See? Sea Monster!: Amphibious Creature of the Deep (2010)

Amphibious 3D (2010)
Dir.: Brian Yuzna
Cinema 4 Rating: 4/9

There is a brief rumination on the lust for power and its connection to the sea at the beginning of Amphibious 3D which left me peeling off into my own thoughts regarding what sort of power I would want given the chance to acquire it. I am a simple man... I don't require much in the way of power, but if I could have it, I would certainly crave the means to make a far more ambitious sea monster movie than Amphibious 3D.

Amphibious 3D has an alternative title -- Amphibious Creature of the Deep -- and it was that version I certainly saw instead since my VOD rental on Amazon was only in two dimensions. While I have clearly put off seeing the film for a few years, I did have some small hopes in finally watching the film due to the participation of Brian Yuzna. For those not familiar with Stuart Gordon, Yuzna was one of the producers of Gordon's trio of Lovecraft epics -- Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon -- and a director in his own right, handling the Re-Animator sequels -- Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator -- as well as Return of the Living Dead III, segments of Necromonicon, The Dentist and its sequel, and Faust: Love of the Damned. Yuzna's first foray into directing -- Society, from 1989 -- is a cult favorite of mine and a couple of my friends, though I will admit the film is a bit of an acquired taste. But isn't that the way of genre movie love anyway?

A type of prehistoric eurypterid.

Like other directorial faves from the '80s and '90s (though he is on the floor directly below the others), Yuzna seems to have slowed his production efforts down in recent years, which, despite what I am about to write here, is a shame. While I really only truly love a couple of his films, also being fond of his Re-Animator sequels and the crazy notion of an impossibly hot punk zombie chick running around in RotLD III, Yuzna always seemed to have an eagerness to his films that made them pleasant to at least encounter for the first time. Making no bones about the genre to which he had committed, his films were often fun, intentionally humorous, and ultra gory as a result.

And I can say that it seems he has done the same here with Amphibious 3D, just to a lesser degree than usual (and without much of a sense of humor this time). Without knowing the true details of the genesis of this project, I would hazard a guess that once Mr. Yuzna found himself in Indonesia filming under the auspices of a Dutch film company (and hence the Dutch lead actress -- more on her later), he made the most of it. While Yuzna and fellow screenwriter John Penney seem to have done the final screenplay, the film is based on a story by the head of the production company, San Fu Maltha and the well-regarded science fiction writer, S.P. Somtow. I assume that Yuzna possibly saw the chance for a Southeast Asia working vacation (why not?), while also getting the opportunity to sit in the director's chair again (and once more, why not?) I would kill for such working conditions.

What the eurypterid Megalograptus looked like.

For a film based on and around the water (the film even opens with a dual attack by the only partially seen creature on a beach area), there is very little underwater photography. There are no diving scenes, and there is also barely a smidgen of deeper water footage. So, what exactly is this "amphibious creature of the deep"? It seems in recent years that low-budget filmmakers have latched onto the idea of eurypterids being an ideal creature to transport into the 21st century to serve as a replacement, when needed, for crocodiles, sharks... what have you. Eurypterids were basically large, prehistoric water scorpions. For those confused, water scorpions are not actually true scorpions; there is a large taxonomic disparity between the two, and they only gained the name due to some noticeable physical similarities between the two groups, namely two large predatory appendages that jut out from the front of their abdomens.

The underwater lab adventure film DeepStar Six somewhat got this tiny specific ball rolling cinematically in 1989, supposedly portraying a particular type of eurypterid, the Megalograptus, on the loose in a wild rampage through the underwater structure that provides the film with its title. Though that version of the creature was mutated to a large degree, and given a more recognizably monstrous form (somewhat in the then nominal style of the Alien films), it was still fairly well-identified as an eurypterid in the press surrounding the film.

Amphibious, however, seeks to up the monster ante a tad by having its eurypterid wreak havoc above the water, though technically, always still on the water itself. The bulk of the action takes place on top of a very ramshackle landing structure that rises above the surface of the water. The shack is owned by a local Sumatran smuggler and all-around creep named Boss Harris, who keeps a group of child slaves at his beck and call, mostly having them fish from the water and perform odd jobs around the structure. (Let us not muse too long upon what some of those odd jobs might be, but given the usual conditions of child slavery, some of them are likely none too savory.) Amongst the ragamuffins is a young girl named Tamal, who straps her chest down to pass as a boy, lest some of those none too savory thoughts of Boss Harris come fully blown into fruition. Tamal bears a pendant around her neck in the form of an eurypterid, and you would be right in assuming the film will play fast and loose as to whether she has any control over the titular creature or not. Or whether the creature has any control over her.

The lead character is played by Michael Pare, a long long way from Streets of Fire and Eddie and the Cruisers. He is a little more weathered, a good deal older, but still handsome and does a decent job in this film. His character, Jack Bowman, is a boat-for-hire captain who has to deal with Boss Harris and his team occasionally, though he remains fairly skeptical of the criminal's operation. Bowman has been hired by Dr. Skylar Shane, a marine biologist doing some research on prehistoric fossils in the waters. It is a good thing that sea monster or shark films are always stocked fairly well with passing marine biologists just in time for the monster to strike. Skylar Shane is played by Janna Fassaert, a Dutch actress who makes the scale move in both directions for me in terms of delivering her performance. At times she is remarkably out of her depth, but there were moments when she fit the role quite well. Dr. Shane has recently lost her daughter in a tragic accident, and so when Bowman and Shane stop by Boss Harris's landing and a terrified Tamal entreats Shane to rescue her from slavery, well, the plot has been formed.

Well, except for the main monster. You see, it seems that when Tamal gets agitated or scared, this monstrous creature rises to the surface and does away with those that get in its way. Eventually, through a series of mishaps, miscommunications, and evil and/or deviant behavior on the part of Boss Harris and his crew, including his disgusting Irish henchman Jimmy Kudrow (played to good effect by veteran actor Francis Magee), the massively powerful giant eurypterid will attack again and again until Tamal has been freed. What this means for the innocent who get in the monster's way is exactly why we are watching this movie in the first place.

And then there is my Pet Peeve of the Week, one of those things that you see a lot (in slight variances) in monster films, usually a move so inexplicable that it just really starts to gnaw at me. In this case, it is the use of the creature's tail as an all-seeing, all-knowing device that the monster employs much like the periscope devices on the top of the flying saucers in the original 1953 film of The War of the Worlds. The creature's tail will be used in a place, such as through a floor or into another room, where the eurypterid can clearly not see what is going on, and then the tail reacts like it had a pair of eyes on it. Now, I am all for setting up for us that perhaps there are sensory organs on the creature's tail (or whatever appendage is being deployed to move about in such a way) that allow to weave in or around objects in pursuit of prey or revenge or whatever the monster is doing. But you have to set that up for us!

We see this time and again when films have a giant octopus or squid character, where every separate tentacle acts as if it has "Spidey sense". Whether it is Harryhausen's octopus (actually, as the Master termed it during the making of the film, a "sixtopus," since they only had the budget to animate six arms) that attacks the Golden Gate Bridge in It Came from Beneath the Sea, the mini-series of Peter Benchley's The Beast, or the massive Kraken in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean films, each one has an animal whose tentacles seem to be acting independently of actual line of sight on the part of the creature, and are able to anticipate the moves of their victims with stunning precision. Sometimes the tentacles even seem to have personality of their own. Not always, but quite often enough to really be a thorn in my side, even in films that I really enjoy or are meant as nothing more than mere B-movie fodder.

And here, too, we get the eurypterid and its magical all-knowing tail. And a full-on land scorpion's tail too, not the very different water scorpion type. The monster really seems to be more of a cross between a lobster and a land scorpion, and it was hard for me at times to believe it was anything but that. Still, this is a completely fantastical concept, and if one is to be believe in the monsters they are seeing on screen, sometimes one has to accept that perhaps a movie monster is not going to look exactly as one would wish or prefer. Come in expecting a true to life eurypterid, it is going to be much smaller, and you won't get many scares. Come in expecting a monstrous eurypterid that has been designed with attachments that you weren't envisioning, and you might have a fun time. Besides, monster movies often have so many other hurdles to overcome: bad scripts, subpar acting abilities on the part of the cast, low budgets; they should at least be able to get by on the notion that if they can at least make the monster look pretty cool and scary, then maybe that will be all the audience needs to accept the film. And I do have to admit that, at times, the monster is kind of cool-looking here.

Amphibious is a film that nearly comes together for me, but not quite, though I cannot completely write it off as unenjoyable and rote. But neither can I consider it a truly good film and worthy of future likely re-watching (though I have just watched it twice, out of necessity, in recent days). Yuzna does a decent job in moving things along and the direction is mostly tight, but the whole affair is laden with an overall cheapness -- mostly marked by being a deep water creature film where we never get a scene in the deep of the water -- that it can never really escape. I decried the film at the beginning of this piece for its lack of ambition, and it is sad that it doesn't try to do more with its setting. But neither is it completely unambitious; the angle built around the connection between the biologist and Tamal is an interesting one that has a somewhat surprising climax, though I wish the film had gone deeper in this direction. The film's chief asset is the location shooting and hiring of local actors (limitations of talent set aside), allowing us a chance to see a film that is, for once, not fully populated by boring, bickering, white American teenagers. If there is one thing I am tired of in modern film, it is boring, bickering, white American teenagers.

As to the main reason for watching one of these films, the special effects are, for the most part, fairly well done, and in some shots, far better than I had reason to expect. There is the usual problem in CGI effects where you often get no real sense of the creature's weight and mass, and of it reacting naturally to objects around it, but that is an ongoing battle that I have had with this style of effect since the beginning. Here, it hardly matters, for the full battle against the creature that takes up the back portion of the film is mostly well staged and a definite step above the type of ultra low-grade effects proffered by Syfy Channel films. Compared to those, Amphibious is almost a masterpiece of high ambition.

RTJ

Not Quite Hammer, Not Quite Wry

Victor Frankenstein (2015)
Dir.: Paul McGuigan
TC4P Rating: 5/9

I could start off by listing everything that does not work in Victor Frankenstein, Paul McGuigan's somewhat revisionist take on Mary Shelley's timeless, Promethean, proto-science fiction tale. I could list them all, but it would take up three thousand words and this entire piece would be composed of nothing but "should have beens" and "could have beens". But here's a few:

How does a self-educated and abused hunchback gain enough medical knowledge while basically being trapped in the squalor of a low-rent circus to rival the highly educated and obviously brilliant but maniacal Victor Frankenstein? Why does Daniel Radcliffe's limp disappear and reappear at will, often within the same scene? Why is The League of Gentlemen's Mark Gatiss, who plays Mycroft Holmes on Sherlock (sometimes directed by McGuigan and sometimes written by Gatiss), not given anything to do but stand around and silently push buttons in the movie's hugely over-the-top finale, when his Sherlock co-star Andrew Scott, who plays über-villain James Moriarty, is given (ironically) the much juicier role of Scotland Yard's top detective?

There is hardly a scene that goes by in Victor Frankenstein where you don't wonder why they did this and didn't do that. When a film pushes the bounds of incredulity from time to time, you either have to suspend your disbelief and just try to enjoy the film, or you have to write the exercise off altogether and pretend you never submitted yourself to it in the first place. But when a movie asks the viewer to make that choice in every single scene, and still somehow remains oddly watchable all the way through, then you've got something special. 

Despite vowing to hit every horror and science fiction feature that reached my local cinema from the moment I became trapped in this new home in an eerily new town, I was somewhat resistant towards making a visit to see Victor Frankenstein. The trailer did not give me much hope -- in fact, nearly quashed my intent entirely -- nor did the dishwater dull movie posters (two big heads or two characters standing side by side with no real artistic vision in sight: both types of popular poster were released for this film). When the release date came, I fought off the urge for a week or so, but as time ticked by and I became aware that the film would likely leave our cinema by last Friday -- much quicker than I expected or Twentieth Century Fox wished -- I rushed up to catch the only afternoon showing left. What sort of Frankenstein fan would I be if I didn't see the latest iteration of the classic story mauled to death on the big screen?

The answer, surprisingly to me, is: a sadder one. No, I was not tricked by the film at all. Victor Frankenstein is not a good film by any stretch of an imagination greater than the people who created this film (which would be legion). It is over-produced, under-written, over-acted wildly (except for a couple of roles where a little more hamminess would have helped), and stuffed to the gills with every artifice and horror cliche known to resurrected man. They have disregarded the source material except for the names of a couple of characters and the basic regeneration concept, mixed in characters that only surfaced in later cinematic versions of the story (such as a hunchback named Igor), all while steampunking everything in a style that many millennials probably now believe was the actual look of the Victorian era. 

My friend Aaron expressed concern that the film would be filled with post-Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes-style "modern quippery and explosions," and that was a concern of mine as well. While McGuigan does resort to current Ritchie-like devices such as the superimposed anatomical cutaways of human and animal bodies, surprisingly there is little in the way of the dreaded quippery. While McAvoy's Victor is a non-stop shouter and rambler (often drunken) of whatever nonsense runs through his mind, Radcliffe's Igor is rather more quiet and introspective, and not up to that style of verbal linguistics, and so we don't really get the pair zinging one-liners off each other like they were in a buddy cop picture instead.

Were the hammy acting scale built into a high-rise building, much of the cast (Including Andrew Scott) would be seen about three to four stories above the ground floor, while James McAvoy, clearly relishing the cheese factor built into his role, would have already settled into the penthouse dozens of floors above and sat around wondering when everyone else in the cast was going to join him for an aperitif. This leaves the thankless job of anchoring the film to Daniel Radcliffe, which is an odd choice since his character (actually a co-lead as Igor) is one of the more bizarrely drawn in the film. But Radcliffe underplays most of the time, and rather disappears as a character in the presence of the far more brazen McAvoy. But apart from the lovely but very wooden Jessica Brown Findlay as the heroine, Lorelei, everyone else in the cast seems to have gotten the note that everyone should step into the ham elevator and push the "up" button.

The true sense I got from Victor Frankenstein was that it was as if someone was told several competing versions of the Frankenstein story while they were growing up, and having only heard each tale once when they were a kid, tried to recall the bits of each story years later through their faulty memory, and then reassemble those bits into one cohesive tale. Thus, like Frankenstein's creature itself, Victor Frankenstein absolutely feels like a patchwork creation.

Shelley's novel is pretty much shrugged aside from the very beginning as McGuigan and his team flat out decide to go their own way. From the second Radcliffe's Igor is introduced in clown makeup, we are in new territory (not that Frankenstein tales haven't taken place partially in circuses before; for example, 1985's The Bride). He is not even named Igor; in fact, doesn't even have a name, but he will acquire the monicker Igor from Victor for reasons I will not go into here. The film has Victor in medical school, and it is clear he has not created his first monster yet, and is in fact, working on raising the deceased chimpanzee first. Here too, we have already perverted the original storyline even more, and switching its main setting to London -- the book two most notable settings are Germany and the North Pole, but also takes time in London, Scotland, and Ireland as well -- also means a general change of atmosphere, and spending less time with the superstitious ways of simple villagers and more time with the manners and personalities to be found in a big city.

The film delights in its gruesomeness. In this age of PG-13 horrors, I have come to be shocked again and again by what can and can't be shown at that rating. While Victor Frankenstein is not loaded with gore per se, it does have enough blood included with its violence to remind you that it is indeed a horror picture. Mostly you get body parts being sewn into new bodies (you don't really see a lot of how they do it, but mostly the end products), and a fairly detailed, reanimated chimpanzee monster that provides some fun at the medical college. Some disembodied eyes that return their function is another sick thrill.

But one of the grosser moments in recent cinematic history is in this film, when Victor siphons the massive abscess that it is the cause of the hunchback's pain. He sucks the pus out through a rubber tube using his mouth, spits out a mouthful of the vile excretion, and then the remainder of the lightly yellowish pus spatters out of the tube onto the floor of the laboratory. (The pus that lands in the bucket which was meant to catch most of it is thrown by Victor off his balcony, and we hear the screams of some people below.) It's nasty and created a pretty good, intentional laugh from me when it happened. (Sadly, I was the only one in the audience, so I didn't get to hear the squirming of others at the scene.) Additionally, I was reminded of Michael Palin's Miles Cowperthwaite segments on the original Saturday Night Live (with the sawing off of a sailor's limbs just because his legs got wet and the spilling of copious amounts of drool from a bucket held about an elderly man's neck) and that is always a good thing for me.

The pus siphoning scene (I love the disgusting sound of that phrase) is still fairly early in the picture, when Victor and Igor (not his actual name, as it turns out, but one purloined for him by Victor) are still establishing their relationship. But it was the moment when I first caught on to what was happening within me in regards to my reaction to the film. While recognizing that the film was all of the negative things I have already mentioned earlier, I realized that I was still having a pretty good time with Victor Frankenstein. As I continued to watch, a small part of my mind was dispatched to do some detective work on its own and begin analyzing exactly why this was. 

My theory is tied up with the late night television adventuring of my twelve-year-old self, who had just discovered there were such thing as Hammer horror films if you stayed up later than your parents suspected. You can read the how and why elsewhere on my blog, so I won't elaborate here, but at that age, my first experience with really bloody films were from the Frankenstein and Dracula titles starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. My favorite of the lot was a Cushing starrer called Frankenstein Created Woman (actually the first Hammer film I ever saw). Frankenstein Created Woman crammed crazy plot element on top of crazy plot element in a way that my twelve-year-old self truly couldn't handle or really appreciate until I was much older (it has a pretty kinky twist to it that went over my head back then), but I loved it immensely even when it didn't make a lick of sense.

While watching Victor Frankenstein, I realized that for the first time in a very long time, I had regained that same feeling that I used to get from watching those Hammer films early in my youth. Hammer rarely held true to the original material themselves except for in a minor way in their introductory films to their Dracula and Frankenstein series, and later films in each series were all marked by some of the most wild divergences possible from what Stoker or Shelley had intended. And as I stated earlier, here too is where I seemed to be catching the vibe (yes, I watch The Flash religiously) that Victor Frankenstein was bringing up some of that residual Hammer Studios feeling in my system, long dormant from misappropriation and unfulfilled horror cinema promise.

As Victor Frankenstein grew increasingly manic but remained purposeful in its relentless path to the ultimate fates of its characters, the more I got caught up in it, with a wide grin plastered on my face in the darkness of the theatre. Luckily, since I despise smiling, no one was there to see me. (There wasn't even a sporadic visit from an usher to check on things, and they usually come through an average of three times a screening.) I wouldn't feel compelled to offer up a meek explanation of why I was enjoying myself at a movie that no one seemed to want to attend. Not that anyone would have questioned me; they would have probably just assumed that I had horrible movie taste, and they would be partially right.

And unless you too were raised on Hammer horror films, and knew the outrageous (and sometimes unsuccessful) lengths they would go to in their monster epics, you might not get why I was so overjoyed as the canvas of Victor Frankenstein got bigger and crazier and built itself toward a ridiculously grandiose finale, in a remote castle in Scotland, in a wild thunderstorm, and with practically every major character in the film in motion somewhere in that finale.

I have said little about the monster in this film, but I will say that when he is finally brought to his feet by Frankenstein's machinery (this gives away nothing, because of course he will; this is a Frankenstein movie after all), he is a remarkable creation. I was a little saddened that he wasn't brought to this world in a much better Frankenstein movie, but then I remembered that I had been smiling like a madman throughout the buildup to his creation. I had to check to see if perhaps the film was a co-production with the revived Hammer Studios, and I was more than a little saddened to find out that it is not. Regardless of that, I still felt like I did when I was a kid watching Peter Cushing build creature after creature in those Frankenstein films of yore. Bad new film or not, for me that is truly mad science at its best.