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yendiThe Thing Below. Directed by either Jim Wynorski or a series of random die rolls used to determine scenery, camera angles, and f/x shots. Written by Raul Sanchez Ingles and Linday James, possibly under the influence of very bad drugs. Distributed by Insight Films.
The Thing Below is not, alas, a porn movie about Alicia Masters and her pet nickname for Ben Grimm's phallus. That's too bad, as that movie would be infinitely better than the movie that was actually released with that title. Actually, almost any movie would be better than this one, which comes dangerously close to hitting the rock bottom area normally reserved for Uwe Boll productions and Harvard Man.
Actually, I think it surpasses those. Yes, folks, The Thing Below is worse than Alone in the Dark.
To be fair, AitD gets less out of more, giving us a cast filled with people who have turned in good performances in the past, and f/x that, if poorly used, at least look like they cost more than thirty bucks. The Thing Below is strikingly consistent, featuring a talentless cast, an awful (and agonizingly unoriginal) script, mediocre directing, and CGI special effects that are so poorly rendered, I expected to see a "thank you" in the credits to the TRS-80.
The movie can be pretty effectively recapped in one paragraph. A boat picks up a radioactive container from the bottom of the ocean. The world's klutziest scientists manage to drop and break it. Bad CGI emerges and attacks the crew.At night, the ice weasels come. Eventually, we meet other crews, like the one on an oil rig, and they fight the bad CGI as it turns into cowboys and strippers*. Finally, the good guys win. Or do they?
Believe me, there are no winners involved in this movie. Want to know just how sophisticated the film can get? The lead character is "Captain Jack" Griffin. Get it? Because it's like Captain Jack Sparrow, only with a totally different bird. Except it's not a real bird anyway, and nothing else about the character resembles (or comments on) Sparrow, and he's not even a pirate. So why fucking bother?
But stupidity is pretty much the only guiding force in this film. The creature is reported to give off massive doses of radiation when it's first seen in its container. We're talking enough to fry an egg half a mile away. But when it breaks, we don't see the scientists start to develop radiation burns, nor do such things happen at any point during the attacks of the radioactive creature. In fact, when the container breaks**, the scientists just stare at it stupidly. And no radiation tags or alarms get triggered (and if no such alarms exist on this huge Naval vessel, then why the fuck is it transporting this creature in the first place?).
I know nothing about screenwriters Raul Sanchez Inglis and Lindsay James, but based on the abomination they produced here, I have to seriously question whether they've ever actually read a book, seen a movie, or otherwise encountered a complete plot. The script is just a muddled mess, jumping from plot concept (a cgi octopus-creature) to concept (now the creature is invading the mind of the character inexplicably dressed like a cowboy*** and challenging him to a shootout) without any coherence.
To be fair, longtime no-talent director Jim Wynorski -- who hasn't made an enjoyable film since 1986's Chopping Mall**** -- probably shoulders much of the blame. Even writers strung out on crack likely meant to have the interchange between the blowhard general and the hacker he brings in to help track the ship take place in a big situation room, seeing as the first exchange of dialogue between them is about why the hacker doesn't have a full team of specialists with him. Instead, it's set in a cavernous room filled with exactly one small folding table and a laptop. If Wynorski were more competent, I'd say that he was making a meta-film about a director sabotaging his own movie (and I'm still not ruling out the possibility that this is a Max Biali scam whose sole purpose is to lose money by hiring the most incompetent louts imaginable).
The acting here takes amateurish to a whole new level. Each line of dialogue is over-enunciated and shouted with an emphasis on every single word, as if someone told the cast that William Shatner was the world's most notorious under-actor. No one here will go on to have any sort of career without years of training, and lead Billy Warlock (who actually owns a Daytime Emmy for his work on Days of Our Lives) is at the epicenter of this disaster. If I were cynical, I'd suggest that the director might have thought they were getting Billy's dad, Dick, who at least has one great role (Michael Myers) to his credit.
To top it all off, the f/x are just unbelievable. I'd almost suggest that folks watch the first ten minutes or so just to see the way the black CGI coils "enter" one man's stomach, then pop out his mouth. It's almost -- but not quite -- as realistic as if an f/x guy had frozen the shot, crazy-glued the tentacle to the guy, then started things up again. And it's the best f/x shot in the film. If the entire budget for CGI exceeded $4.23, the filmmakers did not get their money's worth.
For a movie to leave this bad a taste in my mouth, it usually has to have something exceptionally vile: the raw torturebation of crap like Hostel that putzes like Eli Roth rationalize as transgressive art; the racism of something like Marshall Neilan's Chloe, Love is Calling You; the sheer cynicism of the remake of The Wicker Man. But The Thing Below doesn't commit any of the sins of those movies. It's simply a stunningly bad work, but one that fails to create that special "so bad it's good" vibe that a movie like this needs to remain watchable.
*Seriously.
**And what kind of container for an underwater radioactive creature is capable of shielding atomic-bomb-level doses of radiation while still being made of such fragile glass that it'll shatter after one good hit?
***Something that works in Buckaroo Bonzai and nowhere else.
****I know that some of you consider The Return of Swamp Thing to be decent. Unfortunately, you're wrong.
The Thing Below is not, alas, a porn movie about Alicia Masters and her pet nickname for Ben Grimm's phallus. That's too bad, as that movie would be infinitely better than the movie that was actually released with that title. Actually, almost any movie would be better than this one, which comes dangerously close to hitting the rock bottom area normally reserved for Uwe Boll productions and Harvard Man.
Actually, I think it surpasses those. Yes, folks, The Thing Below is worse than Alone in the Dark.
To be fair, AitD gets less out of more, giving us a cast filled with people who have turned in good performances in the past, and f/x that, if poorly used, at least look like they cost more than thirty bucks. The Thing Below is strikingly consistent, featuring a talentless cast, an awful (and agonizingly unoriginal) script, mediocre directing, and CGI special effects that are so poorly rendered, I expected to see a "thank you" in the credits to the TRS-80.
The movie can be pretty effectively recapped in one paragraph. A boat picks up a radioactive container from the bottom of the ocean. The world's klutziest scientists manage to drop and break it. Bad CGI emerges and attacks the crew.
Believe me, there are no winners involved in this movie. Want to know just how sophisticated the film can get? The lead character is "Captain Jack" Griffin. Get it? Because it's like Captain Jack Sparrow, only with a totally different bird. Except it's not a real bird anyway, and nothing else about the character resembles (or comments on) Sparrow, and he's not even a pirate. So why fucking bother?
But stupidity is pretty much the only guiding force in this film. The creature is reported to give off massive doses of radiation when it's first seen in its container. We're talking enough to fry an egg half a mile away. But when it breaks, we don't see the scientists start to develop radiation burns, nor do such things happen at any point during the attacks of the radioactive creature. In fact, when the container breaks**, the scientists just stare at it stupidly. And no radiation tags or alarms get triggered (and if no such alarms exist on this huge Naval vessel, then why the fuck is it transporting this creature in the first place?).
I know nothing about screenwriters Raul Sanchez Inglis and Lindsay James, but based on the abomination they produced here, I have to seriously question whether they've ever actually read a book, seen a movie, or otherwise encountered a complete plot. The script is just a muddled mess, jumping from plot concept (a cgi octopus-creature) to concept (now the creature is invading the mind of the character inexplicably dressed like a cowboy*** and challenging him to a shootout) without any coherence.
To be fair, longtime no-talent director Jim Wynorski -- who hasn't made an enjoyable film since 1986's Chopping Mall**** -- probably shoulders much of the blame. Even writers strung out on crack likely meant to have the interchange between the blowhard general and the hacker he brings in to help track the ship take place in a big situation room, seeing as the first exchange of dialogue between them is about why the hacker doesn't have a full team of specialists with him. Instead, it's set in a cavernous room filled with exactly one small folding table and a laptop. If Wynorski were more competent, I'd say that he was making a meta-film about a director sabotaging his own movie (and I'm still not ruling out the possibility that this is a Max Biali scam whose sole purpose is to lose money by hiring the most incompetent louts imaginable).
The acting here takes amateurish to a whole new level. Each line of dialogue is over-enunciated and shouted with an emphasis on every single word, as if someone told the cast that William Shatner was the world's most notorious under-actor. No one here will go on to have any sort of career without years of training, and lead Billy Warlock (who actually owns a Daytime Emmy for his work on Days of Our Lives) is at the epicenter of this disaster. If I were cynical, I'd suggest that the director might have thought they were getting Billy's dad, Dick, who at least has one great role (Michael Myers) to his credit.
To top it all off, the f/x are just unbelievable. I'd almost suggest that folks watch the first ten minutes or so just to see the way the black CGI coils "enter" one man's stomach, then pop out his mouth. It's almost -- but not quite -- as realistic as if an f/x guy had frozen the shot, crazy-glued the tentacle to the guy, then started things up again. And it's the best f/x shot in the film. If the entire budget for CGI exceeded $4.23, the filmmakers did not get their money's worth.
For a movie to leave this bad a taste in my mouth, it usually has to have something exceptionally vile: the raw torturebation of crap like Hostel that putzes like Eli Roth rationalize as transgressive art; the racism of something like Marshall Neilan's Chloe, Love is Calling You; the sheer cynicism of the remake of The Wicker Man. But The Thing Below doesn't commit any of the sins of those movies. It's simply a stunningly bad work, but one that fails to create that special "so bad it's good" vibe that a movie like this needs to remain watchable.
*Seriously.
**And what kind of container for an underwater radioactive creature is capable of shielding atomic-bomb-level doses of radiation while still being made of such fragile glass that it'll shatter after one good hit?
***Something that works in Buckaroo Bonzai and nowhere else.
****I know that some of you consider The Return of Swamp Thing to be decent. Unfortunately, you're wrong.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 12:46 am (UTC)Who says this? Who?
Good god, that movie managed to be even dumber than the Wes Craven movie but nowhere near as fun.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 01:03 am (UTC)No way is this possible. I fear I am going to have to watch this film that challenges the very precepts of my Boll Scale of Movie Suckage.
You are a very bad man for issuing such a challenge, even inadvertently. But I can probably forgive you for the ice weasels.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 01:19 am (UTC)I have the only good artifact from that flick: Peter David's novelization, the one where he turned it into something that actually made some sense and had a budget. My used-book-fu was strong back then!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 01:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 04:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 05:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-20 01:08 pm (UTC)and damn, if the ice weasels don't come, then what's the POINT?!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 01:28 am (UTC)Until now.
In fairness, I seem to stumble across the nickname "Captain Jack" all over the place, so it may not trace back to POTC and instead go to some sort of general trend of Captains named Jack.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 05:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 05:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 05:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 05:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 05:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 05:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 05:47 pm (UTC)(And how much do you want to bet that there's a hard core PotC spoof with Cpt. Jack Swallows?)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 05:50 pm (UTC)completely misses the point of the original!?
Date: 2007-03-21 06:39 pm (UTC)Thank you for saving me the time and money of at least one blockbuster waste. I owe you!
Re: completely misses the point of the original!?
Date: 2007-03-21 07:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-26 01:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-11 02:12 am (UTC)As an interesting note, in the room where they find Captain Jack's brother, the scientist-lady waves something over him (which just happened to be sitting there), tricorder-like.. I was shocked to see a sony clie palm-pilot, which wasn't even on. It was a "Holy crap, she has my palm pilot! Wait, that's not even on. What the hell?" moment.
I own a tricorder. Dude. :)
Thanks for writing the review.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-14 01:16 am (UTC)And nice catch on the "tricorder."