Jurassic World: Some Spoiler-Free Thoughts

"You are acting like we are engaged in some kind of mad science, but we are doing what we have done from the beginning. Nothing in Jurassic World is natural! We have always filled gaps in the genomes with the DNA of other animals, and if their genetic code was pure, many of them would look quite different! But you didn't ask for reality; you asked for more teeth!"

This line, from B.D. Wong's returning character Henry Wu, sums up a lot about Jurassic World. It's a lot of things, that line - it's justification for not keeping up to date with the latest paleontological discoveries (feathered T. rex, what the fuck), and a two-pronged jab with a toasting fork against both the science camp for decrying their choice to do so and the public for demanding bigger and better. It's a little ham-handed, but since the entire film seems to be a massive piss-take of today's Apple and CGI culture, it sort of fits, tonally speaking. Somehow, though, I don't think a film with dinosaurs in it ought to be the place to say so - maybe save that for the Social Justice blogs

It took literally ten years of development hell and botched script drafts, but it's finally here, folks. Jurassic World is set twenty-two years after the events of the first Jurassic Park film, thankfully ignoring the confused mess that was The Lost World and the B-Movie shlock that was Jurassic Park III. We have a theme park full of dinosaurs, and it works, and people love it - but not according to Bryce Dallas-Howard's character, who worships at the altar of Lord Focus Groups. Thinking people don't care for regular dinosaurs anymore, she goes ahead and commisions InGen's scientists to make a literal Frankenstein's dino, a genetic hybrid designed to wow the crowds with how disgustingly overpowered and fierce it is. I don't think it's a spoiler when I say it all goes to shit, thanks to a bunch of behind-the-scenes idiocy, and it ends up putting Bryce's two newphews in danger as the Indominus rex (I still prefer Diabolus) starts being a huge piece of shit and fucking up everything.

Some Words About Iron Man 3

So I just got back from seeing Iron Man 3 at my local cinema. And I'm not gonna lie, it rules. The actors are still great, injecting a whole lot of personality and heart into the script. The effects are as amazing as ever, and some of the stunts will leave you gaping with amazement or cringing with fear. And the story is fast-paced, full of intruige and on-the-seat tense at times. There are moments where you'll burst out laughing, especially at half of the stuff Tony says and the antics of the badly-behaved Mark 42 armour.

The film even manages to do the impossible by making Tony Stark, a man as fazed by danger as a rhino is by an irritated sparrow, seem vulnerable and desperate - he's dealing with a force that strikes from the shadows, never being where he wants it to be and never facing him personally like he wants. It responds to his overconfident threats by blowing up his house and stripping him of his suit, forcing him to use his head and think his way past the Extremis-dosed assassins trying to kill him. And the best sequence in the film has to be the arrival of the Iron Legion, all the suits Stark has built leaping in to help him save Pepper Potts and defeat the villain.

That said, however, I have a major problem with the film.

And that's it's villain - the Mandarin.

SPOILERS START HERE! HIGHLIGHT TEXT TO REVEAL SPOILERS!

We start off with this shadowy, robed figure seated on a throne, bearing his iconic ten rings and leading a veritable army of loyal terrorists. From the get-go, he launches into fantastic rants about his cause, comparing the ideals of America to a fortune cookie in a metaphor that sent chills down my spine. His identity is a mystery, he can strike at anything from anywhere and he has access to the hihgly-unstable Extremis virus, making his forces that much more dangerous. The sudden segue's into his video speeches, and indeed the videos themselves, are like something out of fucking Marble Hornets - genuinely scary in their imagery and coming right the fuck out of nowhere. You expect a massive showdown with this guy, the kind that rocks the socks of the movie-going audience.

And then Stark breaks into where the Mandarin is supposed to be, and it turns out the bearded figure on the TV is a mere puppet, bribed with cheap beer and women. The real Mandarin is Aldrich Killian, the leader of A.I.M. and Pepper Pott's old squeeze, who has a vaguely defined plan to kill the president and take over the U.S. Also something about the vice-president's daughter needing the Extremis to live, it wasn't very well explained. Killian injects himself with Extremis, becoming a fire-breathing monstrosity that Stark has to jump between various suits to defeat.

I honestly felt kind of cheated by this twist. Granted it was a very clever twist - for a while, Killian was thought to be working for the Mandarin - but I feel that Killian was a far weaker villain than the puppet he was controlling. His sole motivation for his actions was a classic case of rejection, going after Stark because Pepper chose him instead, and his attempts at giving villainous monologues came off as passive-agressive whinging. Granted, the way he transformed from the start of the film into a crippled nerd into a swathe, handsome jock was pretty cool, but in the end the character was nothing more than a) a big child throwing a temper tantrum and b) another scientific genius, which Tony has fought at least three times before.

The Mandarin puppet was a far more fascinating character, in my opinion. He had the air of a shadow, mysterious showman who had seemingly no end to the tricks he could pull, soliloquizing about the "lessons" he was trying to teach America, and felt like a far bigger and more credible threat than the scorned child Killian showed himself to be. His speeches felt like something from Sun Tzu's Art of War, the source of the character's philosophy, and the stuff he didn't only just make you despise him, but also geniunely wonder what was going on in his head. In the end, the reveal that he was a drunken British actor being paid by the word served to undermine all the character's intruige and felt like a complete cop-out. What's even sadder is that even though he commands the Ten Rings group from the first film and we get a glimpse of the rings he wears, the connection is never made and nothing comes from that little point.

Personally, I would have liked to have a Mandarin that was closer to the comics than what we got in the film. Say we have a man who, in the aftermath of losing his family to the Chitauri invasion in Avengers, finds the rings in the wreckage of a ship and discovers their mysterious powers. Blaming Tony for his losses and deciding America to be weak, he overtakes the Ten Rings group and uses the rings to convince people he is a sorceror, using fear and tricks to decieve people into doing his bidding. Blackmailing A.I.M. into handing over the Extremis formula, he uses it to create the super-soldiers he needs to send his ten "messages" to the government, whilst at the same time calling Iron Man out on failing to live up to what's expected of him. Killain commits suicide, unable to bear witness to his project becoming weaponized, and Stark has to confront the Mandarin when he strikes at Potts as a means to make Stark feel the same pain he felt when he lost his family. Cue showdown with Stark jumping between suits to combat the effects of Mandarin's rings.

Also, throwing A.I.M. in like that may have been a bit too much. Save it for the fourth film, guys - I know you can make M.O.D.O.K. cool!

SPOILERS END HERE!

So yeah, great film but really weak villain. By all means catch it when you can, as it still delivers everything you'd expect from a film featuring Robert Downey Jr. and co., but the big reveal of the film might leave you dissapointed. On a side note, I saw it in 3D, which probably didn't really add that much to the experience, but I don't rate films based on that alone, so feel free to splash out if you want to. But not on snacks. Fuck cinema food prices.

Film Review - "Titans" Duology

Well, seeing as I haven't written much beyond Monster Mash or RP-related stuff this year, I thought it would be a nice treat for you guys to review a DVD double-pack that I recently purchased for around £12 whilst helping my mother with the shopping. Now, keep in mind that because I don't know shit about transfer quality or stuff like that when it comes to DVD's, I'll just be looking at the movies on their own rather than the technical aspects of the DVD release that most critics do.

With that out of the way, Clash of the Titans and Wrath of the Titans.

Greek Myths vs. The Mullet of Doom

Clash of the Titans is a 2010 remake of the classic 1981 fantasy film, based on the myth in which Perseus slew Medusa and saved a town from the sea monster Kraken. Wrath of the Titans is the 2012 sequel in which Perseus, now with the world's most ridiculous mullet, must free his father Zeus from the Underworld and stop the titan Kronos from gaining his revenge for being imprisoned millions of years ago. Both films star Sam Worthington in the lead role and also feature Liam Neeson as Zeus, Alexa Davalos as Andromeda and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, with Bubo the mechanical owl from the 1981 film making cameo appearances along the way.

Now both films aren't trying to be smart. This is a given, considering we're dealing with Greek mythology and angry swordsmen fighting hideous monsters. Neither Clash nor Wrath wants to inspire people, send a heartfelt message or adress a sensitive issue. They just want to be bombastic action flicks, full of swordfights and special effects, that you can kick back and watch with mates and let yourself be thrilled by. And to their credit, the films do provide that. They're both drama mixed with action mixed with a sprinkling of comedy, mostly at the expense of everyone who isn't Perseus or his immediate friends. They're fun flicks that don't try to make you think too hard about anything, and sometimes that's all we want.

That said, however, I wholeheartedly reccomend Clash over Wrath.

"I leave for five minutes and you trash the place! You're unbearable, Zeus!"

Due to the fact that it's sort of shackled to the original film plot-wise, Clash does try to make an effort to suck you into the world that it's trying to build. It has a nice, slow start where it sets up the scene and tells us that mortal man has finally gotten sick of dealing with their prick gods and have declared war on them. It takes time to develop Perseus as a character and show us scenes of him with his foster family, so we can understand what motivates him to save Andromeda. We feel worried when Calibos shows up, we feel tense and nervous as we sail the river Styx to find Medusa, we boo when Hades betrays Zeus and we cheer when Perseus finally defeats the Kraken and flies away into the sunset. It's coherant, epic without being overwhelming and you definitely feel for the character's struggles and motivations.

Wrath's problem is that it's trying too hard to be bigger than the previous film. If Clash is Pirates of the Carribean by way of 300, then Wrath is trying to ape Michael Bay's Transformers without grasping the subtleties. It's trying to be this huge, massive film where the stakes are high and the CGI fills the screen, but in order to do so it sacrifices a lot of what made the first film enjoyable and crams the spaces with more computer-generated beasties and mindless action. And as a result it ends up making several fatal mistakes that definitely cause it to drop in quality when compared to Clash, on top of a sudden drop in cinematography that causes the camera to shake like the cameraman is standing on a trampoline.

And these mistakes, briefly, are:

1. Retreading Old Ground
The first problem one encounters with Wrath is that, especially in the first half, it feels incredibly similar to Clash. Perseus may be going to different locations and trying to defeat different monsters, but there's almost a bit of a formula going on - The Djin from Clash are replaced with Cyclopes, Hephaestus (played by Bill Nighy, of all folks) stands in for the Stygian Witches, Ares replaces Calibos, the nameless hunters are swapped out for Agenor, son of Poseidon (think Jack Sparrow minus the charisma and likeability) and Kronos takes the Kraken's place as the Giant Monster Antagonist of the film. Even whole sequences get interchanged - the Djin leading the heroes across the desert to the Witches turns into the  Cyclopes showing the way to Hephaestus's temple, an underground maze replaces the Styx and the Fury attack at the start of the first film is replaced with an angry Chimera.

"Alright, own up - who superglued this wig to my head?"

For a sequel that aims to be bigger than the first film, this is kind of sad. It's as if the film doesn't trust itself with trying anything new and is just going through what it's comfortable with because that's all it knows. Things do get interesting later, when Ares finally snaps and takes on Perseus one-on-one, but for the most part there's a heavy air of "been there, done that" about the film that seems almost cynical.

2. Lack of Pacing
As mentioned before, Clash has a slow start in order to ensure that the audience is drawn in, and then mixes up the action with moments of tense anticipation or wonder in order to keep us interested. Wrath throws any notion of pacing out of the window - first five minutes in and a Chimera is breathing fire everywhere. From then on we get sweeping vistas with Pegaus flying about, a bombastic struggle with the Cyclopes, panic as the shifting Labyrinth nearly crushes our heroes, a fist-fight with a Minotaur and then it all spirals into a chaotic mess of betrayals, confrontations, reconciliations and an over-the-top battle against Kronos before the film finally calms down.

The film seems afraid that if it stops being huge and full of action and digital beasts, it's going to lose the audience's attention. And that's not a good thing - without calm moments to juxtapose against the tension or epicness, then we've got no point of comparison and anything afterwards is either dull by comparison or just disorienting. In it's haste to try and eleveate itself in scale compared to it's predecessor, Wrath cuts out all the more focused drama from Clash and crams more juvenile explosions into the gaps, and the result is the cinemaic equivalent of jangling your car keys in front of a cat's face for two and a half hours.

3. No Subtlety
Speaking of subtlety, a sequence that stuck out in my mind was when the Chimera was attacking Perseus' village. In one instance, the creature clearly demonstrates that it creates fire by breathing out a flammable spray from it's left head, then igniting the vapor with sparks from the right head. As I watched this, an off-screen villager felt the need to shout out "Look out, it's venom catches fire!" I had to laugh at that moment, not only at how corny the line was, but at the fact that the film needed to include it as a means to explain what we could clearly see with our own eyes.

Why it didn't eat the annoying kid, however, was never explained.

Wrath as a whole suffers from a dire need to simply "Show, Don't Tell", as the rule goes. Things are outright stated that would help the movie infinitely more if they were simply implied or hinted at, as if the film doesn't trust us to simply use our heads and make our own deductions. To take that Chimera scene, for example: what does that screaming villager really add? Nothing in the way of drama or tension, so what was that line even for? Why did the film feel it needed to explain what the Chimera was doing when we could clearly see it? Would it not be better if we could simply, you know, assume with our brains that it has flammable venom, without being told so? Give your audience some credit, Wrath - you know not everyone in the theatre's a total moron!

4. No Feel For The Stakes
This is probably my biggest gripe with the movie, and the point I'm probably going to write the most paragraphs about. As part of it's ongoing quest to overshadow Clash in scale and bombastic-ness, Wrath tells us that the stakes are higher than ever, and all of the universe is in danger if Hades and his wicked plan is not stopped. Unfortunately, as an unfortunate side-effect of the previous problem, the film doesn't take the neccesary steps to show us that the stakes are, indeed, raised. And even if it did, it would be kind of meaningless to us as viewers.

Firstly, Kronos is stated to have the power to tear apart the entire universe - pretty ambitious, for a man made of lava. But when he finally does emerge from his volcanic prison, all he really does is stumble forward, groaning in an unidentifiable movie language and smashing apart a few villages with his massive hands. For the most part, it's his Makhai soldiers that do most of the killing or get involved with the heroes. Yes, we see Hades and Zeus try to fight him, but he brushes them aside regardless of whatever power these gods seem to have. We never see Kronos show any power other than spitting lava everywhere, so I hardly see how it makes him any more powerful or dangerous than the Kraken from Clash was stated to be.

"OH GOD I KNEW I SHOULDN'T HAVE HAD ALL THAT CURRY"

Secondly, the scene where Zeus is chained up so Kronos can drain his life force is also a little confusing. Does this process hurt Zeus in any way? It turns him older, yes, but doesn't it cause him any pain? He's having his own life drained away here - the least he could do is maybe howl in pain or struggle to break his chains. But the old god just stays calm and takes it rather well, considering the process could very well kill him or worse. Seeing this, one gets the feeling that this horrible disaster isn't really so horrible or diastrous, and if Perseus fucks up we could always just send another guy in tomorrow or something.

"Sorry I'm late, dad, had to pick up some fish and chips for dinner."

On top of that, the film has raised the stakes a little too high for the audiencr to swallow. From an entire town and the life of a beautiful princess we've jumped straight into the entire universe being at risk, with no middle ground in between. It's too big and overwhelming - the audience can't comprehend the scale of the danger, and thus they can't empathise with the heroes' efforts. Either the stakes are so high that they are meaningless to the audience, or the danger that is stated to be present doesn't seem as... dangerous as claimed. Either way, the whole thing falls flat because the film is either trying too hard or not hard enough.

In summary, while both films are good-hearted, action-y romps that ensure many a spectacle, Wrath feels like a bloated slog that doesn't trust itself to take any risks or the audience to go along with the story. When it's not treading the same ground as the first film, it's stuffing itself with overblown sword fights and CGI images to try and distract us from the shaky writing, annoying characters and cliche'd drama. By being smaller in scale due to it's ties to the original film, Clash actually manages to be the better story - it focuses on being just a part of a huge, epic world where Gods and Men hate each other, rather than trying to set loose another ancient abomination to destroy the world. If you ever have the chance to pick up one of these films, I reccomend the first, every time. It's not particularly deep or congruous, but you're guaranteed to be entertained all the way through.

Also, Natalia Vodinova makes a great Medusa.
 

...Some joke involving snakes and bad hair days.

How Hollywood Killed the Lorax - A Rant

Well, hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, you guys! I sure did - excepting that Legend of Zelda calendar that never came in the post because so many people were buying them up, I got pretty much all that I wanted and a little more besides, and right now I have a brand new Wii U set up in my bedroom, looking all slick and shiny in it's Premium Edition awesomeness. I could use this post to talk about how kickin' radical it is and how ZombiU is really difficult because I can't do survival horror and how Monita from Nintendo Land simultaneously terrifies and annoys me.

But instead, I'd like to bring you down from your post-Christmas high by talking smack about a terrible movie I saw recently.

In this case, Dr. Seuss's The Lorax with Danny DeVito.

Relesed in the spring of this (last?) year, The Lorax is loosely based on the award-winning book by Dr. Seuss (which I have recently discovered is meant to be pronounces "Soyss" because Germany is funny like that), in which the Once-ler, in his desire to become rich and corner the market for his all-purpose Thneed, ignores the pleas of the titular Lorax as he ends up causing massive ecological damage for the sake of gain. It's a cold, harsh metaphor for how rampant industrialization affects our planet, and unless somebody "cares a whole lot" then it's just going to get worse. Yet it ends on a high and hopeful note by implying that we, the ordinary person, have the power to ensure that we can avert what the Once-ler caused and balance progress with sustainability.

The film is none of that.

Watching this film on the family's recently-purchased Sky TV On Demand thing, I came away from the film with a distinct sense of being cheated. While I could complain about things like how Danny DeVito's deep voice doesn't seem to suit the orange fuzzball, or how ham-handed the film deals with the original themes, there's one giagantic tumour growing in the bowels of this picture that I want to take a blunt kinfe to until it stops kicking and screaming. Some months ago, Del complained quite venemously of Space Marine, calling it a boring, homogenous mess that doesn't try anything beyond ticking the standard Gears of War-esque shooter checkboxes, sometimes forcing the source material to conform to those standards. And if the same can be true for films, then The Lorax is quite similar in that regard, in that it's safe and by the numbers.

It doesn't try anything new, this 3D-animated checklist. It has everything one expects from a big-budget Hollywood production. It has a love interest. It has a villain. It has celebrity voices, with Danny DeVito's alarmingly deep tones coming from the Lorax being top billing. It has humour that balances the fine line between "family-oriented" and "unimaginative", with not one joke being funny in any regard (the line "That's a woman?!" in particular made me cringe). It has stock action sequences as our protagonist dodges the intruder traps set around the inexplibably belligerant Once-ler's house. It even has the bog-standard pop-culture reference - the sequence where the Lorax infiltrates the Once-ler's cart is set to the Mission Imposible theme tune, disregarding the fact that the reference stopped being clever a decade ago. Nothing new or radical is tried, and for a Dr. Seuss movie this is kind of an insult.



Look how insulted the Lorax is. Look at him.



And what creative liberties the film does take with the source material are either completely asinine or only exists to help the movie tick those Standard Hollywood Film boxes. As in the book, the story of the Lorax is told in flashback, but on this occasion it's framed by a post-apocalyptic setting where a boy called Ted tries to impress his girlfriend by getting a real Truffula tree, sneaking out of his gated, totally-synthetic community under the nose of the greedy, scheming Mayor O'Hare. Leaving aside the question of why an all-powerful man who controls the city's air supply feels threatened by a bit of greenery, this "new", cookie-cutter story pretty much shoves the original Lorax tale to the side in order to prance about waving coloured ribbons and blowing kisses to the dollar-waving audience. The whole hero-girlfriend-villain dynamic exists because the film didn't feel like it was being enough like a Dreamworks film, and the depressing-yet-hopeful message of the book is twisted into the bog-standard "we can change the world if we work together" that films like this continuosly spit out like everyone has ADHD. The climax of the film, where Ted busts a hole in the city walls to reveal the desolated landscape beyond, feels hollow and token, as if we've seen it a million times before (which we definitely have).

But it's not enough for the film to try and ape every other, better movie in existance, is it? No, it also feels the need to slap the source material in the face. There are multiple times where lines from the book are referenced in the Duke Nukem sense, where the characters immediately turn to the audience and go "gee, doesn't that sound completely stupid, I wonder what drugs Seuss was on when he wrote that, eh?" The film not only completely misses the subtext of the lines in the first place, but also has the gall to mock it for being written in the classical nonsense-poem style that made Seuss the literary genius he was in the first place, as if to say that modern audiences are too stupid to understand what the author was trying to get across. It's ham-handed attempts at, to quote the wretched hive that is TV Tropes, "Lampshading" the original material that make me want to reach other to where the producers live and strangle them for their incompetence.

Especially if they look like this. Seriously.

Instead of using Seuss's imagery and prose in clever ways, the film feels like it's simply going down a checklist to ensure it has everything that a movie of it's calibre is supposed to provide to an audience that apparently consists of slack-jawed sheep who'll consume anything if you dress the trailer up with enough faintly-recognizable eighties pop songs. And on top of that, it has the nerve to insult the source material that it's based on without any sense of irony, disguising ham-handed insults as self-aware parody in the same way one disguises a vicious killer bull as a fighting rooster by dressing it in feathers. The film has some clever moments (the Once-Ler being browbeaten by his family to resume logging when sustainably harvesting the Truffula trees proves too slow is a nice touch), but ultimately you could swap out half the material with that from any other Dreamworks or Pixar film and it would still be a boring, unintelligent mess that makes no attempt to push any envelopes whatsoever and parrots the same old messages most films of it's type do.

As an Animation student who takes a deep interest in films, this grinds my gears. The Lorax had so much potential as an animated film, especially since the technology involved means I lose track of time trying to count all the hairs in the Lorax's moustache. They could have run with the Seussian imagery to create a cautionary tale that hammers home the consequences of callous environemtnal destruction in the pursuit of money and succes, or perhaps span a story of how we as a species can live sustainably and not have to drive trees to extinction due to demand for all-purpose knitwear. But instead the studio showed no ambition above shoehorning in the same tired old tropes to ensure a safe product that doesn't scare away the average consumer and make guaranteed big bucks. And this dissapoints me.

The Lorax is not a film. It's a giant middle finger to your intelligence and Dr. Seuss in general. Avoid.

Movies to Get Drunk By

There are good movies, bad movies, and then there are movies so hilariously bad it's painful to watch them. Wherever it's low quality special effects, idiotic acting or a laughably idiotic premise, these films usually sell for £5 in HMV and are barely even touched by any sane man. And no two names in the the micro-industry of straight-to-DVD disaster films embody this better than The Asylum and Roger Corman.

While the Asylum is better known for creating crappy rip-offs of popular films so short-sighted grandmas can hand over their cash, of late they've been competing with Roger Corman to see who can create the worst low-budget sci-fi monster flick in existance. And all of them make for great riffing if you get into the right mindset - or, in some cases, if you've had enough shots for the films to make sense. So, if you ever need a crappy film to swig whiskey by, here's six loads of cheap laughs for your drunken enjoyment (hopefully before you smash the disk with a mallet in your stupor).

Mega Python vs. Gatoroid (2011)
by The Asylum

The Premise: When giant pythons begin devouring everything and everyone they can catch, the only solution seems to be to grow equally giant alligators to kill them off.

Why it Fails: Not counting the fact that this is basically the worst attempt at pest control ever, the film tries to tug our nostalgia synapses by throwing in 80's popstars Debbie Gibson and Tiffany into leading roles. Sadly, because the target audience has never even heard of these two, this falls flatter than a pancake. Not even a catfight between these ladies can save this movie.

Look Out For: The aformentioned cat-fight between the leading ladies. Meanwhile, the film makes an extremely clumsy attempt at self-deprecating humour when one of the pythons bites onto a balloon bearing the Asylum logo, which then prrrrrp's away, taking the unfortunate snake with it.

Dinocroc vs. Supergator (2010)
by Roger Corman

The Premise: Two genetically-engineered reptiles escape from their compounds, and only legendary hunter "The Cajun" can bring them together to kill each other off

Why it Fails: One of RC's more entertaining flicks, but the two monsters don't get very much screentime and spend what little they have eating bikini babes. Also, the final fight is a bit dissapointing, with the beasts simply hissing and circling each other before Dinocroc bites out Supergator's throat.

Look Out For: Dinocroc casually walks up to a sleazy movie mogul and his bitches in their hot tub and eats them up as if they were KFC Popcorn Chicken. Not one of the three victims makes any attempt to climb out of the tub or run away, sitting there screaming as the reptile chows down.

And thus, the general public's I.Q. just went down a notch.

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009)
by The Asylum

The Premise: A Megalodon shark and a giant octopus are released from their tomb in a glacier and start wreaking havoc across the ocean.

Why it Fails: It was overhyped to insane levels, about as much as an actual blockbuster film. Imagine being given a golden box encrusted with jewels, only to find that there's only a few McDonald's vouchers inside. That's how viewers felt.

Look Out For: The shark leaps tens of thousands of feet into the air for the sake of taking down an airplane full of people. The scene is made more hilarious by that one guy's cry of "Holy shit!" just before the plane gets chomped.

Dinoshark (2010)
by Roger Corman

The Premise: An ancient sea predator hatches from an Arctic glacier. Three years later, it's all grown up and taken to snacking on Mexican holidaymakers.

Why it Fails: Wikitionary defines the word prehistoric as "Of relating to the epoch before written record". Roger Corman's dictionary defines it as "just slap a T. Rex head on it and hope no-one notices". The monster's design is so phoned-in it orders cheap pizzas from the local takeout, except there's too many anchovies on them. I mean, is it really that hard to re-design a shark to look like a million-year-old killer? And why does the box art have the cheek to call it a fucking pilosaur?

Look Out For: The Dinoshark invades a swimming pool. It's an all-you-can-eat mini buffet!

Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus (2010)
by The Asylum

The Premise: The Mega Shark returns, only now it has a new rival in a 1,500-foot-long crocodile that eats miners and hates Englishmen.

Why it Fails: Crocodiles can breathe and walk on land. Sharks can only flop and suffocate. Even if you ignore the one-sided clash of oversized animals, it's never explained how the shark survived being dropped into a volcanic fissure in the first film (SPOILER ALERT!), or how the crocodile got to be so big.

Look Out For: Jaleel White.

Jaleel White, the voice of Sonic the Hedgehog and Urkel.

MOTHERFUCKING JALEEL WHITE.

WHAT THE HELL.

Sharktopus (2010)
by Roger Corman

Premise: The American Navy creates the best weapon ever - a genetically-engineered hybrid of shark and octopus. Of course, they lose control of it and it gets to snacking on people.

Why it Fails: What could have been the best thing ever - a half-shark, half-octopus monster - is let down by the usual bugbears of obvious CGI and campy acting. The film is more of a let down than anything, thanks to the poor delivery of the titular monster's antics.

Look Out For: "NO, NOT LIKE THIS!" wails a neck-bearded boat painter as the Sharktopus winds a consoling tentacle round his shoulders before eating him. There, there, Beardy McBlubbergut, it could be worse - you might have been in a Uwe Boll film.

And now, for a special guest appearance...

Boa vs. Python
by Sci Fi Pictures

The Premise: Millionare Broddick tries to introduce big-game hunting to the big city with a giagantic python. Needless to say, this doesn't go well, and it takes an equally-large, cybernetically-enhanced pet boa called Betty to stop the creature.

Why it Fails: The film had no relation to the Boa and Python films that were made earlier, and so was rightly accused of trying to captialize on the success of Python. Also, boas look ridiculous wearing cyber-goggles.

Watch Out For: A couple is making out in their SUV, and the python shows up looking for a snack. He eats the man first, then... well, just watch. If you can.

If this post has suddenly given you an appetite for alcohol and low-budget monster flicks, then god helps us all. D: