Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus: Yes, it's as bad as the name would have you believe!

Giggles galore!

As soon as I saw the title Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus, I knew this movie was meant for me. I laughed my way through the wooden acting, and the frugally dispersed CGI of a cool looking Mega Shark and Giant Octopus. I even went so far as to watch the "special features", and those were even funnier. The "outtakes" give one actor about five minutes more screen time than the two minutes he actually had, because he couldn't get one of his three lines right. Listening to the four main actors discuss the movie is almost painful to endure. They try to talk it up, but look in their eyes. They're dying inside as they do so. Three of the four don't even get enough courtesy to have their interview conducted inside a nice, quiet room where you can even hear them. But that's okay. For Debra Gibson's segment I was too distracted by the guy working behind her who kept showing butt crack every time he bent over. The funniest extra was the short clip with the "cinematographer", especially as he tries to get the poor camera person to help him demonstrate a cheap, but effective, technique to mimic a submarine being thrashed around.

But the special features weren't what drew me in. It was the ridiculous plot, passable (I'm being generous) acting, and whiplash-inducing blips of CGI. C'mon, people, a giant shark takes out a passenger jet in mid-air! And attacks the Golden Gate Bridge! Show me that in the previews and you know I'm going to be salivating to watch the rest of what passes for the movie.

Sadly the previews give away the best parts, but this is such a train wreck I will be buying myself a copy when I see it cheap enough. $19.99 definitely is not cheap enough, but get down to the $7.99 range, and I'll be reminding people about it at Xmas time.

So what's all the hub bub about? Debra Gibson is an ocean scientist who is exploring underwater. She notices whales going nuts and crashing themselves into icebergs. This in turn knocks away enough ice for her to catch a glimpse of two prehistoric creatures locked in mortal combat, just before they come back to life and zip away into the murky depths. Giant sized incidents occur around the globe, including an attack on an oil rig, and our fun little plane munch. Governments naturally get involved, and our lovely scientist finds herself caught up in it, along with her former professor, and a forced love interest in the guise of a fellow scientist from Japan. After some lame science, an even lamer excuse for the main characters to have sex, and an even lamer resulting hypothesis about pheromones as a result of that sex, we're off on a monster hunt.

Really, don't bother trying to figure out the plot. It's the same old stuff with government conspiracies, scientists saving the day, and narrow escapes thrown in. This is a low budget (comparatively) movie, and it shows in the small cast and limited sets. I'm actually pretty impressed with how much bang for their buck Asylum gets for their bad movies, and don't mind how much they recycle things between them. I'm watching for giggle factor and cheese, and Asylum delivers at least one time out of five.

For the beleaguered cast I have to give props for at least having fun with the movie. Yes, in their little interviews they may be taking it a little too seriously, but at least that didn't filter too much into the actual movie. There's a lot of tongue in cheek delivery of lines, and I get the feeling that they were trying not to roll their eyes as they said most of them. Debra Gibson isn't the best little actress in the world, but she's definitely not as bad as some I've seen. She holds her own against poor bastard Lorenzo Lamas, who sounded like he really wanted them to kill off his character so he wouldn't have to risk a sequel. Her professor, played by Sean Lawlor, is the believable mentor. The love interest, played by Vic Chao, plays his role a little too "this will get me an Oscar, right?", but he's still very likable, and has decent chemistry with Gibson.

All in all, Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus is a giant waste of time. However, it's a funny-groaningly-bad-leave-you-giggling-and-feeling-slightly-guilty-about-finding-it-so-funny, giant waste of time. And for the Queen Of Cheese, that's good enough!

Blue Demon: The most terrifying floating plastic triangles you'll ever see!

Look out! It

Blue Demon is yet another entry into the "demonized shark" movie category. A secret lab funded by the government is researching ways to control sharks to do their bidding. The scientists believe they are doing work to benefit mankind, but unbeknownst to them the government has other plans. Plus, there's someone hijacking their project with deadly results. dun, dun, dun, dun!

That's about as serious as the movie gets, and I was so very happy to sit and waste an hour and a half of my time on it. It has a lot of goofy extras to it to provide much needed humor, and doesn't go for the gore factor. This is a funny, good time movie with a decent cast to back it up.

I've made it clear that I think Dedee Pfeiffer is very difficult to tolerate onscreen for more than a few minutes at a time. She's twitchy. She's fidgety. I think they keep messing with her dosage. But in the very cheesy, gloriously ludicrous Blue Demon, she fits wonderfully! Her cutesy act isn't nauseating. Her overly-caffeinated persona makes sense as a quirky scientist who's just a bit too smart to speak with us 'regular people', let alone have more than basic social skills. Plus, she's balanced out very nicely by her co-star, Randall Batinkoff, who plays her long suffering, potentially ex-husband. He's the anchor that lets your eyes focus while she vibrates and hums herself practically into another dimension.

The rest of the cast all fit this odd little movie just perfectly. We have Josh Hammond playing a weird little lab assistant named Avery that you keep expecting to start talking about surfing, but plays with the computers instead. There's also Danny Woodburn who plays the uptight, possibly corrupt, boss to our lab gurus, Lawrence Van Allen. He easily steals every scene he is in, and it's not because he can't help but stand out because he's so much shorter. He's got remarkable screen presence, and makes his character the most believable of the lot as he yanks food out of their hands because they're not paying attention to him, and alternates between making the lab gurus lives hell, and needing an antacid to deal with them.

Then there's our big, bad, evil military character, played by Jeff Fahey. He plays a character named, of all things, General Remora. Right there you know for a fact this movie is not taking itself seriously, which is why I love it so morbidly. Jeff Fahey plays it to the hilt, clenching cigars, spitting out orders, seething with righteous indignation when he's questioned. He's out to create a military weapon, gosh darn it, not out for a day at the beach!

But the cast is just the icing on the cake of Blue Demon. The "short bus" special effects are a riot, and almost painfully bad. I swear to god the shark fins in the water scenes are just waterproof cardboard cutouts painted black and on the slowest motor they could find. When people are frantically trying to get out of their way, I checked my watch several times just to make sure I hadn't fallen into some kind of slow moving time warp. In all of those scenes I could have gotten up and microwaved another bag of popcorn and not missed a thing.

The little bit of CGI they went for is actually pretty good. They give the sharks expressions, and have them zip back and forth (not unlike the frenetic pace of Ms. Pfeiffer). Yes, it's so obviously blue screen out of the water it's laughable, but it just adds to the cheese factor, so I forgive.

If you're tired of shark movies that flash way too much chomped flesh at you, Blue Demon will be a pleasant respite. If you're also tired of movies taking themselves too seriously, especially when they should know better, this will be a breath of fresh air. And if you've been given a headache trying to keep up with Dedee in other movies, I think you'll be as shocked as I was at how tolerable, and even likable, she is in Blue Demon.

With Discovery Channel airing Shark Week, Blue Demon should be on your watch list to help get over all that darn reality and education they insist on adding to their quest for ratings. It also has the added bonus of plenty of giggle factor! This is a Queen Of Cheese "must see", or at least "must watch once, and wonder what the heck is wrong with that Queen Of Cheese to think this is watchable...". Enjoy!

Meteor: Sean Connery battles Karl Malden, The Russians, Politics, & A Five Mile Wide Rock

Cheesy effects and great actors. What a combo!

Sweet, mad as a hatter Sean Connery is the only reason I sat down to watch the classic train wreck that is Meteor. Already old enough to feel he needed to wear a toupee, but still exuding that Connery charisma, he holds his own against other stellar actors who got suckered into this thing.

Meteor was plagued by all sorts of problems, mostly due to the folks behind it having grandiose dreams of a blockbuster, but not enough resources or people skills to pull it all together. Sadly for them, this was a flop back in 1979, but for the Queen Of Cheese sitting down to watch it finally in 2009, I loved it.

Meteor has all the elements that make a great B-movie disaster/science fiction flick. We have astronauts all the way out in a spaceship near Jupiter and Saturn. We get to see them converse with space command back on Earth, with absolutely no delay. Spiffy technology since there's at least a few seconds delay just between Earth's orbit and the ground! The acting aboard the space craft as a deadly meteor heads their way is awesome, too, especially with the cheesy lighting effects to simulate combustion. We get more questionable science as a comet zips through an asteroid belt and drags some big rocks with it, and one at least five miles wide ends up on a direct course with Earth, along with some baby meteors just big enough to cause lots and lots of damage, including destroying a ski resort, causing a tidal wave, and other general mayhem.

Even more ludicrous is the science behind how the meteor is going to be stopped. The U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. both have secret, illegal space weapons with nuclear missiles, originally pointed at each other. The plan is to cut through some political b.s., provide some political posturing, but ultimately aim those missiles at the meteor instead, coordinate a launch that will divert the giant mass away from the planet, yet not just break it up into smaller, just as deadly pieces that will hit us anyway.

Really, it's not the bad science or laughable attempts at a political or military drama that will keep you watching this thing. It's the heavy, ominous music that sounds every time the meteor is seen rolling slowly, inexorably on it's path of doom. It's the long, drawn out sequences as the missiles are readied for launch, again with overbearing, giggle inducing music throbbing away, making sure we know this is a serious moment we should all take pride in as citizens of the Earth. Or something.

The acting of the main cast is definitely more than this film deserved. Sean Connery is the bitter scientist sucked back in to save the day. Karl Malden is his friend and liaison who does his best to stand between him and the paranoid military man played by Martin Landau. Brian Keith plays a very convincing native Russian scientist, delivering his lines in an accent that makes you forget all about that diabetes-inducing show, Family Affair. Natalie Wood is beautiful and smart as his English translator, and Sean Connery's tepid love interest. Henry Fonda takes a brief turn at being President of the United States, naturally being more noble of character than any real politician would be under those circumstances. The tons of secondary characters are all top notch, adding alternate touches of humor and melodrama. Even some of the silent, just in the background characters are a riot, including a duo of ladies in a caved-in subway scene who are doing their nails with looks of ultimate boredom as they await rescue.

There have been lots of disaster movies before Meteor and tons after, and arguably Meteor is not well done. However, there's a certain charm to it with it's over the top music, above average acting, and laughable premise of how the world would be saved from a crisis like this, not to mention the overtly phallic symbolism in all those nuclear rockets (which the movie lingers on for several minutes longer than necessary to simply say it's 'dramatic'). It's got the 70's hair, the 70's wardrobe, the 70's attitude about politics, the military, and science, and an awkward, unrequited romance between a young Russian translator and an 'old enough to be her grandfather' American scientist. It all adds up for a popcorn-munching couple of hours. In the end, if the looming meteor rolling towards you doesn't make you giggle a bit, you're not watching this for any of the right reasons!

Shark Attack In The Mediterranean: Great German Cheese!

Cool shark graphics, horrible English dubs, and cheesy fun!

There's just something about a shark attack movie I can't resist. When it's a German made flick with horrible English dubs, that just melts the cheese into a bubbly fondue.

In this case we have Shark Attack In The Mediterranean. A man, Sven Hanson, is trying to keep his life together after losing his wife in what we're told is a horrific shark attack. His teenage daughter is into jet skies and stealing people's boyfriends (even though she does it so sweetly, and the current girlfriend is such a snot you can hardly blame the guy), and rolling her eyes at her father. His best friend is head of the local police force, with a wife wasting away from cancer. Our hero flies a helicopter, and his latest passenger happens to be an attractive marine biologist, Julia Bennett, arriving on the island to help with cancer studies involving lots and lots of sharks. We now have our basic setup of conflict.

Right off the bat we get a young girl (horribly dubbed with a voice too young to fit the actress) setting the stage by telling a tale of tragic love that ends at the bottom of the ocean. The girl is with her family, all tourists in this Mediterranean paradise who wanted to cage dive with sharks. Well, the sharks aren't biting, so the captain of the boat decides to drag the cage, with the tourists still inside, along the bottom to a more dangerous spot where sharks are guaranteed. The cage gets caught on the bottom, the rope breaks, one of the tourists cuts their hand, and they're suddenly surrounded by an awesome display of fluid shark graphics. Even knowing it's got to be fake, it really looks cool, and eerily realistic, including sharks biting at the cage trying to catch a nibble of fingers and other parts.

So our pilot and his passenger come along in the nick of time to save the day. It gives us a chance to see that they have a lot in common, and to make it clear they're going to be love interests. We also get a chance to see our hero be an over-protective father when he sees that his daughter is part of the crew of the ship in such dire straits. Arguments ensue, we get some melodrama over the father wanting to move back to Germany and the daughter not wanting to go, and the police friend stepping in with his sick wife to talk about living every moment instead of living in the past. Good stuff, and probably very well acted, despite what the voice actors would have you believe.

But the meat of the story is about a megalodon. It's entirely unbelievable how a renegade scientist came into possession of a megalodon, although believable that it then escaped. However, the ensuing graphics are so very cool I can forgive all of this movie's plot holes. You really need to watch the movie so you can hear first hand all of the flawed science, but more to see the CGI of the megalodon as it cruises the Mediterranean. There's a scene where the hero is basically fishing for it with his helicopter, and the megalodon grabs a hold of the lure. We get several minutes of slick, believable underwater scenes of the shark rolling and thrashing, putting the folks at Discovery Channel to shame.

There's also plenty of humor throughout Shark Attack In The Mediterranean, provided both by the ludicrous storyline and by secondary characters that are riotously exaggerated. Humor is what's missing from a lot of B-movies lately, and this was like a breath of fresh air for me. Finally, another movie that doesn't take itself so seriously, and revels in the cheese!

Shark Attack In The Mediterranean isn't terribly original, but it's fun, and has the best shark CGI I have seen. Surprisingly there's no gore, which made me happier yet. A little blood, a flash of a body, but nothing horrendous trying to gross you out. Basically this is a well done B-movie about a prehistoric shark come to life, and was worth every second of screen time. If you love Shark Attack 3: Megalodon in all of it's cheesy glory, you're going to enjoy this movie for all the right reasons!

Alright, the trailer is in German, but it's the effects on the shark that make this movie so cool to watch!

The Gamers: Dorkness Rising: Awesome. Simply awesome!

Awesome. Simply awesome!

I came so close to dismissing The Gamers: Dorkness Rising when Netflix suggested it. But there was something about the idea of a bunch of adults sitting around playing D & D and taking it way too seriously that called to me. Not that I ever played D & D, mind you, but I knew plenty of people who did.

This independently made movie by Dead Gentlemen Productions is actually a sequel, but with more money behind it. For an independent film, the special effects are pretty slick, the costumes well designed, and the sets very authentic. It looked like they rented out a Renaissance fair location in the off season, or something.

The story centers around a man trying to write a Dungeons & Dragons module, but having problems finishing it because his buddies screw around while playing, so they never actually get to the end of it. In his frustration he tries to keep them under tight control, which in turn makes them figure out more outlandish things to do to undermine him and screw around with the game even more.

Early on the writer decides to invite one of the player's ex-girlfriends to join the game, feeling that new blood, and an intelligent female at that, would help. The fact he obviously has a slight crush on her doesn't hurt his cause. So they all start a new game with the experienced players laughing at the newbie's choices for her character ("You only have 81 hit points!"), at least until a scene where she slays all of the foes in one turn. The bickering and bantering back and forth is what drives the movie, even with the entertaining medieval yarn being spun for game play.

To add to the ludicousness, one of the other players decides he will play a female in the game, and keeps arguing that this character isn't evil, but merely "chaotic neutral". This is in doubt whenever the sorceress does things like blow up a farmhand just because he's taking too long to give directions. In the game world this character flips back and forth between a gorgeous blond woman, and the player in drag.

This isn't a high octane movie by any means, but I was glued to the screen the entire time, and laughing most of my way through it. Between a gender-bending sorceress, newbies kicking ass, a bard that constantly gets killed (begging the question why anyone would want to play a bard) in between seducing every female character he meets, a warrior priest who tried to be an elf on top of that, and a goody-two shoes warrior trying to keep them all under control, the game play is a riot. Even for someone not all that familiar with the intricate workings of D & D, you'll get the idea just from the arguing among the real world characters.

There's just enough drama from the real world to keep things from dragging. One of the players (the ex-boyfriend) is just plain a jerk, and the type of guy who screams about the rules until the rules put him at a disadvantage. We get glimpses of the players out in their 'real world' to give a little background, but there's never too much to get us sidetracked from the real heart of the movie: the new module being written.

The Gamers: Dorkness Rising is extremely well written. The actors, all unknowns, play their parts to the hilt. This is a wonderfully done independent movie, and one I will be adding to my wish list on Amazon.

For anyone who has ever played D & D, Magic: The Gathering, or any of those role playing games, or even just known someone who did, this movie will entertain you, maybe make you cringe as you see yourself in some of the characters, and will give you a strong urge to pull out that dusty box from the closet you've refused to acknowledge for so many years. The Gamers: Dorkness Rising is a Queen Of Cheese "must see"!