Asylum Productions certainly can’t be accused of hiding their light under a bushel. Usually they make wince-inducing knock offs into big hits designed to appeal to a drunken Saturday night audience with neither taste control nor the willpower to switch channels. And generally they excel at it.
For once, this sky-high concept monster mash is a (mostly) original idea. The two behemoths bust out of a million-year-old icy tomb and continue where they left off, providing such luminaries as Lorenzo Lamas and Debbie Gibson (!) with some petty cash in the process. Of course, we’ve seen this kind of DTV fodder before, so Asylum has decided to up the ante by making these monsters BIG. It makes for some truly spectacular and absolutely bloody ridiculous scenes of destruction – when the budget can cover it, that is.
It all starts brilliantly. Common sense and the laws of nature are chucked out the window with glorious abandon as Mega Shark bites through the Golden Gate Bridge and, at one point, leaps high enough to devour a passing Jumbo Jet! Meanwhile, Japanese workers do their best flee-from-Godzilla acting as the tentacled terror takes on oil rigs in the South Pacific.
Unfortunately, splashing out on all this early action has clearly depleted Asylum’s CGI coffers, meaning the plot suddenly grinds to a crawl as Debbie and Lorenzo have long talks with earnest-looking naval officers onboard cardboard submarines. And push Christmas Tree light buttons a lot.
The problem may be that the script is too ambitious. The dialogue is shonky and the storytelling atrocious, featuring muddled gumph regarding attempts to capture the creatures alive, although God knows why they’d want to. Calamari, possibly?
Against all reason, this actually works brilliantly, as the script chucks in ‘Dr. Shimida’ a Sulu-imitating scientist with 1960s mannerisms who helps solve the conundrum by:
a.) Mixing various smoking, multi-coloured test tubes together.
b.) Sexing up Ms.Gibson in a store cupboard.
It’s a ridiculous mix of classic-era Toho movie and exploitation fare and fantastic, upbeat fun all the way through. Continuity errors appear at random, giving the impression they’ve been deliberately inserted to add to the atmosphere. The concluding battle is as satisfying as you could wish for.
A little too self-aware at times, leading to copious mugging, it still avoids too much at-camera winking. The movie works best when it plays it straight, belching out golden comedy nuggets of dialogue (“We’re headed straight to hell with a Devil on our tails!”) and wilfully disregarding both script and film-making rules whenever the mood strikes.
Make no mistake, this is a BAD movie. But it’s also custom built for a Saturday night with beers and a pizza. Add extra ham and enjoy.
2 Comments
This sounds like the best film ever made. I can, however, see a way you could improve it:
A T-Rex with an aqualung.
or without one, I’d love to see a film with dinosaurs drowning and thrashing about, whiule Saxon play their hits in the foreground.