The Man-Eaters of Tsavo: The Ghost and the Darkness

The Ghost and the Darkness is a criminally underrated historical thriller from 1996 starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas that is based on the fascinating true story of the Man-Eaters of Tsavo. It received a very mixed reception when it was released, the film’s director Stephen Hopkins expressed mixed feelings about it and Roger Ebert hated it so much that he said it was one of the worst films of 1996. With all due respect to the late Mr. Ebert, I don’t know what the hell he was talking about. He must have seen a different movie from the one I saw, because the one I saw was damn good.

But first, some background. In 1898, the British were attempting to build a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. Over a period of nine months, from March to December of 1898, the building site was attacked by a pair of male lions who killed many of the workers. The lions were eventually killed by Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, the man in charge of overseeing the project. The lions were ferocious and cunning adversaries and the second one only died after Patterson shot it nine times. Patterson later wrote a book about his experiences which was published in 1907 (he also had the skins of the lions made into rugs, and later the skins were sent to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where they are still on display today).

Paramount Pictures

The historical accuracy of the book is debated, since Patterson may have exaggerated parts of the story. It’s hard to say for sure exactly how many people were killed by the lions. Reports from the time put the number at a staggering 135, but more modern studies suggest that the number was closer to around 30. Still, 30 people eaten by lions is a heck of a lot! Even then, that number might not be entirely accurate either since it only accounts for the number of people eaten by the lions, not necessarily the number of people killed but not eaten by the lions. We may never know the exact death toll.

Patterson’s book has been adapted to film several times, with The Ghost and the Darkness being the most recent cinematic telling of the story. The screenplay was written by William Goldman, who was an accomplished writer known for novels and screenplays, including Marathon Man and The Princess Bride. It was directed by Stephen Hopkins, who I know best as the director of Predator 2, which is a goofy but fun movie. Val Kilmer plays Patterson, and even though Patterson is unquestionably the film’s protagonist, he gets second billing to Michael Douglas, who plays an American big game hunter named Charles Remington.

Remington is a fictional character, though he was based to some extent on an actual person. Michael Douglas also produced the film and wasn’t originally going to act in it, but when they were having trouble casting Remington (Anthony Hopkins and Sean Connery turned it down), Douglas decided to play the character himself, which both Hopkins and Goldman have since expressed unhappiness with. When Douglas decided to play the character, the role was greatly expanded from what it was originally and the relationship between Douglas and Hopkins was tense. Hopkins has said that making the film was a nightmare and that he was never happy with the final product, although he was very complimentary of Val Kilmer.

This film had all the makings of a cinematic disaster: creative conflicts, difficult filming conditions, stars with massive egos, etc. In addition to animatronics designed by the great Stan Winston, the production also used real lions, so…yeah. I can imagine that would have been stressful, even if the lions they used for filming were for obvious reasons not as aggressive as the real-life man-eaters. But despite all these obstacles, The Ghost and the Darkness is an excellent film, so after all that preamble let’s talk about the film itself.

The film begins in London with Patterson being hired by an arrogant financier named Robert Beaumont to get the railway project in Kenya back on schedule. Beaumont gives Patterson five months, which Patterson finds agreeable since his wife is due to give birth to their first child in six months and he has promised her that he will be there for the child’s birth. It is a promise he will not be able to keep. Beaumont is played by the late Tom Wilkinson, who sadly passed away in December 2023. He was a very gifted actor, and he makes an impression in this film, despite only being in two scenes.

Upon arriving at the work site, Patterson meets Samuel, the foreman. Samuel is played superbly by John Kani, who played T’Challa’s father King T’Chaka in the Black Panther movies. Samuel is one of the most likable characters in the film, and he informs Patterson of a recent lion attack. That night Patterson kills an approaching lion and the next day the workers celebrate the danger having passed. Little do they know of the terror that lurks in the tall grass…

Some weeks later, a worker is dragged from his tent in the middle of the night and his remains are found the next day. Patterson and Samuel make the grim discovery that there are two man-eaters on the loose, which Samuel says has never happened before. The workers start to turn on Patterson, since the lion attacks started after he arrived at the camp. The workers also start calling the lions the Ghost and the Darkness, which are extremely badass nicknames, and the beasts take on an almost supernatural aura.

Patterson requests reinforcements but Beaumont denies his request. After all, Beaumont says, what will people think of the great British Empire if we can’t handle two measly lions? Tom Wilkinson is so great at making you hate Beaumont, he is a selfish prick who openly states he doesn’t care at all about the dead workers, he only cares about his bottom line. Sadly, you don’t get to see him get eaten. Ah, well.

A big game hunter named Charles Remington soon arrives at the camp. Remington’s brash personality initially clashes with Patterson’s more laidback demeanor, but the two develop a respect for each other and Kilmer, Kani, and Douglas are great together. After a series of tense and bloody confrontations in which many more workers are killed, the remainder decide to get the hell out of there while the getting’s good. You can’t blame them.

Paramount Pictures

Eventually Patterson, Remington, and Samuel are finally able to slay one of the beasts, but after a night of drinking and celebrating Patterson awakes from a nightmare to discover that the remaining lion has killed Remington. The scene in which Patterson and Samuel discover Remington’s corpse is extremely well-acted by Val Kilmer and John Kani. The two men don’t say a word. They silently burn him in a funeral pyre and light the tall grass on fire in order to drive the lion towards a trap they have set up on the partially completed bridge. The final confrontation occurs at night against the backdrop of the burning grass. Patterson and Samuel are at long last able to defeat the beast, and the film ends with the bridge being completed and Patterson reuniting with his wife and meeting his child.

Val Kilmer is great in this movie. He gives Patterson a slight Irish lilt which is enough to remind the viewer of Patterson’s Irish heritage but is never distracting. Kilmer had a reputation as being difficult to work with and when he made The Ghost and the Darkness he was coming off the release of The Island of Dr. Moreau, the production of which was an infamous disaster. But despite the negative press from that film, Stephen Hopkins said that Kilmer threw himself into the role of Patterson and had a passion for the film. I think it shows.

And while I’m not usually the biggest fan of Michael Douglas, I think he’s quite good in this film. Behind-the-scenes tomfoolery aside, Douglas is believable as a grizzled hunter and his banter with Patterson and Samuel provides much of the film’s emotional backbone. His death is genuinely sad, and Patterson and Samuel’s reactions to the discovery of his death is one of the film’s most emotionally moving moments.

I think this movie is terrific. The cinematography is great, the music by Jerry Goldsmith is rousing and chilling, the acting is great, the characters are likable, it’s scary and suspenseful, and it tells a fascinating true story. I don’t know what more you could ask for, honestly. This film’s negative reception upon its initial release makes no sense to me, and Ebert’s hatred of it in particular is utterly baffling. It’s a minor miracle that The Ghost and the Darkness even got made in the first place, since it had all the makings of an epic cinematic disaster: a troubled production, creative differences, a mixed reception, and disappointing box office. The fact that it turned out as good as it did despite all that is icing on the cake, and it makes me happy that the film has since found an audience and has a cult following.

Paramount Pictures

So there you have it, the last (for now!) of my series about killer animal movies. I hope you’ll agree that I saved the best film for last. I will probably revisit this topic in the future, since there is no shortage of killer animal movies to choose from and I have had a lot of fun watching and writing about these films. Next post is going to be about something different, but until then, as is tradition, here are my rankings of all the movies I’ve discussed over the last few posts.

FINAL RANKINGS:

1. The Ghost and the Darkness
2. Crawl
3. Alligator
4. Backcountry
5. Beast
6. Anaconda
7. Deep Blue Sea 3
8. Meg 2: The Trench
9. Alligator II: The Mutation
10. Staring at a blank wall for 82 minutes
11. Lake Placid (I hate this movie)

MONSTER MASH: KILLER ANIMALS EDITION (Part Three)

Backcountry (2014)

Let’s switch gears for a while and go from a big-budget blockbuster with a tropical setting to a low-budget indie flick in a forest environment. Backcountry is a straightforward story: a young couple named Alex and Jenn go on a weekend camping trip. Alex is secretly planning to propose and wants to take Jenn to a lake in the woods he loved as a kid. But, of course, Alex makes a bunch of macho bullshit mistakes and they end up badly lost in the woods. It seems like a bear may be stalking them and soon the bear attacks and mauls Alex to death. Jenn struggles through the woods back to civilization and survives.

And that’s it, really. There are no generic corporate bad guys, which is refreshing. It’s a straightforward survival story with only two main characters. Alex and Jenn do meet another guy in the woods, an Irish tour guide named Brad who has dinner with them. Brad and Alex don’t like each other and Brad flirts with Jenn, which pisses Alex off. There are some weird vibes from Brad and in a different kind of movie Brad would have stalked them through the woods and tried to violently murder them, and he would probably be from a family of inbred cannibals living in the woods like something out of The Hills Have Eyes or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

But Backcountry is not that kind of movie. On the contrary, Brad helps Jenn at the end of the movie when she manages to find her way back to civilization, which is a nice subversion of expectations. Jenn is a very likable protagonist, and her trek through the wilderness is harrowing and visceral. Alex is a bit of a frustrating character since the predicament he and his girlfriend find themselves in is entirely of his own making. He doesn’t take a map with them into the woods, claiming that he knows the area so well that he doesn’t need one, only to discover that the lake he wanted to take Jenn to isn’t where he thought it was and they are lost. On top of that, he took Jenn’s cell phone out of her backpack and left it back in their car, so they can’t call for help. Along the way, he tries to act like he’s a great outdoorsman by showing off to Jenn like he thinks he’s Bear Grylls or Les Stroud, which he very much isn’t.

IFC Midnight

Still, it’s not like Alex is cartoonishly evil or anything. He’s a normal guy who makes some boneheaded decisions, but, I mean, don’t we all? And the poor guy pays for his sins big time during the terrifying bear attack scene. The bear attack is filmed entirely from Alex and Jenn’s perspective inside the tent, which puts the viewer right into the scene. It’s every camper’s worst nightmare. I’m not an outdoorsy person myself, and Backcountry perfectly encapsulates the reasons why. The bear attack scene is probably the single most frightening sequence in any of the monster movies I’ve written about lately since it feels like something that could actually happen. For all his flaws, Alex didn’t deserve such a grisly demise (the bone-crunching sound effects are hard to get out of your head, as is the sight of Alex’s eviscerated remains).

Backcountry is also based to some extent on a true story of a couple named Mark Jordan and Jacqueline Perry, who were attacked by a bear while kayaking in Canada. The bear mauled Perry and Jordan managed to stab it with a Swiss Army knife to get the bear off her. He then took Perry back to their kayak and attempted to take her to the nearest campsite, but sadly she succumbed to her wounds in the boat. Jordan was later given a medal for bravery by the Canadian government. It’s a tragic story and Backcountry doesn’t sensationalize it (although it does fictionalize it). Bear attacks on humans are fortunately rare, a quick Google search reveals that the odds of being attacked by a bear are one in 2.1 million, but they do happen.

It is a bit disingenuous to call Backcountry a monster movie, it is primarily a survival thriller. It’s not an action movie with big explosions, it’s a slow-burn suspense movie. It’s very well-directed and well-acted, and maintains a tense atmosphere throughout. There’s only one death in the movie and it is a deeply harrowing one, not the kind of cool or fun one where a mercenary gets his head bitten off, and there is no satisfying cathartic moment where the monster is killed in a gory explosion. The film is a chilling reminder that nature is not to be messed with, and while it may not be as entertaining as Deep Blue Sea 3 or Meg 2, it is undeniably a better movie overall and is tied with Crawl as the most purely frightening killer animal movie I’ve written about so far.

Beast (2022)

The 2022 Idris Elba thriller Beast finally gave me something I have been wanting for years. The trailers for the 2011 Liam Neeson movie The Grey strongly implied that there would be a scene in which Liam Neeson fights a wolf in hand-to-claw combat. But if you have seen The Grey (or maybe you read my post about it that I wrote many years ago), you will know that there is no such scene in that film. The screen cuts to black just as the battle is about to begin. I still think of this as being one of the cruelest rug-pulls I have ever experienced in a movie, and although The Grey is still a very good film (albeit one that is very hard to watch), I never quite forgave it for that.

Which is why it thrills me to no end to report that in the movie Beast Idris Elba fights a lion, and it is glorious. I finally got the action-hero-vs.-killer-animal fight that I have wanted for years. Elba plays Dr. Nate Samuels, a recently widowed man on a safari vacation in South Africa with his daughters Meredith and Norah. Nate is attempting to reconnect with his daughters, with whom he became somewhat distant while his wife was dying of cancer. Nate confesses to his old buddy Martin (played by Sharlto Copley, an actor I am always happy to see) that he feels guilty over not having been there for his family when they needed him most.

Nate, Martin, and the girls soon run afoul of a vicious man-eating lion and it doesn’t take long for a ruthless gang of poachers to get involved too. I liked the inclusion of the poachers; they’re solid secondary antagonists and it makes sense to include them since poaching is a real-life problem. It also helps that you don’t feel bad for them when they get eaten. There are a lot more animal attacks in Beast than there were in Backcountry, and while the latter film’s bear attack is the most frightening and impactful, the lion attacks in Beast are still suspenseful and bloody.

Universal Pictures

Beast was directed by an excellently named Icelandic director named Baltasar Kormakur, who films much of the movie in continuous long takes in which the camera is constantly on the move. I like this very immersive filmmaking style and it increases the tension a lot when the lion is on the rampage. Idris Elba is a very good actor and Nate is easy to root for, and when Martin is gravely wounded by the titular beast Nate has to take charge, even though he is not an animal expert like Martin. But Idris Elba is a big guy and Nate proves to be more than capable of taking care of himself and his daughters.

And then there is that final man vs. lion battle, which is great. I have no idea if such a scenario is even remotely plausible, but something tells me that even a guy as beefy as Idris Elba would be promptly eviscerated in such a confrontation. So it might not be very realistic but to be fair to the movie Nate is not the one to strike the final blow against the murderous feline. The lion is on the verge of killing Nate when a different pride of lions (that Martin helped raise) intervenes and kill the man-eater.

Beast isn’t a perfect film or even a very original one, but it’s well-made, it looks great, has likable protagonists, is tense, bloody and has a satisfying, if a bit far-fetched, conclusion. Backcountry and Beast make for a solid killer-animal double feature and offer a nice dose of more grounded thrills after the over-the-top silliness of movies like Deep Blue Sea 3 and Meg 2. I’ve got one more killer-animal movie I’m going to write about soon, and it’s my favorite of all the movies I’ve covered recently. It’s so good that it deserves its own individual write-up, so that is going to be my next post. See you soon.

MONSTER MASH: KILLER ANIMALS EDITION (Part Two)

Another Monster Mash, another batch of animals that want to eat you! My reviews of these movies ended up being a bit longer that I anticipated so I’m going to break them up into multiple posts. Let’s get started with the third entry in a series I have covered before.

Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020)

Deep Blue Sea 3 is the second sequel to the original Deep Blue Sea, which was released all the way back in 1999. The original is a movie that I am still quite fond of and is one of my favorite monster movies I have ever written about. Sadly, the first sequel, Deep Blue Sea 2, which was released straight-to-video in 2018, was mostly boring and failed to recapture the fun of the original film. I can cut the sequel a bit of slack because it didn’t have anywhere near as high of a budget as the original, but there’s still no excuse for how painfully dull the second movie was.

Fortunately, the third movie is a significant improvement over the second and is quite a bit of good cheesy fun. The main character is Dr. Emma Collins, who along with her team is living on an artificial island called Little Happy, where they are studying the effects of climate change on shark mating, or something. It doesn’t really matter, but the movie’s location is one of its strongest points. The man-made island in the middle of nowhere is a great location for a shark movie, cleverly bypassing the issues of why the protagonists can’t just leave or call for help.

It’s also a cool location, period. I haven’t seen a location like this in a movie before, and considering what was probably a pretty low budget it looks very good. It also starts to sink later in the movie after a bunch of explosions, which reminded me of the scene near the end of Casino Royale where James Bond fights a bunch of bad guys in a collapsing building in Venice. It’s like that, but on an entire man-made island and with sharks. Very cool stuff.

Warner Bros.

I won’t lie, the first half or so of this movie is a bit slow. Emma and her cohorts are likable folks but I didn’t particularly care about whatever research they were doing and so for a while you’re just waiting for the sharks to show up. Eventually they do, accompanied by a guy named Richard (who is of course Emma’s ex-boyfriend) and a bunch of shady Australians that turn out to be ruthless mercenaries, let by a bloke named Lucas who is the main (human) villain. Richard and Lucas are tracking the sharks from the second movie (I think), and they even directly reference the events of the previous two movies, which provides a nice bit of connective tissue for the series.

After some conflict between the two groups, Lucas just decides to kill everybody and starts blasting the island apart with some kind of explosive launcher, I don’t know what kind of gun he uses but it’s blue and green and I kept thinking it looked like a Nerf gun. The island starts to sink and the sharks close in. These are also super-intelligent sharks that are very crafty. There are some great kills in this movie, many of which are quite unexpected. The best one happens when Richard decides Lucas has gone too far and jumps off their boat AND DIRECTLY INTO THE GAPING MAW OF A SHARK!! It’s fantastic. There’s another one where one of the protagonists is fighting a bad guy and a shark comes out of nowhere and bites the bad guy’s head clean off! And then Emma kills one of the sharks by smushing it in a trash compactor! Excellent.

Look, Deep Blue Sea 3 is obviously no masterpiece, but it is much more enjoyable than the lackadaisical second film. The movie’s first half is a little slow, but the second half is quite action-packed. There are likable characters, a cool and unique location, and bloody and often unexpected kills. You could do a lot worse for a direct-to-video shark movie that is a sequel to a movie that came out more than 20 years ago.

Meg 2: The Trench (2023)

Here’s another sequel to a movie I wrote about in a previous Monster Mash. Meg 2 is one of those movies that got absolutely dragged over the coals by critics but that I found to be quite enjoyable, although it does take a while to get to the good stuff. Meg 2 was directed by Ben Wheatley, a filmmaker with a strong horror pedigree who cut his teeth with the grisly 2011 indie thriller Kill List and who also directed the 2020 version of Rebecca on Netflix. It wouldn’t surprise me if Meg 2 had a bigger budget than all of Wheatley’s previous films combined, and despite the many flaws of Meg 2 Wheatley is a talented filmmaker, and I will always be in favor of movies in which Jason Statham does battle with enormous prehistoric sharks.

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about the plot of Meg 2, because let’s face it, nobody cares that much. While I enjoyed the original movie The Meg back in 2018, I don’t think the world was clamoring for a sequel. But money talks so we got a sequel anyway. Meg 2 is utterly ludicrous, but perhaps the most surprising thing about it is how sedate the first half feels.

For the first hour of this movie there’s relatively little shark action and way too much focus on the extremely boring corporate bad guys. Why are there always boring corporate bad guys in killer animal movies? The dull villains in this movie don’t even have a fun evil plan, like building a space laser. All they want to do is mine valuable rare minerals from the bottom of the ocean and sell them to make money. Boring! Be more creative, bad guys! You’re already rich, you don’t need more money! Take a hint from James Bond villains and use your ill-gotten gains to build a freakin’ space laser, sheesh! (What I am realizing here is that I want more movies to feature space lasers.)

Anyway, the somewhat dull first hour is offset when the movie does a nosedive into full-tilt insanity in the last 30 or so minutes. To adapt a phrase from Matt Damon in Saving Private Ryan, Meg 2 takes a nosedive out of the crazy tree and hits every branch on the way down for its totally bonkers climax. All the heroes and villains (and creatures) end up at a gorgeous tropical vacation island called Fun Island where all hell breaks loose.

Warner Bros. I like the tagline too.

Here are some of the highlights: Jason Statham zips around on a jet ski skewering megalodons with improvised explosive-tipped harpoons, all while bad guys chase after him shooting at him with machine guns! Heroes and villains alike are attacked by toothy creatures called snappers that are kind of like Gila monsters crossed with velociraptors! Lots of tourists are devoured by giant sharks! Statham kills one of the big sharks by impaling it with one of the rotor blades from a crashed helicopter! He also kills the main human bad guy by kicking him into the maw of one of the sharks and dropping the one-liner “So long, chum!” (GET IT??)

One of the returning characters from the first movie who was mainly comic relief has now become a badass who wields a massive handgun equipped with poison-tipped bullets, and he then fires the gun one-handed whilst flying through the air like something out of a John Woo or Michael Bay movie! And best of all, there is a GIANT OCTOPUS, in other words, a KRAKEN!!! And then there is an all-out KRAKEN/MEGALODON FIGHT!!!

Whew. So yeah, this movie’s last 30 minutes are completely insane in the best possible way. It’s a shame that the rest of the movie doesn’t have the same momentum of the last 30 minutes, if that level of craziness could have been sustained for the entire movie we might have had something truly special on our hands. Despite a thorough critical drubbing, Meg 2 still made nearly $400 million worldwide so it wouldn’t surprise me if Meg 3 rises from the deep in another few years. If so, here’s hoping that the focus will be less on boring illegal mining operations and more on full-bore aquatic monster mayhem since that is clearly where the strength of this franchise rests.

MONSTER MASH: KILLER ANIMALS EDITION (Part One)

There are a LOT of Killer Animal movies. Every single animal you can think of has been put into a horror movie and made to kill people. Not just obvious ones like sharks, lions, bears, alligators, and snakes, but also slugs, whales, frogs, beavers, and on and on. Basically, if it walks on four legs (or slithers) it has eaten someone in a movie. And while I am not going to exhaustively cover every single Killer Animal movie ever made (there are far too many, and shark movies in particular are their own entire subgenre) I will be talking about some that I enjoy.

Let’s start with one of my favorite animals, the noble alligator. Alligators are fascinating creatures, there is something prehistoric and primordial about them and they look like they could swallow you whole with one bite. The makers of the following films clearly agreed.

Alligator (1980) and Alligator II: The Mutation (1991)

You know that urban legend about alligators in the sewers? Well, 1980’s Alligator asks the age-old question, “what would happen if a teenage girl’s pet baby alligator got flushed down the toilet and ended up in the sewer, where it spent the next 12 years feeding on dead animals that were used in experiments by an unscrupulous corporation that was trying to develop a growth formula for livestock, and the sewer gator mutated into a giant gator beast that was 36 feet long and perpetually hungry?”

We have all asked ourselves this question at some point.

Fortunately, Alligator presents an entertaining answer to this timeless query. The main character is a world-weary police detective named David Madison, played by Robert Forster. Some severed body parts start showing up in the sewers and during the course of his investigation Madison begins to suspect that there is something lurking below the streets of Chicago (or is it somewhere in Missouri? It’s unclear where the movie is supposed to take place, although it was filmed in Los Angeles).

Group 1 Films

Madison meets a herpetologist named Marisa Kendall and the two of them form a romantic relationship while hunting the gator. Nothing like hunting a giant mutant reptile to bring couples together! Also, a herpetologist is someone who studies reptiles and amphibians, and not someone who studies herpes. Please tell me I’m not the only person who thought of this.

Anyway, after Madison spearheads a police operation to flush the alligator out of the sewers and the attempt fails, his boss caves to pressure from the mayor (who is in the pocket of the evil corporation that experimented on animals and caused the alligator to mutate in the first place) and suspends Madison. This frees up his schedule so he and Marisa can concentrate on alligator-hunting full-time.

The alligator itself is a fearsome beast and looks very cool, and Madison eventually kills it by blowing it up with a bomb. I am always happy when a monster movie ends with the monster being blasted into tiny bits. But before its explosive demise, the gator wreaks substantial havoc. The gator’s killing sprees are the most fun parts of the movie, as well they should be since monsters eating people are the reason people watch monster movies in the first place. The best scene comes near the end, when the gator attacks an outdoor wedding and all of the sleazy scientists and corporate types and the corrupt mayor are either smashed flat or disappear down the beast’s prodigious gullet.

The movie has a good sense of humor and has the good sense both to not take itself too seriously and to not be too long. The movie is a flat 90 minutes, which is exactly as long as it should be. There are some funny moments, like a guy selling kitschy alligator souvenirs when the police are hunting the beast and the movie has fun introducing a hardass big-game hunter named Colonel Brock who is supposed to be a super-cool animal-hunting expert and is promptly eaten.

Shout! Factory

Alligator is one of many Killer Animal movies released in an attempt to capitalize on the success of Jaws in 1975. It is not a great movie by any means but it is one of the better Jaws imitators. Robert Forster’s protagonist is scrappy and likable and the monster looks cool, and there are some good kills. Time also seems to have been good to it, it has an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a very cheesy movie and the pacing lags a bit at times but it’s still good fun and the recent 4K Blu-Ray from Shout! Factory is well worth your time.

Not so much for the “sequel”, Alligator II: The Mutation, released 11 years later in 1991. I put “sequel” in quotes because Alligator 2 is basically the same movie. It retreads the same territory without adding anything to it and ends up feeling like a tired imitation, which is too bad because this poster is awesome.

Golden Hawk Entertainment

Sadly, the movie does not live up to this glorious poster, which I would happily hang on my wall.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: an unscrupulous business tycoon dumps a bunch of chemicals into the sewers which mutates a baby alligator to enormous size and when drifters start to go missing and severed body parts start turning up a world-weary detective named David starts investigating and okay Alligator 2 is the same movie as the first one. The main character even has the same first name and there is at least one shot that is straight-up lifted from the first movie.

It’s lazy filmmaking, to say the least. Alligator 2 also makes the mistake of spending too much time focusing on corporate skullduggery. In the first movie the sleazy corporate villains were side characters and we spent most of the movie with the likable protagonist. For some reason Alligator 2 gives way too much screentime to the boring evil business tycoon, who, in addition to dumping chemicals in the sewer, is also a greedy real estate developer? The connection between these two branches on the Tree of Evil is never made clear.

But it also doesn’t matter, because of course Mr. Sleazy Tycoon gets eaten. There are other subplots involving the mayor’s guilt for being in the pocket of Mr. Sleazy Tycoon and the mayor’s daughter and the chief of police is also the mayor’s daughter’s godfather and who cares? There is too much focus on miscellaneous chicanery and not enough monster action. It’s also mostly bloodless, as opposed to the first movie which wasn’t excessively gory but at least it had some blood when people got EATEN BY A GIANT GATOR.

Fortunately, Alligator 2 picks up a bit when it introduces the most entertaining characters. These are a group of cousin-marryin’, moonshine-swillin’, gator-wrasslin’, redneck good ol’ boys, led by a fella named Hawkins. These fellers are by far the best part of the movie. But then of course most of them are promptly eaten. At least Hawkins gets to go out like a badass, locked in mortal combat with the beast. And the movie somewhat redeems itself by having the protagonists kill the gator by blowing it up with rocket launchers, and I will never be able to fully dislike a movie in which a giant alligator is blown up with rocket launchers (more movies should have this).

The ways in which Alligator 2 borrows from the first movie are too numerous to mention, so I’m not going to bother to catalogue them all. But it doesn’t manage to do anything better than the first movie did more than a decade prior. I wasn’t aware that the original movie even had a sequel until a week or so ago and I thought it sounded like good cheesy fun, but sadly Alligator 2 is mostly cheese without much fun. Not even the presence of genre stalwarts like Dee Wallace and Kane Hodder can save it.

I did like the redneck gator-hunters though.

Lake Placid (1999)

I do not like Lake Placid.

It was directed by Steve Miner, whose horror directing credits include Friday the 13^th Part 2, Friday the 13^th Part III, and Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, so you’d think he would be able to handle a movie about a killer alligator, but you would be wrong because Lake Placid is bad.

20^th Century Fox. “You’ll Never Know What Bit You” is a solid tagline though.

But what makes it so bad? Mostly the characters. There are four main characters in this movie and I HATE ALL OF THEM. Bridget Fonda plays a paleontologist who never stops whining and is a condescending jerk. Brendan Gleeson plays the grumpy sheriff who seems to actively hate himself, his job, and everyone around him. Oliver Platt plays a horny, rich asshole who makes crude sexual comments about every woman he lays eyes on. And Bill Pullman is the least offensive character, a fish and game officer who mostly just seems bored. The movie even has the gall to try to foist a romantic subplot on Fonda and Pullman’s characters, and it rings utterly, utterly hollow.

Everybody in the movie seems to hate each other and none of the actors have any chemistry. I hate Oliver Platt’s character the most, he is an aggressively unpleasant douchebag and every time he opens his mouth I want to put my fist in his face. I can’t think of another movie off the top of my head in which every single character is so unlikable and impossible to care about.

Worse yet, none of these jerks get eaten!! I was sure that at least one of them would but none of them did. Even Platt! His character had “Gator Bait” written all over him and then he doesn’t get eaten! Both Alligator movies had the good sense to turn the sleazy corporate types into gator chow, but Lake Placid can’t even get that right. I think at times it tries to be a horror comedy, but it fails miserably on both counts because it isn’t scary and its attempts at humor aren’t funny.

This movie has no stakes, no tension, no drama, and no reason to care. The monster in Alligator killed a good 15-20 people and terrorized an entire city. The casualties in Lake Placid amount to two people, one bear, one cow, and one moose. And I felt the most sympathy for the bear, the cow, and the moose.

All of this is compounded by the fact that Stan Winston worked on this movie. Winston was a legend whose credits include Terminator, Jurassic Park, Predator, Iron Man, Aliens, and many more. Even though the monster in this movie looks good, there is very little monster action and the characters are so unlikable that the whole movie sinks like a stone. Even Betty White as a foul-mouthed old lady who secretly feeds cows to the creature provides only momentary amusement. Although at one point she says she’s rooting for the gator and she hopes it eats everyone else, and I strongly agreed with her.

Worse yet, this piece of crap movie somehow spawned an entire series. There are SIX of these damn things! SIX!!

I hate Lake Placid. It’s not scary, it’s not funny, it has awful characters, it wasted the talents of Stan Winston (a bona fide legend), it insults the intelligence of its audience at every opportunity, and worst of all, it’s BORING. There are only two good things about it: the cool-looking monster and the fact that it is only 82 minutes long (which still somehow feels like too much). This might be my least-favorite movie I have ever watched for one of these Monster Mash posts of mine, and I suffered through Humanoids from the Deep and Wolfen.

One of this movie’s sequels was 2015’s Lake Placid vs. Anaconda, which leads us to our next movie…

Anaconda (1997)

When I was talking about the Ninja Turtles a couple weeks ago, I described the 90’s Ninja Turtles movies as iconic slices of 90’s cheese, and the same applies to Anaconda. This is one of those so-bad-it’s-good movies that has developed a cult following over the years, and it’s not hard to see why.

Columbia Pictures

The cast includes Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, and Owen Wilson. J.Lo plays the director of a film crew making a documentary about a long-lost Amazonian tribe. As they travel down the Amazon River, they encounter Paul Serone, a Paraguayan snake hunter played by Voight. Serone’s behavior is immediately suspicious, and of course it turns out that he’s a poacher hunting for a massive anaconda, and he will stop at nothing to bring the beast in alive for a big payday.

I’m not usually the biggest Jon Voight fan, but he is legendary in this movie. He spends half the movie glowering like he just sucked on a lemon and he is so shifty that it is remarkable anyone trusts him at all. I don’t know what a Paraguayan accent sounds like so I don’t know if Voight’s accent in this film is in any way accurate (though somehow I doubt it), but what I do know is that the man chews the scenery like there is no tomorrow, and I respect it.

Columbia Pictures

He’s making this face for pretty much the entire movie. Of course he inevitably betrays the rest of the group and most of them die, and then he uses J.Lo and Ice Cube as snake bait. This backfires horribly and his death scene is one of the all-time best. There’s a shot from INSIDE THE SNAKE’S MOUTH AS IT SWALLOWS VOIGHT WHOLE! And then IT BARFS HIM UP WHILE HE IS STILL ALIVE AND PARTIALLY DIGESTED, AND HE WINKS AT J.LO!

Amazing.

I’ve read comments online of people talking about how much this scene traumatized them as kids, and if I had seen this movie as a kid it would have traumatized me too, but watching it in 2024 it’s more funny than scary. The titular anaconda is CGI for a lot of the movie, and it’s that wonky mid-90’s CGI that still had that uncanny valley effect. It doesn’t hold up particularly well but the goofy special effects add to the movie’s goofy charm. This movie has the kind of charm that Lake Placid tried for and missed completely.

J.Lo and Ice Cube are likable leads and Jon Voight’s hammy performance steals the movie. It’s a schlocky movie but it’s highly entertaining schlock that is reasonably well-made, in spite of (and perhaps because of) the goofy special effects. It’s a fun popcorn movie that is just the thing for a Friday night with friends and drinks.

Before I close things out, I have to give a special mention to Alexandre Aja’s 2019 film Crawl, which is a top-notch creature feature that I’m not going to say a whole lot about here because I already talked about it back in 2019 and I don’t have much to add. It’s about a college student and her dad who get stuck in the basement of their house in the middle of a massive hurricane, the basement is filling with water and hungry gators are lurking. Crawl is an excellent nail-biter, with solid performances, very good special effects, bloody kills, and constantly escalating tension. I highly recommend it. See you next time for more killer animals!

Expendables 4 is a Bad Movie

I liked the first two Expendables movies. They’re dumb but they’re good fun, and it was fun to see action movie stars from different eras interact with each other and trade catchphrases and punches. But the third Expendables movie, released way back in 2014, just felt flat, even though Mel Gibson played the bad guy (anyone remember that? I think that Harrison Ford and Wesley Snipes were also in that movie). The third movie tanked at the box office and the series appeared dead in the water. But for some reason, it was revived last year with the stupidly-named Expend4bles, which is dumb so I’m going to call it Expendables 4, or just E4 for short.

E4 flopped even harder than the third movie, only grossing $51 million out of a $100 million budget. It’s safe to say that if the Expendables franchise looked dead in the water before, its floating corpse has now been torn to bits by hungry sharks.

Lionsgate. “They’ll Die When They’re Dead” is a stupid tagline and I hate it.

E4 is a shockingly lazy piece of work. The first thing that I noticed about it was how bad it looks. Every single scene in this movie that takes place outdoors looks like it was filmed in front of a green screen, which if it’s done well is not a problem, but this movie does it extremely poorly. I’m not sure why, but all of the exterior shots in this movie look fake and cheap and awful. It’s very distracting, and makes me wonder where that $100 million budget went, because it sure as hell wasn’t to the special effects.

Most of the third act and climax of the movie take place on a giant cargo ship, and whenever they’re on the deck of the ship the sky and the water in the background look so bad. I can’t get over how bad it looks, I mean, District 9, for example, is a movie that cost $30 million and came out in 2009, and it still holds up visually (it also has a good story and characters worth caring about, but that’s beside the point). E4 had nearly a decade and a half of technological improvements and more than three times the budget, and it looks like a straight-to-video cheapie.

The movie’s plot, if you can even call it that, is simplicity itself. Some bad guys stole some nuclear warheads or whatever and the good guys try to stop them. The bad guys are working for some guy code-named Ocelot, and the Expendables are hired by a CIA guy named Marsh who is played by Andy Garcia to stop the bad guys and wouldn’t you know it, it turns out that Marsh actually is Ocelot! What a shocking twist!

Or maybe it would be if anyone cared, but nobody does.

Now am I going to rant for a bit about a plot point in this movie that is so stupid it has bothered me ever since I watched it. OK, so, early in the movie there’s a big action scene where most of the Expendables crew are on the ground fighting bad guys and Sylvester Stallone is flying their plane around. Stallone’s plane gets shot down and everyone thinks he’s dead, and for reasons that are stupid so I’m not going to get into them everyone blames Jason Statham’s character for his death.

So then the rest of the crew head to the cargo ship I mentioned a couple paragraphs ago to stop the dumb bad guys from shooting nukes or whatever. But the good guys are down a couple members because Stallone is (apparently) dead and they kick Statham off the team because they blame him for Stallone’s (apparent) death. But, of course, the team is promptly captured and have to be rescued by Statham, who, of course, secretly followed them. There follows a prolonged battle where so many faceless henchmen are killed that I started to wonder where they all kept coming from, like surely that cargo ship could only hold a certain number of henchmen. It was like the ship had an ant infestation, but with henchmen instead of ants.

Anyway, eventually all of the henchmen are FINALLY dead and the other Expendables have left the boat because it’s about to explode or something, setting the stage for a final showdown between Jason Statham and, er, Andy Garcia. The fact that the movie expects us to take Andy Freaking Garcia as a serious threat for Jason Freaking Statham, after we have spent a large portion of the movie watching Statham effortlessly dispatch scores of infinitely-respawning henchmen, is absurd. It’s like if Godzilla had to fight a giant teddy bear or something, it’s just dumb. Some part of me was hoping for a Statham/Garcia fight, because that would have been hilarious. But wouldn’t you know it, who shows up in a helicopter in the nick of time to blast Garcia into tiny bits, save Statham, and sink the cargo ship with missiles? Why, it’s Sylvester Stallone, of course! He faked his death and shows up just in time to save his best buddy! Yay!

Aside from being an enormous cliché, the method that in which Stallone faked his death is absurd. The movie reveals that after his plane was struck by a missile earlier in the movie, Stallone retrieved some guy that he had secretly stashed in the plane and puts him in the pilot’s seat so after the plane crashes everyone will find the body and think that he (Stallone) is dead. Stallone then parachutes to safety.

I have so many questions. Why in the hell would Stallone not tell his buddies that he had survived? Faking his death serves no purpose and makes no sense. Why would he do this? Because of this, the rest of the team goes after the bad guys minus two of their best team members and promptly get captured. And they spend a large amount of time blaming Statham for Stallone’s death, and at no point does Stallone ever see fit to intervene in this. He basically leaves the team high and dry for no discernible reason. The best I can figure is that maybe Stallone had a scheduling conflict or something so the writers had to come up with some half-assed excuse to explain his absence for three-quarters of the movie (although that is sheer speculation on my part).

But let’s go back to the method of death-faking for a second. You’re telling me that Stallone had some poor schmuck stashed away in the plane just in the off-chance that the plane would get hit by a missile and he would have to fake his death? It sure sounds like Stallone was planning to fake his death, but that doesn’t make sense either. Did he want the plane to get hit by a missile? Did he even know that the bad guys would have missiles capable of taking down his large plane? Did he have some other death-faking scheme in mind in case the plane didn’t get hit by a missile???

I am thinking about this way too much, and probably more than the makers of this movie did. The bottom line is that Expendables 4 stinks and Jason Statham deserves better. He does a good job carrying the movie and he kicks a lot of ass, but the storytelling is so shoddy and the filmmaking is so lazy that the movie sinks like a cargo ship stuffed overly full of ant-henchmen. That doesn’t even make sense, but it makes more sense than this crappy movie.

Anyway, now that I have gotten that out of my system by ranting about movies I didn’t like, it’s time to talk about stuff I do like. I’m not sure yet what my next post will be about but it will be about something I like. See you then.

Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is a Bad Movie

Usually, I like to write about stuff I like. But sometimes it can be therapeutic to rant about stuff that one does not like. Today and tomorrow I am going to indulge in a bit of ranting about two movies I saw last year that I did not care for.

The first of these movies is Zack Snyder’s latest Netflix movie, Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire. This is an original sci-fi film, although it does not feel like one. It borrows heavily from just about every major sci-fi movie ever. The most obvious examples are Star Wars and Star Trek, but if you look closely you’ll see DNA from Avatar, Dune, Alien/Aliens, Blade Runner, Guardians of the Galaxy, and probably loads of others.

Netflix

And while it is not automatically a bad thing to take inspiration from previous films, Rebel Moon makes the critical error of not doing anything original or interesting with any of the concepts from those other films. Instead, it takes a whole bunch of random stuff from all those movies and tosses them into a blender, and then turns that blender on to the highest setting without putting the lid on the blender first. The result is a mess, a near-incoherent hodgepodge of cliches without any sense that Zack Snyder understood what made those other films good in the first place.

I am usually hesitant to place a film’s failure at the feet of one individual because films take a lot of work from a lot of people to create, but in the case of Rebel Moon I am putting the blame squarely on Zack Snyder. He directed, co-wrote, and co-produced the movie. He also came up with the story and was the cinematographer. It’s his movie, and therefore it is his fault (although maybe I can also blame his co-screenwriters for not being able to turn Snyder’s incoherent story into anything resembling a meaningful whole).

The main character is Kora, formerly a fearsome warrior for the Motherworld, now living a peaceful life on a farming planet. Everything is fine until an evil Admiral for the Imperium shows up and demands that the villagers give the Imperium their excess grain. He then kills the village leader and leaves some of his soldiers behind to oversee the harvest and make sure that the villagers don’t try anything fishy. For some reason, the soldiers he leaves behind are (with one exception) violent sociopaths who promptly try to rape one of the villagers. Kora intervenes and kills the soldiers, and then leaves to recruit people to help them defend the village against the Imperium.

Or something.

If you’re wondering what the difference is between the Motherworld and the Imperium, good question. To be fair, the movie probably explained this at some point and I just forgot, but this movie’s lore is so boring and generic that I don’t care. It is immediately evident that Rebel Moon is a tired rehash of Star Wars.

After Kora leaves the village, she and a buddy of hers basically spend the rest of the movie hopping from planet to planet meeting other wacky characters and getting them to join their…resistance, I guess? One of the biggest problems I have with this movie is that it never feels like the characters have any real goal in mind, they just go from planet to planet and there are a few action scenes and then they go back to Kora’s home planet and then the movie ends. The sequel is coming out in a few months and for the sake of completion I’ll probably watch it, so there might be a follow-up to this post in a little while.

The movie has no characters that are worth giving a toss about and the plot is paper-thin. It never feels like anything is at stake, and it was a source of endless frustration to me that the protagonists never moved with any sense of urgency, it’s like they’re on an intergalactic sightseeing tour or something. They’re not heroes, they’re tourists. In the first Star Wars, Luke and Obi-Wan have a solid goal, which is to rescue Princess Leia. In the process they meet Han and Chewie and discover the Death Star and join the Rebel Alliance and so on and so forth. There’s always a goal, and that goal has stakes and consequences and a real feeling of urgency and immediacy that Rebel Moon lacks entirely.

Rebel Moon also feels like a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it too. The movie is rated PG-13 but it feels like Zack Snyder wanted it to be R. The main villain, the evil Admiral, uses a stick or a cane of some kind to beat people to death (he treats the stick with a sort of reverence that led to me thinking of it as the Holy Beating Stick, used to administer Divine Beatdowns), but every time he starts to beat someone’s ass with it the camera pulls away and just shows him swinging like a madman. The effect ends up being more comical than frightening. The villains are sadistic and cruel but the movie never commits to showing their evil and constantly hedges its bets.

And the protagonists are just so, so boring. They’re all cardboard cutouts of characters from other movies, and there is no reason to care about any of them. There’s one guy who is introduced with a long and pointless scene where he rides a creature that reminded me of Buckbeak the hippogriff from Harry Potter, and this guy is buff, shirtless, and had long hair, so I called him Bronan the Brobarian. What was his real name? I dunno. There’s another character who fights a weird spider monster who was abducting children for some reason. What was her name? I dunno.

Some of the visuals in the movie are pretty cool, and there are a handful of decent action scenes, which play to Zack Snyder’s strengths as a filmmaker. He’s a good visual stylist and he directs good action, but in terms of plot and character his movies, and Rebel Moon in particular, often fall flat. At the end of the movie, one of the characters has some dumb line about how they’ve struck a blow against the Motherworld or the Imperium or whatever, but it is a statement that rings utterly hollow.

The protagonists in this film accomplish nothing. They mess around on a couple of planets and fight a few battles, and that’s about it. There’s no sense that the characters have earned anything. The evil Admiral with the Holy Beating Stick isn’t even dead! He gets resurrected Anakin Skywalker-style to be EVEN MORE (generically) EVIL. The movie’s ending is a feeble wheeze that does nothing to get the viewer excited for the inevitable sequel.

Rebel Moon is not a good movie, and its dumb subtitle, A Child of Fire, sounds like something an angsty teenager would come up with. I’ve liked some of Zack Snyder’s previous movies but this one is just so, so bad. See you tomorrow for another bad movie!