The Shark Film Office: Malibu Shark Attack (2009)

Malibu Shark Attack (2009)
Dir.: David Lister
Cinema 4 Rating: 3/9
Shark species: Goblin shark (Mitsukurina owstoni), but a prehistoric version, so it's OK that they do things a goblin shark can't. Right?

The goblin shark has a face that only a mother goblin shark could love. Or an ichthyologist. Or me...

With a long, flattened snout that looks like it was daddied by Jimmy Durante himself, jaws that stretch out forward to an improbable length, and a strange pinkish skin tone, goblin sharks seem like a nightmare scenario when seen in the light of day. But it's our light, not theirs, for the goblin shark goes largely unseen by human eyes. I suppose you could say, technically, such a thing about a great many sharks, since they live in the deep, and we only detect the slightest traces of their oceanic omnipresence from our surface world. But goblin sharks tend to live in the real deep deep, dining on fish and other sea creatures in the relative darkness of deepwater canyons and the seabeds of continental slopes. It's also a rather sluggish swimmer, and maintains its standard diet of fishes and crustaceans by use of ambush techniques. Such techniques are somewhat easier to do when it is fairly dark around you.

What goblin sharks don't do is attack man. Human interaction of even a glancing sort is remarkably rare with goblin sharks, and even in big fishing operations where sharks aren't the main target but still get pulled in certain numbers, goblin sharks are very rarely caught or even seen. Just a few here and there. Likewise, they are even less frequently captured on film, though much of what we know about them, outside of direct scientific expedition, is due to photos or film of specimens that have been accidentally caught (and often released) or from casual observances by divers.

But, because of the goblin shark's nightmare appearance, the impulse was bound to spooge out of sleazy Hollywood producers eventually that these sharks would be perfect for a horror film. Kind of like what they did to the cookiecutter sharks in Shark Night. And so, without the slightest thought given that they might damage the reputation of a mostly reclusive and non-threatening species, they gave us Malibu Shark Attack. In this 2009 direct to video feature, a 5.5. magnitude tremor off the coast of California, thought to have caused no damage initially, opens up -- in a manner that probably replicates the way such visions spring from the minds of low-rent moviemakers -- a deep sea rift. From a crack in this rift, a very convenient squadron of abnormally fast prehistoric goblin sharks were just waiting to make a direct beeline (or is it sharkline?) for the beach at Malibu, to start munching on swimmers in a manner that no goblin shark ever has. It's like they were all hanging out just under the rock, itching to get right into swallowing human beings in what is shown to be a natural instinct for them. While the film barely mentions the detail except briefly, Malibu Shark Attack plays hard off of the "prehistoric" angle, in order to give us goblin sharks that would display such an immediate impulse to destroy and devour non-stop (as opposed to their modern descendants). And, of course, swim in a relentlessly speedy manner ill-fitting to the natural physical limitations of their species.

The squad of sharks finds a diver who has the worst timing in the world, and they make quick bloody work of him. Then they munch some blonde nebbish free swimming off the side of a boat. The attacks are quick, and accompanied by a strange, short roaring noise, for whatever reason. (Sharks cannot roar, so knock it off, Hollywood...) While the violence builds as the sharks speed towards the coast, we are subjected to dull romantic business and infighting amongst the team of lifeguards patrolling the beaches at Malibu, including a post-La Femme Nikita (and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) Peta Wilson, looking fairly uncomfortable throughout the film. Wilson's character, Heather, has had an affair with the foreman of a nearby construction crew (Jeff Gannon), much to the chagrin of her lifeguard lover, Chavez (Warren Christie). We are supposed to care about this love triangle, but since both guys are assholes, why even start?

All of this filler, however, gets ignored pretty quickly once the sharks reach the beach area, which is about twenty minutes into the film. A pair of parasailing beachgoers are attacked when they dip briefly into the ocean, and when they are pulled back up into the sky, there is a pretty gruesome shot of the torn away flesh of one of the pair. Some of the blood drips down on the boats below, including the rubber lifeguard raft being driven through the surf by Heather. The blood splatters her, and Peta Wilson had to be thinking, "What has come of my career in such a short time?" Her raft is then bumped by one of the goblin sharks, and when she looks up, there are dorsal fins above the water coming from separate directions at her. Heather gets knocked out of the raft by the goblin sharks, but before they can collect their tasty prize, she is pulled from the water by Chavez, who is patrolling around on a jet ski.

At this point early on in the film, as the lifeguards call everyone out of the water, it seems that it would be pretty easy to end the film right here. With nobody in the water, and the sharks kept in it, how can there be a shark attack film? Unless the sharks turn out to be land sharks or something else ridiculous. 

Well, there is that bugger of a tremor I mentioned earlier on, and it turns out the early reports of "no damage" will have to be amended. The tremor has triggered a tsunami, which gets reported by the Coast Guard just as the sharks are starting to zip at ridiculous speeds for goblin sharks towards the beach. We then see some terrible CGI animation of what is described as a "100-foot high" wall of water heading towards the coast. Meanwhile, Heather and Chavez are headed back to the beach, with a particularly nasty goblin shark coming up fast on jet ski. As they reach the shore, one of the other lifeguards fires a rifle into the surf, first clipping a bit off the dorsal fin of the shark, and then sending a second shot straight through its head. The shark glides to a stop in the sand at the feet of the assembled lifeguards, and coughs up blood and some human remains to their great disgust. Barb (Sonya Salomaa), also a marine biologist, recognizes the species as a goblin shark, but says they were thought to be extinct. This means either she is a terrible marine biologist, because goblin sharks have been known to be with us in the modern age for a very long time, or she meant a prehistoric variety. (She never specifies... I am banking on the shitty scientist part...)

While all of the tourists seem to depart in time to escape the monster waves, the lifeguards decide the best course of action is to hole up in their lifeguard shelter in the middle of the beach. The wave hits, Malibu is flooded, and the lifeguard shack sits by its lonesome in the middle of the water, its office floor sticking up barely above the surface of the water. (This itself is annoying, since news reports have the area as being "under 30 feet of water"; the shack, at the edge of the ocean itself, seems to under no more than eight to ten  feet.)

The remainder of the drama will occur in Malibu Shark Attack on two fronts: first in the stranded lifeguard shack, and secondly, at the equally stranded construction area, where Heather's construction foreman lover and his co-workers will try to find a way across the water to safety. We get horribly match CGI where a goblin shark breaches fully out of the water in a manner that is mostly confined to great whites, where it grabs a construction worker bodily and pulls him down into the water depths for lunch. We get scene after scene of a couple of goblin sharks using their huge noses to smash their way through the bottom of the lifeguard house, forcing the lifeguards to climb to the roof. Everyone makes their escape, meets up with the construction guys, and it builds to a climax where much of the main cast both separately and together face off with each remaining goblin shark in a power tool versus serrated teeth battle for the ages. Or at least for 2009.

I guess my chief problem with the sharks in this film is that they seem compelled to just merely kill, not feed. You would think their hunger would have been sated pretty quickly, no matter how long they may have trapped in that underground rift or channel or whatever was opened up the earthquake. But, if they had survived down there since prehistoric times, there must have been a steady food supply to allow this species to propagate and make it to 2009 (the year this film was released). So why are they so goddamned hungry? And if they aren't hungry, were prehistoric shark just more murderous by nature? Maybe the filmmakers are suggesting that these individual goblin shark are millions of years old each and haven't eaten, literally in eons? Then the filmmakers are dumber than the biologist in their own movie.

Look... I get it. I understand the B-movie impulse, perhaps better than most people. Something happens in the news, and you figure out how to exploit to make a quick buck and to give your film an exciting angle at the same time. The goblin shark parallel seems to have been inspired by a 2003 tsunami off of Japan, where scores of goblin sharks allegedly washed up onshore. Not attack people, not eat lifeguards... just washed up onshore. But it seems that when they designed their villains for Malibu Shark Attack, they simply looked at a picture of a goblin shark, and didn't ask any questions related to how a goblin shark might actually behave. And because such filmmakers are only interested in dwelling upon the most notorious aspects of shark behavior -- namely, that a tiny handful of species will occasionally, and mostly by accident or curiosity, taste human flesh -- they tend to ascribe that behavior to all sharks automatically, from great whites down to cookiecutters. In this case, they wanted a scary-looking shark, nothing more, and goblins fit the bill. And so we get films like Malibu Shark Attack, where they try to get novel by giving us a species we never see as a beach villain in other films, but never use logic to figure out there is a reason why we never see this. Because the goblin shark, despite its appearance befitting a Halloween haunted house setting, is simply not that kind of shark.

Frankly, it is amazing that film producers haven't gotten to other more well-known sharks first. They haven't figured out a way crossbred a whale shark (a filter feeder, mind you) with an orca yet. Yet, that is.

Coming to a theatre near you... Killer Whale Shark!! And Sea World thought Blackfish was trouble...

Recently Rated Movies: The Bridges of Tortured Accents

Seventh Son (2014)
Dir.: Sergei Bodrov
TC4P: 4/9

Up until a very few years ago, I was pretty much down for any fantasy film that came my way. The cast didn't matter, the special effects didn't matter, the fact that a film perhaps had a budget that was far too low for what it was trying to accomplish could only endear it to me more... and story? Who cares if it didn't make a lick of sense in the real world. All I needed was a dragon, assorted monsters, a wizard or a witch or two, some swashbuckling action, and some damsels in distress. And if the damsels in distress turned out to be the ones doing the swashbuckling, even better. (Sorry, guys... based on aesthetics alone, tough women are infinitely more interesting to watch than sweaty, nasty men.) 

Then digital happened. Then CGI happened. The ability to expand the size of battles and monster fights and all manner of wizardry happened. Films starting looking more and more gray-bluish and turd-brownish the more CGI was used. This didn't effect just fantasy films, but also science-fiction, historical epics, and war films. Every film, despite the disparate story elements and genres, all started looking the same to me, to the point where going to see a simple, two-person drama with bare bones camerawork (which once was anathema to me) seemed to be a reasonable antidote. And with the sameness, and of course, the success of giant franchises that ensured that knockoffs would hit us left and right, came the curse of too many films. We became inundated with movie after movie that all looked like the exact movie we saw the week before, in the same way that I right now can't tell the film version of The Giver from The Maze Runner from Divergent from The Hunger Games.

When I first saw the trailer for Seventh Son in a theatre, I was understandably confused. I had been for many years a fan of Orson Scott Card (and people, it is OK to still enjoy a person's writing even if you don't agree with his personal/political stance on some things). Apart from the Ender's Game series, I really loved The Tales of Alvin Maker series (though admittedly, I have not read the most recent two books in the currently six-book line). But here was the trailer for a film named Seventh Son, which is the title of the very first book in the Alvin Maker series, and yes, here onscreen is, like that book, a young apprentice who is the seventh son of a seventh son. But then dragons and witches and monsters show up in the trailer, and in my head, I start thinking that Hollywood has really screwed up this time. That's not the book I remember. Isn't it supposed to be in an alternate timeline of America? Where are the Native Americans? I scanned the very quick credits card that flashed at the end of the trailer and saw no sign of Card's name, and realized it was a totally different property. And since the trailer didn't look that interesting, there would be no need for me to see it until video.

And see it on video, I have. Years ago, I would have loved Seventh Son. It has Julianne Moore as a truly evil witch with little remorse, and that is OK with me, because I will watch her in anything. The film has a multitude of dragons and monsters, and that too is still OK with me, because I am at heart purely a monster guy. The monster effects here run hot and cold with me; every time that I was wowed by a particular effect, the next one would be a letdown. But there is one huge lizard-monster that slathers and slobbers effectively, so that sat well with me. Seventh Son also has Olivia Williams, and she kind of falls into the same camp as Moore for me, but she is sorely underused (as she often is). The film tries to go far too big given how thin its story is, which I guess would be to allow for more action from its male lead, Jeff Bridges, as an aging knight -- actually a "spook" in the parlance of this film -- who battles witches for a living but who long ago was involved in a tragically romantic way with Moore's sorceress. And this is where I really ran into trouble with Seventh Son.

Since I first saw Bridges in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in the 1970s, ol' Jeff has been one of my consistently favorite actors. For a long time, I felt he was highly underrated and misused in Hollywood; suddenly, after over 30 years in the biz, the massive cult success of The Big Lebowski solidified him in the minds of the public forever, and then his Oscar win for Crazy Heart (after four previous nominations) just added to his legend. Since then, apart from True Grit (which was a smart choice and earned another Oscar nod), I feel he has gotten sloppy in the usual way of actors who have finally won an Oscar and then don't seem to try as hard. (R.I.P.D. anyone?) Then again, Jeff always did have a strange way of picking projects throughout his career.

And here in Seventh Son, taking on an action-heavy role, it seems that Bridges may have gotten too far out of his element. Thrust into a fairy-tale setting without a definite period -- I suppose we could define it mockingly as "medieval timeless" -- it is still noticeably European in look and feel, with most of the characters speaking with British accents. Not known for his Shakespeare, Bridges makes an odd attempt at his own style of accent, that doesn't seek to replicate the inflection of a certain people as much as he instead growl-shouts most of his lines in the hopes of landing somewhere near an accent that seems to fit in with the rest of the cast. And he is wildly inconsistent with it. 

Despite this, the more tender moments in the script (though there are few of them) are his better ones, where the growl-shout is turned down to a mere growl-mumble -- which could be Rooster Cogburn in armor for all we care -- and he is allowed to communicate more through close-ups with his considerable gift at charismatic expression. Overall though, it is a performance that I wouldn't be surprised gained a Razzie nomination this year (it came out theatrically in February 2015), and as much as it pains me, I would have to agree with the selection if they did. I can often admire actors who try things they never would normally try, but it seems that Ol' Jeff bit off more than he could chew here. (Strangely, he actually underplays in many instances, so the scenery is at least safe.)

There is considerable talent behind the camera: director Sergei Bodrov (Mongol), three-time Oscar winning production designer Dante Ferretti, composer Marco Beltrami, and co-writer Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things), and apart from Ferretti's work, it is all for naught. Especially galling is Beltrami's score, which is just far too over-the-top at every second of the film, and you wished for a defter touch in every scene. Combined with that wash of overall mediocre special effects work, and Seventh Son makes you wonder if is actually the work of a bunch of fourth sons of third son-of-a-bitches.

RTJ

For One Practical Purpose: Harbinger Down

Harbinger Down (2015)
Dir: Alec Gillis
TC4P Rating: 5/9

You would be forgiven if you thought from the rating that I gave to Harbinger Down, a new monster picture release from the Oscar-winning special effects team of Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr., that I didn't like it. My "5" rating is what I use for an number of things: outright product with no real soul or purpose apart from crass monetary gain, the most rote or trite of projects that probably bored me to tears with their unoriginality, and anything middle of the road that didn't really strike me as good or bad either way so I have no place else to put it.

I liked Harbinger Down. I just didn't like Harbinger Down as much as the makers of Harbinger Down would like me to like it.

Harbinger Down has purpose, so it definitely does not belong in the category in which I placed it for that reason alone. And its purpose is one that is close to my heart: bringing back the use of (mostly) practical special effects to the monster picture. This gets the film as close to soulful as it can get for me. 

I am not going to launch into a diatribe against the ever increasing use of CGI effects, because that territory has been far too well trod by fanboys and geeks of all stripes for eons. It has become a cliche in its own rite to rail against CGI, and I do not disdain their use as another tool in the filmmakers' bag of tricks. I have the same gripes as many a grumpy old man about how everything feels dark and muddy onscreen these days, but computers are used in so many different areas these days that it just becomes downright quixotic to tilt against the subject anymore. Like any other area of expertise, I feel that when the proper talent and attention are applied in that area, the results can be truly astounding. Of course, this often means the proper amount of money as well, and that is where things get sticky. In this age of the Sharknado, where you can sell the audience on a fake-looking tornado teaming up with an even more fake-looking shark to do ridiculous things that sharks and weather would never do together as long as you have a graphics guy who wants to make a few bucks and is not concerned about artistic reputation, it has become really hard to knock a success that turned out exactly the way that its creators intended. They won't make them if you guys don't keep coming to them. (And I will admit that I watch the really crappy stuff just as much as I watch the primo stuff, so I am at fault as well. But how you can not want to watch something called Sharknado, Sharktopus, or Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark?)

Gillis and Woodruff want to, as much as possible, return us to the not actually bygone days of practical effects. After their elaborate effects work for the 2011 remake of John Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing was rejected and replaced with mostly CGI work (and the film landed with a thud), they launched a Kickstarter campaign to create their own practical effects film. They wanted us to take a trip back to the late '80s, when computers hadn't chiefly taken over the monster game (or even our lives in such a total way), and when puppeteers, makeup experts, and live effects teams still held sway in making incredible visions come to life on the movie screen. A large cross-section of fannies ranting about CGI now probably weren't alive when a half-assed effect attempt back then would get kicked around just as much as today, but of course, we didn't have online boards on which people could overly obsess about these things back then. The backlash wasn't as immediate, was far more localized in its impact, and sometimes took months to travel around.

In 1989, there were a spate of underwater-themed action/sci-fi flicks released (generally with monsters), and I saw three of those in the movie theatre: DeepStar Six, Leviathan, and The Abyss. The last one, of course, is the classic and we responded to it appropriately. It was yet another film that my friends and I saw a zillion times but the film was reported to be disappointing at the box office. (Apparently, money and tickets gathered in Alaskan theatres is not counted the same.) But we saw DeepStar Six first, and then the Peter Weller-starring Leviathan. 

Back then, I had an Apple IIe, and while the internet, in an extremely embryonic form, was just getting started, I wouldn't have access to the WWW for a few more years. The planet was just on the verge of bursting fully flowered into a magical new age of information access, but at that moment, trying to learn something was still mostly based in practicality. Seeing it for yourself or using resources at hand to find the information you needed. Did you have the time to look it up and read through it? You may have to write everything down so be sure to have a notebook at hand. If I wanted immediate information on those then-current underwater films, I had to rely on whatever newspapers might have been laying around or saved in the house, and a few months later, microfiche at the library to look at -- you got it -- more newspapers. We relied on movie credits and what we remembered from them, and then books in the library or bookstore about cinema to fit info together. (And it was fine... and we liked it!)

And as each succeeding underwater flick came out in 1989, if you wanted to discuss how much more cheesy the monster in DeepStar Six looked in comparison with the creature you saw in Leviathan when it came out a few months later, you went afterwards with your pals to a Denny's and stayed up until three a.m. while you shoved down a chili size cheeseburger with fries and a Dr. Pepper, and pretty much left it at that. And once in a while, I might go home and sit at my Apple IIe and pound out a couple thousand words about the movie I just watched. Then maybe I might have printed it up slowly on my dot matrix printer. Maybe I would show what I wrote to my brother or a friend. That was the extent of it, until the next film came out, and the cycle began again. Your friends would share their responses to a film, friends of friends and family members might be influenced by these opinions, but that would be largely it. The majority of the world didn't hear it, didn't see it, and certainly, our responses were never gauged or collected online by studios or filmmakers to tell them immediately of our displeasure in or our fangirl squees over their efforts.

So, now it is just a handful of hours since I have watched Harbinger Down -- online, of course, and streaming -- but it's now 26 years later from the caveman days. I am ready to use several modern forms of popular social media to tell the world -- or at least my meager slice of that audience -- how I felt about a relatively simple monster effects movie that would have garnered not much more than a few minutes of discussion at that old Denny's table while we shot our soda straw wrappers across the table at one another. But we have websites now where I can swiftly gather any technical detail I wish about the making of Harbinger Down, where I might have to wait years for it to be published before. I can find full bios and filmographies of every person involved in creating the film, and I can also find scores of fellow reviewers giving their varied opinions on the film's success or otherwise. I can know so much more information in seconds about the film than I ever could before at any point in time. Immediacy is everything. But the ultimate question at the end of all the gathering and collating and searching remains the same as when one would leave a theatre, bundle up for the cold weather outside, pile into your buddy's car, and drive to that still appealing after-film gab session at a popular dining establishment.

Did you like the movie?

I am the precise audience for whom Gillis and Woodruff created Harbinger Down. I am a monster movie fanatic, and yes, the purveyor of fine, fanged fiends is certainly targeted by this film. And while I said that I won't use this as a forum to rail against CGI, I will admit without reservation that I feel a special kind of glee when someone even attempts practical and/or live effects in a film these days. So, mark me down for #2. And then there is the intangible third, which I have not mentioned thus far: Harbinger Down takes place in Alaska, off Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, to be precise. While I have never gotten even within a thousand miles of that outpost from old apartment in Alaska's biggest city, the fact that it takes place in my home state pretty much ensured that I would see it eventually (even if I am fairly certain that little if any of it was actually filmed there). And finally a fourth point: Lance Henriksen. As I said, I am the audience... precisely.

First, a brief synopsis. The film opens on June 25, 1982, the date Carpenter's version of The Thing was released, which is not coincidental, but whether such an in-joke pays off depends on how the film delivers. A Soviet space capsule comes hurtling to earth, while a cosmonaut is desperately trying to fend off some form of attack by a dripping liquid... something. Cut to the present, in Dutch Harbor, where a college professor and a pair of female students are driving a rented vehicle to the docks to take a boat out into the Bering Sea to study beluga whale activity. Up until the title of the film appears, the action is being captured on a camera by one of the students, though this conceit goes away completely (and thankfully) after the title. Captain Graff of the fishing ship Harbinger is played by Lance Henriksen, and it turns out one of the college students is his granddaughter, Sadie. We meet the crew, there is some bickering as happens between a lot of people in small quarters, but all seems fine.

When Sadie goes to collect data on belugas, she locates a faint signal, and notices a flashing light inside some ice. She convinces the captain to pull the ice chunk out of the water, and pulls the remains of the capsule onto the deck. The ice melts, the alien evil drippy thing is released, and the games begin. The creature will take over the first body, make a lot of mess, shock the population of the craft, and then run amok for the remainder of the picture. Nearly everyone will be wary of everyone else, and everyone will be a suspect. Who is the creature now? What forms will it take? Why has everyone stopped worrying about fishing or beluga whales? The film will continue to build in gore and violence on the route to its inevitable, foreshadowed conclusion. (The goddamned ship is named Harbinger and we are told in the title it is "down".)

And I just sort of liked it. The pace is fairly brisk, and Harbinger Down doesn't get bogged down in anything too philosophical or in strained, personal dramas. There is enough mystery planted about a couple of characters to paint them as possible wild cards later in the action, and the truly annoying characters that you can't wait to see killed (mainly because they yell at everyone else, sometimes for no reason whatsoever) are set up pretty quickly so that you can enjoy it when their fate is ultimately revealed. For his part, Henriksen is far more committed here than he often is when he signs up for these quickie sci-fi roles, where he usually plays a sheriff, a farmer, or a corporate baddie. He shows enough fire here to remind me (not that I needed it) as to why I fell in love with him onscreen in the first place. The film is efficient enough where I felt it probably could have used another ten minutes to flesh out some details, but damn if it doesn't just keep moving solidly to its destination.

And that destination -- in fact, its stated purpose, and the reason I showed up as well -- is those effects. And for the most part, they play pretty well, even if some of the editing lets them down in places. The first transformation scene is held a little too long and there is a shot or two that not only reminds you too much of the puppetry at work, but also that Carpenter's team did it so much better. After that, we get several scenes of flashing lights and briefer glimpses at the creature that, for me, were too brief as I really wanted a chance to take it in longer. (I know that I have just wished for the thing that didn't work right in the first creature scene, but so be it.) I really enjoyed the way the creature would still be wearing (really, dangling) the skinned face of its previous host from its ever-growing body while it attacked the crew. It was a solidly gruesome touch. The finale is the best part of the film, and where I feel the creature effects really shine. But I don't want to say anything more about that lest I spoil the result.

If anything, the film serves as a metaphor for the perils of constructing a non-direct remake out of references to another film or films. Stan Winston, who created the dog creature in the 1982 The Thing (though Rob Bottin and his team did the bulk of the effects), was the mentor for both Gillis and Woodruff, and they have built Harbinger Down from the top down with echoes from that earlier film (and also from the original film, 1951's The Thing from Another World). Apart from the aforementioned date in-joke, there is the way the crew stands in a circle staring in awe around the found object. There are the transformation scenes that do nothing but directly recall Carpenter's superior effort. There is the paranoia that runs rampant among the crew as they try to determine in any others or all of them have been taking over by the creature. There is the isolation of the icy locale of the film (above the Arctic Circle in the 1951 film; Antarctica in the 1982). If anything, the fact there are even more than a couple of references to another specific film pinpoints Harbinger Down as not just an homage to a better work, but also creates so much weight on its shoulders that it cannot possibly ever lift itself up. 

Which brings me to why I could not like this film any more that I did, which is just below my calling it a good film. Were it mere homage to The Thing, and then went off wildly in a new direction, I might be more willing to drop to my knees and begin servicing the film without pause. But Harbinger Down, despite its good intentions to bring monster and effects fans something for which they have been clamoring greatly over the past couple of decades (though we have had other films), is entirely too slavish to the concept of being a new example of The Thing. I will stop short of calling it a parasite upon the host body of Carpenter's film, sucking out its essence and replacing it with a carbon copy, because Harbinger Down has just enough of its own nerve to make things interesting. But I will say that Gillis and Woodruff could have used the opportunity to do something more original with the money they raised and then married their wonderful effects knowledge to that.