Movie Review: Ice Sharks

Released: 2016
Genre: Action / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 3.6 / 10

Just after I reviewed the decidedly average Mega Shark VS Kolossus a little something from one of its lead actors popped up in my Twitter notifications:

Not wanting this to be another Kacey Zen-type incident I decided that there was only one rational thing I could do: become the President and Chief Financial Officer of the Unofficial Edward DeRuiter fan club. It made sense – he tends to be in movies I enjoy watching and he had that oddly buff office worker vibe going on. And so it was decided that I would watch any movie that Mr DeRuiter had a starring role in after the aforementioned Mega Shark VS Kolossus, and the fan club kicked off its run with Ice Sharks.

Once they reach a specific age marine bases swim off to start families of their own.

The Plot

On at undisclosed island somewhere around Greenland at an unnamed facility doing unspecified but very wide-reaching research things are about to get a little hairy. According to the local Scottish Indian Inuit people are going missing on the ice, and Tracy and David (played by the ever-charming DeRuiter) decide to head out and see whether the polar bears are snacking on things they shouldn’t. It all goes a bit pear-shaped when it becomes apparent that several creatures lying in bits and pieces on the ice have been attacked by Greenland sharks, and even David’s swoon-inducing smile isn’t enough to ward off an attack, and he and Tracy barely make it back to the facility alive.

But these are clever sharks, evolved to have razor-sharp fins and a strong understanding of circles. Working as a group they saw through the ice, separating the facility from the connecting land and causing it to float off into the sea. Cautionary tale kids: don’t build your research facility on wafer-thin ice – not even David’s rippling biceps will be able to reconnect that to the rest of the shelf.

Things take a decided turn for the worse when the sharks rally once more and sink the facility, sending it to the sea floor from whence they can pick off the survivors one by one. It’ll be up to David and all his sensuous manoeuvres (and the help of several unimportant characters and a large ice breaking ship) to make effective use of soft science that’ll refloat the facility if anyone’s going to have a chance of seeing the surface world again.

Ain’t nothing wrong with a little extra thigh.

The Visuals

I’ll say this: leave The Asylum to its own devices and it can really throw some painful stuff your way, but have SyFy pitch in with a little spare cash and what I presume must be a vision of some sort and you end up with something that, while not tremendously good, is still quite entertaining. I mean I’m not quite sure why we’re building things on tiny flecks of ice or how a tank that sunk right down landed up half a kilometre away from where it was dropped or how one short cable can turn into four very long sunken-facility-lifting cables, but if that’s what the movie wants to throw at its audience then fine, I’ll accept that. Of course the vast majority of everything is also that CGI work from circa 2002, but it wouldn’t be an Asylum or SyFy movie without it. The day they cough up for real special effects is the day I tap out.

Of course, with all these CGI sharks and floating research facilities, one thing that’s all real (and all man) is Edward DeRuiter, and that’s all that matters at the end of the day.

He got that, he got that, he got that D.I.L.F. $

The Feelings

I went into this movie for ice sharks and Edward DeRuiter, and I left satisfied.

At the end of the day you’re going to get out of this movie exactly what its title and lineage suggest: sharks in and around the ice, some very questionable science, and a bonus round of cockblocking from a Scottish Indian Inuit. In my humble opinion there are far worse ways to spend a Sunday night.

And of course, it has Edward DeRuiter. With absolutely no knowledge of a Germanic language other than English I’m fairly sure his surname must translate to ‘the dreamy one’, and that’s the most important thing this movie will teach you.

My Final Rating: 4 / 10
Buy Ice Sharks at Amazon.com

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Movie Review: Martian Land

Released: 2015
Genre: Sci-Fi / Action
IMDB Rating: 2.3 / 10

Watching this cinematically-induced lobotomy brought to mind the words of one of the world’s most eminent scholars:

“Yes, I see. Something involving that many big words could easily destabilise time itself.”
– Professor Hubert Farnsworth

This was all that lay at the core of this ill-conceived attempt by The Asylum to ride on the coattails of The Martian: if we throw enough big words at the audience, whether or not they make sense, maybe they’ll think that we understand what we’re talking about. Well guess what The Asylum? My penchant for reading hard sci-fi novels from the 60s and a few quick glances at Wikipedia have taught me more about what it would take to live on Mars than anything you tried to throw together!

Next time you build a Martian colony, maybe cover it in something a bit more resilient than Plexiglass!

The Plot

In the distant future the Earth has been lost to mankind. Our habit of burning fossil fuels and the subsequent global warming ultimately resulted in an unprecedented rise in volcanic activity across the planet, leaving the homeworld enveloped in an impenetrable cover of nuclear dust which left life on its surface impossible. And so we set off to Mars to build civilisation anew! Alas, our bad habits will once again be our downfall. While Earth was the perfect temperature to begin with and didn’t really need our help Mars was a bit chilly when we got there, and so we set about trying to warm the place up a little. This fractional rise in temperature has one horrible unintended side effect – it re-ignites Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in our solar system, which causes an enormous dust storm to erupt and begin spreading out over the Martian surface.

The domed cities of Mars are not designed to withstand the wind strengths generated by this storm, and Mars New York is quickly compromised when its dome is shattered. Over in Mars Los Angeles Miranda, a truly remarkable mind in a scientific field so generically named that she could literally be studying anything, needs to mount a rescue operation that will somehow both save her daughter who was in MNY when the storm struck, and deactivate the storm before it can cause similar damage to Mars’ other cities. Thankfully she knows just the right guy for the job.

Miranda has her current husband, Neil, bring her ex-husband, Foster, to Mars from Earth, where he has apparently been living quite comfortably while trying to restore the Blue Marble to its forgotten majesty. Foster devises the ultimate plan to stop the storm – by placing EMF emitters at key points, one of which must be in the eye of this eyeless storm, they can blast the storm apart and thus save mankind’s new home. But Mars is a frigid bitch and a hostile mistress, and it will take all of Neil and Foster’s acting inabilities to pull this plan off before all of the Martian cities are lost.

I would like, at this point, to assure anyone reading this that every word in this description has been carefully chosen to accurately reflect the plot of this film.

You know it’s Mars because it has spacey looking buildings like this.

The Visuals

This has all your typical The Asylum crap and then a bit leftover for you to take home afterwards.

As a rule of thumb The Asylum’s films all tend to have enough budget to produce maybe three CGI scenes which must then be made multipurpose. Martian Land is no exception, and one generic cityscape will just need to cover every city on Mars, with the only difference being how much damage has been done to it by the storm. There’s also no need for extras because all you need to do is copy and paste the same guy running over and over again into the same shot and voila! You have a crowd.

Below par CGI aside Martian Land also has many other wonders to behold. Martian bushes littered all over the planet, for example. And who needs technologically fancy spacesuits to survive a hostile alien world when all-over lycra and a spray painted welding mask with some coloured tape stuck to it will do the same job for a tenth of the price? Why build your Martian rover using fancy materials when all the interior really needs are some broken up crates and a bank of fans from that old PC you were going to throw out anyway? And why are we wasting so much money here on Earth looking into clean forms of energy when all you need is an old TV antenna to act as a lightning rod that can instantly charge batteries?

If bullshit were a currency, Martian Land would be worth its runtime in gold.

My expression throughout the whole movie.

The Feelings

This movie touched me in a bad place and then went in dry.

I am by no means an expert on terraforming or any of the other countless subjects that Martian Land so haphazardly attempts to throw at its audience like Naomi Campbell throwing a cellphone at an assistant she doesn’t like, but I find the concept of interplanetary travel and the colonisation of alien worlds to be a fascinating subject. And to be honest, you don’t need to be an expert to understand that global warming won’t activate a volcano. You don’t need to be an expert to know that you couldn’t breathe on the surface of Mars (although, to be fair, only some characters do this sometimes). And for the love of the bloody maker you don’t need to be an expert to understand that a storm needs to have an eye in the first place if an entire plan hinges on throwing something into the eye of the storm!

You know, I get it – in any space adventure film you can never get all of the facts right, and sometimes you need to bend the truth a little bit in order to make the movie fun. But the only thing that Martian Land managed to get right is that there is, in fact, a planet called Mars, and that’s just not gonna cut it for me.

My Final Rating: 2 / 10
Buy Martian Land at Amazon.com

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Movie Review: Left Behind

Released: 2014
Genre: Action / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 3.1 / 10

A few days back as I was going through my recent reviews and feeling a sense of pride at how this little blog was coming along I was struck by a worrying trend: a lot of the things I was reviewing were things I had enjoyed. I read a fair number of blogs and it’s wonderful when you can tell that someone enjoyed the thing they’re writing about, but I’ll admit that it brings me a sadistic kind of joy when someone rants about something they utterly despised. I can’t expect other people to go out and review and delightfully condemn awful things if I’m not prepared to return the favour, and that’s how I came to watch Left Behind. It was a logical choice given that the universal consensus was that it’s a load of bollocks and I personally can’t stand Nicolas Cage, but I must say that in all the years that the Good Lord has chosen to keep me on this earth watching terrible movies I have never, ever come across a film that fails on every possible level quite as much as Left Behind does.

Maybelline saw our brave heroine through the apocalypse.

The Plot

Chloe Steele has just flown into town to visit her family and to celebrate her dad Rayford’s birthday. Unfortunately Rayford, a pilot, can’t hang around for his birthday as he’s been called away to have an urgent affair with a dimwit airline hostess who, despite living in this sinful world of texting and tweeting and twerking, doesn’t seem to think that the man several decades her senior and with a grown-ass daughter and a prepubescent son might be married. Bloody box of rocks…

In a benevolent act by a generous God about to doom the majority of mankind to eternal torment, Chloe meets Buck Williams, an investigative reporter who doesn’t seem to be awfully good at investigating (or reporting, for that matter) but whose rugged charm would cause the knickers of a less chaste female to come flying off with the force of Lucifer himself falling to Earth. After a brief coffee and some small talk that will set them up for the rest of their doomed lives Chloe leaves to go home to see her much-loved little brother and recently-converted-to-Christianity bat-shit-crazy mother.

Things start to go a tad awry once Chloe and her brother, having sufficiently argued with the mother, make an escape to the mall. At this point God decides that now’s the time for the rapture and starts to take His chosen few (including Chloe’s brother and mother) to heaven. With people vanishing literally by the several chaos breaks out across the world as a very Connecticut, tea and sandwiches after the service, when did they let black people into the country club-style apocalypse starts to happen.

With Chloe and Rayford left behind the two will need to find a way to reunite with one another in this now-literally Godless world. It’s also up to Chloe to figure out a way to fabricate a runway so that Rayford can land his damn plane since air traffic controllers are apparently a very religious bunch.

Prepare yourself for the most underwhelming story ever told, recited in the most monotonous tone imaginable, in a movie that Satan is probably considering as a torture device for one of the circles in Hell.

Just hold it together honey, the credits will roll soon enough.

The Visuals

This movie alleges to have had a $16 million budget. My guess is that 14 of those went to paying Mr Cage. $1 999 500 then went to paying the rest of the cast, crew and the tea trolley lady. The remaining $500 then went into things like hair, makeup, wardrobe and special effects.

That’s how I’m guessing you balance the money-to-visuals ratio. Let your imagination do with this information what it will.

Me too movie, me too…

The Feelings

Boredom with a hint of nausea.

The problem with Left Behind, quite frankly, is everything. On some level, I imagine, it’s meant to portray Christians as the good guys because it’s all about the rapture, but for the brief time we actually have Christians in the movie they’re portrayed as bible-bashing nut jobs, so I can’t say with any conviction what target audience we’re meant to be aiming for.

The “disaster” element of the movie is also very lacklustre. Given that when the Rapture happens only a baker’s dozen worth of adults vanish along with all the children (although I don’t think that a teenager is technically a child, especially by biblical standards), the rioting and mayhem that follow are completely out of proportion to what’s actually happened. Personally the rapture could happen tomorrow and given the friends I have it could be weeks before I noticed anything had happened.

My understanding of the rapture is also that once God takes the chosen into heaven all hell is meant to break out on Earth, but the none of that happens here. Most of Left Behind is just Nic Cage trying to land a plane with an angry midget and some Islamophobia thrown in for good measure. The idea that we should all accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour is kind of mixed in there, but not enough to convince me that that’s the actual point the audience is meant to take away from the film.

I couldn’t actually tell you what the hell it was that this movie was trying to get across to you. It’s like it wanted to climb up on a soap box and preach the good word but only managed to get one leg up. This leaves it preachy enough that you’ll raise an eyebrow at it, but not enough that you can actually engage with its subject matter. Add to that that the acting’s atrocious and there’s literally no action to be found and all you’re left with is Nic Cage’s one facial expression and two hours of your life that you aren’t going to get back.

My Final Rating: 1 / 10
Buy Left Behind at Amazon.com

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Book Review: Famine

Author: Graham Masterton
Genre: Action / Science Fiction
Published: 1981

Famine is a book I read years ago when I picked it up from a bargain bin at my local book store after it seemed to have enjoyed a mass-market paperback run. I remember enjoying it, but threw the copy out during a clean-up on the misguided notion that ‘I won’t want to read this again’. Well, after deciding that I did want to read it again and paying far more money than it’s worth to import a copy from the UK I can happily report that it’s still a very good read.

This book was written in the 80s to play on American fears of the Soviet Union; although the Cold War is long over it still works very well as a pseudo-alternate history and provides some good guidelines for crippling a nation without having to drop bombs on it.

The Plot

Ed Hardesty is just your typical New York actuary-cum-down-home Kansas wheat farmer trying to get by with hard work, honesty and plaid shirts that reveal a testosterone-driven hairy chest. His wife Season is a New York socialite with a taste for caviar, marijuana and affairs with sophisticated men, and his daughter Sally thankfully isn’t old enough to have developed a personality. It’s up to the three of them to keep the family and the Hardesty farm going.

Of course, this could be a little difficult given that a blight is sweeping over the farm and rotting the wheat right off its stalk. Shearson Jones, a Senator more corrupt than an African dictator, offers to step in and raise funds to help the poor, stricken Kansas farmers (and line his own pockets at the same time), but even his enormous girth and political influence can’t save America from the looming famine.

You see, you can’t live off grain reserves when nuclear rods have been dropped into the silos to irradiate them, and you can’t rely on canned food when a good proportion of them have been contaminated with enough botulism to down an elephant. With all sources of calorific intake effectively destroyed, the American people are about to turn on themselves.

As the entire country descends into anarchy Ed must accompany Della, an FBI agent out to bring Shearson Jones to justice, to the nearest FBI office while trying to make his way to California to rescue Season (who went off to find herself just before everything went to crap) and Sally from the growing rampaging mob sweeping the country.

It’s all about to get a little hairy.

The Writing Style

One thing I’ll say for Graham Masterton, he’s not one to mince his words when it comes to describing unpleasant situations. Need a starving woman eating dog food? You’re gonna get a very vivid description of every gravy-laden chunk. Want to hear what people look like when they’ve died from an extreme case of botulism? You’re gonna be able to smell it by the time you’ve finished reading the paragraph. Didn’t want to have a picture of a Hollywood citizen being raped in your head? Too bad, because you’re gonna be able to feel the olive oil lubricant dripping off you soon enough.

This isn’t a negative, however. The book is meant to look at just how badly people behave in the face of disaster, and just how terrible a death by starvation can be. It isn’t meant to be pleasant, and it gives you a very good idea of just how good life is right now.

The only thing to bear in mind is that this book was written in the 80s, which at times lead me to either laugh at a moment intended to be very sincere (for example, when pastel blue Japanese silk pantsuits are considered the height of fashion) or cringe (because it contains a suitable amount of good old-fashioned 80s American racism). This doesn’t detract from the overall story, but you do need to remember the time period you’re dealing with.

The Feelings

Unsettling.

What I enjoyed about Famine so much is just how uncomfortable it made me feel at times. In the event of any natural disaster there’s the possibility that if you survive the initial shock you can somehow rebuild and get back to a state of normality. But what do you do when there literally isn’t a scrap of food to eat? Food isn’t something that we can live for months without, and when the options are either starvation or death by botulism you really have to wonder which is the worse way to go.

What I also thoroughly enjoyed about this book was the way it examined American entitlement (which can be extended to anyone, really). In the face of an unprecedented crisis the reaction is not to stand together and make it work, but rather to screw over your friends and neighbours and watch them starve, so long as your family doesn’t go without. This is particularly true when the looting starts and everything except the essentials are what people load up on. A 10kg bag of rice will go a long way, lawn chairs and foie gras will not.

I doubt that Graham Masterton intended this to be a thought-provoking and soul-searching novel when he published it, but it definitely made me think a lot about the things I take for granted and the things I deem to be essential that really aren’t. For that Mr Masterton, I give you points.

My Final Rating: 7 / 10
Buy Famine at Amazon.com

 

Movie Review: San Andreas

Released: 2015
Genre: Action
IMDB Rating: 6.2 / 10

I love mindless disaster movies. I think I’m one of maybe seven people who can honestly say that they enjoyed 2012 when it came out. What makes San Andreas so much fun is that nobody in it can act, there’s no way that any one human being could survive the amount of shit that gets thrown at Dwayne Johnson’s character, and because it was filmed in 3D there were so many unnecessary things trying to fly out of my 2D TV. It’s one of the most highly entertaining dumb movies I’ve seen in ages.

Hair and disaster on fleek.

The Plot

It’s always occurred to me that the vast majority of North America should be declared unsuitable for human habitation (the San Andreas fault to the West, hurricanes to the East, frozen tundra to the North, and tornadoes sweeping right through the middle). Seismologists Lawrence Hayes and Dr. Kim Park would agree with my assessment given that they just discovered an unknown fault line that destroys the Hoover Dam. And when destroying the Hoover Dam is a movie’s opening disaster, you know things are going to get rough.

Ray Gaines, an air rescue pilot, is called away from driving his unnaturally blue-eyed daughter Blake to college to help attend to the disaster. While preparing for this a large chunk of North America decides that it wants to divorce the rest of the continent and the San Andreas fault goes off, triggering a massive 9.1 earthquake that quickly reeks havoc for as far as the fault runs.

The destruction is unbelievable, and among the casualties of this terrible tragedy is every gay man on Earth as Kylie Minogue accidentally opens a door to a room that isn’t there anymore and tumbles off the side of a building. This doesn’t particularly effect Ray in any way, who is much more focused on getting into San Francisco to save Blake, who has survived the initial earthquake but is now right in the path of the secondary 9.6 earthquake that’s about to strike the city. With nothing to rely on but his massive arms and ability to fly any piece of aeronautical equipment known to man, Ray will need to tell Mother Nature to go shove it while he saves his daughter and reconciles during a free-fall exercise with his ex-wife.

The Golden Gate Bridge places 2nd in the list of unlucky American landmarks, right after the Statue of Liberty.

The Visuals

The great thing about movies like this is that they’re the cinematic equivalent of a bunch of guys trying to show off that they have the biggest dick. San Andreas had the money it needed, so you’re going to get ALL the disaster! Want a tsunami? You get one. Feel like seeing a few buildings crash down on top of one another? You can have your few buildings and then a few hundred more. But why settle there? Not when you can blow up most the western coast of the USA in truly spectacular and debris-flying fashion!

If sheer action, pulse-pounding silliness and unwonted destruction are what you came to see then you’re going to leave this movie feeling very happy for your choice.

Trump’s backup plan if the wall along the Mexican border doesn’t work out.

The Feelings

This was just an absolute barrel of laughs and fun.

I love these kinds of movies because they are completely mindless. You don’t want to see Dwayne Johnson giving an Oscar-worthy performance (and trust me, he doesn’t) – you want to see whether he can string a few coherent lines together and place bets on whether that skin-tight shirt is going to be able to hold itself together until the end of the movie. You want to see young women with frighteningly blue eyes know shit unconvincingly. You want to witness entire cosy, boho-chic neighbourhoods being thrown up into the sky. You want to be there when tiny yachts laugh in the face of danger as they attempt to climb a massive wall of incoming water. And most of all, you want to see that one douchebag get his comeuppance when the Universe eventually decides that it isn’t going to take his shit anymore.

San Andreas is a brilliant movie for what it sets out to do in that its serious in its madness and mayhem and has the gigantic budget necessary to pull it all together. If you like to see a lot of shit get broken, then this is the movie for you!

My Final Rating: 8 / 10
Buy San Andreas at Amazon.com

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Movie Review: Dead Rising: Watchtower

Released: 2015
Genre: Action / Horror
IMDB Rating: 5.3 / 10

I would like to preface this review by saying that I haven’t played any of the Dead Rising games in any way outside of running around a little bit when I stole my brother’s Xbox controller, so for me this movie had to stand on its own merits.

I guess the warning signs were there. I mean, Jesse Metcalfe is the main actor. The guy that got middle aged women and confused teenage boys’ hearts racing in the early years of Desperate Housewives is now meant to fend off a zombie apocalypse. Now I can suspend belief like it’s no one’s business (it’s how I’ve managed to enjoy the Resident Evil movies for as long as I have), but this just didn’t do it for me. Not the actors, not the plot, not the zombies with the dazzling blue eyes, nothing.

Join the war on clowns.

The Plot

Wikipedia tells me that this takes place between the second and third Dead Rising games. This doesn’t aid me in any way, but hopefully it provides some of my dear readers with a little context.

There have been reports of a zombie outbreak in Oregon. On the scene is Chase Carter, a Youtube vlogger with a more impressive-sounding title who’s there to document the ongoing evacuation of civilians. Unfortunately things go awry when it becomes apparent that those infected with the zombie virus but manage it with the use of Zombrex, which will stop them from turning provided they take it once every 24 hours, have become resistant to the medication and begin turning at a rapid rate.

In the chaos Chase is separated from his camerawoman Jordan, and instead must rely on badass Crystal and a few-sandwiches-short-of-a-loaf Maggie if he wants to make it out of the quarantine zone alive. Along the way weapons will be crafted, friendships forged, and tough questions asked. Questions like, ‘why does Crystal’s Zombrex seem to work just fine?’, ‘what does the army aim to achieve with this quarantine?’ or ‘why don’t more middle-class office workers become gang lords when the apocalypse happens?’

Chase “Butter Fingers” Carter

The Visuals

Bless them they tried.

Crackle clearly had some money lying around that they could throw at this movie because visually it isn’t a complete dud, it’s just not quite on point.

The main thing that tells you that a zombie is a zombie, for example, is that it has dazzling blue eyes, the like of which, under different circumstances, any teenage girl would positively swoon over. There’s the occasional missing arm or stock-standard missing cheek, but it’s nothing really special.

To put it another way: the zombies aren’t the Walking Dead variety that’ve been out in the sun too long, nor was there enough of a budget to go absolutely bat-shit crazy with everything like Resident Evil: Retribution did. The whole thing’s a cut above the average zombie b-movie, but not by very much.

Stop production of the sequel!

The Feelings

Like being on a rollercoaster but without the adrenaline rush.

The problem with Dead Rising: Watchtower is that it firstly feels too long. It didn’t need to run for two hours, and cutting out about 30 minutes of unnecessary padding would’ve done wonders for its pacing. Throughout the movie’s run-time there are some initially very exciting moments which then drag on far too much to the point where they became painful.

We must also call the casting choices into question. Poor Meghan Ory was out there carrying this whole movie on her own, because the Good Lord knows that Jesse Metcalfe couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag.

Then we get to the weapons, and from what I gather crafting these is a big part of the game series. Now, having not played the games I might be unfamiliar with a gameplay mechanic that makes the playable character drop and lose his weapon after three minutes, in which case this movie makes perfect sense. If such a mechanic does not exist, then I want to know why Chase can make admittedly awesome weapons, kill at most three zombies with them, and then lose them and have to resort to running around and kicking the damn things a lot. This became a very frustrating part of the experience.

Lastly, plot development. A very common occurrence is for a movie to have too little plot for its total run-time. Not so with Dead Rising. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a film with quite so many different plot points, backup plans and shifting ideas as this one had. And when you consider all the different things it was trying to cram in and the movie still managed to feel laboured, then you know it isn’t going to be a fun run.

It’s by no means the worst zombie movie out there, and it’ll probably do far more for fans of the games than it did for me. As a standalone movie, however, it’s all just a bit sub-par.

My Final Rating: 4 / 10
Buy Dead Rising: Watchtower on Amazon.com

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