I watch a lot of zombie movies. A lot. Zombie films are not often rated highly by IMDB and other aggregator sources. In fact, some of the best zombie films have a mere 40-50% audience approval. Then there’s Little Monsters. This film has garnered 100% (no joke) audience approval on Rotten Tomatoes. Frankly, I didn’t think that was possible and I was prepared to hate-watch it just to ridicule it and tear it apart.
Little Monsters
Instead I found myself laughing and cheering with almost every scene, from the death metal Christian music, to the ukulele zombie “pied piper,” to the zombie puppet sidekick. I couldn’t find any significant flaws. It earned it. It really was a very well-rounded zombie/horror/comedy, and one of the best I’ve seen. More importantly, the characters each had lots of character development and still stayed true to their origins — growing enough to make the film an honest and remarkable almost family-friendly tale of flesh-eating redemption and apocalyptic survival.
If all of that isn’t enough, the Australian location and international cast provides adorable accents and the only real human villain is a Pee-wee Herman wannabe that makes it ridiculously easy to dislike him.
This film was designed to portray how an ultra-woke couple would deal with an alien invasion. On the verge of becoming social outcasts and losing their income and respect for one another, a NY couple is offered the opportunity to stay at a cabin for a week. They decide to go offline for their vacation to make it more personal and rekindle their relationship.
Warning: Spoilers!
The tagline for this film is “Turning off their phones was the dumbest idea on the planet.” Sure, but their first instinct the moment they had cell service again and learned that there was an alien invasion was to rush from the comparable safety of the forest back to the city as quickly as possible. The same city that was already leveled by the aliens.
Save Yourselves! — Don’t waste your time on this movie
They’re being attacked by aliens that literally suck the life out of people, and Su adamantly refuses to arm herself to defend from their attackers. She’s perfectly happy to chop up the little furballs when actually attacked (and then feeling guilty for saving her friends life afterwards), but no guns.
They’re perfectly happy to lie to each other while discussing why they need to be more honest and open, break promises and insult each other left and right. One of the opening scenes at the cabin is Jack talking about how he wants to learn how to make a rabbit trap to “humanely” capture them. In the final scene they’re captured in much the same way that a rabbit trap works. “Humanely.” They’ll end up being food for the puffs.
If you’re a fan of the end-of-the-world/zombie-apocalypse/alien-invasion genre then you’ll probably want to skip this one. There is very little to redeem this film. In thinking it through to write this up, the only real redemptive part is that you get to see these two babbling idiots place their politics above their lives again and again and again, demonstrating how true believers are insane.
I watched Jurassic World tonight with my son, Zack. Meh.
Sure, Jurassic World grossed more than any individual Marvel Cinematic Universe movie has, but it wasn’t as good as any of them. Even The Incredible Hulk and the first Thor. I attribute the Jurassic revenue to the resurrection of the beloved Jurassic Park series, and not to the actual film itself.
Jurassic Park 4: Jurassic World
Jurassic World stole the ideas from several of my favorite series (including the BBC Primeval series, Surface, and the original Jurassic Park trilogy) and did a rather poor integration of the ideas they stole. The much lower budget Primeval and Primeval New World series’ were each FAR better than Jurassic World, much more in-depth and creative, and of course the character development was much better, too.
The only character I really cared for in Jurassic World was Owen (played by Chris Pratt). The rest of the characters were paper cut-outs with little to no development, and no drive save survival. Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) had some character development forced upon her, but aside from a few smiles and saving Owen’s life at one point, the movie could probably have done without her and not skipped a beat.
Jurassic World was so slow to build. They spent too much time and effort developing the effects and must have wanted to use them all. This created a slower-paced film with long delays between action and what amounts to silly filler being used instead of actual story development. The effects were cool, but not worth the extra time.
They would have done far better fleshing out the new “science” than displaying yet another 3D hologram of a dinosaur information module or overview shot. Yeah, yeah…the park is expansive and it’s 20 years since the original events occurred so the technology has come a long way. We get that. At least a third of the movie is there just for the sake of convincing you of this, yet they still “hang a lantern” on about 20 facts in order to avoid going into any actual detail. I guess if you’ve never seen the original films this might be helpful, but they’d have done better by reissuing them shortly before the 4th film was released rather than trying to re-hash everything from the first 3 films sporadically within the 4th. George Lucas was genius in his re-release of Star Wars 4-6 before the launch of Episode 1. It worked very well and brought a whole new audience to the genre.
My biggest complaint for Jurassic World was the lack of a clear mood. It’s a contemporary horror film so you’d expect fear or trepidation to play a strong part, or at the very least dark humor. When the credits started rolling I realized there were only three scenes in the entire 2-plus-hour film that really stood out. It’s really not a good sign when a film’s most memorable scenes could have just as easily been in either Friends or The Big Bang Theory (both of which get way more laughs and viewer buy-in, by the way) or any action flick or TV series. That’s a far cry from most other films I’ve seen recently, which create a challenge of exactly which scenes you want to talk about with your friends after the show. That won’t be the case here.
Bottom line: save your time. You’ll get a better experience watching just about any episode of any current sci-fi show. If you want to experience what this movie should have been, hop onto Amazon, Netflix or Hulu and watch Primeval.
