Shark Porn

Ever notice how Lou Diamond Phillips looks just like porn legend Peter North? From the neck up, anyway.

In the rogue shark movie Red Water (2003), Lou plays a charter boat captain in Louisiana in financial trouble because his business is seasonal and his customers aren’t. He used to work on oil rigs, but they had a blow out and two guys were killed. It wasn’t Lou’s fault, but he blames himself and traded his hot wife and career to own a stinky boat that barely floats. I probably would’ve done the same thing, but kept the hot wife (in case the boat quit working and we needed to be rowed back to land).

Speaking of which, she shows up as a rep for the EPA wanting to charter his boat so she can keep tabs on the oil drilling going on up river. Lou’s hot ex-wife is played by Kristy Swanson, the original and ONLY Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Also in the drilling zone is three million dollars scuttled when the feds were closing in on a drug run gone horribly awry.

Now the drug dealer who owns the spending rights wants it all back and hires a shark-bitten scuba expert/criminal to retrieve it. He also sends rap icon Coolio along to keep an eye on things. Coolio has played good guys before, but he really shines here as a gangsta thug brandishing a gun to cap yo’ ass and using appropriate street talk to get his point across.

Prior to these soon-to-cross scenarios, a 12-foot bull shark has made it up river and has eaten several people. I see you waving a red flag here: sharks are salt water fish. Not so fast — bull sharks are ambidextrous. The criminals clash with Lou, resulting in a MANY opportunities to bleed in the water. To a hungry shark, that’s like a refreshing human beverage to wash down its hourly meals.

Realistic criminal behavior, all-purpose explosions and enlarged fish attacks build up to a well-staged climax. Lou’s past factors in nicely on the final face-off with the shark (which looks like its made of some sort of water-proof rubber when it launches (!) out of the water to eat people).

The oil drill, it should be noted, looks to be of Peter North proportions, if you catch my drift. But it’s the snappy dialogue and double-crossing gangstas that are the real heroes here.

Terror Birds: Droppings From the Sky

Terror Birds, as the ad poster indicates in entry level Photoshoppery, is “hatching soon.” As you can see, there is a monster bird claw coming out of a giant egg. And hatching is what giant eggs do. So that makes it a clever turn of phrase, yes?

No. It’s Art Institute™ grade advertising at best. But I digress. The real reason for griping is that Terror Birds, an obvious cash-in to Jurassic World’s (2015) rampaging box office success using once-thought extinct dino birds as the movie’s antagonists, has already been done. Several times, in fact.

One example: Pterodactyl, starring “terror birds,” was released in 2005 and had rap star Coolio shooting machine guns at the prehistoric monsters. (Not a fan of rap music, but Coolio is pretty dang cool.) Terror Birds stars a bunch of generic, scrubbed and polished white kids straight outta Scooby-Doo™ and/or Disney™. There’s your target audience right there.

On top of this, Terror Birds even steals concept art from Pterodactyl to the point of plagiarism. But that’s the least of anyone’s worries, as you can see by the plot:

“When Maddy Stern discovers her father has gone missing during a routine birdwatching excursion, she and her college pals trek out into the wilderness to find him, only to end up in a wealthy scientist’s desolate ranch aviary, where they encounter a pair of giant, hungry terror birds believed to be extinct for centuries.”

Now compare that to the plot of Pterodactyl: “A dormant volcano deep with the Turkish forest holds within it a deadly secret. Perfectly preserved, a nest of pterodactyl eggs are ready to hatch…”

Couple that with Coolio, steaming piles of pterodactyl droppings, machine guns, a volcano, and you have quality sci-fi entertainment. (Note to anyone who gives a dropping: stick it out to the end; there’s a final scene that’s pretty coolio.)

P.S. For all you hard-core pterodactyl fans, seek out The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (aka, Les Adventures Extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec/2010): “A popular (and supermodel hot) novelist flies around 1912 Paris on the back of a pterodactyl, dealing with her would-be suitors, the cops, and monsters.” Fun movie, but unfortunately no machine guns. Or Coolio, who wouldn’t be born for another 51 years. Pitié.

Space Dracula

When you run out of things to for horror icons to do and still want to keep the rent checks coming in, send ’em into space. That said, it’s about time they did something different with Dracula; this time they plunged him into deep space. Good – his dusty schtick was getting a bit long in the tooth. Heh.

Instead setting him up with sleek astronaut pants (with optional Van Allen radiation belt –heh), they have Dracula decked out in his dusty old 18th Century clothes. And everything that follows circles Uranus from there.

Investigating a derelict space ship, Casper Van Dien as Commander Van Helsing (gimme a break) boards the empty craft, but discovers a bunch of wooden coffins. According to the ship’s log, the coffins were picked up on Transylvania Planet in the Carpathian System (good grief). Dracula is in one of the easily-opened boxes, breaks out and bites 187 (Coolio). The scene-chewing rap star turns into a vampire and hams it up good. When in Rome.

Dracula 3000: Infinite Darkness (2004) belongs in a black hole. Sorry, that’s all the space references I could think of. I blame it on gravity, always holding me back ’n stuff.