Today's Feature: Poseidon Rex (2013)
What happened to you, Mark L. Lester? The man who directed Class Of 1984, Firestarter and Commando, the man who produced The Funhouse (thirty-five years later, still the best "spook house" movie ever made), has somehow resorted to directing such irredeemable, bottom shelf dreck like Pterodactyl, Dragons Of Camelot, and today's frustrating little feature, Poseidon Rex.
Obviously, Lester was never a member of Hollywood's elite with the earlier films I listed above, and I would never make the argument that the man who helmed Roller Boogie ever had a real shot at becoming an A-list director, but he certainly demonstrated some serious skills as a filmmaker once upon a time. His screenplay for Class Of 1984 (which he co-wrote with Fright Night director Tom Holland and the late John Saxton, writer of the infamous Ilsa, She-Wolf Of The SS) is a clever, angry work of social satire masquerading as exploitation entertainment, and the film itself is a cult treasure that somehow continues to fly under the radar of most serious cinephiles who eagerly embrace so many other lesser works, and this has always baffled me.
You know what else baffles me? That the man who directed Class Of 1984 also directed Poseidon Rex. This simply does not compute, because Poseidon Rex is so rote, so flat and formulaic that it leaves almost no impression on the viewer after it ends. I'm not kidding. I watched Poseidon Rex maybe three hours before I began writing this, and I actually had to rewatch portions of the movie moments ago in order to remember any plot details. I've never had to do that before, and that's a bad sign for a movie that prominently features a giant aquatic dinosaur wreaking havoc in some tropical paradise. You'd think something like that would be a little more memorable, but there it is.
Poseidon Rex follows the adventures of Jackson Slate, a hard boiled treasure hunter in the mould of Indiana Jones, if that mould was shattered and hurriedly glued back together by an apathetic intern before his dickbag boss returned from his lunch break. Maybe that mould looks okay at first glance, but if you pay even the slightest bit of attention to it you realize that something is seriously wrong, but it's too late to do anything about that because the ruined mould has already been utilized to produce our latest basic cable monster movie action hero, and his name is Jackson Slate, and he is just the worst.
This grim-faced goober gets easily captured by a coterie of irate Rastafarian criminals who force him to go deep sea diving off the coast of Belize to retrieve a long-lost cache of Mayan gold, and his plan to use explosives to unearth the treasure rouses the eponymous monster from its ancient slumber, kick starting all of the film's carnage. Left for dead after the explosion and subsequent monster rampage conveniently eliminates all of Slate's rivals, he just immediately finds the nearest resort island and recruits some random folks to join him in a second expedition to retrieve the gold, apparently too stupid to realize that the very bad hombre (some sneering, one-eyed bastard named Tariq) who shanghai'd Slate in the first place knows exactly where the first boat went and has already dispatched a second boat of gun-toting goons to check up on the last group after they went radio silent.
Luckily for Slate, this second group of bad guys is also conveniently eaten by P. Rex, and Slate never even finds out about it. In fact, the P. Rex is actually the only reason this anthropomorphic shit sandwich even survives the movie in the first place, because Tariq and the rest of his goons catch up to our hero during the third act and would've killed Slate if our resident Dinos Ex Machina didn't somehow sneak up on these pricks and quickly eat them, leaving Slate completely unscathed. This dumbass owes the P. Rex his life, and he still keeps trying to kill it. The monster was probably just so glad to be freed from his subterranean prison and kept eating all of the people trying to kill Slate as a means of saying "thank you".
So Jackson Slate is just an asshole. He's also played by Brian Krause, an actor I can't help but admire due to my unhealthy obsession with the schlock fantasy series Charmed, despite knowing full well that the series and his performance on the series are not all that great. I'll never defend Charmed as anything more than B-grade trash, but it's my kind of B-grade trash, and I find it effortlessly watchable, because there's something wrong with my brain. But browsing through Brian Krause's IMDB profile, I realize that, aside from a guest-starring role in an episode of Mad Men, B-grade trash is essentially the man's entire career. That's fine, really. We're not all meant to be Brad Pitt or George Clooney, after all. Some of us have to settle for being Brian Krause.
Oh god, I've lost track of things. I can't even remember this movie. It's all slipping away from me again, because now I'm just thinking about Charmed again. Maybe I should rewatch Charmed. I could write about it for the three people who read my blog, and end up driving even them away with my obsessive rambling about the trials and tribulations of a family of sassy witches as they juggle with dueling the forces of darkness, burgeoning romantic relationships and their own flourishing careers in picturesque San Francisco.
Anyway, this big fucking monster is wandering around some tropical island paradise, eating motherfuckers left and right and just generally having a blast during his first day out in maybe 65 million years, and this leathery prick Jackson Slate and his counterfeit scientist lady friend decide they need to get their hands on a goddamned rocket launcher so they can blow this toothy prick's head off before the military calls in an airstrike to level the entire fucking island just to kill one rampaging dinosaur. That's a bit of an overreaction, but some general somewhere just watched The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and mistook it for a documentary, and now he's not taking any chances with such trivialities as collateral damage, so it's time to turn this island to glass in the name of freedom!
The military, by the way, is represented in this film by three day players wearing rented fatigues standing in an abandoned warehouse with a single laptop computer resting on a flimsy card table in front of them standing in as a desk. Oh, and stock footage of fighter planes flying around, doing nothing in particular. Exciting shit. Jackson Slate gets the bright idea to get in a two-seat puddle jumper plane and fly around the island, buzzing the P. Rex in an attempt to lead him away from the island, allowing the military to blow the big bastard up harmlessly in the water, but the clever monster just ignores this dummy and instead begins to chase the counterfeit scientist lady as she makes her own escape in a speedboat with some bazooka-brandishing shirtless dude that just falls out of the boat after ten seconds for no reason, getting quickly gobbled up by the hungry monster.
The P. Rex, I must add at this point, is just fucking ridiculous. The beast is obviously a computer generated creation, and this movie doesn't have the budget to make it look remotely realistic in any way. It looks like a T. Rex with derpy little flipper hands and a big dorsal fin, and its eyes are these lifeless little pinpricks just resting on either side of its big, dumb head. The creature never convincingly occupies the space in which it is placed at any point, with light playing unnaturally across its body, forcing the monster into the foreground of every shot (even when it's supposed to be in the background) just floating weightlessly in the frame every time it lumbers onscreen,
Actors routinely have no idea where to look when they're meant to be confronting the monster, just looking all over as they aimlessly fire their guns into the air, which is never not stupid. This wouldn't be an insurmountable problem if the movie didn't force the monster into so much of the film. A smart approach would have been to keep the monster off screen until the third act, creating a sense of tension as some unseen force wreaks havoc in the water surrounding the island. You know, kinda like Jaws. Spielberg kept that shark off screen as much as possible because he knew if he tossed it front-and-center as often as possible, audiences would see it for what it truly was: a sorta-dumb-looking animatronic puppet.
But Mark L. Lester is. was, and never will be a Steven Spielberg, so we're introduced to Poseidon Rex in full less than four minutes into the movie, and he keeps making regular appearances up until everyone's favorite counterfeit scientist lady blows his stupid head off with an errant bazooka at the very end. The monster looks dumb, is what I'm saying.
And you know what else doesn't help when you're trying to build tension and fear in your movie? Noticing random people in the backgrounds of scenes of a supposedly violent dinosaur's island rampage, just shopping and drinking margaritas and basically enjoying their vacations without a care in the world. That always helps sell the illusion Mark L. Lester, you fucking hack. The fucking world's ending in the foreground, and Brian Krause is selling the terror like a champ, and over his shoulder there's a fat tourist buying a shaved ice treat, completely unaware of the goofy parade balloon of a monster floating through the frame in front of him.
That's pretty much it, I guess. The P. Rex corpse drifts lifelessly along in the ocean, getting picked apart by sharks and seagulls as it rots away in the hot sun, and Jackson Slate and his counterfeit scientist lady friend hold hands and-
The eggs! I forgot about the eggs! Blowing up the ocean floor didn't just unleash a hungry dinosaur upon an unsuspecting world, but also a clutch of somehow still viable P. Rex eggs, and both Jackson Slate and his counterfeit scientist lady friend know this, but neglect to inform the military of this potentially dire situation, just walking away hand-in-hand at the end of the movie after she brings up the eggs to her new boyfriend, who just shrugs and immediately forgets about what she just said, despite being very vocal about returning to the "blue hole" where the P. Rex emerged and destroying all of the eggs before they could hatch and become the world's new apex predator earlier in the film.
It's just whatever, right? Who cares that they're hatching and growing and eating and we're all doomed because you're too busy trying to get some strange to do the right thing. This dumb asshole never even gets his hands on any of that buried treasure, so in the end he has nothing. Good job, Jackson Slate, you worthless sack of shit.
Did this movie premiere on SyFy? Because it feels like a SyFy original movie, just right at home in that fragrant landfill of shame. Two days ago, when I praised Dark Was The Night as an example of how to do a creature feature the right way, Poseidon Rex was what I was talking about when I referred to the "groan-inducing garbage" that modern monster movies have become. It's the poster boy for that lifeless, "fuck you, consumer" product with which SyFy has become forever associated. Movies like this seem to actively hold their audience in contempt, but maybe audiences enjoy feeling like underappreciated filth, because these movies just keep getting made, and that's the real horror story.
YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!
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