Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 1: Alien: Covenant (2017)

Take a moment and imagine it's, say, 2009 or so. The exact year is not important you need to place yourself in the time between the release of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem and 2012. Now, imagine the reaction to the news that Ridley Scott is directing a new entry in the Alien franchise. Pretty wild, right?

Of course, we don't live in that universe. No, we live in the universe where the news that Ridley Scott would be directing a new Alien movie came after he had dropped Prometheus in our laps--the film where the highest praise you will hear is generally, "Well, it looks pretty." Better still, this news came when fans were practically begging the studio to make the concept sketches Neill Blomkamp had developed for a hypothetical Alien 5 into a reality. Scott's project, however, killed that hypothetical film dead.

Imagine going from being the visionary director who effectively created the franchise to being seen as the spoilsport villain who kept us from getting a sequel we actually wanted--the one that would have been directed by the guy who unleashed Chappie on us.

Of course, I don't actually feel bad for Scott in this situation. First off, Blomkamp's Alien 5 concept genuinely sounded amazing, even if Blomkamp is--to put it charitably--a flawed director. Secondly by this point in his career Scott had crapped out a whitewashed Biblical epic and then compounded it by defending it by being lazily racist.

And, worst of all, Scott directed Alien: Covenant.

Now, part of why Prometheus is such a frustrating mess of ideas is that it was originally meant to be a prequel to Alien until somebody got cold feet and decided to just make it sort of a prequel. You could watch the film and get the impression that it had no relation to Alien at all, it was just set in the same universe. However, when it did well enough to justify a sequel, Ridley Scott decided to go forward with the "it's a prequel" idea after all.

The result means that this film gets to disappoint on two levels: it squanders the promise of the sequel that Prometheus set up in one of its few bright spots, and it gives us the backstory of Alien that nobody actually wanted.

Just to make sure we're not starting off with too much optimism, the film opens with an almost entirely unrelated prologue in which the android David (Michael Fassbender) is brought online in a white room by his creator, Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), so they can mumble philosophically at each other while David plays the piano. Pearce is not forced to wear embarrassing old age makeup this time around, at least, but given that means he looks about 50 years younger here than in Prometheus, that just fudges the timeline all the more.

He's playing Wagner, in case you were concerned this bit wasn't as pretentious as possible.

The actual plot begins in 2104 aboard the Covenant, because somehow this series has now begun to just name its films after the suspiciously symbolic names of the spaceships involved. Now, like the Prometheus before it, the Covenant is manned by a single Fassbender-model android (here named Walter and speaking in a truly peculiar accent) while its human crew of 15 is in stasis. Unlike Prometheus, however, this ship is a colony vessel filled with 2,000 colonists in stasis and 1,140 frozen embryos, as well--seven years out from its destination. This means it is a massive vessel and one person, even a synthetic one, is going to be ridiculously overburdened trying to supervise all of its functions on their own.

Sure enough, while Walter is taking care of the task of tossing out the few embryos that have somehow spoiled in the cooler (?), the computer alerts him that a neutrino burst is about to hit the vessel. Walter barely has time to be to late in ordering the computer to retract the solar sails before the blast hits and the extended sails mean it does catastrophic damage to the vessel. The human crew has to be awakened, but unfortunately the ship's captain--who will turn out to be a cameo by James Franco--is somehow incinerated alive inside his stasis pod before they can get him out. If that's not bad enough, we'll later learn 47 of the colonists were lost, as well.

Because it was, for some reason, decided that the crew should be made up entirely of married couples, this leaves Daniels (Katherine Waterston) in near-crippling grief at the death of her husband, while the burden of command falls upon Oram (Billy Crudup). When the crew holds a funeral at sea for their dead captain, over Oram's objections, Oram whines to his wife that he feels the crew disrespects his ability to command because he is a man of faith--but we'll soon see it's because he is an incompetent buffoon and this is just the first indication. Seriously, he thinks people mourned a dead friend and husband to spite him. How did this chucklehead get placed second in command?

I'll take a moment to point out that it's really not worth trying to name the rest of the crew here, since the only other character that makes any kind of impression is Tennessee (Danny McBride). Everyone else is nigh-impossible to tell apart or are so thinly sketched I'm not even sure if they have names.

Hi! We'll be your expendable meat for this evening! Don't worry about out names, you won't care about us anyway."

During the efforts of repair, taking stock of equipment, and trying to get out of the sector to avoid any further stellar flares a few things happen of note. One, Daniels bonds with Walter over her promise to her late husband to build a log cabin by a lake on the new world. Two, a bizarre transmission finds its way into Tennessee's com while he is EVA to fix the solar sail. Examining the transmission inside the ship, the characters begin to make out the staticky image and audio of a human woman singing--and Tennessee recognizes it as a John Denver song.

The transmission originated from an Earth-like planet only a few weeks away from their position. Daniels is bewildered, since they shouldn't have missed such a perfect candidate on their initial survey that led them to choosing Origae-6 as colony planet. The crew thinks maybe they ought to give up on the planet they specifically outfitted the expedition for and just settle for this one, and Oram agrees over Daniels's strong objections.

And so the Covenant ends up in orbit of the mystery world and a majority of the crew goes down in the lander. This includes Oram and Daniels, despite the fact that you'd think as second-in-command she'd want to stay aboard the main vessel--especially when she expressed concern for the fate of the colonists aboard. But no, Tennessee is left in command of the ship.

It doesn't take long for things to go tits up, of course.

First, the powerful plasma storms in the atmosphere wreak havoc with the lander's coms and give them a rough ride down. The pilot sets the lander down in a marsh and the crew disembarks, first arming themselves with guns--but noticeably not wearing any kind of protective gear beyond goofy bomber hats.

Pictured: Ideal clothing for exploring a completely unknown alien world.

I'll let this slide, however. Sure, it's rock-stupid, but this mission was funded by a huge corporation. Obviously they cut every possible corner in outfitting the expedition, including any kind of respirators.

The pilot stays behind to repair the lander's coms and make sure it's safe, while the rest track the ghost signal with Walter's help. One of the crew realizes the vegetation they're trekking through is recognizably cultivated wheat, which raises some important questions. Oram's wife stops off with another crew member to begin an ecology work-up. The others recognize what appears to be the path of a huge, crashed spaceship--while Daniels gets unnerved by how quiet the place is. Why is a huge forest absent of any sign of animals, insects, or birds?

The crewman with Oram's wife steps aside to "take a leak," which is apparently code for "smoke a rolled cigarette while stepping on an alien fungus." Naturally, the alien fungus responds by sending out a cloud of spores that burrow into his inner ear like the Ceti eels in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Gee, who could have predicted that?

The other crew members find the crashed spaceship: a very familiar horseshoe-shaped vessel. While exploring it, another crewman pokes some more of the fungus and inhales the resultant spores. Inside the ship, Daniels finds a dog tag for one "Dr. E. Shaw." Walter immediately realizes it belongs to Dr. Elizabeth Shaw of the Prometheus, which famously disappeared ten years earlier. This is further confirmed by Daniels finding a photo of Shaw with her husband and then Oram accidentally bumps a button in the ship's control room and activates a staticky hologram of what we are supposed to infer is Shaw (never mind it looks as much like an Independence Day alien as it does a human woman) singing John Denver while seated at the controls.

Naturally, both of the spore-infected men begin getting sick around the same time. Everyone begins heading back to the lander, where the pilot has prepped the med bay and alerted the Covenant. Unfortunately, the pilot already begins to panic when she sees the crewman vomiting blood and struggling to breathe. When something on the man's back bursts and splatters her with blood, the pilot seals the med bay and flees. Unfortunately, she calls her husband, Tennessee, in her panic so now he's worried for her, too.

And then a spiny fetus monster bursts out of the man's back--our first look at the film's much touted "Neomorph," which I will speak more on later. For now the baby Neomorph proves itself a nasty customer by ignoring the knife Oram's wife points at it and tearing her face off. The panicked pilot now returns with a gun and finally grants the dying woman's prior request to open the damn med bay door. Except, since this is an Idiot Picture, the pilot slips in the pool of blood and shoots the ceiling, and then manages to close the med bay door on her foot so she is limping away when the Neomorph baby inevitably smashes out of the door's window.

Shrooms: Not Even Once.

Oh, it gets dumber. For when the Neomorph chases her into the cargo bay, the pilot fires wildly at it until she manages to hit the huge yellow explosive tanks. So, as we see the Neomorph hilariously flee to safety, the whole lander is engulfed in an explosion. While Daniels is busy keeping Oram from running into the flames, the other infected crewman goes into a seizure and then vomits up another Neomoprh in a gout of blood. Walter watches the creature run off into the wheat with a truly priceless "huh, that was a thing" expression.

Naturally, a huge ion storm is keeping the Covenant from hearing the away team's distress calls now. And we get an actually nice moment where we find out that the dead crewman was married to one of the other men on the team, but isn't it amazing how even in a fucking futuristic mainstream sci-fi movie from 2017 the best we can seem to do is casually infer a homosexual couple?

Walter just manages to save Daniels from being ambushed by a much larger Neomorph as it returns, but he gets his left hand bitten off in the process. Another crewman dies when the beast knocks his jaw off with its tail and I think it mauls another one before their bullets wound it badly enough that it flees. The other Neomorph attacks, but as it attempts to maul...someone, it is driven off by a mysterious man in a hooded cape firing a flare into the air. When he yells at them, in English, to follow, they don't hesitate.

The stranger leads them to the films's best and mostly wasted visual--a ruined alien city filled with humanoid bodies frozen in their last moments before some horrific catastrophe.

Once inside a building, their savior reveals himself to be David--who has someone grown long, stringy hair so I guess androids can grow hair? David dramatically explains that the ship he and Shaw were on was carrying a deadly virus that deployed when they crashed. Not only was Shaw killed in the crash, but so was all non-botanical life on the planet. He assures the crew that they all know if they were infected, but when Oram says they need to be sure lest they endanger the 2,000 colonists--David seems to be a little too delighted by that number of vulnerable humans.

He invites them to try an make themselves at home "in this dire necropolis" before almost immediately trying to ingratiate himself to his "brother" Walter. Meanwhile, Tennessee shows the flaw in the "crew full of married couples" idea when he orders the ship's computer to bring the Covenant to within 80 kilometers of the storm, which is the very limit of "what won't rip apart our ship full of innocent people."

David cuts his hair to look like Walter's while humming ominously, which will in no way be important later, and then finds Walter examining his curious room full of insect specimens and drawings. Walter is particularly eyeing a carved flute, so David decides to teach him how to play--in a scene whose bizarre subtext is in no way helped by the line, "I'll do the fingering."

It is an important scene, however, not only for establishing that Ridley Scott way overestimated how much his audience wanted to see two androids play a flute but for establishing the personalities of the two models. Effectively, it is Bishop and Ash having a conversation. David is a clear misanthrope and Walter explains he is a far superior model than any other android before, and part of the reason is that David's model was found to be too disturbing so Walter's was made to be much less "human" and more robotic--including being programmed to lack an interest in creating art.

David then shows a view of the ruined city to to Walter while quoting "Ozymandias" at him. Then we get a flashback to David successfully flying the alien ship above the city full of bald albinos and, tears in his angry eyes, deliberately unleashing the vessel's entire payload on them. It's a gripping sequence and all, but its placement makes no sense, as we cut back to Walter and David where Walter finishes the poem for him. So he clearly wasn't telling Walter about it and it's way too early in the narrative to be outright confirming our suspicions about David being a monster.

"Hey, Ozymandias! Look on this and despair, ye mighty prick!"

David then mistakenly attributes the poem to Byron and, since nothing will be made of this until later, we are left to wonder if the filmmakers think the audience are too stupid to catch it. David then explains he buried Shaw in the garden, feeling it would be the best place for her. He confesses he felt love for her after she repaired him--but Walter is understandably sketptical.

Meanwhile, Oram apologize to Daniels for not listening to her and the only other woman in the away team decides to wander off in order to "freshen up." Naturally, she means "wander way out of earshot so I can splash some stagnant fountain water on my face and then get ambushed by the Neomorph." She somehow manages to scream despite it apparently taking her head off in one bite.

Meanwhile, when the other team members finally radio the Covenant, hearing they have casualities causes Tennessee to demand they bring the ship within 40 kilometers of the storm. The computer refuses until one of the other 3 bridge crew members remaining backs up his order. Man, I really hope the rest of the colonists were dumb assholes, too, because otherwise they got a raw deal.

Oram decides to also wander off by himself to recover the missing crewmember, which means he happens upon David trying to make friends with it next to the headless corpse of the woman. David tells Oram not to shoot, babbling on about blowing on the nostrils of a horse, but Oram ignores him and damn near empties the clip into the beast. He then points his laser sight at David and babbles about meeting the devil as a child. So, uh, none of these people can communicate in anything but bizarre non sequiturs, huh?

"Okay, I know this looks bad, but..."

At any rate, despite David being incredibly shifty, Oram follows trustingly as David leads him into a the darkness while promising to explain everything. Daniels finally connects with Tennessee and they decide they need to use the Cargo Lift to bring the team back up, even though it is not designed for space launch. Yes, despite the Covenant not being designed for atmospheric entry, and the destroyed lander being called "Lander One", the vessel does not have any other shuttle-type vehicles on board. Who the fuck designed this mission?

Daniels proves incredibly sensitive by responding to Tennessee asking to speak to his wife by telling him on a private channel that she's dead. Couldn't that have waited until the rest of the crew was safe?!

At any rate, David shows Oram his workshop full of the original virus containers from Prometheus, the various design maquettes--er, specimens showing the stages of development of the creatures spawned by the virus, and finally the room full of recognizably Xenomorph eggs. David explains he has effectively been engineering these creatures and Oram somehow trusts David when he says the eggs are safe and urges him to take a look at the open one. You'll never guess what happens next!

Daniels gets the crew together after one of them finds the headless woman, and sends two of them to find Oram who is not answering his radio. Hilariously, Oram is busy having small pebbles thrown at his unconscious body by an impatient David. Hey, remember how people found it annoying how quickly Alien vs. Predator sped the incubation period of the Xenomorphs up to less than an hour instead of how long it took in all the previous movies? Well, guess what this movie does, too!

Actually, it's even worse than that because Ridley Scott is about to make a mockery of the most iconic sequence of his career. Say what you will about the rubbery, serpentine chestburster from the original film--it was effective even in its cheesier moments. Here what emerges from Oram's chest is a tiny Xenomroph, which seems to be a combination of twitchy marionette and awkwardly rendered CGI that imitates the arm gesture David makes at it. It's absolutely ridiculous.

When Spaceballs recreated the chestburster better than you did, you really missed the mark.

Well, by this time Walter has managed to stumble on David's lab of horrors--including the gutted and deformed body of Elizabeth Shaw. That's right, this film went full slasher sequel. Also now Walter confronts his sinister flutist doppelganger and figures out that David deliberately released the pathogen. Gee, I wonder if maybe this would have been the place to show that flashback?

David reveals he does not feel humanity deserves to expand into the universe. Walter now points out that David was quoting Shelley and not Byron, which is I guess is what tipped him off to David's dishonesty? Way to do nothing about that when it still could have saved people, Walter. Naturally as the two prattle about dreams and perfect organisms, Walter tells David he can't let him leave so David decides to respond by throwing the fanfic authors an awkward Fassbender-on-Fassbender kiss before stabbing him in the throat with the flute.

Hilariously, this causes Walter to fold up into a seated position as his neck wound repairs itself. Daniels finds some of David's H.R. Giger fan art of what I assume are his experiments on Shaw, while the other two crewmembers find Oram's body and a facehugger. The facehugger latches onto one of them before the other manages to cut it off of his face with way more ease than any other character in this franchise ever has. This results in the facehugger dying and its victim getting a burned face, but they don't have time to dwell on that before the Xenomorph is tackling and mauling the man who wasn't wounded.

David then attacks Daniels in a way too rapey manner before Walter comes to her rescue. Turns out David didn't take into account that there had been updates made since his model. As Daniels and the wounded survivor flee outside to wait for Tennessee to arrive, the two Fassbender-bots have a surprisingly uninteresting fight to the death. Probably because, despite the attempt to play it coy, we all know that David is going to win and then pretend to be Walter.

The first mart thing in the movie happens as Daniels sets the beacon for Tennessee and the two survivors stand back-to-back to cover all angles of attack. "Walter" then joins them, saying that David is "expired" and the three climb aboard the cargo lift. The Xenomorph follows, of course, which actually leads to a genuinely badass sequence where Daniels grabs a gun, hooks herself to lifeline, and goes outside to fight the bastard. After a lot of near misses she finally catches it in a crane claw and squashes it like a bug. Now the crew are home free and return to the Covenant.

Oh, but don't worry. Sure, the film could end now with a modicum of dignity, having disposed of an Alien in a way we hadn't seen multiple times before. But no, we still have about 20 minutes to go in this bastard!

So, instead, Tennessee and the medic patch up the wounded man--including an actually decent joke about Phantom of The Opera--while Daniels helps Walter patch himself up. Unfortunately, the computer soon calls Captain Daniels to med bay because it turns out the wounded man's Xenomorph impregnation actually did take. Tennessee and Daniels grab their guns and call upon Walter to locate the Xenomorph on the ship. Naturally it turns out to be headed for the crew quarters and...

...Jesus fucking Christ, we are in full on "lesser entry in the Friday the 13th franchise" territory here because the one remaining intact couple among the crew are having shower sex while listening to R&B so they don't hear the computer's warning to get out. You're telling me my GPS can interrupt my Bluetooth audio in the middle of a great podcast, but in 2104 the computer can't interrupt the crew's Spotify playlist to issue orders? Hell, why couldn't they turn off the shower to get their attention?

Well, naturally the Xenomorph pokes the woman in her butt with its tail and then, before she has time to warn her hubby, it puts its inner mandibles through his skull. The film at least has the taste to cut away after this so we don't have to watch a bloodied, screaming naked woman get butchered.

Oh, and did I mention that, since this was an interracial couple, the last non-white character in the film just bought it? Feels like I should point that out.

"Dear Penthouse: I am a monster created by genetic engineering to do nothing but kill, and I never thought this would happen to me..."

Coming upon the scene of carnage, Daniels and Tennesee follow the bloody footprints left by the monster and have Walter help them herd the creature into the terraforming bay by closing off bulkheads. During this sequence, we get the dumbest "Xenomorph Cam" POV shots in the history of the series, which is saying something. Apparently the Xenomorph sees just like we do, if our eyes were full of wriggling worms for some reason.

In full EVA gear, Daniels lures the Xenomorph into the cab of a truck and locks it in while Tennessee opens the bay doors. After a few false starts, the Xenomorph is finally impaled on a falling bulldozer and launched into space.

Unfortunately, only as Walter is loading Daniels into her stasis pod for the journey to Origae-6 does he fail to respond properly to her mention of the cabin on the lake and she realizes he's actually David. David then takes over the computer, requests the computer play him that Wagner piece and then regurgitates some frozen xenomorph embryos into the baby freezer. He then sends a fake transmission about all the crew except Daniels and Tennessee perishing in the solar flare incident. The End.

"Grr! Argh! ...what do you mean I'm not as scary in broad daylight?"

Whew boy. Where do I even begin?

Let's start with the film's biggest misstep: pulling a Friday the 13th: Part II and killing off the Final Girl from the previous film. Almost everyone agreed that the ending, setting up Shaw and David's quest to go visit the homeworld of the Giant Albino Bodybuilders was one of the few things Prometheus did right, so it's incredibly galling for the film to decide Shaw deserved to be simply killed off between the two movies. It's hard to say if that's the biggest slap in the face of anybody who was willing to follow the franchise loyally this far, or if  it's how the film casually reveals the true origin of the Xenomorphs.

Now, fans of the franchise long suspected that the Xenomophs were some kind of a bio-weapon gone out of control. It also seemed clear that Prometheus was trying to say that, too, since it wasn't satisfied with just revealing that the Space Jockey was really just a big buff dude in a space suit. However, revealing that the "perfect organism" was created by a bored misanthropic robot in serious need of a hobby is just plain insulting.

I mean, if that's the case, how the hell did the Nostromo end up finding the ship full of Xenomorph eggs? Are we going to have to wait for a sequel that provides a completely unsatisfactory explanation to that, too? Count me the fuck out, if so.

And, as an aside, it almost seems like Ridley Scott hates Aliens. After all, in the original Alien, Scott cut a scene that revealed the Xenomorph was turning the victims it didn't kill into more eggs--which allowed James Cameron to reveal that the creatures operated like eusocial insects, with a Queen at the head of the hive laying eggs while being protected by soldiers and workers. Yet, years later Scott not only put the egg-transformation scene back into his director's cut, but started down this path of retconning the Xenomorph life cycle back to what he originally implied it to be.

If so, it's especially rich that he seemed to take glee in killing Blomkamp's sequel project, since that was intended to be a direct sequel to Aliens that erased the continuity set by Alien 3. I realize I'm totally projecting here, but it would fit.

Anyway, we were talking about this film. So I'll start by saying something about it that's semi-complimentary: I actually think the Neomorphs were a pretty nifty idea. When it was first revealed I found it just as ridiculous as the creature revealed at the end of Prometheus, since it looked like they were somehow managing to yet again rip off the alien from Alien vs. Ninja.

However, in practice the Neomorphs are actually kind of fascinating and plainly different enough from the Xenomorphs that came before that they represent an actually interesting direction for the movie to go in.

So, naturally, Scott says "fuck that" and brings out the classic Xenomorph we all know and love so that the remainder of the film can just play like a highlight reel of our favorite moments from the franchise.

Now, let's be clear here: this would probably still not have been a good movie if it hadn't gone in that direction. There are just too many elements at play here that don't work even before the facehugger latches onto Billy Crudup. However, there was at least something here that showed promise up until then. The film just simply tosses them all out so it can be an official Alien movie, which for some reason involves tossing out any potentially original elements at once.

So it may seem unfair to harp on this film as it relates to the franchise, but as a film on its own, this is still pretty bad. As I said before, the characters make so little impression that I couldn't even be bothered to learn most of their names--despite this cast being easily smaller than the crew of the Sulaco in Aliens, where I can easily name half of the Marines that get wiped out all at once in the alien hive. I can't tell if it's the actors, the direction, or the clunky dialogue that all adds to this the most but they're all factors.

And holy shit is this film up its own ass, philosophically. If you took a drink every time a character posed some kind of philosophical question at another you might well get alcohol poisoning. Jesus, the last thing Oram does seconds before a monster bursts out of his rib cage is to ask David what he believes in! It's incredible how seriously a movie that unironically features a shower sex death scene can take itself.

The film's score is also kind of terrible. Very repetitive and utterly fails to generate suspense even in tense moments.

Lastly, the real reason we're all here: the special effects. They're...not great. Oh, it would be a stretch to call them awful, but mostly the film uses CGI and it's frankly not very impressive CGI. Plus, the CGI works against the film's intent. Sure, it's cool to see a Xenomorph use its tail like a spider-monkey as it climbs down a ladder, in a way that practical effects probably couldn't pull off. However, we don't want to be able to see the Xenomorph do that because the more we see it the less scary it is.--and this movie clearly wants us to be scared of it, so it's sabotaging itself. Scott knew that keeping the monster in the shadows made it scarier in his original film, so how did he manage to forget his own lesson?

Honestly, this film retroactively makes me almost like Prometheus because at least that movie entertained me with its wrongness. This film is just bad. Hell, I'd say it was the worst entry in the entire franchise if Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem didn't still exist.

So I guess that's one more nice thing I can say about it?

Welcome to the first day of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for A!

Look out! It's coming! It's--Hubri5Ween 2017!

Hey there, readers!

I apologize for the unplanned hiatus, but life events have made it difficult for me to regularly update until now. Forget about that personal crap, however, because it's time to announce:

We promised you last year would be our last, so of course we're back again!

Prepare yourself for 26 days, 26 movies, and a word count of thousands! Join the bravest and/or most foolhardy of The Celluloid Zeroes as we bring you a horror or monster movie a day for every letter of the alphabet, starting with A on Thursday, October 6th and going all the way to Z on Halloween!

Who will use Scrabble pieces for Q and X? Will I be able to keep up with the deadlines or curl up in a fetal position and admit defeat?

Tune in at 9AM Eastern/ 8AM Central each day to find out, dear reader!

Naturally, we have no intention of giving away our whole schedule of reviews, but here's a little preview of what's coming up for the letter A:

Colossal (2016)

I think most of my readers have surmised that I take giant monsters very seriously. This is not to say that I can't laugh at them--far from it--but I tend to distrust non-fans who laugh at giant monsters.

After all, they tend to laugh at them for the wrong reasons.

For starters, let's put aside the outright racism of telling someone I love Godzilla, only for them to put on their best Mickey Rooney accent and say, "Run, it's Go-Zira!" (To paraphrase the 1998 film, "It's Gojira, you morons!") As I've opined in the past, most folks immediately react to the mention of Godzilla by mocking the "cheap" special effects and bad dubbing, which is just plain lazy. Not only does everyone make that joke, but that leaves so much more material to be mined.

And no, I don't mean the racism that people usually go for instead.

At any rate, mocking Godzilla films for being cheap because they use a guy in a rubber suit--something that has never caused anyone to mock the Alien or Predator franchises--is a great way to get on my bad side. So you can imagine my great annoyance when director Nacho Vigalondo, best known for Timecrimes, announced in 2015 that he was going to make a kaiju movie and, in his own words:

"It's going to be the cheapest Godzilla movie ever, I promise. It’s going to be a serious Godzilla movie but I’ve got an idea that’s going to make it so cheap that you will feel betrayed.”

Yes, you read that right: he called it the cheapest Godzilla movie.

You might think Vigalondo was merely using a brand name in place of an object, like saying "Kleenex" when you mean "tissue." However, that is not the case. For when it came time to shop the movie around at Cannes, with Anne Hathaway already attached, it was being sold by literally claiming Godzilla was in it! Right down to using official images from the 2014 film in press releases and, even more shamelessly, displaying a poster that featured Godzilla and Mazinger Z facing off in Tokyo!

"Damn, that's ballsy." --The Asylum

I'm sure you're shocked that Toho sued. Even though I had found the film's premise intriguing, this entire boondoggle soured me on the enterprise since it seemed like an elaborate publicity stunt with no genuine sentiment behind it.

So imagine my surprise when the film was actually completed and started getting positive buzz at the festivals. Alas, that was largely where the buzz stayed because the film did not have a wide release scheduled--not even near me, in Chicago!

Luckily, however, it finally crept into a local theater and I was able to see it. Finally, I could see if I was right to be distrustful of a cynical publicity stunt or if the positive reviews were right on the money.

We open in Seoul, South Korea about 25 years ago. A young girl and her mother are searching a park for the girl's doll when lightning comes down from the sky in a strange arc. Even stranger, this is followed by the shadowy outline of a giant horned beast standing among the nearby buildings. The girl screams in terror...

And we return to the present, as sometimes freelance writer, Gloria (Anne Hathaway) sneaks into the New York apartment she shares withe her boyfriend, Tim (Dan Stevens). She spins a long yarn to him about why she is sneaking in after seemingly being gone all night, but the end result is the same: they both know she was out drinking and partying. This is clearly a dance they've done for a while now, especially since Gloria lost her regular job recently.

Tim has had enough, though. He has packed her things and doesn't want her to be there when he gets back from work.

Well, not having any other options--since it seems her only friends are the ones who just like to party with her--Gloria moves back to her hometown. Her parents apparently still own her (gigantic) childhood house, but they no longer live there and it's empty of any furnishings. So, in an effort to settle in, she goes to buy an air mattress.

Finally, a movie that tackles the problems of attractive, inexplicably affluent white people.

Lugging the bag back home, Gloria encounters her childhood friend, Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) driving to his work. After a brief exchange about how he can't believe she's back, he offers her a ride to his place of business: the bar his dad used to run. Despite Oscar having established he has followed Gloria's social media life since she left town, Gloria is shocked to find out his father passed away--and then turns out to not even remember that she attended his mother's funeral.

At the bar, Gloria sees that Oscar has tried to make the bar his own--stripping it of the Country & Western theme his dad used. He did this to bring in more people, but it doesn't seem to have worked. Instead of giving it what he calls a "vibe", it just seems dull. In fact, about his only patrons are his friend, Garth (Tim Blake Nelson) and...okay, I don't actually know how the fuck Joel (Austin Stowell) fits into the dynamic. He seems to be much younger than the others and he's not an employee of Oscar's, but he hangs out after close with Oscar, Garth, and Gloria just the same. Maybe he's Garth's friend.

Whoever Joel is, even Gloria is shocked at how much Oscar explodes when Joel misreads her cues and tries to kiss her. Gloria had already set the boy straight, so Oscar threatening to kick his ass seems pretty excessive.

It's morning when Gloria makes her way back home, lugging her air mattress, and she cuts through a school playground on her way home. And then she promptly falls asleep after opening the air mattress, only to wake up with a stuff neck hours later and get a phone call from her sister to check the news online: a giant monster has appeared in Seoul, killed hundreds, and then mysteriously vanished into thin air.

Gloria watches multiple social media videos of the creature's rampage. The beast, which looks rather like a scrawny version of Pulgasari, fittingly enough, just strolls casually through the city in a straight line until it vanishes in a puff of electricity and smoke. Curiously, though Gloria won't make anything of it at this time, the beast is walking as though it was carrying an invisible load over its shoulder.

"Hi there! I have been expertly designed to avoid any possible lawsuits from Toho studios!"

In a state of shock at what she is seeing, Gloria calls Tim. However, he's less than helpful since he just points out that the attack happened at 8:05AM their time so it's hours in the past, before he then berates her still staying out all night partying instead of working on self-improvement. Luckily, she has an easy out from that conversation because Oscar has just mysteriously showed up with a huge TV for her.

Oscar tells her they talked about it last night, but she mysteriously does not remember. However, she isn't about to turn down a free TV even as bizarre as its appearance may be. Later that evening, Oscar's bar is packed with patrons watching the replay of the monster footage on the bar's projection TV. After mentioning the creature was sighted 25 years ago, but written off as a hoax at that time, Oscar casually points out how it always seems to work this way--seeing something this horrible happening across the world and just being glad you get to just watch it on TV.

"Really makes you think about how to solve your own problems, doesn't it?"

It's good for business, though, so Oscar is not so heartbroken when the monster appears again in the exact same place at the exact same time the next day, though the fact that nobody is injured this time allows him some extra moral distance. Oscar shows up at Gloria's house this time to tell her he offered her a job at the bar the night before after she revealed the real story of why she was back in town--which she previously avoided discussing directly--and he offered her a job at the bar. Drunk Gloria said yes to that, and hungover Gloria decides to honor that, especially when has Joel help him deliver her a futon just in time to save her from a deflated air mattress.

However, she also notices something strange about the way the monster behaves in this second appearance. At 8:05AM Gloria had been at the playground arguing with Tim over the phone, and the monster's strange gestures sure seem to resemble those she made--right down to scratching the top of its head in the way she does when she's agitated.

"Yes, I'd like to speak to my agent. I was told this would be an art film!"

Surely what Gloria thinks she saw can't be possible, so she decides to test it at 8:05AM the next morning. After mapping out the closest approximation of which parts on Seoul are represented by which sections of the playground, she stands there and makes a series of hand gestures.

Over in Seoul, the creature makes the exact same gestures.

Well, that's either a huge coincidence or she is somehow controlling a monster. So the only thing for it is to say, "Hold my beer and watch this." After another night of drinking in the bar, she has Oscar, Garth, and Joel follow her to the playground and reveals, via dancing like a goofball, that she is the monster.

Actually, that's not shocking: Korea has been subjected to the horror of dancing kaiju before.

The others are, naturally, astonished. Everyone is having a little too much fun with all of this until the Korean military starts shooting at the monster--and Gloria feels it. Well, it doesn't hurt her much, but she's drunk and starts swinging her fists wildly until she hits a helicopter and it crashes into the monster's forehead.

"Aw, man, I just polished my horns!"

When it dawns on Gloria that helicopters have pilots, she suddenly remembers that the monster killed hundreds in its initial appearance. Suddenly, making a kaiju do a silly dance in a densely populated city isn't fun any more and she panics, trying to figure out how to safely extricate herself from the playground/Seoul as Oscar tries to calm her down.

Unfortunately, she trips and falls.

When she wakes up on her futon, Oscar walks in with the newspaper. Gloria, panicked, demands to know how many she killed. Oscar is reluctant to tell her, but finally reveals that things didn't really play out the way she or anyone expected. As the newspaper headline states, the monster was not alone--and the accompanying photo reveals that it was mysteriously joined by a giant robot.

A giant robot right where Oscar was standing.

Oscar thinks it was awesome, but Gloria wants no part of this any more. Oscar knows a Korean barbecue proprietor nearby and at her request he has the man translate some phrases into hangul. This is one of the few glimpses into the horror Gloria has caused here, as she sees the proprietor and his wife holding each other while staring forlornly at a TV screen next to a sign asking for donations to help Seoul.

In monster form, Gloria carves the hangul message into the payment, apologizing for her actions and swearing it will not happen again. the world at large is astounded and begins to regard the monster as an intelligent hero of some sort.

On a whim, Gloria closes the night by going home with Joel for a one night stand. As she tries to make her escape in the morning, however, she sees that the robot has reappeared in Seoul and is gingerly walking around in order to terrorize the business district but trying not to squash anyone. Desperate to stop him, Gloria has Joel drive her to the playground. When Oscar, jealous and mad with power, refuses to leave she walks onto the playground and slaps him before ordering him out of the area.

In Seoul, this means the monster orders the robot away and everyone hails the kaiju as a hero and starts making memes of the slap. Oscar, however, laughs a little too much at the memes. He also suddenly turns cruel, ordering Gloria around more than necessary and mocking Garth for being a recovering junkie. When Gloria refuses to have a beer, since she has sworn off alcohol on account of the danger she represents when drunk, Oscar gets even angrier.

Not only does he drive home drunk--which Joel does nothing to stop--but he returns to the playground. A scuffle ensues between him and Gloria, but despite Oscar eventually giving up and going home--to the cheers of nearby people watching on their TVs.

They won't be cheering for long, however, Oscar has accepted that he's the villain and he also knows that that role carries a lot of power. More importantly, it carries power over Gloria. Oscar knows she will do whatever he wants, because if she doesn't a giant robot is going to kill hundred and maybe thousands of innocent people...

"I had this horrible nightmare: I was hosting the Oscars and my co-host was so stoned I had to carry the whole show!"

There's one thing I have to address right off the bat: my half-Korean fiancee went to see this movie with me and as the credits rolled and we exited the theater, she made it clear in no uncertain terms that she hated it. It isn't hard to see why that is, if you've been paying attention to my synopsis. Notice how many named characters I mentioned who are Korean.

That's right, I didn't mention any.

This is a film about well-off white people having problems that need the horrific deaths of multiple faceless people of color in order to improve themselves. There is exactly one speaking role for a Korean person in the film after the prologue and she's a bartender who is just there to immediately start to talk to our heroine about her problems instead of the devastation her city has suffered up to that point.

Oh, yes, did I mention this is the kind of movie where the supposedly broke main character can easily book a flight to Seoul? Between that and the gigantic house she spends most of the movie in, Anne Hathaway has to work overtime to make the audience care about Gloria's plight.

Well, until Oscar really shows his true colors, of course. But we'll get to that.

So, yes, there is no question this movie has a core concept that is based on some seriously racist concepts. I could get past that a lot easier if the film had something to say about that, but the film pays only the slightest lip service to that. Hell, when it's eventually revealed why the monster and robot have to be attacking Seoul instead of London or Seattle, it just goes to show there's not really a good reason at all. Maybe if Gloria was a Korean-American woman, this film would have had much more to say.

That said, I did not hate this movie. In fact, I liked it quite a bit.

Don't get me wrong, this movie is very flawed. Beyond the inadvertent racism and hilariously mistaken idea of what "broke" looks like, it has some serious story issues. For one thing, Joel adds nothing to the story beyond the effect his relationship with Gloria has on Oscar, and yet the film gives us a moment with him at the end that was utterly unnecessary. Nobody gives a shit about Joel!

Second, it's a magical realism story that feels the need to "explain" the source of its magic--and that explanation is entirely unnecessary and adds nothing beyond revealing that Oscar was always a bitter asshole.

That's especially frustrating because of what the movie does so right with Oscar. Oscar doesn't wear a fedora and we almost never see him near a computer, but he is unquestionably the sort of guy who would whine on a message board about how life has been so unfair to him because he's such a nice guy. He clearly feels he deserves Gloria, and when we see the hoarded mess that is his home it's not shocking to see he still has pictures of his ex around with her face scratched out.

The kind of entitlement and desire for power isn't born just from being a hateful person or self-loathing. That's simplifying it far too much, when Oscar feels so real in all other aspects. Jason Sudeikis is not an actor I would have expected to be a convincing and disturbing villain, but he very much is and I suspect any woman who has dealt with an abusive male partner or friend will see his heel turn coming the moment he brings Gloria that first gift of the TV.

He's so horrible I'm sure there's already a Reddit thread of GamerGaters declaring him the hero.

Oscar isn't a cartoon villain: he's a very real threat that way too many women, men, and intersex individuals will face at some point in their lives. Having him appear in a movie with a dancing kaiju just emphasizes his threat all the more.

As for Gloria, Anne Hathaway is also really great. That's not very surprising, since I've loved Hathaway as an actress for a long while, but she really nails the awkward dance this role calls for her to perform, and I don't just mean on the playground. Hathaway is a goofy fuck-up one minute and the horrifyingly tragic face of a trapped woman. She manages to sell watching a grown man stomping on wood mulch in front of her as the deaths of hundreds that she is helpless to stop.

I suppose one could argue White Feminism and Toxic Masculinity are the real monsters in this movie, but I'm not sure the filmmakers realized they were showcasing the former.

And that brings us to the monster action. If you loved the hilarious cut-away from Godzilla roaring at the male MUTO to the hero's son watching it on TV, as I did, then you're in luck: that's basically this entire movie! When Nacho Vigalondo promised the film would be "so cheap that you will feel betrayed," it turns out he didn't mean that he was going to do a super cheap monster suit and deliberately bad miniatures.

And all the Death Kappa fans are crushed.

No, he meant he was going to make a monster movie that wasn't about the monster at all. People who whined that Godzilla didn't have enough screen time in the 2014 film are not going to be super pleased with this film. Most of the shots we get of the giant monster and the robot are rendered pretty well--though honestly I wish Vigalondo had had the guts to follow through on the man in a suit promise--but the giant beasts are mainly seen through various smaller screens and we certainly never see the entirety of their rampages.

And if you're going to this movie because I told you that a monster and a robot fight more than once, well, I hope you like that slap because that is all that we see of the monster vs. robot fights. The rest of it is just Hathaway and Sudeikis on the playground, with the sound effects of destruction added over it. It's an effective gimmick--even if it renders the faceless victims even more faceless--but Pacific Rim it ain't.

Then again, that isn't really the point, is it? This is about the characters, not the monsters. And whatever else can be said about this film, it delivers on the characters.

Except for Joel. Fuck Joel.

He even manages to have to stupidest jacket in this picture. Fucking Joel.

On the whole, while it's a rather unique take on the giant monster genre, it's far from original as many critics would love to declare it to be. Applying toxic masculinity to the formula is pretty novel in its own right, but I'm pretty sure "ordinary person finds themselves unwittingly controlling a kaiju" is an entire subgenre of Ultraman episodes alone.

Calling it an "Instant Classic" is also quite a stretch. I think this is a good movie that I enjoyed quite a bit--I particularly liked the ending punchline, I have to say--but I've already seen much better genre fare this year alone in films like Get Out and Kong: Skull Island.

Bottom line, if this ends up showing near you, it's worth a look. I can't see it having much rewatch value, but I'm glad I saw it once. Considering the positive buzz it's getting, ui suspect most fo my readers would feel the same way.

Though I certainly wouldn't recommend pre-ordering that signed Blu-ray that comes with a statue of the monster, unless you just really want that statue.

To be fair, it is a sweet statue.

The Lair of the White Worm (1988) [Russelmania]

I believe I have previously mentioned that when it comes to religion, I don't partake. However, the few times I have been tempted to, of my own volition, always involved pagan religions. I once pondered Druidism, for example, but ultimately decided that--like any religion--it just had too many rules to follow.

I'm also very fond of reptiles, so snake-based religions are always going to have my sympathy.
This is especially so when they come into conflict with Christianity--a religion so tainted by its false practitioners that it's hard for me to separate it from the actual tenets, most of which I can actually get behind.

The trouble, of course, is that the snake worshipers lost long ago. So whenever pop culture pits the two against each other, guess who's going to be playing the villain? However, as many actors will tell you, being the villain is often the most fun role you can play.

And when you're the villain in a film by Ken Russell, based on a novel that Bram Stoker wrote as he was thought to be dying of syphilis, well--you're definitely going to have a blast.

Considering he probably didn't expect to find very much of interest beyond a few Roman coins while digging in a field behind the Derbyshire bed and breakfast, you can understand why Scottish archaeology grad student Angus Flint (Peter Capaldi!) lets out an excited whoop when he uncovers a strange skull. His cry brings the owners of the farm, sisters Mary (Sammi Davis) and Eve Trent (Catherine Oxenberg) running to his aid, though their "alarm" is pretty playful.

Angus is understandably bewildered by the skull, which he found only a lair below the ruins of convent from 1066.  He has no clue what it is, though he can be sure it's not a dinosaur--not only is not a fossil, but the skull only dates back to the Roman occupation, and they weren't known for keeping pet carnosaurs.

He won't make the connection yet, but it looks like a snake skull--though it's far bigger than any snake that was ever thought to live in England.

"I can get so much for this on eBay!"

Angus has barely had time to clean any dirt off the skull before Mary tells him that they're all invited to the annual shindig at the D'Ampton estate. And what a shindig it is!

See, the D'Ampton family have a proud tradition because an ancestor, Sir John, is a local legend. As an absolutely delightful folk rock song tells us, Sir John was responsible for slaying a serpent known as the D'Ampton Worm. And to my delight, the D'Ampton Worm is a real legend, known actually as the Lambton Worm*--and the song lyrics are a slightly modified version of the actual folk song that recounts the tale of how Sir John discovered the worm while fishing and threw it in a well, only for it to grow to monstrous size and go on a rampage until Sir John cut it in halves with his sword.

[* I'm honestly not sure why they couldn't just use the Lambton worm, unless it was a concern of the legend being too well-known to easily fit the narrative in the way its alternate here does. However, looking up the legend did allow me to learn that screenwriter Anthony Shaffer wrote a sequel to The Wicker Man that would have involved Sgt. Howie facing off against the Lambton Worm! It seems like an utterly bonkers concept and I'm sad it was never made now. based on what I hear, it would have been fair preferable to the director Robin Hardy's much later sequel, The Wicker Tree]

Well, the D'Ampton household has recently passed to young Lord James D'Ampton (Hugh Grant!), who takes great delight in dancing with Eve and then delights the revelers by slaying a worm portrayed by the maid staff in a costume, as it snaps at the playfully "terrified" Eve.

Well, I know the theme for my next birthday party.

Angus and James make each other's acquaintance and discuss the skull, which James half-jokingly assumes must belong to the D'Ampton worm. Angus scoffs at first, but James points out that "worm" in this case is actually derived from "wyrm" and means something like a dragon--and then James advises Angus that the dish he's heartily devouring are pickled earthworms. This seems slightly unlikely, but it's possible James just felt like getting a dig in at the poor Scot.

On the way home through a grove, Mary tells Angus about how their parents disappeared a year ago in the same grove. It was a path they had used coming home from the pub many times, and yet somehow this time it resulted in them vanishing mysteriously. She then casually mentions her previous boyfriend dying, which Angus uses as the cue to kiss her.

Only a mysterious car driving past to the gate to the nearby Temple House distracts them. Angus thinks nothing of it, but Mary is disturbed. So much so that she insists the car didn't have its headlights on when it plainly did.

However, she's in for a bigger shock when she gets home. Since Eve chose to stay over night with James--the two being somewhat flirty best friends--Mary and Angus are the first home, and find local constable Ernie (Paul Brooke, best known as the Rancor Keeper in Return of the Jedi) waiting with some new evidence: her father's watch, which was found in Stonerich Cavern. With a new lead, they'll be starting up the search again the next day. Mary mentions seeing the strange car, so Ernie says he'll stop and check it out on the way back to the station.

Well, Ernie finds that someone is wandering around inside the darkened Temple House with a lantern, but his attempt to call for backup is waylaid because the other constable is a doofus who can't make it out there because his bicycle pump is broken. (The voice on the radio is director Ken Russell) Then poor Ernie manages to get himself bitten on the ankle by a snake that never shows itself. Luckily for Ernie, the prowler appears and turns out to be the rightful owner of the house, Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe), dressed in a hilariously garish manner. She corrects Ernie when he refers to having been "stung" by a snake, since snakes bite and bees sting, but she takes him inside at least. There, set to a sultry saxophone, she pulls the old "suck out the poison" method on his ankle that I have previously mocked. Note that she does not spit the poison blood out, however.

Was she at a cosplay convention?

After some jovial conversation, she learns from Ernie that it was one of the Trent girls who reported her--since the car was new and Sylvia wasn't expected back so early in the season. She also learns that the search for the girls' parents will be resuming after the watch was found.

Sylvia pays a visit to the Trent farm in the morning, but no one is in. After briefly snooping around, she finds the skull of the snake that Angus found and absconds with it. However, on her way out she sprouts fangs and expectorates a large quantity of venom over the crucifix on the wall. Eve and James return to the farm, just missing Sylvia.

Eve is rather distraught when she sees her father's watch on the table and the note that her sister and Angus have joined the search party. It's too late to follow them, so she says she's going to go lie down upstairs while James says he wants to go poke around at Angus's dig site--both out of concern as the local landlord and out of genuine curiosity. Unfortunately, Eve notices the soiled crucifix on the wall and goes to wipe away the venom with her fingers--which results in her passing out and having a vivid nightmare of herself as a nun in an ancient convent.

A convent that suddenly finds its live Jesus on the cross (!) wrapped in the coils of an immense white serpent, which begins gnawing at his flesh while roaring-and then cartoon flames surround the nuns as a familiar-looking snake woman cackles from the flames and Roman soldiers rush in to rape and murder the nuns. It's a pretty bad trip.

Titanoboa vs. Jesus, coming this Fall on SyFy!

James finds Eve muttering to herself and carefully leads her down the stairs. She can't remember what happened, until James notes that the watch hands have somehow twisted into a snake shape. Eve raves about seeign a snake coiled around a cross and James asks if it was white, like the one in the pit outside. Eve is confused but James coaxes her outside to show her that Angus must have uncovered a mosaic depicting a white serpent on a cross since she was home last. It matches her hallucination pretty closely, but when James asks to see the skull the two discover that it's missing.

Angus and Mary return, crestfallen and dirty, to find Eve and James rifling through Angus's room. James rather rudely excuses himself after it's established the skull has apparently been stolen and he can tell the search did not go well.

Meanwhile, Sylvia casually picks up a teenage boy scout named Kevin (Chris Pitt) who is trying to hitchhike back to his youth hostel in the pouring rain. He doesn't pick up on her incredibly unsubtle innuendoes as she offers to take him back to her house to get warmed up. Even as she plays Snakes & Ladders with the lad in her underwear, he doesn't get the hint until she draws him a nice bath and begins to scrub his body. He begins to get the hint when she asks him to stand up--but then she breaks her promise not to bite him, sprouting fangs and biting him in a, uh, sensitive region.

Kevin is instantly paralyzed by her venom, which she explains to him with great glee. She also mentions that he is going to be fed to her god, the great Dionin--and she stands on the edge of the huge tub, holding the skull above her head to emphasize her words...

"Can you believe the steal I got on this on eBay?"

...only for the doorbell to ring. Her irritated, "Shit," when her grand speech is interrupted is delightful. Taking no chances, she pushes the helpless Kevin down into the tub with her foot so he is both hidden and drowns. The guest at the door turns out to be James, in his military uniform. He advises he heard about Ernie and came to follow up with Sylvia and make sure she is doing well.

Sylvia proves to be delightfully charming and extremely bizarre. She makes innuendo at James, quotes Oscar Wilde to his confusion when referencing the way the Trent girls became orphans, and then pretends to have a meltdown due to a fear of snakes. When james asks why she plays Snakes & Ladders if she's afraid of snakes, she artfully throws the board into her fireplace and mutters, "Rosebud," to herself. It's all incredibly silly, very odd, and inexplicably endearing.

Certainly James is intrigued and asks if he can see her again before she kisses him, and then he takes his leave. Before bed, James calls Mary to make sure Eve is doing well, and after he determines she is--while watching a silent movie involving a very snake-like caterpillar becoming a butterfly--he wishes her a good night. As he falls asleep, he glances at the painting of Sir John D'Ampton slaying the worm...

"Was it something I said?"

...and then he dreams he is in the painting. As he walks into the cave in the painting, he finds himself boarding an airplane. An airplane where the flight attendants are Sylvia, Eve, and Mary--and his fellow passengers are the missing Trents, Joe (Christopher Gable) and Dorothy (Imogen Claire). The two look catatonic as Sylvia pours what appear to be drugged drinks into their mouths. James settles in with a red pen and a newspaper. Just as he discovers that the connect-the-dots on his crossword puzzle forms a serpent, he realizes he is strapped down and Sylvia is laughing evilly as she goes to make him drink the same concoction.

However, Eve grabs Sylvia by the hand to stop her and the two fight. his fight quickly devolves into a wrestling match, and Russell decides to get subtle on us as James watches the fight with a stone face and the red pen on his lap begins to point higher and higher...

I think this is telling me something, but gosh I just can't figure it out!

Then the fight abruptly ends and James watches as Joe Trent gets up and walks out of the plane, as if mesmerized. And then James follows, finding himself in Stonerich Cavern, and picking the glowing watch off of the cave floor.

Unfortunately, James is woken by his butler Peters (Stratford Johns) bringing him breakfast. When Peters hands his boss the latest paper, James notices that the photo of Stonerich Cavern looks an awful lot like the cave in the D'Ampton Worm painting. Peters advises that it isn't too surprising, given that the cave was the legendary lair of the D'Ampton Worm. James is surprised, since he somehow missed that part of the legend over the years.

Combined with his dream, James decides to drag the reluctant Angus, Mary, and Eve to Stonerich Cavern on a hunch. After Angus shows him the only thing they found on the last trip--an ancient cave painting depicting hermaphrodites as part of a ritual--James decides explain his pet hunch to the others:

The D'Ampton Worm is real and somehow survived being bisected by Sir John D'Ampton, and is hiding somewhere in the cave. He thinks that the watch was passed through the beast's gullet, undigested, after it swallowed the late Mr. Trent. The others are horrified and bewildered in equal measure. Eve, having had enough, decides to walk back home on her own to tend to duties at the bed and breakfast.

Except she doesn't get there. Sylvia is waiting in a tree and spins a yarn about having gotten stuck after trying to rescue a kitten. When Eve helps her down, Sylvia mesmerizes the poor girl and abducts her. Back at Temple House, after lounging naked in her own tanning bed, Sylvia orders Eve to disrobe while she explains a few things to her victim.

First, Sylvia is much, much older than she appears. Old enough to have seen that reincarnation is a very real thing and she met Eve once before--as a nun belonging to an order who build a convent on top of Sylvia's sacred temple to Dionin despite her warnings. Second, Sylvia has never gotten over this particular transgression. Third, she knows Eve is a virgin--and she tests this with the carved ivory phallus from her mantelpiece just to make sure--and Sylvia's God is just as fond of virgins as Eve's is.

Well, except ol' Dionin prefers to eat virgins rather than marry them.

Sylvia orders Eve to call her sister and say she is going away for a few days to London to get away from it all. It almost works, but Eve sees the crucifix ring she always wears and it breaks the spell long enough for her to yell a warning to her sister about Dionin. Sylvia repays that insolence with a face full of hallucinogenic venom and Eve passes out to dream of being impaled on phallic spears.

"Today on The 700 Club..."

At the Trent farm, Mary shares what she heard. Angus recognizes the name Dionin as belonging to the god of a snake cult and James remembers Eve muttering it after he found her on the stairs. Sicne the railway station confirms they never saw Eve and none of her things are missing, it's pretty obvious she's been kidnapped. James even thinks he knows who did it and he formulates a truly silly plan.

Obviously Lady Marsh's return is connected to all this weirdness, and he deduces she must belong to the Dionin cult and potentially took on some characteristics of snakes herself. So all he needs to do is blare a recording of snake charmer music and it will draw Sylvia out of her house so Angus and Mary can sneak in. If you aren't laughing uproariously at the fact that this plan works, despite the fact that that isn't how snake charming works at all, then you must be dead inside.

I don't know what's funnier: the snake basket she hangs out in or the inflatable T-Rexes she keeps as decor.

Well, it works to a fault. After Sylvia slinks outside, Angus and Mary sneak into the castle and find Dorothy transfixed by a recording of a snake dancer. Mary is so excited to be reunited with her mother--until Dorothy sprouts fangs and bites her on the neck. Angus manages to drive Dorothy off, but only quickly sucking the poison from Mary's wound saves her from following her mother's fate. Though the hallucination she suffers of being impaled by a gang of snake men wearing carved penises isn't very pleasant.

Angus calls to warn James that Sylvia's venom can turn other people into snake vampires, but it's a bit too late. The power is cut off and Peters is killed. Only quick thinking on James's part allows him to grab a huge honking sword and slice Dorothy in half when she charges at him. Hilariously the momentum of his swing causes him to crash into a drum set nearby. Dorothy's two halves are still trying to get at James when he calls Angus back and the record that contained the music has been snatched from the turntable.

Together Angus and James form a plan. Well, sort of, since they actually manage to form it independently but toward the same goal. Angus will storm Temple House armed with bagpipes (to do his own snake charming, you see), a live mongoose, and a hand grenade to rescue Eve and stop Sylvia. James, meanwhile, will lead a crew into Stonerich Cavern to smoke the D'Ampton Worm out with gas.

Unfortunately, neither of them anticipated that Sylvia had already turned Ernie to her side and after he lures Mary to Temple House, things become a lot more complicated. Especially when our heroes learn what's living in Sylvia's basement...

"Dionin demands mice!"

The popular opinion on The Lair of The White Worm is divisive, to say the least. Then again this is basically true of most of Ken Russell's filmography, of course, but of my limited experience with Russell's filmography, this is unquestionably his most accessible film to the average viewer.

And frankly, this film is a hoot.

There are most definitely moments that make it hard to recommend, of course. As I alluded to before, the hallucinations that Sylvia's venom bring on invoke a lot of extremely brutal rape imagery--though at least it's tough to accuse this film of treating rape as titillating instead of horrifying. These scenes especially stand out as shocking because the rest of the film has such a playful, silly attitude to it.

However, the overall film is a delightful romp. It's unquestionably a horror movie, rather than an out-and-out horror comedy, but it's clearly not afraid to be deliberately silly. Not only with the snake charming bit, but Russell also seems to be pulling the other one with a lot of the film's religious aspects, too.

Russell is no stranger to casual blasphemy, certainly, and he seems tempted to side with Lady Sylvia. (As do I) But he ultimately portrays her as equally silly in her beliefs, particularly since she seems to believe that Dionin was the serpent in the Garden of Eden while also decrying his treatment by "the False God." Russell seems to view this clash of ideologies as two buffoons of different sorts striking at each other.

Buffoon or not, though, the casting of Amanda Donohoe as Lady Sylvia is inspired. She embraces the role with infectious enthusiasm, and she seems to be having the time of her life. Russell's first choice was apparently Tilda Swinton, but it's clearly for the best that she turned it down because she could never have done the role the same justice that Donohoe does. She is menacing when she needs to be and utterly charming in all other scenes.

When will we ever realize the true danger of tanning beds?

Certainly not many actresses could have seemed dignified and intimidating when half naked, covered in body paint, and wearing a scaly swim cap and a screw-on ivory dildo.

In case it wasn't already obvious, this is definitely not a film to watch with the family.

There are definite weak points to the film. Whether because they're underwritten or due to the limitations of the actresses, Mary and Eve come off as wooden and unnatural virtually every time they're on screen; the film's score is often way too melodramatic even when it isn't trying to be; and the big reveal of the titular White Worm is pretty anticlimactic since it's a largely immobile puppet in a hole that can't do anything but roar and that gets dispatched in the laziest way maybe all of two minutes after it first appears.

No, I changed my mind, now I know the theme of my next birthday party.

As a monster fan, there is almost nothing more disappointing than a monster that barely shows up and goes out like a punk, so that almost soured me on the whole enterprise when I first saw it. However, over the years I've come to find the abrupt resolution kind of hilarious in its own right. And it's hard to fault the film for that when it follows that up with a stinger ending that's outright hilarious instead of merely obligatory.

There's nothing particularly revolutionary about this film, and yet it's hard to imagine any other film quite like it. So, if you enjoy a good atypical vampire story, then The Lair of the White Worm is definitely right for you. If nothing else, you can't help be entertained every time Amanda Donohoe is on screen.

This has been my (late) entry for the Celluloid Zeroes Roundtable of Ken Russell's filmography, just in time for Wrestlemania!

Checkpoint Telstar was possessed by The Devils

Cinemasochist Apocalypse went through a Gothic phase

Micro-Brewed Reviews got heavy with some Altered States

Web of the Big Damned Spider went on a date with The Boy Friend

The Shallows (2016) [The Celluloid Zeroes Proudly Present: A Franchise Kill]

[Blogger's Note: Before we get started, I want to apologize for the lack of updates since November. After the election of a short-tempered Reality TV star to the highest office in the land, I found myself really struggling to get up the positive energy I needed in order to update and I also focused most of my energy into spending time with my loved ones--and spoiling my son rotten for Christmas]

The challenge with jumping on board a Roundtable focused on reviewing every entry in a franchise is that, well, sometimes a franchise does not have enough entries to go around. And the Celluloid Zeroes are all lovers of crap cinema, so when choosing to cover the entire Jaws franchise it should be obvious that we all wanted to claim the worst entries, but we couldn't all do Jaws:The Revenge, now could we?

Rip-offs were, of course, fair game. That left a lot of attractive possibilities such as Piranha, Alligator, or Great White (aka The Last Shark), which was considered to be such a brazen rip-off that it was sued out of American theaters by Universal. However, one film called to me as a way to address the continuing legacy of Jaws, even if it might not seem that obvious at first.

After all, if you've seen the trailers, you know that today's film is about a woman finding herself stranded in the ocean by a ferocious shark near a secluded beach. That premise owes more to a film like Open Water* than your typical Jaws rip-off, which usually feature large numbers of people likely to be eaten by its aquatic menace.

[* Granted, Open Water makes joking reference to Jaws by naming its protagonists after the first two victims, but it can't otherwise be said to be riffing on the film]

However, given that the menace in this film is an abnormally huge Great White shark, and the way the film ramps up ridiculously at its climax--I would argue that you could call this Jaws: The Shallows and edit in John Williams's famous theme, and it wouldn't be a stretch.

The film, in a move that seems more and more typical these days, opens with a scene that actually comes from much later in the narrative. A young boy (Pablo Calva) finds a damaged helmet floating in the surf, with a GoPro camera mounted on top of it. Reviewing the footage, the boy sees the camera's owner surfing with another man--and then suddenly sees footage of the surfer trying desperately to pull himself up on the rocks, as though something is chasing him. Given that he then submerges and gets a great shot right down the throat of a huge shark, the chances the guy is still alive are pretty slim.

The boy runs down the beach hurriedly, carrying the camera. He doesn't notice the shattered remains of a surfboard that washes up.

Too late, Orin Scrivello learned that becoming a shark dentist had been a mistake.

After the title card, we are introduced to Nancy Adams (Blake Lively), riding in the cab of a pick-up truck through a Mexican jungle. Thanks to the cinema magic that makes the contents of her phone screen float around her head like dialogue options in a Sims game, we see that she is staring longingly at a picture of a Polaroid--the subject of which is a young blonde woman on a beach with a surfboard. The caption reads 1991, so it's not surprising that when Carlos (Óscar Jaenada), the driver, asks if that's her, she tells him it's actually her mother.

The whole story will come out in due time, but she tells Carlos a piece of it: her mother found and surfed a secluded "secret" beach back in 1991, right before she found out she was pregnant with Nancy. Since her mother taught both Nancy and her little sister Chloe (Sedona Legge) how to surf, she had always wanted to take them to the same beach.

Unfortunately, we all know that being a parent means that shit like that is far easier said than done. And since Nancy has the most organized photo album on her phone, we'll later see the progression of her mother from young surfer, to middle-aged mom (Janelle Bailey), to obvious cancer patient. It almost doesn't need to be said that she's coming to the beach to honor her dear departed mom.

Unsurprisingly, it is incredibly tough to find stills from this movie that aren't focused on objectifying our heroine.

However, after Carlos drops Nancy off at the beach--and steadfastly refuses to take her money, because he saw driving her to the beach as a mere favor--we do get it explicitly said when Nancy has a Skype call with her sister. Since Nancy's Skype connection is immaculate, she is able to show her sister the beach before her father (Brett Cullen) hops on the call and expresses his concern about Nancy. It seems that her mom's passing made Nancy drop out of med school, and her father tries to point out that she ought to stay in med school to try and save others like her mom.

Well, that awkward call complete, Nancy swims out on her board--missing the text from her friend, whom she earlier told Carlos had ditched her in order to recover from "the Irish flu" at their hotel after partying too hard the night before. Unfortunately, she's ditching Nancy even worse than that now because she's going on a hot date while Nancy goes surfing.

She catches a few waves before making the acquaintance of two local surfers (Angelo José Lozano Corzo and José Manuel Trujillo Salas), both of whom have a bit of fun with lightly teasing her about her poor Spanish. Naturally, one of these surfers is wearing a GoPro helmet. They also helpfully tell her to watch out for the rocks that form a small island at low tide and to avoid the fire coral, as it will sting the dickens out of her if she bumps into it.

After surfing alongside them for a bit, Nancy goes ashore to have some food. The two surfers come ashore jut as she decides to go out once more, and start packing up their stuff. Unfortunately for Nancy, this means they're too far away when things start to rapidly go South.

First, she gets startled by a pod of dolphins that seem to be going somewhere in an awful hurry. She then discovers a dead humpback whale floating a few yards from the aforementioned tide island. Apparently not being much a viewer of the Discovery Channel, she floats next to the dead whale for a few minutes, even when she notices the huge bites taken out of it--and then it starts to be pushed from below by a large scavenger.

Thus it's too late when she decides to turn and surf away. A shark suddenly lunges out of the way she is surfing and wipes her out. After getting knocked around by the waves, she swims over to her board--only to be immediately yanked under the water by the shark. In true actual shark fashion, after it gets a good taste of her it lets her go. Also, because if if it went full Jaws on her, we wouldn't have much of a movie.

Bleeding, panicked, and desperate, Nancy swims to the first bit of safety she can think of: the dead whale. Unfortunately, in a cruel joke she can see the two surfers as they drive away, but when she sees their jeep stop it turns out to be because one of them had to secure a loose surfboard strap--and then they are gone, completely oblivious to her ordeal. She has no time to process that before the shark is pushing at the bottom of the whale to try and flip her into the water.

Nancy just makes it to the outcropping of rocks--planting her bare foot right in some fire coral in the process--before the shark can catch her. She's also not entirely alone, since a sea gull that was injured when the shark flipped the whale has taken shelter on the rocks, too. Well, and of course, the shark is very intent on keeping her company.

"Well, at least I'll get to be featured on shark week."

In a game attempt to not die, Nancy puts her medical training to use by making a tourniquet out of her surfboard tether, and stitching up the bite on her leg using her earrings and necklace. (You, uh, may want to look away during this bit. It's a bit unnerving how graphic you can be in PG-13 movies these days, huh?) She tears up her wet suit to use as a bandage, as well, so she at least won't bleed to death. Except now she's stuck over a hundred yards from shore and any chance of calling for help.

Worst of all, it turns out that the shark has decided that anyone else who gets into the water shall be killed instantly. A drunk man (Diego Espejel) who decides to steal her floating surfboard ends up bitten in half, and when the two surfers return and attempt to help her after they see her...it doesn't end well for them.

"Wheee!"

So, now that the shark has proven it will not give up until Nancy is dead, she's going to have to come up with a plan. Especially since the tide is coming in, and soon she'll be right where the shark wants her...

I was skeptical when I first heard they were remaking Psycho Shark, but...

I'll get this out of the way: it's a bit awkward that the film introduces a total of five characters that aren't white and three of them end up killed by the shark. I don't think the filmmakers really considered this, but it's definitely a bit awkward.

However, aside from that I confess myself a bit mystified by the mediocre or bad reviews I saw about the movie before I caught it in the theater. Especially since many seemed to find it dull and meandering. I highly disagree.

This film is a brisk 86 minutes in a world when every fucking movie has to be two and a half hours long, and while it makes sure to establish our heroine as a character before it gets down to business, it makes sure not to linger too long on the set-up. Blake Lively may not get much credit as an actress--largely due to being part of such a lovingly trashy show as Gossip Girl, I'm sure--but she does a great job here. Especially since a lot of the film was shot in a large pool and yet she still sells the primal terror of being a land animal caught in the ocean.

It is true, however, that she is a bit upstaged by her costar--the seagull she eventually names Steven. I'm not kidding, that sea gull is a charismatic presence.

Her other major costar is, of course, the shark. Now, it's clear that this shark is CGI and it is also clear that this film's CGI is rather shoddy when we see the dolphins, jellyfish, and the occasional greenscreen flub. So one would think the shark would also come off vaguely like it swam off the set of a SyFy Channel Original.

However, the shark looks pretty damn amazing. It moves and behaves like a real shark, complete with rolling eyes and snarling lips when it lunges in for the kill. There are few scenes where it doesn't look great, even though it clearly changes size throughout the film. Most of the stills I chose above would make you think it was maybe a slightly larger than average specimen, but holy crap by the end that sucker appears to be at least as big as Ol' Bruce.

"Mmm, drumsticks! My favorite!"

It could be that the negative reviews came about because the film's climax is fucking bonkers. We go from a semi-realistic and subdued survival horror film, to an overblown action-packed monster movie showdown. It's like the film switches genres midway through.

And I Goddamn love it.

This is a movie that is harrowing, makes you jump, and then just becomes fun and even silly. So one could say that that is what it rips off the most from Jaws.

So, while I wouldn't put The Shallows on my list of top five films from 2016, I still highly recommend it. It's a damn good time and we need more horror movies this fun nowadays.

Maybe the secret is more seagulls,

This has been my rather tardy contribution to The Celluloid Zeroes Franchise Kill of Jaws:

Seeker of Schlock put a bounty out on Jaws

Checkpoint Telstar goes sailing with Jaws 2

Cinemasochist Apocalypse is Coming Right At You! with Jaws 3-D

Micro-Brewed Reviews took things too personal with Jaws: The Revenge

Web of the Big Damn Spider sighted The Sea Serpent