Monster (2008)

2008 was a typically busy year for The Asylum with no fewer than ten DVD releases hitting the shelves in the space of twelve months, among them the expected number of lookalikes, the “mockbusters” that have come to make the company’s name. Among them were riffs on some of the year’s biggest hits, including 10,000 BC (100 Million BC), Doomsday (2012: Doomsday), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (The Day the Earth Stopped). And with found footage monster film Cloverfield beginning to cause a stir after the releases of its initial teaser trailers, The Asylum were inevitably quick off the mark, getting their lookalike, the baldly titled Monster directed by Eric Forsberg, onto shelves just three days before Cloverfield was in cinemas. Given that Matt Reeves’ film had been shot on secret and that there were only a couple of teaser trailers to work from, Forsberg does well to ape several scenes from the bigger (and better) film almost shot for shot. But sadly that’s where comparisons between the two films end.

In January 2003, sisters Erin (Erin Evans) and Sarah Lynch (Sarah Lieving) travel to Tokyo to shoot a video on climate change (the irony of flying to another country, one of the worst things anyone can do for the environment, to question a government whose attempts to confront the issue has been among the robust of any nation is lost on both the sisters and screenwriter David Michael Latt). On arrival, they mooch about the city for a while before a meeting with a government official is interrupted by a massive earthquake that soon turns out to have been caused by the arrival of a tentacled monster whose rampages the sisters mostly fail to capture on tape as they run around screaming, crying, arguing and being the worst documentarians you’ll ever meet.

Top marks for having the gumption to set the film in Tokyo and kudos too for a neat little scene that announces the first arrival of the monster only with the sound of a fleet of emergency vehicles roaring past, sirens blaring, as the sisters try to record their first interview. But after that it’s downhill all the way. For supposedly professional – or at least aspiring professional – film-makers, the sisters are woefully ill-equipped, armed only with a camera that glitches, breaks up and drops out almost continually. Every slight tremor, every jolt seems to bring some new technical malfunction, all the better for hiding the monster to cut the effects budget. There can be few releases with as much black screen as you’ll be expected to sit through during Monster. The sound too is terrible, their microphones picking up lots of background hiss and rumbles while often leaving the dialogue incomprehensible.

But dodgy equipment is the least of their problems. Neither of the women seems to have the faintest clue how to shoot a film. Case in point – at one point they and a fellow American, Justin (Justin L. Jones) they briefly meet on their travels make it to a rooftop where Erin and Justin react in horror to the devastation they’re seeing around them. Sarah’s response to this is to circle around them, filming their reactions rather than record for posterity the chaos the monster is wreaking.

Of course this is just one of the ways that Forsberg can cut costs on expensive special effects and throughout the film we barely see the CGI monster at all. Cloverfield had got the balance between concealing the monster and giving us tantalising glimpses of it just right but here we see nothing more than a couple of poorly rendered tentacles flapping feebly about. In both films we reach the end credits with no idea of what the monster is or where it came from but at least in Cloverfield we get some idea of what it looks like. In Monster it could be almost anything – a giant octopus, perhaps? Or a Lovecraftian horror? Who knows… Most of the film consists of the two women filming each other at angles that conveniently restrict our view of their surroundings while the sounds of roaring aircraft, panicking crowds and explosions are dubbed over the top. We hear the monster a lot too, but it’s the same sound effect looped over and over again to the point of extreme irritation.

To his credits, Forsberg manages to stage a couple of halfway decent crowd scenes which are undermined by the wobbly appearance of the monster’s tentacle but for the most part we’re stuck with our two heroines sobbing in extreme close-up (though they do accidentally catch a few bewildered passers-by wandering past wondering what the hell they’re up to). The film tries to ape not only Cloverfield but the early Godzilla films in a scene in which the sisters encounter an old Japanese man who seems to be laming the Americans for unleashing the monster in the first place but we never find out why he feels this way.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard on Asylum films. After all we should know what we’re getting as soon as we see the dread words “The Asylum presents” appear on the screen. But when you’ve got a film about a tentacled monster attacking Tokyo that’s almost entirely unwatchable, not just because of it sometimes intentional technical primitiveness but because it’s so bloody boring then there’s really not a lot of slack you can cut it. An hour into the film you lose the will to live – and then realise that there’s another half hour of this nonsense still to endure.

Other Asylum found footage “mockbusters” worth avoiding are their series or Paranormal Activity rip-offs Paranormal Entity (2009), 8213: Gacy House (2010) (also known as Paranormal Entity 2), Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes (2011) (also known as Paranormal Entity 3) and 100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (2012) (also known as Paranormal Entity 4).