Movie Scum

Written by: Digger The problem with basing a movie on something that actually happened is that most people are going to know how it ends. While most movies based on historical wars or other large scale events can get around this by focusing on unknown facets or personal stories of people who played minor roles in the grand scheme of things, how do you put any surprises in the story about one guy who had to amputate his own arm? Interestingly enough, director Danny Boyle found a way. Literally all I knew going in to 127 Hours is that a climber gets trapped by a rock and has to cut off an appendage to escape his eventual death. Strangely, this foreknowledge actually made the anticipation and the emotion of the film’s imminent climax all the more intense, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The film follows the novel ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’ written by Aron Ralston, the mountaineer who survived the film’s central event in 2003. So that would make this the third time Ralston ha...

Written by: Digger Before I even get started, let me set a few things straight about this film. The movie Yonggary has kind of a twisted past.   Although billed as a remake of the 1967 South Korean monster movie Yongary, the title and country of origin are really the only things the original film shares with its 1999 counterpart.  In an attempt to help the movie appeal to a broader international market, the film was produced with an English-speaking American cast.  The film was initially released in South Korea and internationally in 1999 but a second version of the film, with additional scenes and “improved” special effects, was released in 2001.  This remastered version, retitled Reptilian or Reptile 2001 in the United States, is currently available on DVD, and is the version that I am reviewing. Now, with all that out of the way, this movie opens with a team of archaeologists exploring a cave and some of the most horrific line deliveries in recorded histo...

Written by: Digger The role of a monster in storytelling is to be the manifestation of our fears and anxieties. The reason monsters come in so many varieties, (undead, giant beasts, aliens, demons, radioactive mutants) is because each one represents a different part of our world of which we are afraid. Zombies, vampires, and other humanoid monsters represent parts of the human condition and our own nature that we would rather not acknowledge. Aliens, on the other hand, represent our fears of things that are foreign and unfamiliar. As we are creatures of reason and define our world based on what we know, the unknown is a terrifying concept. The recent independent film Monsters tries to tap into both of these areas of the human psyche, with both alien creatures and with an unflattering portrayal of how society and governments deal with said giant aliens. The premise is that a U.S. Space probe returning to Earth carrying samples from one of Saturn’s moons crash landed in northern Mexi...

Written by: Digger Some people consider 1950′s era drive-in science fiction a low point in American cinema. It is true that a lot of garbage came out of studios who green-lit half-hearted scripts because they included space aliens or nuclear energy in them. Although several well made classics came out in the same time span, the stigma of the B movie is a hard one to shake. While there is no reason to be ashamed of enjoying the cheese, what reason would anyone have in making a film now that is intentionally cheesy? A movie that is part bad-sci-fi celebration and part bad-sci-fi parody is Alien Trespass, the story of an invasion in 1950′s America. Eric McCormack plays Ted Lewis, an astronomer that one clear night in his home near a California desert, prepares a wedding anniversary celebration with his wife loving wife Lana (Jody Thompson). Ted sees a bright shooting star in the night sky, which turns out to be a flying saucer that crashes in the desert. On board the ship are two extr...

Written by: Digger If there is one thing I have learned from watching creature-features in my lifetime, it’s that monsters love New York City. King Kong terrorized New York, although he was taken there against his will, the Beast from 20000 Fathoms rampaged through New York of his own accord. Even the fake Godzilla from the terrible 1998 American film thought New York City would be a lovely place to raise a brood of hatchlings. So, when it came time in 2008 to throw a new giant monster into the mix, what better place to have him destroy than the Big Apple. Unlike classic creature films, Cloverfield takes the audience on a journey through the eyes of the displaced masses. Basically, the story is told from the perspective of the guy that you would only see for a split second pointing and screaming in a Godzilla movie. It all comes to us via “found footage” from the hand-held camcorder of Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David) and starts off with footage recorded a few days before the even...

Written by: Digger No one can deny that Stephen King is one of the most prolific writers working today. He has over forty-five published novels, nine collections of short-stories, and dozens of credits for films, TV shows and TV mini-series. While the success and worth of his various film adaptations is debatable, his impact on the entertainment industry is certain. One of my favorite movies to bare Stephen King’s name is Frank Darabont’s 2007 adaptation of The Mist. The set up for the film is easy enough to follow. Thomas Jane plays David, a professional artist living with his wife Stephanie (Kelly Collins Lintz) and five-year-old son Billy. (Nathan Gamble) After a vicious storm knocks out the town’s power and knocks over several trees onto people’s cars and boat houses, David’s vacationing neighbor Brent (Andre Braugher) who is a New York attorney and has a bit of a history with David, asks David for a ride into town do buy some supplies. Before leaving, David and his wife notice...

Written by: Digger I love Bigfoot. I don’t believe that the legends about Sasquatches and Yetis are true, but the concept of the missing link or man-ape is a fascinating one, and right on the boarder of believability. I also love that there are so many movies about Bigfoot that are either family films or horror movies. Most of the horror movies featuring a Bigfoot monster are made on a shoestring budget, have Lance Hendrikson in them, and are only watchable due to how campy they are. These films fall into the sub-genre of “Sasquatchslpoitation.” The film that really highlights this sub-genre, and is also the best Sy Fy original movie I have ever seen, is Ryan Schifrin’s Abominable. We start off in this movie with a farmer discovering his horse slaughtered in the snow, then spying a huge dark figure lurking in the shadows. He and his wife run inside until it seems safe, and look outside to find massive footprints in the snow. Months later we find Matt McCoy (his second time on this ...

Written by: Digger For every Alfred Hitchcock, there is an Ed Wood. There are many talented directors working in the film industry today, but there are just as many infamously terrible directors churning out worthless trash on a regular basis. Uwe Boll, arguably the worst of the worst, has garnered a legion of haters since his earliest days in film making, and for many good reasons. “Doctor” Boll has no idea how tell a story visually, how to get good performances from actors, how to compose an interesting shot, or how to make a movie enjoyable in any way. After the cinematic train wreck that was House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, his second film to be released in American theaters, cemented the popular opinion of Boll as the king of schlock. The film opens with what is possibly the longest text crawl in movie history that flat out tells the audience this complicated back story about an ancient civilization and a dark world that they accidentally opened up and then some secret go...

Written by: Digger On the third of November, 1954, unsuspecting Japanese audiences were introduced to a character that would become the most recognizable movie monster of all time. Gojira (Godzilla to Americans) stomped his way into the popular consciousness throughout the next five decades. Godzilla has starred in a total of twenty-eight films (not including the crappy Roland Emmerich version) the latest of which is possibly the craziest of all. Godzilla: Final Wars was released on Godzilla’s 50th anniversary and, as the title implies, was meant to cap-off the latest series of Toho’s Godzilla films. We start off seeing a military unit from the Earth Defense Force that is engaging Godzilla at the South Pole. The strategic importance of defending the South Pole is up for debate, but a war ship named Gotengo launches a volley of missiles to bury Godzilla in an avalanche. Then a narration describes a brief history of Earth, stating that near constant warfare and pollution has released...

Written by: Digger I’m going to diversify things up a little here today and throw a lady monster in the mix. Darkness Falls is the story of a young boy Kyle who is terrorized by, of all things, the Tooth Fairy. This isn’t your grandma’s Tooth Fairy I’m talking about either, or the Tooth Fairy from that other horror movie The Tooth Fairy that came out in 2006. The undead creature haunting this picture is Matilda Dixon, and she wins the award for most complicated back story of any monster, ever. Matilda’s legend begins when she was a kindly old spinster woman in the town of Darkness Falls (sounds like a cheerful place) where she was loved by all the children for paying them money for there baby teeth that had fallen out. What she did with those teeth is anyone’s guess, but she was eventually caught in a house fire and her face was burned so badly that she hid her face behind a porcelain mask. On top of all that, she was blamed for the disappearance of two children and hanged by the t...

Written by: Digger Several legends of the common monster stable originated in European folklore, so it is oddly fitting when the creatures that American film industry have made popular become the focal point of a European production. Such is the case with Neil Marshall’s horror film Dog Soldiers, which has no shortage of -Spoiler Warning- werewolves. The film starts off with a young couple out for a romantic camping trip far from civilization, which in horror movie terms is pretty much a huge neon sign reading “Please attack us.” Sure enough, a big wolf hand reaches into the tent and makes short work of the two. Not too far away in the woods, a man is trying to escape from pursuers, but is eventually taken down. The man is Private Cooper (Kevin McKidd) and this was an exercise to test his resourcefulness for the British special forces. Captain Ryan (Liam Cunningham) is considering letting him join his team, but denies him entry, and beats the tar out of him, when Cooper refuses a d...

Written by: Digger In most movies that involve a monster of some sort, you usually get a story that revolves around one type of creature or ghost or alien. Rarely, a monster movie will have two or three different varieties of creature, but in the science-fiction comedy Evolution, you get an entire ecosystem’s worth of imaginative creatures. Ivan Reitman, most well known for directing Ghostbusters, took a serious and straight-forward script about an unusual alien invasion and turned it into a humorous outing in his own style. It begins with a meteor from the unknown reaches of deep space crashing to earth in the Arizona right on top of Wayne’s (Seann William Scott’s) car, turning it into a smoking hole in the ground. Ira Kane (David Duchovny) a professor at the local community college finds out about the meteor impact and suggests to his friend and geology professor Harry Block (Orlando Jones) that they check it out. Ira takes a sample from the meteor and discovers it contains nitro...

Written by: Digger In 1922, during the German Expressionist movement of early silent cinema, director F.W. Murnau released the horror film Nosferatu onto an unsuspecting audience. The film’s image of the Dracula fill-in Count Orlock, portrayed by actor Max Schreck, became an iconic staple of horror movie history. Almost eight decades later, director E. Elias Merhige brings a secret history of the classic film’s creation to the screen in Shadow of the Vampire. The film opens with an intertitle card explaining how Marnau (John Malkovich) was unable to secure the rights for Dracula from Bram Stoker’s estate, but went on with the production under a different name. On a sound stage in Berlin, Marnau is filming the first scenes of his production Nosferatu with German actors Gustav von Wangenheim (Eddie Izzard) and Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack). After the shoot, the movie’s producer Albin (Udo Kier) discusses the crew’s plan to film much of the picture on location in a castle in S...

Written by: Digger Few films have explored the terrifying notion of a possessed appendage. The Crawling Hand was entirely centered around the disembodied hand of a dead astronaut being controlled by an alien consciousness. In Evil Dead 2, Ash dueled with his own hand that had been infected by evil spirits. And, in 1999, audiences were introduced to the next evolution of the demonic limb in the horror comedy Idle Hands. Devon Sawa plays the improbably named Anton Tobias, the epitome of the stoned, high-school slacker that were so very prevalent throughout the nineties. The local news is buzzing with unsolved murders, but this is the least of Anton’s worries, as he is out of weed. He visits his friends Mick (Seth Green) and Pnub (Elden Henson) who convince him to smoke a mixture of oregano and nutmeg. Anyway, after all this dumb-fuckery, Anton discovers the bodies of his own parents, then murders Mick with a broken bottle and Pnub with a circular saw blade. Anton is horrified that hi...

Written by: Digger This film starts with a little educational text stating that the South China Sea hides deep chasms that have never been explored by man, and that numerous ships have mysteriously vanished in those areas of the ocean for decades. If only we could find a way to surrender this movie to the depths of the ocean for all eternity. If I had to pick only a few words to describe the plot of Deep Rising, those words would be derivative and over-written. One piece of the story starts on a small boat captained by John Finnegan (Treat Williams) who is not out crab fishing but shuttling a band of black ops mercenary types to some obscure point in the middle of the ocean. The mercenary group is led by Hanover (Wes Studi) and is composed of half a dozen or so soldiers too bland to be memorable, although I did see Jason Flemyng and that guy that played Kano in Mortal Kombat in the mix. The black ops team turns hostile on Finnegan’s crew when the ship’s wormy mechanic Joel (Kevin J...

Written by: Digger The Relic, a techno-thriller from the late nineties is based on the best-selling novel of the same name by writers Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs. Some critics described the film as Alien in a museum, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Directed by Peter Hyams, probably best known for Timecop, the film largely takes place, unofficially, in Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Dr. Margo Green (Penelope Ann Miller) is an evolutionary biologist who is developing a new method of mapping genetic codes, but is in danger of loosing her funding to a rival scientist, Greg Li (Chi Muoi Lo). As such, Dr. Green spends most of the movie either pissed-off or terrified. In order to stay afloat, she must prepare herself for the museum's opening of their “Superstition” exhibit. Her office receives a package from Dr. Whitney, another researcher whom Margo does not like, who has been studying tribal practices and rituals in Brazil. All the crates c...

Written by: Digger Is it Full Moon Studios time again? Already? Yep. This is another film from the not-so-proud direct to DVD tradition. But I have to warn everybody, this one makes Subspecies look like an Oscar winner. While the box art shows Zarkorr the invader, a giant dragon-like monster that shoots lasers from his eyes and wrecks cities for kicks, we rarely ever get to see it in the film. A giant monster wrecking stuff is not in and of itself a bad premise for a movie, but we soon move on to introduce this film’s worst element, the plot. Earth has been chosen by a collection of intelligent alien races, which we never actually see, to undergo a test. The aliens release a massive, planet crushing monster, Zarkorr, and contact one representative of the human race that they choose based on being the most average human specimen they can find. That average human is Tommy Ward (Rhys Pugh) a postal worker who likes to watch old cartoons that are probably in the public domain. The alie...

Written by: Digger H.P. Lovecraft is called the father of modern horror and is credited with creating the Cthulhu Mythos and the ‘weird fiction’ sub-genre. Although there have been several adaptations of his various stories (most of them directed by Stuart Gordon) the highest any of those films have ever climbed in the mainstream consciousness is the movie Re-Animator, and that’s not a very well-known film. In 1995, the fans of John Carpenter (one of the more iconic horror directors working today) were treated to the giant H. P. Lovecraft tribute film In the Mouth of Madness. The movie opens with Sam Neill as a raving lunatic in a straight-jacket being dragged into a padded cell. Doctor Wrenn (David Warner) is called in to find out what made Sam’s character, named John Trent, go insane. John, who has covered himself and the walls of is cell with the images of crosses, sits down to tell Wrenn about his most recent case. John was a private investigator that specialized in cases of in...

Written by: Digger Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus , is considered to be the first science fiction novel ever. The monster from this story is the first fictional creature to be created not from mysticism or occult rituals, but from scientific hubris. There has been a legion of film adaptations of this story, in fact, one of Edison Studios' first motion picture is a retelling of the Frankenstein tale. There have been many other attempts to translate the tale to film since, the most famous of which is the Universal Studios version from 1931, but in 1994,  Kenneth Branagh  directed what is possibly the most faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley's original novel.  The movie  begins with a voice over quote written by Mary Shelley talking about 'speaking to the mysterious fears of our nature' or some such, then opens to Captain Robert Walton ( Aidan Quinn ) leading an expedition to the north pole and getting many of his crew killed in the process. Once the ship i...

Written by: Digger In 1955, Jack Finney wrote a science-fiction novel about a race of alien seed pods that traveled through space and landed in Mill Valley, California. Those pods hatched into emotionless duplicates of the town's citizens and replaced them while they slept. A year later, this story would be adapted into the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers and would go on to become an American science-fiction classic. This was the first of four movie treatments that the original novel would receive over the next 55 years. The third of these adaptations, simply titled Body Snatchers, was directed by Abel Ferrara of Bad Lieutenant fame and features B-movie legends Larry Cohen and Stuart Gordon on the writing staff. Unlike all previous versions of this story, this film does not take place in California, but at a military base in Selma, Alabama. It begins with a family driving to the base. Steve Malone (Terry Kinney) is an agent with the Environmental Protection Agency th...