Parasite

Every now and then a buddy of mine and myself sit down with your usual set of junk food and watch a new piece of art from our favourite genre: mutant animal movies. Ahhh, mutant animals (read: bad cgi) hunting down a team of experts (some airheads) through a deserted, dark building (cheap studio sets)! You don't have much expectations with a premise like this. Normally, you'll get some splatter effects, gratuitous nudity and it really doesn't matter if you leave the TV for a minute to make room for more Pepsi. Mutant animal movies are stupid and fun to watch.

Parasite is not.

The film is about a deserted (of course) oil rig, that is supposed to be cleaned before sinking via a newly developed, uh... fog or something. Things go wrong, because the experts are a bunch of idiots. They simply IGNORE an official letter from their boss they find, where the exact mixing proportions for the cleaning substance are noted, next to a big, fat, biohazard – sign. They find the letter, they read it, and then put it away. Now, this IS stupid, and it has just begun. That biohazard stuff infects a worm or snake or whatever (couldn't tell due to bad cgi), which of course gets quiet big and start killing people, not only the team but also a bunch of environment protecting terrorists, who have no function in the story other than being snake/worm food.

So far, so good (and I really don't care that it's cheap and stupid), but this movie is just lame. After the first five minutes of shaky DV camcorder footage, nothing, absolutely nothing happens for at least half an hour (and not much more afterward). It's all dialog that won't add to the story or the atmosphere or the characters or whatever. For a low budget film like Parasite, this is fatal, because without an evolving story that drags your attention (or at least some funny lines/gratuitous nudity/blood), the film gives you time to recognize its countless other flaws.

Either the director had some ingenious plan that didn't work out in the editing room, or he just didn't care. They use close ups nearly all the time, leaving you confused of where everybody is and what the heck they're doing there. Almost as to compensate this, there are some exterior shots (cgi) edited into the movie every now and then, without system, obviously just to remember us of the fact that this takes place on an oil rig (frankly, you couldn't tell from the sets, which look much like my grandma's cellar).

As I mentioned before, I really don't care if a monster movie's premise is stupid or if there are no production values – but I'm getting really annoyed if it isn't even mildly entertaining. For something entertaining you have to have a solid screenplay and/or a talented director, and Parasite loses at both tables. The film is full of scenes you might have seen in similar movies (so at least it fulfills some genre standards), but here those scenes are indiscriminately thrown into a mixer. The outcome is chaotic. Nothing you'll ever see has a dramatic function, no actions our "heroes" take make any sense at all, because there is no story. The whole film is nothing but a plot hole bigger than my butt.

Put all those flaws together and you get 96 minutes of confusing nonsense that is practically unwatchable. We were neither drunk nor stoned nor tired and, as far as I can tell, we are not stupid, but from some point at about the middle of the film we simply did not understand what was going on anymore.

Worst Creature Feature in years. (2/10, just for the fact that it had a mutant worm. Or snake.)

An abandoned oil rig in the middle of the North Sea. Dr. Christine Hansen (Saskia Gould) is charged with the task of testing an experimental cleaning fluid which could revolutionize the oil industry. Hired to carry out the tests is Jacob Rasmussen (GW Stevens) and his rough and ready crew of deconstruction engineers. But within hours one of them is missing under suspicious circumstances. Things go from bad to worse when environmental activist Mickey Hennessey (Conrad Whitaker) and his hard-bitten associates seize control of the rig, taking everybody on board hostage. But very soon oil workers and environmentalists will be compelled to join forces in an evolutionary battle for survival. For a savage new life-form has made its home on the rig. And it is hungry. Not an especially bad movie, but far from being a great one. A dumb script (courtesy of 5 screenwriters) and weak acting destroy the tension. Special effects weren't great but that's to be expected. It's an OK time waster, but it's very familiar and highly unsatisfying. 3/10.

Right, well it is obviously clear that director Andrew Prendergast is a fan of the original "Alien" movie, as most of the things shown in "Parasite" (aka "Hell's Mouth") is either a homage to "Alien" or a blatant rip off.

The story takes place on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean, thus leaving all people isolated and cut off from any immediate help. Where a new and alien life form has made its nest and is preying on the humans that inhabit the oil rig.

A monster or alien movie needs to have proper special effects, that either blow you away, dazzle you or make the creature and the atmosphere work well. "Parasite" didn't have that, and as such the movie was just another B-movie creature feature. The idea and concept of the creature was good, but it wasn't executed to a satisfactory end result.

The acting in "Parasite" was as to be expected. I can't really claim to remember a single actor or actress standing out from the rest of the bunch. But then again, such a movie is not going to be a Shakespearian thespian experience.

"Parasite" is definitely among the top ten of bad monster movies that I have had to sit through in my track record of watching movies. I didn't even manage to watch it to the end, as I had to give up about halfway through out of sheer boredom and a lack of entertainment.

As such, then I am rating "Parasite" a meager one out of ten stars. I am sure that there is an audience out there somewhere for a movie such as this. I just wasn't in that particular target audience.

From the opening scene, I knew this would be among the worst movies of all time. I was not disappointed, as the production values of segments made for high school television stations are much higher. With that said, the Sasha character is hot, and what can one expect- it's 3 AM and I'm watching the sci-fi channel. "I'm sorry I smacked you earlier" seems like a great line at this hour. Another great quote: "Just because I don't live with you any more doesn't mean I've forgotten how to live" (I seem to remember an ex-girlfriend saying something like that). Also: "Hi, I'm Erik Estrada...start planning your future by owning Arkansas real estate" (Ok, that was from a commercial).

I was expecting the lowest of the low, but it turns out that this movie has several things to recomment about it. Its atmosphere is effectively dark, the cast is adequate, it taps on some timely issues, and the creature in this movie is unique. People who like movies like this, hate it when the film makers muck it up, but these people do the genre justice.