Shocking Dark (1989)

I’ve often said that, if I was ever rich enough, I would move to Venice, Italy to live out the remainder of my days (it’s usually either this or buying my own island/small country).  I’ve done no research into the place, unless movie viewing counts.  It just looks like the kind of city that would appeal to me.  There are no cars to run you over or blare their shitty music at all hours of the day and night (maybe they do that by gondola?).  It has a quiet, rustic quality to it while also being just modern enough for my taste.  This is why it works so well as a horror film setting (witness: Don’t Look Now).  Its silence, its narrow, mazelike streets, and its floating, sea-worn characteristics are both peaceful and unsettling.  I tend to think, based on its location, that there is likely a large rat issue, so that wouldn’t be fun, and I’m sure that the salty, ocean air plays hell with the architecture and metal plumbing (thank God for PEX).  Still, I imagine that the positives would vastly outweigh the negatives, so all I have to do now is become a multi-millionaire.  Not even a toxic cloud over Venice, like in Bruno Mattei’s Shocking Dark (aka Terminator 2, aka Aliens 2, aka Alienators), could deplete my desire to live there.  The genetic mutations might be a sticking point, though.

An S.O.S. is received from some underground scientific/military bunker.  Operation Delta Venice is activated, and the Mega Force (Hal Needham should sue) of Space Marines are called in to investigate and retrieve the head scientist’s diary (automatically assuming that everyone is dead or about to die).  Joining the cosmic grunts are Sam Fuller (yes, really; played by Christopher Ahrens) and Sara Drumbull (Haven Tyler), a fellow scientist.  And then the rest of the plot of Aliens plays out with a smattering of The Terminator.

There is an earnestness present in the best of trash cinema.  Even at its most mercenary, even when you can almost hear the conversations behind the scenes about blatantly ripping off popular films for the sake of quick box office (possibly the progenitor of the current pass/fail attitude towards opening weekend sales?  Maybe), junk movies often still contain an openness that appeals in part because they are taken or given in “as-is” condition.  They are the runts of the litter, the dog or cat with an overemphasized underbite or other physical imperfection that plays to our sympathies and fondness for things that may need a little more love than others.  This is part of the reason why it has become so fashionable to like “Bad Movies” (and something which most intentionally “bad” or throwback films don’t seem to grasp), the line between intent and result.  Most filmmakers don’t set out to make bad movies.  Yet, when the reach of a film exceeds its grasp, it becomes fodder for mockery (right or wrong).

In films like Shocking Dark, no one bats an eye at the inanely wrongheaded actions of the characters or the dialogue that wouldn’t even make it into a comic book (and this is coming from a longtime devotee of the comic book form).  To wit: Two of the Marines enter a room, walk a couple of steps, and stop.  Koster (Geretta Geretta) turns to Kowalsky (Paul Norman Allen), and pulls a photo of how Venice used to look out of her pocket.  They both pine for a moment, and then Koster gives Kowalsky the picture, stating that she has a lot more.  Hopefully, in her other pockets.  In generic terms, this scene is meant to flesh out the characters a bit, to spark in the audience a desire for these people to make it to the film’s end.  Instead, it plays like an awkwardly inserted scene that kills a bit more time so the film can reach feature length.  There are a couple of video presentations that are just like any other dull, corporate video presentations except these ones are for evil exposition (because if you’re going to do something highly illegal and unethical and immoral, you should keep some evidence of it on video).  And sample some of this dialogue.  “Let’s get out the KY so we can shaft him real good.”  “What bastards.  They’ve done it.”  “We’re the computer.”  And so forth.  This is all done with the straightest of faces, and you just know that Mattei and screenwriter Claudio Fragasso (he of the infamous Troll 2) felt genuinely proud of their accomplishments.  Too bad that what accomplishments this film does achieve were done so three years earlier by James Cameron and have nothing whatsoever to do with this film’s writing and/or direction.

To say that this film is derivative is like saying that the Big Bang was a historical event of note.  Shocking Dark doesn’t just follow in the footsteps of Aliens.  It stomps in them.  The Space Marines are the same ballbreaking hardasses.  Koster is Jenette Goldstein’s Vasquez character with the exception that she LOVES taking potshots at her mates’ ethnicities (there are many references to Italians and grease; Again, you can almost hear Fragasso and Mattei grinning).  Fuller is a representative of the Tubular Corporation (I can’t imagine this world being bereft of other corporations with names like Radical, Gnarly, and Totally), and his reason for being there is sneaky and underhanded.  There is an android who nobody can guess is an android, even though he acts like an android from the very start.  There is a young girl, Samantha (Dominica Coulson), who has managed to stay alive on her own, and she connects with Sara in a maternal way.  The monsters wrap their victims in cocoons for later feasting.  There are some deviations from Cameron’s template, but they’re so blatantly and haphazardly tossed off, they trigger nothing so much as incredulity.

I guess I could get over this film’s swindling of its audience if it were competent.  After all, how many art forgeries are there that we still enjoy based on the assumption that they are the originals due to their technical quality?  But no, Shocking Dark is painful in its lack of originality.  It doesn’t try to do anything more interesting than evince thoughts of better films.  This is a copy of a film done with tracing paper, getting the shapes and placement right (mostly), but completely fucking up the details.  There are endless scenes of people walking through factory corridors.  When they do stop for some action, it’s shot and edited in the exact same way every time, with the exact same result, and presaging more endless walking through factory corridors.  My Dinner with Andre had more shot variety than this film.  The thing which completely flattens any chance of a good time, however, is that the characters all seem extremely depressed.  Not so much because of the situation their world is in, but because of the situation that the actors are in.  Namely, Shocking Dark.       

MVT:  James Cameron’s script by way of Claudio Fragasso, such as it is.

Make or Break:  The break really depends on how long you can stand watching Aliens filtered through store bought marinara sauce.  Personally, I’d prefer a homemade pesto, but whatever.

Score:  2/10

Cruel Jaws (1995)

People get really bent out of shape over movie remakes, especially these days.  Every time a remake is even rumored, the internet practically explodes with people bitching and moaning about how it’s going to suck and about how this is “raping their childhood” (a gripe as invalid as it is overblown).  Personally, I’m of two minds on the subject.  On the one hand, I understand some of the complaints, primarily as they relate to the dearth of ideas in Hollywood.  I would love to see more original material developed, see new characters and franchises for us to love as much as those of the past (and let’s be honest, most of this grousing comes from nostalgia).  That studio execs just don’t get it is frustrating (in much the same way that the thinking that the higher an action film’s budget is, the better a film it is, which is not only patently false but also distressing for how many low- to mid- budget films they could produce with that same money; but this shit makes billions, and money talks).  

Do I feel that a remake of Escape from New York is warranted (and I won’t even touch subjects like the recasting of characters with actors of different races, genders, et cetera here)?  No, but I also have the option of ignoring it and any of the changes it makes to Carpenter’s original.  That’s something that people just don’t seem to get; speak with your dollars.  If you don’t want to see any of these profligate reboots, don’t pay to see them.  Don’t watch them at all.  But more importantly, don’t whinge on endlessly about how offended you are by them.  There’s nothing wrong with voicing your disapproval, but it’s unnecessary and, frankly, boorish to carry on the way many folks do.  And that’s the other side of my thinking.  I have no problems with stating that I’m disinterested in a particular remake, but I don’t dwell on it and overreact about it as if any of this has any concrete impact on the course of my life or the turning of the Earth.  If anything, one of my biggest quibbles anymore is that I now have to clarify which version of a film I’m talking about, and this is becoming more and more frequent.  But it doesn’t kill my love for any of the originals, and I can always go back and watch them instead of a remake.  Try it sometime.  You might find yourself a little happier for it (or at least a little less bitter).

A group of Cuban salvage divers scope out the wreck of the USS Cleveland looking to haul up some major booty.  Of course, there’s a massive shark down there who kills them all.  Cut to: marine biologist Billy (Gregg Hood) and girlfriend Vanessa (Norma J Nesheim), who arrive in Hampton Bay, Florida for vacation (including “disco dancing ‘til dawn,” and this is in 1995, folks).  Visiting pal Dag Sorensen (Richard Dew, who will forever be viewed as a poor man’s Hulk Hogan lookalike) and his family at their little aquarium, Billy becomes enmeshed in Dag’s struggle against greedy land developer Sam Lewis (George Barnes Jr) as well as local sheriff Francis’ (David Luther) quest to rid his waters of this “anomalous” man-eater.

Bruno Mattei’s (hiding out under the William Snyder nom de guerre) Cruel Jaws (aka The Beast aka Jaws 5) is an amazing thing to behold.  Don’t misunderstand, this is as incompetent a film as Mattei has ever turned out (possibly moreso).  The editing is confusing, even when it’s not being used to attempt to fool us into thinking that the shark attack scenes are in any way exciting.  For instance, Francis goes to talk to Mayor Godfrey (who looks like a cross between Trace Beaulieu and the frantic television station manager at the beginning of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead) and Sam (why Sam is there at all is anyone’s guess) about closing the beaches, and in the middle of their conversation, they go from standing around Godfrey’s office to standing on a balcony outside.  This particular technique has been used before in many good films, but here it makes no sense.  Their conversation isn’t long enough or in-depth enough to believe that they would continue it outside and at a locale which also gives the impression that these are just bros hanging out (which they’re not).  Some of the shots in the film don’t even give us actual visuals in any sort of continuity (and it’s not as if this is some type of art film…or maybe it is?); they’re just cuts to something and then cut away from.  It’s a hatchet job.

In the grand tradition of Italian genre filmmaking, we also get the inclusion of odd bits of business which we’re supposed to believe are A) of any importance to the story and B) not dumb (often simultaneously).  The perfect example of this is the subplot of Dag’s paraplegic daughter Susie (Kirsten Urso).  She swims with the dolphins at the aquarium and even has a pet seal.  Her aquatic antics are set to the most rodeo-clown-esque, slide-whistle-abusing, offputting music imaginable.  Otherwise, she passes comments about punching sharks which are meant to be cute and endearing.  They’re not, and she’s not.  We also have the subplot of Sam’s douche bag son Ronnie (Carter Collins, a dime store Nick Cassavetes if ever there was one), getting enraged, trying to poison Susie’s dolphins, and generally being an asshole.  There’s the subplot of Dag’s son Bob (Scott Silveria) and Sam’s daughter Gloria (Natasha Etzer) falling in love and emoting in some of the most baldfaced dialogue ever written.  And the capper is the inclusion of Sam’s Italian “business partners” from New York, who come to us by way of Central Casting.  One of the more intriguing elements of the film is the inclusion of Glenda (Sky Palma), a bleached blonde insane woman who just wants to party (including, but not limited to, kneeing a friend in the balls while dancing with him; Jocularity!) and kill sharks.  Does all of this seem like a lot to include in a movie ostensibly about a large fish terrorizing a small coastal town?  You bet.  In fact, the shark and its entire plot barely get any screen time until about the last third.  Consequently, Cruel Jaws is a meandering slog to get through, even after everyone and their brother decide to take a swing at the shark (an editorial decision that only makes the film feel longer than it is), and this kills what dipshitty enjoyment I got from the first third, because it took me that long to realize that this thing was just film being passed through a camera. 

Of course, no conversation about this film can take place without mention of its stunning appropriation of not only the footage from several Jaws films (as well as some from L’ultimo Squalo and Deep Blood, as I’ve read) but also their plot points and even their dialogue.  In fact, most of my notes on this thing are just notations of moments stolen from that other franchise.  Witness: Gloria taunts Bob with the line, “Do you always do what your dad tells you to do?” (Jaws 2).  Billy expounds about how all sharks do is “swim, eat, and make baby sharks” (Jaws).  Francis says that their shark is “a perfect machine” (Jaws).  There is the prank played on a couple necking in the water by their pals, which involves a megaphone and the impersonation of authority figures (Jaws 3D).  A character inexplicably lifts an open can of gas over their head just before the idiot next to them fires off a flare gun, causing their boat to explode (Jaws 2).  These are just a few instances in a film positively littered with direct lifts.  The filmmakers throw in some horse shit about the origin of the shark (which, incidentally, is a tiger shark, not a great white, but even this is taken from the original Jaws and its famous “A whaaat?” scene), but no matter which way you cut it, Cruel Jaws is a hot mess trying to disguise itself as a movie in much the same way that the Land Shark from the classic Saturday Night Live skit tried to disguise itself as a plumber.  

MVT:  For all its deficiencies, I did enjoy watching Glenda be unhinged and eat up every shred of scenery around her.  It doesn’t hurt any that Palma’s pretty cute.

Make or Break:  The Break for me was the moment Susie showed up aqua-dancing with her dolphin friends.  I knew at that point that she was going to be cloyingly saccharine and involved in way more of the film than she should be.

Score:  5.75/10

Cop Game (1988)

There once was a man named Vladimir Koziakin, and about this man’s personal life I know very little (read: nothing).  What I do know is that he produced one of the most entertaining, engrossing, and lovingly remembered books of my youth.  I’m of course speaking of Movie Monster Mazes, the 1976 tome that not only reinforced my love of monsters but also gave me new creatures to track down (if only their films would play on one of our stations; bear in mind this was back when we had maybe thirteen channels that could be tuned in on our television, and you were subject to whatever their programmers wanted to/could afford to run).  The premise is self-evident; there were fifty (“a panoramic journey through FIFTY (not Forty-Nine) FIFTY Monstrous Mazes!”) puzzles in the shapes of different cinematic fiends (as common as Godzilla, as obscure as The Monster of Piedras Blancas).  The accuracy on a few of the pieces would drive monster perfectionists insane (He spells Ghidorah as “Gidra” and calls Ray Harryhausen’s Ymir “Giant Ymu”), but I didn’t care.  I was too intent on running through the mazes (in pencil, of course, because the book cost ninety-five cents [!], and it’s not as if the book was easy to come by [that I recall]), erasing the lines, and doing it all over again (the erasures made their own permanent paths on the paper after a while, but the artwork was still attractive enough on its own to warrant paging through again and again).  There is a PDF of the book you can find online, the great tragedy of which is that many of the mazes have already been solved.  I’ve made it my mission in life to digitally remove all that and print each of these pieces to do again (and to share them with my monster-loving godchild if I can get him to lift his head up from his Nintendo DS or whatever the hell that thing is).  It’s good to have goals.  The relevance of this circuitous circumnavigation to Bruno Mattei’s (under the pseudonym of Bob Hunter) Cop Game (aka Cop Game: Giochi di Poliziotto), is that the film’s plot is so convoluted, you’ll almost certainly need to use the rewind button (the modern film viewer’s equivalent to a pencil eraser on a maze) to get all the way from start to finish with some idea of the plot intact.

During the final days of the Vietnam War, officers are being picked off one by one by former (maybe current?) members of the Cobra Force.  Enter special investigators Morgan (Brent Huff) and Hawk (Max Laurel) who are charged with getting to the bottom of this mess.  And they’re not afraid to break the rules in order to do it.

Post-Vietnam-War, movies set during almost any conflict tend to have a very dim view of the governments who send the soldiers off to fight in them as well as of war itself (though the latter notion in cinema has been around for much longer, it rose in prevalence around the time of this war and carried on ever after).  Typically this stink eye is focused on America, and there is far more anti-colonialist subtext at work (and not wrongfully so in both regards, I think).  Gone is the homogenized “rally round the flag, boys” depiction and attitude of good men fighting the good fight for a good reason.  Having the bloody footage of a war broadcast into homes on a daily basis not only peeled away the clean cut façade of warfare and changed the public perception of the men and women who fight, but it also forced filmmakers to steer toward more realistic portrayals of war time, even when the stories were fantastic in nature.  Things became grottier.  Characters became less idealized, and many began to lean far more to the dark side than to the light.  Italian filmmakers, combining the neo-realist movement developed and popularized by auteurs such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini with the sensational, primal elements which would quickly transform into a sleazy aura that became like a signature writ in giant, glowing, neon letters for exploitation hounds the world over, tucked into this new approach with gusto.  

Naturally, different filmmakers achieve different levels of success with this approach, and, if you know anything about Mattei you know he does his level best to hit all the right notes, though rarely do his compositions orchestrate the way I’m sure they were first envisioned.  I’m also quite confident that his motives were more monetary than artistic, and I have zero problems with this.  So, we get a lot of exterior shots of the Philippines standing in for Vietnam, and the footage from the streets adds the appropriate flavor to the proceedings.  The attitude is present with Hawk telling Morgan that he comes “from a country of assholes,” that America is “playing cowboys and Indians” in Vietnam, and most presciently, “After you get back home, you will forget all about me.  But I will still be here, drowning in a sea of shit.”  Shooman (Robert Marius) commands the Cobra Force, and is alleged to have destroyed a village full of women and children in bloodthirsty pursuit of the Viet Cong (a trope of Vietnam War films inspired by the infamous My Lai Massacre in 1968). 

Likewise, we get the populist components such as plentiful gun fights, chases, and brawls.  Hawk and Morgan break a suspect’s fingers to get him to talk (in broad daylight and full view of anyone wandering by).  What feels like a large chunk of run time takes place intercutting back and forth to scenes in a strip club (with French cut bikini bottoms and fashionably torn half shirts aplenty, but somehow no nudity) which feels more Eighties than anything else in this film, barring Huff’s dangly left earring.  Morgan and Hawk are flippant to their direct superior Captain Kirk (yes, really, and played by the late, great Romano Puppo) and everyone else they encounter, dress exclusively in street clothes, and don’t give shit one about any collateral damage they cause while doing their job.  The film does manage to balance these two perspectives (gritty, yet overwrought) fairly well, but it also piles on plot points nigh unto the breaking point.  In fact, once you add on the idea that a Russian spy named Vladimir has infiltrated the American armed forces, may or may not be a heroin dealer, and may or may not have had a hand in or is just spreading rumors about the village massacre and what any of this has to do with the initial murders, your head will be spinning, especially since the filmmakers don’t care about connecting scenes or ideas until it’s absolutely necessary.  Luckily, the aspects of the film that work (Mattei knows his way around action sequences, and there is a quasi-Noir angle that I enjoyed) do so well enough that the labyrinthine story and the writhing the script has to do in order to attempt resolving it become like frosting on the multi-flavored layer cake that is Cop Game.

MVT:  Huff loves giving everybody guff (yes, I made this sentence rhyme; sue me).  He is jaw-clenchingly anti-everything, so much of the joy in watching his character do his thing lies in how relentlessly hard-headed he is in every single way.

Make or Break:  Without giving away exactly why it’s so outstanding, there is a car chase in this film that I would attest can stand up to any in the history of cinema.  Okay, that’s an outright lie, but it’s so much damned fun, I couldn’t help loving every second of it.

Score:  6.5/10