Review: "The Lost City of Z"

GRAY, James (Dir.), “The Lost City of Z”, Mica Entertainment/Northern Ireland Screen/Plan B Entertainment/Keep Your Head/Madriver Pictures/Sierra Pictures, 2016.

The story of Percy Fawcett’s mad dash to the Matto Grosso in the Amazon Basin is a classic tale of adventure and exploration. Ernest Hemingway used to carry a copy of the book with him and referred to it as one of the greatest adventure tales of all time, even moreso because it is all true. It was only a matter of time therefore, that someone would turn it into a movie. If only it hadn’t been these people.

My first exposure to Percy Fawcett (outside of some sparse gaming material) was through a book entitled Brazilian Adventure written in the 1930s by Peter Fleming. It recounts the efforts of the author, along with some mates, to try and retrace the footsteps of Percy Fawcett’s last expedition along the Amazon and possibly solve the mystery of his disappearance. Despite a lot of serious difficulties, it reads a lot like something that P.G. Wodehouse might take a swing at – like Bertie Wooster goes to Brazil. However, in the background of that narrative is the looming spectre of Fawcett and the quest upon which he was bent. Inevitably, I moved on to another book – Exploration Fawcett: Journey to the Lost City of Z – which is the account of all Fawcett’s travels in South America, edited by his youngest son Brian.

Like Hemingway says, this is a mighty work, detailing years of painstaking exploration and mapping across the Amazon River Basin. It’s unflinching in its portrayals of the discomfort and the sheer back-breaking work of travelling through the region and is full of many bizarre and wonderful encounters, from eccentric murderers and landholders, to meetings with ghosts. (I posted a review about this book several years ago now, so if you want to know more, you can back-track.) You could say that any section of the work would contain enough material to keep the average script-writer, or movie director, occupied for a lifetime; however, this movie actually spends very little time in the jungle.

This treatment of Percy Fawcett focuses almost exclusively on Fawcett’s relationship with the society back home in England. We see him struggling in the army to win recognition for his efforts; we see him being passed over for various favours from the aristocracy, due to the circumstances of his birth (his father disgraced himself rather badly and placed his family beyond the pale); and we see him being handed an onerous job by the Royal Geographic Society that would see him sent out of the country and which no-one else thought was ‘exciting’ enough to consider taking on. This, of course, was the Bolivian mapping expedition which introduced Fawcett to South America and which set him on course for his mysterious disappearance.

All of this is interesting background, but it plays rather too strongly throughout the film. Various incidents where the ‘Old Boys’ Network’ prevents Fawcett from making any kind of headway take place and these are as outrageous as they are unfair, as you’d expect. They serve to underscore the desire that Fawcett must have felt to leave so-called “civilisation” behind and get back to where the ability to succeed depended upon a range of entirely different skills, not dependent upon who you were, or how well you could stab someone in the back. As it is, this celluloid Fawcett is rather un-fazed by all the bickering back home: he seems far more interested in hoofing through the jungle than looking after either his career or his family. When at home, he appears little more than mildly irritated and bored.

The jungle scenes themselves are somewhat lacking in anything that would serve to promote any notion of there actually being a Lost City somewhere out there. The motley crew find a pile of broken potsherds and a face carved into a tree; Fawcett sees a bunch of… skulls? Carved heads? It’s not clear, but then he has to turn back and temporarily abandon the quest. Throughout Fawcett’s writings, there were encounters with natives and traders who told him about the City and other clues that reinforced the possibility that something was out there somewhere; here, there’s very little of any merit to convince anyone, let alone the viewer.

A major feature of Fawcett’s travels was his desire to treat the local indigenes well and to learn things from them. The encounters with the natives shown here are colourful but they often don’t serve to push the narrative ahead. We have moments where Fawcett disappears into the Bush with a group of bow-wielding Indians, then he returns moments later with free access to the village, food and supplies and a new compass heading. The sense is that the natives are merely a colourful background before which the explorers move without impinging upon in any significant way.

Muscularly-faced Charlie Hunnam is a good pick to play Fawcett physically, but it feels like he’s tired all the way through the movie; Robert Pattinson – almost unrecognisable beneath layers of beard and spectacles – is sulky and world-weary as Fawcett’s right-hand man; and Tom Holland – while barely in the film at all – is distracting behind his moustache (I kept thinking, “Spidey has a lip-fairy!”). Added to this, Sienna Miller, as Fawcett’s wife, is completely wasted. In fact, most of the scenes in which she appears feel tacked-on and pointless: her constant cavilling to be treated as her husband’s equal feel like they are intentionally timely, homilies drawn from our current zeitgeist rather than the circumstances of the source material. I don’t want to take anything from the #MeToo movement (of which I approve), but this comes off almost as a paid advertisement for it, more irritating than the most blatant product placement in a blockbuster.

Political hedging aside, this film feels as though it’s treading a line, following links between narrative points in Fawcett’s life and desperately trying to miss nothing. However, all of the episodes it so painstakingly screens are the bits that took place in England, and very little of what took place in Amazonia, arguably the bits that are described by Fawcett in his own words and which are far more interesting than stuffy period piece club rooms, society galas and aristocratic get-togethers. Add to this, the fact that the film kind of tapers off at the point where Fawcett pere et fil vanish into the jungle, borne away by natives, the whole thing just comes across as fuzzy and poorly focussed. In short, this is a bloodless re-telling of beside-the-point facts, deliberately missing all the really interesting parts of Fawcett’s life in favour of painting a “Downton Abbey”-esque backdrop to it. I was left wondering what Werner Herzog could have done with it?

Three Tentacled Horrors from me.

Another Day, Another Shark Flick...

ROBERTS, Johannes (Dir.), “47 Metres Down”, Dimension Films/The Fyzz Facility/Dragon Root/Flexibon Films/Lantica Pictures/Tea Shop & Film Company, 2017.

With my passive sonar pinging, I encountered this DVD just the other day. I know it’s quite soon after my previous foray into deadly waters but I suspect that the surfeit of shark films that have been appearing lately might have something to do with a general public awareness campaign to do with surf and swimming safety and good boat-handling practice. Perhaps. It could also have something to do with idiotically self-important surf stars demanding shark culls on their favourite breaks, or perhaps it’s a sneaky campaign by those companies who make cans of shark-fin soup to demonstrate why we really do need a sharp increase in shark killing – or perhaps not. Regardless, these vested interests are probably being well-served by this kind of cinematic fare, which makes me kind of queasy about discussing it in any kind of positive light.

The best way to start I guess, is to rake over all the arguments once more in the interests of providing a counter-argument to hating on sharks. First and foremost: you are more likely to be killed by a cow, a bee or an automobile than a shark (in fact you’re more likely to get killed by a donkey, or a hippopotamus); second, you have to be in the water and acting stupidly in order for a shark to even notice you; third (and it galls me to even have to bring this up) sharks are not submersible torpedoes loaded with a pecker-stiffening Viagra equivalent – they’re fish. You’d probably earn more cred in the macho stakes by sucking down a jar of rollmops (from me certainly). There’s a particularly roast-y part of Hell for all those cretins who think that Chinese Medicine has any kind of potency and who support its planet-destroying trade…

So there you have it: arguments against everything that shark films prey upon. The real reason why these films are so popular comes back to those old tropes of Hollywood Morality, which mostly devolve to a sneaky thrill generated by watching young girls get killed by horrific monsters, fates predicated upon morally-dubious actions and activities set up in the early part of the movie. Too, in these days of computer-generated horrors, sharks are easy to model in a virtual environment: I suspect that there are readily-obtained pre-generated constructs out there that require only a little tweaking to suit any film-maker’s needs. Increasingly, we’re moving away from the practical effects of Spielberg’s “Jaws” and Renny Harlin’s “Deep Blue Sea”, and into a realm where shark flicks are almost 100% CGI, in terms of their finny antagonists. Finally, I’ve yet to see a shark movie where the location shooting isn’t some exotic beach locale or tropical tourist paradise – given that these stories are all about young people, there’s a definite ‘spring break’, or ‘schoolies’ mentality at work here, reflecting the target audience, but also manifesting as a tangible holiday perk for the film cast and crew. In short: cheap; nasty; easy; with benefits. Voila! I give you the shark film!

This movie contains all of the above, in a presentation which could have been assembled by rote. Two sisters, Lisa and Kate, go to Mexico for a vacation, and it is soon revealed that Lisa is escaping from the severance of her long-term relationship, a fact she kept secret from her younger sister. When Kate finds out, she sets about ramping-up the party tone of the holiday, insisting upon drinks, dancing and hooking up with the locals. Since ex-boyfriend Stephen claimed that he broke up with Lisa because she was “boring”, when the opportunity of cage-diving in shark-infested waters presents itself, Kate insists they both go, in order to demonstrate the fault in Stephen’s thinking.

So far, so obvious. When they get to the boat the next day, things get a little iffy: the vessel (named “Sea-esta”; yes, it’s that bad) is rusty and ancient and the crew leering and disorderly, with the exception of Captain Taylor (Matthew Modine, slumming again!). Lisa has further reservations, but Kate puts her foot down. Here is where Kate crosses the Hollywood Morality line for the final time: not only – by this point – has she insisted on making Lisa a party girl, encouraging her drinking, staying up late and kissing strange boys, now she pushes her into doing something that she absolutely does not want to do. Oh, and she lies to the Captain about the level of Lisa’s diving competency (zero). At this point we understand that Kate, along with the greasy, sarcastic first mate Javier, will not be coming home (no spoiler alerts required here).

Strangely, it’s at this point that the film takes off and shows some ingenuity. Rather than simply turning the last half of the film into a series of floating heads (a la “Open Water”) we instead learn the subtle and debilitating mysteries of SCUBA diving:

SCUBA diving is one of those activities that utterly bewilders me. The dangers and threats that you have to expose yourself to in order to take part in this sport boggle the mind. Not only are you putting yourself in harm’s way (low as it generally is) in terms of sharks, but you also mess with your body chemistry, exposing yourself to myriad life-destroying impairments along the way. The Bends is no joke: you can suffer aneurysms; burst blood vessels in your eyes resulting in permanent blindness; ruptured eardrums; you can split your hard palate and crack your teeth; create debilitating ruptures of your spinal cord; suffer paralysis; haemorrhage your lung tissue; and that’s if you don’t straight-up die. Nitrogen narcosis is a bitch.

Kate and Lisa enter the shark cage (swinging from its rusty chains, attached to a dodgy cable running through an even dodgier winch) and head into the depths. They become surrounded by sparkly fish and soon a big shark glides by creating a momentary thrill. Then the cage drops downwards a fraction: via a radio transmitter system, Captain Taylor says “nothing to worry about – just a little winch slippage” …then the cage plummets to the bottom of the sea. Didn’t see that coming! The girls end up on the ocean floor at 47 metres of depth – the radio transmitter conveniently cuts out at 35.

Now the scenario becomes a race for freedom while the air in their tanks slowly runs out. Initially Lisa panics and wastes a bunch of air by doing so; Kate is the first to venture out of the cage, in order to make contact with the ship by swimming up to 35 metres. Captain Taylor informs them that he’s sending the reprobate, Javier, down to them with a cable attached to a back-up winch and tells them to watch out for his tell-tale flashlight. They see the light, but Javier has roamed too far afield and has wandered into a benighted abyss far from where the cage is. Lisa – now with more air than Kate after shark encounters have upped her consumption – is forced to swim out to Javier and haul him back. Several close calls with sharks later, she meets up with him in time to see him horribly eaten. She returns with the cable, a few signal flares and a spear-gun (hooray!).

From here on in, every permutation of rescue from this unendurable situation takes place with varying degrees of failure and success - the new cable breaks; the spear-gun goes off accidentally (and doesn’t find a piscine target); fresh tanks are dropped and must be retrieved – and all the while the air pressure in the sisters’ reserves is ticking down. The end of the film provides an interesting wrinkle: before sending down the spare tanks, Captain Taylor warns them that breathing a second round of the oxygen mixture could cause hallucinations, dizziness and other neurological side-effects. He cautions them to watch each other closely for signs of this happening. This signals a distressing twist at the film’s conclusion but also paves the way for some truly outrageous stunts with the finny denizens of the deep, with Lisa going mano-a-mano with one of them as it leaps from the water to pluck her from the jaws of safety, amongst others.

Did I like this film? It starts slowly and the sound levels are truly weird at the beginning – I was raising and lowering the volume over and over trying to reach some kind of sweet spot before finding a level (about 20 minutes in) that catered for both the dialogue and the sound effects. Matthew Modine was a huge distraction and I wondered as to the thinking behind his inclusion. It’s been awhile since “Memphis Belle”, or “Cutthroat Island”, or “The Transporter 2”, or even that weird episode of “The West Wing” where he sleeps with Allison Janney at a school reunion, but he still stands out like a shark fin in a cast replete with no-names (Mandy Moore, pop starlet, included). I get it – even moderately well-known actors need to pay the rent occasionally, but this was really slumming it!

The sharks are all CGI spectres and they glide in an out of the dark on cue. There are some nifty shots of them through the surface of the water from the boat’s deck but underwater they seemed a bit lacklustre. There’s a ridiculous moment during a rescue attempt when the signal flare goes dark and, when the girls light the next one, it’s only to find themselves surrounded by gaping maws. Do the sharks carry on with these launched attacks despite the sudden illumination? No: like a pack of underwater Stooges suddenly caught in the act, they flee into the dark – “Nyuck! Nyuck! Nyuck! Whoops! Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo…!” Like a shark going into a full-on bite frenzy, I rolled my eyes…

I enjoyed the extra layer of dramatics that the SCUBA process brought to the table in terms of creating complexity in the narrative – it was far and away better than just watching heads floating through the waves and listening to endless bitching before the inevitable. This film also had its moments of “it’s all your fault we’re in this mess!” recriminations, but thankfully, it was low-key. It’s not “The Shallows”; it’s not even “Jaws”; however, “Open Water” 1, 2 or 3, it certainly isn’t either, and that gives it three Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: "The Shape Of Water"

Del Toro, Guillermo (Dir.), “The Shape of Water”, Bull Productions/Double Dare You/Fox Searchlight, 2017.

Here’s a question: say you’re on the production team of Universal’s “Dark Universe” project, wrestling with the critical non-acclaim of its first turkey – the Tom Cruise-led ‘un-make’ of “The Mummy” – when an Oscar-winning independent director films a re-boot of “Creature From The Black Lagoon” that’s far better than anything your team could come up with and which is completely outside of your ambit – what do you do? Well, since Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” is already on-track for Academy Awards success, I guess all you can reasonably do is wring your hands, quietly shelve the whole “Dark Universe” mess and hope that no-one remembers what you were up to.

Del Toro has been a little off track of late. “Crimson Peak” – while visually stunning – was a disorganised mess, and the TV series “The Strain” was more than a little patchy. Even “Pacific Rim” had some troubles. I put a lot of this down to the frustrations of being involved with the whole “Hobbit” fiasco, which must have been distracting at best. Now, however, it’s clear that time away from these lesser vehicles has given del Toro a chance to re-set and to focus on what he does best.

There are a lot of parallels between this film and “Pan’s Labyrinth” – an ingénue encountering fantastic elements in the face of a repressive regime. In this story, a mute cleaner at a Top Secret research facility in the 1960s discovers a ‘fish man’ being studied there and decides to release it before it is killed and anatomised. This contest of pure and determined innocence against dark and vested forces is a hallmark of del Toro’s best films, notably “Cronos” and “Pan’s Labyrinth”. The setting allows for much playfulness in terms of design and the wonderful soundtrack, but it isn’t a random or whimsical choice: the 60s was a period of gloss and glamour, but it was also a time of conformity and repression where socially unacceptable elements were swept violently beneath a Hugo Gernsback-styled veneer. In this tale, the baddies are the ones with slick hair-dos, shiny cars and magazine-curated homes and families. In this sense, del Toro is commenting quite a bit about the world of today.

Many of the traditional del Toro touches appear throughout this film. Shoes – and shoebrushes – are a feature, as are cats; there is a signature colour throughout (green this time); and a distressing hand injury takes centre stage (hearkening back to “Pan’s Labyrinth” once more). And the ubiquitous Doug Jones is here as well. In fact, knowing that he was going to be playing the creature in this film, I had a few qualms going in:

Many actors, over time, develop a unique ‘tool-kit’ of tics and flourishes that cover most situations in which they find themselves. For this reason, I can’t watch Meryl Streep anymore. In the course of her career, she seems to have become a caricature of herself on screen, where once, in her earliest film appearances, she was daring and kinetic. Robert de Niro also has this effect on me. Doug Jones, no matter how many layers of latex he’s covered with, is almost always recognisable. I was worried that this role would be another Abe Sapien re-hash from “Hell-Boy”, but I was more than pleasantly surprised. As “the Asset” in this movie, he plays it low-key, abandoning all of the quirky C3-PO head jerks and shoulder twitches, and focuses not only on portraying his character, but also the interconnectedness of the two lovers at the heart of the story. I was very impressed.

But it’s not just the main characters who get all of the attention. Like most of del Toro’s films, each character on screen gets moments to shine, no matter how small their contribution. Here, the second-string and background characters are as luminous as the leads. The bitchy queue-jumper hating Yolanda is great; the lugubrious theatre owner downstairs who thinks ‘Mardi Gras’ is spelt ‘Mardi Grass’; the incompetent Russian spy ‘nyetwork’: they all serve the story brilliantly. It’s part of what makes a del Toro film a rich and varied tapestry.

If I have a beef with this film at all, it’s to do with the language. Here, I’m talking about the four-letter word kind of language, rather than the prevailing idiom. There are some scenes here, of such finely-constructed beauty, that get trampled by an overuse of the F-word, and also some scenes of menace and threat that lose energy by being verbalised with the same excess. They’re called “F-bombs” for a reason – they’re loud, distracting and destructive. Less is more.

Before I conclude, I have to take a moment to mention the soundtrack. There are few films that I go to where the music is not just some background orchestral thing that underscores the action. “The Illusionist”, the soundtrack of which was written by Philip Glass, almost overtook the visuals in that film – it was the first movie, I think, where I shut my eyes and listened rather than watched. This film was similar. The soundtrack is circuitous and almost tangential, coming out of various 60s pastiche moments and doing its job wonderfully as well as subtly. It’s noticeable but not demanding of your attention; it serves the movie while being utterly unique, rich and captivating.

If you’ve never seen “Creature From The Black Lagoon”, you should really try to before seeing this film. Of the Universal monsters series, it’s one of my favourites simply because the visuals – especially the underwater sequences – strive to rise above the B-movie cheesiness of the concept and attain something greater. I think that is what has inspired del Toro here – the notion that a piece of genre storytelling can talk to wider and higher concepts than its ostensible basis would intimate. Watch both of these films before the "Dark Universe" puts its grubby mitts all over the concept - you can't go wrong.

Four-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.

"The Haunting" Handouts

I have recently taken the plunge and bought the 7^th edition rules for “Call of Cthulhu” and I am ploughing my way through them. Some things have definitely changed, but on the whole these are changes for the better and not to the game’s detriment. I am not unhappy to see the old “Resistance Table” as a thing of the past, for instance. The presentation is a bit wordy but there is a concerted effort to talk to newcomers while leaving old-timers to do their own thing – the presentation and organisation reflects all the other iterations, so returning readers won’t easily get lost. Some things have been retained – Harvey Walters is back as the Example Character and – in the Quick-Start version of the rules – the introductory scenario, “The Haunting”, has been dusted off for another run around the block.

This isn’t a bad thing, because it’s a good introduction to the game for new players and Keepers alike. I’ll admit that I have never run this story for my players, or played it myself, but I can see the quality of the design. One thing that always bothered me about it was the rudimentary presentation of the player handouts: rather than being anything of note, they comprise a simple set of boxed statements telling the results of inquiries at various locales. Of course, Keepers are allowed to flesh these out as they like, but I’ve always felt that, if you’re going to try and lead by example, you should demonstrate to the newbs what is possible, not the minimum effort.

To this end, to celebrate the return of this tried-and-true tale under a new and streamlined system, I’ve thrown together some more elaborate handouts which can be given to players, and which will help generate a little more atmosphere than just bald lines of text. Essentially, there is no difference between the original handouts and these ones – the essential information provided is identical; these ones are just a bit more picturesque. Enjoy!

“The Haunting” Handout #1:

“The Haunting” Handout #2:

“The Haunting” Handout #3:

“The Haunting” Handout #4:

“The Haunting” Handout #5:

“The Haunting” Handout #6:

“The Haunting” Handout #7:

“The Haunting” Handout #8:

“The Haunting” Handout #9:

(All information presented here is copyright Chaosium Inc., taken from CALL OF CTHULHU 7th Edition Quick Start, 2013.)

XI - Aichmophobia: The Fear of Sharp and Pointed Objects

“The desire for life, the desire for love, are too strong within us to be repressed for long without serious hurt to the mental processes. Aichmophobia is simply another version of the agonized protest of the life-force crying out against atrophy and disuse. The sublimation of sexual impulses into so-called higher activities is all very well in theory, but frustration sometimes wreaks a horrible punishment on its voluntary or involuntary victims. The maladjusted man who, either out of personal conviction or the restraining hand of social forces, has disregarded and suppressed the natural urge to sex-expression, may end up by wishing for death or castration to release him from the fury of impulses he is unable to gratify. The aichmophobiac fears the cutting edge and the sharp point for an obvious reason: he does not trust his own power to resist their insidious appeal. He is fascinated and terrified by sharp and pointed instruments that may release the surging flow of blood – a symbol for an orgasm in which the entire body makes a last, convulsive sacrifice.

“Prisoners in jails, inmates of asylums, driven to frenzy by their enforced sexual inactivity, have been known to mutilate their genitals with pieces of glass or wire torn from the springs of their beds. This same tendency exists to an advanced degree in the aichmophobiac, and the slow erosion of mad suggestions ends finally by breaking down the mind. Razors, knives, scissors, needles, fence-palings, iron gates, hundreds of the commonplace objects of his daily life, are all means to an end he desires and fears. He is constantly haunted by visions in which he sees himself stabbing his friend, or opening his veins, or mutilating his organs: by any of these acts his purpose is accomplished – the destruction of life itself or the emasculation of the life-giving principal (sic.).”

John Vassos

New York City

May 25^th, 1931

Deep Waters - A Real Bright Light...

One good thing about the Innsmouth crowd, tell ‘em there’s a threat to their community and – no matter how otherwise occupied they are – they come out swinging.

In short order we had all gathered ourselves together and made our way down to the lobby via the fire stairs. We showed up just in time to see a splash of something grisly spray across the glass entrance doors and hear a handful of shots ring out in the night. Then there was the sound of Prudence’s Caprice tearing off into the dark.

‘Right,’ I turned to the troops, ‘Winston, grab a few guys and take the side entrance…’

‘Nuh-uh,’ he countered, spinning his pistol around on his finger, ‘I’m taking point – you can sneak around if you like.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Okay, hot dog,’ I said, ‘you lead the diversionary attack. We’ll back you up from the side entrance.’

‘Wait. What?’ Winston looked confused. ‘“Diversionary”? What do you mean…?’

‘Keep up, Winston,’ I said, ‘there’s a bunch of these guys. At the moment there’s only one of ‘em out front. When you hit him, the others will converge; when that happens, the rest of us can attack them from behind.’

‘So, what?’ grumbled Winston, ‘we’re… bait?’

I clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You wanted to take point, remember?’ I turned and loped off towards the staff entrance behind the reception desk, several of our cronies in tow.

‘And you, Boothe!’ I called across the foyer to one of them, ‘you’re coming with me: ‘can’t risk the two of you coming into contact with each other.’

The indicated Boothe grinned sheepishly and slouched over to join our troops.

As we slipped through the door to the exit beyond, I heard the foyer doors crash open and Winston’s voice ringing out:

‘You feelin’ lucky, punk…?!’

In the meantime, our group slinked through the short passage, past the staff locker room and out through the side entrance. As we emerged, we could hear sounds of fighting mingling with the disco beats still - still! – wafting up from the waterfront.

The scene which confronted us was dynamic. Winston stood on top of the trashed Lincoln Continental, jacket fringes lashing as he fired his pistol over and over into the pillar of gelid flesh that had been the Latino’s heavy-hitter. With each bullet, the horror burst wetly but still kept on growing, bubbling up from some obscene point of generation. In other news, the fused Latinos kept Winston’s troops pinned down with a creditable display of shooting, four pistols blazing in the dark. It seemed that the two bodies which comprised their new form could moved freely through each other, turning, reloading and aiming, but they couldn’t actually separate. Standing with his back to us, taking in the scene just as we were, was the Latino’s jefe. He turned around to face us as we rushed forward.

‘Ah, David Coverdale!’ he said, grinning crazily, ‘sabía que no estarías muy lejos. Sabes, siempre odié esa mierda Whitesnake.’

‘Um, he seems to think that you’re…’ began Boothe, beside me.

‘Yeah, I know: he’s delusional. Attack!’

In the background, the Blob grabbed the front end of the Lincoln and hauled it upwards, throwing Winston to the ground; off to the right, the Twins kept Winston’s guys pinned down, alternately firing and reloading in swift, smooth movements. In front of me, Jefe ripped open his shirt and the sinister jelly burst forth again from the shining hole in his abdomen, billowing up into the air, a black cloud of staring pop-eyes and tittering fanged maws. Around me, my comrades stalled their charge, staring in amazement.

‘Cool,’ breathed Boothe.

‘C’mon you fish-heads!’ I yelled, exasperated, ‘Kill the evil Jell-O!’

We charged once more and ploughed our way into the dark mass. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a small swarm of fish nibble at you as you’ve swum through them, but this was kind of the same. Except with much bigger teeth. Fists didn’t seem to be of much use and, once we were deep in the bulk of it, guns didn’t seem like a smart move, so I hauled my switchblade out of my jacket pocket and went to work with that. Even then, each time I slashed a floating eyeball, another one just appeared to take its place, and dozens of lamprey mouths latched onto me trying to drain my blood. I admit, it looked pretty bad.

Beside me Ned Pierce fell to the ground, frantically trying to rip himself free of all the mouths that had latched greedily onto him.

‘What is this?’ he yelled, ‘what is this?!’

There was a sudden bright burst of white light, followed seconds later by an enormous explosion of sound. In the dazed silence that followed I could feel my skin sizzling and I sensed, rather than heard, large gobbets of gelid flesh detaching themselves from my body and thudding to the ground.

‘That was Bugg Sash,’ a voice like gravel being tipped into a pond rang out.

‘He Who Comes In Darkness,’ intoned a chorus of croaky responders.

Standing behind us on the road was a gathering of trench-coated and black fedora-ed figures. At their head stood Abner Gilman holding a tall staff, from the bejewelled head of which a bright white light faded into nothingness.

‘What’ve you sprats bin up to?’ Abner yelled testily.

‘A la mierda esto, me voy de aquí,’ muttered Jefe behind me, and I spun around just in time to see him and the Twins race off into the shadows. I turned to look at Abner once more.

‘Um, Mr Gilman, I can explain everything…’ I began.

‘And you’re gonna,’ he cut me off, ‘but I ain’t gonna stand in the street listenin’ to a bunch of buck-nekkid schoolkids. All o’ you: off to the Temple! Now!’

That was the point I realised that the flash of light had burnt more than just the hideous monster off of us…

*****

To Be Continued...

Two Shark Flicks...

Awhile back I reviewed a movie called “The Shallows” which was about a young woman trapped on a rock in the ocean by a marauding Great White Shark. Starring Blake Lively, it was a captivating and genuinely stressful experience, and also one that didn’t talk down to its female lead, or pull any punches with the toothy fish. I had a good time watching it and, coincidentally, managed to catch “Jaws” on telly a few nights later (it’s still good, but I think “The Shallows” is better – chew on that controversial little morsel!). Anyway, since then, I’ve had my passive radar pulsing, seeking out other movies with finny adversaries and I came up with these two.

KENTIS, Chris, “Open Water”, Lions Gate Films/Plunge Pictures LLC., 2004.

Based on a ludicrous incident which happened on the Great Barrier Reef, in which the operators of a reef-diving tour boat forgot to perform a head-count as the day drew to a close and thus stranded two French tourists out at sea, in this re-telling, the French couple are swapped out for two Americans named Susan and Daniel. Both suffering from the stress of busy careers, the two take a break and decide to go diving offshore with a reef-diving company. Things start well: everyone gets into the water and there are many pretty shots of colourful fish, blue water and thriving coral (alas, would that it had stayed that way!). Soon enough, the boat operators perform a miscount and take the rest of the tourists home for the day, leaving Susan and Daniel stranded.

At this point, all of the interesting footage in this film has been seen. From here on in, all we have to look at are Susan’s and Daniel’s heads sticking out of the water and an endless succession of rolling waves. Sometimes it’s daytime, sometimes it’s night; occasionally there’s a point-of-view shot of a distant boat, or a way too high aeroplane; a storm sometimes blemishes the horizon. And, every now and then, a shark pops up to say “hello”.

Susan and Daniel’s life issues get well hammered out. They panic; they deny; they blame each other; they try to jolly each other along. Finally, one of them gets eaten and the other one gives up and drowns (and is eaten). I should probably have said “Spoiler Alert!” but, check it – it’s a movie about two people left behind in shark-infested waters. What did you think was gonna happen?

The format of this film is defined by its handheld camera-work. This gives the set-up phase of the film a nice sense of immediacy and intimacy, but when we hit the water it mainly instigates sea-sickness. Still, it’s a choice that the director of the next movie should have opted for, because it would have minimised a bunch of that film’s issues. Overall, this film was fairly tedious in the long-run: watching a young couple sort out their marriage issues, even while facing the possibility of being eaten alive, felt too much like watching reality TV, something that even the random emergence of ravenous sharks (“hello!”) couldn’t save. I’m giving it two Tentacled Horrors.

*****

RASCIONATO, Gerald, “Cage Dive”, Just One More Productions/Odin’s Eye Entertainment, 2016.

The tagline for this film is “First you find the sharks, then they find you!”. As menacing as that sounds, for some reason, the sharks in this film don’t seem to be able to find the people who deserve to be eaten anywhere near quickly enough! The moment I started watching this, I felt a distinct sense of déjà-vu: In pretty much all of its essentials, this film is a re-make of “Open Water”, but with a bigger budget and wa-a-a-ay more annoying lead actors.

The premise for this iteration centres around three young Americans, Jeff, Megan and Josh. Jeff is going out with Megan but, as we learn, she is two-timing him with his brother Josh. Incestuous much? The three of them decide to audition for a reality TV show (groan!) which seeks to emphasise their teamwork and survival skills, keeping hidden the fact that Jeff has a heart condition for which he needs medication, a detail that would automatically disqualify him from entering. Our trio decide to go shark-cage diving, film their effort and present the footage as their audition tape. To this end they fly to Adelaide in South Australia and get ready to face the fishies. While they’re in the shark cage, a freak wave capsizes the boat and they get jettisoned: in the aftermath they encounter a dead body with its face peeling off (which gets eaten), an hysterical girl (also eaten) and a purposeful guy who seeks to get everyone organised (eaten). Our trio end up clinging together and eventually float away from the sunken boat.

From here on in, it’s just heads bobbing in the waves, recriminations and panic and the eventual unravelling of the secret of just who Megan is sleeping with. Every now and then, a shark pops up to say “hello!”. Unlike “Open Water” however, random incidents happen to break the monotony: a life-vest floats past, giving them something to cling to and rest upon; an esky drifts past, tempting Jeff to strike out and capture it, thus splitting the party, a thing they were expressly told not to do if they ended up in the water (arguments ensue); and finally, a four-person inflatable life raft appears, which, after they grab it, inflate it, get stuck into the supplies and rescue another comatose female survivor of the boat, they then set fire to with a signal flare and burn to the waterline (along with the comatose woman). At this point I was actually yelling at the TV screen for the sharks to show up already!

Whereas “Open Water” used handheld camera-work to reasonable effect, “Cage Dive” decides to go one further: the film is established as the real, actual footage found in a damaged camera, detailing the last few days in 2012 of a doomed trio of Yank teens. Committing the movie to the ‘found footage’ trope, means that everything that happens has to be filmed by at least one of the main characters, and, when they’re all in the water, it starts to stretch the limits of credibility. Why are they filming when they could be doing something – anything! – to better effect? It simply underscores the fact that, shallow and affected as you think these three are, they are actually shallower than you can think.

And of course there’s the panic, the denial, the recriminations, the jollying along and the occasional Great White Shark (it’s South Australia – they’re all Great Whites). Boats and aeroplanes are too far away to see or be seen; sometimes it’s day, sometimes it’s night; occasionally a storm blemishes the horizon… you know the drill… “hello!”. Despite being dressed up with pretend news footage about efforts to find the missing boat and “interviews” with those involved who survived, the essential problem with this movie is that these three aren’t worth saving. There was some nice footage of a pod of whales at the beginning and a cheesy shot right at the end of the camera going down a shark’s gullet, but these are the only high points. I’m giving it one Tentacled Horror.

*****

A bigger budget doesn’t mean a better film as we’ve often seen before. “Open Water” did well enough with what it had but essentially, once the chum was in the drink, there’s not a lot to keep viewers interested, certainly not the endless domestic arguments that the couple resorts to in order to pass the time. “Cage Dive” did itself a great disservice by running the "Hollywood morality" playbook and by presenting itself as ‘real events’ – I just ended up pitying the sharks who had to try and digest those pathetic oiks. Wait! Maybe that’s why the sharks weren’t in any hurry to devour them?! All is explained…

PS: I just did some research (which I prolly should’ve done earlier!) and discovered that “Cage Dive” was billed in the US (and maybe elsewhere) as “Open Water 3: Cage Dive”. No wonder they seemed so similar! Here in Australia, there’s no clear connexion between them in any of the packaging or marketing and I haven’t seen any sign of “Open Water 2: Adrift”. Not that I’m going to go looking for it any time soon…