Cheesy Movies

The trailer for Shaun of the Dead. Not all zombies are created equal. The most popular zombie archetype is a shambling, brain-eating member of the recently deceased, but, in recent films from 28 Days Later to Zombieland, the definition of what a zombie is or isn't has become more complicated. Does a zombie have to be a cannibal corpse, or can a zombie be someone infected with a virus which turns them into a blood-crazed, fast-running monster? For my own part, I have always preferred the classic George Romero zombies from the original Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead films (as well as…

One of the unwritten rules of creating a good horror yarn is that the location your story takes place in has to be as frightening as your monster. The setting almost has to act an an extension of the bloodthirsty antagonist; a place that can more easily be seen as its lair than a place of human habitation. In Lincoln Child's latest novel Terminal Freeze that place is Fear Base, a rotting military facility shivering the the shadow of Fear Glacier, and it is stalked by something utterly horrifying. Readers of The Relic, another horror novel penned by Child and his sometimes partner Douglas…

Frank Peretti's book Monster was bad, but the recently-aired SciFi Channel movie Monster Ark is worse. Not that SciFi original movies inspire much hope in me in the first place (they are better for riffing on than anything else) but I simply have no words to fully convey how atrociously bad Monster Ark is. It is best left to speak for itself, as in this clip excerpted on the cable show "The Soup"; The storyline involves a team of archaeologists that find a previously unknown story about another ark Noah had built to trap an ancient evil. They find this ark and, not ones to buck convention…

I haven't reviewed any bad movies lately, but this new cheese-fest is making me consider starting up again. For your viewing pleasure (?), Shark In Venice (warning: badly done blood & gore ahead); Shark In Venice - Trailerby ohmygore Stock footage, bad CGI, and a lesser Baldwin brother? How can I possibly resist?

... a ring-tailed lemur; I found Chris Mooney's latest piece about Sizzle so aggravatingly condescending that I was set to pen a lengthy, ill-temptered response. I thought better of it, especially since it is clear that any negative comments or criticisms about the film will be ignored. (Instead you're just getting a shorter ill-tempered one and a photo.) Apparently anyone who didn't like the film is a boring, humorless soul who can only find joy in endless streams of scientific data. The notion is absurd, but that's what's coming from the Sizzle soapbox, Randy Olson telling audiences that…

[Note: Apparently Emma Marris didn't like Sizzle either, and you can read her review in Nature. I'm definitely interested in seeing more reviews of the film from various sources as we get closer to the release date.] After reading Chris Mooney's hyperbolic review of Sizzle this morning I have to admit I was a little pissed off. While I panned the film Chris went head-over-heels for it; it seems that we saw two different films. Maybe we did. Although the topic of science communication is an undercurrent through the film (breaking to the surface in a few places) I did not think that framing was…

Sizzle, the new documentary by Flock of Dodos creator Randy Olson, describes itself as "a movie you'll feel passionate about (even if you don't know why)." This description is particularly apt, although perhaps not in the way that the team behind the film expected. Randy Olson is concerned. An Inconvenient Truth was a great film but there are still hordes of people who deny human activities are changing the world's climate and reputable climate scientists seem nowhere to be found. He decides to set off on an admirable quest to find the top climatologists and find out what they have to say…

Some cheesy dinosaur carnage, as seen in the film My Science Project.

I'm really not that worried about Expelled. Sure, it has resulted in a fair amount of posts here on the blogosphere (and I've done my fair share), but from what I can tell most people have never even heard of the film. Set to come out on April 18th, the film hasn't even shown up on the radar of many movie websites, and from what I've heard about test screenings the film is still undergoing some last minute changes before it slithers onto screens. How many screens? I have no idea, but I wouldn't imagine that it will be that many. It's expensive to go to the movies these days, the cheapest…

In nearly any film that involves dinosaurs, the main problem facing the people making the movie is determining how to get humans and dinosaurs together in the first place. Some films have opted for genetic experiments, others hidden refugia, and still others nuclear tests (although these films usually feature mutated dinosaurs rather than the animals themselves), but a solution is usually found through time travel, the existence of the lost world, or (more recently) fiddling around with DNA. Once the monsters have been securely brought into contact with humans, though, a hero needs to…

The Bleiman brothers just mentioned Deep Star Six, which I fondly remembered from my video-store clerk days. Believe it or not, I think Deep Star Six was better than the gross-out cheese-fest that was Leviathan, although the latter received a lot more airplay on UPN, TNT, and TBS when I was younger; Leviathan, of course, was a much more direct rip-off of ALIEN; Like JAWS, ALIEN was a terrifying film that everyone wanted to emulate, although some films (like Creature) were less shy about lifting bits of the plot;

Against my better judgment, I went out to catch a matinée showing of 10,000 BC yesterday, and the only good thing that came of the outing was that I found a $20 bill in the parking lot. The movie is one of the stinkiest pieces of movie cheese I've encountered. At least Dragon Wars was so bad it was funny; 10,000 BC was trite and boring. There was one mistake present throughout much of the film that continually made me chuckle though. The super-sized mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) in the film were twice incited to charge, and rather than run like modern elephants do, they galloped like…

There must be some unwritten rule that if you're going to face off against a prehistoric predator, you'd better make sure there's some heavy machinery nearby to even the odds [from an episode of Primeval]; The first time such a confrontation between "monster" and machine on film (that I know of, anyway) was in the film Dinosaurus!; More recently the low-budget gore-fest Carnosaur pulled the same trick; Of course, nothing says cheesy b-movie like recycling action sequences; Carnosaur 2 rehashed the climax of the first film using a forklift (Beware: Clip contains gratuitous gore near…

Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds

A monster in Loch Ness, crazy old Scots, and Nazis; what else could you want? Well, a coherent movie, of course, but The Loch Ness Horror is so full of rolled "r"s and movie cheese that fun all the same. The movie starts off with Nessie spotting some Nazi activity over the lake, the information she anonymously leaked helping Allied forces during the closing days of the war. The fact that the monster breathes air and constantly is sculling about on the surface while still being referred to as an elusive legend must mean that she was under some sort of government witness protection program.…

Most of my nightmares aren't rated PG, but if they involved a crazed and shirtless Leslie Neilson, they would be pretty terrifying indeed. Throw in a few cougars, birds, bears, wolves, a pack of purebred German Shepards, a motley crew of campers, and a mysterious hole in the ozone layer and you've got the 1977 film Something is Out There (also known as Day of the Animals), one of the worst revenge-of-nature films I've ever seen. For some time movie monsters were aliens as mutants produced by exposure to radiation, but during the 1970's there was a shift to "monsters" being normal animals…

The idea of a lost world, harboring Mesozoic remnants on a plateau in a steaming jungle or in a "hot spot" at one of the poles, has long enthralled writers of fiction, especially when there were truly blank spots on the map that had yet to be explored. The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle provided as wellspring of inspiration for later works (the film adaptation delivering convincing reconstructed dinosaurs for that era), the tale of a different lost world on Skull Island (King Kong) becoming a classic in cinema. Over time, however, such stories began to fade away, a rather late entry…

I've been excited about the release of the Aussie killer croc flick Rogue for quite some time now, the film looking like a better-than-average horror story (at least compared to films like Primeval and, shudder, Lake Placid 2). My patience, however, is being stretched rather than rewarded, as it appears that the release date for Rogue has been pushed back to January 2008 even though some movie websites still list it as being released on November 27, 2007 (and the official website still says it was supposed to be out November 8, 2007). Adding to this confusion, there's already an Amazon.com…

As we've seen with the last two movies featured here, there are some animals that naturally make good movie monsters. Sure, filmmakers might tack on a few feet and enlarge the size of their teeth, but sharks, crocodiles, and bears only require a setting and a foolish group of cast members potential victims to provide for a feature length film. It is the last of these "natural monsters" that we'll be dealing with today in the 1976 horror film Grizzly, featuring an antagonist that deadlier than your av-er-age bear. At it's heart, Grizzly is the tragic story of a cousin of Gentle Ben who loves…

Some movies, like the recently released cheese-fest Dragon Wars, are so utterly terrible that you can have a good time poking fun at everything that's wrong with them. Other films are downright painful to watch, and the killer-croc film Lake Placid falls into this latter category. Who would of thought that a monster film written and produced by David E. Kelly (creator of the show "Ally McBeal") and starring Bill Pullman and Bridget Fonda could have turned out so terrible? Oh, wait... As per killer-critter flick tradition, our opening scene features someone being attacked by a POV shot (…