Monster

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.

If I had seen this before Cloverfield, I would have had a better impression. But it is just a knockoff. If Cloverfield is "Blair Witch Godzilla" this is "Blair Witch Calamari".. And I don't like Calamari. Frankly I thought I was going to be sick from the camera work. "Camera Effects/Artifacts" were poorly placed. When the camera was still the "effects" were at the highest. When they were running they were at their lowest. I guess all that knocking around kept the camera working..LOL I liked the actors, kept the screaming to minimum. Only one part where the acting look forced. But my overall impression is still low.

The entire movie is two young women, attractive but nothing special, with rather flat and uninteresting personalities running around Tokyo during some kind of giant octopus attack. The special effects are not very special, the monster is never really seen other than partial glimpses, there is zero in the way of plot intrigue and plenty of annoying focus on the two characters. They cry. They get their faces dirty. They crawl around in the caves. They run the camera but it's hard to understand some of the shots since nobody is holding or controlling the camera.

This goes on and on. And on. And on. What were they thinking? Then, as if this vacuous mess were insufficiently annoying, every 30 seconds or so the "damaged film" effects kick in, disrupting the continuity and interfering with what little actual "action" there is in the film.

Actually making it through this movie is an exercise in futility. You keep hoping it will either get better or end. I'm about 20 minutes from the finish as I am writing this. It sounds like there is a battle going on but you can't see anything -- another "damaged film" special.

Yikes. Don't bother. Do yourself a favor and just don't bother.

If there is a thousand ways to disrupt a video feed in order to make it look like it's been badly damaged, these girls have now found 1200 ways. The cutting of the video feed had a purpose, I know that, but it was an annoying feature in this film. It almost made me go crazy, but I stuck with it just to see the rest and be able to give this film a fair judgment. The film (idea) itself is not bad at all. The acting has one or maybe two decent moments (although Erin is kinda cute (when she's not sobbing)). The script is just wonderful. It had the potential of being a new Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, but unfortunately it just had the intention, but not the drive to actually make it. But honestly I think you should spend your 90 minutes on collecting navel lint instead. In the long run it'll do you much more good than watching this. I watched it - so you wont have to.

This time around, The Asylum decided to rip off "Cloverfield". There is one positive thing I can say about this movie, and that it employs a lot of Asian actors, a minority that just about all Hollywood movies do not use. Aside from that, I can't think of anything else that is good about this movie. The movie is obviously not filmed in Japan, just using occasional stock footage of Tokyo in an effort to fool the audience. The sound is awful - there were large sections of the movie where I simply could not understand what the characters were saying. The visual look of the movie is equally bad, clearly shot with a low-rent digital video camera. The direction is horrible, with some things like characters in the background walking casually when the city is being terrorized by the monster. There is far, FAR too much talk, when a movie like this needs plenty of adventure and special effects. (The limited special effects are pretty cheesy, and never gives us a good look at the title creature.) And there is no real ending to this movie - the last scene ends in a way that makes you think the director said, "Okay, we've got enough footage to make this movie 85 minutes long if you count the slow-moving end credits!" The writer/director, as of this date, has only this movie on his resume. No wonder.