Simply A Masterpiece

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Even bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon I could not cope with watching this. It's another "found footage" film, which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing - some of them can be good. This, however, was in my opinion unwatchable. A large amount of the run time had nothing discernible on screen thanks to the massive amount of camera-waggle and low light etc. I know some degree of this is part of the genre but in this it was far too much. Unless it was a dull (and often repetitive) piece to camera by one of the 2 main characters you could barely see anything and the waggling camera is enough to make you feel sick. This is one of those low budget films where almost nothing happens, when it does you don't see much (it's basically a monster movie with almost no monster at all) and it felt like a total waste of my time. I've thrown this away because I would feel guilty if someone else ended up paying any money for it and wasting 90 minutes of their life on it. It truly is awful.

Very rarely is there a film that comes out with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING redeemable about it. Even garbage like transformers 2 has one scene that at least makes it look like one part of got it right (even for one second), and even batman and robin is so bad its hilarious. This movie just has absolutely nothing to it, not even as a riffing movie with friends over a beer, its just that bad. The monster isn't even shown for a good glance, and when you do its so generic, acting so bad you actually feel sorry for the actors involved, and it doesn't show its budget. And it wasn't even 1 million dollars. Do yourself a favor, don't waste your time on this, watch something worthwhile or just take a nap. Its just a waste of time

Some films are abhorrently bad, but you can still find a redeeming quality in it. But this thing was a monstrous waste. Time better spent watching a turd floating in gas station toilet.Typically, you should feel sympathy for a character. In this film I couldn't wait for the 2 stupid girls to die - despite Sarah Lieving's cleavage shots. Forsberg, Estenberg and Latt should be tarred and feathered for creating such plotlessness, inane dialog and most of all, that retarded damaged tape effect that compelled me to chuck my beer bottle at the TV and hit my wife for buying the damn DVD when there is economic crisis going on.You might be a masochist and want to watch this for the pain factor. Fair enough, but remember there is a long list of other films which should never have been made. Watch one of those instead or better yet, clean your bathroom tiles with a toothbrush.As director Lech Kowalski says: "Film is ecologically unsound and messes up a lot of water in the process of development. Why mess up so much water by making a bad film?"

Sisters Sarah and Erin hop the bigger pond, landing in Tokyo to film a documentary about global warming (though God knows why). In the midst of their interview with the Environmental Minister, havoc strikes. At first, it's assumed to be another earthquake. When military presence intensifies, terrorism is suspected. But all too soon, it's revealed to be...something else. Sounds a bit familiar, no? Just to get it out of the way, whether or not it's an unhappy accident of conflicting release dates, there's no getting around that this is "Cloverfield"-lite, with a few (very few) deviations. This is evident--from the distant explosion that marks the start of the action, to the overall concept, to splattering the camera with blood at least once. The monsters even roar as if they were separated at birth. To be fair, this film does have a few things on Cloverfield. The fish-out-of-water angle, namely placing the protagonists in an unfamiliar culture, was a great idea. It's difficult enough to survive disaster when most everyone speaks your language, but when they don't, the challenge is increased quite a bit. While the presentation of the global warming message is..."crunchy" at best, the not-so-subtle hint that global warming itself awakened the creature is another juicy notion. Honestly, there's no better place on earth to set your disaster than Tokyo, the world's capital of disasters! The biggest thing for me personally would have to be the logic of the beast itself. In this film, it seemed to cut its paths of destruction through heavily populated areas, as I believe an angry beast would, rather than conveniently following four scrawny twenty-somethings around, and even directly snacking on one of them, as New York's monster did.Now that that's out of the way, even if Cloverfield never existed, this would still be pretty poor. The creature, a giant squid presumably, isn't actually seen doing very much to constitute a threat. Perhaps it could have actually picked up someone or smashed something, but all we're treated to is many angles of large, waving tentacles. One thing it makes you appreciate is how difficult disaster is to write. It seems that it's very easy to get so wrapped up in the turmoil of your story that you forget how people actually talk, particularly in the midst of emergency. Sarah and Erin (their actual first names, by the way; a bright-and-shining sign of non-actors) appear to struggle on the initiative to keep many of David Michael Latt's throw-away lines out of the production, but enough of them sneak in to become distracting. "I feel like we were meant to be here...", "It's so important to document this..." Sure. I realize they would have to invent reasons for our heroines to lug around an industrial-grade camera, but there must have been another way. Call me shallow, but I believe I'd find it difficult to think of what progeny will see someday when flaming debris is exploding all around me, and the street is caving in underneath my feet.An additional note about the cast--in truth, considering the script, there's really no reason to have anyone American in it. The Japanese actors (and their characters) are FAR better than the American ones; particularly the high-schooler who lives with her half-crazed dad (and dad seems to know something of the angry creature) and the young doctor who just wants to get across town and make sure his son is okay. I wished the film were about THEM, or someone like them. Were I in Erik Estenberg and company's shoes, I'm sure I would have shot the entire thing with an entirely Japanese cast and subtitles. Couldn't the Japanese document their own disasters? They've had lots of practice.So, maybe it's not so much a ripoff as it is just not good. Of course, consider that trailer for another Asylum treat, "AVH". As in, "Alien Vs. Hunter". As in intergalactic hunters with advanced camouflage fighting slimy aliens with elongated heads and teeth. Can't wait for that one, can ya? What? You've seen it? Of course you have...