BEFORE: The general rule, of course, is that horror films must be watched in October - BUT, rules are made to be broken, right? Sometimes there's a film that seems too weird or silly to fit into that traditional horror mold, and I think that's the case tonight. Some other times, the linking kind of demands that I break the rule, right now the best way for me to GET to the October horror chain is to put this film here - because first I've got to get to September, and for some reason the road goes right through here. Also, I've still got way too many films in the horror section, and some of them just don't link to anything else in that section.
OK, so three good reasons to watch "Monster Trucks" tonight. Let's be honest, this does not look like a great movie, or even a great genre film. But I've got to just buckle down and get through it so I can move on, not every film is going to be "Watchmen" or even "Superman", doing things this way occasionally means watching a very silly film in order to get to something better, it's my special habit of punishing myself, or building up a tolerance perhaps. Look, as a reward, the next day I'm going to watch a sci-fi sequel that I've been meaning to watch for 20 years, it's kind of been on the list longer than there even has been a list. That's significant, I hope - it will feel great to finally cross that one off. Tonight's film, really, who cares?
I've got a few more films coming up in September that don't really feel like traditional horror, five I think, and that's just going to help clear that sub-genre and narrow the focus a bit, plus create more room to add horror films that come my way. I think I've got next year's horror chain figured out, but after that things get very fuzzy, I'm not sure if I can put the remaining pieces together for a decent chain in 2027, just a heads-up.
Holt McCallany carries over from "The Iron Claw". Only 1 week left in August after this, so the real horror films will be here before you know it.
THE PLOT: A young man working at a small town junkyard discovers and befriends a creature which feeds on oil sought by a fracking company.
AFTER: Yeah, this one was pretty painful to watch. It might have helped a bit if I were eight years old, but I'm not. Really it's a big riff on "E.T", only the Elliott analog is a little older and a budding car mechanic, the alien is from underground, not outer space, and instead of making bicycles fly, the creature makes a truck do all kind of impossible things. But really, it's the same stuff we've seen before, if you're going to copycat, you might as well start with a great movie and then change every element so nobody figures out where you stole the story from, except me.
Ugh, I just can't figure out what purpose this movie serves, like who is the target audience, and in what way does it help for them to imagine that there are creatures living deep below the earth's surface who survive by drinking oil and gasoline? That makes no sense, because we drill down there to get oil, and if there were creatures down there drinking it, then it wouldn't even BE there. This also makes no sense from a scientific point of view, because oil and gas are NOT FOOD. I don't see how this animal could have a working biology because there's no animal that could process oil or gas and get nutrition from that. So this is just weird on top of weird.
So I guess this is supposed to be a movie for kids, I mean, I guess kids like trucks and kids like weird creatures, so when you put those two things together this movie should be like a beer float is to adults. If you like beer and you like ice cream, then logically you should LOVE a beer float, right? Not so fast, because I love them and I tell people about them, but quite often it's a hard sell. Very few of my friends over the years have been willing to try beer floats, even though I know how to make them, some people are still reluctant. The reason is, they have to be done right, you can't just take ANY beer and ANY ice cream and put them together in a (frosty) glass. Like the other night I combined a "Sexual Chocolate" imperial stout with some Vienna Mocha Chunk ice cream - now that's a mainly chocolate beer with notes of espresso, and a coffee ice cream with chunks of chocolate. Perfect pairing!
In the same way, you can't just throw monsters and trucks into the same movie and call it "Monster Trucks", because I guarantee, nobody really thought this one through, they just did a focus group to find out what kids like and tossed those elements together into one story. Like, let's have a teenager character but NEVER show him going to school, because kids want to be cool teens but also they hate school. Kids want to (apparently) find a unique monster creature of their own and then become friends with it, I mean, who doesn't want a loyal pet? BUT they don't want to walk it or feed it or do any work to take care of it, so OK, there's none of that in our little story. Kids love trucks, even though they're too young to drive, they probably fantasize about the day that they CAN drive a truck, but again, they don't want to do the work like filling it up with gas, checking the oil, rotating the tires when necessary, so let's just have all the good parts of truck ownership on the screen. Yeah, this all sounds like a winning formula, too bad that things just didn't add up.
I mean, COME ON, what are the odds that this creature would perfectly fit under a truck frame so that he can see out through the front grill but can't be seen by humans looking directly at the truck, that he would have tentacles that are PERFECT for spinning the axles, and that somehow pulling UP on the steering wheel (which, umm, is not really a driving thing) would make that monster jump straight up in the air with the truck on him, totally defying the laws of physics but enabling the truck to hop over any barrier that gets in its way? Really, the chances against all of this are quite astronomical, hate to be a buzzkill but that's what I do.
The bad guys are frackers (of course) who set out to disrupt the natural order of things, ignored the warning signs of underground life (to be fair, it is quite impossible that far down) and then decided to capture two of the three animals that came up through their drilling pile (honestly the creatures are way too big to fit through the long drilling hole, I can't be the only person who noticed this) and then send a group of mercenaries out to hunt down the third.
Tripp, that teen mechanic, is lucky enough to find the missing creature and along with his classmate and future love interest Meredith, retrofits his truck so that it can be monster-powered and do all of these amazing things. Or, looked at another way, he enslaves the creature and makes it drive him around so he doesn't have to pay for gas. Yeah, it's not so much fun when looked at from that angle, is it? But he still has to find oil or gas to feed the monster, who he names "Creech" - so that's a zero sum advantage, why not just have a normal truck like everybody else and just leave this creature alone?
When they find out that the evil Terravex corporation has captured the other two creatures, and those creatures are Creech's parents, Tripp and Meredith team up with the lead scientist who's become attached to these creatures, and they work together to find two more trucks so that all three of them can drive around in the new monster/truck combo, really that's the only way they're going to win this crazy thing, by harnessing the combined power of monsters and trucks. IT'S RIGHT THERE in the title.
Really, what a complete waste of my time, and I wish I could get all 105 minutes I spent on watching this back. Now I'm really glad I didn't save an October slot for this, because it is a horror movie, sort of. Maybe calling it a disaster would be more appropriate.
Directed by Chris Wedge (director of "Epic" and producer of "Spies in Disguise")
Also starring Lucas Till (last seen in "Stoker"), Jane Levy (last seen in "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"), Thomas Lennon (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Barry Pepper (last heard in "Creed III"), Rob Lowe (last seen in "Brats"), Danny Glover (last seen in "Places in the Heart"), Amy Ryan (last seen in "Beau Is Afraid"), Frank Whaley (last seen in "A Midnight Clear"), Aliyah O'Brien (last seen in "Crash Pad"), Daniel Bacon (last seen in "The Edge of Seventeen"), Jedidiah Goodacre (last seen in "Tomorrowland"), Samara Weaving (last seen in "Ready or Not"), Stacey Scowley (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Tucker Albrizzi (last seen in "Sicko"), Chris Gauthier (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Scott Patey (last seen in "The Show"), Ryan Cowie (last seen in "The Mother"), Adrian Formosa, Philip Granger (last seen in "Tucker and Dale vs Evil"), Alex Kliner (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Pat Waldron, Peter New (last seen in "American Dreamer"), Devielle Johnson, Jordana Largy (last seen in "Come and Find Me"), Ian Carter, Candice Zhao
RATING: 3 out of 10 crushed oil barrels
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