More monster movies!
I went into Rogers near my house yesterday to pick up this week’s new releases, only to find out they were shutting down that store. Everything was off the shelves, and being sold off cheap. So I took advantage of the opportunity to beef up my terrible-monster-movie collection. I picked up Boa vs. Python, Frankenfish, and Attack of the Sabretooth (which is not to be confused with the “superior” movie, Sabretooth, released some years before). I then sat down to be entertained by ridiculous badness and aggressive mediocrity. I watched Frankenfish first, which hit all of the gnre buttons dead on. Topless female nudity, mostly gratuitous (and none involving the stars, of course). A pointless romance between the only two characters who could possibly get together, the bad-ass local guy who knows the swamp and can kill the evil fish by himself…it was all there. The awesome badness of the movie was sealed when the attractive black guy and the Chinese girl were clearly not going to get together, and they meet up with a very attractive black girl whose white boyfriend was an obnoxious sissy…these movies still think that only people of the same race can hook up properly. Otherwise, the audience has too much to think about.
Of course, this girl (and those around her) is unrealistically hot for someone who has been brought up on a houseboat deep in the swamp, and somehow has perfect hair and makeup the whole time. Of course, there are also the customary bad guys too - cowboy-type rich executives, the people who genetically created these mutant Frankenfish to begin with, who will swoop down to the swamp, attempt to capture it alive, and get their just deserts for being so evil. Of course, when the heroes finally finish the job, they laugh and kiss each other as though forty-three other people have not just died in the carnage. And, of course, there is one final SCARE at the end. This is the monster movie formula, and it is fantastic. The only thing they were missing was a group of sorority girls and fraternity boys who happen to get caught up in the chaos. Which brings me to the next movie…
Attack of the Sabretooth involves sorority girls and fraternity boys who have been thrown together and dumped on an island for the purposes of completing some sort of scavenger hunt. Why this island, why a scaveneger hunt, dropped off by whom, why only five of them, we will never know. Every ethnicity and stereotype is represented. The black girl who is good with guns. The oriental guy who is good with computers. The ditzy blonde big-chested cheerleader and the muscle-bound jock she secretly lusts after. (Despite her assertions that she hates him.) And, of course, the goth chick who so desperately insists on not being judged. At the same time, the evil bad guys who genetically created the monster sabretooth tigers and want to recapture them alive are hosting a meeting of investors on this same island to show them the sabretooth menaces. When people start dying, the evil bad guy in charge of course tries to keep that quiet, so it does not scare off the investors, while the tough-chick security guard who’s been there and seen it all goes renegade to bring down the big cats herself.
There are a few variations on the cliches in Attack of the Sabretooth. There are TWO evil bad guys, scheming against each other, and…oh! They’re brothers! Who hate each other! Even though one is clearly American and the other clearly British, they are brothers. There are three sabretooth tigers who get loose, a male a female, and, bizarrely, a genetic freak. In most monster movies, the freakish genetic abnormality is three times the size, three times the fury, and shows up only at the end…blah blah blah. In Attack of the Sabretooth, this weird cat does indeed show up at the end, but it’s special freakish nature is such that it doesn’t have back legs, only a pile of jelly coming out of it’s butt. So it drags itself around with it’s front legs, and kills no one. Oh, and no boobs at all. Another cliche of these movies remains intact, however. The one that says that there must be dozens of rooms in the building, each with generically labeled items like “flammable gas” canisters, which can all be used in clever ways to kill the predators. Then the movie ends, with one big FINAL SCARE, but this time, it is in what would appear to be the middle of the movie.
Attack of the Sabretooth is a Jurassic Park rip-off with hilariously bad animation and even worse acting. It is terrifically indicative of the genre. However, Boa vs. Python is something else entirely. Oh, sure, it has it’s share of totally gratuitous boobs, it has unrealistic creatures attacking unrealistic humans, and various attractive young people who band together to fight the good fight against the bad beast. But this time, it takes place in a CITY! And the epic final battle is not between the beast and the two surviving characters who are meant to hook up, but between two of the monsters themselves! The boa and the python, of course. This time there are government agents involved, and the animation is slightly better than usual. Jamie Bergman shows up as a marine biologist. The least convincing scientist since Denise Richards played Christmas Jones in that Bond movie. And the boa apparently eats in a bird-like motion and growls like a…sabretooth tiger.
If you want a really good monster movie, rent Jaws, or The Host, or…ummm…something else. These are the bottom-of-the-barrel, worst-movies-ever type of monster flicks, the kind where they purposely insert breaks in the film where commercials could go, knowing it will likely appear only on late-night TV, and that way they don’t have to re-edit the movie once for TV and once for video. They are staggeringly awful, and the only thing that could make me enjoy them more would be the inclusion of Steven Seagal.