Hot on the tail of my fish person post, here comes a movie about... you guessed it... a fish person! Hypothermia showed up out of the blue on Netflix, a movie that I hadn't heard about (and I like to think I'm pretty good about keeping an ear to the ground about upcoming horror movies, be they big releases or indie releases.
Hypothermia is a strange movie. Not strange in that it's a weird plot—it's got a pretty normal plot as far as monster movies go. A family goes out for some ice fishing, is frustrated to find they have to share the remote frozen lake with an obnoxious man and his obnoxious son, then they all get trapped on the ice by something monstrous that lives in the freezing waters below.
No, the weird part is the fact that the movie's got some really well done camerawork and directing when it comes to establishing mood. The shots of the monster swimming under the ice are actually pretty effective and spooky, and there's some pretty good gore effects, and the music is nice and spooky.
That said... the acting's all over the board. The main family's dad is played by Michael Rooker, and seeing him play a pretty decent guy when what I know him best as is Henry from "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" and Merle from "The Walking Dead" was a bit disconcerting. He does a great job in the movie... and his acting is made all the more excellent by the fact that everyone else in the movie is various shades of mediocre to terrible. Especially the other father and son.
But that's not the worst. Because, eventually, the monster comes out of the ice.
I've seen some pretty unconvincing monster suits in my time on this blue and green rock hurtling through the cold vastness of space, but I really don't know if I've seen one more ridiculous and unfortunate than this one. The fact that the monster's shown in full daylight makes things worse, even if the director tries to hide the shame by using jerky camera moves, quick edits, and lens flare type effects.
We can still see it's a guy in wetsuit with a rubber mask on his head.
This.
This is a perfect example of less being more. Had they left the creature in the shadows, I might have been frustrated by the lack of a good look at it... but I'd rather be frustrated by that lack than boggled by the worst monster costume of the century.
... would have us believe that fish see in "lava vision," where everything is seen through an orange filter. And if you get slashed by its spines... YOU see in "lava vision" too.
... was executive produced by Larry Fessenden, who also apparently has a cameo as a fishing show host. I didn't recognize him, which kinda startles me. He's a bit memorable looking, after all.
... one ups its crappy fishperson costume by capping the movie with what may just be the goofiest and silliest ending a monster movie's had in years. I'm tempted to spoil it, but it kinda has to be seen to be believed.
... still avoids getting an "F" grade because despite its failings... has some good qualities in there... if you're charitable enough to notice them and not forget them when the fish person shows up for the first time in hard, unforgiving focus.
So, IMDB claims that "The Snow Creature" is the first movie about the yeti. My favorite yeti movie is probably "The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas." Made a few years after "The Snow Creature," that movie featured Peter Cushing in a movie directed by Val Guest and written by Nigel Kneale—the duo responsible for the Quatermass Xperiment and Quartermass II, two of my favorite sci-fi movies from the 50s.
But it's "The Snow Creature" that I'm here to talk about, and if it is indeed the first yeti movie, then it's also rock solid proof that what comes first is not always the best. In fact, in this case, what comes first is one of the worst.
The plot, such as it is, involves a botanist and his boozy photographer henchman who head up to the Himalayas to seek out and photograph high-altitude plants. Like moss and some tiny flowers. When the yeti (more on THIS piece of work below) shows up to abduct the lead Sherpa's wife (despite the fact that the yeti has a doomed nuclear family at home), said distraught Sherpa rounds up the other guides and they head off to hunt down the yeti, save the wife, and kill the presumably rapist or woman-eating monster.
Unfortunately, the movie assumes we, the viewer, identify more with the (white American) botanist and his boozy photographer pal. Who are mortified that their plant-seeking expedition is being usurped by a mutinous crew of Sherpas and a yeti. Much of the first 3rd of the movie consists of the group trudging around in the snow during the day, then the two American "heroes" spending time trying to fix the radio to call the police at night. Eventually, the botanist realizes that catching a real-live yeti might make him more money than mountain moss, and soon thereafter they find a yeti in a cave with his yeti-wife and yeti-kid. There's a confrontation, and the yeti-dad (for some reason I'm still not clear on) races up to the cave wall and pounds his fists on it, causing a cave-in that not only knocks himself out but also kills his yeti-wife and yeti-child. The brave Americans boldly leave the two dead yetis behind, truss up yeti-dad with a rinky-dink home-made stretcher, and after 15 agonizing minutes of watching the logistics of walking their prize down the mountainside, storing him in a warehouse, arranging to have a refrigerated shipping unit (that looks like a metal outhouse with a frosted window in the side) built in the states and then shipped to Tibet, and then loading up their yeti onto an airplane and flying to Los Angeles from Tibet via New York.
ANYway... they get back to LA and after spending a mind-boggling 5 minutes or so on a "must see to believe it" subplot wherein the customs department at the LA Airport are trying to decide if the yeti is a man or a beast so they can decide if he needs immigration papers... the yeti gets out, kidnaps and/or chases some women, steals some meat from a meat packing plant, then gets netted in the sewers by the cops and shot dead by a hand gun (seen in a closeup wherein the man firing the gun is using his middle finger... thanks movie!). The movie ends with us seeing the botanist eager to get home to his wife, his policeman friend excited to go see his new baby at the hospital...
...and with the Sherpa's wife still missing out there in the Himalayas after being kidnapped by a yeti. Well... I guess it was the 50s. American movies had different priorities back then I guess.
Behold the SNOW BEAST in all his glory! Check out those muppet mitts!
So! On to the yeti! This was one of the WORST monsters I've seen in a movie. Ever. I kid you not. The yeti was basically a tall lanky guy wearing what looked to be like long underwear to which someone had glued swaths of rabbit fur to the the shoulders, chest, groin, back, and legs, then slapped a couple of novelty muppet monster gloves on each had, then threw on a squarish fur hat and a fake beard.
That's it.
Oh... and he's all gray and black, just like you'd expect a creature that lives in the snow and, indeed, is called "THE SNOW CREATURE" to appear as.
But the absolute best part? The director doesn't skimp at all on showing us the monster, often in unforgiving hard focus. Unfortunately, probably 75% of the scenes where we see the monster doing stuff ARE THE SAME SCENE! There's a shot of the monster walking slowly forward toward the camera against a black background, and the director sees fit to simply splice in that scene over and over and over and over whenever he wants to remind us that the yeti is out there. Doesn't matter if the scene's supposed to take place on a snowy mountainside or a deep Himalayan cave or in the LA city sewer or in an airport warehouse or in an alley. That scene's apparently good enough for anywhere!
HA! Also? When he wants to convey the notion that the yeti is being sneaky and retreating into the darkness to hide? He simply runs that same footage BACKWARDS.
I picked this movie to watch tonight out of the 100+ movies in my online Netflix queue for 1 reason—it was tied with "Tetsuo: The Bullet Man" for the title of "shortest movie in my online Netflix queue" at a mere 70 minutes or so. I'll have to watch "Tetsuo" later this weekend to see which one seems longer. Because "The Snow Creature" seemed like it went on for 70 hours, not 70 minutes!
... informs the viewer of many well known scientific facts, including, for example, that yetis instinctively know where to seek out the cooler areas in a region... such as the sewers of Los Angeles.
... may well have the honor of the least convincing yeti costume ever filmed.
... seems to think that in a movie featuring a woman-abducting yeti and life-or-death survival situations on the slopes of the highest mountain range on the planet, the best place to go to for tension and action are sequences of radio repair.
... assumes that if a dude brings a live yeti back to Los Angeles, one reporter is enough to represent the media attention such an event would bring—and that this one reporter wouldn't put up a fight when the cops tell him "you'll get a chance to ask questions about the yeti later; first we have to get him through immigration!"
... would have probably been about 15 minutes shorter if the producer had told the editor & director, "Okay, you can't re-use ANY FOOTAGE in your film."
... is one of those movies that's important to preserve and see, so that you can point it out to those people who say that Hollywood doesn't make great movies the way they used to.
... teaches us that the best time to cry out a warning to "LOOK OUT!" is after the cop you saw walk by the tunnel you just watched shabby-yeti shamble into has already been snatched and mauled.
... really could use a good rifftraxing.
Grade: F
Sorry... couldn't find a trailer for this one, so enjoy a clip from the movie where the heroes ambush the yeti and his family at home and marvel at the yeti's nonsensical reaction to this home invasion.
So, as if to celebrate that last Sunday's monster day entry was on the Fouke Monster, today I sat down to watch "Creature from Black Lake," which more or less exists due to the popularity of "Legend of Boggy Creek." Unfortunately, this movie is nowhere near as spooky and charming and interesting as the former.
"Creature from Black Lake" opens with an attack on a pair of trappers floating in a boat on the eponymous Black Lake (which looks more muddy than black, but whatever) by a big hairy hominid who comes at them from under the water. That's right! Bigfoot can swim, apparently!
Anyway, that scene dealt with, the movie shifts gears to a pair of "yankees" (as the movie is so fond of reminding us) from college in Chicago who've come down to the Black Lake region to try to find the creature. Maybe to catch it and bring it back alive. A large portion of the movie chronicles these two gadabouts as they run into trouble with the locals, be it a faux pas at a hillbilly dinner or flirting with the sheriff's pretty young daughter or trying their damndest to track down the surviving trapper from that first scene so they can interview him and find out where to get their own look at the Creature from Black Lake.
There might not be any hamburgers in your future, but I bet getting mauled by Bigfoot will make up for it!
I'm not sure WHY the monster's called the Creature from Black Lake... since the lake only appears in that one pre-credit sequence. The rest of the movie takes place in a small town and in the woods, more or less.
Anyway... no real suspense. Some goofy music. A pretty mediocre ape suit. And a big dose of pan-n-scan coupled with at times barely-understandable dialogue from a pretty sub-par transfer to DVD equates to what can be charitably called "Not one of my top ten Bigfoot-related movies."
... features a Vietnam Vet who's defining characteristic is that he likes hamburgers. Why? Because he grew up in town with a chicken processing plant and his dad worked there so they had chicken every day. Chicken for breakfast. Chicken for lunch. Chicken for dinner. One day his dad tried to make chicken jello. What does this have to do with Vietnam or, more on-topic, the Creature From Black Lake? Not sure... but there's a lot of film time spent on the topic so it must have been important to someone.
... isn't interested in showing us the fate of the creature. Did it die when it got shot? Did the van explosion kill it? What happened? Doesn't mater, because with about 5 minutes to go, the movie loses interest in the Bigfoot and wallows in a long coda where we get to worry about Mr. Hamburgers after he gets mauled by the Bigfoot earlier on.
... reminded me why I don't like pan-n-scan.
... doesn't have a cat trick, but it does have an unexplained bearded man in the woods trick.
... spends roughly 2% of its running time at the actual Black Lake. I guess that's okay, since it's about the creature FROM Black Lake, not the creature AT Black Lake.
Those of you who have seen the remake of "Clash of the Titans" know that when I say its sequel, "Wrath of the Titans," is a better movie than its predecessor know that I'm not necessarily saying "Wrath" is a good movie. Whatever it is, though, it's certainly never quiet.
Ray Harryhausen is one of my cinematic heroes. The last movie he did special effects work for was the 1981 version of "Clash of the Titans," so when the remake came around a few years ago, I was wary but hopeful. The trailers certainly made it look exciting. But no... no. It ended up being one of the worst movies of 2010.
"Wrath of the Titans" has an advantage then. It's an entirely new story... well, sort of, unless you count mythology... and so I wasn't spending every single second of the movie mentally comparing it unfavorably to an original. This time out we get more neat mythological monsters, but each time they show up... they end up kind of being wasted. Chimeras make a big opening scene, but even though they're supposedly rampaging across the countryside for the duration of the movie, once Perseus kills one at the start of the movie (in what's easily the most interesting scene in the entire movie), they're never seen again. Perseus and crew head out to Hephaestus's island, and once there they get in a fight with a bunch of cyclopes, but it turns out they're kinda nice if dumpy guys who end up strolling up the mountainside with the heroes to visit Hephaestus. And they end up having to go through THE labyrinth to enter Tarterus to save Zeus, and wouldn't you know it the minotaur does indeed attack Perseus, but he's just a big dude with growths on his head who, after a series of quick-cut fight edits, ends up not leaving much of a mark on the memory.
"WHYYYYY? WHY DIDN'T THEY MAKE ME LOOK LIKE A NORMAL MINOTAUR?"
I suppose that all the lava effects splattering off Kronos's enormous mitts at the end were pretty nifty, as were his double-sided lava warrior thingys... But by then, I was pretty well bored with the absolutely uninspired dialogue and frustrated by the obviously well-done special effects that you couldn't really stop to admire because they were too busy doing fast edits. Fast edits are hard to do well, but easy to do when you're covering the fact that you don't know how to choreograph an action scene, whether or not it has CGI in it or not, I guess...
Oh. Wait. Just remembered... like "Clash" did a few years ago, "Wrath" manages to get a somewhat goofy and nonsensical cameo in for Bubo, so now I hate the movie just a little bit more.
... thankfully doesn't have any suicide bombing djinn or comedy-relief adventurer duos. It does have a comedy-relief single adventurer, so it's not a total improvement.
... makes the mistake that the viewer would rather watch Perseus and Ares have a fistfight rather than see some more special effects in the form of just one more mythological monster encounter.
... somehow manages to have less memorable characters than the first movie. Which is, in a way, a blessing, since the traits that made the previous characters memorable were insulting or frustrating or annoying.
... spends way too much time trying to make us interested in the human armies that don't have a chance in the fight anyway and end up kinda just standing around and getting dirty.
... makes me wonder why, if you steal Zeus's lightning bolt, you don't bother using it in a fight, even if you ARE Ares.
... really does want to be God of War, but it doesn't have the courage to even get close to it. Maybe if it had been R-rated and was loaded with gore and profanity and nudity it would have been more interesting.
Zack Snyder's made one movie that completely caught me off guard and impressed me*, one movie that completely underwhelmed me**, one flawed masterpiece***, and now, with Sucker Punch, masterpiece flaw.
So... what do I mean by it being a "masterpiece flaw"? Well... the movie is never boring to look at, for one thing. But the longer you look at it, the more you become painfully aware of the fact that what you're looking at is trying SO HARD to outdo itself with every single scene that the only thing it really accomplishes by the end is it makes you tired. I mean... when a movie has a fight with three giant-sized demonic warriors from a samurai's nightmare armed with swords, polearms, gatling guns, and rocket launchers against a beautiful gun and katana wielding blonde who just got armed with her weapons by Scott Glenn, you'd think that you'd come to the end of a pretty over-the-top action movie. In fact, that's more or less how Sucker Punch starts. By the end, I was thinking back to that fight sequence and how mundane it was, after wading through clockwork German soldiers and robots and dragons and so on.
I think my primary disappointment with Sucker Punch was that it ended up feeling like scenes from like 5 different movies that I would have really liked to see the WHOLE movie of, then incorporated one of my least favorite storytelling tropes into the whole thing—the fact that a lot of the movie was just a hallucination/dream/vision. (And no, that's not a spoiler... it's pretty obvious from the start when the really crazy stuff—rocket wielding giant samurai—starts showing up.)
I mentioned above that Sucker Punch is never boring to look at... and while that's true... at places it got boring to watch. In a movie with everything I just mentioned above that ALSO has wall to wall hotties in it... being "boring to watch" is what I'd call the definition of a "masterpiece flaw."
Pardon me... do you know the fastest way to Little China?
... a strong piece of evidence that director Zack Snyder should not write moive scripts wholly on his own, but should adapt scripts from better writers. Like, say, Alan Moore or George Romero.
... not helped by being PG-13. Netflix failed me there by not sending me the unrated version of the movie, which while I doubt is much better, at least would have been even MORE over the top.
... pretty much what you'll see in the trailer below... stretched out to nearly 2 hours with not a lot more story added to what you see in the trailer itself.
