My first impression was, “Really?! You want to start your movie with a bad CGI shot?” I guess you can respect their honesty, but yeesh.
So we open on an obviously animated boat on obviously animated stormy waters. Then we cut to actors on a boat set which doesn’t match the animated boat, and then cut back to a closer look at the CGI vessel. This is a big mistake. The ‘closer’ it gets to the ‘camera,’ the faker it looks. The supposed crew is tossed around by the supposed crashing waves. Anyone who’s seen an episode of the Discovery Channel’s The Deadliest Catch is unlikely to be mesmerized by the verisimilitude of all this.
Then an obviously CGI sea serpent appears and ‘swallows’ one of crew, no doubt so as to leave the surviving skipper (Corin Nemec!)—the only witness to this, natch—to become a Captain Ahab-like obsessive.
I guess the most relevant question is why I bother renting one of these deals every year or two. Well, I mean, the ‘SyFy’ station contracts for seemingly dozens of these things every single year. And although they never seem to get any better, you just keep thinking they should. I mean, it’s not like I’m setting the bar very high, here. Yet it’s a crappy sea monster movie indeed which already have me depressed and bored two minutes in.
I mean, again, shouldn’t pure repetition and the passage of years result in some sort of improvement? Better scripting? How about just better CGI? I know these things are made on a tight budget, but yeesh. They have a whole lot more money than Roger Corman did back in the ’50s, and that’s even accounting for inflation. Yet his films are still entertaining sixty odd years later. This movie came out last year and it already just plain sucks.
Yeah, yeah, I’m only about three % of the way into the movie. Even so, I’d be willing to a ten spot right now.
So then we pause to meet our various characters, including…oh, why bother. Fishing community, hero’s teen daughter, her local boyfriend, etc. There’s a funeral scene, trying to add to the human drama, or whatever. There’s an eligible hot female scientist on the scene. (Where do they get their ideas? They haven’t established yet that Nemec is a single parent, but I mean, they ALWAYS are in these things.) Nemec is in financial straits and in danger of losing his boat, owing money, predictably enough, to the Town Dick. Oh, and Nemec’s daughter, her beau and their two friends are planning to sneak off to a (no doubt seaside) cabin and have a party. I wonder where that is going?
The human stuff is OK, if no great shakes, but it’s of course this is supposed to be the filler material in between the monster stuff. So the idea is the latter redeems the former. That would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath. Still, we get watery POV shots from the monster’s perspective. That’s pretty original, right?
Uhm, wait, is the monster (which can go on land?!) supposed to be able to TURN MOSTLY INVISIBLE?! You know, like the Predator. Seriously, that really happens. Oh, and it spits narcotic goo, or some crap. Good grief, I was actually giving the movie too much credit. It’s obviously far more retarded than I had assumed it would be. I will say the monster design isn’t bad, or at least our first real look at it isn’t. It’s not awesome or anything, but it’s decent enough.
Oh, and there goes the black guy. Amazing that they waited an entire 16 minutes to play that card.
So, let’s see. Black guy dead. Daughter and beau and female friend off on their own, with nobody knowing where. Nemac taunted again by the Town Dick. (I wonder if anything will happen to him later on?) Mysterious circumstances bringing Nemec and Hot Scientist together. They make these things with a checklist, right? Oh, well, at least it’s kind of moving along at this point.
There goes the daughter’s friend. And there’s a big monster (mini-van sized, roughly) carrying three smaller, dog-sized monsters around. This set-up will allow them to kill some of the monsters but still have the main menace extant. Frankly, I still think giving the reptilian monsters the narcotic goo is lame. I mean, aren’t they dangerous enough without it? My guess would be that they wrote it in so that they wouldn’t have to animate a lot of shots of the monster running after people. Now the victims just fall to the ground and Bob’s your uncle.
OK, the scene where Boyfriend gets bit on the hand by one of the little monsters because he stops to take its picture with his cell phone? That’s actually believable and a bit funny. More than I expected, anyway. And again, the pacing remains pretty good. So it’s not a total disaster or anything.
Oh, and the monster is supposed to be some sort of mutated angler fish or something. Which, I therefore presume, are primarily known for being roughly humanoid and moving around on four frog-like legs.
Oops, there go two more victims. (And the hero has a gun in his car. Good for him.) OK, I’m moving my rating all the way up to two stars. If all else fails, keep things moving, and at least they got right. Still, the ability of the monster to instantly ‘camouflage’ itself to 95% invisibility is still mighty stupid. How many awesome powers did they need to give this thing?
I was really hoping the hero would manage to kill one of the lesser beasts, though. I’ve been dreading the employment of the “the hero’s the only one who’s seen the monster and no one will believe him” trope. Man, that’s a tired cliché, and I’d have a lot more respect for the film if it had just headed it off entirely. And what’s with Nemec’s daughter just running off with her boyfriend and not contacting her father for a couple of days? That seems kind of irresponsible, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t he be kind of pissed off?
Also, the boyfriend isn’t very bright. Bitten by an unknown creature? How about seeking medical attention for that? Wouldn’t you be worried about rabies, if nothing else, especially after you get all sweaty and stuff? I guess it doesn’t matter, because they monster got rid of the boat. That certainly sounds like something a fish monster would be smart enough to do, wouldn’t it? Plus, neither the boyfriend of daughter put together the ‘missing friend’ thing and ‘that monster you saw’ thing either. Again, would it kill the screenwriters of these movies not to make their characters complete morons?
Ah, the obligatory “yahoos hunt the monster with predictable results” scene. Another one off the checklist. And hey, the monsters no have incredibly long prehensile tongues it can shoot out like a whip, yet another extra power. Maybe they’ll eventually start shooting laser beams out of their eyes.
Even worse, the movie’s starting to slow down and drag. Any chance it had to leap all the way from two stars to two and a half stars is rapidly diminishing.
By the way, who shoots a monster just once and then approaches the damn thing? I’d pump every bullet in my gun into it first. And sure enough, there you go.
OK, the scene where the boyfriend decides the only weapon they can use against the super high leaping, tree-climbing monsters is fishing gear is sooo stupid that it was actually kind of wonderful. Luckily, Nemec’s stowed fishing gear includes several spearguns—which they tape together? Their attempts to barricade the downstairs of the cabin, an area chock full of wall-sized windows, is just idiotic however. Isn’t there a bedroom or a basement or even a bathroom they could actually hope to secure?
Hmm, nearly an hour in before I actually resorted to the fast forward button. A bit of record for one of these things. That’s grading on an awfully flat curve, though.
Boy, amazing how easy it is to kill the monsters (at least the little ones; by the way, now there are dozens of them all of the sudden?) when you’re what the movie considers its ‘good’ characters.
OK, the crazy fisherman guy is just a little too crazy.
Was the movie this gory when it played on the SyFy Channel? I mean, this is the age of CSI on network TV, so it’s possible I guess. Still, I assume they pumped things up a bit for the DVD release.
If the monster can spray its prey with paralyzing goo, and generally does so, why would it instead occasionally opt to just ensnare ungooed prey with its tongue, especially since that means it can’t bite them as the tongue’s in the way. (Also, convenient that the monsters never then use their huge frickin’ claws as a rending weapon.) OK, I know why; it’s so that the characters they want to survive can get attacked yet still get away. Still, that’s pretty lame.
Man, the Hero’s Death Battle Exemption is getting a real workout in this one. Even so, the film has an amazingly high death count. (Of course, the latter kind of emphasizes the former, since everyone else gets whacked with ease.)
OK, the thing where the old grounded ferry was abandoned but with a bunch of electronics and other gear left utterly unscavenged? Uhm, kinda dumb.
Ah, the boyfriend tells the daughter to look for flares. Indeed. Grab those and a fire extinguisher in a monster movie and you’re practically invulnerable.
Wow, the daughter suggests they find the most secure room on the grounded ferry and barricade themselves inside. Amazingly smart, at least for one of these. Of course, they first spend a lot of time wandering around on deck, completely out in the open. Plus, after hearing another monster, boyfriend decides to walk around and investigate. So much for the smart thing. There must be a law stating that you make your characters as dumb as possible when writing these flicks.
Am I supposed to be getting less interested as we approach the ‘exciting’ climax? I would have thought it would work the other way around.
Oh, c’mon, if one of these monsters (clearly designed to spend lots of time on land) really laid such a vast quantity of eggs, how the hell would Man have never stumbled across them before?
Man, they really abandoned a lot of working crap on that ferry.
Hmm, good thing the hero was a student of Rube Goldberg.
Well, another hour and a half of my life gone.
