Monster of the Day #1365

Updated on May 31, 2016 By Ken Begg 16 Comments

I hope and trust everyone had a good holiday weekend. I watched this on Saturday, it was indeed a mashup of Groundhog Day and Starship Troopers, but a pretty good one. These are the more infrequent fancier aliens, the more typical ones are basically tumbleweeds made up of whipping mechanical tentacles. Vaguely neat, but again not the sort of thing that kids will fall in love with. Monsters can be just too non-human or non-animal now for their own good. You can make good ones, like the Attack the Block beasties, but they are definitely rarer.

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  • Beckoning Chasm

    Yeah, I thought this one was quite good, though with a big “We have to do this, or there’s no movie” bit right at the beginning.

  • kgb_san_diego

    One of my favorites of the last few years. Although, not so much for the beasties, but more for the premise and execution.

  • Eric Hinkle

    If you guys want to see what almost became a real-life SyFy Channel movie, try Google or YouTube for footage of that humongous alligator that strolled across a Florida golf course. It was gigantic!

  • That’s one sad alien.

    Yep, he’s really blue.

    …

    …

    …

    It’s funny cause it’s true.

  • Flangepart

    Hummmm…a week of MOD with ‘primary colors’ as the key. Interesting…

  • Eric Hinkle

    OT but as I remember the magnificent series of articles Mister Begg has done on the JAWS series, I recently got to see the video game ‘Jaws:Unleashed’ on YouTube. Fans of bad movies have to see it; it’ll leave you raving what a work of genius JAWS: THE REVENGE was.

    Among other things, the shark (the player’s character) destroys two oil platforms by spitting torpedoes from a sunken sub at them. And he can jump up out of water onto dry land. At one point the shark does this to grab a scientist and force him to open the gates of an enclosure with his keycard.

    Oh yes, it ends with the shark sinking a Coast Guard cutter by tossing their own depth charges back at them. I did not make any of that up.

  • The Rev.

    That game is pretty fun; I played that years ago. After using the corpse’s key card, you then swim from pen to pen at a Sea World-type place. You can leap out onto the side of the pools and eat handlers, and eventually you face off with a killer whale (in a nice touch, as you do more damage to it, it starts showing wounds in the same places as the one found in Jaws 2). There’s a special move you can use on wounded people that will insta-kill them, and they explode in a cloud of blood just like the one after the shark blows up in Jaws 3-D. It’s also entertaining to stealth snag someone from the surface; the other people don’t panic and you can eat until satiation (there’s a hunger gauge that requires you to regularly eat anything you can find — fish, smaller sharks, dolphins, killer whales, people, dogs, cans, license plates).

    I rented “Jaws: Ultimate Predator” for the Wii last year. It’s pretty crappy. No blood, no clever touches, very few collectibles, no side missions, the boss fights are all quick-time events, and the story is even dumber than the previous game’s. The only positives are where they start cloning prehistoric monsters so you fight pliosaurs and such, eventually having to face a Megalodon; one of the bosses being a gigantic frilled shark; and the ludicrous idea of the shark having combos like a fighting game. Just imagine a shark biting left, biting right, and then doing a screw attack, or slapping people repeatedly with its tail, topped off with a somersault so you can bring your tail down on them like an ax blade.

  • The Rev.

    So, what is this? I don’t recognize it.

  • Acethepug

    Edge of Tomorrow.

    Live. Die. Repeat. :)

  • The Rev.

    Is that the one where Tom Cruise keeps dying? I thought it looked interesting from the trailer, but the reviews didn’t convince me to pay theater price to see it. If they’d shown me cool aliens I might have. Maybe I’ll pull this up before too long.

  • Acethepug

    That’s the one.

  • Gamera977

    Wow, I guess there’s no PC version of those or I’d have heard of them. Only shark game I really remember is the old controversial* ‘Shark Attack’ where you played the shark complete with ‘CHOMP’ button and hunted divers. Of course since it dates back to the late ’70s it’s probably the most brutal stick-figure violence you’re likely to see. It even had a small cameo appearance in the original ‘Jaws’.

    *You really want controversial gaming look up the Atari 2600 game ‘Custer’s Revenge’ sometime. I’m pretty libertarian when it comes to stuff like gaming but you wonder what the hell were the programmers thinking there…

  • The Rev.

    “Jaws: Unleashed” does have a PC version, along with PS2 and XBox. I’m pretty sure Ultimate Predator” was a Nintendo exclusive, on Wii and 3DS only.

    While I haven’t played any of the pornographic Atari games, like “Custer’s Revenge,” I’m familiar with them. I want to say Seanbaby wrote about them years ago, which is where I learned of them. May have been elsewhere online, though.

  • Gamera977

    Thanks Rev. I’m going to look up the clips on YouTube Eric’s referenced this weekend. If it’s crazy and cheap enough I might go ahead and buy the thing.

  • The Rev.

    Considering it came out two Playstation consoles ago, it’s probably pretty cheap nowadays.

    Then I checked Amazon and there, at least, the PC version is not cheap at all! What the hell?

  • Gamera977

    Yeah, I looked on Amazon and Ebay, seventy bucks??? Maybe GOG (Great Old Games) will pick it up. Otherwise I’ll stick with watching the videos.