Monster

I saw this movie, while looking for something to watch. I saw "monster" and Japan. Having been a fan of Japanese monster movies way before the average American had even been born. I thought what can possibly go wrong, after all they were so bad that there were good fun: 1) the two "actresses"; 2) a great example of the term "the Ugly American". An "ancient" book by the title, about how rude, impolite, and self absorbed, Americans could be while abroad. Add to that how ridiculous those two women were: "we have permission to film", really? Regular people who didn't want to be filmed. Didn't wait to see the monster.

Giving "Monster" a one star "awful" rating is wayyyyy too high. Without question this is the worst film I have ever seen. The tone was set with the first 5 minutes when the office of the Japanese Minister was smaller than my closet and the exact same sound effect was used 4 times outside the Ministry of the Interior Building.

The camera work was MUCH worse than Cloverfield and Blair Witch, mostly because even when stationery the objects on the screen were a conglomeration of the floor, the speakers legs, her breasts and mindless panning of the walls.

The plot was utter aimless with dialog to match - the inane banter was devoid of emotion and at the "scariest" moments the two wooden actresses sounded like Ben Stein lecturing on the economy! There wandering around the destroyed city was pointless to the story and lines like "it looks like it's going to be a beautiful morning" while overlooking the fake destruction made one want to throw a shoe at the TV screen.

The best way to describe this "movie" is Pointless waste of film! Another "Cloverfield" did not need to be made and this was a poor attempt at it anyway!

SOMEONE PLEASE!!!! TAKE THEIR CAMERA AWAY!

Sisters Sarah and Erin hop the bigger pond, landing in Tokyo to film a documentary about global warming (though God knows why). In the midst of their interview with the Environmental Minister, havoc strikes. At first, it's assumed to be another earthquake. When military presence intensifies, terrorism is suspected. But all too soon, it's revealed to be...something else. Sounds a bit familiar, no? Just to get it out of the way, whether or not it's an unhappy accident of conflicting release dates, there's no getting around that this is "Cloverfield"-lite, with a few (very few) deviations. This is evident--from the distant explosion that marks the start of the action, to the overall concept, to splattering the camera with blood at least once. The monsters even roar as if they were separated at birth. To be fair, this film does have a few things on Cloverfield. The fish-out-of-water angle, namely placing the protagonists in an unfamiliar culture, was a great idea. It's difficult enough to survive disaster when most everyone speaks your language, but when they don't, the challenge is increased quite a bit. While the presentation of the global warming message is..."crunchy" at best, the not-so-subtle hint that global warming itself awakened the creature is another juicy notion. Honestly, there's no better place on earth to set your disaster than Tokyo, the world's capital of disasters! The biggest thing for me personally would have to be the logic of the beast itself. In this film, it seemed to cut its paths of destruction through heavily populated areas, as I believe an angry beast would, rather than conveniently following four scrawny twenty-somethings around, and even directly snacking on one of them, as New York's monster did.

Now that that's out of the way, even if Cloverfield never existed, this would still be pretty poor. The creature, a giant squid presumably, isn't actually seen doing very much to constitute a threat. Perhaps it could have actually picked up someone or smashed something, but all we're treated to is many angles of large, waving tentacles. One thing it makes you appreciate is how difficult disaster is to write. It seems that it's very easy to get so wrapped up in the turmoil of your story that you forget how people actually talk, particularly in the midst of emergency. Sarah and Erin (their actual first names, by the way; a bright-and-shining sign of non-actors) appear to struggle on the initiative to keep many of David Michael Latt's throw-away lines out of the production, but enough of them sneak in to become distracting. "I feel like we were meant to be here...", "It's so important to document this..." Sure. I realize they would have to invent reasons for our heroines to lug around an industrial-grade camera, but there must have been another way. Call me shallow, but I believe I'd find it difficult to think of what progeny will see someday when flaming debris is exploding all around me, and the street is caving in underneath my feet.

An additional note about the cast--in truth, considering the script, there's really no reason to have anyone American in it. The Japanese actors (and their characters) are FAR better than the American ones; particularly the high-schooler who lives with her half-crazed dad (and dad seems to know something of the angry creature) and the young doctor who just wants to get across town and make sure his son is okay. I wished the film were about THEM, or someone like them. Were I in Erik Estenberg and company's shoes, I'm sure I would have shot the entire thing with an entirely Japanese cast and subtitles. Couldn't the Japanese document their own disasters? They've had lots of practice.

So, maybe it's not so much a ripoff as it is just not good. Of course, consider that trailer for another Asylum treat, "AVH". As in, "Alien Vs. Hunter". As in intergalactic hunters with advanced camouflage fighting slimy aliens with elongated heads and teeth. Can't wait for that one, can ya? What? You've seen it? Of course you have...

Okay maybe this is not a rip-off of Cloverfield, and maybe I should not have watched it a few days after said movie. But still, Monster is almost exactly the same with chicks (you could sell anything with chicks, right?), without a decent plot, acting, and sadly, without a monster.

We get two girls who are in Japan to make a documentary, when Tokyo is hit by an earthquake. And this is when the movie starts to get irreversibly bad and annoying. Because the two girls, however cute they may be, just cannot seem to use the camera. In the middle of a monster attack, *everything* is filmed, except for what is actually happening. When our heroines are staring with their jaws dropped at something supposedly terrible, the camera is well... showing them, their jaws dropped, staring. Then cut, or artifacts on the film (at every 5 seconds, or when something interesting is about to happen), and we go to the next scene. Rinse and repeat. In the end, we are given 90 minutes of artifacts, girls being scared and talking nonsense, running somewhere (filming each other's legs in the process), and just hanging out in Tokyo, obviously afraid of some tentacle monster that they always fail to capture with the camera.

Besides of not being able to make a point (it is hard when you point the camera at your sister instead of at whatever is happening around you), the movie fails to convey a sense of plot. We know where the girls are trying to go, but we just do not care if they ever get there, or what happens if they do. There is simply no drama, no excitement, mostly due to the bad use of camera, and the long talky scenes, and short scary ones (usually cut by artifacts, or simply, darkness).

I can't help but to compare this movie to Cloverfield, where you got a monster, and after some time, you actually got interested in where the group is going, and in the end, you cared. Monster could have been a great movie, even without showing the monster, if it manages to make you feel for the girls, but it sadly fails. It is not simply bad, but also an uninteresting movie.

It starts out OK and has a decent premise to it. But after about the first 15 minutes it turns into a complete waste of time and do not waste your time by watching this.