Shark World

The bad news is global warming melted the ice caps and bottoms and flooded the entire Earth as if some sort of sci-fi take on Noah’s Ark, which, ironically, is also sci-fi. The good news is sharks have proliferated (made photocopies of each other) and have taken over the new real estate en masse.

Such is the premise for Planet of the Sharks (2016), whose plot on paper looks interesting the way an uneaten sandwich made with day old bread looks tasty. But the lower-grade special effects, painfully bad characters (some look like the B-team from Road Warrior/1981), and a LOL windsurfing scene renders the entire thing a wet messy mess.

Like Waterworld (1995), people now live on floating “cities”, which look more like discount boat docks. One appropriately named city called Junk is under attack from hundreds of hungry sharks, led by an alpha Great White that commands his army with mutated thinking abilities. Oh yeah, his snout freckles glow, too, which logically communicates with his mates. Think of it as a face walkie-talkie. Prior to the attack, which had sharks torpedoing out of the water to swallow anyone wearing Dockers™ (heh), Junk City had 72 citizens. Final head count: one.

With scientists on a nearby flotilla working to launch a rocket into the upper atmosphere to reset the weather, dry up the water, and go back to swimming at the YMCA. With all the shark attacks, this plan is falling apart faster than their docks. After the population is being reduced by the minute, it’s decided to drop a trigger over an undersea volcano that will explode right when the sharks swim over it. Yep, totally plausible.

The problem is, a shark ate the personal mini-copter carrying the Whiffle Ball™ device. So a female scientist with self-contained shirt pontoons, windsurfs out into the ocean to snag the device, jumping over sharks as she zooms around the waves. Barely avoiding becoming seafood, she deploys said Whiffle Ball™, which triggers the volcano, which kills a pile of shark and causes a tsunami the size of a tidal wave.

Alfie the alpha shark ain’t having none of this and makes trouble bubbles. It’s determined that this particular mutated shark emits a powerful electrical charge, not unlike a cordless shaver. The remaining scientists figure out how to stick cattle prods into its freckled face, thereby jump-starting the rocket, which is (barely) launched. Once the payload goes off, the sun comes out, the seas begin to dry up, and cities, which have been underwater for years, emerge all sparkly and clean as if just having gone through a car wash. (Why they couldn’t have a giant starfish stuck to the Empire State Building left me visibly shocked.)

No nudity, digital blood, some stock swearing in wincing fake accents, a far-reaching premise and sharks so dumbly designed, they’ll make your freckles start glowing. So yeah, something to not do for 83 minutes.

Globally-Warmed Bugs

Thank you global warming for wrecking our planet. And after all we’ve done for you. Because of you, that parasitic infested woolly mammoth has defrosted, and one million (give or take) previously frozen prehistoric flesh-eating bugs have hatched and gotten into human orifices. That’s gratitude for you.

Dr. David Kruipen, an “Earth-first” kind of scientist, discovered the room-temperature mammal meat and its germs and, after watching it infect it’s way through his staff out in the field, decided it probably isn’t a good idea to let said disease get back to civilization. Too bad his estranged college-aged daughter doesn’t listen to him and flies out with several grad students to study infestation up close and, for some, really personal.

Once the little buggers get under your skin, red bumps and open sores show up all over your face and stomach, you itch yourself at socially-inconvenient times, you throw up like it was your first quart of Jagermeister™, you sweat on everything, then you die a horribly painful death, thereby hatching even more bugs. (Note: said crawlers look like the Motorhead version of caterpillars.)

The helicopter pilot discovers he caught the bug and in an “oh, crap” scene, has two people dope him up with morphine (standard research equipment), put a tourniquet just above the goal line, and chop off his infected arm with a meat cleaver (also standard equipment). The two things he needed to happen didn’t quite work out, with the knife getting stuck halfway through the former arm and the discount amputation not getting all of the infection. Sucks to be him.

In order to make the world understand the threat, the good ’old doc infects himself and plans on being the only one evacuated. His reasoning being that, yeah, a few hundred thousand may die, but this is a valuable lesson for us all to stop making the atmosphere so toxic with our SUVs and party flatulence. But the doc’s daughter has a different ending in mind — and it’s just what the doctor didn’t order.

The Thaw (2009), though a decent “bug up your butt” movie, could use a little less moralizing and a bit more meat cleaver. And some Raid™.

Mutated Frozen Burritos

Harbinger is defined as anything that foreshadows a future event. For example – you eat a few 7-Eleven Truckstopper™ microwave burritos and a bathroom is a foreshadowed conclusion.

Another Harbinger is a boat in the upcoming horror/sci-fi thriller, Harbinger Down (2015), involving mutated sea creatures and global warming. (Look for Harbinger Down on VOD and limited theaters on August 7, 2015, as well as a commerical release on September 1, 2015.)

So how did the Harbinger encounter such boat-stopping creatures? Glad you asked politely: “A group of grad students have booked passage on the fishing trawler Harbinger to study the effects of global warming on a pod of Orcas in the Bering Sea. When the ship’s crew dredges up a recently thawed piece of old Soviet space wreckage, things get downright deadly.”

“It seems that the Russians experimented with tardigrades, tiny resilient animals able to withstand the extremes of space radiation. The creatures survived, but not without mutation. Now the crew is exposed to aggressively mutating organisms. And after being locked in ice for three decades, the creatures aren’t about to give up the warmth of human companionship.”

Pffft – the warmth of human companionship can be found in any bottle of the good stuff, the cheaper the better. Still, I like the idea that a bunch of grad students, who are bottom-dwellers on the human companionship scale, are likely to be devoured alive, like some sort of human Truckstopper™ burritos.

Man, I’m easily entertained/fed.

P.S. Do not confuse Harbinger Down with Beast of the Bering Sea (2013). That one had sea vampires in it. Same location, though.

A Monstrously Bad Monster

Monster (2008) is a Cloverfield (2008) knock-off so unbelievably bad, how anyone could claim writer’s credit for this pile of film droppings is more unbelievable. Hell, it’s not even good enough to be a rip-off.

Two American girls doing a hand-held camera documentary on global warming go to Japan to get their take on the whole pollution myth. While fumbling through an interview with the Minister of Garbage (great job title), a 7.5 earthquake rattles everyone’s teeth. Then another and another. An ominous roar is heard reverberating throughout the city and you hear (but don’t see) any buildings being destroyed, or more than three or four people in a city of eight million running for their lives.

This is the first 15 minutes. The rest of Monster is spent with the sisters trading the camera back and forth and crying, whining and checking their makeup. When the monster does show up (wiggling its patently fake rubber legs – less than 30 seconds total on-screen time), it’s so horribly pathetic, you wanna kill your TV.

The DVD cover promised a 200-foot multi-tentacled creature flipping buildings over. This does not happen. What does happen is you get extremely pissed for having wasted $3.99 on something that looked like it was made by a sixth-grader. (Note to six-graders: Sorry about that, but you’ll get your turn.)

Titanic Failure

Here’s a good idea: rebuild the chill-fated Titanic to spec, loudly proclaim nothing can sink it, then go on an ocean cruise that traces the original Titanic’s scenic route near whale-sized icebergs. That totally sounds like something I’d do while under the guidance of Budweiser™.

Thanks to global warming, glaciers are splitting off in Greenland and headed straight for cocktails in America. An incoming tsunami  that apparently no one saw coming throws the ice chunks right at U.S.S. Screwed Yet Again.

The rest of the movie has everyone trying to saves themselves, though I don’t know why. It’s not like they can realistically do a sequel with me as its star who saves everyone and gets all the chicks at the end.

The interior shots of this “state of the art” cruise liner has people going into the hold that looks like a ratty warehouse with peeling paint and leaking pipes. But then, that was the predestined fate of Titanic II (2010) – to boldly sink to new depths.

Sci-Fi Amtrak

An advance sneaky peek at the upcoming futuristic sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer, courtesy of the French, all of whom I probably owe francs to. (Money, not hot dogs.)

Big expectations surround Snowpiercer, a cautionary tale of global warming and future violence as it pertains to my personal entertainment. Bong Joon-ho, the South Korean filmmaker behind the superior giant monster movie The Host (2006), is helming this one. Makes perfect sense that a Korean director would be making an English sub-titled sci-fi movie based on a French graphic novel that no one can read except the French.

Based on Le Transperceneige, the F.G.N. (figure it out), Snowpiercer is “set in a future where, after a failed experiment to stop global warming, an Ice Age kills off all life on the planet except for the inhabitants of the Snow Piercer, a train that travels around the globe and is powered by a sacred perpetual-motion engine. A class system evolves on the train but a revolution brews.”

Curse my sub-standard language interpretation skills – I could have sworn Snowpiercer was a story about a vigilante hunter of vampire snowmen/women, a sort of Van Helsing in stylish ski wear. But a future choo-choo works for me just as well.

Snowpiercer comes out sometime in le future.

Cannibalistic Ghost Moose

Global warming with a twist – it’s not the toxic greenhouse gases leaking up from thawing permafrost that’s causing an oil drilling advance team in Alaska to walk naked into a sub-zero midnight snow storm, but the mythical Wendigo, a cannibalistic ghost moose. And all this time we’ve been buying into the lies of scientists. Damn conservatives.

Begrudgingly working alongside of hippies, uh, I mean, Greenpeace™ type environmentalists, Ed Pollock, a tough-talking leader of a drilling base in the de-cooling Arctic, needs massive equipment delivered, but ice roads can’t be constructed due to the ground being all warm ’n fuzzy. The environmentalist won’t sign off on letting the gear to be brought in because it’ll damage the Tundra. That’s like saying you won’t go outside because the wind will mess up your hair.

While that battle rages on, a team member is beginning to freak out over incessant noises, mysterious tracks, out-of-nowhere windstorms, and ghostly visions of cannibal ghost moose running around like they own the place. This culminates in the taking off of clothes and wandering out into the frozen night.

The next morning victim #1’s footprints lead 15 feet from the building, then disappear as if having been given a lift from a passing cannibal moose. His body was found miles away with the eyes picked out by crows. (Note: Since it’s so globally-warm in Alaska, birds can hang out up there and eat all the delicious snow/eyeballs they want.)

A rescue plane doesn’t fare much better, with a less-than-textbook landing into the drilling station. More than one are burned alive, which means BBQ buffet for the birds. The team captain and hippie, uh, environmentalist take off on a snowmobile (or “Ski-doo™”) to get help. They find none. Then the Ski-doo™ pulls a doo-doo and conks out. Then the Wendigos arrive to gore you with their antlers of death and hooves of doom.

The Last Winter (2006) has a good creepy build-up of events, some nicely-enunciated swearing, and a cheery dread that something is out there in the show that has the potential to eat your snowshoes off from the knee down. Too bad the Wendigos were computer graphics, though. Would’ve been nice to see a real one for once.