Monster (2008)

I've seen more than a few bad movies over the years. I've seen three Uwe Boll movies. I've seen DC Comics crank out Steel, Catwoman, Batman & Robin, and Superman IV. I've seen movies like The Room, Gymkata, Hobgoblins, and Manos: The Hands of Fate. But oddly enough, until recently, I'd never seen a movie from The Asylum.

For those of you who have yet to discover The Asylum, they're a Hollywood production company that specializes in "mockbusters," low-budget knockoffs of mainstream hits. Released straight to video shelves just before the theatrical releases of their mainstream counterparts, The Asylum's mockbusters are usually only watched by rubes who don't know the difference and people who know The Asylum's track record.

But as I said, it was only recently that I first saw an Asylum movie. After I happened to buy the Blu-ray of Cloverfield this past May, I suddenly felt compelled to hunt down its Asylum equivalent, Monster. I don't know why, but stupid ol' me had to run down to a local video store that was going out of business and buy their copy of Monster on the cheap. And holy crap, everything I'd heard about The Asylum was right.

Monster follows Sarah (Sarah Lieving) and Erin (Erin Sullivan), a pair of American sisters who have arrived in Tokyo to shoot a documentary about global warming. They aren't there for long, however, before Japan is rattled by what is believed to be the aftershocks of a massive earthquake that struck the country recently.

But as you may surmise from the movie's title, they're something much worse. These quakes are actually a precursor to the arrival of a tremendous beast, a gigantic octopus come to lay waste to Tokyo. Caught in the bedlam, Sarah and Erin document the chaos with their camcorder as they desperately hunt for safety.

Want to know my opinion of Monster? Take all of my complaints about Cloverfield and multiply them by a million. The Asylum practically got all the same things wrong as Cloverfield did, only they do it worse. If you want to see someone turn a mediocre movie into a crappy one, go rent Monster.

The sad part is that it's not one of those bad movies that's a catastrophic failure, either. It's not a BloodRayne or The Room kind of bad movie, where it's so bad that it sends me into a frenzy. It's one of those bad movies where, once it's over, you say, "Okay, that just happened. Whatever." I really don't like that particular type of bad movie, because at least the really crappy ones can inspire some sort of emotional response. The really bad ones, I can end up writing 2,000+ words about how much they suck. But not Monster. It's just kind of there.

But I guess I'd better get into just what makes the movie that way, so let's get started. At the helm of this sinking ship is Erik Estenberg, who has Monster listed as his only credit on his IMDB profile. His work here is really lame, showing an extreme lack of imagination. I know Estenberg was only hired to make a cheap knockoff of Cloverfield, but he could have at least tried making it watchable.

Then again, Estenberg is hindered by the movie's obviously meager budget. The movie looks like it was filmed in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles instead of Japan, making it feel cheap and artificial. But the budgetary limitations are even more obvious in how the monster is depicted. In Cloverfield, you rarely see the monster. Estenberg takes this one step further by never showing the monster. You see a tentacle here, a tentacle there. But that's all you ever get to see of the monster. Whenever it appears, it's obscured by really fake-looking camera malfunctions, or appears off-screen and has its attack narrated by whichever characters are in front of the camera at the time. I know there probably wasn't enough money in the budget to do any tremendous monster effects, but geez, it's like nobody wanted to bother.

I also thought the screenplay, written by Asylum co-founder David Michael Latt, was seriously lacking. I know that he didn't have to do anything creative, but did Latt have to tank it so badly? It's like he didn't even want to try. I mean, was it so hard to come up with something beyond "some people with a camcorder meet a monster in a major city"?

And did the characters have to be as bad as Cloverfield's too? The two main characters in Monster aren't totally unlikable, but they still tend to get annoying. Their whole routine of telling everyone they encounter that they're Americans gets old really quickly. But then again, they almost have to tell everyone what country they're from. I mean, I thought the two white girls who don't speak a word of any language other than English were totally Japanese at first.

All that's left for me to critique is the acting, which shouldn't be too hard, considering that there's only two major players in the movie. And to tell you the truth, neither Sarah Lieving or Erin Sullivan are really worth writing about. It's not that they're bad, they just aren't very good. The fact that the characters are so poorly written doesn't help anything, either. I think that with better actresses, it might not have been so bad. But Lieving and Sullivan just weren't strong enough to carry the whole movie by themselves.

I was familiar with The Asylum's reputation before I saw Monster, but nothing could have readied me for the amount of sheer failure that was displayed on my TV screen. Monster fails at being a monster movie, it fails at using the "found footage" gimmick, and it fails at being entertaining. It's not even a good bad movie. If it were like Uwe Boll's movies, where you can have oodles of fun mocking them, then I'd have been okay with it. But as it stands, Monster is just your run-of-the-mill crappy movie that I'll probably never give a second thought to. And I can't believe I actually paid good money to own a copy of this on DVD. What's wrong with me?

Final Rating: *