Before I even get started, let me set a few things straight about this film. The movie Yonggary has kind of a twisted past.   Although billed as a remake of the 1967 South Korean monster movie Yongary, the title and country of origin are really the only things the original film shares with its 1999 counterpart.  In an attempt to help the movie appeal to a broader international market, the film was produced with an English-speaking American cast.  The film was initially released in South Korea and internationally in 1999 but a second version of the film, with additional scenes and “improved” special effects, was released in 2001.  This remastered version, retitled Reptilian or Reptile 2001 in the United States, is currently available on DVD, and is the version that I am reviewing.

Now, with all that out of the way, this movie opens with a team of archaeologists exploring a cave and some of the most horrific line deliveries in recorded history. Throughout this picture the acting ranges in quality from stiff and unnatural to hammy and laughable, but what we get inside the first five minutes of screen time is absolutely terrifying.  Thankfully, the acting never gets any worse than this and most of these guys in the cave get torched after one of the diggers hits a glowing rock with a hatchet. A couple of years later, one of the surviving archaeologists from earlier, Dr. Campbell, (Richard B. Livingston) is heading an excavation to unearth a massive dinosaur skeleton. A photojournalist is dispatched to the sight who’s name escapes me because he serves no purpose to the plot other than to introduce the audience to other, more important characters. He meets Campbell’s sometimes British assistant Holly, (Donna Philipson) and Campbell’s old and seemingly insane associate Dr. Hughes. (Harrison Young) Hughes has come to warn everyone that the skeleton they are uncovering, which he calls Yonggary, will destroy mankind. He apparently learned this from some unexplained prophecy written in hieroglyphics in that cave from the opening scene. Of course no one buys this prophecy crap, not even I do and I watched the whole movie, and Dr. Hughes is escorted out of the camp. It turns out that there have been a lot of ominous and plot convenient fatal accidents happening around the dig site, but Dr. Campbell acts like a monomaniacal ass hole the entire time and tries to play them off as run-of-the-mill industrial accidents and threatens people to keep quiet about them.

At the same time the military, represented here by the very fictional United National Defense Agency, is having trouble with some missing satellites. Turns out there’s a big, badly rendered alien spaceship special effect orbiting the Earth, and the hand puppet aliens inside, that also speak English, are here to wipe out humanity and conquer the planet. For what reason, we don’t know, but they intend to do this thing by reanimating the giant fossilized skeleton. The evil insectoid aliens, because there are no good insectoid aliens, fire a massive energy beam down to Earth that resurrects Yonggary and puts muscle and skin back on him. In typical monster movie fashion, Yonggary, who is being controlled by the aliens via a diamond shaped device on his forehead, is set loose to destroy humanity. Let me just recap that. The aliens came to Earth two hundred million years ago, found a giant monster (apparently the only one of its kind) fitted it with a brain control device, then let it die and waited for hundreds of millions of year to come back to Earth, which they knew would eventually be controlled by the human race, and then bring a fossilized monster, which has just recently been conveniently unearthed, back to life to kill all humans. That is their master plan. Why not just return to Earth while humans are still living in caves and conquer the Earth then? How about invade Earth with more than one battleship and wipe out civilization yourselves? But it’s this flimsy premise that finally gets us to the giant monster wrecking stuff portion of the film. Anyway, after the fake army throws helicopters and jets at the monster to no avail, they turn to a newer, more high-tech option to take the monster down. That option is to send in guys wearing jet-packs and fly around Yonggary like tiny, foul mouthed gnats and shoot at him with assault rifles. The strike vehicles with missiles and large caliber guns didn’t work, so they send in smaller, less well armored troops with smaller guns to finish the job. How does this make any logical sense? Needless to say, there are a lot of holes in this plot. It’s just to bad that the giant monster they’re shooting at is so bland, unoriginal, and badly made. If I was director Shim Hyung-rae and I saw these lifeless, rubbery, completely unnatural looking creature effects during production, I would have scrapped those scenes and re-shot them with a man in a foam-rubber Yonggary costume. This computer generated abomination actually looks worse than the worst guy-in-a-rubber-suit effect.

On top of all the acting, writing, and special effects problems, this movie is so full of cliches and scenes that seem almost completely ripped off from other films that I had to watch it twice just to find them all. It follows all of the giant monster movie tropes that have been cultivated over three decades of kaiju cinema. Aliens start out in control the creature to use as a super weapon to crush humanity. The monster runs a muck in a major city. All of the major human characters are either scientists, in the military, or in the news media. And, after Yonggary is freed from his alien overlords, those aliens bring in another monster so the two beasts can slug it out in a major metropolitan area. However, the film seems to take more inspiration from certain Roland Emmerich movies than it does from classic monster films. The aliens bare a striking resemblance to the invaders from Independence Day, and there are several scenes involving fighter pilots firing missiles and spouting jargon that sounds like it was lifted right out of that film. The director also makes the mistake of trying to recreate several scenes from the 1998 American Godzilla, including Yonggary dueling with a squadron of helicopters and many instances of missiles failing to lock on to the creature and striking nearby buildings instead. I’m sure one could make a wonderful drinking game out of this movie. Every time the old crazy guy mentions something about the supposed prophecy that no body cares about, take a shot. Every time you see a bad composite image, take a shot. Every time Holly forgets to talk with her British accent, take a shot. Every time there’s a scene where the stupid aliens talk about something that we just saw happen on screen thirty seconds ago, take a shot. Come to think of it, where is my bourbon? I need to drink the pain away.

This piece of shit is the most insulting installment in the Chainsaw franchise. Without question. And if you disagree, you are wrong. I really hate Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation.

Honestly, the specifics of the plot do not matter. It’s the same basic shit. A group of kids get lost in the backwoods of Texas for whatever reason and they run across random strangers that all end up members of the same murderous cannibalistic family with a different last name, depending on what sequel we’re in. This time the family’s last name is Slaughter. W.E. (mentioned as the only apprehended family member to stand trial in part III’s narration ) is in this one, which takes place in 1994, which contradicts ONLY THE ENTIRE PREVIOUS TIMELINE. I fucking swear to God, did no one see how sloppily this franchise was put together? Also, yet again, Leatherface is here, but with a completely different family. Also, once again, there is narration referring to the events of the first film, which I have come to the conclusion only serves to piss off the viewer. So, more death, more chasing with a chainsaw.

This really is a horrible film. The writing is terrible. The acting is really not all that bad considering what they had to work with. Leatherface is now a cross-dressing, screaming retard. The most unbelievably fucked up part of this film is that after we are subjected to the most shitty, sacrilegious (in comparison to the original) pile of trash we have ever seen thus far, we are handed some bizarre storyline where the family is part of some international alien government program and is assigned to kill and/or torture people. In fact, this is but one of many families across the world that do the same. I would rather this film just showed a title card that read “fuck you” for the entire runtime, than have me watch the events of this film.

All of the above makes it almost impossible to tell the story coherently which it most certainly was not. Especially with the outer space storyline explained in the 2nd half of the film. It was like two pieces of shit from different farm animals sewn together into one giant, smelly, differently textured dung log.

I should mention that Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey are in it. Not that it matters.

There is not one thing in this film that is enjoyable. It also serves no purpose in the entire series. This could, and should utterly not exist and it would make no difference. It is the antithesis of the original. I cannot swear enough to describe how much I hate it.

In an effort to shy away from the mainstays of Christmas movies for this marathon, I turned to Netflix to deliver a nice package of obscure holiday fun. What it delivered was quite possible the most painful movie I have ever experienced. Fuck you movie!

Elf Bowling is apparently based on a computer video game of the same name that I have never heard of. In the game, Santa is pissed at his unionized, striking elves and apparently uses them as bowling pins. Seeing 82 minutes of that would have been far more entertaining. In a bastardized retcon of the origin of THE jolly old fat man in a red suit, Santa transforms from the captain of the Stinky Toe into ol’ Saint Nick that we know him as after his crew stages a mutiny and pushes Santa and his brother Dingle Kringle overboard into the freezing ocean waters. After thawing, Santa enters into a contractual agreement with the native elves on the North Pole to deliver the toys made by the elves as long as working conditions are happy. Dingle is tired of being upstaged by his brother and concocts a scheme with a couple of penguins to remove Santa from power and relocate the toy-making operation to Fiji.

To be honest, if I wasn’t in a crunch for a Christmas movie today, I would have turned this shit off in the first ten minutes. For a CG-animated movie made just a few years ago, the animation was embarrassingly bad. Being that I had never even heard of this fucker before watching it, I wasn’t expecting Pixar-like animation or story telling. But this literally looks like someone managed to hack a Nintendo 64 to create the visuals that look and move like stop-motion props carved out of wood based on a story that a drunken father tells his children on Christmas Eve. I’m not even sure what demographic is being targeted as there are some jokes that are a bit too overtly lewd for a children’s movie but a story and characters so woefully undeveloped that I fathom kids would be the ones most likely to to tolerate it.

Between the sheer absurdity of the story, the mild, cartoonish physical violence, and the random musical numbers, this was either created by a bunch of guys who’ve either never seen a movie or conversely seen way too many as it is all over the place. And someone should have sent them a message that having a song and dance espousing the virtues of slavery or a dark skinned elf rapping about wrapping probably isn’t the most appropriate in a family film. But then again, no one else is going to seek out this trash other than me so why bother?

As I scrolled through the Jesusflix offerings the other day, I came upon this gem and thought “A Michael Mann movie with Scott Glenn, Ian McKellen, and Jürgen Prochnow? How have I never even heard of this before?” The short answer to that question is that The Keep is truly awful.

Mann must have learned much in between this and Manhunter, such as how to construct a decent story. Taking place in a Romanian village in 1941, the Keep is a mysterious fortress of some sort that some German soldiers decide is a good place to hole up in. Even though they are specifically warned by the caretaker not to molest any of the silver crosses embedded in the walls, two soldiers unearth a passage to the walled-off inside of the structure only to have their faces blown off. Meanwhile, another group of German soldiers lead by Major Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne), this time wearing the SS armbands which remind me I probably need to pay more attention to history, arrive after the death of many of the first group to take over control from Captain Woermann (Prochnow). Also meanwhile, an old Jewish man and his daughter are called from a Nazi war camp to help unravel the mysterious deaths of the German troops. Still meanwhile, vampire/android/androgynous thing Glaeken Trismegestus (Glenn) is traveling to the Keep to dispatch of the evil that is inside. As you can tell, the story is just a tad fragmented.

Based on a novel by F. Paul Wilson which I can only assume was much more coherent, Mann crafts a story that I can only describe as baffling. What could have been an interesting movie with a brigade of troops being attacked by a supernatural presence is horribly botched here as there are many different stories going on with very little intersection and none of which make much damn sense. The German soldiers are shacked up in the Keep we assume for wartime purposes but they are not really doing anything other than stringing lights and getting killed. Glaeken is, I assume, supposed to be the hero but he does not show up until thirty minutes in, is largely MIA until the finale (save for a random sex scene), and poorly developed to the point that we don’t know (or really care) who he is or why he wants to kill the Keep monster-whatever. The most interesting aspect of the story though was of Dr. Cuza (McKellan) who is so enraged at the German army that he joins forces with the monster to bring them down without stopping to question if he is unleashing more harm than he seeks to destroy.

The unfortunate thing about Cuza’s storyline is that McKellan was quite simply horrible here with a performance that consists mostly of yelling and screaming like a senile old man. He is in good company though as short of Byrne and Prochnow at times, the acting ranged from laughable to depressing to watch. And just like Glaeken, we really know nothing of these characters and most of them are around just for random off-screen kills anyway. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the disposing of one-dimensional characters in a horror movie, these deaths added nothing as there was honestly no tension or suspense throughout the whole movie. I chalk this up to the fact that the monster is specifically targeting the German soldiers, most of whom are douchebags anyway, so we are pretty safe to assume that nothing bad will happen to a character that we may have some attachment to. I also attribute the complete lack of horror elements to the score by Tangerine Dream which swung wildly from somewhat cool to horribly out of place in anything other than a techno-color light show.

Reading around after seeing the movie, there seems to be an underground following of this movie but for reasons I cannot comprehend. I will give Mann credit in that the aesthetics are pretty impressive and I enjoyed the use of widescreen to create spectacular shots in the bowels of the castle. Also the special effects are overall pretty good once you consider the time it was made and lack of money it was likely made with. With a little more focus and a lot more professional acting, this could have turned out to be a decent horror flick awash in 80s cheese instead of a wasted ninety-five minute affair (probably close to 80 had there not been as much slo-mo).

In (possible) fairness to the movie, some of the unanswered questions or characterizations may very well have been there but the transfer and audio on Netflix were horrendous to the point that entire lines of dialog are unintelligible. This could be due to the fact that the film is nowhere to be found on DVD (but on a $200 VHS from Amazon if you’re interested) but honestly, the whole package was shoddy so I would not be surprised if the audio was that bad originally.

Take everything that was good about the first one,  reverse it, and make a new movie. BAM! The Lost Boys: The Tribe. Great music turns in to terrible music. Clever, funny dialogue turns in to weak, lame jokes. You get the idea.

The Tribe is the first sequel to the original Lost Boys film that for some reason a group of people felt they needed to ruin the legacy of. This went straight to video, and it looks like a film that went straight to video. The only connection this film has with the original is that Corey Feldman reprises his role as Edgar Frog. Also, Haim shows up during the credits for about 2 minutes and is now a vampire. That is not a spoiler and the scene is not relevant to the rest of the movie.

Chris and Nicole Emerson have lost their parents and move to California. Chris was a professional surfer that was kicked off the circuit after having snapped. I assume he repaired himself, because he is remarkably low key for someone who has snapped. Chris is looking for a job as a shaper, and is referred to The Frog Brothers shapers. They go to their trailer and no one answers, so Chris leaves their contact information on the door. Chris eventually meets Shane, also a former surfer and a bit mysterious. He invites Chris to a party. Chris and Nicole attend and Shane is quite fond of Nicole. She unknowingly drinks Shane’s blood and turns in to a half vampire. She slowly displays vampiric characteristics, which prompts a visit from Edgar Frog, vampire hunter and surfboard shaper. Very much like the first film, Edgar must convince Chris that his sister is now (half) undead, and that the head vampire must be killed so that she can return to normal. Then this piece of shit movie wanders on for another hour or so, sure to infuriate the viewer.

Cory Feldman is the worst part of the film. He does this, Christian Bale Batman voice the whole time, it’s ridiculous. And he has the worst lines. “Who ordered the steak (stake)?” should never be uttered in a vampire film. Everyone else ranged from marginal to not bad. Kiefer Sutherland’s half brother Angus Sutherland plays Shane, and he is pretty decent. But the cast was not nearly as tight as the first film. It was like a bunch of school kids waiting to spout off their lines autonomous of each other. “The Tribe,” which is just Shane’s vampire gang, is a bunch of idiots. One of them stabs the others because he thinks it’s funny. He doesn’t kill them, he will just stab until an intestine comes out. And they’re all jerks. To each other, to humans, just in general. In the first film, they were a family that was civil to each other. Shane refers to the Tribe as a family, but they act like dicks to each other. It’s like, who wants to be a part of that fucking family?

Another thing that was bothersome was once Nicole was half vampire, that was it. She just hung out with the Tribe the whole time and there really wasn’t any struggle there. She was no longer interested in being a human. In fact, she tried to recruit Chris toward the end of the film. I rather enjoyed the back and forth Michael went through in the first film.

The music was a bunch of garbage, featuring a horrible rendition of “Cry Little Sister.” The song that played during the credits was so weird and bad, it seemed as if I was imagining it due to the late hour.

Also, the film had numerous scenes that were not needed. The entire opening scene had nothing to do with anything. The police chase scene had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING.

Look, my face hurt from scowling so much at this. Don’t watch it. You will hate it. It is an embarrassment, not only compared to the original, but as a film in general.

As I sat to watch Saw 3D, I was worried that having not seen the last installment, the series’ reliance on retcons and alternate looks at previous events would prove challenging to keep up with. While finishing part six after the fact helped fill in some of the backstory, it had little bearing on my opinion of the allegedly final Saw film which was very disconnected from the previous entries. Even a brand new viewer to the series would have little difficulty understanding the plot yet be baffled by the shoddy quality in this hugely subpar installment in the Jigsaw saga.

Even with the return of director Kevin Greutert and writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, 3D feels more like a straight to DVD, half assed sequel than a legitmate follow up to a major theatrical series. Mostly gone is the intricate weaving of past events into a new narrative featuring Jigsaw’s traps to emphasize the preciousness of life. Of course, there is a B-side story of Bobby, a so-called survivor of one of Jigsaw’s previous games where he must choose between his family and friends who have made truckloads of money off of a fabicrated story. But unlike some of the better films, namely II and III, Bobby’s story has absolutely no bearing on the main events featuring Detective Hoffman and his cat and mouse game with Jigsaw’s ex Jill.

This actually feels more like a standard, cheap slasher film as the main motivation is Hoffman’s rage because Jill tried to kill him and has turned to a horrible caricature of a cop to expose his apprenticeship with Jigsaw. After the last, there really is not much more backstory, or even sidestory, to wring out as Jigsaw (clocking in with barely a few minutes of screentime), Amanda, and Hoffman’s experiences are mostly tapped out in the narrative sense. Thus, we have a movie that features traps like a Saw movie should but with characters that exist only to pad the running time until Hoffman can catch up to Jill to exact his revenge.

What should not be a shock if you follow movie news, Cary Elwes returns from oblivion as Dr. Gordon from the first but if you thought that his role would be more substantial than a quick cameo, you would be correct. While I do not wish to reveal his role, suffice to say you could probably figure it out even without seeing the movie. Even though the reveal technically makes sense, there was no indication or any clues sprinkled in previous films to back it up giving the impression that the writers just wanted to play to the fan favorites here. This also serves as one of the worst endings to a Saw film because it’s predictability seems to fly in the face of everything that has come before it in the series.

This fiasco with Gordon sums up my thoughts on the movie as everything here was not logical or necessary, but done likely because it was cool and something that fans were clamouring for. The opening trap was neat being that it was set outside in the midst of a big crowd of people but the fact that it had nothing to do with the rest of the movie is one thing, Jigsaw has gone from targeting murderers and drug dealers to a love triangle constructed by a deceitful woman who strings men along for affection. As you can see, one of these things is not like the other and I fully suspect this was designated as the last film because the next plot of torturing jaywalkers and customer service phone reps was not as compelling.

Of the cast, Costas Mandylor and Betsy Russell have had a few movies to get comfortable with their characters and turned in fairly decent performances and the faux-vivor Bobby was a sympathetic, if kind of otherwise flat, character played well by Sean Patrick Flannery. The rest of the cast, especially Chad Donella were pretty horrendous. Granted the first was saturated with Cary Elwes-brand overacting (he has barely improved, even with letting some of his natural accent slip through) so the bar was not set very high but it was painfully distracting to see Donella as a “seasoned” IAB detective with the mannerisms of a ten-year-old.

The biggest crime of Saw 3D is that everything was just a poor photocopy of the more decent moments of the series. In one of the villain’s final scenes of rage, he kills four people in a row in the least interesting way possible by a quick jab of a knife into their throats. The 3D was pretty good considering it seems randomly shoehorned into the series as a going-away present and to inflate ticket prices but it really did not serve much purpose. At the very least, it did not make the movie worse like bad 3D can but then again, the dumb random trap fodder characters did not really elevate things on their end either.

For every Alfred Hitchcock, there is an Ed Wood. There are many talented directors working in the film industry today, but there are just as many infamously terrible directors churning out worthless trash on a regular basis. Uwe Boll, arguably the worst of the worst, has garnered a legion of haters since his earliest days in film making, and for many good reasons. “Doctor” Boll has no idea how tell a story visually, how to get good performances from actors, how to compose an interesting shot, or how to make a movie enjoyable in any way. After the cinematic train wreck that was House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, his second film to be released in American theaters, cemented the popular opinion of Boll as the king of schlock. The film opens with what is possibly the longest text crawl in movie history that flat out tells the audience this complicated back story about an ancient civilization and a dark world that they accidentally opened up and then some secret government agency or some crap. This thing seriously eats up the first minute and a half of run time and tells only the broadest bits of the back story in the most boring manner imaginable. This thing fails right out of the gate. The next part gives us a flash back about some kids in an orphanage that were experimented on by the evil Professor Hudgens. (Matthew Walker) One of these children escaped from Hudgens’ experiments and grew-up to become Christian Slater, or Edward Carnby as he calls himself. Carnby is a freelance paranormal investigator who spends most of his time hunting down ancient Abkani artifacts, the ones made by the civilization that decided it was a great idea to open a portal to a place they called the DARK WORLD!

Both Hudgens and Carnby are racing to collect all the little gold puzzle pieces that will reopen the portal, Hudgens so that he can ally himself with the dark world monsters, and Carnby so he can keep that portal closed. Carnby links up with his ex-girlfriend Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid) who is supposed to be a scientist of some kind, but for whatever reason, I just don’t buy Tara Reid as the scientist type. One of the dark monsters is released by a pirate (don’t ask) and tracks Carnby and Cedrac to the museum where she works to attack them. The monster is kind of a boney-looking dog that is sometimes invisible and sometimes not. While running from the CG dog creature, the agents of a secret government paranormal paramilitary group called 7-13 (not 7-11) storm the museum to shoot the monster a few times before it escapes. Commander Burke (Sephen Dorff) leads the team, and he is not happy to see Carnby at the scene. Carnby used to work for 7-13 after he escaped from the orphanage, but wait, Hudgens also work for 7-13 in an advisory capacity, and he works at the museum with Aline Cedrac. So why is it that none of these people know that Professor Hudgens is an evil douche bag that is putting dark world centipedes into people’s spines to turn them evil, and has been doing this for twenty years? The fact that this malformed story is supposedly based on a popular survival horror game that relied on quite, subtle atmosphere and legitimately scary situations makes the final product all the more disappointing.  This movie is so bad, so disgustingly bad on every level that it’s hard to express in words alone. Stay far, far away from this twisted mockery of a film, unless you have a few friends around, a ready supply of alcohol, and a high tolerance for pain.

I’m going to diversify things up a little here today and throw a lady monster in the mix. Darkness Falls is the story of a young boy Kyle who is terrorized by, of all things, the Tooth Fairy. This isn’t your grandma’s Tooth Fairy I’m talking about either, or the Tooth Fairy from that other horror movie The Tooth Fairy that came out in 2006. The undead creature haunting this picture is Matilda Dixon, and she wins the award for most complicated back story of any monster, ever. Matilda’s legend begins when she was a kindly old spinster woman in the town of Darkness Falls (sounds like a cheerful place) where she was loved by all the children for paying them money for there baby teeth that had fallen out. What she did with those teeth is anyone’s guess, but she was eventually caught in a house fire and her face was burned so badly that she hid her face behind a porcelain mask. On top of all that, she was blamed for the disappearance of two children and hanged by the towns people. As Matilda swung by her neck, she cursed the town that her spirit or corpse, or something would keep taking teeth, I guess. I’m actually not sure, the legend gets kind of confusing there, but the point is that she is now a ghostly monster that takes teeth, wears a mask, hates light, and will kill anyone that looks at her. So the story proper starts a century or so after all that stuff when young Kyle (Joshua Anderson) looses his last baby tooth. He accidentally sees the Tooth Fairy and runs to get his mother. Kyle’s mom tries to tell Kyle that he’s just imagining things at that his room is perfectly safe, but then she gets snatched up by Matilda and killed off screen.

Skipping ahead twelve years, we find grown-up Kyle (Chaney Kley) still traumatized from his almost being killed by a monster experience and on a heavy regiment of medication. Caitlin (Emma Caulfield) was Kyle’s childhood friend and calls him in regards to her younger brother Michael. (Lee Cormie) It would seem that Michael is suffering from night terrors, but Kyle realizes that Michael has gotten on the bad side of the Tooth Fairy as well. Kyle heads back to his old town of Darkness Falls to help Michael. He is eventually arrested by the local authorities under suspicion that he is insane and possibly killed his own mother all those years ago. This puts Kyle in a bit of a pickle and he struggles to convince everybody that the Tooth Fairy is coming to kill little Michael, and him.  Although the film did get a theatrical release, this is a direct-to-video quality movie at best that stars nobody you’ve ever heard of and has barely enough scares to keep a horror fan interested the whole way through. The effects are pretty good, but the story is just so banal and, worse yet, the lore about the killer just makes no sense. Where did Matilda find the supernatural powers to will a curse on a whole town? Do the collected baby teeth give her arcane powers? I don’t get it.

This film starts with a little educational text stating that the South China Sea hides deep chasms that have never been explored by man, and that numerous ships have mysteriously vanished in those areas of the ocean for decades. If only we could find a way to surrender this movie to the depths of the ocean for all eternity. If I had to pick only a few words to describe the plot of Deep Rising, those words would be derivative and over-written. One piece of the story starts on a small boat captained by John Finnegan (Treat Williams) who is not out crab fishing but shuttling a band of black ops mercenary types to some obscure point in the middle of the ocean. The mercenary group is led by Hanover (Wes Studi) and is composed of half a dozen or so soldiers too bland to be memorable, although I did see Jason Flemyng and that guy that played Kano in Mortal Kombat in the mix. The black ops team turns hostile on Finnegan’s crew when the ship’s wormy mechanic Joel (Kevin J. O’Conner) finds live torpedoes amongst the weapons. Another part of the plot involves the massive luxury cruise ship Argonautica (which is a titanically stupid name for a boat) and a foxy thief named Trillian (Famke Janssen). She tries to break into the Captain’s quarters to get at his safe, but is caught by the ship’s owner Simon Canton (Anthony Heald) and locked in the galley freezer. Someone on board the ship disables several vital systems including, of course, communications, then a large something attacks the cruise liner. All of the passengers start to stampede in an attempt to escape, and we are treated to a scene where a terrified woman is violently pulled down a toilet.

Finnegan damages his own boat by colliding with one of Argonautica’s speed boats, that was made entirely of C-4 judging by how it exploded. Plot A meets up with plot B as the damaged little boat find the disabled cruise ship in the middle of the stormy seas. Hanover’s commando unit deploys on board the Argonautica, taking Finnegan and Joel with them to gather engine parts. Hanover had intended to rob the wealthy passengers then sink the ship, but all of the passengers have disappeared, except for Trillian, whom they find locked safely away in the freezer. The team also locates Simon as well, who it turns out had disabled his own ship and hired Hanover and company to sink his multi-million dollar cruise ship so he could collect the insurance money. You see what I mean about this being over-written? We don’t need all this forced subterfuge and intrigue just to get all the characters stranded on a boat for a monster to attack. When the monster, a giant mollusk of some sort finally does show up, it makes short work of most of the remaining cast, usually picking them off one-by-one a la Alien or Predator, two much better movies that I wish I were watching instead. While the awful writing effectively torpedoes the good ship Deep Rising before it leaves port, some entertaining bits can still be salvaged from the wreckage. The cinematography employed here is consistently much better than this movie deserves, like an amazing part near the beginning that zooms in from a wide shot of the cruise ship and follows a man through a door to the ballroom. Famke Janssen’s and Kevin J. O’Conner’s performances are also enjoyable, even if O’Conner’s screaming gets a little grating near the end. The monster is an original idea as well, as it only appears as tentacles with gnarly teeth and hooks when first seen. It isn’t until the end of the film that we get to see the full and somewhat badly rendered giant demon-octopus-thing in all its glory.

Is it Full Moon Studios time again? Already? Yep. This is another film from the not-so-proud direct to DVD tradition. But I have to warn everybody, this one makes Subspecies look like an Oscar winner. While the box art shows Zarkorr the invader, a giant dragon-like monster that shoots lasers from his eyes and wrecks cities for kicks, we rarely ever get to see it in the film.  A giant monster wrecking stuff is not in and of itself a bad premise for a movie, but we soon move on to introduce this film’s worst element, the plot. Earth has been chosen by a collection of intelligent alien races, which we never actually see, to undergo a test. The aliens release a massive, planet crushing monster, Zarkorr, and contact one representative of the human race that they choose based on being the most average human specimen they can find. That average human is Tommy Ward (Rhys Pugh) a postal worker who likes to watch old cartoons that are probably in the public domain. The aliens pick a bizarre method of contacting Tommy using a mental projection that he sees as a tiny teenage girl. She tells Tommy that no weapon on Earth can harm Zarkorr and he must find a way to defeat the monster, or all life on the planet will be destroyed. Obviously, the alien conglomerate that devised this test is composed entirely of huge douche bags, as even if Tommy is manages to solve this test, Earth will have already suffered many casualties and millions of dollars in property damage.

Tommy, being the quintessential average-joe, has no idea how to fight or defeat this creature. On the local news, he sees an interview with Doctor Stephanie Martin (De’Prise Grossman) an expert in cryptozoology. How one can be an expert in an unofficial field largely considered to be pseudoscience is anybody’s guess. Tommy drives down to the T.V. station and tries to tell Dr. Martin about the monster being a test that the aliens told him he needs to defeat to save the world, and when she refuses to help him, Tommy kidnaps her at gun point. Tommy barricades himself in the women’s bathroom with the doctor, who still refuses to answer his questions, and the police show up to defuse the situation. When Tommy explains the alien test and how he must defeat Zarkorr, one of the officers, George (Mark Hamilton) actually believes his story makes perfect sense and turns his gun on the other officer to aid Tommy in his mission. As you can see, the writing for this film is a completely convoluted nightmare that writer Benjamin Carr probably hammered out in one drug-fueled weekend. The plot occupies this strange paradoxical state of being completely convoluted and hard to follow, but at the same time is so thin and contrived that it might as well not exist at all. The only thing the plot does is waste time between the scenes of Zarkorr trashing model cities, and while that is fun to see, it does not justify the 80 minutes you will throw away watching this thing.