Two-Headed Shark Attack (2012) - 2/4

“Two heads means twice as many teeth!” is the pithy quip of dialogue that sums up the brilliant idea behind Two-Headed Shark Attack, a new sharksploitation motion picture from The Asylum. The Asylum, a production company infamous for blockbuster rip-offs and intentionally hackneyed plots, is, along with the SyFy network, the champion of increasingly preposterous sea monster movies. Sharktopus may be SyFy’s most absurd film so far; Two-Headed Shark Attack is The Asylum’s, a film so abstracted into self-parodical irony, it’s a metaphor for itself alone.

A highly nebulous pretext about a field-trip is intended to explain why a menagerie of d-cup bikini bimbos and ‘roid-guzzling muscle-heads are on a yacht together. Unfortunately the doubtless highly-educational cruise is interrupted by the central plot, namely the two-headed shark’s attack upon the keel, leaving the motley crew stranded on a sinking atoll.

Duality is the leitmotif governing the Two-Headed Shark Attack narrative. The shark has two heads, so there are two survivors, two humongous hooters on each girl, two boats for douchebags to get eaten in. Starring Charlie O’Connell, the film’s duality cries out for the presence of Jerry O’Connell. Few films have done so since Season 5 of Sliders, but this is one. Instead, Charlie is joined by Carmen Electra, whose purpose in the film is to sunbathe the hell out of the deck. Even the shark’s medium of existence is dual, sometimes CGI and sometimes a huge, rubber head whose teeth bend when the flailing actors touch them.

Before nearly everyone is eaten, we are treated to every form of stupid decision, lesbian kissing, a few unleashed melons, terrible acting, and a total waste of whatever talent Charlie O’Connell can lay claim to as his lightly-grazed leg so debilitates him that he is condemned to foreground reaction shots like shouting, “They’re in danger!” whenever a shark eats someone.

The problem with Two-Headed Shark Attack is that, while two-headed sharks are possible, as are Carmel Electra’s leatherette buttocks, the film’s abstractions take us too far beyond the realms of fun, into the realms of pure this-oughta-be-fun ideas. Nevertheless, the farthest realms of shark possibility have yet to be explored and I hope The Asylum is ready to launch that expedition. J.G. Ballard’s The Shark Exhibition, about a cult of shark-attack survivors exploring the sexual possibilities of shark wounds, rows of disordered teeth in flesh, and the notion of being devoured, needs to be adapted. Salman Rushdie’s Islamasharks, in which Muslims train sharks to destroy the Miss America pageant, is a thoroughly cinematic novel waiting to be filmed. And, last but not least, Jose Saramango’s The Sharking, in which all the world’s bankers suddenly become sharks is the non-too-subtle social commentary The Asylum is ideal to carry out. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Wolf Town (2010) - 2/4

A group of youngsters take a road trip to a local ghost town where they are attacked by an unfriendly wolf pack. They have to use their ingenuity to defeat the wolves, hiding in the abandoned buildings of an old mining town. Not a terribly inspired plot. Wolf Town would be a fairly indistinct, low-budget animal-attack movie were it not for a few admirable quirks that made me want to write about it.

The most impressive of Wolf Town’s features is, oddly enough, its psychological realism. The film’s psychology is, in fact, infuriatingly realistic. In countless films, a total wimp like Shaun in Shaun of the Dead becomes an ass-kicking badass the moment a real threat shows up. Perhaps we all believe really intensely in the fight-or-flight response or, as I think, we believe the world works like video games. If we’re really good at Resident Evil and have shot enough zombies, we’ll be ready for a real zombie threat. I suspect the people who spend all day playing Resident Evil would do little more than defecate and die when the real zombies showed up. Lazy, videogaming nerds like to believe they have inner badasses just waiting to come out, but they don’t: a pussy is a pussy is a pussy is a pussy, as Gertrude Stein never said. It’s curious how this implicit belief is one also shared by the conservatives who think video game violence can translate into real violence. Both are wrong, of course. Video games and real life threats are totally unrelated.

The protagonist of Wolf Town, Kyle (Levi Fiehler) is a pussy, as his friend tells him. He’s so afraid to ask a girl out, he contrives the road trip just to do it. He’s humiliated when he sees her with Rob (Josh Kelly), an alpha male sort of guy who did ask her out. When Rob says ‘Let’s just go to Vegas’, Kyle is ready to back down. When the wolves arrive, Kyle remains a pussy who whines and cries, while Rob remains an alpha male, barking out orders and making decisions. This is psychological reality. Meek guys like Kyle do not become alphas whenever a tense situation arrives. And as much as the film’s sympathetic focus on Kyle may make us dislike Rob, and as tedious as overconfident people are, someone has to make the decisions and Kyle is clearly not up to it. This is the psychological realism I admire in Wolf Town. It’s very refreshing, even while it’s infuriating. We want Kyle to man up, but he, like many of us, can’t just do that: it’s not who he is.

That said, there is a feeling of cheapness to Wolf Town. What budget Rebel did have was probably spent on the ghost town setting, a charming concatenation of shacks with an inexplicably intact saloon. The sense of cheapness is probably due to the wolves clearly being huskies and alsatians with a bit of fur-paint, and we rarely see more than two on screen at any given moment. On the one hand, director John Rebel deserves praise for using real animals instead of CGI. On the other hand, the use of real dogs does limit what he can do. We’ll never see a wolf injured in any way on screen, for instance, nor will be see them performing impossible jumps.

Rebel settles for editing the dogs wherever they need to be, giving the wolves a strangely mystic quality. This mysticism would be egregious were it not pervading the whole film. The dogs don’t just try to scare their victims off; they disable their car and steal their cell phones. The film’s subtext is one of nature vs humanity. The wolves just want a space to be without human interference, a place that belongs to nature. It’s a line of argument I don’t think carries much weight, whether in Wolf Town or in Avatar, because humans and their activities are a part of the natural order; but it is what it is.

Wolf Town is a mildly entertaining way to pass eighty minutes, especially for wolf-lovers. But the film does drag. However praiseworthy the real dogs and psychological realism may be, Wolf Town could have done with a ton of CGI wolves getting chopped to pieces by a bunch of badass nerds. In a film like this, fun is more important than realism.

A Psychoanalytic Look at Organizm (2008)

Originally a made-for-TV movie that got new life on DVD and Netflix, Organizm is a beautifully perverse film that flew under the radar for that reason. The lot of made-for-TV movies is to fly under radars, because so much has to be flown under the radars of the producers and censors. With Organizm, writer-director Richard Jeffries gets away with a lot. This is a film in which the ‘obligatory sex scene’ is the protagonist coating a newly-widowed woman’s naked body with his own blood, and in which the climax is basically a death-by-fisting. If we’re to see all this film has to offer, however, we shall have to go through it carefully, and, I think, with the aid of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is not always the ideal tool for approaching a film, but this film in particular is structured around it and the perverse treasures it has to offer are best found using it.

The plot is deceptively simple, even hackneyed. A high school teacher warns military officials that they must not disturb the old base they’re destroying, because his mother told him so the night she killed herself. The army takes him seriously and investigates, causing a cancerous mass to explode from a body into a sea of tendrils that spread over the base and begin growing at an exponential rate. The teacher and a female soldier discover the developer of the tentacular organism is his father, a Russian scientist who defected to the USA. The shared genes gives the teacher an in-built vaccine for the organism. He realizes he must plunge his blood into the organism’s source, his father’s body, in order to kill it. He does so and it dies.

What is interesting in this plot is its gradual progression deeper into the subconscious. We begin with the pure, conscious facticity of the present: tendrils swarming military artillery and invading a bowling alley, where a soldier tries to flee and fails. This is the diseased, apocalyptic present, a present in extreme conflict. We then rewind thirty-three years to a boy being terrified by his disturbed mother. She warns him to remember “sublevel 3, vault 12” at all costs, carves it into his hands, and sashays out to kill his father. If the present is the consciousness in conflict, then the flashback we’re given is to the source of the trauma that would eventually erupt into the diseased state we see thirty-three years later. We’re given the two extremities of consciousness that matter; in between is the period of festering in the subconscious, metaphorically ‘sublevel 3, vault 12’.

We then join the high school teacher (Jonathan Schaech) on his way to the army base. We realize that he is the little boy we saw. Therefore, this film is to be his psychodrama. He has heard that the base is to be destroyed, so he comes to warn the Colonel that there is something that should not be disturbed. When he busts in, he’s captured, but by the intelligent records experts who decide his story is worth hearing, despite the Colonel’s objections. They are going to plumb the depths of sublevel 3, vault 12. It is this exploratory action that releases the disease into consciousness, that causes the eruption of the tendrils into the light of day. What they discover in the vault is a man’s pickled body with a horrendous, spreading growth on his chest. From this body the tendrils spring.

What’s interesting thus far is the teacher’s relationships to father figures. We know that when he was a child he witnessed the death of the man he thought was his father. When he arrives in the town where the army base is located, he tries to get the attention of an old man, who simply walks away without answering. The Colonel in charge of the army base is difficult to get in touch with, and, when he is reached, doesn’t want to deal with the teacher. He tries to reach out to older men instinctively, and finds it impossible to have a meaningful connection with them.

The teacher’s difficulty with father figures is important to note because of the next major plot point. As the teacher escapes with a female solder who just lost her husband to the rampaging tentacles, they speak to the old man who shunned the teacher earlier. They discover through him that the body at the source of the tendrils is a Russian scientist and that this scientist is the teacher’s real father. The source of the eruption of the diseased consciousness and the reason for the childhood trauma, then, is the teacher’s biological father. The repressed horror at the heart of his subconscious is the father.

The teacher and soldier run from the growing tendrils to a school where they watch an old film reel. The reel shows the Russian scientist discussing his work, explaining that his quest for the ultimate biological weapon ended in his own body. His own tissues were growing at a phenomenal rate, consuming any energy at all, from fire to nuclear radiation. At the same time, the teacher is infected and successfully fights off the tendrils, turning his blood into an instant tendril-cide. However, we’ve just learned that the tendrils are, literally, his father’s body, meaning that tendril-cide is a sort of patricide.

Now the teacher and soldier realize they have to go to the body at the source of the tendrils and kill it. To protect the soldier, the teacher coats her in his own blood, but the imagery is that of a newborn covered in birth-blood. They then fly a helicopter to the base, landing in a disturbing terrain of all tendrils. They are plunging into the subconscious, to the repressed monstrosity of an absent father. In a stroke of excellent set design, the tendrils swarm the closer they come to the center.

As they do this, the threat of bombing looms. The military plans to drop nuclear bombs in hopes of destroying the tendrils. Curiously, the Russian scientist described the US military as his new father, enriching the interplay between patricide and infanticide already at play in the film.

Finally the teacher confronts the body of his biological father, simultaneously alive and dead, present and absent. In the center of his father’s chest is what is unmistakably a throbbing, pulsing anus out of which all the tendrils grow. As perverse as any Greek myth, the teacher thrusts and knife into his father’s heart-anus and digs, metaphorically fucking his father. He then slices at his hands, drawing blood, and thrusts both hands into the orifice, in an act that can be best described as fisting his father to death.

Meanwhile, the soldier is sidetracked by the discovery of his husband in some sort of amniotic sack. Clawing with her hands, she digs the sack open, giving birth to her own husband in a way, but washing the protective blood off her own body in the process, leaving herself vulnerable. Fortunately, the father dies from the fisting just in time. The trauma has been overcome in facing the repressed, subconscious absent father that the disturbed mother so desperately tried to repress in sublevel 3, vault 12.

Not everything in Organizm makes sense to me. I don’t even mean the chronology, which would make the obviously late-thirties teacher in his fifties. I mean it’s not really clear how the tendrils form an amniotic sack and what the interplay of birthing imagery in this film really amounts to. I don’t think the psychoanalytic structure of the film means it’s a film filled with great depth: what good is reiterating Freud, really? This is a film made more with the subconscious than with the conscious. Its beauty is in how perverse it all is in representing diseased consciousness. From the reproductive imagery of the tendrils, through the birthing imagery, and the anal father-son fisting imagery of the conclusion and the anti-oedipal implications of such, the film is just perverse in the story its images tell, whatever the cheesy plot may be.

Amphibious 3D (2011) - 2/4

I've always been fascinated by Yuzna's work. He always teeters on the brink of hackwork, using story-ideas that are disarmingly insipid. Yet, when you watch the films, you see he always takes a different approach than any other filmmaker would, and there's always something, some wealth of subconscious, buried in the play of creative gore effects and strange appetites. With Rottweiler (2004), he pushed the killer-dog movie about as far as it could logically go until the killer dog became an archetypal fiend, a sort of symbol of fate, like Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven. Amphibious 3D, unfortunately, never does get pushed into the archetypal realms quite like Rottweiler does, but, as with any Yuzna film, it teases with more below the surface; and Amphibious is a good deal more subtle than most monsters-from-the-sea movies we've been seeing from SyFy, the Asylum, and several other b-movie filmmakers who hopped aboard that particular shark-filled train.

The plot, a fairly typical one, concerns a pretty female researcher interested in some scientific thing or other--it doesn't matter what--and chartering a boat from a charming local white guy. They uncover the prehistoric monster, which the researcher has no trouble identifying, and together slay the beast. In this case, the charming boat owner, fittingly named Jack Bowman, is Michael Pare and the researcher, with the pornstar name of Skylar Shane, is played by some TV actress from the Netherlands.

What makes Amphibious 3D stand out is not the 3D, but the remote Indonesian setting. Most of the action takes place on a fishing platform so far out to sea that you can't see the mainland. Here a part-time smuggler and full-time fishing-platform foreman manages his child slave labour. Some of the action does take place on an Indonesian island where a religious ritual, reminiscent of footage of voodoo rituals from Haiti, is taking place.

One of the children on the fishing platform is a dark, scrawny child sold by a witchdoctor. The other kids taunt him and call him something like 'voodoo boy.' The researcher, it turns out, lost a daughter on a scientific survey and now hallucinates her daughter in the island ritual, and finds a surrogate for her daughter in the weak boy on the fishing platform. It is in this material that the film's darker depths are to be found, with its play on maternity and on the mystique of a culture that threatens to devour the outsider.

Unfortunately, subconscious depths does not imply interesting action, in this case. Much of what happens on the fishing platform is boring, as we're just waiting for the monster action to begin. The character drama, the shallow interactions, is not good enough to sustain interest, even in these interesting locations.

Worthy of note, however, is the cool monster. I won't spoil what it is, but Yuzna uses real effects, as he always does, so that the monster is really, physically present with the actors. When someone sticks an axe in the creature's 'head', he really does that. Though little of the monster is seen until the end, the climax, for anyone who loves classic monster movies and creature effects, more than makes up for the scarcity until then.

Amphibious 3D is admittedly sub-par Yuzna. There are moments where it suggests the possibility of being a giant sea monster version of I Walked with a Zombie (1943), but it sadly never rises to being as clever and haunting as that film. It has a lot more going on in its depths, a perverse subconscious that bubbles up in the film's final, disturbing moment, than the likes of Two-Headed Shark (2012) or Mega-Python vs Gatoroid (2011), but it's never as much fun.

Forget Me Not (2009) - 2.5/4

After a mildly mysterious, but not particularly encouraging pre-title sequence, Forget Me Not introduces us to a menagerie of tedious high school seniors and their sad little lives of fucking and drinking. Quite nice camera movements are wasted on a student house party that looks like the student house parties you see in every high school comedy or drama since the '90s, with lots of attractive, half-naked teens drinking and writhing, "having fun". I don't make a point of describing this lifestyle in a deliberately contemptous tone because I was never invited to these parties, but because I think the director, and co-writer, Tyler Oliver, purposely sets up a 'normal' (as defined by movies) group of high school buddies to disarm us. Then he starts to screw with it--and that's when it gets fun.

In the middle of a round of "tell your first time" the responsible Final Girl character, Sandy, decides to tell her first kiss instead, which took place during The Game. "The Game!" everyone says, "let's play!" Their banal existences suddenly take on some meaning, a tinge of mystery. What is this bizarre game these bland people play? Well, they chant a creepy chant about ceasing to exist and going to hell, pronounce one person "The Ghost" and then the rest hide. The Ghost touches each one, making them ghosts, until there's only one non-ghost left. When they play this game again, a strange girl joins in. After she appears to commit suicide and then disappear, despite having won The Game, each participant starts disappearing in real life. The catch is that the only one who remembers the ghosted participant is the Final Girl. Everyone else forgets that person existed. The whole world changes, as though that person never existed.

Forget Me Not plays out as a fun metaphysical mystery, not unlike one of those episodes of Star Trek where they'd get trapped in a time loop or some godlike being's anus. And the drive to crack the mystery, the full solution to which Oliver manages to hold out of reach for a good while, is what kept me engaged. Even after the mystery is cracked, there are some metaphysical shenanigans that will keep the intellectually-engaged viewer interested. For instance, the pattern of The Game played in the first act dictates much of what will happen for the rest of the movie. What is the significance of that?

Of course, interest does not equal plausibility. One wonders just how a person can be erased from the time-space continuum. The most superficial answer provided is strongly inadequate. And the other possible answer, suggested by the final shots, isn't explored in quite enough detail, tantalizing as it is. As allegory, however, it presents an interested interplay of how individual lives vie to be remembered, how our lives are valuable after death mostly for the way we impact the living, whether a close friend or the whole world. Death is frightening, but being forgotten may be even worse. You have to do something worthwhile to be remembered. And when we watch the first ten minutes of the movie, we wonder how many of these young people will really deserve to be remembered, and how many will go the way of the third eunuch in the Court of Tiglath-Pilesar?

Forget Me Not does also contain some proper ghost-monster action that is not as successful as the rest of the film. For horror zonks, the gittery, fast-moving ghost-monster, with its 'crick'-'crick' body sounds and large-mouthed roar, will be mildly annoying, because we see this monster in every low-budget supernatural horror movie, sometimes even on youtube. Otherwise, they're fairly creepy creations out of which Oliver gets some good mileage. Forget Me Not has a good many creepy, spooky moments, the best of which are, naturally, of a more metaphysical variety.