Amphibious – Brian Yuzna

(the sporting guru takes time out to review a really bad horror movie as a favour for a friend. The Monkey would like to reassure his loyal fan base that this is a mere sideshow from his day job of reviewing Premier League football... but it is the close season... and he may toss out a review of Sharknado 2 as well)

You are what it eats

As a general rule, there are three types of creature feature film. The good. The bad. And the so bad they’re good. Amphibious, the latest offering from Brian Yuzna, is not good. It’s not even bad. Infact, it’s so far past bad that it goes all the way around so bad it’s good and back again.

That’s right. Amphibious is so bad it’s bad. A new level of feature film ineptitude. 

The problems with the film are vast. That the cast can’t act is taken as a given for a low budget creature feature. But they don’t ever appear to be trying here. It’s like they know they’ll never make it past the straight to DVD section of their careers and have resigned themselves to this fate long ago. The lead actress is passable, despite an accent that wanders more often than the errant camerawork. The villains however, are caricatures of caricatures. And the romantic lead is about as romantic as the giant scorpion he is eventually killed by.

It’s hard to summarise a plot that makes no sense. There is a giant sea scorpion which has apparently been created by a mixture of the Tsunami and unexplained witchcraft. For no reason I could fathom, it attacks a group of smugglers and child labourers who seem to live on a large floating raft. Early on the second in command is killed and it takes a full 24 hours for anyone to notice. Despite them all living on a large… floating… raft. Elsewhere a child is killed by a blow to the head, yet wakes up several hours later to deliver some final, meaningless words. Blood still fresh and flowing on his wound. He then dies in 2 seconds flat. There is also something going on about a lost daughter, and a character who is fat and clumsy and spectacularly unfunny. Oh and around 20% of the entire movie is just an ominous shot of the same patch of water not moving. I’ll be honest, within twenty minutes I was rooting for the Scorpion.

But you don’t watch a film called Amphibious for the plot, you watch it for the gore (plentiful, mostly absurd), nudity (almost nil, one pair of clearly cgi boobs mid-impalement) and sense of humour (completely absent). And, of course, for the monster. Amphibious doesn’t have the worst monster you’ve ever seen (step forward Son of Godzilla), but it’s far from the best. The CGI is competent but the genetic make-up of the monster make little sense, given it moves like a Scorpion on land but appears to then morph into a squid in the water. There is also far too much stinger impalement and too little savage claw dismemberment for my liking. 

The main problem with the film, other than the obvious fact that it’s complete and utter shit, is that Amphibious is not interesting enough to sustain its initial premise. It is devoid of humour and appears to be taking it’s over complicated, overly stupid plot seriously. That it’s racists, sexist and homophobic is almost an afterword by comparison. If you’ve been unlucky/stupid enough to endure the entire film, you’ll be further treated to an end that only makes things ever more confusing than before.

It’s been a long time since Re-Animator, and Brian Yuzna doesn’t look he’s going to strike gold again anytime soon. Amphibious is boring, senseless, witless and terrible in almost every conceivable way. Hell, at one point I even found myself wishing Tara Reid was in it just so I could laugh.

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Five Things We Learnt From The World Cup Knockouts

1. The goal gods were saving themselves?

The group stages saw a record number of goals scored. 136 in total at an average of almost 3 per match. Owing to a number of factors; the oppressive heat, nervousness, better defending, awful finishing, the continued presence of Argentina in the tournament… said goals dried up like a desert as soon as we entered the business end of the tournament.  Excluding the “rout of Belo Horizonte” there have been a miserable 24 goals scored in 13 knockout games. The bottom half of the draw has seen Holland and Argentina play the last 450 minutes between them for a single, hit and hope effort. A good job then for that semi-final in Belo. Proving that in the desert, when it rains… it really does pour.

2. Brazil should be ashamed & embarrassed. But…
The score line is not as significant as people think. The crucial, take home factor here is that Brazil lost the match. Losing it 1-0 in the 119^th minute, being beaten 4-3 in an end to end thriller or being routed 7-1 by vastly superior opposition all deliver different versions of despair. But they all have the same overriding feels of loss and disappointment. In the context of Brazil and the World Cup, yes this result was historic, but in terms of football in general over the past 4 years? Not really. Routs are becoming much more common place at the highest level as the semi-finals of the Champions League have shown of late. Such is the attacking talent that the top teams now possess, if they get 1 or 2 gone are the days when they sit back and protect the lead. Teams go for the jugular more than ever and if being hammered by a rival meant the end of your football pedigree, Arsenal would have long since collapsed and given up by now. At the end of the day, Brazil fans will easily forgive and forget this defeat should they go and win the thing in 4 years. Granted that seems unlikely with this current crop of players and one cannot use the above excuse to mask Brazil’s failings. They had been lucky to get this far and the performances of Luiz, Hulk, Fred and Marcello beggared belief in their collective ineptitude. Huge swaths of space were open for the entire German midfield to run into and it’s hard to think of a 5 minute period at this level where one team has collapsed so badly. Brazil still possess good players, many of which weren’t even included in Scolari’s faintly blinkered squad. But this match showed them up for what they were, a once great nation coasting on past glories and a wonderfully organised, attended and vibrant tournament. When your goals against column has to be written in brackets (seven), you know you’ve hit rock bottom.

3. Germany now owe to us all to win.
Scoring seven goals against Brazil will ultimately count for nothing if Germany lose the final this Sunday. A victory for Argentina would surely see them crowned the most underwhelming victors in tournament history. Well organised, drilled and disciplined. They have essentially been Greece but with Lionel Messi. They deserve credit for not getting beaten, but none whatsoever for entertaining anybody. A similarly negative display in the final is almost a certainty and neutrals must be praying for an early goal to release the shackles a little. For the Germans, it’s hard to see beyond this being their moment. This wonderfully talented group of players have been around for three major tournaments now and come up short at each one. If they fail again against a team that they are better than in 10 out of 11 positions, they will forever be labelled as bottlers. That reputation, in its own way, will hurt just as much as the ones now being given to Brazil.

4. The squad remains key to tournament longevity.
Playing so many games in so short a time, in high temperatures and oppressive humidity, is going to take its toll. It was little surprise then that teams who managed the conditions have also managed the tournament. Costa Rica looked dead on their feet in the knockout phase and were lucky to go as far as they ultimately did thanks to some outrageously errant finishing. Likewise France, who stormed their group but rested none of their key attackers or defenders and then looked jaded against the German machine. Belgium started the tournament tired and despite coming alive for the ridiculously entertaining USA match, then found themselves involved in one game too many against Argentina. Brazil, Argentina and Columbia have all managed the conditions well, as have the Dutch, by excellent use of rotation, drinks breaks and tactical switches. Germany of course took a different approach, score four goals in ten minutes and then take the rest of the semi-final off…

5. Let the shopping spree commence.
As ever following a World Cup, what tends to follow is a mad, frenzied bidding war for those players who hugely over achieved. It looks like being no different this time around with Costa Rican, Columbian and Mexican players all now being looked at in vastly more favourable lights than they were a month ago. This will almost certainly result in players who were massively pumped up for the occasion, producing pale shadows of these performances whilst playing for Sunderland on vastly inflated wages. Still, it’s always funny to point and laugh. So we’ve got that to look forward to.

Hindu Monkey Team of the Tournament

Navas (Costa Rica)

Gonzalez – Vlaar – Hummels - Garay (Chile, Holland, Germany, Argentina)

Kroos - Mascherano - Rodriguez (Germany, Argentina, Columbia)

Robben - Fred Benzema - Mueller (Holland, France, Germany)

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