of its body was still in the water so I can buy that it was doing what's known as "tail walking."

Crocodiles just love the fresh flavor of pirate flesh!

Seizing the moment in the confusion, Bog and Jeremy knock all the pirates overboard and start the boat up to leave. Unfortunately, the head pirate shoots at them with his uzi once he makes the shore and manages to ignite barrels of fuel all over the boat. Jeremy, Zack, Bog, and Cecily barely dive off into the water before it explodes. Floating in the water, calling for the others, Zack is startled by Dirks, floating in an inflatable dinghy and smoking a cigar. Um...why is he in a dinghy? And how long would he have had to be floating there?

On board Dirks' vessel, the others talk about what they've just seen. They agree the croc had to be at least 30 feet and Cecily declares that it clearly wasn't killing for hunger. Dirks takes a knowing swig of liquor and tells Arti to show them to their bunks below decks. Bog stays to thank Dirks, and also to see the sign for Dirks' old tour boat. He figures out that Dirks quit because of an encounter with an enormous saltwater crocodile, and Dirks confirms it. He also reassures Bog that he has no intention of trying hunt it down and risking all their lives.

Below, Arti is handing out dry clothes to Zack, Jeremy, and Cecily. She makes a snarky comment about her tank top likely being too small for Cecily. Zack's next jerk move is to get all excited about how they just survived an encounter with the Devil, and then he grabs a bottle of whisky nearby and toasts to their survival. The others take turns toasting to the memories of the people they lost to the crocodile, to make Zack feel like shit about being happy to be alive--even though it's not like it's his fault the Lofranco family are dead. Really, the only truly awful thing he's done in the film is not try and stop pirates from having their way with his girlfriend--I mean, that's a pretty shitty thing to do, but somehow the movie seems to gloss over that in comparison to the other selfish behaviors he's demonstrated.

Up on deck, Dirks feels the presence of the crocodile (um, sure) and decides it's time to go Ahab. Zack wakes up in his bunk, surrounded by nude pin-ups--which seems to be a set-up for a joke they don't make. Zack goes snooping and Arti catches him trying to open a chum container , so she sneaks up behind him and hands him a knife to pry it open. Inside the container is a sheep's head, which Zack reacts in horror to--but you really have to wonder what the hell he was expecting to be in there. "Salties love 'em," Arti helpfully explains, pointing out the porthole at Dirks tossing baited bouys over the side. Now Art lays out in detail what Bog earlier figured out partially.

Dirks was a tour boat captain, a very successful one, until one tour of Lilo Kay ended with his all of his passengers being killed by a 31-foot saltwater crocodile. He's been dreaming of revenge for years and now he has the opportunity. Zack points out that Dirks has four people on board who want no part of hunting the croc that nearly ate them. So now the film inexplicably rips off Anaconda as Arti questions Zack's talent as a TV producer. After all, wouldn't a documentary about a man catching and killing the biggest crocodile ever recorded be a huge deal?

Well, Zack didn't bother to share this new deal with the others so they are none too pleased to wake up in the morning to the sight of Lilo Kay. Well, as it turns out, Dirks isn't entirely in on it, either. He rants a while to the group about how the saltie "owns these waters" and must be destroyed. Zack then pitches his idea to the others, and Dirks is none too happy to hear that Arti told him all about the history between him and the croc. I'm not sure why it matters, but okay. Zack then goes on to say that they'll frame the story as a man seeking revenge on the biggest crocodile that ever lived, which he now christens "Big Mick."

Dirks is just as disgusted as the others, and gets in real close to Zack's face to tell him about the horror he witnessed of his passengers being torn apart in front of his eyes. He tells Zack to go ahead and make his stupid TV show out of it, but to stay out of the way. Bog confronts Dirks, but their tense stare down is interrupted by Big Mick taking the bait. As Arti drives the boat, Bog and Jeremy man the winch while Dirks lines up a harpoon shot.

"Hey, what do you guys think of my new piercing? Too much?"

As Zack pretends to supervise, Cecily dives over the side with the camera to film the croc capture from below the surface. Why it would need to be from that angle and not from the boat is never explained. Naturally, the engines burn out from the strain and the beast breaks loose so it can chase after Cecily, but Bog and Jeremy get her to safety just in time. And, hoo boy, the underwater effects for Big Mick sure are dodgy. Jaws 3-D dodgy.

Unfortunately for our heroes, Jeremy ends up trapped within inches of Big Mick's jaws when it comes up after Cecily. So Dirks...tosses Jeremy a knife. Jeremy then jumps onto the croc's snout to stab it repeatedly and ineffectually. As you probably guessed, this results in him getting flipped into the air like a snausage and devoured.

"Witness me!" "Ugh! MEDIOCRE!"

Bog punches Dirks for getting his friend killed, but Dirks shrugs it off--especially once Arti comes to tell him the engine's dying. Seeing Zack shaking in fear (you know, after having just watched someone he knew get eaten in front of him), Arti assures him not to worry because the crocodile "only eats real men." Could the movie please stop making me sympathize with the yuppie douchebag? Jesus Christ, every shot someone else takes at him just makes me want to see them get eaten more. No one's mocking Cecily for being just as shaken as Zack, for fuck's sake.

At any rate, Dirks takes the wheel, apparently intent on leaving--but then he decides to turn the boat around and speed toward the reef around Lilo Kay. Apparently, since they can't ourtun the crocodile he's decided suicide is a better option. Once they crash, Dirks tells Arti to lead the others to the ruins and fresh water--he claims it's full of alkaline and salties can't stand it because it burns their skin. I very much doubt that, given crocodiles are not known for having sensitive skin, but okay. What is Dirks doing, you ask? Why, staying to set the boat to explode and hopefully lure Big Mick to his death.

So the others walk across the reef, with Zack complaining the whole way, especially after he cuts his foot. Sick of hearing them berate him, he spies Bog's surf board floating nearby and decides to surf into shore on it. Except Big Mick is waiting for him and Zack surfs right into its waiting jaws. (This is a really awkwardly edited sequence) How do our remaining heroes react to witnessing another of their number be swallowed alive?

Bog: "Oh man. That has got to suck."
Cecily: [shrugging] "Couldn't have happened to a nicer person."
Arti: "Amen."

And then they just keep walking like nothing happened. Jesus Christ. Cecily just watched her boyfriend die and that's how she reacts? I mean the other two have been assholes to him the entire time, anyway, so I can at least understand their reaction even if I still hate them for it. But Cecily? That's fucking callous. She reacted with more horror to watching the death of the guy who tried to rape her!

I realize that this entire bit is a casualty of the film coming out in the post-Scream, self-aware horror craze--but despite the many, many, many flaws of Scream it at least still made some effort to have its characters be human beings when confronted with the deaths of people they cared about.

Well, they make it to shore as Dirks is finishing setting up all his explosives. Unfortunately for Dirks, the crocodile bashes through the hull right in front of him. His pistol proves about as useful as the knife did for Jeremy earlier. He leaps up above its snout, grabbing hold of a pipe, to kick at it. That goes poorly. Big Mick gets Dirks' legs in its jaws and tears him in half. Apparently Dirk's is stronger than a 3,000 pound crocodile because he hangs by his arms, dripping blood from his severed torso for a bit before falling off. Back on shore, the others watch the boat sink with no explosion.

Arti wants to go back, but Bog tells her to take Cecily to the ruins and he'll go. He reasons that, Dirks or not, they need the explosives. So off he goes. Meanwhile, the pirate from earlier is watching the women from the woods. Oh, what, you forgot about that subplot, too? Well, the movie might as well have since it resolves it so perfunctorily. After Cecily saves the fucking insufferable Arti from walking into another spike trap, the pirate slaps Arti unconscious. Cecily manages to lead the comically inept pirate back to his own trap, via a sequence just this side of him chasing her around a table. She triggers the trap and he helpfully stands in place to swear and then get impaled. When Arti comes to, Cecily tells her that she was hit by "a bad joke."

You can say that again.

Bog recovers the explosives, meanwhile, only being startled by a severed goat head this time. Cecily and Arti somehow get lost on their way to the ruins, even though Arti suppoedly knows the island and Cecily was just there. They find a rickety bridge, but then they see Big Mick sunning itself on the stream bed below. It sees them and gives chase. They find the ruins just as Big Mick somehow ends up directly behind them, and they have to dive into the water to escape. And, sure enough, Big Mick reacts like he's a vampire who can't cross running water or was just denied invitation into a home. Of course, you'd think that if the water was so alkaline as to burn a crocodile's skin, it would be hellishly uncomfortable for a human, but the two women don't seem bothered by it at all.

Seeing that the crocodile can't pursue them, Arti and Cecily decide to...flash their breasts at it. Sure, okay. Well, Arti flashes her breasts, Cecily just pulls her top down a bit. I guess Kate Fischer either decided Sirens would be the only time she'd be getting naked in a film, or this movie didn't pay her enough. At any rate, when Big Mick roars angrily at them, they turn and run for the opposite bank of the pool while Cecily quips, "I guess that's what you call croc teasing!"

Dear God, I like Jim Wynorski movies and that's painful.

Night falls as the two sit on the ruins, watching the crocodile sitting across the pool from them. Why he's been waiting there for them now when he hadn't been just waiting around for prey before is beyond me, but whatever. Arti angrily wonders aloud if Bog will ever show up, then asks if Cecily really likes him. Cecily sort of defers the question, so Arti turns to talking about her fear that Dirks is dead. She explains that Dirks won her in a dart game and was the first man to treat her with dignity. So, yeah, the fact that the movie is now implying she was sold into sexual slavery makes me feel a little bad about calling her insufferable now.

Man, sexual slavery and statutory rape. This movie really wants you to feel icky about the characters who provide its nudity, doesn't it?

Bog returns with a big grin on his face, having somehow found a way to the ruins that did not take him right past the crocodile. He asks Cecily for a kiss, which I guess is supposed to be endearing, but it's really, really not. He breaks the bad news about Dirks to Arti, and then he looks at the crocodile and wonders aloud if it realizes it's about to be blown up.

Well, no, it couldn't, since the plan is to lure the crocodile into a passage in the ruins and set off the charges to collapse the structure on top of it and crush it. This seems needlessly complicated, since it requires Bog to lure the beast to where the women are waiting in a tiny space with no escape, in order to hopefully bring the ruins down on Big Mick before it can reach them. They could easily just walk over to the crocodile and toss one of the charges at it with a lot less risk at present. However, this is the plan they've chosen, so Cecily tells Bog to go do what he does best, "Piss things off." Yeah, like the reviewer!

Bog knocks part of the ruins over to form a bridge across the stream feeding the pool. Big Mick seems to get it's a trick, but Bog eventually succeeds in luring it across the patently foam bridge. The plan works and a few rocks fall on top of Big Mick, most certainly killing him forever and ever. "If that didn't do it, nothing will," Bog declares. He and Cecily begin to walk away, but Arti has to try and air her grievances by kicking the croc in the snout. You'll never guess what happens next.

"Hey, baby, are you Captain Hook? Because you make my clock go Tick-Tock."

Yep, Arti gets chomped by the utterly not dead crocodile after her kicks rouse it out of its stupor. Bog attempts to save her, but that promptly fails and so Cecily and Bog are forced to flee as the croc gives chase.  This results in them rolling and sliding down a steep hill, the croc hot on their heels. Somehow they land on a ledge and are able to do a Tarzan swing to safety, just ahead of the croc. They fall safely into the stream below and it--lands on a huge rock spike (!) that runs it right through. Bog and Cecily watch its death throes from the water, before it succumbs to its wounds.

Now that the movie's hero is dead, Bog pretends to pass out to trick Cecily into trying to do mouth-to-mouth on him. When she objects that wasn't a kiss, he basically forces her into one anyway. But it's okay, see, because she wants it. Ugh, Bog then wonders how they'll get off the island, but they both declare that they don't care. Good, they can starve there for all I care. The End.

"It wasn't the spikes that got 'im. It was budget killed the hand puppet."

In the intro, I almost lied to you. See, when I watched this on Netflix a few years ago, I liked it way more than I expected to. Not enough to revisit it in any hurry or add it to my collection, but I enjoyed it. So when I started writing this review, I assumed my opinion would not have changed much.

Oh, but it did. It did.

For one thing, I had forgotten just how insufferable the characters are. While Cecily is almost likable, at least 90% just because Kate Fischer is an incredibly gorgeous woman, the most sympathetic characters in the film are definitely Lemmya and her parents--if we ignore the creepy running gag about her real age--and from the moment we see them we know they're only there to be croc bait. People of color in their native "exotic" land surviving a monster movie while the dumb white foreigners get devoured? Unthinkable!

So once they're eaten, we're stuck with a bunch of bad actors playing repulsive people. To be fair, Duncan Regehr, Kate Fischer, and even Joel West are mostly capable actors--but the others alternate between saying their lines flatly, inappropriate facial expressions, and that certain broad way of enunciating their lines that would make them feel like the worst actors in a high school play. I can't decide if I'm more eager for the actors or the characters to bite it.

(Er, not literally, so if one of the actors gets eaten by an actual crocodile, I am not going to celebrate)

That leaves the crocodile action, and while there is a lot of it, it's still pretty lacking. I've touched on the effects already but it bears further elaboration: the full-scale puppet head and front legs are quite good, but a lot of the croc footage is a plainly miniature prop and puppet. There's certainly something charming about the woefulness of those effects, but good they are not. And the filmmakers seem to have no idea what to do with the croc. Consider the introduction of the pirates, a plot thread that adds nothing to the film.

Not only do we only see one pirate get chomped by the crocodile when the heroes make their escape, despite having set up multiple potential victims, but the lead pirate doesn't even get eaten by the croc when he shows up again later. He just gets killed by one of his own traps and that's that.

Really, the film's story is it's greatest failing. Not just the fact that it has no idea what it's doing and throws in pointless plot cul-de-sacs. I mean the fact that it utterly fails to make good on the great premise it promises the viewer.

Consider two things: One, its title is Blood Surf; Two, look at that fucking poster! If the film was going to promise surfers getting eaten by a crocodile, it fucking failed to deliver in a big way. The titular blood surfing happens in one scene, and the only person eaten on a surfboard is Zack! His death should have happened to an actual surfer, way earlier. The title and poster belong to a movie that should have been about a whole bunch of expendable surfers trying to outdo each other in blood surfing at Lilo Kay, and then those who survived the initial attack trying to stay alive and kill the croc.

Instead we get two surfers, only one of whom gets eaten, and the film turns into an Anaconda rip-off midway through before abruptly abandoning that thread.

If they weren't going to realize the greatness of surfers being devoured by a giant crocodile, then they should have stuck with the original title, Krocodylus. Throwing a "K" onto "Crocodylus" is perfect for this movie--utterly stupid while thinking it's clever.

If you must watch this movie, do it for the adorable crocodile puppets. If you expect anything more, you will leave sorely disappointed.


Today's review brought to you by the letter B! Hit the banner above to see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for B!

You may or may not realize it, but most of the movies I reviewed for FridayFakeosaurusFebruary had something in common besides the fact they contain bogus species of dinosaurs. That something is a "movie" called Fantastic Dinosaurs of the Movies, a VHS tape that I wore out as a kid.

I say "movie" because, despite an opening that posits it as some sort of documentary on dinosaurs in film and then goes on to feature some cool behind the scenes footage of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, including a pin-up photoshoot with Caroline Munro, everything afterward is nothing more than a parade of trailers for movies about dinosaurs. Of course, the "movie" advises you early on that its definition of a "dinosaur" is so general as to include any large monster. Hence trailers for The Land That Time Forgot; The Valley of Gwangi; The Giant Behemoth; and One Million Years B.C. play alongside Tarantula; The Giant Gila Monster; The Giant Claw; and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

I loved it, naturally. It was basically a list of movies that I needed to see. Of course, over twenty years since, I still haven't crossed Journey to the Beginning of Time and Valley of the Dragons off the list, and I only saw King Dinosaur via Mystery Science Theater 3000--and that's almost cheating.

Of course, obviously not every movie included in Fantastic Dinosaurs of the Movies was actually worth the effort--however minimal--I took to track it down. Some wore their poor quality on their sleeves. Even before I read reviews, there wasn't much chance of me going into The Loch Ness Horror expecting a good movie. Yet, some trailers definitely did their job--including the trailer for a film that promised a Jaws cash-in with a Plesiosaur-like creature taking the place of the shark.

There was no way I could have anticipated what the actual movie had to offer.

To begin with, the film opens with the mark of anti-quality: the logo for Crown International Pictures. Their logo looks a lot like that of Imperial Toys, and it's fitting because they seem to make the cinema equivalent of off-brand cheap plastic toys. If you see this logo before a film, you should gird your loins.

Dr. Richard Calkins (Bob Hyman) is enjoying a pipe outside of his mountain cabin, when his colleague Dan Turner (Richard Garrison) drives up an excitedly tells him to come quick: he and Susan Patterson (Kacey Cobb) have made a discovery that he has to see. Calkins begrudgingly agrees to come along but complains that Dan and Susan never make any discoveries in the middle of the day, which is about our only clue this is meant to be taking place at night. though it is pitch black when they get to the mine where Susan is waiting for them.

Dan is excited because they've broken into a new tunnel that he believes will prove all the legends of the area are true. In this tunnel is a cave painting that he and Susan believe to be several thousand years old. (And as movie cave paintings go, I've certainly seen less believable ones) The painting depicts what appears to be a shooting star flying over what is clearly a plesiosaur as several men on the shore await its approach with spears. Dan and Calkins agree that this is proof that dinosaurs survived all the way into the age of man, even though it's really only proof that aquatic reptiles did since there's not actually a dinosaur in the painting.

The painting proves prophetic, for just then a cartoon meteorite streaks over the mountains as Sheriff Steve Hansen (Richard Cardella) watches. It crashes into the lake and Steve radios it in. Meanwhile, Dan, Susan, and Calkins have to rush out of the mine as an earthquake strikes--apparently as a result of the meteorite strike. They make it out just in time as the mine collapses and the find of the century is lost.

Cut to the next morning as Steve pulls up to a local diner. Inside, the comic relief rednecks, Arnie Chabot (Glenn Roberts) and Mitch Kowalski (Mark Siegel), are ogling the waitress (Susy Claycomb) as she serves them coffee. And subtle they are not. Steve is there to get his thermos refilled with coffee, but Calkins calls him over. Apparently, Steve is going to be taking Dan and Susan out on the lake to dive for the meteorite. Calkins understands, saying that "for a paleontologist it's better than finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow." Uh, do you understand what a paleontologist does, doc?

Steve ends up talking Calkins into coming along, and the film oddly focuses on the waitress for way too long after they leave. At the boat, Dan and Susan express concern that with the mine collapsed their funding might get pulled, but Dan feels sure if they can recover the meteorite they'll have "two rare finds in 24 hours" and the university will have to let them keep working. Well, yeah, except one of those finds is not that rare and the actually rare one is buried under tons of rock without so much as a photograph of it.

Steve and Calkins stay up top while the young pair dive to the bottom of the lake. Steve apparently doesn't understand what Susan sees in Dan, but Calkins doesn't comment on what an odd comment that is to make. At any rate, Calkins suggests that if Dan can recover those cave paintings a lot of theories will have to be rethought. Dan and Susan come up, reporting that the bottom of the lake was too hot, at least 90 degrees (Fahrenheit or Celsius?) all over, and the meteorite could take weeks to be cool enough to recover.

There's an odd shot of a prop egg at the bottom of what is unmistakably a fish tank, and then we see a backpacker walking through the woods around the lake. He sets his pack down and pulls a handgun out of it, briefly pausing when he hears a low growling somewhere behind him. We cut to a quick shot of a prop plesiosaur head under the surface of the lake, and then a POV shot emerges from the lake and rapidly advances on the man's position. He turns and, apparently forgetting he just loaded a gun, screams at the sight of--a stop-motion Plesiosaurus roaring at him! He stumbles back over his pack and we cut away, but it's safe to assume that he's been eaten.

Of course, we can infer that a huge amount of time must have passed between when we saw the egg and when this guy got nommed by what can only be interpreted as a full-grown Plesiosaurus. And the stop-motion effects are by Dave Allen, so at least they're good. So good that a significant portion of them were featured in the trailer I saw as a kid. Rightly so, I'd say.

"Ach, laddie! I could use a spot o' help. I cannae seem to find me way back to the Loch."

Obviously, a short time later a man out recording wildlife sounds hears a growling sound and turns to look at the lake via his binoculars. There he sees the prop head of the Plesiosaurus floating in the lake. It's...not nearly as convincing as the stop-motion. I'd even argue that the Plesiosaurus in Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds is more convincing.

The guy calls Steve to report the sighting, but Steve is more interested in counting how many flies he can swat and writes the guy off as a cook. Incidentally, he's checking off dead flies on a sheet of paper that has a section marked "Me" and one marked "Flies", so now I have to wonder by what criteria the flies win because there are check marks in that section! Meanwhile, the stoop-motion beastie menaces some cows. Steve takes a call about missing cattle at the Ferguson Ranch more seriously. It turns out to just be a missing bull, but Steve isn't sure if he believes Mr. Ferguson's hunch that it's cattle rustlers.

Meanwhile, a man we'll much later discover is senator Jack Fuller (Marv Eliot) arrives at the dock with his fishing gear. He rents a rowboat from Arnie and Mitch, who insist on him paying $20 which he objects to but doesn't have much choice. Arnie just warns Fuller to have the boat back by 6 as he rows out. Mitch asks Arnie why he didn't tell Fuller that there hasn't been any fish caught in the lake for 2 months and Arnie scoffs that he isn't about to go broke on principles.

A nicely atmospheric mist rolls in around the boat as Fuller fishes, but the attempt to replicate it in the following shots that were clearly filmed in a tank are not so successful. It's also pitch black all of a sudden, though the water where we see the Plesiosaur lurking is much lighter. The beast strikes by knocking Fuller out of the boat, which largely involves him helpfully standing up (!) so he can fall out more easily. Rather than try to climb back into the boat, Fuller looks around dumbly until he sees the Plesiosaurus directly in front of him--and he pulls a face that looks more like Don Knotts seeing a ghost than anything resembling fright.

"Chiiiick! Oh, Chick!"

In an actually decent close-up, the eye of the beast turns toward him. And then Fuller helpfully sticks his legs into its open mouth so it can drag him beneath the waves. The boat is left to float empty.

Cut to some unfunny arguments about oars and motors with Arnie and Mitch, the two talk about how if Fuller stays out in the boat after 6 they'll get more money from him. Arnie comments that he'll probably stay out until dark. Notice it is daytime when they are saying this, when we just saw Fuller get eaten in full dark. Then they see the empty boat floating towards them, and Arnie refers to having rented the boat out "this morning." So I'm left unsure if the time issue was bad editing or not adjusting dialogue for when they could shoot.

They row over to the boat and discover it's full of blood (!) and Arnie suggests they fetch Calkins. Of course, your guess is as good as mine as to where all that blood came from since Fuller got eaten in the water. Steve arrives shortly and he and Calkins conclude that the man must have wounded his head falling overboard and bled into the boat. it's unlikely they'll find him but they need to start up a search at once--and in one of the few bits of good editing, the film cuts from Calkins starting a sentence to Steve finishing it as he talks to someone on the phone about the missing fisherman, He's sure that the man is dead, but they'll keep trying.

Meanwhile, we cut to Ross (Michael Hoover) and Paula Conway (Suzanne Lewis) driving past the town of Crater Lake. They're apparently some kind of married performing duo on their way to Las Vegas to start a new gig. Ross is also "English" but the actor is not quite up to that challenge. As they talk about Ross finally sobering up, their car dies. After an Arnie & Mitch interlude that's too "komical" to get into, we see the couple at a mechanic. Their engine is so hot it's smoking so he can't get to fixing it for hours. He suggests they go down to the lake and rent a boat while they wait.

Arnie & Mitch, meanwhile, are talking about the hoedown they're about to go to, as well as the motor that Mitch just fixed in their boat. Of course, Mitch had an extra piece left after he fixed it, but since it runs without the piece Artie tells him not to worry and tosses the part in the lake. Of course, it doesn't run after all--but that doesn't stop Arnie from renting it out to Ross and Paula for $25. And, "hilariously" the motor works for the couple.

Arnie and Mitch argue on their way to the hoedown, which results in Mitch throwing Arnie's hat in the lake and Arnie scuffing Mitch's new shoes. Mitch pushes Arnie in the lake and that does it. The two come to blows. Steve pulls up and just watches the two wrestling with a smirk on his face. They both end up in the lake, still squabbling--until Arnie lands on the severed, chewed up head of Fuller. Steve recovers the head with a plastic bag and then tells them to get back to their cabin and stay off the lake. Unfortunately, they don't remember they rented a boat out to the couple until Steve's parting demand to them as he pulls off is to not rent any boats, either. Arnie decides they better disregard rhe warning to stay off the lake and go find the couple before Steve finds out.

Two increasingly hilarious things happen next. One, despite a shot indicating it should be darker out, we see the prop head under the lake in broad daylight as it bumps its snout up against a solid white object. I can only assume this is the bottom of the Conways' boat as we cut to them, also in broad daylight, embracing in the boat. "There's so many stars," Paula says in awe, "I've never seen so many!" So either she's going blind or the moonlight in Crater Lake is really bright.

"He touched the butt!"

Their kissing is interrupted when their boat shakes, which would seem to indicate the shot of the Plesiosaurus bumping it should have happened then. Ross decides to gun the motor in response and ends up running them aground on a beach. Ross is knocked out, but he soon comes to in Paula's arms. She tells him that she saw something on the water--and then the stop-motion Plesiosaurus roars at them and advances towards them. Note that it's suddenly a lot slower than it's been on land in previous scenes. Paula runs to some nearby rocks and screams in terro, while Ross decides to--douse the boat in gasoline and set it on fire. This gambit works and the Plesiosaurus flees back into the lake, giving them an offended look over its shoulder as it goes.

And now the film takes a complete detour, so we can watch a guy with a greasy mullet and handlebar mustache load a gun in his apartment, before driving through a city to a liquor store. He grabs a bottle of booze and, instead of paying for it, draws his gun on the cashier. The cashier complains that it's the third time this month, but a woman walks in carrying a bag of groceries (!) and distracts the robber. He shoots the cashier, who has just grabbed a gun, and then shoots the woman through her mystery bag. He then grabs his bottle and leaves, not even bothering to try and get the money from the register as he steps over the dead woman.

The film continues to be weird as we look at Calkins via what is clearly meant to be the POV from the severed head he is examining. (Maybe it's also inside an anaconda?) Outside, Steve is waiting anxiously. Calkins comes out and over coffee the two discuss the odd details of the severed head. For one thing, the wounds were made by some kind of teeth that Calkins can't recognize. For another, the saliva he found in the wounds was teeming with a bacteria he couldn't recognize. (Not that anything will come of this, like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms) Here, Calkins casually informs us that 6 months have passed since the meteorite hit and that seems to be related since the fishing went bad and animals started disappearing shortly afterwards. Calkins declares that they should keep it to themselves for now, but Steve will warn everyone away from the lake just the same.

Arnie and Mitch find the Conways, apparently in a state of shock from what they witnessed. I guess they had a crippling fear of plesiosaurs. Mitch plays the sensitive one while Arnie gripes about the destroyed boat. After they see the couple onto an ambulance, Steve chews them out for renting the boat in the first place--not giving them a chance to explain that they rented it before the order to close down.

The film then spends more time with Arnie and Mitch set to whimsical Komedy music as they get drunk and argue over their money woes. Wasn't there a monster in this film? Could we get back to it, please? Wait, this sequence is still going. I don't want to see them get drunk and wander in the woods. I don't want to see them get scared by an owl and a log. No. Stop this. No. Why? Why?! Make it stop, for the love of--



At the diner, Steve investigates the car of the robber. The robber sees this through the window and hurries to his car as Steve is radioing it in. The two exchange gunfire and then a high speed chase ensues. The chase quickly ends up on some dirt roads. Hilariously, the robber suddenly bails out of his car before it goes over a cliff into a quarry. Oddly, they could drop a car off a cliff but not blow it up, because we just hear the explosion before cutting back to the burning car. Steve pursues the suspect past a cabin that Jason Voorhees ought to be hiding in. He manages to shoot the suspect in the leg just before they get to the lake...

...and then, in a completely silent shot, we see the robber reacting in horror at the sight of the plesiosaur prop head being waved around in front of the camera. Horrifying? No. Hilarious as all Hell? Yes. There's nothing but a smear of blood on a rock when Steve catches up to where the guy should be. So he phones Calkins and declares that he wants to comb the lake because there might be a creature in it after all.

Now, Steve mentions it's almost dark here. But it's broad daylight when he hears a sound while driving past the lake and wonders through foggy woods to find a flipper print--and then the Plesiosaurus chases him back to his car, which is suddenly only a few yards away. Steve finds that bullets just annoy it, but he manages to escape in his car.

Pictured: The only way to get me to start watching The Dukes of Hazzard.

Steve fetches Calkins and they go to examine the flipper prints. Calkins decides they should bring in Dan and Susan. Hearing Steve's description, Dan declares it sounds like "an aquatic dinosaur." (No. No. Not a freaking dinosaur) Steve then identifies a picture of a Plesiosaurus and Dan and Susan agree it must have been a fertile egg, somehow hatched by the meteorite,

As expected, Steve wants to kill it but Dan wants to capture it. Oddly, it's here that we find out that Fuller was a senator, because apparently the fiasco of a dead senator in his town is one of Steve's arguments for why an incredibly rare creature should be killed. I'm on Dan's side, though I kind of have to side with Steve when Dan admits he has no idea how to contain the plesiosaur. But he does come up with the idea of containing it inside a bay that could be sealed off. Steve agrees to call a town meeting to discuss the issue.

Cut to the prop plesiosaur head floating through the lake set to somebody pounding on piano keys to vaguely rip off the Jaws theme. The mechanic from earlier is working on some tractors and apparently missed the town meeting memo. Somehow he is ambushed by the Plesiosaurus that is slow-moving and roaring the whole way. At the town meeting, the only people agreeing with the capture plan are Arnie and Mitch--and then the wounded mechanic runs in, declaring there's a monster down at the ski lift.

For some reason, when Dan, Susan, and Steve get down there the beast is tossing bales of hay around. I don't really know why, since it's not like it thinks they're food.

"Look, I need some fiber to move all those humans through me, okay?"

Arnie and Mitch drive up, discussing what to do. Steve declares he's gonna kill it and runs over to a bulldozer. Arnie, intending to stop Steve runs over to point a shotgun in his face and order him not to kill the creature. Steve tells him there's no way they can save it now, so...Arnie climbs on the back on the bulldozer where he's totally exposed in order to tag along with Steve.

Upon actually rolling up to the beast, Arnie decides he doesn't want to get that close after all and hops off the bulldozer. Like many a squirrel crossing a street, his indecision was his doom. Arnie trips and the Plesiosaurus picks him up in its jaws. It then casually stands around with him in its mouth like a dog with a chew toy until Steve prods it a couple times and it tosses Arnie's dead body to the ground.

Now, you'd think a Plesiosaurus vs. bulldozer fight would be pretty entertaining. In fact, when I first read about the description of the climax, the person describing it claimed the Plesiosaurus got pushed off a cliff. That is false. Instead, via some awkward extreme close-ups, Steve pokes it in the back of the neck a few times as it bends down to pick up Arnie again. It then howls it pain, wanders off a little ways and then falls dead.

"Look, this is the best way to teach it how to balance a ball on its nose,, okay."

After a couple mournful glances at Arnie's corpse, everybody walks away and leaves Mitch sitting on the ground. He mumbles their old argument about "our boats." Roll credits.

Oof.

The Crater Lake Monster is truly a case of some great special effects (and some not so great ones) in service of a terrible film. It reminds me rather of Planet of Dinosaurs in that regard, but the main difference is that while the human scenes in that film were not well-written and added little to the proceedings, they weren't dull or actively painful. The Crater Lake Monster is rarely out and out painful, it's true, but it sure skirts the edge.

While the actors playing Arnie and Mitch are just charismatic enough to almost make the material work, it's still horrifically unfunny. And we spend a lot of time with them, for no real apparent reason. This isn't a movie that needed a lot of comedy to break up the tension because there was none to begin with. The biggest scaredy-cat you know could watch this film without being frightened a single time.

There's barely any plot, either. It's practically a thinly-connected series of scenes where stuff happens and occasionally a plesiosaur attacks. I mean, just try and figure out what the subplot of the liquor store killer had to do with anything. He just kills a few people, gets in a chase with the sheriff, and gets eaten. You could cut out his plot thread entirely and the film would not change in any significant way. In fact, I bet his plot was added in at the last minute as a misguided attempt to pump up the action.

As noted throughout this review, the film's post-production and editing are a joke. Scenes that were clearly meant to take place at night were never darkened so they just happen in broad daylight. Some scenes seem completely out of order--why did the monster's first victim have a gun, for instance? Why was he the first victim when, thematically, Fuller's death would have been a more appropriate first victim?

There's really nothing noteworthy about the film aside from its stop-motion beastie. The music is an oddly awful and utterly unnoticeable, The acting is an interesting mixture of pretty good, barely acceptable, and "Why are you trying to sound English?!"

Would I recommend The Crater Lake Monster? Hard to say. The stop-motion effects are certainly good if that's all you want out of the experience, but the film around them is no damn good. Worse, it manages to hover in the general region of "competent" too often to be enough fun as a bad movie. In the end, the film is just aggressively mediocre.

If you watch it, it won't hurt you, but it won't really entertain you, either.


Today's review brought to you by the letter C! Hit the banner above to see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for C!

I have a definite fondness for Jaws rip-offs and my favorite Universal Monster is The Creature From The Black Lagoon. So you can imagine that any combination of these two elements is likely to get my attention. (Like Shallow Water, obviously) It's rather a shame--and quite a surprise, really--that there's so few films that do combine these two great flavors.

Sure, there's Humanoids From The Deep, but what else truly qualifies? Zaat and Octaman? Hardly, they both came before Jaws, so they can't be accused of having the good taste to rip it off.

You might think, based on the poster art, that Demon of Paradise is another example of an oddly rare breed. Well, that's debatable. You see, the artwork is sort of dishonest. There's no fish man in this movie, but it's something much rarer:

This is a movie about an amphibious lizard man.

Now, if you're anything like me, then--as cool as that fish man in the poster art is and as unlikely as it may be that the film's monster can live up to that poster--you've suddenly perked up and become even more interested in this film. Of course, find any random review of it on the web and you'll decide your excitement is misplaced. The critical consensus on this film seems to be about as positive as an Adam Sandler film.

Well, fie on the popular opinion. I love this stupid movie.

We open in "Kihono, Hawaii," but of course, like Up From the Depths this is really the Philippines. Out on a boat, some ne'er-do-wells are doing an exchange of dynamite for money. Once the sellers have departed, the jerks still in the boat start tossing dynamite into the lake. There's talk of getting out of there before the sheriff arrives, but he's already on his way--Sheriff Keefer (William Steis), who oddly spends the whole film wearing a slouch hat with the brim folded up on both sides, is riding at the bow of a fan boat with several deputies.

He's the least of their worries, though. As one jerk lights a bundle of dynamite, some scaly clawed hands grab the boat and shake it. The doofus drops the dynamite right by the box of sticks and KA-BOOM! Keefer arrives on the scene after the flames have died down, concludes the dynamite fishers have blown themselves up--and decides that's enough investigating and steers back for home. He therefore does not see the scaly head that rises from the water and watches him go.

The dynamite smugglers, meanwhile, are having a bit of a squabble. There's four of them and two of them, Snake (David Light) and Blue (Joe Mari Avellana), get to stay in a crummy little hut on the water packing sticks of dynamite, while the other two, Langley (Nick Nicholson) and Shelton (Henry Strzalkowski), get to lounge around the local resort. The two who hang out at the resort claim they do so to meet buyers but it remains a sore spot you aren't going to care about.

Meanwhile, Keefer stops by a local native village to make sure they turn in any dynamite fishers. The village chief (Angel Buenaventura) knows that none of his people are guilty of such a thing, but their catch of late has ben terrible--and he blames it on Akua. As you may have guessed, Akua is a legendary water monster that is not so legendary after all. The chief believes the tribe needs to appease Akua before it's too late. One of the tribe's fishermen (Ramon D'Salva) scoffs at the backwards thinking of the chief and heads out with his son, Koby (Hero Bautista) to go fishing.

The chief is not the only person who thinks Akua might be real. Keefer goes to visit Annie (Kathryn Witt), a herpetologist staying in a nearby hut. we know she's a herpteologist because she tells us, but the movie doesn't entirely bear that out. For one thing, she has a stuffed pangolin in her office and when Keefer starts toying with it and saying that he thought girls were supposed to be afraid of lizards, she takes it from him while talking about saving lizards from her sister's cat. The whole time it's clear that both characters in the scene think the pangolin is a lizard.

At any rate, she's not convinced that Akua doesn't have some basis in fact. What exactly she thinks Akua might be is not addressed yet, but naturally she has the right idea. For the fisherman who earlier scoffed at Akua's existence catches something in his net--and when he hauls it up he discovers it's one pissed off lizard man.

"This is not the kind of fishnets I ordered!"

Akua's first act upon surfacing is not to try and kill the fisherman and Koby, however. The beast turns and swims away as fast as it can, dragging the canoe behind. The fisherman wraps the net around a pole on the canoe and makes Koby jump to safety--but he already knows his foot is tangled in the net's rope and he goes down with the canoe.

Word gets back to Keefer, but on his way to investigate he discovers that it also got back to Ike Baskerville (Frederick Bailey, the film's screenwriter), the obnoxious comic relief local reporter who chases after Keefer's car in his junker while waving a hand-written "Press" sign out the window. Ike's car is practically on fire when the two vehicles pull up to the dock beside the resort owned by Cahill (Laura Banks). Cahill wants the smoking piece of shit moved, but after a token attempt to extinguish it, Keefer heads on to the dock and Ike follows despite the deputies' best efforts.

In the fan boat ride to the native village, Ike tells Keefer he won their bet--he's found out Keefer's story. Keefer was a sheriff in Reno, Nevada but couldn't catch a psycho killer there and resigned in disgrace. Ike gloats to the deputies in the boat while Keefer sulks. Look, I realize this was pre-internet and all, but that doesn't seem like it would be that hard a story for somebody to dig up. Don't get smug, Ike.

They also observe on their way the resort's only real guests, a model named Gabby (Leslie Scarborough, here credited as Leslie Huntly) and her photographer, Ted (Paul Holmes), taking photos by the water. As you may have guessed, they're setting up Chekov's T&A here.

At the village, Keefer is shown the body of the fisherman. He's been clawed up pretty good, and the chief declares the wounds to be from the claws of Akua. According to the chief, Koby said the creature was headed up the river to the lake. Attempting to interview Koby doesn't get very far because Ike tries to wedge himself in by taking photos and practically drooling over the story. In fact, when they get back to the resort Ike immediately gets on the phone to some tabloid with the story. When asked if he has proof, he scoffs that he doesn't have any proof because Akua doesn't really exist and the art department can surely print up a picture of Godzilla instead. Sure, if they want to get sued but good.

When the tabloid quibbles over the $75 he wants, Cahill appears and hangs up the phone. See, she has a counter proposal for Ike. What if they work together to use Akua to their mutual advantage? As Cahill sees it, Akua is basically Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster rolled into one and they can use the creature to bring in the tourists she has so lacked of late. Sadly, this does not mean Werner Herzog will show up later, but on the other hand there is not going to be a Japanese country band. And on the other side of the resort, Langley and Shelton discuss that they are going to cut the other two mooks out of an upcoming deal on more dynamite from the Mob. I was not aware that the dynamite trade was such a big deal for organized crime, but okay.

Meanwhile, the medical examiner is only able to tell Keefer and Annie that the fisherman was lacerated before death and the weapon was crude, but that's all he can say for sure. He did find a bit of bone or a claw that he turns over to Annie for analysis, with Keefer's blessing. Returning to Annie's bungalow, the two find that all the natives are getting the hell out of dodge. Where they are going is anybody's guess, but Annie has a hypothesis about what they're running from. In her hut she leafs through a book of images of ancient art and then shows Keefer the page featuring a hulking lizard man drawn in comic book style.

"It's a carnivorous lizard man of the Triassic Age, about 200 million years ago," Annie explains. Well, obviously, everyone knows that. Kudos to them for getting the time period of the Triassic right, even if it was a Period not an Age, and I very much doubt there were humanoid lizards running around. She further elaborates that, "It's also the missing step-stone between reptiles and early primates."

I'm sorry, that loud boom you just heard was my head just exploding from the stupid of that line.

She declares that the creature is nocturnal and that night would be the best time to search for it. Keefer is not convinced the creature even exists, but he trusts her judgment. Meanwhile, Shelton gets the call that the Mob's shipment is on its way. As they head out to pick it up, Langley whistles lwedly at Gabby and she responds with the immortal, "Take a hike, spaz-ass." Watch out, David Mamet.

Have I mentioned the huge American flag Keefer flies on his fan boat? Because it's not fooling anybody. Investigating the wreckage of the fisherman's canoe (why hadn't they done that already?), Annie finds a claw buried in the wood, while a POV cam watches from the water. She takes it back to her lab and sees that it matches the smaller fragment from the corpse. How does that work, exactly? It broke off part of a claw in the fisherman and then broke off the rest in his boat?

Elsewhere on the lake, Blue gets fed up and goes to the resort to talk to Shelton and Langley about the fact that their dynamite needs to be sold pronto. Snake asks him to pick up a 6-pack, while he sits there fishing. Snake gets a bite so big it breaks his pole, and a few more minutes of film are used up.

Keefer and Annie go to tell Cahill (currently bullshitting with Ike) that she may want to consider keeping her guests off the lake until they confirm if Akua is real or not. Cahill refuses to close the beaches, of course, insisting she obviously would not have offered a reward for the creature if she thought it was real. So that goes nowhere. Even Keefer is beginning to think Akua is a hoax, but Annie is determined to find Akua and will camp out on the lake until she does.

Meanwhile, Blue overhears Gabby complain to Ted that she's bored and wants some coke to sniff. Ted points out she used it all. After her brattiness and complaining about the green beer annoys Ted into leaving, Blue tells her he's got lots of nose candy for her. She goes for it incredibly eagerly and next thing you know she's following Blue's jeep in her car. Blue leads her into the shack and offers her what looks like an urn (?) full of cocaine, Snake is not happy about the new arrival because he keeps hearing something sloshing around in the water outside their shack and it's got him on edge.

Blue decides to go party with Gabby, but is interrupted when Snake sees a scaly head disappear next to some dry ice fog and calls for his companion to come look. The head reappears and this time Blue sees it, too. With both men distracted, Gabby takes the whole container of coke and sneaks away to her car. Of course, Blue and Snake are distracted from their rage at being ripped off when they see that Akua is now waving at them from the water. Snake rudely responds to this by shooting at Akua with a shotgun.

"Oh, hey guys, new to the neighborhood? I brought you a gift basket."

This rudeness is repaid when Blue rushes into the shack to grab something from the box of dynamite and knocks over an oil lamp (!) which immediately sets the floor ablaze. Snake and Blue notice the fire licking at the boxes of dynamite just in time to widen their eyes and then the shack massively explodes. Akua watches this from the water with a look of bewilderment. I mean, you can't honestly blame him for that, after all.

The next day, Keefer and his deputies find the wreckage and declare it must have been the factory of the dynamite smugglers. They also find their boat and Keefer orders his men to find out who owns it.

Wouldn't you know it, though, word of a lizard man travels fast because a bus full of tourists is being greeted at the resort by Cahill and Ike in a gorilla suit. Cahill informs the tourists that they'll be having a "Beast Egg Hunt" tomorrow and the winner gets a free vacation.  She also waves off one tourist's questions about killings, while Ike introduces himself to a woman named Luisa (Liza Baumann) by offering her a plastic banana. This oddly works. Shelton and Langley are about nervous about all the new people at the hotel, but they hope it just means they'll stick out less.

Sadly, Bigfoot Goes Hawaiian bankrupted the studio that year.

Keefer confronts Cahill about the danger of the crowds, but she just pulls the "my taxes pay your salary" routine and tells him he should station an officer around the resort to protect her guests. Annie, meanwhile, goes scuba diving and finds a human skull under a...potted plant? It comes to nothing so I have no idea what the point even was, other than padding.

Keefer meets up with Annie outside her tent and the two take a moonlit stroll, while talking about how reproduction for Akua would work. After establishing it takes two, just like humans, Annie awkwardly says, "I always wanted to kiss a man in a cowboy hat." But since none are around, she kisses the man in a slouch hat. A splash interrupts them, suggesting even Akua doesn't buy this sudden romance. Then Ike and Luisa jump out of the bushes and Ike reacts to Keefer drawing a gun on him by basically calling him a buzzkill. He and Luisa turn and walk back into the bushes, while Keefer offers to buy Annie a drink.

Ike and Luisa hop in the nearest boat. As they get hot and heavy, they fail to notice that Akua has appeared nearby with dry ice fog and a Klieg light behind him, The beast knocks the oar off the boat, which gets their attention. Then Akua slashes Ike's face with his claws (way to make us root for the monster) while waving at Luisa, who dives into the lake. Akua tips the boat over to dump Ike in and then swims after Luisa, who is pulled under the water without a sound. Keefer and Annie heard the screams and come out to investigate.

Stupid hipster monsters and their vape pens.

Keefer sees the oar floating out in the lake and wades hip deep to retrieve it, only for a barely living Ike to grab him by the arm. Keefer drags him ashore, where we get entirely too good a look at his "wounds" as he dies. Annie also does one of the most hilariously awkward "look away in horror and then look back" takes you will ever see.

Cahill, as you may have guessed, is still refusing to acknowledge that she needs to close her resort. In fact, when Ted interrupts her argument with Keefer and Annie to ask if something happened on the lake the previous night, Cahill dismisses it as "a boating accident." Har har, At any rate, short of a court order Cahill refuses to close down and after Annie warns her that Akua can come on land if it chooses, Cahill orders her off the property. Keefer is powerless to do anything and Annie is frustrated with him, which leads to some dialogue between the two would-be lovers that brings a whole new shine to trying too hard. Dig the wordplay on "cold-blooded," Daddio.

Cahill, meanwhile, advises her guests that Akua came ashore in the night and laid eggs on the property. She tasks them with rounding them up, and whoever finds the big Akua egg wins a free vacation--but Akua may be lurking anywhere! As Cahill watches from the deck, commenting on the hunt with a megaphone, "Akua" turns out to be a guy in swim trunks and a monster mask who does a hula dance after his obligatory, "Rar!"

Finally, one tourist finds the jumbo prize "egg" when he digs near some leaves and a rubber crocodile head pops out at him, with a ball in its mouth. I'm honestly not sure if the hands holding the croc head are intentional or a goof. The fact that the tourist noticeably does not have a mustache in his close-up but does have one in every other scene, is definitely a goof, however.

Gabby is watching from a boat on the lake while Ted takes photos of her, When he tells her to ignore it and instead concentrate and "feel the lens," she snaps at him to, "Feel this!" And then she lifts up her shirt to show him her breasts. This may be the only time I have ever seen "flashing someone your breasts" used in the same way as giving them the finger. And, after a joke about whether she would ever be accepted as a "serious actress," Gabby peels off her top and dives into the lake instead of posing for more shots. Ted shoots her anyway, not bothering to tell her why he briefly froze after seeing something pass underneath her. Luckily for her, it was either a false alarm or Akua wasn't hungry.

Meanwhile, Annie discovers an obvious doll on her next dive that I think is supposed to be Luisa. I'm not sure why Akua just drowned and stashed her, but it's not like he's really been eating his victims so far. Maybe he intended to mate with her and only discovered too late that she couldn't breathe under water. Although, it is rather interesting that in spite of my comment there this is one of the few gill man-type stories where the creature shows no inclination towards trying to mate with human women. Rather than report this to Keefer, Annie just goes back to her tent and stares at the water for...hours, apparently.

Back at the "Kihono Community Center", whose hand-painted sign is just sad, Keefer gets the confirmation that Shelton and Langley, whom he noticed looking suspicious earlier, are dynamite smugglers. He gives the word to bring them in. At night, Keefer heads to the resort as Cahill presents the paid vacation to the schlub who found the egg. Langley and Shelton have just picked up their order of dynamite from the Mob contact as Keefer arrives and a shootout results. Langley and Shelton run into Gabby and Ted, and Langley grabs Gabby while Shelton shoots Ted dead. The cops corner the smugglers by their boat as Gabby bites Shelton and runs away. Langley shoots at the cops from the boat, but Keefer fires back and his shotgun apparently hits the backpack full of dynamite because Langley and the boat explode instantly.

Akua watches this from the water. Shelton has recaptured Gabby and is running down the beach with her. He decides they should go into the lake to escape as the cops close in. Bad idea. Shelton is dragged under the water and then Akua looms up for all the cops to see, menacing Gabby with his trademark paw wave before Keefer drives him off with a couple shotgun blasts.

Apparently a real Akua is bad for business, because Cahill watches helplessly as her patrons all board the bus home in the morning. Keefer has traded his slouch hat in for a dark baseball cap as he delivers a close order to Cahill, advising that the National Guard will mobilize in a few days and maybe she can resume business then. As he heads out hunting, Annie joins them and begs them to try not to kill the beast. She offers him a tranquilizer dose, but he can't make any promises.

Hilariously, Keefer's plan is to sit in his fan boat with three deputies, one of whom is tasked with hammering on a pipe in the water to attract the creature. It works and Akua starts off by spinning their boat around and then preventing them from starting the fan by grabbing the blade. (How it knew to do that is beyond me) As Keefer and the others take pot shots at it, one deputy falls into the water. When another tries to grab him, Akua surfaces and drags both of them under.

Annie arrives in her speed boat just as Akua decides to flip the fan boat over. She actually manages to save both Keefer and the remaining deputy, since apparently Akua is more bothered by bright light than shotgun blasts. When they get back to dock, the ever-sensitive Cahill loudly asks if Keefer can do anything right since he failed to kill the beast. Man, Jaws rip-offs really love to make their Mayor Vaughn stand-ins as assholish as possible.

The next day, the National Guard arrives. They choose to just sit around watching as Keefer tosses bundles of dynamite out of a helicopter. We've come full circle, eh? Hilariously, this is all set to music that wants so badly to be Goblin's soundtrack to Dawn of the Dead that the movie might as well have its composer credited as "Nilbog." Of course, we see Akua moving below the helicopter but the characters can't notice this until the chopper lands so Keefer can switch places with some nobody. After that is accomplished, the helicopter sees Akua and hovers about ten feet above him, Show of hands, who can see where this is going?

Well, you probably didn't guess how hilariously inept it would be. In obviously reversed footage, Akua leaps out of the water. His paws grab the landing strut and, in a long shot, we see an obvious Akua doll drag an obvious toy helicopter into the water. They don't even bother to foley in a properly loud splash. Once in the water, one guy swims away from a full-scale mock-up of the helicopter that then explodes into paltry flames. Words cannot fully describe the hilarious awfulness of this sequence. It is worth the price of the DVD alone.

Darkman 4: Swim, Darkman, Swim!

That night, a rainstorm blows in. The national guard colonel (Joe Zucchero) advises that they are pulling out, but he's leaving a token force behind in case. The colonel believes that the creature was killed in the explosion. When Annie counters that the corpse should have floated to the surface, the colonel declares that there must have been nothing left of it. Annie, however, stands in the rain and casts a significant look at the lake.

A few hours later, the rain having passed, one of the remaining guardsmen tells Keefer that since there's been no further sign that they'll pull out in the morning, too. Annie makes some coffee for the troops, like a typical female movie scientist, and begrudgingly offers some to Cahill, who seems to be finally feeling some guilt over risking people's lives. (Although, to be fair, can she really be blamed for any of the deaths since only one of them was a guest at her resort?)

As some of the guardsmen enjoy coffee next to that leaf-covered pit where the rubber crocodile head earlier burst forth. And now the real Akua does the same, and hilariously he has stored a klieg light in the pit with him. We get entirely too many good looks at Akua during the following sequence as lightning illuminates his leisurely rampage through the guard camp. To be fair, the head is not bad--it looks like a scaly werewolf with a crown of rubbery horns--but the body, while covered with some nicely done scales, is baggy and kind of formless. It's also covered in stringy "sea weed" that reminds me of nothing so much as the Salt Vampire from "The Man Trap" episode of Star Trek. The single row of plates running down the back to the tail it drags behind it just further compliments the "would be impressive as a Halloween costume" aesthetic.

Akua fails to get any of the guardsmen as everyone retreats back to the resort, discovering as they go that Akua is bulletproof. Everyone barricades the doors--but not so much the windows---and those with guns take potshots at Akua when it tries to break in. Unfortunately, it somehow gets underneath them and smashes up through the floor to drag Cahill to her death. Everyone flees out into the night again and hilariously one of the guardsmen yells for everyone to scatter. That seems to me to be the worst strategy, but you do you.

Somehow they all end up next to some stone ruins that look like the ones in Blood Surf a bit and then prepare to fire on the approaching Akua to make a last stand. Somehow, Akua grabs one guardsmen and drags him off into the jungle.

Satisfied for the night, Akua waits until the morning to return. However, seeing the sun rising over the trees, Akua realizes that it's a cheap monster suit and should not be out in direct sunlight. It flees and Annie points out that in daylight they have the advantage and there will be no greater time to get the beast. They follow its trail--I guess it's wounded, maybe--to a cave behind a waterfall. Inside, they split up into two teams. Annie, going with Keefer, brings her tranquilizer gun to the ready, apparently believing it's still possible to capture it.

Annie spots the beast and calmly aims at the creature. Keefer sees her doing this and decides it's his cue to fire his shotgun a foot from her ear (!) instead of letting her take the shot. She still does, though, and nails Akua with a dart to the gums. Like Anaconda, though, the beast just yanks the dart out--but this movie is actually less stupid, because the beast succumbs to the drug and falls over. Annie convinces everyone else not to shoot while she goes to investigate the creature, which is literally steaming. Is this thing supposed to be radioactive?!

Surprise! It was playing possum! Keefer and Annie scramble back as everyone else wastes their ammo shooting it. Hilariously, one guy gets fed up with shooting it and pulls his knife on the creature instead. He gets backhanded to death for his efforts. Annie fires a second dart and hits the creature in the gums again, but everyone else just keeps shooting. Notice several shots of "Annie" reacting to the guns going off beside her head.

Akua runs outside to stand beside the pool in front of the waterfall. Apparently sunlight no longer bothers it, but it is acting vaguely groggy--which is not really any different from its usual behavior. The guardsmen all take positions to shoot it some more. Then they start tossing grenades and, in one memorable shot, the explosion causes the poor suit actor to nearly trip over his tail.

"Can't we just hug it out?"

Finally, one guardsmen gets the idea to all throw their grenades at the same time. Somehow this explodes poor Akua's upper torso. This is a somewhat underwhelming way to kill off your lizard man, I might add.

Keefer then remarks that that's the end of it. Annie smirks sardonically and asks, "You ever pull the tail off a lizard?" So...what, Akua's remains are gonna wriggle around and gross everybody out? They didn't blow off its tail, they obliterated its vital organs! Yet, apparently we're supposed to infer this means that Akua is related to Reptilicus as we watch a chunk of bloody reptile flesh wash out into the lake. The End?

Oh, sorry, accidentally included a shot of Donald Trump.

Let's get one thing absolutely straight: Demon of Paradise is not a good movie. In virtually any respect you want to look at it, this is a bad movie. It wears its low budget on its sleeve, it pads the plot out with subplots that add up to nothing, and for about 90% of the movie its titular monster does nothing but wave at people and tip over boats.

And yet, damn it all, I adore this awful movie.

For one thing, maybe I'm just weird, but unlike most reviewers who tend to loathe this film I never found it boring. There are definite slow spots and the plot has about as much forward momentum as Last Year at Marienbad, but somehow the film never becomes dull to me. There may not be much happening, but there is always something happening and that something usually manages to be utterly stupid.

Take for instance the film's obligatory bit of topless female flesh. Gabby the model ends up doffing her top and going for a swim anyway, so there is absolutely no logical reason for the scene where she flashes Ted the photographer. Especially since she is obviously doing so to express annoyance. Find me one woman anywhere on Earth who has ever flashed her breasts at a guy to indicate that she is irritated with him, and I'll eat a trilby.

Then there's the herpetologist who thinks pangolins are lizards, that Triassic reptiles evolved into primitive primates, and that if you pull the tail off a lizard it grows a new lizard. If most of our heroine's scientific dialogue doesn't either make you cackle or boil your brain, then you're made of sterner stuff than I.

Of course, the acting in the film is awful, as well, but I doubt even Helen Mirren could pull off the material these actors were given. The writing is terrible, the direction is often delightfully incompetent, and outside of some cool explosions the special effects are the sarcastic kind of special. It all mixes together into something without any legitimate redeeming qualities, and I love it so. This film is absolute cheese.

If you have no patience and don't love a good, bad, or good-bad rubber monster suit: this movie is not for you. If you expect your monster movies to be any good at all, this movie is not for you. However, if you love a film that has no clue what it's doing and features a monster you feel sorry for because it's just so poorly executed, this is your movie.

At the very least, it's way more enjoyable than Up From The Depths. Not that that's hard.


Today's review brought to you by the letter D! Hit the banner above to see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for D!

I cannot recall when or how I first learned of this film's existence, It may have been seeing it on a video store shelf or reading about it in a book on horror movies, though I'm guessing it was more of the former. What I do know is that when I was around 14, I began reading reviews of it online in the early days of internet review sites. I may have read Stomp Tokyo's review of it first, I can't be sure.

What I can be sure of is that I was overcome by a desire, not to see this film but to write a screenplay using its basic concept but doing it right. See, back then I had big dreams of being a movie director that would be dashed by the time I finally made it to film school--but that is neither here nor there--and every single review I encountered of this film said how awful it was or how it was an especially disappointing follow-up to Tobe Hooper's debut film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So I felt the concept deserved a second chance.

I mean, homicidal maniac keeps a hotel in the Louisiana bayou with a pet crocodile and feeds his guests to them after--and sometimes before--he kills them? That's a slice of fried gold right there and it was apparently wasted.

Of course, I'm sure reading the script that I cranked out back then nowadays, I'd probably find my own work was not much better, After all, starting from the position of "I can do that better than you" is not usually the best way to go about something creatively. Still, I am proud of a few sequences I included and maybe someday I might revisit it, like many of my story ideas.

Now, you might notice that I didn't mention watching the film in there. That's because, prior to Tim of Checkpoint Telstar graciously providing me with a copy, I had never gotten around to watching it. Either by choice or circumstance, I had never, ever seen the movie I had written a remake of.

Though, based on some of the misguided Hollywood remakes of the last 20-odd years, that would put me in good company.

The film opens by telling you it's a "Virgo International Pictures" production and the more highbrow a movie's production company sounds ("VIP"), the worse you can expect it to be. The electronic blooping soundtrack does not exactly bolster my confidence, either. Apparently Tobe Hooper is partially responsible for the soundtrack, as well, so he's definitely no John Carpenter. The credits roll over footage of a full moon and then fade into a close-up of a tacky round belt buckle of the sort favored by shitkickers the world over.

The belt buckle comes undone while a blonde woman named Clara (Roberta Collins) is superimposed over this with a look of frozen indifference. The owner of the belt buckle announces that, "Name's Buck. I'm rarin' to fuck." I imagine he practices that line in the mirror before he visits every brothel. Yes, Clara is a sex worker and she's having some obvious second thoughts about her chosen profession, or at least she's re-thought it ever since baby-faced Buck (Robert Englund!) showed up. Buck implying that he wants to try to enter the establishment from the rear is clearly the last straw, and him trying to force the issue sends her across the room brandishing a chair like a lion tamer.

"This is called the 'Freddy's Revenge.'"

When he tries to throw her back on the bed, she screams for the madam, Miss Hattie (Carolyn Jones, better known as the original Morticia Adams, under some not exactly stellar old age makeup). Miss Hattie kindly escorts Buck out, offering him two of her best girls instead for no extra charge. When he's gone, she turns on Clara and gets mean. If the girl isn't going to work for her keep, she's going be out on her ass. The friendly housekeeper, Ruby (Betty Cole) consoles Clara on the front porch and gives her some money for the road. Ruby also tells her there's a hotel down the road called the Starlight, which will do her just fine--so long as she does not tell the owner she's from Miss Hattie's.

By this time the wigs, the make-up, the costumes, and the obvious sets should be making any viewer feel like they're watching a recording of a stage play--but Clara's trek through the woods just seals it. The woods are so patently a set you expect to see stagehands dressed as trees walking by in the background. She comes to the Starlight Hotel presently and it is a dingy looking dump. There's a fenced in area next to the front and she hears something grumbling and splashing behind the fence but the smoke machine won't let her see what it is. (To the foley artist's credit, it does actually sound like a crocodilian) She sees someone moving inside the hotel and wanders in the open door.

She rings the bell and the proprieter, Judd (Neville Braand) limps out from his office, putting on his badly repaired glasses. He hands her the pen to sign in, making sure to stare down her cleavage as he does so. He notices her looking out the door at the pen and he informs her that, "That ain't no ordinary gator. That's a croc," before explaining that gators can only move fast in the water but a croc can outrun a horse. Yep, that's a crock, all right.

To be fair, a crocodile can conceivably outun a horse for a very short burst of speed, but they can't possibly match a horse for actual speed--and an alligator can move at exactly the same speed, anyways!

While showing her to her room, Judd relates a charming story of how his croc got out of its pen one day and chased down a "n***er mule" and bit it in half. He laughs at the memory of the two halves of the mule writhing around...and then suddenly asks if Clara is one of Miss Hattie's girls. He turns...more threatening and tries to tear her clothes off.  He calls her a whore and the two end up tumbling down the stairs. She gets up first but has broken her ankle and has to try to crawl away. Unfortunately she only makes it to the porch because Judd recovers much quicker and happens to have a large rake handy, which he uses to aerate her torso.

Afterwards he gets a look on his face like he just a teenager who just wrecked the family car after taking it without permission. He drags the still wheezing Clara down the porch and then throws her over the railing into the crocodile pen. You'd think he'd maybe want a bit more of a barrier between a croc that has chased down a mule than a flimsy wooden railing, but what do I know? As expected the sound effects confirm the crocodile happily disposes of her corpse.

The next shot is a monkey picking at the floor of its cage in boredom, so I guess Judd just has a thing for exotic pets. In his bedroom--which naturally has a fully made-up mannequin in one corner--Judd sits on the bed singing a song to himself while scrawling on a notepad and reading a magazine. He's trying on different glasses as he reads, so presumably these glasses came from previous guests who got an extended stay in the croc's stomach. The monkey looks bored and the crocodile keeps floating to the surface in shots that I assume are meant to be sinister. I have no idea how the monkey and the crocodile relate to each other in the scene so I have no reason to care, even if I liked monkeys enough to be sad that the croc wanted to eat it.

Just then, a car pulls up with an arguing family in it. The parents are having the cliche argument about directions and travel plans, while the little girl is just concerned that her little yap dog named Snoopy has jumped out of the car. The girl, Angie (Kyle Richards), chases Snoopy while mother Faye (Marilyn Burns!) and father Roy (William Finley, the Phantom of the Paradise, himself!) keep arguing. Judd limps out to greet them, Roy asks to use the restroom, which Judd directs him to. Faye asks Judd how far away Tyler is, which Judd advises is maybe an hour away.

And then Buck pulls up, to Judd's great annoyance. Buck is inquiring about a room, but Judd in no certain terms wants him off his property. Buck hands him a wad of cash before leaving, which only solves Judd's resolve slightly. While Angie plays on the porch and pokes the monkey with a stick, her mother watches the water in the pen nervously, and Judd mutters about how he won't have all this coming and going in his hotel, Apparently the monkey died of boredom, which upsets Angie greatly. Judd is somewhat unconcerned about his dead monkey.

Though if Angie was upset about the monkey, you can imagine how she feels when she sees Snoopy squeeze himself through a hole in the fence while barking his foool head off. Before Angie's horrified eyes, as she tries to grab Snoopy, a really bad alligator puppet attacks Snoopy. It's a quick glimpse, but there are so many things wrong with this puppet: A) It's clearly an alligator, B) its lower jaw is firmly locked in place while its upper jaw flaps open to swallow the dog, and C) it's maybe five feet long, tops. I mean, its head is smaller than the yap dog it's eating.

Now, a five foot alligator could certainly mess up your day, but it's not exactly going to be biting any mules in two.

To make matters worse, as the parents grab their crying daughter and Judd hurries them inside, we see the puppet again holding a struggling Snoopy in its jaws. This shot lingers longer and, again, the alligator puppet is clearly indicating an animal five feet long at most. Judd ushers them to a room, unable to stop babbling about how the old croc will eat anything and doesn't know any better. Inside the room, Roy lays Angie on the bed while Faye tries to calm her down. Roy sits in a corner, clearly trying to hold himself together as well.

Judd walks away from the room, seemingly more upset about the accidental death of a dog than he was about murdering a woman in cold blood earlier. Of course, that kind of disproportionate remorse is not uncommon even in neurotypical individuals. Roy and Faye snipe at each other, while Roy has a positive meltdown. He literally makes a fist towards Faye's head while clinching his teeth and letting air escape through those teeth like he's trying to crush her skull with his mind. Downstairs, Judd wanders around turning on lamps and dusting while listening to the sounds of Angie crying and her parents arguing. He's also listening to country music in case that noise wasn't objectionable enough.

And then another car pulls up. Jesus, this place seemed to be stuffed somewhere in the bayou earlier but now it's getting more traffic than rest stop with a fast food joint. The car's driver, Harvey Wood (Mel Ferrer!) gets out while his passenger, Libby (Crystin Sinclaire) stays put and watches him go with an odd glare on her face. Harvey asks to rent a room for himself and one for Libby, who is his daughter. He shows Judd a picture of Clara and Judd recoils, telling him to go to "the local prostitution house for that." That turns out to be a mistake because Harvey won't stop grilling Judd over whether he's seen the girl in the photograph and how he can get to the brothel. Clara is his other daughter, naturally.

Libby calms her father down--who then hilariously calls Judd "old-timer" despite him being clearly older than Judd--before she apologizes to Judd and explains it's been a rough day. Libby unloads their bags, which Judd helpfully takes inside but goes with Harvey when he insists on going into town to investigate the brothel. Back upstairs, Faye puts her cigarette out in an ashtray and Roy chuckles, "Why don't you grind your cigarette out in my eye?" What the hell are these two on?! Jesus, I've seen my parents have more sensible arguments than this on road trips.

Faye then takes her wig off, which means the movie is now deliberately messing with my ability to tell which wigs are bad on purpose. Roy's meltdown crescendos into him pretending that Faye has gouged his eye out and he's trying to find it on the floor. Faye has had enough by this point, but then Roy starts barking (!) and Faye breaks down crying and asking if he wants her to throw herself to the alligators. After pretending to be an alligator, this somehow inspires Roy to march authoritatively out of the room and down the stairs. Judd tries to stop Roy when he sees that the man is fetching his shotgun from his car's trunk and loading it with shells. Judd pleads with the man that it's no common gator in the pen but a croc from Africa. Judd goes on about how he got the crocodile from someone named Frank Buck and nobody has any idea how old the croc might be because "they don't never die!"

Sadly, that's somewhat less than true.

Judd begins overacting and ranting about "get me the uniform" while Roy overacts about how the dangerous animal has to be killed and throws stuff into the pen before firing wildly into the water. Upstairs, Angie freaks out but Faye just tells her, "Daddy's off to slay the dragon." (Did I mention that I called my remake "Dragonkeeper" instead of actually by this film's title?) At any rate, the dragon slaying is stopped when Judd runs up and buries a scythe in Roy's back. And then in Roy's chest. Roy shoots Judd in the foot before collapsing on the railing and dropping the shotgun into the water. Judd cackles and is about to finish Roy off when a bad crocodile puppet smashes through the railing (told you it wasn't safe) and grabs Roy in its jaws. You'll notice even in the quick shots of it that this puppet is a good three times the size of the one that ate Snoopy and is a little more vaguely crocodile-shaped. Of course, we're used to size-changing crocodiles around these parts.

"Mmm. Ham."

Even Judd looks terrified and runs off as Roy is dragged under the water. Meanwhile, Faye assures Angie that "Daddy took care of everything." Judd, for his part, limps back into his room and eats some white powder from a packet. Given he says, "Happy C make me feel better already," I'm gonna go ahead and say that this is cocaine. Oh, and his leg that was shot? It's a wooden leg. Hence his limp.

Well, now that Angie has fallen asleep, Faye decides to go take a bath. She stands at the stair railing and calls for Roy to bring up her suitcase, but when she sees Judd he just tells her that her husband will be up in a minute and scurries off. We watch Faye undress in real time, intercut with Judd bringing everyone's luggage up. It quickly begins to feel like the world's most lethargic burlesque routine.

Except when she gets to the point of shutting the water off and wetting her feet--while oddly still wearing most of her clothes--Judd barges into the bathroom. He rants about, "I know he seen it," before wrapping her in the shower curtain and tying her up while he slaps at her head. The screaming wakes Angie, who runs in to the bathroom to see her mom being attacked and runs outside. Judd pursues the little girl but is utterly unable to hit her with his scythe. She flees into the crawlspace under the porch, so he just locks her in. Faye gets free and runs downstairs screaming for her daughter and husband--but Judd chases her back up the stairs. Her pleas for mercy don't sway the madman.

When next we see Faye, Judd is sitting in her room hooting at her--while she is tied to the bed with tape over her mouth. Judd babbles about how he abided by the rules and regulations, but they didn't and they came for his uniform. Meanwhile, Angie finds one path to freedom is blocked by the crocodile and then gets cornered by rats. No one is currently available to answer her screams, though.

Harvey and Libby are meeting with Sheriff Martin (Stuart Whitman), meanwhile, and Harvey is antagonizing Martin about allowing Miss Hattie's to keep running. Libby calms the situation down and eventually convinces the sheriff to take them to Miss Hattie's to find out if Clara is still there. Back at the Starlight, Judd has decided to crawl under the porch after Angie, which seems like it would be an exercise in frustration for an old man with one leg.

Martin, Harvey, and Libby go to see Miss Hattie in her office. When she's shown the photograph of Clara she responds that she's never seen her before in such an obviously false manner, it's amazing that none of the characters pick up on it. Then she finds out they're staying at Judd's and she explains some fo Judd's backstory. He used to be a regular, but all he wanted to do was look at the girls and babble, so she eventually had to run him off because he was scaring them. She then says that Judd thinks his "big ol' gator" is really a crocodile from Africa that will never die unless it's killed and that it was the croc/gator that bit his leg off.

While I find the implication that Judd has decided an ordinary alligator is an exotic, immortal crocodile from Africa--and the uncertainty of its true nature does afford the filmmakers a bit of leeway in not having to actually make their cheap prop look like a crocodile or an alligator, specifically--having the beast be the one that cost Judd his leg doesn't really make much sense. The implication so far has been that he was a veteran who went off the deep end after being wounded in combat, so blaming the leg on the croc doesn't make any damn sense from that perspective.

The group excuses themselves from Miss Hattie's company. Meanwhile Judd, who hilariously brought his scythe along under the house, chases Angie around the crawlspace--but he's interrupted by Martin arriving with the Woods. Harvey is dropped off, while Martin and Libby head back into town for some food. Harvey is just entering the hotel when he hears Angie screaming. He goes to investigate the entrance to the crawlspace--and Judd rushes up from the porch and buries his scythe in Harvey's throat. Then, rather hilariously, Harvey stumbles towards Judd with the scythe stuck in his throat while Judd backs away in a panic.

"Sir, I believe you dropped this."

Judd then begins hopping around, laughing and clapping as Harvey collapses with his legs dangling in the croc pen. Judd goes to retrieve his scythe just as the croc grabs Harvey's legs. This leads to madman and beast having a darkly hilarious tug-of-war with the still-living Harvey. The croc wins, but Judd gets his scythe back. He then rants and raves to himself, in a bit that suggests he just might hear the croc talking to him. And for all Judd is an obvious loon from frame one, Neville Brand plays him to the hilt. It's easily one of the best performances in the film.

Granted, that's not saying much.

At a delightful local bar where we are introduced to one of the locals saying to his friend, "Colored, hell, God damn n***er if you ask me," in a hur, hur voice, Martin and Libby walk past our old pal Buck. Buck is playing pool with his date, Lynette (Janus Blythe), who is being ogled by every creep in the joint as she bends over to take her shot. Buck's friend, Marlo (David Carson), a spastic greasy sort you might call a hipster these days, tries to pick a fight with one of the creeps. Despite looking rather like Stephen King and avoiding confrontation, the creep almost kicks Marlo's ass but decides not to when Buck reminds Marlo that it's his turn at pool.

Martin apologizes to Libby for not being able to do more to help, while they discuss her sister. Martin orders coffee while Libby orders a chicken-fried steak (damn it, now I want some), and the waitress lets Martin know that Buck is causing trouble. Martin just tells her to let Buck know he's being watched, and after she leaves Libby reveals that the mad dash to find Clara began because their father is very ill and wanted to see his daughter one last time before the end. Well, I suppose he did at least get to be reunited with his daughter in a crocodile's stomach.

Martin tells Buck and Lynette to move out, which Buck throws a tantrum over but does eventaully leave--threatening a nerdy guy on his way out. Buck decides he and Lynette should go to the Starlight to fornicate. Judd is furious and jumps up and down, angrily telling them to "git, git, git", but Buck just grabs the room key himself while Lynette flirts with Judd (!) because she knows he just acts mean to hide that he's an old softie. Buck tells Judd that if he doesn't let them have a room, he'll come back and shove a stick of dynamite up the crocodile's butt--and then the lustful couple adjourns to their chamber. Judd is left to go back to grumbling and mopping up blood,

Martin drops Libby off at her car, while assuring her that Clara will turn up. Meanwhile, Faye tries to struggle out of her restraints; Buck and Lynette get naked (Buck wants to come in through the back door with her, too, which she is also not down for); Angie screams for help; and Judd cranks up the country music radio to try and muffle the sounds of his prisoners. However, even Buck can't hellp noticing something odd is afoot and he throws some pants on to go yell at Judd. Buck hears Angie and goes to investigate.

Unfortunately, Buck is kind of an idiot and does so by leaning over the porch into the croc pen. Judd walks up behind Buck, but somehow the muttering and ramblings combined with a terrified girl's crying don't clue Buck in--and into the water he goes. Buck hollers threats at Judd, while Judd laughs, "That old croc'll eat anything. Even old Buck!" And what do you know, he's right!

Man, those Dream Warriors really learned how to beat Freddy at his own game.

Lynette throws on a shirt to go investigate Buck's screaming, while Judd laughs maniacally as Buck is...what's the phrase? Devoured Conscious? Chewed Awake? No, no, that's right: Masticated Breathing! Lynette comes down to the porch and Judd chases her into the woods, wielding his scythe. Unfortunately for Judd, a passing motorist happens upon her and thus she is driven to safety while he gets himself lost in the woods.

Libby meanwhile, arrives to a seemingly empty hotel where the radio is now blaring what sounds like a polka in Spanish. She goes into her room and--sigh--gets undressed in real time. Although, perhaps to make up for rendering a striptease boring the last time, we find out after Libby unbuttons her dress that the only thing she was wearing under it was a pair of panties. It shows an interesting shift in the preconceptions of horror films that Libby reads as the "final girl" but she's one of the three women who get naked in the film.

Judd walks back to the hotel, worn out from his trek through the woods. However, he gets a wonderfully grinchy idea and decides to try and cut a hole in the fence between the crawlspace and the croc pen. However, the croc decides this means that it's time to try and eat its master so Judd is forced to pound it on the head with the scythe to keep it at bay. Libby is brushing her hair and generally wandering around topless when Judd finally succeeds in cutting open the fencing. The croc crawls through the hole--and we get a nice close-up of its tail that reveals it is far too round for a croc's tail.

Angie screams as she hides from the croc and Libby hears, but she also hears Faye and goes to find the  poor woman tied up. Libby unties her as Angie manages to elude the croc and climb out of the hole and up the outside fence of the pen. Libby and Faye run down the stairs, only for Judd to intercept them. He chases them into Libby's room and slices Faye good with the scythe but then stumbles and nearly goes out the window. Libby abandons Faye, fleeing outside, but she does try to rescue Angie from the top of the fence. Unfortunately, Angie has lost her balance and hangs precariously over the water, where the croc is waiting.

Judd throws Faye off the stairs and then runs outside and tries to knock Angie off the fence. He didn't bank on Faye recovering enough to push him over the railing. The croc decides it would rather go for the larger meal within easy reach and grabs Judd by the head to drag him into the water. Martin pulls up then in time to be no use at all, aside from comforting our survivors. And then Judd's wooden leg bobs to the surface of the water. The End, as that dreadful electronic score pounds on.

"You ungrateful suitcase! Who brought you up out of that New York sewer, huh?"

When your feature debut is considered to be one of the films that revolutionized the horror genre, it's going to raise the stakes for your follow-up a lot higher than is really fair. So the fact that Tobe Hooper was making this film as his follow-up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre did the film no favors. It would have to have been amazing to not be seen as a disappointment, and boy is this film not amazing.

However, I have to say the extremely negative popular opinion of this film is exceptionally harsh. Yes, it is technically a killer crocodilian film--though, despite its release date and concept, there's almost nothing in this film that suggests it was intended to cash in on Jaws in any way---and we know how bad those can be. Most of the acting is hilariously dreadful in a variety of ways, particularly William Finley's truly inexplicable performance as Roy. And, as I said before, the entire film feels exceptionally cheap like an off-Broadway cast reunion show on PBS with a killer crocodile in the middle of it.

In spite of all that, I can't say I actually disliked this film. While Neville Brand's Judd is an obvious out-and-out maniac, in a way that makes him far less effective a villain than a seemingly harmless young man like Norman Bates, he's still an enjoyable villain. I mean, it's hard not to identify with the guy who doesn't want his pet killed because some bozo couldn't keep a better eye on the family dog--so he's a very briefly sympathetic villain. And the scene of Angie trying to elude the croc in the crawlspace is genuinely well-done and effective. The effects for the croc actually even get pretty good for a bit!

Ah, yes, I need to definitely rant a while on the crocodile. Or the alligator. Or the allodile. It's fitting that the movie can't decide if the beast is a crocodile or an alligator, because the effects folks sure as hell couldn't. The puppet that eats Snoopy, as I said, is very clearly an alligator--in addition to being way too small. The puppet used for the rest of the film is harder to pin down. I won't get super nerdy and say something like, "The osteoderm pattern on its back clearly is that of an alligator," because the people making the puppet obviously wouldn't know the difference. This thing looks like a rubber alligator toy. You can't honestly say what it's supposed to be because it doesn't actually look like either one.



The height of scientific realism.

The shape of the head is too rounded for a crocodile, but too long and narrow for an alligator. The teeth are all basically a uniform size and length, which doesn't describe either animal's dentition. You can call it a crocodile or call it an alligator and you're technically right either way. It's also pretty clearly a stiff prop that can only open its mouth--probably with the lower jaw locked in place while the upper jaw flops open, like the smaller puppet, but the large prop at least covers that a bit better--and is obviously just being thrust forward by some enthusastic stagehands. It kind of renders a lot of the tension inert when your monster is so clearly an inanimate prop.

It's really a shame they didn't spring for a more realistic prop, since it actually gets a fair amount of screentime. (Obviously, I'd have preferred even more screentime because I love crocodilians, but I'll take what I can get) I mean, I don't know how much of the budget went towards the prop allodiles, but it clearly wasn't enough and it doesn't appear to have been spent on sets or make-up. The only make-up effect more involved than some fake blood is Harvey's death scene and the old age make-up on Miss Hattie is truly unfortunate. She looks like a zombie that was given lines by mistaken.

As a horror film, this isn't exceptionally effective. I certainly can't imagine anyone seeing this and having nightmares about a one-legged man feeding them to a rubber crocodile, and there's definitely a reason I've never encountered a cult around this film--certainly not one anything close to the one for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and even Lifeforce has more of a following. (Not that surprising, though) This is not a very good film and there's no geting around that.

However, I still can't say I dislike it. The central premise is great, there are some memorable (if not horribly effective) set pieces, and while it starts slow the movie gets off to a roaring clip at about 30 minutes in and is rarely dull from then on. So while it may not be a good movie, I have to say that is actually a fun one.

Though, given the way this feels like a stage play, I was clearly wrong for not trying to write a musical version instead of a remake. Somebody find me a composer!


Today's review, brought to you be the letter E! Hit the banner for the other Celluloid Zeroes' reviews for E!

C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!

You may have noticed that my first five films this HubrisWeen were about killer aquatic reptiles. Well, it's kind of hard to keep that trend going forever, so now it's time to depart in a big damn way. Instead of killer reptiles, now we're looking at killer hopping brains!

Really, I shouldn't have to say more than that to get your attention, right? I mean, brains that can survive outside the body are a horror movie staple. Usually, however, the only killing they do is psychic. Not so with these brains! These are predatory, highly ambulatory brains!

They're also oddly adorable.

So where exactly do adorable, hopping brain monsters come from? I'm glad you asked. Canada, of course.

Specifically, Winthrop, Manitoba. In Winthrop, the US Air Force has stationed a brand new interceptor base designed to have an unprecedented radar range thanks to a nuclear reactor powering it. And when we join the movie, a base guard is having a smoke just outside the fence on his late night duty. He then hears an odd noise, like something slurping and hopping around in the woods. He goes to investigate it, and we see another man standing in the forest and also listening to the odd sound. The solider hears a scream and then comes upon the dead body of the man we saw before.

Well, that dead body right outside the base is just the last thing that Major Jeff Cummings* (Marshall Thompson) wants. Tensions between the Air Force and the locals in the area have been tense enough as it is without a dead man in the mix. Captain Al Chester (Terry Kilburn) tries to tell him to forget about it, since for all they know it was natural causes. Cummings is a bit shocked to hear that attitude from a base security chief, since they're supposed to be suspicious of everything. He'll rest easier when the base doctor's autopsy comes in, though.

[* I first saw this film at B-Fest, and discovering the lead character's name was "Cummings" resulted in exactly the kind of constant jokes you're thinking of already. My favorite was definitely, "Major Cummings is all over it."]

However, when they go to see the base's doctor, Captain Warren (Gil Winfield)--passing by the desk of one officer who "comically" hides the sandwich he's eating in his desk drawer until they're out of sight again--they discover he hasn't done the autopsy. Why? Because he doesn't have the body to examine. The town's mayor and the man's sister claimed the body and are refusing an autopsy, and the colonel already signed off on it. Cummings is not too happy to hear that, but he might get a chance to plead his case because they're still on the base meeting with the colonel.

When Cummings arrives, Colonel G. Butler (Stanley Maxted) is pleading with Mayor Hawkins (James Dyrenforth) and Barbara Griselle (Kim Parker), the dead man's sister, to let them do the autopsy. They still refuse, so Butler shows them, and Cummings, the notebook that Barbara's brother was suspiciously writing in at 3AM outside an Air Force base. The pad is a list of flight times for the base's aircraft--how do you explain that, commie? Well, if Butler had read the next page he'd have discovered that it was a list of various women's names and descriptions of their product. Said women are actually the Griselles' cows, who have had very low milk yields of late and Barbara's brother was convinced that it was the constant sound of planes that so disturbed them. Unable to pin espionage on the dead man, Butler relents to them claiming the body.

Cummings, for his part, drives Barbara home. He tries to offer condolences, but she wants no part of it until he objects that Americans aren't so different from Canadians. it's not like they're aliens, right? That gets her laughing, at least. However, she's got a funeral to prepare while Cummings has a radar test to supervise. The test, for some reason, involves stock footage of a plane that Cummings is communicating with and lots of footage of spinning radar dishes, including one where the director decided to jazz things up by mounting the camera on one of the spinning dishes at whatever base he was allowed to film that footage at! After boosting the nuclear power way past safety limits, apparently forgetting that the locals already dislike having a nuclear reactor in their backyards without it melting down on them, the big radar screen in the base allows them such a thorough range that they can see Russia from their house,

Though I'm not sure how a radar station located in Manitoba is able to display a radar signal that appears to be centered directly at the North Pole.

Unfortunately, the celebration is short-lived because the signal fails. Apparently, this keeps happening whenever they test the radar array. Cummings and crew still can't figure out why, since it doesn't seem to be a power drain--it seems to be some kind of interference. Speaking of interference, the plane from the test returning to base (or, at least, I assume it's that plane since the stock footage here is an entirely different plane) passes over the funeral of Barbara's brother and, hilariously, completely drowns out the preacher speaking over the grave.

It also annoys two old, oddly Irish farmers. The old woman says she's at least glad the cows are getting used to it and goes into the barn to feed the chickens. Unfortunately, the strange sound from the beginning of the film finds her now. Something clearly invisible makes its way through the straw on the barn floor and then leaps up and attacks her. Her screams draw her husband, but he's too late. Hearing the creature moving and seeing the straw rustling, he tries to attack it with a pitchfork, but it's no use. Whatever it is kills him by apparently wrapping around his neck and making loud slurping sounds.

Barbara is leaving the funeral with Professor R.E. Walgate (Kynaston Reeves), when a young man rushes up to inform the mayor about the old couple being found dead in the same manner as Barbara's brother, on their farm at the edge of the air base. Walgate gets a significant look on his face, but Hawkins goes for the blaming the Americans. Butler gets the call and makes a futile effort to explain that there is no evidence of any radioactive contamination that would cause these deaths. After the phone is hung up, Cummings suggests maybe they ought to try and tell the townspeople a bit more about what they're actually doing there, show them why it's important. Butler is just reminding Marshall why that's not true when Chester arrives. His men had gone to investigate the farm, but the local constable chased them off the scene.

So it falls to Cummings to track down relatives of the old couple and get them to consent to an autopsy. He apparently succeeds because we next see Warren explaining his autopsy results to the local doctor Bradley (Peter Madden), Butler, Cummings, and Chester. He's discovered that the victims both had two tiny puncture wounds at the base of their skulls and when he cut open their skulls to investigate, he found that the brain and spinal cord were gone--sucked out through those two tiny holes. Marshall describes it as a "mental vampire" and Warren can only offer that as his explanation because he's never seen anything like it. Chester makes an odd comment about, "Maybe that Gibbons guy was right. Maybe it is supernatural," but if he's referencing an earlier scene it must have been cut because I don't recall that ever coming up.

Butler gets the Bradley to agree to keep this a secret from even the mayor, while Warren contacts a variety of specialists to find out what could have caused this. Cummings is tasked with keeping an eye on the townsfolk and reporting anything unusual. So naturally, Cummings heads right over to Barbara's house--where he manages to walk in on Barbara, who has just gotten out of the shower and is wearing nothing but a towel. (This is pretty damn racy for 1958, I hasten to add--Ms. Parker almost comes out of the top of the towel when wrapping it around herself, for instance) Of course, being Canadian she politely tells him to make himself at home while she gets dressed instead of violently throwing him out.

"Dear Penthouse: I am a Major in the USAF stationed in Canada, and I never thought this would happen to me..."

Cummings pokes around and finds a manuscript titled "The Principles of Thought Control by R.E. Walgate" on a desk with a with a tape recorder. He starts leafing through it when Barbara returns, now wearing a robe with the towel wrapped around her hair. She wasn't even getting her hair wet when we saw her in the shower earlier, so I don't know why she needs the towel, but okay. She explains that Walgate dictates into the tape recorder and she edits the tapes and prepares the manuscripts. Cummings observes it's odd to find a man like Walgate in Winthrop, which Barbara jokingly means he is implying they're too back woods for that.

Walgate had a stroke a few years ago, so Winthrop was the perfect quiet location for him to settle while continuing his work. Cummings asks if Walgate is still doing research into psychic phenomena, but abandons that thought thread to try and move in for a kiss--and then Constable Howard Gibbons (Robert Mackenzie) walks in. Gibbons is outwardly hostile to Cummings, implying he's letting the "G.I. killer" run loose so he can focus on putting the moves on local women. And here I note that Gibbons is also vaguely Irish, so either Winthrop is a town of Irish expats or the filmmakers wanted to try and make the locals sound extra Canadian but had no idea what Canadians sound like.

(Given that this film was made in England, I'm guessing the latter)

Gibbons eventually provokes Cummings into a fist fight, and Barbara understandably asks Cummings to leave. Following up a hunch, Cummings then gets Chester's help in tracking down every book and article Walgate has ever written and binge reads it. Meanwhile, Gibbons leaves the mayor's residence, just in time to miss the arrival of the invisible menace. Much like Forbidden Planet, the camera tracks the invisible monster's movements as it knocks over things it passes by on the porch and tears a hole in the screen door. Hawkins goes to investigate the sound of the thing--and thus gets his brain good and sucked out.

Gibbons faces an angry mob the next day, but he assures them that it was no radioactive fallout that killed the mayor. He believes there's a psycho soldier on the loose, and he so immediately convinces the crowd that they immediately all grab their rifles and head into the woods to hunt for the killer. Cummings, meanwhile, goes to visit Walgate. Barbara is not happy to see him, but she shows him to Walgate nonetheless. Walgate surprises Cummings by having already figured out what they're doing at the base with atomic power and radar, because he read an article about Cummings' work a few years ago. He assures Cummings that he doesn't spread his assumptions around, though neither one acknowledges that Barbara is within earshot when they're discussing this.

Barbara goes to transcribe the latest notes, so Walagate asks what her brother's face looked like after death. He claims to have a reason for that. When Cummings brings the topic around to a possible supernatural explanation, Walgate scoffs, but when Cummings brings up the professor's psychic research, the man gets irrationally upset. Barbara all but kicks Cummings out for nearly killing the old man, but Walgate assures them both that he's fine. Cummings takes his leave, anyway.

Meanwhile, the posse in the woods is getting tired now that it's either mid-afternoon or pitch dark depending on the shot. They split up into pairs to hurry the seaarch, and Gibbons is walking with another man when they hear a strange sound--and then Gibbons vanishes. A council meeting, led by deputy mayor Melville (Launce Maraschal), is called. Cummings is invited along to offer any defense and assistance from the USAF perspective. Barbara ultimately comes to his defense, pointing out that it was clear that no radiation was responsible for the strange behavior of the cows.

And then Gibbons wanders into the meeting, moaning with a far away look in his eye. Apparently he has been mentally disabled by whatever attacked him--having his brain only partially devoured. Later, Cummings tells Barbara that he believes Walgate is somehow involved in what's going on--and acting on a hunch, he goes to the local cemetery. He sees someone slip out of a mausoleum, and entering the door he finds Hawkins' coffin has been opened and Walgate's pipe was left beside it. And then Cummings is locked in when the door shuts.

Luckily, Chester realizes Cummings is missing and he and Barbara go to the cemetery. They discover Cummings just in time, before he can suffocate. He rushes to confront Walgate, who has just started to notice the absence of his pipe--and he swears he didn't mean to nearly kill Cummings. But Cummings has moved beyond that, as he explains to Walgate that he read about Walgate's ideas about materialization of thought. Walgate objects that he declared it impossible, but Cummings counters that with atomic power it could be possible. Upon hearing the sound of the invisible monster nearby, Walgate admits that Cummings is right and it is a terrible story and pleads with Cummings to shut down the nuclear plant--just before he has another minor stroke.

Butler is reluctant to shut down based on such a cockamamie theory when Cummings explains it, but he does relent. Unfortunately, when Cummings gets to the power station the technicians discover the control rods are all smashed. Without them there's no way to control or shut down the reaction, and it will take four to six hours to get replacements. After Walgate recovers from his attack, he has Barbara summon Cummings, Chester, Butler, Bradley, and Melville to hear his explanation. He had been experimenting with the materialization of thought in his lab--which Barbara didn't even know he had--and somehow discovered that electric shocks to his brain could boost his telekinetic ability. The effects made him ill, so Bradley introduced him to Barbara for use as a secretary.

With Barbara helping him complete his actual work, he could focus on shocking his brain to flip a book's pages. But he was utterly unsuccessfully until lighting struck his house. He realized then that he needed much more power, and gradually he got the hang of moving small objects but it was not enough. So, somehow, he tapped into the power from the radar tests and used it to create a being from his thoughts that could be used to channel these psychic energies further. But, being created from thought, it was invisible--and smart enough to figure out that Walgate intended to control it. So it smashed his equipment, destroyed his notes, and escaped the lab. Walgate couldn't tell anyone because who would believe him?

Well, he now knows he created a "mental vampire" (and Cummings hilariously gives Butler an "I told you so" look here) that draws power from the nuclear reactor and needs to feed on human nervous systems, but even worse than that--he's pretty sure he created more than one. Butler dismisses this as lunacy just as Chester arrives with Bradley, Melville, and the Sandwich Guy from earlier. Sandwich Guy notices something moving in the bushes outside the glass doors to the veranda, and when Butler goes to use the phone he discovers the line has been cut. And then the glass shatters and Sandwich Guy is dragged to his death by the invisible attacker. Realizing they're under siege, the others work together to try and board up the windows--except for Melville, who becomes the simpering, panicked ninny who won't even help Barbara move a desk in front of the door.

Cummings asks if there's any way to make the creatures visible, and Walgate suggests that the only way might be to give them more radiation to absorb. Sure enough, after eating the head technician at the lab so he can't stop the radiation dial from going into the "Danger" zone (which oddly is after the "Overload" section), the fiend at the base becomes visible. And what a beautiful sight it is: a stop-motion brain with nerve tentacle legs, spinal column tail, and little eye stalks on top of its cerebellum.

"This is your brain on a nuclear engineering degree."

Back at the house, Melville goes all Irish and panicky--and then the others realize they can see the fiends gathering outside now. Walgate explains that the power must have increased at the nuclear plant and the only option is to shut the plant down: without its energy, these creatures will perish. Luckily, they'll also perish from gunshots, as Chester discovers by putting a bullet in one. And boy, do they go out in an amazing gory fashion for 1958.

Unfortunately for Melville, nobody thought to close the chimney  The others are too late in pulling it off and killing it with an axe. Cummings suggests their best plan of action is to to get to a dynamite shed between the house and the plant and to blow up the control room. Wait, what?! So Cummings decides to make a run for it, after getting a good luck kiss, of course. Walgate suggests maybe he control the fiends long enough to buy Cummings some time, so he rushes outside as well.

Well, he does buy some time for Cummings--by being immediately set upon and devoured by three of the fiends.

"You ever notice that brains just taste better when they belong to the guy who created you?" "Oh, totally." "I concur."

Cummings makes it to the dynamite shed, easily killing the one fiend waiting outside for him. He makes it back to the base, where a really obvious stand-in for Marshall Thompson runs by a bunch of drained bodies. Here's a tip for filmmakers: don't shoot your stand-in face on in medium shot and assume your day for night tinting will disguise it in post.

Back at the house, some idiot left the hammer right by the window they boarded up. It turns out, though, that the fiends just needed their tentacles and tails to break through. Butler and Chester use up their dwindling ammunition, but it's clear it will soon be no use. Luckily, Cummings has his dynamite all set in the control room--even though I'm still not sure how blowing it up will do anything but accelerate the reactor into overload, which would be very bad--and easily lights the fuse, kills a fiend, and runs for cover. It's just in time, too, for a fiend has latched onto Barbara's head just as the dynamite explodes.

The fiends all fall to the ground, dead, and then melt into goo--in a scene I'm positive Sam Raimi used as inspiration for the end of The Evil Dead. Cummings returns and Butler puts him and charge before everyone else vacates the premises to let Cummings and Barbara get their celebratory make-out session on. This is all framed in happy terms, seemingly ignoring the fact that the only base personnel still alive at this point are three people and they just destroyed the reactor that powers their operation. Oh well, hero's gotta bang the hot Canadian lady. The End.

"What do you think of my new fiend stole? Too garish?"

Fiend Without A Face runs a relatively brief 74 minutes, but it's hard to call it lean. As you may have guessed by my synopsis, a large amount of the running time is eaten up with characters that have little to do with the main plot and are then abruptly discarded when the mental vampires finally come into the main focus. Hell, Cummings being locked in the mausoleum adds nothing to the plot but a few more minutes of screen time. Tightly plotted, this film is not.

However, while a lot of films with similar story issues would end up being dull, this film really can't be accused of that. Even the normally deadly dull scenes of radar arrays are handled deftly--they're kept to a minimum and feature quirky touches like the camera on the radar dish.

And then there's the fiends. Oh, they are a delight. There's almost no way that crawling, hopping brain monsters could be anything but fun. Still, while the stop-motion effects that bring them to life are a bit dodgy, there's no denting how impressive they are. Not only that, but there's the simple fact that the climax of them swarming the house can't help but feel incredibly familiar. Rather like Matango, this film is not mentioned as one of the influences on George A. Romero's Night of The Living Dead, but you can't help but think it did contribute to that film's existence.

Not only do you have characters boarding up windows to protect themselves from a relentless horde of foes, but those foes can only be put down by shots to the brain and there's an awful lot of black and white gore spraying around when that happens.

Speaking of which, I didn't have to look it up to know that this was a bit of a transgressive film in its day. I'd imagine the towel bit alone was rather controversial, though I cannot confirm that, but I can confirm that this film did raise quite a stir in its native Britain for the gore effects. Fairly understandable, honestly. After all, the film seems fairly restrained and bloodless for most of its running time, before suddenly turning into a bloodbath.

It can be very easy to write off Fiend Without A Face as just another B-movie. Like a lot of 1950s science fiction, the mad science that creates the monsters doesn't actually make any sense and the plan to stop them makes even less. The characters are also pretty thinly sketched archetypes, and the story certainly is not deep or meaningful in any way.

However, I have to agree with the Criterion collection that this is a movie people should see. It's a fun movie, pure and simple, And sometimes, that's more than enough.

Today's review brought to you by the letter F! Hit the banner above to see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for F!

Even if you're only passingly familiar with producer Charles Band, you probably know of his reputation for loving stories about small monsters killing people. This obsession is usually associated with the Puppet Master films, but it started several years before that. The actual basic idea for the film was actually being tossed around by Band as early as 1983, but it's pretty obvious that the first Ghoulies really came to life after Band saw Gremlins. After all, the original title was "Beasties" and that wouldn't fool somebody into accidentally renting it, thinking it was related. I also would be willing to bet the wacky hijinks that the "Ghoulies" get into in the first film wouldn't have existed without Joe Dante's film.

It's strange, then, that the first Ghoulies should miss the central lesson of the film it was trying to cash in on: the titular monsters are not even close to the focus of the movie. They're merely tools of the various sorcerers facing off, and they aren't even the major antagonists of the film. It feels rather like a wasted opportunity.

Luckily, somebody was taking notes when Empire Pictures decided to continue the franchise four years later. (Intriguingly, this would be two years before Gremlins 2: The New Batch came around) When Ghoulies II was written, they wisely decided that the main focus should be on the titular creatures.

The film opens as a semi-truck emblazoned with "Satan's Den" on the side makes its way toward Greenville, the current site of the carnival it belongs to. Driving the truck is Larry (Damon Martin), while his uncle Ned (Royal Dano) sits beside him, polishing off a bottle of whiskey. Ned keeps commenting about how the moon is the fullest he's ever seen, which leads me to believe he's never seen the moon before since the moon we see is slightly more than three quarters full. Ned chides his nephew for not paying more attention to the moon if he wants to be a great magician like his uncle used to be. Larry is a bit more concerned with paying attention to the truck, because the radiator is overheating. They'll have to hope there's a garage on the way.

(Incidentally, I can't help but find all the talk of a "full moon" entertaining because Charles Band would form Full Moon Entertainment the next year, after Empire Pictures went belly up)

Meanwhile, a priest (Anthony Dawson, a prolific character actor) is fleeing through some misty woods with a wriggling and snarling sack slung over his shoulder. He's being pursued by three guys in red hoods, presumably devil worshipers of some kind. He manages to escape from them by hiding in a closed garage that had left a back door unlocked, which he then bolts behind him. However, he doesn't bother to wait long before turning on the lights inside the garage. I guess the devil worshipers didn't want their bag back all that badly, since they don't immediately bust their way in. To his delight, the priest finds a huge barrel of something labelled "solvent" in the garage--whatever it is is bubbling and giving off a mist, and is just sitting there without a lid. Boy, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

The priest offers up a prayer to God to stop the devil worshipers and demon spawn before tossing the bag into the barrel of acid. Unfortunately, he missed one of the demon spawn, because just then the Bat Ghoulie smashes through the window on the door. It makes sure he sees it before swooping down and knocking the priest into the acid.

More like a flying squirrel than a bat, but close enough.

Larry and Uncle Ned arrive at the gas station, and Larry walks inside to ensure that nobody is around. He almost sees the skeleton inside the barrel before Ned calls to him for assistance. Once he walks out, the priest's skeleton floats to the surface--and then the Ghoulies surface as well, completely unharmed. The Ghoulies don't have official names that I know of, so I'll just go by the names given online for them: the Fish Ghoulie looks like a toothy baby doll got merged with a gill man; the Cat Ghoulie looks a bipedal cat with cloven hooves on its hind feet; the Rat Ghoulie looks like a bipedal rat without the tail; and the Toad Ghoulie looks like a lizard got merged with, well, a toad.

All of them, as with the first film, are John Carl Buechler creations. Though this time around they look a hell of a lot better. You'll also notice there's no way all four of them could've fit into the bag the priest was carrying.

"Hello, hello, hello, hello!"

While Ned and Larry are making sure the radiator is cooled down, the Ghoulies spy the "Satan's Den" logo and take it as an invitation. They walk over to the truck--via some really good stop-motion animation, courtesy of David Allen--where the Rat Ghoulie unlocks the back of the truck and they all climb in. The Bat Ghoulie swoops in at the last moment before they close the doors behind them. Of course, they don't lock the doors behind themselves, so you'd think that either Ned or Larry would notice that, but they don't.

Then again, Ned is both drunk and preoccupied with their oncoming doom when the "money man" arrives at the carnival. He's referring, of course, to P. Hardin (J. Downing), whom we see pulling in to the carnival grounds the next morning in a fancy car. He's the son of the carnival's owner, and given he looks like every coprorate douchebag character Kyle MacLachlan and James Spader ever played got spliced together, it's not hard to guess he's the human villain.

Hardin introduces himself to Sir Nigel Penneyweight (Phil Fondacaro!), who used to be a Shakespearean actor--and, indeed, won't ever stop quoting Shakespeare--but now works with the Satan's Den crew as the resident hobgoblin. Hardin wants all the carnies to meet with him in twenty minutes so he can law down the law. Nigel goes to inform Larry and Ned, bearing coffee, but Ned is passed out drunk again on the haunted house's electric chair. When he awakens to hear the news, Ned makes a quip about flipping the electric chair on--while Nigel complains about how hard it is to scare kids these days.

Incidentally, the haunted house is basically all set up, so I'm not sure where the Ghoulies found to hide during the set up process, but they managed. At any rate, at the carnival meeting Hardin announces that this weekend's show will be a trial run. Any acts that are not showing a profit will be out on their asses after the weekend's over. It's probably not a good thing that Ned was so eager to heckle Hardin during the man's speech, since Hardin advises that Satan's Den has been losing money for some time. So Hardin's got an especially serious hate-on for them.

Unfortunately for Larry, Hardin definitely does not hate Larry's crush, Nicole Le Fevre (Kerry Remsen, who can be seen getting a cross carved into her forehead by the titular Pumpkinhead in the same year), who is one of the dancers in the bellydancing show. Speaking of which, the manager of the show, Ray (Mickey Knox), is having a bit of a dispute with one of the other dancers, Patty (Ames Morton). Seems she's found a guy in town and she always finds a guy in town and then disappears for the whole weekend. Well, Ray wants her to actually work the show this time, but his demands are interrupted when her cat runs off.

Following the cat, she ends up in Satan's Den. Unfortunately, the meowing she hears as she goes further in is not her cat. She finds out just a bit too late when she reaches into a sarcophagus and the Cat Ghoulie bites her and slashes at her with a straight razor. The Toad Ghoulie knocks her down and holds her feet, and then the Rat and Fish Ghoulies hold her arms down. The Cat Ghoulie advances on her with the straight razor drawn...

"So! You thought you would have me fixed, no? I FIX YOU!"

That evening, Hardin goes to see Nicole in the dressing room of her show. He wants to see her after the show, but she defers him a bit because she has several shows that night. So he convinces her to meet him after the last show. Meanwhile, a drunk Ned decides to start fiddling with a small grimoire he keeps in his trunk. He flips to a page about summoning demons and imps to do your biddig and half-heartedly reads it, whereupon the Ghoulies crawl forth from various hiding places to meet him. Incorrectly assuming he summoned the little demons*, Ned excitedly runs to fetch Nigel to show him. Of course, the Ghoulies deliberately hide from Nigel and Larry, and Larry--already short on his temper from Hardin's ultimatums--blows up at his drunk uncle for forcing them to make up for his slack. Nigel calms Larry down, and they lead Ned off to a back room to sleep it off.

[* I'm honestly not entirely sure why the filmmakers don't just have Ned summon the Ghoulies. It's not like there's any clear continuity between this film and the first, and the spells in that grimoire will turn out to be real deal later on]

Well, the business is slow for Satan's Den, of course. Two bratty kids, the elder just shy of adolescence, buy tickets despite the elder asserting that it's going to be lame. They're shortly followed by a group of five...teenagers? College kids? The leader of the group carries a red boombox and after Larry tells him he needs to turn the music, the guy gives him the finger--but actually listens and turns it off.

Hardin, meanwhile, is watching Ray advertise for the bellydancing show as Nicole and the other dancers gyrate out front in skimpy outfits. (Which sort of begs the question: if that's how they're dressed outisde the tent, what do they do for the show? Surely at a carnival they don't have a nude stripshow) Ray, bizarrely, advertises that the girls "slither on their bellies like..." before tapping his cane on the stage for the two groups of dancers on either side of him to finish in turn with, "Reptiles!"

Oh no, did he hire Strother Martin to supply his dancers?

Inside Satan's Den, the two kids are wandering around while the elder is being a twerp--kicking displays and stuff. Well, until they encounter the Rat Ghoulie gnawing on a severed doll head in the guillotine set-up. It spits some kind of goo on the older kid's shirt and he retaliates by producing a shuriken (!) and throws it at the fiend. It just catches it in its teeth and eats it. The kids decide that this makes the place awesome and they have to tell their friends about it.

The group of college kids have managed to lose their fifth wheel, and the couples decide they should ditch him. Which seems harsh until you see the guy wandering around trying to find them and you realize he's wearing the trademark late 80s/early 90s inexplicable vest but with dangling leather fringe. Surely even then he looked like a dumbass. Well the couples try to party in a side room, only for the Ghoulies to smash the leader's boombox. He pulls a switchblade on them, but the Bat Ghoulie swoops in and bites his hand so he drops it. He and his girlfriend decide to leave, but the other couple decide to stay and make out--whereupon the Rat ghoulie spits his goo on them, which apparently hardens quickly into a form of adhesive.

Unfortunately for the fifth wheel, when he finds the room his friends have already gone. The Cat Ghoulie has traded his straight razor for a switchblade and stabs him in the leg. When he collapses on a nearby table, it turns out to be the one beneath a pendulum. And before you know it, he's being stretched and the actually sharp (!) pendulum is swinging down towards his gut...

Larry is pleasantly surprised by the huge crowd that forms now, excited to see the "rats." seeing the two couples exit, the group leader clutching his hand and threatening to sue and the other couple all glued together, just works the crowd into a frenzy. Poor Nigel in his stifling hobgoblin suit (basically a gorilla suit with horns on the mask) is utterly ignored, because the crowd only wants to see the "rats." They get to see them, all right, as the Ghoulies are busy wrapping their latest victim's body in gauze to disguise him as a mummy. The crowd just thinks the Ghoulies are putting a prop mummy into its sarcophagus and cheer them on. They especially love it when the Cat and Rat Ghoulie high-five each other.

Well, okay, then.

Hardin notices the business that Satan's Den is doing and demands Larry show him the receipts immediately after closing. He then goes to see Nicole, whom he takes to Nigel's trailer. Nigel graciously allowed him to use it, you see. Nicole smirks and happily goes with him, at least partially to see his reaction to the fact that the trailer was designed with someone only 3'6" in mind. I'm--I'm not really sure what he expected. He did see Nigel, right?

Well, we won't know the details yet but Hardin had a reason beyond the amorous for inviting Nicole over, which is the only reason she went with him. But Larry doesn't know that when he sees them outside Nigel's trailer after closing. While he and Hardin are discussing the anomoly of how successful satan's Den has been that weekend, Ned wakes up inside the haunted house--and remembers seeing the imps earlier. The lights are off in the haunted house, so he picks up a magic lightbulb (the kind that light up when you hold them in your hand) and goes searching through the place--eventually finding that the pendulum has blood on it, and discovering that one of the mummy "props" has real blood on its belly.

He angrily yells at the Ghoulies that he didn't want this, and he is attacked by the Bat Ghoulie, dropping his light bulb. Outside, Hardin and Larry are interrupted by a police car pulling up with the boombox jerk and his girlfriend in the back. (Unlike any police car ever, the back doors open from the inside) They've come to find their missing friend and the broken boombox they left behind. Well, Hardin greases the palm of the head officer so they're ready to declare everything above board when Ned flips the switch to turn on the lights.

Ned has pulled his grimoire out and found a spell for "explusion of demons by demonic intercession," and this gets the Ghoulies good and agitated. The Fish Ghoulie bites him on the neck, but he just uses the blood to paint a rather subpar pentagram (the lines don't connect) and begin reciting the spell. The Cat Ghoulie stabs him in the chest with the switchblade, but it turns out his deck of playing cards protected him. "You can't kill me, I'm a Goddamn magician," he challenges, oblivious to the Rat Ghoulie gnawing through the electrical cord to the electric chair. He's interrupted in his second attempt at finishing the incantation when the Rat Ghoulie pokes him with the chewed-off cord and he is cartoonishly electrocuted to death.

Walking through the now dark exhibit, the cops, Larry, Hardin, and Nigel find Ned's body. The officer points out they'll have to investigate the death, but Hardin objects that everyone in the carnival would tell you that Ned as a drunk. He probably just tripped over something in the dark and electrocuted himself. The officers oddly accept this, even though it would still require some investigation even if it was an accident--and the dead man has an obvious wound on his neck. Then a grieving Larry pulls the neverending handkerchiefs out of his uncle's sleeve in order to cover his face.

I honestly have no idea if that was supposed to be funny or not.

Larry throws himself into his work the next day, trying to fix the Satan's Den's rig. Nigel tries to tell him not to throw his life away, wasting it away in the carnival. Larry snaps at Nigel, then later snaps at Nicole because she couldn't possibly understand what's going through. Well, for your information, douchecanoe, she could: Hardin wanted to talk to her because he found out she used to be part of a high wire act with her family, The Amazing Le Fevres, as part of the circus that Hardin's family bought out--until her brother fell off the wire in front of her, and missed the net. She's been afraid of heights ever since, which is why she refised Hardin's offer to start in a new high wire act. Larry apologizes for being a jerk and the two kiss. So, I guess they're a couple now?

Well, an angry Nigel goes to work fixing some of the Den's flying bats, only to drop his pliers. When he fnds them, they're lying next to a bloodied bracelet he recognizes as Penny's. And then the Ghoulies show themselves to him, which he reacts to by fleeing in terror. Well, Larry comes to man the ticket booth for Satan's Den for the night, only to find that somehow Hardin has legally seized the attraction (?) and has an armed guard to keep Larry out. He's fired Larry and Nigel, and also put a lien on Nigel's car just to be an extra dick about it.

The armed guard is oddly willing to let Larry barge into the place to claim some personal artifacts. While rifling through a trunk, Larry hears an odd noise and opens a different trunk to find Nigel cowering inside. Larry laughs off Nigel's talk of demons--until Nigel points out the Fish Ghoulie nearby. Nigel points out that creature's teeth match the bite on Ned's neck, and then the Fish Ghoulie helpfully confirms by launching itself across the room and sinking its teeth into Larry's chest. The other three pile onto Larry, while Nigel runs to get help.

The new ticket taker, the security guard, and the male halves of the couples from earlier (who have come back once again to find their friend) just laugh at Nigel's insistence that Larry is being attacked, before the two doofuses barge into the joint. Larry, meanwhile, is somehow holding his own against four little monsters made of teeth. He shakes them off by grabbing a bare wire for one of the displays (!) which somehow does not harm him beyond a minor burn on his hand, but shakes them loose. He rushes out, finding Nigel on the way, and they go to get guns from several of the carnies, and to enlist the aid of Ray, a strong man, and a fire eater.

They rush back to Satan's Den, but Hardin orders his guard to shoot them if they try to go in. The guard turns out to be less bloodthirsty than Hardin and just lets them go in. Hardin grabs the guard's shotgun, fires him, and follows the group in. They're just in time as the Ghoulies have gotten the head jerk into the guillotine and the other guy is under the pendulum, while the cackling patrons watch since they think it's part of the show. Nigel rushes the patrons out, while the others rescue the two morons. Hardin stares dumbly at the Ghoulies while the others try to kill the Ghoulies. Guns don't work, fire doesn't work, and even the strong man's attempt to choke the Rat Ghoulie just gets him a faceful of goop. And then Patty's corpse falls out of the iron maiden prop.

Hardin accuses Larry of bringing these creatures to the carnival, and they end up struggling over the shotgun, which blows a hole in the wall--letting the Ghoulies out into the carnival. Of course, they could have just walked out into the carnival at any time, but never mind that. Larry says they have to close the carival, but Hardin refuses and offers a reward to whomever catches one of the Ghoulies alive, so Larry punches him.

"Let's paint this town red! ..you know, like blood?" "We got it, Jeff!"

The Toad Ghoulie stops and ogles Nicole doing her act, causing her to scream when she sees it. Larry hears her and enlists her help, so they rush away for her to get dressed in actual clothes. And now it's time for the rampage sequence! At a strength test, involving a punching bag, the Cat Ghoulie sees some guy win a stuffed animal and responds by jumping into a huge boxing glove (?) and leaping at the guy, suckerpunching him the back of the head. At the bumper cars, the Toad Ghoulie and Rat Ghoulie work together: the Rat Ghoulie scares a woman out of her car and when she falls, the Toad Ghoulie runs her over.

Man, Fast & Furious 8 looks amazing.

 Meanwhile, a clown (no, I mean an actual clown) in a dunk tank finally annoys someone into hitting the mark. Unfortunately for the clown, the Fish Ghoulie is waiting in the tank and chews his arm off just above the elbow. (Which begs the question of why its teeth only did superficial damage to Ned and Larry) And then the Fish Ghoulie makes it to a rocket ship ride and unhooks the pod of a middle-aged couple, sending it flying into another tent and causing an explosion. Um, sure. This triggers a mass exodus from the carnival, during which Hardin hears a father tell his daughter that he's going to sue the owner into the next lifetime.

Larry, Nicole, and Nigel regroup and figure that they need a plan--they've seen that conventional weapons don't hurt the creatures, so Larry suggests they use a supernatural solution. After all, didn't Ned have the grimoire in his hand when he was killed?

Hardin meanwhile, is having a breakdown in the men's room. He doesn't see the Fish Ghouie starting to crawl out of the toilet behind him--as one did in the first film, briefly, as well as on its infamous poster. It hides in the toilet before Hardin apparently decides he needs to heed the call of nature and sits down on the toilet. And, finally, the film makes good on the original's tagline of, "They'll get you in the end," as we hear crunching, tearing sounds and Hardin screams in agony.

"Oh, God, no! I should've used Preparation H!"

Larry, Nicle, and Nigel find the grimoire and the blood-stained page that Ned looked at last. Rushing outside, they make a pentagram in the sand, and Nigel begins to read the incantation since he can actually pronounce Latin. Unfortunately, the Bat Gremin swoops down and yanks the grimoire out of Nigel's hands and drops it in a car at the top of a ferrish wheel. Rather than trying to get the ferris wheel turned back on, they decide someone has to climb up--and Nicole asserts she's the only one who can do it. She climbs up to the top, dodges a token attempt by the Bat Ghoulie to knock her down, and tosses the book down to the others. They fall to the ground to avoid the Bat Ghoulie and finish the incantation.

Well, the incantation makes the ground shake, and then a crack opens up and a huge, clawed hand reaches out of the ground--and snatches the Bat Ghoulie out of the air. Then the creature the hands belong to rises from the ground, revealing itself to be a Fish Ghoulie, if that Ghoulie were about seven feet tall. It sniffs out the other Ghoulies and begins tracking them down. The Cat Ghoulie is easy prey, since it's focused on a shooting game. Down the gullet it goes, whole.

This is a very high brow site, so I won't make a joke here about eating pus--damn it!

The Toad Ghoulie has buried itself in a popcorn machine, but that's not enough to save it. Bye bye, Toad Ghoulie! You were always my favorite. The Rat Ghoulie makes a stand on the platform of the hammer-style strength test, which results in it getting flattened before being devoured. Unfortunately, the Giant Ghoulie doesn't just disappear--though we in the audience know that the Fish Ghoulie is still alive--and it assumes that Nigel is a ghoulie. No time for searching the grimoire for another spell, the others grab Nigel and head to his trailer to barricade themselves in.

When the beast shakes the trailer, Nigel's hobgoblin suit falls out of the closet and it suddenly occurs to Larry that maybe the beasts are tough on the outside but not the inside. He quickly fashions a Molotov cocktail and, with Nigel's aid, stuffs the suit full of clothes and shoves the Molotov into it with the wick sticking out of one eye. They offer it to the Giant Ghoulie, who immediately swallows it whole, somehow without dousing the wick. Sure enough, it goes boom, and the resulting fireball then returns to the Hell that spawned it.

The next day, Larry and Nicole load up her car and Larry leaves Satan's Den in Nigel's hands before driving off. The camera pans over to the men's room trailer, and we hear the Fish Ghoulie flusing something and cackling. The End.

And people worry about snakes in their toilets. Bah!

I had seen the cover for Ghoulies in the video store, of course, but my actual first experience with it was at one of the first sleepovers I ever went to when I was maybe nine. It was a pretty perfect movie for that, but even then I recall A) having no clue what the hell was going on and B) not thinking it was any good. Years later, I would pick Ghoulies II up from the video store and immediately wished I had seen it at the party instead.

Back then I usually watched most movies I rented several times before returning them, and I definitely enjoyed this one each time--even if I wished the Toad Ghoulie had been the survivor instead of the Fish Ghoulie. However, like many things I never bothered revisiting it for years and didn't bother with the third or fourth films at all. (Still haven't, but maybe some day) Then I saw the double feature DVD of this film and the original Ghoulies in Half Price Books and had to grab it.

Sure enpough, Ghoulies was still not very good, but Ghoulies II was just as fun as I had remembered--even if it was slightly more profane than I remembered. See, the original theatrical release was rated R but once it hit video, it was reduced to PG-13, like the first film. The DVD uses the theatrical cut, but near as I can figure, the only difference is that a few uses of the word "fuck" were trimmed, because the film isn't any gorier than I recall. And it certainly doesn't have any nudity. Really, I have to wonder why the film wasn't cut down to PG-13 to begin with, since a lot of its dark sense of humor seems to be tailored to the tastes of the older kids and teenagers an R-rating would exclude from seeing it.

Simply put, this film is a delight. It wastes only the barest amount of time with character development, and unlike the first film it actually understands that the Ghoulies are the entire reason we are watching it in the first place. So the film delivers them in spades, and makes stopping them the focus of the film instead of whatever bullshit wizard battle formed the central conflict of the first film. Sure, the budget clearly didn't extend far enough to really give us a Ghoulie rampage in the climax, but they did he best they could and the Ghoulie puppets definitely look as good as can really be expected--and the stop-motion sequences are geninely excellent.

While Ghoulies II is hardly as good as, say, Critters 2: The Main Course--and certainly not so good that I fear spoiling its plot beats--there's no denying that it's a damn fun entry in the "pint-sized killer beasties" genre. If that's your thing, check it out. You'll definitely have a blast.

And don't forget to check your toilet for Ghoulies.


Today's review brought to you by the letter G! Hit the banner above to see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for G!

There's a rather misguided belief that I've been guilty of buying into, which is that practical effects in movies are dying. Movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and even Furious 7 prove that there are actually some filmmakers who understand that you need to squeeze some real destruction in amongst the computer graphics, and even smaller films like WolfCop and Late Phases show that even low-budget productions are trending back towards practical effects instead of SyFy-level CGI.

However, it's certainly easy to believe that Hollywood is killing off practical effects when you look at a movie like Jurassic World, which is the latest entry a series that has always set the bar for understanding when you need CGI and when you need a practical effect--and totally failed to learn that lesson. Despite the director's insistence that he was using practical effects, we got 99% CGI and one dying Brontosaurus puppet. (No, fuck you, I'm not calling it Apatosaurus and you can't make me) It really makes you miss Stan Winston even more.

Then Rick Baker quit doing special effects because he was tired of competing with CGI, and I can only imagine that the way the studio decided to replace his efforts in The Wolfman with the worst CGI werewolf transformation effects since An American Werewolf In Paris had a lot to do with motivating that decision. Peter Jacksomn suddenly decided that orcs needed to be CGI in The Hobbit, despite having previously delivered an entire trilogy full of badass orcs that were stuntmen in make-up.

The worst offender by far, however, was 2011's The Thing. It was bad enough that somebody decided that they needed to do a prequel about what happened in that Norwegian base in John Carpenter's 1982 remake, but refused to believe audiences could care about a group composed entirely of non-Americans. The true insult came about, though, when the promo materials all claimed the film would be delivering practical gore effects like Rob Bottin had created, courtesy of a genre legend in his own right, Alec Gillis--and then the finished film replaced all but a few tentacles with passable CGI that didn't have anywhere near the impact of the gore effects from Carpenter's film.

If you've seen the behind-the-scenes footage of the effects that were replaced, you know this was a horrific injustice. Still, no one was more understandaly offended than Alec Gillis. Turning to Kickstarter, Gillis set up a fund to create his own take on a shape-shifting alien monster story. I missed the Kickstarter when it came out, so I have not a penny to my name in the film's creation. However, you can bet that I'm contributing whatever I can spare to the Shallow WaterKickstarter, since I love practical effects and I can't possibly resist a good fish-lizard-turtle-man creature.

So I was definitely excited for this film, even if I knew it was likely that it would not actually be good just because it was doing practical effects. I mean, hey, Leviathan has Stan Winston doing a version ob The Thing that turns people into fish monsters and it's "meh" at best. Hell, for all I knew it would be the worst kind of crushing disappointment. Still, I knew I had to pick it up when it hit DVD (forget Blu-ray, unless you were a donor) and at least give it a chance.

The film opens in 1982, in the Arctic Circle as a Soviet lunar lander crashes back down to Earth. Two things present themselves in this sequence: one, the effects are a charming mix of mediocre CGI and obvious miniatures for things like the clouds. Two, when I say "lunar lander" I literally mean that. Landing struts and all. The cosmonaut (Jason Speer) inside is clearly boned, of course. Not only is his craft burning up as it plunges into the atmosphere, but a container on the panel behind him is leaking some kind of space goo.

That's never a good sign.

Cut to the modern day, in Alaska. The film briefly decides to introduce our characters via horrible camcorder footage as college professor, Steven (Matt Winston, a real "that guy" actor) is loading stuff into a rental car while grad student, Sadie (Camille Balsamo) scrapes the ice off. Filming all this is Stephen's other grad student, Ronelle (Giovonnie Samuels), but we won't be introduced to her face-to-face for a little while yet. The trio's destination is the crab fishing vessel, Harbinger.

Why are they going on this vessel, exactly? To study the effects of global warming on beluga whales, of course. The trio get an introduction to the crew, a real rag-tag bunch: Russian ex-pat Svet (Milla Bjorn), righteously bearded Inuit Atka (Edwin H. Bravo), the aptly named Big G (Winston James Francis), obvious love interest Bowman (Reid Collums), and token black guy Dock (Michael Estime).

[There's also Roland (Kraig W. Sturtz), who seems to stay in the drive shaft area of the ship, but both the movie and the characters seem to forget he exists for much of the running time]

Dock gets a load of Ronelle and, as you would expect of a thinly sketched character, has to remark on his surprise at a "sistah" being on board. And I quickly realize I would like this movie so much better if Ronelle was the heroine. Not only is she gorgeous and cute, but it'd be a nice change of pace to have a woman of color be the survivor of a sci-fi horror movie. That the only recent example of that I can think of is Alien vs. Predator is severely disheartening.

Team Ronelle.

Nope, as you probably guessed, our heroine is Sadie, as cemented by the fact that the boat's skipper is her grandfather, Graff (Lance Henriksen!). The two have not seen each other in quite a while, and it's also apparently been a while since Sadie has been on a boat. Oh, she's got her sea legs just fine--unlike Stephen, who is turning green already--but she gets nervous when Graff invites her up to the wheelhouse. It seems her parents died in a boating accident and she's been way of boats ever since. Graff offers her a platitude about not letting fear get the better of her, but doesn't force the issue.

Sadie and Ronelle set up their gear, meanwhile. In addition to what appears to be a woefully inadequate whale tracker (the boat shows up as flashing boat,on a grid, the belugas they're tracking as flashing circles--with no frame of reference), they also have a genetic analyzer. Bowman, standing in for the audience, wonders what the heck they need one of those for if they're tracking whales. Ronelle explains it may be useful if they get a sample (?) from one of the whales.

Or you know, encounter an alien life form that they need to analyze.

That night, as the fishers are drawing up huge bundles of crabs, Sadie sees the pod of beluga on the screen right next to the ship. She is unable to wake her fellow scientists, so she goes topside and sticks the underwater camera over the side. She sees the beluga (which appear to be some barely adequate puppets), but more importantly sees that they are crowding around something lodged in the ice floe. Whatever it is has a blinking light on it, and it's in blue ice so it's been there a while.

After a brief discussion with Graff and Svet, during which the possibility of it being a Navy buoy is dismissed, the decision is made to extract the object from the ice and bring it aboard. Stephen and Ronelle finally wake up and come topside to see what all the fuss is abut, Stephen being briefly irritated that Sadie didn't wake him when she sighted the belugas. However, he quickly decides that the thing in the ice is way cooler. While Ronelle films, Atka, Svet, Dock, Bowman, and Big G chip away at the ice. One of them wonders if it might be a sea mine, but Svet points out that putting a big blinking light on a sea mine kind of defeats the purpose.

Upon uncovering more of the metal of the object, Graff realizes it's Soviet so whatever it is has been in the ice for over twenty years. And then they find the dead cosmonaut inside, whom they assume burned to death on re-entry. Graff votes they bring it back to port and report it to the Russian authorities. Stephen objects that it belonged to the Soviet Union, so since they no longer exist salvage law applies and it belongs to the university. Sadie backs up the salvage law part, but when Stephen tries to strong arm her into going along with his plan for it, Graff points out Sadie found it and they're on his boat so it's going back to port and they can decide who gets to claim in then.

The partially uncovered space capsule is lowered into the hold, next to the container of crabs they've caught. Graff tries to radio in that they've found wreckage with human remains, but the storm blowing in is garbling the radio so all he can successfully get through is "negative mayday." Dock, Atka, and Bowman go down into the hold to freeze the crabs with liquid nitrogen. Seeing that Dock is sticking his head into the capsule nervously, the other two blast the liquid nitrogen to scare him.

Sadie and Stephen, meanwhile, are at odds. Stephen doesn't want the capsule touched, but Sadie wants to examine it. Finally, she turns to Bowman for help. Bowman gets Big G to distract Stephen by...asking the marine biology professor for psychiatric advice. This somehow works (and the dialogue is fairly clever, so it may have been improvised) and Sadie sneaks down to the hold with Svet, so the Russian can translate the writing on the capsule. They discover that it is, in fact, a lunar lander (this being a movie like Apollo 18, in that it suggests the launch of a rocket for a moon landing could be kept secret).

"And this one here says 'Comrade Kilroy was here.'"

For some reason, Sadie decides to take off the cosmonaut's helmet and realizes he didn't die from burning. His body is riddled with what appear to be parasites beneath the skin. She carefuly extracts one and puts it in a sample tube. Satisfied, she turns to go and analyze the sample--but Svet stops her briefly to note that oozing sample canister from before, now empty. She can't figure out the exact English word on the label, but the closest she can figure is "water bear."

After Big G gives up the ruse, Stephen sees Sadie talking with Svet and Bowman and figures out she was behind it. He goes to investigate the capsule and sees it was disturbed, picking up the discarded helmet in his bare hands. Ronelle and Sadie analyze the sample while Bowman looks on. Sure enough, the sample indicates the parasites are mutated tardigrades ("water bears"). Naturally, they don't look like tardigrades, but just you never mind that. Based on the analysis from Ronelle's little machine, the tardigrades DNA matches a wide array of creatures--somehow, in the decades that they've been in the ice, the tardigrades have been absorbing the DNA that just floats freely in the ocean from virtually every creature in it. They've used this DNA cocktail to evolve into something completely new.

Unfortunately, they've also started to thaw. While Svet and Big G are flirtatiously trying to drink each other under the table, the film remembers that Roland exists. While lounging on his cot by the drive shaft, Roland hears something squeaking around and decides to look under his cot. He sees a mass of blue, pulsating flesh--and then the mass shoots out tentacles that bust his skull open. Svet and Big G are now inexplicably trying to beat the shit out of each other (!), but Svet ultimately wins and walks away. So, I guess that wasn't foreplay?

Svet then goes to see Ronelle, who comments that Big G obviously likes her--and then gives her make-up tips because Ronelle was previously studying to be a make-up artist before she settled on marine biology. She then notices a scar on the side of Svet's face. Svet dismisses it as a bad break up and a horrified Ronelle says she hopes they found the guy. "Most of him," Svet replies.

About this time, it's discovered that the body of the cosmonaut is missing. Stephen blames Sadie for this, claiming she threw the body overboard. When it's pointed out it'd be hard for Sadie to carry a body by herself, Stephen claims Bowman helped her. Graff throws Stephen against a column, having had just about enough of his crap. As everyone is arguing about what to do, Sadie notices Stephen is acting funny. She follows him as he suddenly runs out on deck and strips to the waist. He's screaming about being hot and inded his very skin seems to be steaming in the cold air. The crew helps Sadie get him back inside--but then, as he bends over a desk, his back breaks into a strange pattern of what look like keloid scars. (This is plainly a CGI effect, incidentally) And then several tentacles burst out of his back and spray an off-white liquid at the ceiling.

Some of the liquid splashes into Dock's mouth, and then they observe the liquid (via reverse filming) oozing into a drain under its own power. Another puddle on the desk forms into a wriggling mass of tentacles that leaps into the air and then dives into the drain as well. Sadie traps another bit of the liquid as it turns into a rolling polymer with a glass and a lid. They take it down to the hold so it can be frozen with liquid nitrogen. Sadie cuts off a piece to examine. Sure enough, it's more tardigrades and she discovers that, when thawed, she can cut them apart and not only will they reform but they can change from solid to liquid and back again at will.

The crew all meet and discuss what needs to happen. The simple fact of the matter is that they've all been exposed to a parasite ("Some more than others," Svet says with a glance at Dock) that can take over and destroy its host completely. It can also change from liquid to solid and is nigh impossible to kill. The only weapon they have on board is liquid nitrogen, but at least they already know that cold can stop the creatures...temporarily. They set up some portal spray tanks and pour some of the liquid nitrogen into buckets.

Graff and Atka go down to find Roland, having finally remembered the poor bastard. Well, they don't find him--aside from some blood--but they do find that the drive shaft has been bent out of shape. And then they find the cosmonaut, dangling from some translucent tentacles.The tentacles drop his body and they see that they belong to a creature that has attached itself to the wall with tentacles, but looks like a large blue insect. It lashes out with tentacles, but luckily for Graff they can't reach him. Unluckily for Atka, it's because he was in the way. Before Graff can do much of anything, Atka's arm has been torn off and he's being dragged to his death.

When Graff meets the others in a hallway and sees Bowman holding a small bucket of liquid nitrogen, he dryly quips, "We're gonna need a bigger bucket." This is legitimately the best line in the film, which is rather unfortunate.

Big G, Bowman, and Graff go back down to find that the creature has transformed into a dead ringer for the monster from Forbidden World and is currently chomping Atka's body in half. It begins spraying liquid from various pores as they approach--which has the amusing effect of making it look like the creature is doing that thing in cartoons where tears or sweat are rendered as huge spouts of water--but they thoroughly hose it down with liquid nitrogen. This really only allows them a moment's peace before they hear screams from the upper decks. On the deck of the boat, Svet has Dock trapped in a crab net with a Very pistol pointed at him. She is insisting he is infected because he is sweating, and a high temperaure has aleady been established as symptom.

The others try to reason with Svet, but then Dock slumps forward and translucent blue tentacles burst out of his back. Svet fires the flare gun and sets him ablaze. Something about this doesn't sit well with Sadie, though, and she confronts Svet inside the cabin by throwing Svet's duffel on the ground. Graff opens it and discovers it's filled with sophisticated radio equipment. Why does she have this? She's a Russian spy, of course.

"Come on, guys, I'm fine: this is a birthmark!"

You see, the Russians have been installing spies on fishing boats all over the Arctic in hopes of finding this capsule. Now that it's been found and the threat of the organism inside it has been discovered, she sets the countdown for the various explosives she's set all over the boat to go off in an hour. She'll be fine, however, because she's been inoculated (against what, water bears?!) and there's a Russian sub coming to get her. She then pulls a gun on the others. Graff decides to go for the old "you can't shoot all of us" gambit, and the group prepares to rush her--just as the goop that's been pouring out of the pipe behind her, in full view of the crew (and earshot of Svet) finally decides to strike at her after taking the form of a very familiar-looking webbed tentacle. And for the life of me, I have no idea if the lack of reaction was supposed to be intentional or poor blocking.

At any rate, Svet drops the gun and--in the stupidest death I've seen in a good while--Ronelle picks it up, but stands in place holding it out in her palm to the others, asking someone to take it from her until the tentacle grabs her by the head and yanks her into the pipe. Now, not only is this death stupid because Ronelle gets herself killed in the dumbest possible way, but this is not one of the gore set pieces. We do not see a single drop of blood as a grown human woman is forcibly yanked into a pipe she could not possibly fit into and vanishes, which implies she somehow fit perfectly. While the abilities of the monster are maddeningly inconsistent, it definitely could not have liquefied her that fast.

I knew that the token black woman wouldn't survive, but couldn't she at least have had a somewhat dignified death?

Svet tries to escape, but Big G grabs her by the arm and demands to know where the bombs are. She starts to tell him--and then sees a lower torso (I'm guessing Atka) standing down the hall. The intestines are tentacles now and before she can say anything more useful, the torso tackles her and she is dragged into a vent. Apparently being inoculated just means the creature has to take its time digesting her, as we'll see her occasionally being devoured for a little while.

Well, the remaining survivors decide it's time to find the explosives before they all die, and they figure out how many were in her bag. Big G, examining the busted drive shaft, figures out that he may be able to bend it back and then they can get back to port and go into quarantine--but there's not time for fixing the shaft until they find the bombs. Graff finds a few of the explosives, which are magnetized, and collect them. However, then Sadie figures out that Svet must have hidden the rest of the bombs in the bilge pump and she's the only one who can fit into the bilge to get them--and sure enough, she's right. As she's sticking all the bombs onto a crowbar, Big G and Bowman realize that the container full of a ton of crabs is now empty. All that mass had to go somewhere...

...like the bilge pump. And indeed, as Sadie drops the last bomb into the bilge water, she suddenly realizes that the water she's standing in is not water. The monster begins to solidify around her and the others pull her up just in time so she only loses her hip-waders instead of everything below her hips. The monster then bursts up out of the bilge pump and Sadie just leaves the crowbar covered with explosives by the the tanks of liquid nitrogen because apparently if you concentrate all the explosives in one area it will be fine.

Unfortunately, Graff gets splattered with tardigrade goo so he charges Bowman with keeping Sadie away from him while he dumps his wife's ashes as a last human act--oh, yeah, Sadie's grandmother has been dead for years and he just didn't bother to tell her. Big G goes to work bending the drive shaft back, but he gets ambushed by the film's one truly memorable monster: the re-purposed corpse of Svet that has mantis-like blade hands and a huge, toothy mouth coming out of the back of her head.

"Greetings, fellow hew-mon. I am also hew-mon woman, how are you?"

Big G just punches the Svet-Mantis out after stabbing it a few times, and goes back to to straightening the drive shaft. As you might expect, the creature waits until he has it fixed and then gets back up and impales him with its claw. Now that the movie has disposed of its last person of color, we cut back to the other three survivors. The bombs go off and...the explosion just blows a hole in the deck and temporarily freezes the big monster in the hold. Sadie has to face her fear and take control of the helm in the wheelhouse, while Graff begs for Bowman to freeze him.

Unfortunately, the monster has just re-awakened and has other plans. Its tentacles impale Bowman and then drag him out onto deck. Sadie gets to watch her love interest die, helpless to do anything about it. Graff then spots a huge iceberg ahead and tells Sadie to crash the boat into the ice as he tosses himself to the giant monster whose tentacles are now completely cocooning the boat. (And really this part just reminds me of the boss in Resident Evil 5: the attractive woman in a low-cut dress with exaggerated breast jiggle who suddenly turns into a giant tentacle monster on a barge) Sadie sets the course for the iceberg, jams the throttle and grabs a radio before diving out the window and onto the ice floe.

She watches as the giant, glowing creature rises from the boat, roaring to the heavens--and then slams into the iceberg. This is somehow considered final, even though we already know this creature is made up of nigh-inestructible tardigrades that can also turn into liquid so it is not even remotely dead. Her radio suddenly working now, Sadie radios in, "Harbinger Down," and collapses onto the ice as we hear the sound of a helicopter closing in on her. The End.

Yep, I still think she should have been the final girl,

The trouble with Harbinger Down, ultimately, is that it's a film whose very reason for existing is to be "different" from other films. Its use of practical effects was supposed to distinguish it, but in reality it did nothing of the sort.

There's several reasons for this. First of all, while everyone is used to the awful CGI in SyFy Channel Originals and Sharknado sequels flooding the bargain bin market, there's actually been a bit of a trend away from that in low budget fare. I already mentioned WolfCop and Late Phases, but they aren't the only examples. Hell, even the Asylum's Age of Dinosaurs featured some hand puppets in among the cheap CGI.

So just having practical effects is not enough to distinguish a movie, despite the seeming trend toward 100% CGI in Hollywood. Therefore, you need to deliver really good practical effects. This movie, sadly, does not. The effects (aside from some dubious miniatures and the beluga puppets) are certainly not bad, but there's nothing about them that stands out. Rather than trying to be their own thing, most of them are based on the principal of, "Hey, remember how cool the effects in John Carpenter's The Thing were?" Unfortunately, while that film gave us a mulitude of memorable creatures, this film gives us...tentacles, more tentacles, and tentacles that sometimes glow! When the monster does take on a form more recognizable than "mass of writing tentacles," it usually looks very generic. I've already mentioned the Svet-Monster, which is the only one really worth mentioning.

Oh, and that attitude I mentioned extends to the movie itself. It makes constant reference to The Thing: just off the top of my head, Dock calls something "voodoo bullshit" for no reason and in Roland's bunk there's a Chess Wizard computer lying on its side. Even the structure of the climax is basically the same as MacReady rapidly losing all his allies and barely fleeing a gigantic version of is shapeshifting nemesis prior to destroying it, only to probably freeze to death. Of course, this film just shows how necessary Childs showing up again was to the success of that film's ending.

Failing to be its own thing is really just a symptom of the film as a whole. The characters are thinly sketched stock roles, you can almost guess every one of the plot's beats, and the direction is rather like Anaconda in that it's largely stolid and lifeless, but then will attempt some form of stylish approach that doesn't eally fit. I can't help but snicker a bit at this quote from the film's Kickstarter page:

Visual Effects limitations back in the 80's meant that those sci-fi/horror filmmakers had to tell more psychologically engaging stories. They didn't have CGI to show expansive worlds, so they told stories that relied on well-developed characters in intense situations. It was those very limitations that made their films better.

Hilariously, this film shows that that statement is completely inaccurate. Movies in the 1980s didn't need CGI to have paper-thin characters and terrible writing. This film shows that that has not changed. As a screenwriter and director, Alec Gllis makes a fantastic special effects artist.

Ultimately, watching this film reminded me of nothing so much as a direct-to-video film from 1995 called Proteus. Like this film, Proteus is an "homage" to John Carpenter's film that takes place on the ocean: the story involves characters on an oil rig-based research station fighting for their lives against a shapeshifting mutant. The ending involves the mutant turning into an enormous sharktopus, and it is delightful. However, I missed Proteus on video. The reviews for it were terrible, and I probably would have disliked it back then, too.

Seeing Proteus on Netflix Instant, though, was a breath of fresh air. It was a largely crummy film, but it was mostly practical effects and charming ones at that (again, giant sharktopus) and that made it seem unique...in 2011. Harbinger Down was specifically produced to be unique, and it feels less unique than a direct-to-video rip-off (ostensibly based on the novel Slimer by Harry Adam Knight, of Carnosaur fame) that had no grander ambitions than stocking video store shelves.

I really wanted to like Harbinger Down, and I don't regret supporting the film by buying it on DVD, but sadly it just isn't very good. It's a passable time waster of the sort you might watch at the gym when it inevitably makes it to cable. If it ends up on Netflix Instant, I'd say it's worth a spin, but I just can't recommend actively seeking it out.

It's far from the worst movie I've watched for HubrisWeen, but that's damning it with the faintest of praise as you'll soon see.


Today's review, brought to you be the letter H! Hit the banner for the other Celluloid Zeroes' reviews for H!

On June 23, 2013 the world lost Richard Matheson, but like many a genre legend he will never truly die. Matheson was a hugely prolific writer, so even if you don't know his name you've definitely seen something he wrote if you watched more than ten films or TV show between about 1950 and, hell, today. If he didn't write it directly, then it was based on one of his many novels or short stories. From TV shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek: to movies as varied as The Comedy of Terrors, Duel, What Dreams May Come, and Real Steel have had Matheson's mark on them.

Matheson made one of his biggest marks, however, with his 1954 vampire novel, I Am Legend. The novel tells the story of a man named Robert Neville who just might be the only human left alive after a plague he is strangely immune to turns the rest of the world into vampires. Vampires that he hunts out and stakes during the day, while fortifying himself inside his house during the night as the vampires call for him to come out. But is he really the last true human left alive?

The effects of the novel can be seen in a variety of ways, not the least of which is the attempt to explain vampirism in scientific terms. The novel was first adapted to film as The Last Man on Earth in 1964 with Vincent Price as Robert Morgan, which Matheson actually wrote the original screnplay for. However, while it is the most faithful adaptation of the story, Matheson was not fond of the later rewrites and requested to credited under the pseudonym "Logan Swanson." I'm sure I'll review this version in due time, but one of its biggest departures was making the vampires into slow-moving, shambling corpses. It's little surprise, then, that it's often cited as one of George A. Romero's inspirations for Night of The Living Dead.

The film was adapted a second time as The Omega Man in 1971 with Charlton Heston in the Robert Neville role. This one, however, diverges wildly from the novel. The menace that Neville faces are no longer vampires, but a cult of albino mutant Luddites that blame modern technology for the downfall of the world--and see Neville as one of the chief architects. The twist of the original novel is virtually cut out all together, so the tragic yet hopeful ending is robbed of a lot of its power. It is notable for having one of the earliest onscreen interracial romances between Heston and Rosalind Cash, but overall it's not very good.

In the 1990s, rumors swirled of a third adaptation with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but that attempt was cast into development hell until around 2002, when the project was revived as a vehicle for Will Smith. It took several rewrites and mutations before the film finally made it to the screen at the end of 2007, and yours truly went to see it with expectations firmly lowered.

What I saw was almost a pleasant surprise.

The film opens in 2009, with a television interview with Dr. Alice Krippin (an uncredited Emma Thompson!). Dr. Krippin has engineered a version of the measels virus that is designed to combat cancer. She happily announces that in the 10,009 human trials she has conducted, all 10,009 patients have become cancer free. The amazed announcer asks if this means she has cured cancer and Krippin replies, rather modestly, that she has.

A "Three Years Later" title card finds us in an empty, ruined Manhattan. (A rather clever nod to the 2012 apocalypse hysteria of the Aughts) Wild plants everywhere and not a sound can be heard anywhere--until we see a car zooming down an otherwise abandoned street. In the passenger seat is a German shepherd named Sam, but the driver is Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith!), a former US Army doctor and current last man on earth. Sam has caught wind of something, and Neville nearly runs right into an entire herd of deer. (Which oddly vocalize like elk) He and Sam pursue the deer, ultimately having to get out on foot and chase after one buck.

Together, they fight crime.

Unfortunately, a feral lioness kills the deer. Neville briefly ponders killing the lion, but then sees her mate and cub. Something about their dynamic gives him pause, reminds him of something he's lost. And then his watch beeps, and he realizes the sun is dipping dangerously low in the sky. Calmly, he and Sam leave the lions to their kill and hurry back home. Neville covers their tracks into his brownstone with some kind of chemical (vinegar, looks like). They eat their supper while Neville watches a recording of a morning show on his TV, he bathes Sam, and then closes down the heavy shutters on all the windows as the sun sets and bars the door.

Sam and Neville sleep in the bathtub that night, listening to the sound of creatures that might once have been human howling and screaming outside. In this version, the vampires (or "hemocytes" if you go by the subtitles and "Darkseekers" by the dialogue, but fuck that--they're Goddamn vampires so just freaking call them that) don't know where Neville lives and are too feral to call him out even if they did.

Neville's days are pretty loaded. He starts off each morning by experimenting on vampire rats in his basement lab, trying to find a vaccine or antidote. It seems that KV (the "Krippin Virus") turns you into a bald, albino rage zombie version of your former self. And I have to say, the vampire rats are truly cartoonish CGI, despite the fact that at least one of them could have been played by an actual hairless rat. Most of his subjects are unaffected or killed, but he does see one rat that looks like it's returning to normal. The rest of the morning consists of searching every apartment in the city, both for supplies and to ensure no vampires are hiding inside. (There's some nice worldbuilding in these scenes, particularly when we see a newspaper front page warning that infected dogs can come out at dusk) Then he swings by a video store populated by mannequins he's set up, including a mysterious woman near the adult section he promises Sam that he'll talk to one of these days.

So, in this film the apocalypse spared us Batman v. Superman. Clearly, those of us in the real world are in the darkest timeline.

His afternoons consist of broadcasting a radio signal to any possible survivors and waiting at the docks every noon for other survivors who never come. Here we notice that every bridge out of the city has been destroyed. Sam sees another deer and the two pursue it, only for the cornered creature to duck into a ruined bank building. To Neville's horror, Sam follows. Neville reluctantly goes in to recover his dog, and finds the deer has aleady been killed by the vampires inside. He nearly runs into a huge group of the vampires, standing in a bank vault in a cluster and panting heavily--which is about the only truly effective shot of the vampires.

As we soon see when Neville finds an unharmed Sam, only to be attacked by a vampire, someone decided that the bald, hairless humans that repesent this version's vampires needed to be entirely CGI. I have no idea why, since the only thing they do that needs CGI to accomplish is opening their mouths really wide like Arnold Vosloo in The Mummy movies. It renders them incredibly non-threatening because they never look real. This is a far cry from Gollum, let me tell you.

"Whoa. Wrong book."

Neville gets Sam out of there, and ends up jumping out a window with two vampires gnawing on him. The sun kills them pretty effectively, but it's certainly an unpleasant process. Neville chides Sam for running into the dark and forgetting that she can still be turned if she's bitten, then makes her stay in the car while he uses some of his blood as bait for a trap that captures a female vampire (Lauren Haley, but mainly bad CGI). This raises the ire of a male vampire (Dash Mihok, also mainly bad CGI, though), who almost charges partly into the sunlight, stares Neville down, and vanishes.

In his log later, Neville attributes this behavior to the vampires becoming desperate for food and forgetting self-preservation. He also discovers that the female vampire has a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder before he tests his vaccine on her. It appears to work at first--only to then apparently kill her. Neville revives her and keeps her locked up under sedation in his lab.

That night, like most nights, Neville is tormented by his memory of the night New York City was locked down by the military. We don't see it all in one piece, but Neville loaded his wife Zoe (Salli Richardson, voice of Elisa Maza on Disney's Gargoyles) and young daughter Marley (Willow Smith, yep, his real-life daughter) into a military transport, along with Marley's puppy Sam. They barely made it past the infection scanners and through the crowd desperate to escape the island. Neville had to stay in order to continue his work, but he loaded his wife and daughter into the helicopter--keeping Sam at his daughter's insistence. Unfortunately, the helicopter took off just after the missiles had destroyed the bridges, and another helicopter lost control after being swarmed by desperate people and spun into the helicopter containing Neville's family...

Now, Sam is all he has left in the world. Too bad fate isn't done screwing him over. During a regular run, Neville notices one of his mannequins in a place it should not be. Isolation has made Neille, understandably, a bit disconnected from reality. So he angrily approavhes the mannequin demanding to know if it's real, and ends up gunning it down--and firing wildly at the windows of the buildings around him. Unfortunately, he makes the mistake of stepping into the puddle by the mannequin to investigate it--and finds himself caught in the exact kind of trap he used to catch the female vampire earlier.

Blood rushing to his head knocks Neville out for hours. When he comes to the sun is going down and cutting himself down results in landing on the knife, wounding his thigh. He crawls back towards his car, only for the male vampire to appear in the building behind the trap--holding onto three vampire dogs. A thin strip of sunight that's rapidly fading keeps the dogs at bay, but Neville has only just made it to his car (and his other gun), when the sun dips below the buildings enough to allow the dogs to charge. Neville ultimately kills the vampire dogs, but Sam has been bitten several times.

"Bad vampire dog! Bad!"

Revealing her name is Samantha, Neville loads the dog into the car and speeds home. Unfortunately, the vaccine doesn't work on dogs any better than humans and as Neville cradles Sam in his arms, her fur falls out and she lunges at his throat--and he is forced to strangle her to death. He buries her in the field where he grows corn, and goes to the video store to make good on his promise to speak to the mysterious mannequin in the adult section. Through tears he begs the mannequin to speak to him. And that sounds like it should be ridiculous, but it's amazingly heart-wrenching.

Unfortunately, from here on the film takes a slight dive from the great one-man show it's been up until now. Neville attempts to ambush the vampires that night on the dock, running several over with his car. However, there's too many and they finally overturn his car. The male vampire leans in toward Neville, teeth bared--only for a bright UV light to drive the vampires away. A dazed Neville hears a female voice desperately asking him where he lives and he tells her address, but warns not to let the vampires follow.

And then he comes to on his couch. His leg has been stitched up, Shrek is playing on the TV, and there are two normal humans in his kitchen. The adult woman is Anna Montez (Alice Braga!) and the young boy is Ethan (Charlie Tahan), though Ethan appears to be mute (at least for most of his screentime). Anna is making eggs and bacon from Neville's reserves, and advises she set some antibiotics by his plate for his leg.

Anna and Ethan were aboard a Red Cross ship harbored in Philadelphia, but unfortunately it was overrun. Apparently, only they survived the assault and have been on the move ever since--and they heard Neville's broadcasts. Unfortunately, he wasn't at the docks that day so luckily they had waited nearby and were able to save him from the vampires. Anna then mentions that their real destination is Vermont, since there's a colony of other immune survivors there. Neville gets furious at this, since he is sure that is a myth and he smashes his plate against the wall and storms away until he can calm back down.

When Neville comes back down, he obsessively quotes Shrek for a bit before getting down to business with Anna. She explains that on board her ship there were five immune people, but the vampires (no, stop saying "Darkseekers" just fucking call them vampires) got the others. She talks again about going to Vermont but Neville refuses. He has to stay and fix things, finally stop the plague once and for all.

Anna asks what happened to his leg, so he shows her the trap. He's mystified because he is sure the infected could not have laid the trap for him because they have no higher brain function, but Anna is not so sure. While they sit beside a koi pond, she asks Neville if the vampires could be evolving. Ethan then splashes into the pond, so Neville throws some food in to send the fish into a feeding frenzy. When Ethan observes that the water is cold, Neville realizes that temperature is the key.

Putting the female vampire on a bed of ice, he tries again. Anna brings him coffee, and then notices that one wall of Neville's lab is devoted to the human subjects he has experimented on--all of them dead. Anna begins to see Neville in a different light, but doesn't say much. After taking Ethan up to bed as the sun sets, Anna notices Marley's picture. Neville explains that they named his daughter after Bob Marley--whom Neville has been listening to off and on for the whole film--and discovers, to his horror, that Anna doesn't know who Bob Marely is,

Neville endeavors to educate her. Afterwards, they close up the shutters as Anna begs him to come with to the colony in Vermont. Neville insists there is no colony, and her admission that she knows the colony is there because God told her doesn't exactly sway him. He counters her "God's plan" bullshit with pointing out that KV killed 90% of the world's population, leaving only the immune and the vampires. And then the vampires killed those who were immune. As far as Neville is concerned there is no God.

And then, perhaps to prove Neville's point, there comes a keening scream from nearby. It seems that, concerned about Neville's chances, Anna didn't wait for full dawn to bring him home. Well, now there are dozens of vampires charging across the park toward Chez Neville. The UV floodlights in the park only slow them down, but the car bombs he sets off on the street seem to the job. Except, going upstairs to find Anna and Ethan gets him ambushed by the male vampire. Bitten on the neck and tossed around like a rag doll, Neville only escapes by stabbing his foe in the leg with a screwdriver. Well, more like this causes his foe to throw him down the stairs in a way that would kill an ordinary human.

Neville shoots at the male vampire with a hidden assault rifle,sets off another explosion, and then chases after the fiend when he scrambles up the stairs. He chases the male vampire out of a window, and then finds Ethan and Anna hiding under a dresser as another vampire tears a hole in the ceiling. Neville dispatches that vampire with another gun--but the male vampire is outside, calling down another wave of vampires. Their only option now is to flee down to the safety of the lab...

And here's where the movie completely falls to shit if, like me, you went to see it in the theater. I'll elaborate on that momentarily, but I will tell you right now that if you watch it on Blu-ray or DVD you want to be sure you have the "Alternate Cut" selected if you want the film to not completely piss all over the floor in the last few minutes.

We'll start, therefore with the alternate cut's ending, a.k.a. the ending that isn't infuriating. Locking themselves behind the plexiglass, Anna discovers that the vaccine is working, turning the female vampire into something more like her former human self. Unfortunately, then the vampires smash through the lab doors. Neville desperate, tries to reason with the vampires as they slam against the glass, telling them he can save them. However, the male vampire tosses the others aside and smashes against the glass, cracking it.

Then, to Neville's shock the vampire uses its bloody hand-print to paint the image of a butterfly on the glass. And suddenly, Neville understands, as he looks at the butterfly tattoo on the shoulder of his test subject. This whole time, the male just wanted the female back. To Anna's confusion, Neville unhooks the creature from her IV, which causes her to revert back to her vampire complexion. Neville has Anna open the door and he rolls the female vampire out to the others.

Calmly, as the male vampire keeps the others at bay, Neville gets a syringe and uses it to bring the female vampire back to consciousness. The mated pair are happily reunited, and the male gives one last baleful look to Neville--who apologizes aloud, with a sideways glance at the wall of photos of the vampires he's killed. The vampires depart, leaving Neville to realize that he is the boogeyman. You might even say, he is legend.

And then Neville, Anna, and Ethan drive across the one bridge that apparently wasn't destroyed. (Yeah, okay, that part is dumb) They broadcast to others that there is hope, that they are not alone. The End.

"Well, your tonsils look fine from here, but that wisdom tooth has got to go."

Unless you saw it in the theater, of course. Apparently test audiences--the same bastards who deprived us of Audrey II going on a Godzilla-style rampage in Little Shop of Horrors until the director's cut finally hit Blu-ray--couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that Neville was the real monster all along. This, of course, is the entire point of the damn novel and The Last Man On Earth got it right, too. Though, the oddest part is that this means the audience rejected a happy ending!

Sure, Neville driving happily into the countryside after realizing he has been callously torturing and murdering intelligent beings is a bit of an odd decision, but I can accept it. Meanwhile, the theatrical ending opts to have the vampires just have been mindless monsters all along--despite keeping all the obvious cues that they are more than that--and Neville becomes "legend" instead by giving his cure to Anna and then suicide bombing the vampires. It keeps the tragic ending the story has always had, while removing everything that actually made it mean something.

Oh, and the film's already heavy-handed butterfly motif in the theatrical ending takes a turn for the "Swing away" reveal of Signs, in a way it already borders dangerously on in the original ending.

Now, even with the fixed ending this movie is still heavily flawed. As I said earlier, the film takes a distinct dive in quality once Neville is no longer alone and making Anna (and Ethan) just other immune humans instead of vampires who gradually became human robs the reveal of a lot of its power, as well. And the vampires, my God, the vampires are just awful. There is no reason that the vampires had to be such awful CGI for most of their screen time, but somebody decided that was a good idea and they were wrong.

These vampires might be creepy in a Resident Evil game, but they never feel like anything but cartoons that have entered the real world. The ending still works in spite of the fact we're being asked to sympathize with game sprites, but the only way they could look sillier would be if they were all dressed in rubbery bat monster costumes. And calling them Darkseekers just makes it that much worse. At least "Hemocytes" almost sounds cool, but why is it so hard to just call them vampires? People in the real world certainly would.

Even with an ending that doesn't make you wonder why they bothered with the rights in the first place, the film is barely more than okay. But, damn it, I really want to like it more. For one thing, Will Smith gets to really stretch his chops as an actor for the first 2/3rds of the film. This film has to rely on him alone for that stretch of it, and he is more than up to the task. His performance is easily on par with the one Vincent Price delivered in The Last Man On Earth, which is high praise indeed. I mean, the aftermath of Sam's death is made even more heartbreaking by his performance.

It makes me really wish the rest of the film was deserving of that. It's not just that I feel the writing suffers a bit, but Smith's performance does as well. Unfortunately, when Anna and Ethan show up, Will Smith the actor becomes overpowered by Will Smith the Persona. You know exactly what I mean, I'm sure--the scenes of him teaching Anna about Bob Marley and quoting Shrek could just as easily have come right out of something like Hitch.

In the end, my favorite adaptation of Matheson's novel will always star Vincent Price. However, this film comes frustratingly close so many times it really makes me wish it could have actually pulled it off. In the end, I'm afraid it comes up just too short. It's definitely worth seeing, as long as you watch the alternate cut, but it will never be the horror classic it should have been.

Sad to say, it's no legend.


Today's review brought to you by the letter I! Hit the banner above to see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for I!

As a Western horror fan, it's rather inevitable that you end up being exposed to a lot of the same mythologies over and over. Vampires. Werewolves. Demons. You've seen it all before, and in a lot of cases they're stories with a very Judeo-Christian bent.

So I couldn't help being at least a bit intrigued when I heard about a horror movie about djinn or, per the title's spelling, jinn. Jinn are a far more common variety of mythological creature in Muslim and Arab cultures. Usually when they show up in Western stories at all they're rendered as evil genies, aside from their rather odd appearance in the Clash of the Titans remake as wooden wookies, but that's not entirely accurate.

To give an entirely brief history lesson on a mythology even I barely understand, jinn are of the third race of creatures created by Allah--the other two being humans and angels. Jinn are beings of fire and they have free will like humans and unlike angels. Jinn who turn to evil are "shaytan" (or, in a spelling familiar to readers of the original Dune books, "shaitan"), which are equivalent to demons in Christianity. Which you probably guessed, since it's a couple letters off from "Satan."

Clearly, there is a lot of potential in this concept and so few movies have exploited it. The only other horror movie that I've heard of involving a jinn is Born of Fire, a rather obscure Muslim horror film that I would really like to see one of these days. So a movie like Jinn has a pretty rare opportunity to shape the conversation about its subject matter.

Of course, that doesn't mean much if uses that opportunity to shape it like a giant turd, does it?

After text showing us a passage in Arabic, a passage in Hebrew, and lastly Psalm 23:4 in English (you know, the one Coolio quotes in "Gangster's Paradise"), we see a badass CGI sword with glowing crescent moon, star of David, and cross in the handle. This sword is used to roll open a CGI scroll, which seems like a waste of a badass sword. A portentous narrator explains the basic back story that I earlier pulled from Wikipedia for you. You know, three races: man made of clay, angels made of light, and jinn made of fire; free will; blah, blah, blah.

The scroll shows us an inkblot recreation of how the jinn ruled the Earth for thousands of years before man was given dominion, and that bit is accompanied by a figure that is unmistakably the Witch-King of Angmar from The Return of The King. According to the narrator, the sect of jinn called shaytan--or, as he says it, "shai-uh-teen" because he apparently thought he was narrating The Visitor--objected to this. I can't say I blame them, given it sounds like Allah made the three races, gave jinn control of the Earth and then said, "Hey, I want Adam to rule the world now. Hand it over to him." Well, the shaytan hold a grudge like a motherfucker and have lain in wait planning their revenge, but luckily there are bloodlines of magical guardians--I'm guessing human, but the movie is mum on the subject at this point--sworn to protect the world.

Cut to "India, 1901." A handsome man with beard and long hair we will later come to know as Jehangir Amin (Dominic Rains) washes his face in the sea, says goodbye to his horse, and strides into the forest. Night falls and Jehangir makes his way through the misty woods past dead rabbits hung from a tree, to a cabin that looks like Bruce Campbell ought to be cowering inside it. Inside the cabin, he finds a dark figure with stringy black hair seated cross-legged, with its head bowed and smoke seemingly drifting from its flesh. After a prayer (in a language I can't place, but I think is Urdu) to God to protect him from Satan, Jehangir advances shakily. Whilst reciting a prayer for protection, he tosses small boxes with protective emblems into the four corners of the room. He has come to demand the "Devil Worshiper" return the girl it has taken, though he politely tells it that it may keep "the body" since its soul has departed.

"I can get you some better hair, though, if you like."

The creature responds to this by floating into the air and basically asking Jehangir who the fuck does he think he is? It will be keeping the body, the girl, and Jehangir. A fierce windstorm kicks up, while Jehangir frantically chants a prayer or a spell. When the wind dies down, the body of the creature lies inert as his feet. He pulls out a white sheet to cover it--but the fiend was playing possum. It taunts him in English about his God deserting him before dragging him into the grave it conveniently had set up just for this purpose. Jehangir drops a small blue flask as he is dragged into the trap.

After a brief silence, Jehangir pulls himself out of the grave and successfully smashes the small blue flash on the forehead of his attacker. The reaction is dramatic to say the least as it bounces around the walls and ceiling. However, it does not kill the creature and it faces Jehangir to deliver the ol'"I'm going to hunt down all your descendants and kill them" threat before Jehangir draws his badass dagger and the two dive at each other...

Cue dramatic title card!

We return to the film in "Ann Arbor, Michigan  Present Day." We cut back and forth between establishing shots of what looks like a university campus and the interior of an apartment. (Dig the huge framed photo of a woman that looks like it was lifted from a computer game in the 1990s) In the apartment a man surrounded by comic book art draws a car in his office, while Jasmine Walker (Serinda Swan) cooks in the kitchen, and a third man walks up to their door carrying a wrapped gift. Jasmine answers the door and the mysterious man asks if he has the Amin residence. She corrects him that this is the Walker residence, but he still leaves the gift.

The cartoonist walks over to meet her and we see that the man, while clean-shaven and short-haired is also played by Dominic Rains--this is Shawn Walker. It's Shawn's birthday, so it's not that odd that he'd get a gift, even if the delivery of it was weird. Weirder still is that the box only contains a note reading "Happy Birthday Shan [sic]" and a VHS tape. Shawn jokes that it might be a dirty video, while Jasmine wonders how they'll even watch it. Shawn has a VCR in his office, though, but Jasmine has to go deal with their burning dinner.

Shawn suggests they go out to dinner--and then is distracted by the strange outline of a person in the window across from their apartment that appears to be staring at them. Jasmine observes it's been there for days and wonders if it might be a cardboard cut-out. Shawn, meanwhile, has a flashback to himself as a child (Armin Pirzada) seeing an inhuman face staring into his window...and then his mother being dragged into a terrible CGI fire by an invisible force. Shawn wakes up in fright from the dream while Jasmine comforts him.

Cut to an asylum as Ali Amin (Faran Tahir, a definite "hey, it's that guy!") mumbles to himself while scrawling over notepads in a ridiculously open room, where he is chained to the floor. (I don't think this is the accepted practice...) He hears something and then is joined by a man he addresses as Gabriel (Ray Park!), who appeared from nowhere. Gabriel assures him the package has been delivered. The two exchange standard "chosen one" dialogue about how important Shawn is and how they hope he believes the tape.

Shawn is meanwhile bragging to Jasmine as he washes his face and she folds clothes that he not only gets to design a car called "The Firebreather II" (which I'm sure fails to live up to its name), but he might be looking at a raise. Shawn brings up a prior conversation about having children, since they might have the resources now. So, naturally Jasmine reveals that she can't have kids, which she apparently never brought up before because she was afraid he'd no longer want to be with her. Considering his response is to mope like a little punk, she might have a point.

Shawn drives off to park and sulk by himself near some woods. He starts to call Jasmine and then decides against it...but then looks at the package. Cut to the video tape, as Shawn watches it in a screening room at his actual office. Note that it's a widescreen TV he's watching and the attempt to make it look like VHS footage is hilariously bad and the weird sound distortion just makes it even worse. The video is Shawn's father, Zaheer Amin (Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad, the film's writer/director) addressing him. You know the drill: sorry you had to grow up fatherless like I did, there are mysterious forces out there, seek out friends, I'm dead now, I love you, blah blah blah. Shawn then notices an action figure he used to play with is in the box.

As Shawn sits in his car trying to call Jasmine back, he hears something in the woods as a heavy mist rolls in...and then a jinn forms out of cinders in his backseat to just whisper, "Jasmine," and vanish. After something smacks his car, Shawn takes the hint and burns rubber the hell out of there. He gets home and finds Jasmine is missing and his apartment has been rearranged all sinister-like. He calls the cops, but it turns out to be a false alarm when Jasmine comes home--she didn't asnwer his calls because she went for a walk.

Later, after they've put their apartment back to normal, Jasmine tells Shawn, hey, it's okay if he wants to have a family more than he wants to be with her. Shawn, not being a total prat, tells her that's ridiculous because he loves her. They kiss and go to bed, but when Shawn goes to get orange juice after she's gone to sleep, he finds the apartment rearranged again. Worse, Jasmine walks in and points out that the "cardboard cut-out" across the way has just slowly lowered its hand--and then it tilts its head, and walks out of view. Boom! Lights explode in their house and they run down to the car just as Shawn gets a call from Gabriel telling him only to get to a nearby cathedral at once. The couple doesn't need to be told twice.

In the brightly lit sanctuary, Gabriel meets them and introduces himself. He explains that "it" can't get them in here. And then Father Westhoff (William Atherton!) joins them. Jasmine and Shawn want answers, of course. Gabriel starts by moving a pen to his hand with telekinesis and asks them how they would explain that. Gabriel explains that ghosts, demons, and poltergeists don't exist and then reiterates the origin story of the jinn because everything blamed on those mythical beings is actually the work of jinn. When Shawn scoffs that nobody has ever even heard of them, Westhoff points out a mention of them in the Old Testament. Westhoff then explains the jinn are jealous of humans and our imaginations, before laying on the expected, "There was a prophecy among the Jinn..."

Yep, Shawn is a chosen one, as you already knew. Jasmine and Shawn are about to leave when Westhoff hands Shawn the dagger from earlier in the film, which looks for all the world like a knock-off of Sting, complete with blue glowing blade, Stang, if you will, He tells Shawn to use it if he needs it and to remember that he is safe in any house of God. Oh, and he should ask the Walkers about "Father Westhoff. Me." So Shawn goes to see his adoptive parents, Owen (Dennis North) and Milla Walker (Milica Govich), in the middle of the night. He explains the evening they've been having and then gets to the part about "jinn." Owen says all he knows is that the priest who delivered Shawn to them told them to never let him not wear his necklace and it had something to do with jinn. And Milla confirms the priest was Father Westhoff.

This convinces Shawn he has to go meet his "friends" as Jasmine begs him not to go. He assures her that he will never leave her--and then an invisible force yanks her into the woods. Shawn gives chase, but falls into a drainage ditch and is knocked out. Meanwhile, Gabriel and Westhoff exchange dialogue about how something should have happened when Shawn was a baby and if he doesn't start to believe he's gonna die. Shawn then wakes up and is sucked into a culvert by a bad CGI sand storm. A jinn appears in the culvert and chases Shawn, before turning into the smoke monster from Lost to chase him through the woods. An invisible force grabs Shawn and hoists him up a tree so the jinn can float up to him and taunt him face-to-face.

This, naturally, is a mistake on the jinn's part as Shawn slices its face open with Stang and then plunges from the tree. He flees back to the church to regroup with Gabriel and Westhoff in a montage that is bizarrely rendered via a slow heartbeat sound effect accompanied by quick flashes of images. Westhoff explains that the jinn don't technically fear Shawn, as was earlier implied, but fear what he may become--the Kwisatz Haderach! Er, I mean, a being more powerful than jinn or man who would usher the world into a golden age.

Shawn flashes back to his childhood, seeing his father carry him to safety from the bad CGI fire and the shadowy jinn staring at him from the flames. Then Gabriel wakes him up because it's time to go visit the man who can give them answers. On the way, Gabriel explains that the shaytan are the big bads he'll have to fight and the last human capable of fighting them was Jehangir Amin, Shawn's great grandfather. He also comments that Shawn's car, a Firebreather, is really sweet and might be able to outrun even a jinn. They arrive at the asylum to visit Ali--and there's an admittedly amusing non sequitur as they pass through security where Gabriel reveals he actually made the pen move with a magnet earlier.

Ali is babbling when Shawn enters, but then immediately observes "he looks just like his father." Which is hilariously false. When Ali touches Shawn, the young man sees flashes of shaytan doing various wicked things--including one that looks like the Faun and the Pale Man in Pan's Labyrinth got merged. Montages follow, showing us Shawn's father's funeral, him meeting Jasmine, and asking her to marry him. Oh, and Ali now reveals that the jinn have come for him because Jasmine is pregnant--as impossibly as it seems. Apparently, the jinn always kill the father to test to see if the son that is born will be the chosen one and only a few bloodlines have the ability to become this chosen one.

So, wait, why do they kill the father? Why not kill the child? Why not wipe out those few bloodlines before they can breed another generation? Man, jinn are totally wasting that free will by being idiots.

Oh, and Ali then hollers that Shawn must pass the test (no, not putting his hand in a box of pain) or the "chilla" and uses the Vulcan mind-meld to transport Shawn into Jehangir's memory of facing the jinn in 1901. Shawn stupidly walks right up to the floating jinn, which helpfully just terrifies him rather than killing him. Ali reveals here that he is in an asylum because he failed his test and the jinn were able to enter his mind--oh and he's Shawn's uncle. The film then cuts to Shawn outside the cell asking Gabriel why no one ever told him his uncle was alive.

At any rate, it's hugely important that Shawn pass the chilla. Presumably this is why the jinn suddenly choose right then to begin possessing the other patients in the asylum. Ali hollers for Gabriel and Shawn to run, which gives Ray Park an excuse to start kicking some folks in the face, while Shawn flees. Outside, it's time for Gabriel to tell Shawn to run to the car and not to turn back no matter what, as Gabriel waits behind to distract the possessed patients--and his eyes glow. Gabriel then summons a glowing ball of energy that he slams into the ground and this releases a lot of lens flares and causes the patients to freeze in place. While a really inappropriate melancholy guitar plays over the scene, Gabriel pulls his own version of Stang anf goes twirling through the forzen inmates, punching the jinn out of them and slicing the CGI smoke with his dagger.

Ray Park does his best to sell this but holy crap does it look silly and the music does not help.

"The spice must flow."

Oh, and Shawn can't leave because his car keys are still back in the asylum office. So Gabriel closes his eyes to glowing magic the keys to Shawn--and gets himself Obi Wan'ed by the remaining jinn. Which is of course the only time the music makes any sense in the sequence.

Shawn drives away and finds Westhoff outside by a huge candlelit altar. He asks Westhoff what Gabriel was and, unsurprisingly, the answer is "Gabriel is a jinn." Well, it was that or an angel. Keep up, Shawn! Westhoff then tells Shawn he can hide, safely, in the walls of the church or he can end all this.

Shawn opts for chosen one training, so Westhoff takes him into a room and explains that passing the chilla allows him a window into the jinn's world. Westhoff explains that Stang's blade is metal forged in jinn fire (as is Shawn's necklace) that can cut through to the jinn world. First, he must pass the chilla which is a test of, you guessed it, fear. In this case, the personal fears of the sort you encounter in the Galaxy of Terror. First, Shawn will need holy water from Mecca; then a verse to trap the jinn. Then it is time for Shawn to find an isolated place to commence the chilla, where the jinn will come to him and test his mind.

The lead-up to this is the expected arming up montage, which the hilarious touch of revealing that Father Westhoff hides a sword in the cross on the wall of his rectory.Shawn sets up in an abandoned warehouse--though you'd think he'd want a place to test his fear that is not already creepy. The first test is a doppelganger of himself...whom Shawn promptly runs away from as it taunts him. He creates a circle of holy water around himself that deflects the jinn's attack, however. After the CGI smoke dissipates, he begins chanting the words to trap a jinn. The jinn respond by sending a doppelganger of Jasmine to torture in front of him, but he manages not to fall for it,

"Do you have any idea how badly this stains?!"

A ring of fire summoned by the jinn then segues into Shawn back in the cabin from 1901, only now the jinn he faces is a doppelganger of himself, Shawn wraps his necklace around his fist before asking the jinn what it wants. It naturally offers him the, "You could be a king," speech to tempt him to the jinn's side. When Shawn refuses, the ol'"there's a war coming" is trotted out. But Shawn does not leave his circle and the jinn is defeated when it charges at him. Passing his chilla somehow allows Ali to pass his, and Ali tears out of his straitjacket and rip the chain out of the floor, vowing to destroy the jinn that night.

As Shawn leaves the warehouse he is confronted by a jinn forming out of smoke. He dives into his car--which has Arabic writing all along the inside--and side-swipes the jinn. He then drives away as fast as he can, somehow outpacing the jinn. If you think this seems like a commercial for the car, you're basically right! Westhoff, meanwhile, prays at that outdoor altar in a black hooded robe while leaning on his sword. An unseen jinn arrives and Westhoff taunts that he's used his sword against many jinn over the years and goes on the attack. Shawn arrives at his apartment, now festooned with Arabic writings, and drops Stang when the jinn pursuing him slams into the door--but Ali is waiting in the apartment to pick up Stang and offer the obligatory "let's finish this."

In a rather clever touch, Shawn puts his phone on his iPod dock and plays a recording of himself repeating the anti-jinn verse, even as the invisible jinn toss his furniture around the room...and then one jinn forms out of CGI smoke, This creature, an apparition with fiery glowing eyes and crackling skin appears to be the one that killed Shawn's parents. Ali grapples with the jinn to distract it as Shawn fills bucket after bucket with water and splashes it on the jinn. He's using tap water, but I guess it's somehow being blessed because it does hurt the jinn a little.

I still don't think Star Trek: Deep Space Nine needed a "gritty" reboot, but I do like the new direction they took with Odo.

Of course it's not enough and Ali is mortally wounded. Shawn faces the jinn with Stang and--is backed into a corner and disarmed. He then gets choked unconscious and, again, faces the jinn in the cabin from 1901. Only now the jinn is woman holding a crying fetus. The fetus vanishes into smoke and he charges at the fiend with Stang drawn...and gets his ass handed to him, telekinetically, Look, I realize your chosen one has to earn his victory, but he's beginning to feel worthless,

Except, suddenly Shawn realizes the power was in him all along and uses the Force to call Stang to him and stab the jinn in the gut. He tackles the jinn and beats the crap out of it, calls a vial of holy water to himself and smashes it in the jinn's face...

...and he comes to in the present and grabs the jinn strangling him by the throat. He then dives out the window with the jinn into a...pool? Hot tub? Fountain? The little vial of holy water causes the pool water to burn the jinn as Shawn keeps it from climbing out.  It eventually dissolves and Shawn sinks to the bottom of the pool so his life with Jasmine can flash before his eyes. He then meets his father--before Gabriel pulls him out of the water.

Wow, way to undercut the character's earlier heroic sacrifice.

Gabriel force punches the water out of Shawn's lungs...and then holes begin burning through reality around them as jinn fly out of these holes. Most of them look like CGI skeletons with tentacles for legs and I will excuse the por CGI here because that's awesome. Suddenly Shawn's shirt has vanished (?!) so he can be extra sexy action hero-y as he grabs Stang and confronts the leader of the jinn, who looks like Marvel's Loki and Lord Zedd got glued together and set on fire.

"It's in my contract that I have to have at least one major shirtless scene."

Lord Zeddki warns Shawn not to take on all the jinn because he cannot win--so Shawn gets surrounded by glowing spheres and murders the fuck out of Lord Zeddki, The other jinn choose to respond to Shawn's "where's my wife" by fleeing back to their world. So Shawn turns to Gabriel to ask the same thing.

Why, she's back with Westhoff. See, Gabriel kidnapped her and they had been hiding her safely this whole time without telling him so that the jinn wouldn't know, either. What scamps, kidnapping his wife to make him risk his life and sanity to face down an ancient evil!

Flash forward to Jasmine and Shawn sitting at the kitchen table with their infant son and, hey, Ali isn't dead, either! The baby drops his pacifier and as Ali and and Shawn reach to grab it, the baby uses the force to pull it back to his mouth. Everyone looks at each other in stunned silence, baby laughs. Roll credits!

Oh, wait, there's a mid-credits scene where Gabriel and Westhoff talk about faith and then Westhoff hands Gabriel a pin of that earlier moon/star/cross symbol and tells him he's earned it. Sadly, the scene of them eating shawarma was deemed too relevant.

Oh, but there is an end credit cookie with the jinn in the cabin staring over its shoulder at the camera, muttering something unintelligible, laughing, and then leaning its head back down before the camera slowly leaves the cabin and the door closes. Well. Okay, then.

When I referred to Jinn as a turd in the beginning, I was overstating a tad. This isn't something so horrible as all that. No, this is like a new hamburger at McDonald's: it advertises something new with the flavors or condiments, but underneath that it's the same over-processed junk we've been scarfing down for decades--and somehow, biting into it and realizing that makes it taste worse than it otherwise might.

Don't misunderstand me, this is a bad movie. However, what makes it so bad is that it's so utterly generic. This is not really any different from the likes of I, Frankenstein in that it's an entirely forgettable supernatural adventure flick full of bad CGI with the same reheated chosen one plot we've seen before. What hurts is that it takes a concept so rarely explored in Western cinema and introduces it to us via a plot we've seen a thousand times before and a thousand times better.

For starters, you can already see one thing this movie does wrong right off the bat: we have two characters perform a heroic sacrifice so the hero might defeat the jinn. Both times, it turns out the characters we last saw choking on their own blood are perfectly fine! Actually, make that three if you consider that Westhoff going all, "I kick jinn ass for The Lord!" seems to be set up as a last stand before the movie forgets about it. I get that both Gabriel and Ali are more dynamic and interesting characters than Shawn, though that's not saying a lot, but the whole point of a sacrifice like that is that we don't want to see the characters die.

That's not the only story beat this film gets wrong. I mean, the nature of the shaytan sect of jinn means that we don't even get an actual central villain! The closest we get is maybe the jinn that killed Shawn's parents, but the film requires the audience to assume that that's the jinn he's facing in his apartment at the climax. Because the jinn possess human bodies and all speak in roughly the same voice, it's impossible to tell one jinn from another and the film is frustratingly vague on whether the heroes are even actually killing the jinn during their battles. It could all be the same jinn they're fighting or fifty. This renders the jinn almost utterly faceless and removes a lot of the potential interest they could have generated.

The acting in the film is rarely less than servicable. Obviously, William Atherton and Fara Tahir stand out as great performances because they're old pros, but nobody stands out as awful. I mean, as an actor Ray Park makes a great martial artist, but he's never stiff or awkward in delivering lines. In a way the lack of any bad performances kind of hurts the movie because just one blatantly awful performance like the Police Chief from Spawn of the Slithis could at least make this movie more than "mediocre."

And it's truly a shame, because this was an opportunity to introduce genre fans to the jinn. It's also probably the only Western films I can name where the hero is a bland Persian guy instead of a bland white guy. There are definitely things to like about this film...but whether due to a lack of experience on the part of the writer/director or meddling from the film's backers, it ends up falling back on the most tired of tropes. It's a real shame, and ends up making me actually like the movie less than if it was just another damn vampire or demon movie.

Although, you gotta love the reviewer for Variety who is quoted on the film's Wikipedia page as disparaging its "bogus mythos." First off, isn't that kind of redundant? Second, I wonder if he would criticize films like The Exorcist or The Exorcism of Emily Rose for their bogus mythos. Just because it's not based on Judeo-Christian mythology doesn't make it bogus. Sure, I'm certain the prophecy is made up for the film, but there are made up prophecies in Christian horror films, too.

Now I'm annoyed that I felt compelled to defend this lousy film.


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It may sound odd in a world where we have films like Tron: Legacy, but once upon a time it was not standard procedure to make a sequel to box office disappointments starring Jeff Bridges long after anyone would reasonably be expected to still give a shit. And yet, Tron was not the first film to get a sequel that tens of people were clamoring for.

The ten year gap between Dino de Laurentiis unleashing his con-game remake of King Kong (which was sold to audiences on the strength of a full-scale robot it's fairly clear even Dino knew was never going to actually be anything but worthless) and the sequel to it that nobody wanted should tell a potential viewer something right off the bat. Either Dino (and the previous film's director, the late John Guillermin) was just that invested in the plan but couldn't convince anyone else to be, or he was waiting for the bad word of mouth to die down in the hopes that audiences would suddenly decide they wanted to see another King Kong movie from him.

Sure, this was well before the internet could make the fallacy of that plan immediately obvious, but it's still rather like Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich deciding to release "Godzilla's Spawn" in 2008, while changing nothing about what everyone hated the first time around. If it was clear that the first time around nobody liked what you had to offer and you just barely made anything that could be considered a profit, why would you assume anything would be different ten years later?

Well, such pedestrian concerns were clearly beneath Dino de Laurentiis. And thus, his King Kong got a second chance to win nobody over.

The film begins by refreshing your memory of how the last film ended. This means we get to watch a mercifully truncated version of Kong climbing the World Trade Center, being gorily shot to pieces by military helicopters, and plunging off the towers to his completely unambiguous death. Bizarrely, de Laurentiis sprung for permission to use footage of Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange from this sequence, despite how irrelevant they will prove to the film at hand, but didn't bother to spring for John Barry's score--one of the only things that worked in the previous film. They're also using a completely different sound effect for Kong's roar that sounds like a guy going "Raarrrgh! Graarrr!", which is kind of a shame as I always loved that particular stock monster roar used in the first film.

We then roll the opening credits and the title card has always amused me, because a film like this needs a ludicrous, over the top title card to really sell the ridiculous concept. Instead, the title card doesn't stand out at all from the rest of the credits and if a title card could be bored, this one is.

"King Kong Lives. Whatever. Yawn."

Captions helpfully inform us we are at "The Atlanta Insitute, Georgia, Ten Years Later." And the film doesn't really bother easing us into its impossible-to-swallow concept, but rather goes right to the facehugger approach and rams the ovipositor down our throat. We see a lot of medical personnel bustling around the giant form of King Kong, clearly hooked up to life support machines, before Dr. Amy Franklin (Linda Hamilton!) walks past a giant artificial heart and enters a room to deliver exposition to a room full of bigwigs headed by Dr. Andrew Ingersoll (Peter Michael Goetz):

Kong has been in a coma for the past ten years. (At a cost of $7 million, which seems low even in 1986 dollars, honestly) They've been preparing an artificial heart to replace his real heart--you know, the one turned into salsa by those helicopters--but the process took too long. If it had been ready a year earlier, it would be okay but his blood has deteriorated too much. The great ape is now dying and without a transfusion, replacing his heart will kill him. Trouble is, no animal on earth can serve as a suitable donor for Kong. Franklin, a tear in her eye, explains that the only thing that can save him is a miracle.

[deep breath]

Okay, so the film is absolutely ridiculous already and it's not even ten minutes in. Unless Kong has some heretofore unknown Wolverine-like healing ability, there is no way he was shot hundreds of times and fell 1400 feet to the ground without rupturing every organ in his body and breaking every bone. And somehow he survived for 9 years in a coma with a shredded heart with no problem, but now he's going to die because one more year was too much? And why exactly has anyone been putting so many resources into reviving a giant ape in the first place? And to what end?

Better strap in, folks, it's about to get even bumpier, because we're about to get Dr. Franklin's miracle.

Somewhere in a rain forest, Hank Mitchell (Brian Kerwin) is leading a pack of mules. They pass by a macaw and he talks about jaguars before gently tossing a boa constrictor aside, but we'll later find out he's in Borneo--so this must be the movie that the makers of Anacondas: The Hunt For The Blood Orchid used as research. At any rate, he attempts to take a nap on some comfy leaves...only to discover there's a giant ape hand under them. Based on the angle when we see the ape it's attached to, Mitchell somehow overlooked a 40-foot ape crouched in front of him.

"I am not a chair, you puny rodent!"

The ape clearly has breasts, but Mitchell still tries to calm it down by saying "steady big fella." The ape, which I'll go ahead and call by her official moniker, Lady Kong, gives chase. Here you'll note they oddly try to have her move like an actual ape--hunched over and knuckle-walking--as opposed to just walking bolt upright as in the previous film. Well, she almost catches Mitchell before some natives appear out of the jungle and pump her full of tranquilizing blow darts. This both saves Mitchell and provides him a giant ape to make money with if he so chooses.

Now, a quick aside here: the movie briefly tries to explain away Lady Kong in Borneo by saying that Borneo and Kong's Island were once a part of the same landmass. That's absolute nonsense, of course. Even if it were, how long ago would it have separated? Unless Kongs can live for thousands or millions of years, somebody would have seen a breeding population of gigantic apes in Borneo. You can get away this on an uncharted island or even a plateau, but it does not work on an actual landmass.

Mitchell negotiates a deal with the Atlanta Institute, over the objections of Franklin when she hears that the ape is female. She is concerned that the female's presence will ruin Kong's chance of recovery after the surgery, but without Lady Kong they don't have the plasma they need. So Ingersoll makes the deal and Lady Kong is flown to Atlanta in a plane that is clearly too small to hold her. Seeing how Mitchell calms Lady Kong after they land, one of the technicians in the plane jokes, "You better be careful, I think that little lady has a crush on you."

As Mitchell addresses the swarming reporters, Franklin mocks his silly hat from afar. Now, Linda Hamilton is kind of sleepwalking though a lot of this movie, but she actually makes that line work. And then Ingersoll makes a comment about how having two giant apes will prove the eminence of the "Atlantic Institute." That's right, the movie has already forgotten the damn name of its fictional institute. Mitchell and Franklin get the expected "they dislike each other but set your watch for when they start banging" introduction, before Mitchell chases some reporters away from Lady Kong, haranguing them for disrespecting a lady. Hence, Lady Kong.

Well, Mitchell is later unhappy with the fact that, after drawing blood from Lady Kong, the Institute just stuck her in a warehouse, but he's assured that she will be moved to an enclosure they're building as soon as possible. (Um, so if there wasn't already an enclosure set up, what were they gonna do with Kong if they had saved him, then?) And then the heart surgery scene takes place, and it's hard to know whether to admire or mock the level of effort the filmmakers went into when planning the sequence out. Instead of a scalpel, Franklin uses a buzzsaw to cut Kong open. Her team have enormous forceps to hold him open and his heart is removed by crane before another crane provides the new artificial heart. There's some minor tension when the crane breaks but the operation is a success.

Cut to the next day as a rowdy crowd outside the Institute celebrates the successful operation on a giant ape. There's people in gorilla masks, a "You Kong, Me Fay" banner (which makes no sense, diagetically), and a young black kid waving a Confederate flag around excitedly. Jesus. A reporter then explains that until the enclosure for Lady Kong can be completed, the warehouse behind him has been converted "into the world's largest ladies' dressing room." That...that's not...oh, forget it.

Well, apparently dressing rooms in the 1980s were a lot kinkier, because inside we see Lady Kong is chained to one wall with a bunch of food piled beside her. That night, while Mitchell attends a party, Franklin stays by Kong's side--so she's there when he wakes up. Almost immediately, he smells Lady Kong and tries to unhook himself from all the wires and electrodes to break out and reach her. This almost causes his new heart to fail--cue a guy in an ape suit clutching his chest--and Kong has to be knocked out for his own safety.

And a brief word about the Kong suit in this film: I don't actually recall if the suit was new, like Lady Kong's, or if they got the Rick Baker suit out of storage. However, it sure looks like someone took the suit from the first film and melted the mask a little before using it.

"Dur, who, me?"

An angry Franklin confronts Ingersoll about the issue of Lady Kong being so close to her patient. Ingersoll actually gives in to her demands and they decide to work as hard as they can to get the habitat ready in 48 hours and move LAdy Kong. Mitchell and Franklin start warming up to each other already at this point--and then we cut to the hilariously misguided strategy Ingersoll and team have in place for moving a giant ape. Step one, give her a bunch of doped food but don't first make sure she actually eats it. (Though, to be fair, it's Franklin who shoots down the idea of using tranq darts instead) Step two, surround the giant ape with bulldozers and get it good and agitated. Step three, wrap it up in nets held by cranes.

Astoundingly, this fool-proof plan is going awry when a Lou Costello-style security guard who is clearly not paid enough gets the honor of witnessing Kong wake up, immediately break his chains, and then smash his way out of the skylight. The guard radios in to the warehouse before fleeing the scene, as Kong strides right on over. He smashes right through the warehouse wall and, in a "you've got to be shitting me" moment, Kong and Lady Kong's eyes meet while tender romantic music plays. No, I'm not making this up.

As Kong strides through the warehouse toward Lady kong, all manner of hell breaks loose. Rather like the scene where the military is fighting Ebirah at the refinery in Godzilla: Final Wars, there are a bunch of cars and pick-up trucks driving wildly around the inside of the warehouse (!) and crashing into stuff. Kong tears Lady Kong out of the net--hilariously causing a car to roll over lightly and promptly explode--and they make eyes at each other again. Dear God.

Goddamn it, another Gerard Butler romantic comedy? Oh, sorry, my mistake.

The security guards order the bulldozers to take Kong down, interrupting this nauseous--er, tender moment. It goes poorly. First, Mitchell jumps onto one bulldozer and kicks the driver in the head, causing him to crash into another damn truck. One bulldozer pokes Kong in the leg, so he flips it over and it bursts into flames! When the military guys start shooting at the apes with machine guns, Mitchell deliberately crashes a jeep into theirs. Amazingly, he does not kill any of them but one soldier almost goes under the wheels after the impact. Kong then swoops Lady Kong up in his arms and carries away as the music swells again.

For some reason, Kong's path makes him walk right through a transformer but I guess electricity must make him stronger like in King Kong vs. Godzilla, because he doesn't even notice as he continues carrying his mate into the countryside. Also, despite Ingersoll angrily yelling at Mitchell for keeping them from stopping Kong--to which Mitchell counters, melodramatically, that they would have killed Kong--no official charges will come against Mitchell despite the fact they obviously should.

In fact, the next day Franklin runs Mitchell off the road so she can talk him into joining her in her truck instead of his car to go find the apes. We also learn a military convoy has been tasked with tracking and recapturing the apes, under the command of Lt. Col. Archie Nevitt (John Ashton), and holy crap does this guy hate apes. Though he seems almost reasonable at first, talking about the plan to gas the apes to recapture them--but you can already see the revulsion in his eyes. There also seems to be a bit of an editing gaffe here because Nevitt asks about two civilians who broke through his perimeter, and he means Franklin and Mitchell--except they haven't crossed his perimeter yet.

Meanwhile, ugh, at "Honeymoon Ridge" the apes are romancing each other. Lady Kong playfully steals his tree branches, he taunts her with a live snake that would have to be a loose ten-foot python based on the scale of the animal in the suit actor's hand. They cuddle as Lady Kong tends to his wounded leg, and then Kong tries to pull a Licepick and Chill on her. Only after this do we see Franklin and Mitchell break through the military perimeter in pursuit of the apes. They end up having to continue on foot after losing the soldiers they drive past.

Seeing a metallic box, Mitchell asks if it's Franklin's makeup kit--lighten up with the blatant sexism, movie--and she explains it's a portable cardiac monitor for Kong's heart that can remotely adjust any functions as necessary to keep him healthy. Crossing a rickety wooden bridge over a waterfall, Frankling almost goes over the edge when the bridge breaks but when Mitchell hauls her in her only concern is for the cardiac kit. Until she notices that Mitchell cut his arm, that is, whereupon she tends to his wound so they can grow ever so much closer to banging.

They find Kong and Lady Kong by nightfall, To Franklin's amazed delight, Kong's heart is getting stronger. Mitchell, watching the apes cuddle, then realizes that they could save the apes by transporting them to Kong Island or Borneo--they'd just need the money for a reserve. The two then find a spot to camp for the night, but unfortunately Mitchell has the only sleeping bag. Being a gentleman, I guess, he tries to pitifully cover himself with a blanket while she comfortably sleeps in the sleeping bag. However, sensing that the bang timer has gone off, she decides to invite him in to the sleeping bag...

No, I have no idea why she needed to make him freeze first.

Boy, if I had a nickel for every time this happened when I went camping, I'd...have to actually go camping.

The next morning, Mitchell wakes up first and sees that Lady Kong is all by herself--Kong is gone. They both leap out of the sleeping bag, giving us a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of Linda Hamilton's breasts--ten-year-old me felt it was necessary to inform you of that. At any rate, Kong had gone to pick some trees for his Lady, but now the military arrives. Helicopters fly over, spraying gas, and Lady Kong is knocked out. Hilariously, Nevitt immediately pulls off his mask to issue orders despite the gas not having cleared. You'd think enough gas to knock out a 40-foot gorilla would kill a human, but he's fine. Lady Kong is secured with nets as Kong arrives.

The gas oddly does not knock Kong out the way it did his mate, so Nevitt orders concussion grenades be used until Lady Kong is airlifted away. Kong watches helplessly as sad music plays--and then a squadron of flamethrowers goes after Kong. So, wait, why is Nevitt cool with capturing one gorilla but wants to kill the other? Did his wife leave him for that handsome gorilla in Japan? At any rate, a storm starts to kick up as Kong flees up a nearby peak with the army in pursuit. Mitchell and Franklin steal a jeep to follow.

As Nevitt calls the helicopters back, lest they be lost due to the wind, Kong throws a boulder and crushes one jeep--after the soldiers dive out to safety--in an effect that looks like it was borrowed from A*P*E. Sadly, Kong will not be giving anyone the finger. Mitchell and Franklin are captured just as movie lightning and sheets of rain roll in. Kong is trapped at the top of a cliff over a raging river. And I do have to give this movie credit--its optical composite shots don't look nearly as shitty as its predecessor's. At any rate, Nevitt gives the other to shoot Kong dead. However, Kong leaps from the cliff in a bit that is accomplished via an actual stuntman in a gorilla suit leaping off a very high ledge. So, kudos to that guy.

The raging river sweeps Kong away, and he bashes headfirst into a rock, Blood fills the water as Nevitt observes that not even Kong can survive that. Sure, he survived being shot to pieces and plunging off the tallest building in the world, but a little head wound will surely do him in. Indeed, the cardiac unit flatlines as Franklin and Mitchell despair...

An undisclosed amount of time later--dialogue later says it's been "since last summer"--we see Lady Kong is being held in what appears to be a missile silo. Food is regularly dumped in to her, but the film sadly doesn't address where the massive amounts of ape shit are going. Also of note is that one of the base guards watching her is played by Mike Starr. Franklin and her colleague finally gets a written authorization from the Secretary of Defense to see Lady Kong, and we learn that Mitchell is in Borneo.

Reluctantly, Nevitt allows her to see Lady Kong. Glancing at the moaning gorilla, Franklin declares that Lady Kong senses that Kong is alive. Franklin says she feels it, too, when Nevitt scoffs, so he angrily cuts their visit short. Franklin's colleague points out that Kong would have been found by now, and for that matter where would he find a source of protein sufficient to sustain him?

Well, we get our answer in an obvious miniature swamp at night as Kong grabs a baby caiman--which morphs into an adult alligator in close-up--and snaps it in two before eating it. Look, would it really have been that hard to make a rubber alligator? The difference between an adult alligator and a baby caiman is incredibly obvious. They're different shapes and colors.

King Kong and The Sewer Gator, coming this Fall on Fox!

Kong then carries a bunch of dead baby caimans--which i hope are as rubber as they appear--over to a cave in the swamp to eat them. Now, given the huge pile of bones next to him, you'd think someone would have noticed the huge drop in the local alligator population. Especially since I do believe alligators were still endangered at this time. Kong then hears Lady Kong howling for him and stares longingly at the moon--which is actually a beach ball, but to the movie's credit you can't tell in this scene.

Mitchell arrives in Atlanta and greets Franklin with the news that he has secured a preserve in Borneo for only $1.3 million. Franklin has to break the news of how awful Lady Kong's captivity is to him, including that she isn't eating or sleeping and they aren't being allowed to see her. Mitchell demands they try to see her right then, but that just ends up getting Mitchell a rifle butt to the stomach when he tries to rush the guards.

Well, Lady Kong's howls finally bring Kong out of the swamp to rescue her. He first wanders into a town, peers into a window at a couple making out, and then causes a "comedic" panic amongst the town folk as they flee in all directions and Kong confusedly wanders onward. This triggers the expected posses of rednecks eager to take Kong down. Meanwhile, Mitchell and Franklin fly into the countryside in a single engine plane to follow Kong's trail. They land and head out on foot.

So the pair are just too far away to witness what happens when Kong bumbles into an ambush set up by a group of redneck hunters in a ravine. The hunters dynamite the walls of the ravine and bury Kong up to his neck. They take pictures with the ape, but then decide to have a little fun with him--starting with trying to feed him booze. One of the hunters wisely objects that if they're gonna kill Kong then they should do it, but they shouldn't torment him. In fact, he draws his rifle on the others when they grab logs from their fire--but he's quickly disarmed and they foolishly go ahead with poking Kong in the face with their makeshift torches.

You guessed it, Kong bursts up out of the rocks. Two of the hunters are killed instantly, including the guy who was very much anti-Kong-torture. Kong easily grabs one of the others and snaps him in two. The leader of the hunters almost escapes up the cliff face, but Kong knocks him down--and eats him. Kong then pulls the guy's baseball cap out of his teeth, which as a kid I thought was supposed to be an internal organ for some reason. He then walks away, but clutches his chest in pain--the exertion having damaged his artificial heart, apparently.

"No, God, please, no!I don't know who killed your organ grinder, I swear!"

Mitchell and Franklin end up in Kong's path, but as Franklin tries desperately to fix Kong's heart, Mitchell is forced to grab her out of the way at the last second--and Kong stomps on the cardiac unit. Franklin declares that since she couldn't complete the sequence, Kong's heart is not going to last a day. After Kong departs from view, they come upon the aftermath of the hunters' trap and disgustedly surmise what happened. Franklin despairs because now that Kong has killed there's nothing to stop the army from killing him. Mitchell disagrees because he believes there is one thing that could.

Of course, I love the idea that Kong killing four people will mean that he's going to be put down by the military--but the military didn't object to bringing him back after he killed easily dozens of people in New York ten years earlier.

Well, the military does roll out the next day, with Nevitt eagerly leading the offensive. A major tries to inform Nevitt that he's still being ordered by the General in charge to capture, not kill. Nevitt orders the major to pretend that the channel the orders are coming in on is malfunctioning. Yeah, you show that gorilla what happens to home wreckers!

Mitchell and Franklin fly over a town that is desperately evacuating as Kong charges through it. Komedy ensues as Kong stomps on an expensive car and gets hit with a golf ball on a golf course. So I guess only part of the town evacuated. Mitchell and Franklin fly over the military units waiting for Kong and then land next to Lady Kong's silo. Somehow the entire day has passed, because Mitchell declares it will be dark soon and they can get in then.

Indeed, night falls shortly and somehow Kong manages to walk right through the squads waiting for him, unharmed, by tossing up a lot of dust. I'm sorry, dust screen or not, he's still 40 damn feet tall. He is nearly impossible to miss. He tosses a few vehicles around, including Nevitt's, before continuing on his way. Nevitt hops aboard an armored transport and orders them to pursue.

Meanwhile, Mitchell and Franklin manage to get past the outside guards. They then knock out the inside guards after using Franklin's beauty as the most obvious and ridiculous bait this side of having her just show up nude. Seeing Lady Kong's distended belly, Mitchell is horrified. However, Franklin points out that this isn't because of her mistreatment--she's pregnant! The pair climb into the silo with her and activate the elevator and open the hatch at the top. Here we see the beach ball moon again, but this time it is definitely obvious.

Unfortunately, Mike Starr wakes up and stops the elevator and begins to close the hatch. Lady Kong panics and then grabs Mitchell so he can play Fay Wray for a bit. Then Kong grabs the hatch doors and tears them open--hilariously, when Kong then pulls Lady Kong up out of the silo, you can see the "moon" wobble behind him. Mitchell is carried along since Lady Kong won't let go of him, and Franklin climbs out of the silo and steals an army truck, just ahead of the oncoming squads of soldiers.

Kong and Lady Kong crash a barn dance that turns out to be a family reunion, because nothing is funnier than hicks, right? Mitchell gets set down just as Franklin pulls up, and then Lady Kong falls onto the barn and goes into labor--just as the military arrives. Despite Franklin's desperate pleas that they'll hit Lady Kong, Nevitt orders his men to open fire. Kong is once again blasted to pieces, but he gives almost as good as he gets and punches several vehicles into fireballs, before grabbing Nevitt's vehicle and tossing him into a convenient nearby cemetery.

Nevitt doesn't give up, though, and tries to kill Kong with his side arm--only to be fist-smashed into a grave. Having killed his adversary, Kong now collapses beside the barn and, hilariously, we are given to interpret this as his heart giving out. Yeah, being shot full of holes was no big deal--it was that shoddy heart of his.

"Those bullets...would be...no problem...if only...I had eaten...less bacon."

Naturally, Lady Kong gives birth right then and--well, things are about to get even stupider. See, when we first see the baby that Lady Kong is holding, it's a gooey-looking prop that looks about like a newborn gorilla should, albeit the size of a grown human. However, after Mitchelll implores her to show Kong his son, she sets the baby down on her belly and--suddenly it's a man in a gorilla suit with not a speck of goo on him. It's also completely able to move around on its own, walking and all--unlike every baby primate ever. Jesus, who decided that was a good idea?

The music and acting all try to convince you that this is sad and triumphant as Kong reaches for his mutant offspring, but even as a father now this does nothing for me. I'm too distracted by how silly the Baby Kong is--the little monster even has a full mouth of teeth! Anyway, Kong touches his freak of a son and then dies. Thus, one could argue, rendering the title of the movie a stupid lie!

Cut to Borneo, where Baby Kong swings on vines like Tarzan and his mom smiles at him. They smile at each other. The way the masks contort in order to smile renders it creepy. The End.

"Look, I had a long day of fighting dinosaurs and swatting planes--can we just cuddle tonight?" "You were with that tiny blonde again, weren't you? You pig!"

Really, making a sequel to King Kong that involves a living Kong without resorting to cloning or time travel is an impossible challenge. However, if your film is going to start off with a premise as crazy as "Kong was in a coma for ten years," you need to run with it. King Kong Lives really doesn't quite run with it as much as it needs to.

However, I don't want to sell this film short. It is absolutely bonkers in just about every way it can be. I mean, try to imagine the thought process that saw someone decide that what the world needed was a romantic comedy starring giant gorillas facing off against rednecks. I don't know what I expected out of a movie called King Kong Lives when I rented this as a kid, but it sure as hell was not that.

It's especially strange when you consider that this film posits a King Kong that is an out and out hero. Even its original tagline is "America's biggest hero is back..and he is not happy." The thing is, nobody thinks of King Kong as a hero. I mean outside of King Kong Escapes and the cartoon it's based on, up to this point Kong had never been a full on good guy. Sure, in King Kong vs. Godzilla he's the "good" monster, but he's still considered a menace and does way more damage than Godzilla. (Which we'll address at a later date) And in the previous film, even though we are supposed to sympathize with the beast, Kong still stomps on innocent civilians, deliberately kills Charles Grodin, roughly throws a woman who is not Jessica Lange onto the ground and then drops a train on her, before going on to kill several soldiers and destroy at least one helicopter during his last stand at the World Trade Center.

We sympathize with Kong, even in the original film, because he is a wild animal who was ripped from his home against his will and ran wild in a world he doesn't understand. He's put down because there's no other options and he causes a lot of destruction and death in his wake. He doesn't do it out of malice, he's just an animal. Yet, here, Kong is anthropomorphised to a ridiculous degree. It actually has the odd effect of making him less sympathetic because it's so ludicrous.

Suddenly Kong is exceedingly gentle unless he is provoked by a direct attack. And, indeed, until the final military battle the film takes ridiculous pains to make sure Kong doesn't kill any of the soldiers attacking him. It doesn't really fit his character and the lengths they go to try and make us root for Kong ring inauthentic every step of the way.

However, while I can fault the film for its attempt to humanize its giant gorilla star, I can't fault it for the amount of giant gorilla action it features. This film has easily the highest ratio of Kong and/or Lady Kong scenes of any King Kong film. And unlike its predecessor, I can forgive it for not featuring a single dinosaur. Now, of course, that doesn't mean the Kong action is necessarily good, just because there's a lot of it. For one thing, there's the fact that the military battles are all fairly perfunctory, and in order for Kong to have any chance of winning the military never even rolls out actual tanks for him to fight.

I do have to give the film credit for trying to have its giant apes do a lot of their walking in actual ape fashion, full on knuckle walking and all. And as I said, the optical effects are a lot more consistent then the previous film, but they're still not always great. However, holy hell is the miniature work in this film often awful. Just look at the inexplicable decision to use a small live snake and a live baby caiman to indicate full grown animals that would look nothing like that. Then there's the pitiful dolls that stand in for humans in any shot with the suits carrying humans.

So the effects are a mixed bag, usually skirting the edge between competent and bad. The story is ludicrous and usually wildly misguided. The music is not awful but sure is bizarre since it fits the film's intent but the intent is bizarre. The acting is pretty uniformly unimpressive--from the normally charismatic Linda Hamilton delivering most of her dialogue with a sleepy disinterest to John Ashton's scenery chewing human villain. Nobody stands out as exceptionally bad, but the overall performances make the previous film look like a full company tour de force.

In the end there is no question that this is an awful film. It's honestly hard to say if it's worse than its predecessor, however, since they're both astounding failures in their own ways. It definitely does its damnedest to try being worse, though.

That does not mean that I hate this film, though. Far from it. This film is a glorious piece of shit. King Kong Lives is one of the ideal examples of a "good-bad" movie. For this film fails on multiple levels, over and over, and yet even when you've seen it multiple times--as I have--you can still find a new way to be surprised and entertained by its idiocy all over again.

Everyone needs to see this movie, frankly. It's that terrible.


Today's review brought to you by the letter K! Hit the banner above to see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for K!

The trouble with werewolf movies isn't just that they are often terrible, but that they don't seem to come out out all that frequently. Presumably it's because they just require more resources to make than a cheapo vampire or zombie film. So I rarely hear about a new werewolf film at all, much less one that gets my attention.

So in 2014 it was a rare thing to hear of two that got my attention. Sadly, the one that really got me excited was WolfCop. But there was another film, a more serious one that I heard of briefly and then forgot until it turned up on Netflix. And then I heard more positive buzz about it and decided to check it out.

Happily, it turns out that 2014 did give us one really good werewolf film after all.

We open at a headstone vendor, as blind Vietnam veteran Ambrose McKinley (Nick Damici) is examining headstones, with his seeing-eye dog, Shadow, at his side. He ends up not finding anything he likes and tells the owner he'll be back. He still has time, after all. Ambrose's son, Will (Ethan Embry!) is waiting at the car. It's an awkward drive since Ambrose is rather terse with his on and chides him for texting while driving, which Will is amazed he can even tell he's doing. Will was just texting his wife, Anne (Erin Cummings!), to let her know that he'll be late for dinner.

Their destination currently is Crescent Bay, the retirement community that Ambrose is moving into. The guard at the gate is busy watching what sounds like porn and barely even acknowledges Will before letting him in. Ambrose half-jokingly chides at Will for calling the guy an asshole--he doesn't need his son to turn the folks he'll be living with against him, he can do that on his own. Will assures his father that the place is nice, but then asks why Shadow is freaking out and whimpering. Ambrose tells him it's because Will has his mother's scent, which is the first time he's mentioned her since the funeral, apparently.

They pull up to the house, apparently ahead of the movers. The house is therefore totally empty as they walk in, and as he feels along the wall, Ambrose discovers some strange scratches in the dry wall--and what seems to be a broken off claw. Going next door, he bumps into a garage sale run by his neighbor, Delores (Karen Lynn Gorney). The two hit it off almost immediately, somewhat flirtatiously. Ambrose asks her to identify what he found in the wall, and she could only sugegst it's some kind of a claw. Will then comes to collect his father, as the movers are pulling up and Will has to get going.

While he's trying to unload things that the movers have left, Ambrose is intruded upon by the community's welcoming committee: Emma (Caitlin O'Heaney), Gloria (Rutanya Alda), and Clarissa (Tina Louise). It does not go well, thanks to Ambrose's prickly persona and their stuffy attitudes--especially when they see he owns a loaded revolver. Having thus alienated the rest of the neighborhood, Ambrose settles in for the night, feeding Shadow and shutting all the windows.

It's a full moon that night, and as Delores answers a call from her daughter, Victoria (Karron Gaves), who's calling to try and get out of their plans tomorrow, we get our first glimpse of the werewolf as it walks past the window behind her. This was when I knew I would like this movie, because the first shot of the werewolf is not accompanied by a loud shock sting and there's no attempt made to draw your attention to it, aside from its position in the frame. It's a wonderful touch and somehow the fact that you could totally miss it without paying close attention makes it that much better.

As Ambrose discovers the movers didn't bother to put his mattress in the actual bedroom, he also hears an odd noise from outside and realizes Shadow is acting strangely. Meanwhile, Dolores shoots down her daughter's suggestion of getting her another dog to keep her company because the last three have run away. Oh, but she still has the doggy door--and something big and hairy is trying to come through it just now. When it doesn't fit, the beats smashes the door in. Hearing the commotion, Ambrose pounds on their shared wall to ask if Delores is okay.

She's very much not okay, as there is a werewolf disemboweling her at present. And when it hears Ambrose pounding on the wall, it comes for him. As Ambrose tries desperately to find his gun, Shadow attacks and wards off the werewolf. Unfortunately, the werewolf wins and mortally wounds Shadow--but it takes off when it sees Ambrose's gun. Unfortunately, Ambrose didn't have a phone set up yet, so he has no choice but to put poor Shadow out of his misery.

"He's behind me, isn't he?"

The next morning the movers come back, having forgotten something the day before. As they argue about whether old people or patchouli smell worse, they discover the scene of carnage. Ambrose is still sitting on the floor with the dead Shadow on his lap and begs for help, and then they find Delores next door.

Will and Anne go with Ambrose to the animal hospital. Anne chides Will for leaving his father alone in a new house without a phone. Meanwhile, the veterinarian asks Ambrose if he has any idea what attacked him. She thinks bear or mountain lion, but he tells her it smelled like a dog--and indeed, the vet does think the wounds look vaguely like a dog's teeth. She mentions that these animal attacks seem to happen every month at Crescent Bay, which gets Ambrose's attention. The vet attributes it to them being right on the edge of the woods, in an isolated community. However, Ambrose is already making connections in his mind.

To Anne and Will's chagrin, Ambrose insists on taking Shadow home to bury him and declines their offer to take him to get a new seeing-eye dog. Back home, the police have arrived on the scene. Delores' daughter, Victoria, is there and all a mix of anger and grief. Ambrose makes quite a sight of himself, walking up to her and the officers with blood all over his shirt. He gives his condolences to Victoria, who then--fighting back tears--says she should have taken her mother out of Crescent Bay as soon as she heard "the stories" about it. This also gets Ambrose thinking.

The cops inform Ambrose they don't need a statement. They've declared it an animal attack and are fine with leaving it at that. It happens in a place like this, on the edge of the woods with elderly folks who can't defend themselves. Ambrose gets started on digging a grave for Shadow as Anne walks up and offers her sympathies. She mentions off hand the fact that it's a full moon, and a final piece of the puzzle falls into place for Ambrose.

Yep, he's guessed it already. What attacked him and killed Delores and Shadow was a werewolf. With a month until the next full moon, Ambrose decides he he is going to figure out who the werewolf is--and end it.

"That dog really tied the room together."

Normally, I'd keep going but if a movie has a big switcheroo or a mystery that I feel needs to be fresh going in, I'm rather reluctant to ruin it so I'll actually be stopping my synopsis early. I do want to mention that the film also features Tom Noonan as a priest and a nigh-unrecognizable Lance Guest as a friend of the priest who helps transport the parishioners as needed. The identity of the werewolf is actually spoiled fairly early on, but I'd still rather not reveal it, nor spoil the ending.

From here on in, the movie is about Ambrose becoming more involved in the community with the aim of uncovering the werewolf's identity. And, ultimately, it builds to a climactic confrontation where Ambrose prepares himself for a siege and he finally gets to face the werewolf down for a fight to the death.

The middle stretch of the film, therefore, might test the patience of some viewers. It's very character driven, with none of the werewolf action that precedes or follows it. However, while I don't have the greatest attention span, I don't have much sympathy for those who can't handle it. There's a lot of great stuff there and the mystery and Ambrose's preparations for siege are fun to watch--as well as the preparations of the werewolf, once it knows it's been found out.

Really, it's hard not to see this film as a more straightforward Bubba Hotep and I'm far from the first person to make that comparison. Both films focus on an elderly community nobody gives a shit about being preyed on by a supernatural creature and both have some things to say about the poor treatment of the elderly in American society. Of course, Bubba Hotep managed to be an incredibly touching and affecting story, despite its completely gonzo concept. Late Phases, quite frankly, does not succeed nearly as well--but that does not mean it doesn't try its damnedest.

A lot of the film's success is definitely down to Nick Damici, who has to carry the majority of the film. He makes a surprisingly sympathetic asshole, someone angry at the world and too far past caring if he rubs people the wrong way. He also does a pretty decent job of playing a blind character, although that brings me to the first of the movie's two big weaknesses.

First, the climax is set up with the promise of the really neat idea of Ambrose setting up traps and, well, melee weapons to take on the werewolf. Except his plan then ends up revolving around the use of a sniper rifle (!) with silver bullets. I see no problem with him using silver bullets and silver shotgun shells, but something that requires as much visual acuity as a sniper rifle renders the climax kind of silly.

Second, the film falters in its werewolf when we finally get a good look at it. On the one hand, I have to give credit for a lot of practical effects use. The transformation effects are also similar to WolfCop in that they involve the werewolf basically tearing its way out of its human skin, which works a lot better here. However, the werewolf itself is...well...

If the film was a horror comedy, this design would fit because it's a mix of ugly and cute. This isn't a horror comedy, though. For a movie like this, your werewolf needs to be scary. It needs to be intimidating even when we get a good look at it. So the fact that the werewolf looks more like a were-bunny undercuts all of its menace. It's like a cat gremlin with an underbite.

"Haha, real funny guys, now where's the actual werewolf?"

I am all for trying to be unique with your werewolf design, but this is not the way to go with that, at all. Having most of the werewolf vocalizations be stock monster roars doesn't go far with making it seem less silly, either.

That said, if a movie is good enough it can overcome even a weak monster. Happily, Late Phases is very good. While it's unlikely to bump any candidates off my unofficial "favorite werewolf films of all time" list, there's no denying it's a damn good movie and I highly recommend it.


Today's review is brought to you by the letter L! Click the banner above to see what the other Celluloid Zeroes did for their L.

One of the pitfalls of explaining science to non-scientists is that it requires simplifying (or "dumbing down," if you're cynical) very complex concepts. This is especially frustrating because this means that it often leads to a lot of people thinking they understand the concept when they really, really don't.

Evolution is one such concept. If you haven't seen the following illustration or some variation, you must have been living under a rock or some oppressive Christian parents who want to keep trans women out of bathrooms but are okay with their sons being sexual predators:

As illustrations of basic concepts go, it's satisfactory, but it presents evolution as a linear process. If you wanted to illustrate the process of growing from a baby to an adult, it'd be roughly the same layout. And so the concept of evolution is understood thusly: simpler forms of life gradually evolved into more complex forms of life, until it culminated in humankind!

That's not really how evolution works, however. I'm not going to go into the full details here because this is not a science lecture, but evolution is not a linear process at all. You can't trace one long straight line from single-celled organisms to humanity, despite what illustrations in elementary school textbooks may say. Nor does it necessarily require millions of years. In fact, it's a near-constant process--if it wasn't, nobody would ever catch a cold or the flu. Evolution is a constant state of organisms adapting to their environment through mutation--whichever organisms are born with the best mutation for their environment get to go on and have more mutant offspring, and so on.

Yet popular culture continues, to this day, to willfully misunderstand the process of evolution. Science fiction is especially guilty of this, often leaning too hard on the "fiction" part. Thus we have stories that treat evolution as a predetermined course that you can move forward and backward on. You end up with stories about people "de-evolving" back into their more primitive ancestors--even if those ancestors weren't ancestors at all!

As you may have guessed, today's feature is one such example. I'd cut it some slack for being from the 1950s, but even then we should have known better, damn it! (Incidentally, you know you're a certain type of nerd when you're watching the credits and go, "Hey, Whit Bissell is in this!")

The film opens as Jimmy Flanders (Troy Donahue) swings by his frat house in a refrigerated truck to pick up his German shepherd, Samson. Jimmy is making a delivery to the biology department. At said department we are introduced to a series of "life masks" showing the various hominids leading up to what is listed as "Modern Man." One of those life masks is for "Piltdown Man", which was recognized as a hoax in 1953. We're maybe 2 minutes in and the film has already declared it can't be bothered to have its science even within 5 years of being up to date.

Well, those busts notably end with a plaque for "Modern Woman" that is missing its mask. We are then introduced to our mad scientist for the evening, Dr. Donald Blake (Arthur Franz), as he looms into frame and jokingly intones, "Ah, the human female in the perfect state: helpless and silent." He is not, as you might expect, looming over his latest victim but rather a woman currently covered in the plaster for the mold of her life mask. After threatening her with tickle torture, he helps her out of the mask and we discover she is his fiancee, Madeline Howard (Joanna Moore), who is definitely too good for our hero but you know how that goes.

After thanking her assisting him, Blake trails off into the expected musings about how the human race is doomed if we can't shake off the barbarous instincts of our ape-like ancestors. Madeline teases him about shaking off his instincts for their plans that evening, though you'd think she should be joking that he ought to embrace them. Their canoodling is interrupted by Jimmy pulling up in the ice truck and hollering that the delivery is already thawing out. Blake explains to Madeline that Jimmy has brought a specimen, which he mentions is the fish from Madagascar that her father let him order.

Jimmy notices that some water is dripping out of the truck and that Samson is drinking it. Jimmy drags Samson away by the collar, commenting about the "bloody water" since it's impossible to tell bloody water from regular in black and white. Blake excitedly joins Jimmy in the back of the truck as they open the box to reveal: the coelacanth within! Hilariously, the prop makers seem to actually have based the fish on an actual reference photo of a coelacanth, but apparently decided it didn't look prehistoric enough, so they added some horns on its snout.

"Yeah, I got a rhinoplasty! Heh heh...look, my jokes haven't changed in millions of years, okay?"

Predictably, Blake begins explains to Jimmy that the coelocanth has had "no change in millions of years" and is a "living fossil" that is somehow "immune to the force of evolution." He also, less predictably, pronounces the creature's name as "sill-uh-canth", though this is better than poor Ann Turkel in Humanoids From The Deep talking about "kole-uh-canth."

Of course, there's so much wrong with this I don't even know where to begin. For one thing, coelacanths are not "living fossils" because they are not the same species as were known previously only in fossil form. Modern coelacanths are bigger, for one thing, and have adapted to a deep water environment when their extinct ancestors preferred shallow waters. Also, it is impossible to be "immune" to evolution. Species may not need to evolve because they have found themselves at the most ideal niche, but that doesn't mean they stop evolving at an almost imperceptible rate. Just look at modern humans--the average human today is taller than the average human a hundred years ago.

However, coelacanths need to be immune to evolution for our plot to get into gear. Which it does when Madeline steps outside and discovers that Samson has suddenly transformed into a saber-toothed German shepherd! Madeline does not notice the fake fangs in the dog's mouth and thus is shocked when the normally gentle Samson attacks her. She manages to get back inside and slam the door in time for Jimmy to intervene and get his arm savaged for his trouble. Blake throws the tarp from the truck over Samson and...well, I'm not sure what he does with the bundled up dog because we then fade to a doctor's office, where Dr. Oliver Cole (Whit Bissell! Whoo-hoo!) is treating Jimmy's arm.

We do know that Samson hasn't been put down because Jimmy asks if his dog has gone mad in the present tense. Dr. Cole doesn't have an answer for that because it doesn't sound like rabies--still he wants to take every precaution, which oddly includes rubbing acid on Jimmy's wound! Cole advises Blake to examine Samson in his lab, and that Cole's nurse, Molly Riordan (Helen Westcott) will come by to get a saliva sample. Blake just requests that Molly pick it up by 7:30, as he has to help Madeline chaperon a dance that evening at 8.

In his lab, Blake toils over beakers, flasks, and a microscope--while the saber-toothed Samson snarls at him from a cage in the corner. Molly arrives just then and Blake hands her the saliva sample, which she avers that Cole won't want until morning. Blake tells her it's pretty clearly not rabies, since Samson doesn't exhibit any of the signs beyond being vicious. Blake has finally noticed the damn tusks, which he observes are odd.

"You know anything about paleontology?" he asks her. "I know that very attractive men study it," she replies while eyeing him hungrily. Blake gives her a look that seems at first to be disturbed, but then he quips that she should be careful because Samson is in no position to protect her. Dude! You have plans with your fiancee in half an hour and you're trying to rape-flirt with a hot nurse? You deserve your inevitable comeuppance.

Molly's face momentarily looks as suitably horrified as it should be, given he just implied that if she doesn't stop flirting with him he'll assault her, but she gets even more horrified when Blake keeps poking his hands just out of Samson's reach so he can point out that the dog has teeth like those of ancient wolves. Of course, if he means dire wolves, I'm afraid their teeth weren't really any more impressive than a modern wolf (or German shepherd), they were just larger animals overall.

Blake apologizes for frightening her, but then says that she rather frightens him. Molly looks offended as he goes to answer a phone call, but really she should just decide that Madeline can have this creep and go flirt with someone who's not a total ass. After assuring Madeline he'll make it on time, Blake goes to find Molly in the next room standing over the coelacanth and asking what it is. Blake explains it's a coelacanth and then says he better get it in the fridge before it spoils.

You don't say! What the Hell, Blake? It's been hours and you haven't found two minutes to put away a rare specimen before it's ruined?!

Blake enlists Molly's help in opening the fridge while he--picks up the coelacanth by the tail and mouth. Yes, he's carrying a fish with notoriously sharp teeth by the mouth. After making a joke that it's a relative of our ancestors, he sets the fish down on the table inside the walk-in fridge. In a totally shocking twist, he manages to get the thing's jaws closed on his hand and draws blood. "First time I was ever bitten by a fossil," he quips. It's not a fossil, you cretin!

Anyway, rather than dealing with the open wound on his hand he decides to have Molly--the person who could help him bandage his hand up and all--help him push the crate full of bloody coelacanth water out of the room. He plunges his wounded hand right into the water, of course, so I see we have an Idiot Picture going here. This is confirmed when, over Molly's chiding, Blake is sucking on his wounds when he walks back in. She asks where his first aid kit and he replies he doesn't have one! You work in a lab, you total nincompoop!

Well, Molly has one in her car and leads him out to get it. She flirtatiously jokes that he needs a nurse to take care of him, but then notices he's acting woozy and agrees to take him home right away. (Like she wasn't angling for that already) He's completely passed out when they arrive at his house, so Molly lets herself in to use the phone to call Cole. She is waiting for the other nurse to fetch Cole when a hairy hand opens the front door. When a shadow falls over her, Molly turns and freezes before letting out a horrified scream...

Meanwhile, Prof. Gilbert Howard (Alexander Lockwood) arrives home to greet his daughter, Madeline. The two briefly talk about how his "future son-in-law" was supposed to pick her up to chaperon the dance, before Howard is talking about how Dunsfield College having a coelacanth is going to really boost alumni donations and publicity. And in 1958, he's probably right. At any rate, a call for Madeline that results in the kind of movie phone conversation where the person we can't hear must be a cattle auctioneer takes place. Madeline learns that couples are showing up and the house mother isn't there, so she needs to get to the dance even if Blake hasn't shown up. Howard advises her to stop by the science building, since Blake may have lost track of time.

When Madeline arrives, she gets a false scare from Townsend (Hank Patterson), the night watchman, who came by to investigate the refrigerated truck that's still sitting open on the street. He lets Madeline in to the lab, where they discover that Blake is nowhere to be found. They also discover the Samson has returned to his normal, friendly self after Townsend ignores Madeline's warning and sticks his hand in the cage. He attributes this to his innate goodness with dogs, not being aware that we are clearly following werewolf rules here.

So Madeline goes to Blake's house instead. Finding Molly's car probably doesn't help her mood--the registration is helpfully stuck to the convertible's sun visor--but she forgets all about that whhen she gets inside and finds the living room looks like Keith Moon has been through it. She phones the police before she hears Blake groaning nearby. She goes in the bedroom and discovers that it is also a shambles and--horror of horrors--Blake has torn up the signed headshot she gave him! Is Madeline a model or actress or something? Because I don't think signed headshots have ever been a typical part of American courtship,

She follows the groaning to the veranda out back and finds Blake on the ground, nursing a typical lycanthropic hangover.We get an actually very effective shock set-up when she helps Blake to his feet and we see before they do that Molly is behind them, hanging by her hair from a tree branch with staring eyes and her throat bloodied. When Madeline sees she screams, which brings the two cops that have just arrived running to the back of the house. Blake's white, though, so nobody ends up shot. Instead, Blake mumbles to Madeline that he doesn't know how Molly got there as the cops hoist her down instead of waiting for forensics.

Lt. Mike Stevens (Judson Pratt) takes Blake's statement inside. He naturally doesn't buy Blake's story about not remembering anything after cutting his hand, and then Sgt. Eddie Daniels (Ross Elliott) brings in a tie clip found in Molly's hand. Blake recognizes it as his own, but Madeline tries to pretend he's never worn it before. So apparently she's either not an actress or not a good one. Blake thanks her for lying to the police, but still owns up to it being his clip and is therefore taken into custody.

Stevens turns the tie clip over in his bare hands, helpfully covering up any fingerprints it might offer, as Madeline insists Blake is innocent. Sgt. Powell (Phil Harvey) then calls Stevens over to show him the fingerprints on the torn photograph and a handprint left on the glass patio door. They not only don't match Blake's, they appear to be deformed. So, to Madeline's rather macabre delight that means Blake can go free after he's done being questioned.

Free to commit further crimes like lecturing his students about the coelacanth having been stablized for 200 million years. Humans are not stabilized, he claims, and unique among all living creatures can choose the direction their change can take. Um, what? Apparently man can "destroy all spirituality and reduce the race to bestiality"--a poor choice of words, there--or choose to advance beyond our wildest dreams. After he dismisses his class with that nonsense, Sylvia Lockwood (Nancy Walters) comments to Jimmy that sometimes Blake scares her--but Jimmy just wants to know how Samson is doing.

Blake shows them to the back office, where Madeline is watching Cole examine the dog. Obviously, dogs don't just get over rabies, so Cole is stumped. Blake proceeds to make himself look crazy by commenting about how Samson is a throwback with huge fangs--fangs that are no longer there. Cole waves it off as Blake's work getting the better of him, but Jimmy sure doesn't seem amused. Blake decides to take his mind off all that by showing Madeline her life mask. He uses this as another excuse to rant about how close humanity is to barbarism. We get it, already!

Madeline takes her leave of Blake after asking if there was anything between him and Molly. That really seems like a question that could wait, to me, but she is satisfied when he says Molly was attractive but he totally wasn't boning her. When she leaves, Stevens arrives and asks Blake, "One more time, are you sure no one hates you?" You mean, besides this reviewer? Over Blake's objections, Stevens advises he is going to assign Daniels as a bodyguard for him in case whomever killed Molly makes another attempt on his life. He then leaves Blake with the curious fact that Molly wasn't badly injured at all, in spite of the bloody corpse we saw earlier. No, what killed her was heart failure: she died of fright.

Daniels gets bored pretty quickly of watching Blake let the coelacanth rot on a table, but he's the one who notices a dragonfly has landed on the fish. I'm not sure what it's doing, but I'm pretty sure dragonflies don't feed on dead fish, so I don't see why Blake says there's no harm done because he has to dissect it, anyway. Blake sees something odd on microscope slide so he urges Daniels to follow him on a quick run to Cole's office. On the way they meet Jimmy and Sylvia, whom Blake tells to meet him at the science building to discuss Samson.

On the way there, though, Sylvia and Jimmy hear an odd buzzing. Sylvia spots the source of it, a shadow passing a street lamp. But Jimmy and Sylvia decide to have an intimate, tender moment near a tree before a really bizarre false scare involving the male half of a necking couple on the other side of the tree gropes her head. Look, if you're making out and your partner is able to put his left hand past you and over a tree branch to his right, something has gone awry. Jimmy and Sylvia laugh it off, though.

It turns out that Blake wanted to show Cole crystallized bacteria, which he has never encountered before even though he's heard of crystallized viruses. But Cole just sees bacteria, and when we see an insert shot of the bacteria, we see what are clearly sperm. Also, are they suggesting bacteria evolved from viruses? Because I'm pretty sure microbiology doesn't actually work that way. Anyway, feeling condescended to by Cole, Blake decides to tell the doctor that the infected bite on his hand was caused by being bitten by the coelacanth and then storming off without explaining that bizarre statement. At the science building, Blake is snippy with Jimmy and Sylvia but agrees to let them take Samson, while Daniels goes to the police call box to report in.

Howwever, when they go inside to get Samosn, the buzzing comes again. There's a knocking at the window and Blake raises the blinds to discover--a Meganeura hovering outside the window! (Sadly, not a Meganula, however) Sylvia's scream frightens it off momentarily, but Blake opens the window to let it in so he can capture it. Sylvia and Jimmy are not exactly down with this plan, but the Meganeura immediately flies in and alights upon the mask of a Neanderthal. And I have to say, it's a very mobile puppet--even if the wires manipulating it are clear as day on DVD.

"Oh my God, are you James Coburn? I'm a huge fan!"

Blake brings the coelacanth out as bait because apparently he's just not yet done ruining that speciment. The Meganeura lands on the fish and Blake and Jimmy catch it in a fishing net that Blake has in his classroom for some reason. However, the net starts to rip, so Blake stabs it with a knife. "That's too bad," he says to Sylvia and Jimmy, "I wanted it alive. But you're my witnesses!" He means to the fact that he just killed a damn Meganeura (which he identifies correctly by name), but it sure sounds like he's saying that they can testify he killed it in self-defense.

It's hear that Blake figures out that feeding on the coelacanth made a regular dragonfly transform into this prehistoric creature, and he also finds out that Samson drank the fish's blood. He pretends like he thinks it's a crazy notion, but tells Sylvia and Jimmy as they take Samson home not to tell anyone so he can make the announcement himself. Naturally, we see that Blake stabbed through into the coelacanth, and as he carries the Meganeura over to his desk, he drips blood into his pipe.

Well, faster than you can say, "Put mutagenic coelacanth blood in your pipe and smoke it," Blake is getting woozy off the buzz. Before his wavy-lined vision, the Meganeura morphs back into a regular dragonfly and then Blake's hairy hand smashes it in a rather messy composite shot. Daniels hears the lab being trashed and rushes in, gun ready. He narrowly avoids the life mask of a gorilla being chucked through the glass of the lab door, and then finds that Blake has gone out the window leaving a shoe behind. Daniels pursues, firing once into the air to try and get the fleeing man to stop.

Glad to see police were always careless about discharging their firearms around unarmed people.

Failing to catch Blake, Daniels goes to the call box to let Stevens know that Blake is gone and he chased some kind of maniac from the scene. He doesn't notice the noir-like shadow advancing on him as he talks, until it's too late to do anything but stare and then scream into the phone as a hairy hand grabs his face.

"I can't talk now, I'm being shadowed!"

Well, it's too late for for Daniels when Stevens gets there. As the cop is loaded into the meat wagon, Powell points out to Stevens that the killer left ape-like footprints. This puzzles and frustrates Stevens, who is of course unaware that Blake is coming to nearby--barefoot, with a torn shirt and a serious case of disorientation. When the footprint makes the front page of the paper the next morning (ooh, look, "New Petitions Against Tax"!), Blake confidently tells Stevens, Howard, and Madeline that those footprints weren't left by a man but by a creature that should be extinct.

Howard thinks the footprints are faked, but Stevens is unsure that they are. He is certain that whomever left those prints and killed Daniels wants the police to blame Blake, but the fingerprints--which are not fake, he points out--don't match any known criminal in the police, FBI, or DMV databases. Blake for his part puts a call in to a Dr. Moreau in Madagascar (boy, that guy gets namedropped a lot, huh?), which...goes nowhere.

Blake is busy poking at the coelacanth when his class shows up and he tells them class is canceled. Jimmy hands Blake his pipe, saying he found it where Daniels was killed. Blake shrugs it off, but then Madeline shows up and points out that her father is already mad that Blake is telling the press about a murderous "subhuman" running around killing people, but he'll be really steamed if he finds out Blake isn't doing his damn job, Blake goes all mad scientist on her, blathering about disproving theories he was hired to teach. (Er, come again?) He won't rest, he says, until he finds the killer.

Dr. Moreau then returns Blake's call, and Madeline runs to tell her father that her fiancee is making calls to Madagascar on the company dime. Howard calls Cole to tell him to meet him at the science building. He's going to force Blake to take a leave of absence, and you'll note he's most upset about the calls to Madagascar at this point. Blake ends his call and is then confronted by Howard and Cole over the $400 phone call and is suggested a leave of absence until the police catch the killer However, they do grant Blake an audience to explain to them how this "subhuman" came to be.

Blake shows them coelacanth plasma, which he tells them not only "resists evolution" (the...the plasma resists evolution?), but when administered to another organism it temporarily reverses evolution. I...what? How exactly does that work? Cole points out that this is ridiculous because natives near Madagascar have been eating coelacanth for centuries with no regression. Although, actually nobody eats coelacanths because they taste awful and the heavy oils in their flesh basically make eating coelacanth a great way to, shall we say, bring the revenge of Montezuma down on your head. I think I'd prefer turning into an ape man.

Well, Blake has an answer for that: the coelacanth he received was bombarded with gamma rays (!) to preserve it for shipment. "It's the latest thing," he declares. Sure, okay. Blake goes off again on how much humanity wants to turn back into the beast before Cole asks how he thinks someone could have discovered how to turn themselves into a beast this way. And then, the film suddenly turns into a bit from a Zucker and Abrahams parody as Blake begins to realize that he's the monster but tries not to let on that he knows: first by saying the first transformation was clearly an accident caused by cutting themself on the teeth (Blake stares at his hand) but the second hand to be deliberate (Blake looks at his pipe in dawning realization and sniffs the plasma).

When Stevens and Powell arrive, Blake even more hilariously backtracks his earlier declaration and decides he'll take that leave of absence after all. Howard offers his cabin. Blake naturally uses this a chance to record a confession on tape that he knows he must be the murderer and is about to deliberately turn himself into the monster. He sets up the 1958 version of a selfie to record his transformation,

Of course, Jimmy and Sylvia chose just then to go to Madeline and tell her about the Meganeura being real. Naturally, she decides she has to go to the cabin. (Thanks a lot, Jimmy) However, Blake is already being annoyed by another extraneous character as a knock at the door turns out to be Tom Edwards (Richard H. Cutting), a nosy forest ranger. Look, movie, we're an hour in and you barely run 80 minutes. Now is not the time to introduce more characters! This isn't exactly a body count picture, after all.

Blake gets rid of Edwards after being told that the ranger's station is just down the road, and proceeds to inject himself with the plasma. So now it's time for him to cross dissolve into--an ape man! And, oof, what a sorry sight it is.

Oh, sorry, that's Mark Jeffries, former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch. My mistake!

It's not that the mask itself is bad, but it doesn't blend to the actor's face at all and when the actor inside moves his mouth you can plainly tell the mask is an immobile bit of rubber. Not only does it ripple unnaturally, but you can see his lips through the mouth of the mask. I suppose the poor quality shouldn't shock me. This film's make-up was done by Bud Westmore, who had previously worked on director Jack Arnold's The Creature From The Black Lagoon. You'll note that the monster there was one of the most convincing ever put to film, but this film has a key ingredient missing: Millicent Patrick. Patrick was instrumental in the design of the famous Gill-Man, but apparently Westmore was furious at what he perceived as Universal giving her sole credit for the creature's design and made it his mission to drive her off of Universal's make-up staff.  If that is true, then it explains quite a lot about how the quality of effects could plunge so drastically.

Maybe I'm giving Patrick's talents too much credit, but it wouldn't be the first or last time a man threw a hissy fit because a woman did his job better than he could.

Well, at any rate the ape man responds to the sight of the tape recorder by flipping the table and sets off the various cameras, which he then also tries to smash before grabbing a hatchet to play with it, Before you know it, he's smashed the window and escaped. Meanwhile, Madeline has been driving over to the cabin and blows past Edwards at his station. She almost runs Blake down, but when she sees his mutated face she drives off a ledge and is knocked unconscious by the time her car rolls to a stop.

Yep, it's time for the monster to fulfill the "carrying the heroine around" part of his contract. Well, after he scares off Edwards, of course. Edwards runs back to his station to fetch his gun and call the police. When Stevens gets the call about a half-man, half-ape, he doesn't waste any time loading himself, Powell, and Howard into a police car and speeding to the cabin. Edwards, for his part, goes to the cabin to fetch Blake--but of course finds an empty cabin. It just so happens that the monster has set Madeline down near the cabin and she wakes up, sees the ape-man, and screams her lungs out. Edwards arrives in time to see her faint again under the beast's rough advances, but his attempt to sneak up on the monster is ruined when he steps on a branch. He succeeds in putting a bullet in the creature's shoulder, but the creature succeeds in throwing the hatchet--and burying it in Edwards' face!

Well, shit, I guess this kind of is a body count movie.

Madeline wakes up and flees to the safety of the cabin, while her pursuer passes out from its wound. However, when Blake appears behind her in the cabin, wearing the same clothes and featuring the same shoulder wound, she doesn't put two and two together. When Blake develops a photo of himself after transforming into the beast, she comments, "He's wearing your clothes," but she still doesn't get it. Look, I realize it was 1958 but was it really necessary to make the heroine this fucking stupid?!

Blake pockets the photo when the cops arrive at the cabin, though. He tells them that the beast is not dead but he knows where it's hiding. He tells Madeline he loves her and begs her to stay in the cabin, which she does. He then grabs a syringe of coelacanth plasma and after he leads the three other men into the woods, he takes Howard aside so he can make sure Howard understands wants going on as he turns into the ape-man one last time. Howard's pleas for the cops not to shoot is not listened to and Blake is gunned down. Stevens and Powell turn out to be almost as dumb as Madeline when they ask where Blake is and Howard points to the corpse as it turns back into Blake. The End.

And note that, at this point, poor Madeline doesn't even know that her fiance is dead. Way to make the heroine totally superfluous, movie!

All in all, I have to say that Monster On The Campus isn't actually all that awful. It tells very much the same story as the earlier B-Movie about de-evolution, The Neanderthal Man, but is definitely a better film overall. While the monster make-up isn't all that much better--both are terrible masks--the story is a bit more focused and it lacks the hilarity of the plush sabre-tooth tiger head. Though I naturally find that an endearing trait about the earlier film.

Obviously, as I've stated the two biggest hurdles to a modern viewer is that the science is painfully awful and the hero is a total jackass. The former is actually kind of part of the film's charm, as it makes it a hilarious experience. The latter, on the other hand, I honestly can't tell whether it was intentional or not.

After all, a hero who's a sexist and makes jokes about rape as a flirtation tactic? In 1958 that was probably expected to be an endearing trait.

Still, Blake can be a seriously unlikable jerk and I think we would be expected to feel that way about him even in 1958. After all, he is a scientist, right? Though God knows what kind of scientist, since he has the office of an anthropologist but is tinkering with coelacanths and talking about paleontology and microbiology when he's not ranting about the fundamental flaws of humanity. So, basically, a Movie Scientist.

The other problem, one could argue, is that the film's title is a tiny bit misleading. Yes, Blake is working at a college and yes he does transform and go on the rampage on the campus...once. The first time he transforms at home, and after he transforms the second time he ends up at a cabin many miles from any campus! The title, and the poster for that matter, seem to promise a fiendish beast menacing coeds--but the creature never attacks any students!

In the end, I find this film a fascinating slice of cheese with some hilariously dumb science on display. However, while it's definitely no lost classic like some of Jack Arnold's other genre films from the 1950s, it has a lot going for it. For one thing, it has an earnest adherence to tropes that were well-worn even by 1958--in a later film, this might feel reflexive or self-referential, but here it's rather charming. Yes, it's a boilerplate mad scientist story with a bit of the Hollywood werewolf mixed in, but that somehow adds to the charm.

Would I recommend it? To a genre, fan, absolutely. To a more general viewer, I'd point them towards an actual classic like The Creature From The Black Lagoon or The Incredible Shrinking Man, just to name a couple of the director's better films. Naturally, I'd also recommend this to a scientist, since they'd no doubt laugh themself silly.

And while I'm making recommendations: seriously, don't pick up a coelacanth by the mouth, folks.


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