I marked this as containg "spoilers", although I really don't think you could spoil this one. The short version is: a couple of cute actresses don't make up for 90 minutes of innovatively slow and eye-wrenching film-making.
Wow this one was bad. I kind of like these rip-off titles, because it's fun to see a low-budget rip-off of a Hollywood production. This one was timed to pre-empt Cloverfield with a 1-15-08 release, and mimic the hand-held camera, street point of view experience of a giant monster attacking a large city. In this case the city is Tokyo, and the monster is... uh, some kind of tentacle thing. Hard to say cause you never really see it.
However, the filmmakers here decided to one-up Cloverfield by making the camera MORE shaky. And they came up with the brilliant device of simulating a damaged tape by having the picture fuzz out and go to black...well, every three seconds or so.
So basically it was like watching a feature-length film in three-second bursts, separated by static and black screen.
What's worse, when something does happen, the film punctuates the action by freezing the film and then cutting to black. Wha....? Most of the film consists of excessive shaking of the camera (either Tokyo was built on pudding, or both actresses have a really bad nervous tremors) while filming the actresses talking or crying. Sometimes there are sound effects of people screaming in the background, and sometimes a terrifying monster roar.
Because HEARING the monster roar is better than SEEING the monster. Which seems to be the mantra in this movie.
I measure how bad a movie is by how quickly I start fast-forwarding through it to get to the special effects. Five minutes into seeing the girls acting cute, I was blazing at full speed. And I think I stopped maybe three times to see glimpses of the monster and then... fuzz out and cut to black.
The only good thing about this movie is that the girls are cute. They are easy to watch for a while. And in another innovative simulation of what real life may be like, a lot of the scenes are shot of the actresses from the neck down. There are several scenes with the camera lying on the floor with an actress crawling toward it.
But on the whole, this is an amazingly bad movie, with some amazingly bad filmaking choices sort of obsessively driven home. In the end, it's not even close to being so bad it's good -- it's just spasmodic, choppy, and amazingly slow and talky.
I think the real monster in this snoozer is the film itself.
Wow this one was bad. I kind of like these rip-off titles, because it's fun to see a low-budget rip-off of a Hollywood production. This one was timed to pre-empt Cloverfield with a 1-15-08 release, and mimic the hand-held camera, street point of view experience of a giant monster attacking a large city. In this case the city is Tokyo, and the monster is... uh, some kind of tentacle thing. Hard to say cause you never really see it.
However, the filmmakers here decided to one-up Cloverfield by making the camera MORE shaky. And they came up with the brilliant device of simulating a damaged tape by having the picture fuzz out and go to black...well, every three seconds or so.
So basically it was like watching a feature-length film in three-second bursts, separated by static and black screen.
What's worse, when something does happen, the film punctuates the action by freezing the film and then cutting to black. Wha....? Most of the film consists of excessive shaking of the camera (either Tokyo was built on pudding, or both actresses have a really bad nervous tremors) while filming the actresses talking or crying. Sometimes there are sound effects of people screaming in the background, and sometimes a terrifying monster roar.
Because HEARING the monster roar is better than SEEING the monster. Which seems to be the mantra in this movie.
I measure how bad a movie is by how quickly I start fast-forwarding through it to get to the special effects. Five minutes into seeing the girls acting cute, I was blazing at full speed. And I think I stopped maybe three times to see glimpses of the monster and then... fuzz out and cut to black.
The only good thing about this movie is that the girls are cute. They are easy to watch for a while. And in another innovative simulation of what real life may be like, a lot of the scenes are shot of the actresses from the neck down. There are several scenes with the camera lying on the floor with an actress crawling toward it.
But on the whole, this is an amazingly bad movie, with some amazingly bad filmaking choices sort of obsessively driven home. In the end, it's not even close to being so bad it's good -- it's just spasmodic, choppy, and amazingly slow and talky.
I think the real monster in this snoozer is the film itself.