Big Foot looks scarier in this poster than he does in the movie

The “giant creature” subgenre of horror b-movies has never really been my favorite. The stories and plot development are usually pretty standard – the unaware soon-to-be victims + giant creatures + bloody death = The end.  I was mildly surprised however, in that “Abominable” was a pretty decent b-horror movie, full of drama and suspense. It was hampered by only a few of the usual b-movie faux-pas, and its good points eventually balanced out the negative ones successfully.

The main storyline of the movie follows actor Matt McCoy, as Preston Rogers, an author who’s wife was killed 6 months earlier in a climbing accident which also resulted in his own legs being paralyzed. Preston was traumatized psychologically by the accident and upon his doctor’s advice, he returns to the cabin where the accident occurred, in an attempt to speed up his emotional healing.

Otis, not giving Big Foot a dental exam

Accompanying Preston, is a miscast male nurse, Otis (Christien Tinsley), who reminded me of an older version of Danny Masterson’s  character on “That 70’s Show”. Strangely enough, he comes across not so much as a nurse, but as an unwilling companion, genuinely annoyed by Preston and his insecurities. Otis even goes so far as to spike his own milk with alcohol and chill out on the couch. Not something I would expect a home health nurse to be doing much of. I’m not really sure what his purpose actually was in the movie. Besides being generally apathetic toward Preston, he’s pretty much absent for a large portion of the film because he’s out looking for a store in the backwoods podunk town that carries Preston’s soy milk, which he forgot to pack.

One of the hot chicks next door, post-Big Foot

While Otis is out, a bunch of hot young girls show up to spend the weekend in the cabin next door, and Preston, being stuck in a wheelchair, has nothing to do besides spy on them with a pair of binoculars while feeling sorry for himself. During his spying, he sees one of the girls get kidnapped by Big Foot as she’s talking outside on her cell phone. Drama quickly ensues as Preston tries to get messages to the other girls, the police and Otis, but to no avail, as they all believe he’s some psychologically messed up, delusional “peeping Tom”.

Preston Rogers looking nervously intense

The character of Preston was generally likeable throughout the movie.  He had an innate nervous creepiness about him which I attributed to a vague resemblance to Anthony Perkins  as Norman Bates  in “Psycho”. This seemed to make it harder to determine if he was really a good guy or not, especially with his spying habit. However, his character seemed rather clueless for an author, and it seemed like he whispered his lines throughout the whole movie ( I guess to avoid being heard by Big Foot?). His lack of energy and overall monotone voice made the extended scenes involving him alone in the cabin even longer than they were.

*sigh* Lance rules the horror genre

About 45 minutes into the movie, we get a break from Preston with a separate subplot involving movie icon Lance Henriksen, as one of 3 local men camping in the woods, hoping to find and kill the alleged “Big Foot” creature. This scene, although excellently acted, did not quite mesh with the rest of the movie and seemed to run a bit long, almost to the point where it feels like you’re watching a different movie altogether. We see about 5 minutes of sarcastic macho banter between the woodsy men, that is actually amusing, before Lance’s character, Ziegler Dane, hears a noise and goes running off in the direction of where he thinks Big Foot might be. The scene is almost satirical in that the men are obviously not the “sharpest tools in the shed” and yet they are joking about people that died doing stupid things, a la the “Darwin Awards.” Soon after, we subsequently see Ziegler go running off after Big Foot by himself, into the creature’s cave no less, and becoming the first of the three to earn their own “Darwin Awards” at the hands of Big Foot.

Oooooh...scary lighting on white skin. Big Foot likes this.

The lighting and effects throughout the entire movie, especially the scenes involving Preston, were successful in helping create a “spooky” atmosphere. At one point, Big Foot knocks down power lines so a lot of the scenes inside Preston’s cabin are eerily lit, with a foggy glow highlighting Preston’s face, much like the spooky flashlight effect often used when people are portrayed telling ghost stories. The scenes toward the end where Preston and the last surviving girl, Amanda (Haley Joel) are trying to escape to the car are especially enhanced by rapid flashes of light in the dark which seem to add to the panicked effect on screen.

"Why the hell am I up this early?"

Separated at birth?

Overall, “Abominable” was a smartly directed, tension-filled b-horror movie with fairly good acting. In fact, I was able to take the movie fairly seriously until a point near the end where the viewer is shown a close-up of “Big Foot’s” face. The face on the Big Foot creature was such a ridiculous caricature, that in the most intense escape scene at the end, I couldn’t help but bust out loud laughing because Big Foot looks like Fozzie Bear’s  maniac cousin gone wrong. I mean, it seems like a decent effort was put into the rest of the movie but someone didn’t quite understand the meaning behind making a “realistically frightening” creature. In fact, it seemed like they tried to create a brown version of the “Abominable snowman” from the stop-motion animation movie “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” from 1964. On my personal cheese wedge rating scale however, the Big Foot creature added many points to the movie’s cheesiness so it ends up with a total of 3.5 cheese wedges, for pretty good quality and average cheesiness.

"Lightning Strikes" starring Kevin Sorbo

Ok, well maybe he can’t control actual lightning, but there’s a good chance he  could make you believe that he could since he played Hercules on TV for about 7 seasons. I’ve been a fan of Kevin Sorbo ever since “Hercules”and the science-fiction show “Andromeda” were on the air, so I was looking forward to seeing him in the new SyFy movie entitled, “Lightning Strikes”.  The movie trailers were a little “sketchy”, describing a “demon in the lightning” that was attacking people in a rural town where Kevin Sorbo plays the sheriff. I was interested to see if this far-fetched storyline could be kept in the “somewhat believable” realm with Kevin Sorbo at the reins.

Lightning Strike

Immediately in one of the opening scenes we are presented with a scene so unbelievable, that if it were done badly, would have definitely made me give up on the rest of the movie and change the channel.  We see a mother and her son driving down a highway, eventually being “chased” by a bolt of the “super lightning”. They try to outrun it, but when they can’t (lightning is very fast you know), their car is cut cleanly in two as the monstrous bolt of lightning slices right through it.  Being that this was a “b-movie” of sorts, this scene could have easily been extremely cheesy. But, instead of groaning at a lame attempt to make this scene appear believable, I was pleasantly surprised by my friend shouting, “Dude, that was awesome!”

Mom and son running in "Lightning Strikes"

In fact, I was pleasantly surprised throughout the movie in general.  I felt the special effects surpassed my expectations for a typical movie on the Syfy channel. The lightning was fairly realistic, meaning it didn’t look like shots of lightning from another movie that were spliced in. The scenes where the actors interacted with the lightning weren’t horribly fake-looking either. The only complaint I would have is the appearance of the demon/alien inside the lightning. It looked more like an actor in an alien costume that filmed the scene alone in front of a blue screen and as a result, its movements didn’t exactly correlate with whatever it was supposed to be interacting with in the movie.

Kevin Sorbo and SyFy

The acting was definitely “above par”. I was quickly reminded that no matter how bad or “cheesy” a movie is, an actor with veteran acting abilities, such as Kevin Sorbo, can automatically kick it up a notch. It was evident that Kevin was not simply reading his lines, as we see actors doing in a lot of SyFy b-movies. Instead he delivered his lines with a purpose, actually creating a Sheriff that the viewer can identify with and care about, no matter how unbelievable the situation and characters around him were.

Kevin did an excellent job of “grounding” the movie when he was in scenes with “over-the-top” characters, most notably, Todd Jensen as Mayor Fordice, who was portrayed as a highly annoying cross between Max Headroom and Matthew Lesko. I know this dude was meant to be annoying, but he was a one-dimensional caricature and extremely hard to take seriously. It was equally hard to believe that a guy wearing melon and salmon colored business clothes with bleached blonde hair, could ever be elected mayor in a small blue-collar town such as the one portrayed in the movie. The guy was more likely to get his butt kicked outside the bar at closing time and run out of town permanently.

David Schofield plays "Donovan"

The main storyline was simple and a bit dragged out, but overall, it kept my interest, which is not an easy thing to do over the course of 2 hours. The plot centered around the demon that lived in a very intense lightning storm, which actually contained an alternate plane of existence. People could only see and interact with the demon/alien if they were being struck by the lightning, and thus inside of it.  The “lightning demon” had a knack for taking the lives of children, but letting their parents live, leaving the parents immune to further lightning strikes. This sets up the two characters that are out to seek revenge, the  “preacher/adventurer/father” Donovan (David Schofield), and the mom that was driving the car in the beginning of the movie, Nancy (Annabel Wright),  who awakens from a coma to find out that her son was killed after their car was split in two by the super bolt of lightning.

Annabel Wright plays "Nancy"

Thrown into the whole mix is a group of University “storm chasers”, a professor and 2 students, who serve as the scientific “foil” to Donovan’s proclamations of the mythological history of the “lightning demon”. I found the play of these opposing viewpoints very interesting and actually educational, as I learned some interesting true facts about lightning, as well as the mythological stories that illustrated how ancient cultures explained its existence. Other than that though, the “storm chasers” didn’t really have a pivotal role in the plot of the movie.

Double lightning strike

Overall, “Lightning Strikes” exceeded my expectations. It has pretty decent special effects and the quality of the movie was carried mostly by Kevin Sorbo’s acting talent. The storyline was simple and drawn out, but not overly predictable. It was cheesy, but not “groan-worthy”, so I’m giving it 4 cheese wedges for “high cheesiness” combined with “high quality”, which ends up equaling a pretty decent Syfy movie.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

As I sat down to watch “Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus”, I was extremely stoked to be watching yet another “so bad it’s good” SyFy Channel movie. To be clear, I was fully aware, that I was not sitting down to watch a movie of the same caliber as “Jaws”, or even “Jaws 2”, for that matter.

I consider SyFy movies to be in a sort of “pseudo-movie” genre, that is, a movie so cheesy, that even the actors seem to play along  by overacting or revealing a telltale smirk now and then, and that is what makes these movies so enjoyable. That being said, it’s also entirely possible for the movie makers to miss the mark and take the cheesiness a little too far.  This results in a truly horrible movie that is neither entertaining, nor tolerable for longer than 5 minutes of viewing. “Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus” ended up walking a very thin line, slightly teetering into the “unwatchable” category while also keeping me entertained enough that I didn’t feel a need to summon up the energy to change the channel.

 As far as the movie’s plot, the title is pretty much self-explanatory. A prehistoric “mega shark” and “giant octopus” are accidentally unfrozen from a giant ice block near Alaska and they start terrorizing the world (as most giant prehistoric creatures do). Now, this sounds like it has all the makings of a great “monster battle” movie, along the lines of Godzilla vs Mothra. Ironically though, the scenes where we see these monsters actually trying to destroy something (or each other), are extremely scarce, and unfortunately they are also some of the worst quality scenes in the movie as far as special effects go.

Helicopter exploding on impact with giant tentacle

The destruction scenes involving the shark and octopus had great potential but look like they were slapped together in an hour on an outdated version of Photoshop. Seriously, if orchestrated correctly, a giant shark  leaping out of the water to grab a 747 out of the sky could be pure genius! With a little more time and talent spent on CGI, this outrageous scene could have crossed the line from completely ridiculous to freaking awesome! Unfortunately, that scene ended up looking like a blurry photo of a shark superimposed on stock footage of a plane that was flipped back and forth to simulate movement along with some random flames dropped in via computer. Explosions in the movie were just as bad…every vehicle was “hyper-explosive” as seen when one swipe of a Giant Octopus tentacle  makes a helicopter explode instantly in a fiery ball like it was full of rigged dynamite. Evidently there was a special on fireworks that ended up fitting the budget better than a few talented CGI artists.

Debbie, aka "Deborah", Gibson

The movie spends extremely too much time focused on dragged out discussions between Deborah Gibson, as the oceanologist  Emma MacNeal, and the same few characters, namely her ex-professor, an Asian scientist and Lorenzo Lamas cast as a “random head of some unnamed government department”. I know, you’re thinking what I was when I first saw ads for the movie…Deborah Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas? Seriously? They’re not even “SyFy” movie regulars!…and Debbie Gibson is a singer for God’s sake! When I sat down to watch the movie however, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Ms. Gibson actually has real acting talent. She was so relaxed and natural in her role that I could have sworn she’d been in at least 10 other “Made for SyFy” movies before this one. I would even go so far as to say she was the best actor in this whole movie.  Seriously, someone needs to get her a role on “Eureka” or something.

Lorenzo Lamas stuck in the early 90's

Lorenzo Lamas, on the other hand – completely nauseating. Dude STILL has his hair greased back and in a pony tail and is STILL wearing a tight black shirt and black pants, making him look like a sleazy guy stuck in the early 90’s hanging at the club to hit on 21-year-olds. His acting in this movie was so lifeless, even some attempt at overacting would have been more tolerable. It was like he was there to recite random lines off a script with the sole purpose of attempting to seduce Debbie Gibson with his cheesy cologne-reeking smile.

Pic of "Bobby Sixkiller" from the early 90's with Lorenzo who has the same cheesy hairstyle as in the movie!

I don’t know if I watched too many episodes of “Renegade” in the early 90’s but I seriously think Lorenzo Lamas just can’t appear tough without “Bobby SixKiller” (Branscombe Richmond) at his side. It’s like he’s half a man without his trusty Indian sidekick. They could have easily added a whole new dimension to the movie by writing in his character with some “Native American Mega Shark legend” subplot that explained the mystical background of the creatures. That would have been the greatest “Renegade” reunion ever! Sadly however,  the biggest contribution Lorenzo Lamas made to this movie was his referral to the giant shark as “Sharkzilla”…which is actually a truly classic moment in the film.

Mega Shark "biting" the apparently tasty Golden Gate Bridge

Overall, “Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus” merits 3 out of  5 wedges on the “cheese scale”. To attain a more respectable level of “cheese-dom” there should have been an attempt to make the “unreal” special effects appear more real, no matter how ridiculous they were. We know a giant prehistoric shark is not going to bite the Golden Gate bridge in half, but wouldn’t it be cool to see what it would look like (realistically) if it did? And they could have really recast Lorenzo Lamas with more of a SyFy movie stand-by like Lou Diamond Phillips. He actually seems to care more about his role than whether or not his ponytail has enough gel in it. Debbie Gibson is what carried the movie. She showed that she has real acting talent, even in a cheesy SyFy movie, which even for the most seasoned actors is not a feat to easily accomplish.

Why? Why do I feel compelled to deprive my brain of fulfilling, quality entertainment? Could it be that the “SciFi” channel has found a way (being true to its name) to broadcast endorphin-releasing waves during its movies, thus keeping us from changing the channel and making us compulsively return for more? Even more puzzling is the huge number of relatively “big-name” actors who take parts in these “low-budget” theatrical travesties…Can it be that the SciFi channel is indeed controlled by some endorphin-releasing alien overlord (much like a past Doctor Who episode) who seeks to enslave mankind and make us look ridiculous at the same time because of our taste in movies?
Personally, I have another possible theory, which places the root cause of our obsession with crappy SciFi movies in the fact that “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ is no longer on the air. As described on Wikipedia, “The series features a man and his robot sidekicks who are trapped on a satellite in space by an evil scientist and forced to watch a selection of bad movies, especially (but not initially limited to) science fiction B-movies. To keep sane, the man and his robots provide a running commentary on each film, making fun of its flaws and wisecracking (or “riffing”) their way through each reel in the style of a movie-theater peanut gallery.” I believe that since we can no longer be made to feel superior to bad movie makers through the MST3K character’s wisecracks, we might feel the need to do it ourselves in a society where we have constant entertainment available at our fingertips.

It’s almost an oxymoron of a personality flaw. We crave infinite varieties of entertainment of some sort, be it video games, movies, music, etc. and in order to avoid feeling the resultant powerlessness that comes with being so “needy”, we become addicted to shows that we in turn can ridicule WHILE we are being entertained…a sort of pseudo-control that we create in our minds saying to ourselves, “Yes, I am watching a really bad SciFi movie and I should be mowing the lawn, but it feels so awesome to know that I am so much smarter than someone that actually gets paid to make a movie! I will point out all the flaws, misspellings and bad acting and thus prove myself superior to the people who created this “entertainment” that is consuming 2 hours of my life, thus validating my need to actually watch it instead of doing something more productive!” It’s really a never-ending circle, like the snake eating its own tail. We love “junk food” entertainment and love it even more when we can find some way to validate our wasting our time on it.

Whether the curious appeal of crappy SciFi movies is due to an alien overlord seeking to control us through our need for “junk food” entertainment or due to our own need to be able to ridicule the moviemakers that we secretly admire because they get to create such entertainment, I have to admit I am addicted and have no desire to be cured of this addiction. So, in my own effort to attempt to validate my own addiction within myself, I plan to offer occasional blog posts on here, and possibly jewelry or art, dedicated to specific SciFi/Chiller movies that make me feel especially superior (i.e., ones where the acting/plot/graphics/etc are so bad they deserve a particular mention). After all, everyone’s a critic right? I’m just fulfilling my role in society, paying homage to Joel Hodgson, Mike Nelson, Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot and the rest of the MST3K crew, and trying to hold off the alien overlord invasion by not resisting their attempts to keep us glued to our TV’s watching bad SciFi movies.