By DR. BENNY GRAVES
Starring Christopher Ahrens, Haven Tyler and Geretta Geretta
Directed by Bruno Mattei
Written by Claudio Fragasso
Blu-ray release by Severin
When a piece of cinema is written by Claudio Fragasso and directed by Bruno Mattei, expect a very specific vibe. To be clear, it isn’t a good one – in the conventional sense. However, as a result of frequent brain scramblies, I am not always after a conventionally good time. Sometimes, what I’m looking for is schlock that infringes on intellectual property to a heinous degree.
Enter my reliable Bruno, the director behind Hell Of The Living Dead (We have Dawn Of The Dead at home) and Robowar (We have Predator/Robocop at home). Mr Mattei was not content with robbing one movie blind. Instead, he wanted to ensure that two of James Cameron’s greatest accomplishments were stripped for parts and then reconstructed using construction paper and airplane glue.
[Editor’s note: Hey, Doc! Ye Ed here, butting in for a bit. It’s safe to say that James Cameron is no font of originality himself. Believe me, if Harlan Ellison were still around, he’d tell you all about it. At any rate, I think we can all agree that Rats: Nights of Terror is an infinitely better film than Avatar…]
Mattei haphazardly fuses The Terminator with Aliens as if they went through The Fly telepod. The results? A movie called SHOCKING DARK (Also released with the title of Terminator 2… Yes, I’m serious). How’d it turn out? Well, you saw what happened to Jeff Goldblum.
In the near future of the year 2000, Venice is polluted to the point of being uninhabitable. Yet, beneath the city is an elaborate labyrinth of tunnels where researchers working for the Tubular Corporation are apparently attempting to reverse man’s destruction of the environment. Unfortunately, those researchers are being killed by hordes of monsters. Mega-Force, a group of hardass Space Mar… I mean, uh, soldiers are sent in with a plucky female scientist to discover the nature of these monsters. At the last minute, they’re joined by a secretive representative for Tubular. Oh, they also meet a little girl who is a survivor of the monster attacks, and she ends up developing a surrogate daughter relationship with the female scientist. So you see, no one had ever created a story like this before, and certainly no one could craft it with the directorial eye of Bruno Mattei.
SHOCKING DARK rips off Aliens to the point of high comedy. The scene where the Space Marines suit up? Replicated in what appears to be a college locker room, as our soldiers don outfits that look like they were supplied by Christian heavy metal band Stryper. Geretta Geretta (the only actor in this flick with a spark) works double duty as both a store-brand Vasquez and Sergeant Apone, delivering a speech that is a master class in scenery chewing. We also get moments of cocooned victims begging for death, the Mega Force team discovering they’re surrounded via motion tracker, and even a scene where the crooked company man turns off security cameras to engineer the deaths of the female scientist and the survivor girl.
So what does Mattei do for a finale? Sadly, we don’t get to see an Alien Queen analog to the monsters who resemble cranky humanoid cuttlefish with post-nasal drip. Instead, we discover that not only is the company man evil, but he’s a cyborg weapon designed to kill everyone to protect company interests. You could even say he’s there to, and I’m just paraphrasing here, terminate them.
You don’t watch SHOCKING DARK because you want a better version of the movies it’s skinning in the back of an unmarked van. You watch it to experience the sheer audacity and incompetence of the crime being committed. You watch it to see not one, but two scenes of a countdown to the underground tunnels’ destruction. You listen to its dulcet tones so that you, too, develop a profound hatred for fake Newt, yelling “Sarah” so often it’ll put you into a coma if you take a shot every time she says it. Most importantly, you see this movie to the end because the idiocy of the last act needs to be studied in film schools. That’s to ensure that for every ten Safdie brothers created, we get at least one Bruno Mattei.
If you can believe it, the movie was not released stateside until 2018 for what is concisely described as “legal reasons.” Do yourself a favor and pick up Severin Film’s pristine Blu-ray release… Just don’t tell James Cameron.
