Godzilla Minus One (2023)

"Godzilla looks really ticked off," a naval officer says at one point, and it is funny because in this 37th Godzilla movie in 2023 the kaiju is still a stiff, rather rubbery, frozen-faced stare-bear - it doesn't matter if he has taken gunfire to the face, swallowed a mine, or been plunged over 1,500 metres to the bottom of the ocean, the demented grin persists - but everything else in Godzilla Minus One, which takes the series back to its roots and presents Godzilla as nuclear annihilation itself, is elaborately, effectively staged, from the razed-to-zero post-Second World War Japan setting to the big-budget Jurassic Park-style chomps and stomps.

★★★★☆

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Deep Rising (1998)

Imagine Die Hard banged together with Alien, without the sophistication, on a cruise liner at sea, with a cheesy Big Trouble In Little China sort of all-American goofball lead and BTILC-esque special effects, and you've got this zany cult classic, so bad it's fun, about a hijacked boat full of torpedoes, a cruise ship overrun with winding gnashing alien (?) creatures, some ghastly body horror, and if it sounds mad consider the rumors that the never-made sequel, Deep Rising 2, was to be set on Skull Island and feature King Kong, as if this original weren't already loopy enough!

★★★☆☆

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The Vourdalak (French: 'La Famille du Vourdalak') (2023)

This French fantasy — at times horrible but never really horror; more ghastly, like a Grimms' fairytale — is based on a 1839 Russian novella about an aristocrat, lost in a Serbian forest, who encounters a strange family, and it's this story rather than the movie that is interesting — the monstrous patriarch predates Bram Stoker's Dracula — but the ghastly monster-like character is a weird overacting claymation or puppet, which detracts from rather than enhances your engagement with the gothic goings-on. 

★★★☆☆

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Super 8 (2011)

 

A Goonies gang accidentally captures government secrets on their Super 8 camera as they make a zombie film, and while the kids revel in making their zombie movie, you get the sense director J J Abrams himself is revelling in making  the sort of movie Spielberg made in the 80s with kids on an adventure  in a richly detailed small-town America, but J J Abrams is also paying homage to the paranoid scifi invasion B-movies of the 50s and this dual, conflicting purpose strips some Spielberg heart from the kids' adventure.

★★★☆☆

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Dracula 2000 (2000)

Risen by elaborate means from a treasure vault in modern-day America, Gerard Butler's Dracula is an almost entirely non-verbal ponce whose exhilaration at the sight of ripe virginal necks looks like constipation, but this Wes Craven-endorsed exercise in horror, featuring Christopher Plummer as a Van Helsing descendant, Jonny Lee Miller as geeky-chicy muscle, and Justine Waddell as a woman with a supernatural bond to the ancient bloodsucker, is so-bad-it's-not-so-bad mindless horror-action fun.

★★★☆☆

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Alien vs. Predator (2004)

A security guard at work assures me that the bringing together of the Predator from the Predator movies and the Alien from the Alien movies into an Alien Vs Predator (AVP) series of movies isn't silly, that the two series and two monsters complement each other nicely, but this first movie of the series has a research team investigating an underground pyramid in the Antartic, unleashing from a prison the beginnings of a long Predator/Alien mythology that is pretty bloody silly. 

★★☆☆☆

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Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Of course, the single purpose of these kaiju movies is to stage spectacular cgi fights between the towering beasts, which this movie does impressively and without a boggly ping-pong eyeball in sight; everything else - a signing child, a conceptually confusing Hollow Earth, a mystical glowing axe, a plethora of unnecessary characters (many of them annoying children with no business being there at all), a visit to Hong Kong, mecha-robots, "skullcrawlers", is just a whole lot of nonsense to fill the time and whether you care less about this filler will depend on which side of thirteen you are. 

★★★☆☆ (my score)

★★★★★ (my nephew's score)

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John Carpenter's The Fog (1980)

Celebrating the town's centenary, the folk of seaside Antonio Bay are weirded out by a fog that occasions a pandemic of shattered glass and maritime deaths, but all it takes is for local Father Malone to read a couple of pages of an old diary and suddenly everyone is confidently spouting paranormal fog lore and exhibiting magical knowledge of things they can't possibly have seen or heard, and this silliness doesn't matter because The Fog is atmospheric horror so fun I'd like to see it continued as an ongoing series of sequels, origin stories and offshoots - forgetting all about the woeful 2005 remake, of course.

★★★★☆

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Gamera VS Viras (ガメラ対宇宙怪獣バイラス) (US: Destroy All Planets) (1968)

My first encounter with Gamera, the beloved icon from Japan's long-running kaiju movie series, was watching this 1968 movie, the fourth, that pits the fire-breathing turtle-with-a-frozen-stare against a fidgetspinner from outerspace with a bumblebee paint job; the incoherent monster battles that make up a bulk of the movie's ninety-one minutes entertain on account of their rudimentary but serviceable special effects, but you'll want to experience them with the tv muted — kaiju battles make nails down a blackboard sound positively melodic.

★★★☆☆

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Rampage

Chris Pratt, I mean, Dwayne The Rock Johnson is a dinosaur wrangler, I mean a primatologist, who has developed a special friendship with a velociraptor, I mean a gorilla, but when a mutagen is released on Earth that causes the gorilla and several other beasts to mutate into city-wrecking colossi, it takes the white-shirted hero, himself a big mutant cinematic monster, to overcome the dinosaurs, I mean, the genetically-mutated animals and the fact this B-grade Jurassic Park action blockbuster is all based on an arcade game series is unimportant except that it sort of helps to explain the movie's pair of villains, a remotely located pair of buffoons so dastardly they make Lazy Town's Robbie Rotten seem like Hannibal Lecter.

★★☆☆☆

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Ragnarok (Gåten Ragnarok) (2013)

Following in the giant footsteps of André Øvredal's Troll Hunter (2010) is this creature feature - nothing to do with superheroes - also set in the wildest reaches of Norway, but where Troll Hunter plumbed Norwegian folklore and came up with a creature feature that was inventive, this movie is far more tired with its main character, a gormless cross between an Indiana Jones archeologist and an Alan Grant paleontologist, banging on for the first half of the movie about Norse mythology - Oseberg ship artefact finding, runic alphabet-deciphering, code-breaking and very loose history-building - but only as an extremely longwinded way of getting him and his two children and a few other hangers-on to a Jurassic Park in Finnmark where a giant monster briefly harrasses them.

★☆☆☆☆

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Colossal (2016)

A simple but effective metaphor, likening an alcoholic's lifestyle to a gigantic monster wreaking havoc in South Korea, becomes thoroughly mixed because someone wanted to see the monster fighting a giant robot under the spotlights of hovering helicopters - Hathaway survives but characterisation, side plots, and creative potential are left decimated.

★★☆☆☆

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Godzilla: Resurgence (シン•ゴジラ) (2016)

In Tokyo, the emergence of Godzilla, a big destructive sock puppet with a frozen stare, requires a multi-agency response from Japan's various emergency response services, and the administrative workings and bureaucratic interactions of these agencies is a bit like watching Parliament sitting.

★★☆☆☆

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Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Francis Ford Coppola's ludicrous, outrageous Dracula story is buoyed by Gary Oldman's gleefully grotesque portrayal of the 400 year old count who floats around with a disembodied shadow and an ability to transform into green mist or a writhing mass of rats, and the movie's Giallo horror stylings help present a world so reminiscent of the book that this really does feel like it is Bram Stoker's Dracula and not just another camp monster cliche.

★★★★☆

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The Mummy (2017)

At his best when playing steely-eyed and unerring truthsayers, Tom Cruise as this movie's Nick Morton, a character of "troubling moral turpitude", is the first thing that is wrong with The Mummy, and the second is the movie's three disparate elements - action adventure, horror, and longwinded "Dark Universe" exposition, all presented in switching, changing fashion, a symptom of the curse affecting Universal Studio's overriding concept: like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which failed to get viewers excited about a bewildering mix of disparate literary figures (the Invisible Man, Mina Harker, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray, etc, all thrown together in one story), Universal Studios wants the world to get excited about a "Dark Universe" in which gods and monsters from all over hangout and cross paths and mix in a universe that Universal hopes will lead to endless blockbuster instalments, but I'd have preferred intelligent updates of individual monster classics linked together by genre alone over this already, after just one instalment, disjointed marketing exercise.

★★☆☆☆

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The Fly II (1989)

The son of Seth Brundle, the character played by Jeff Goldblum in the original The Fly, investigates his father's experiments and falls victim to the same fate, slowly tranforming into a human fly, in this perfectly entertaining but inferior sequel that is all about the Brundlefly reveal because when he at last appears, he brings with him some truly grisly 80s horror effects in the movie's final twenty minutes.

★★★☆☆

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