Poor Quality Dynamic Effects That Have a Horrendously EVIL Bite! “Bad CGI Gator” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on August 26, 2024

“Bad CGI Gator” is an Amazon Choice item! Order it Here!

Six college students end the schoolyear with a long weekend at a lakeside cabin in rural Georgia. Looking forward to the youthful debauchery of drinking themselves into a stupor and engaging in lots of sexual hanky-panky, they each throw their school issued laptops into an alligator’s lake habitat for an Instagram moment to go viral and also in a moment of jovial release to be finally done with school and kick off Summer. When the small gator encounters the laptop’s electrical current, the gator grows into a monstrosity and has the unique ability to float through the air. Now larger than man, the gator is ravenous for his next meal and the college students are an easy, convenient dish. Trapped inside the cabin, brawn stupidity won’t save them against the mutated reptilian that circles outside, and they have to use every ounce of their brainpower to outsmart the insatiable beast.

You’ve (probably) heard of “Bad CGI Sharks!” Now, get ready to sink your horribly rendered jaws into “Bad CGI Gator,” the latest alligator creature feature comedy-horror from Charles Band’s camp of Full Moon Features. Helmed by resident Full Moon filmmaker, “Deathbed” and “Dark Walker” director Danny Draven, the 2023 film removes practicality and plausibility for the sake of following in the wake of the badly rendered shark film from brothers Jason and Matthew Ellsworth. “Bad CGI Gator” is also a family affair with Charles Band’s son, Zalman Band, in his first full-length feature writing credit that, like “Bad CGI Sharks, gives into itself and doesn’t take itself seriously with genre tropes, the gore and nudity one-two punch, and, of course, bad computer-generated imagery. Shot in the location state of Georgia as well as in Charlie Band’s Full Moon estate in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, “Bad CGI Gator” is produced by the father-son duo of Charlie and Zalman with Nakai Nelson (“Evil Bong 420,” “Don’t Let Her In”) picking up the rest of the producing slack.

If there was ever a time to root for a visually vexing constructed alligator and not the young people trying to save their lives from its floating ferocity, the time would be now. The cast is compromised of the very worst caricatures of millennial youth with their “bros,” Instagram virality, and overall toxic behavior. As a whole it’s all purposefully scripted to be painted like pure putrid of personas that sodomize the very essence of heroic protagonists. Ben VanderMey (“Malicious”) and Cooper Drippe are impeccable at being gym bro chads, even VanderMey’s character is named Chad, and their on screen slay honeys, in Rebecca Stoughton and Sarah Buchanan, are social media influencing prejudgers with thigh-high skirts and low cut blouses. The obnoxiously coarse foursome becomes grounded by contrasted counterparts in Sam and Hope, played by Michael Bonini (“#ChadGetstheAxe”) and Maddie Lane (“Monster Mash”), and this clues in audiences of the two more level-headed potential gator bait as the likely, predictable heroes who will either survive with their life or end up destroying the floating gator. While the Chads and Paisleys are an exaggeration of arrogantly crass people, led with the worst of qualities for easy kill digestion, Sam and Hope are also to the extreme in a polar opposite manner. Sam’s cautious philosophy makes him the butt of many jokes while the neutral Hope, a rival hottie shoulder-to-shoulder with the other ladies, can whip Chad into place with almost a stare being his stepsister. The common dislike for tasteless jerks force Sam and Hope together with the gator being a keynote in closing the door on the once ajar flirtations. Lee Feely rounds out the cast as a fisherman badmouthing the gator’s size, but the opening scene doesn’t do much for the rest of story nor does it come back to bite, literally, with the lack of Feely’s return in his short-lived moment.

A title like “Bad CGI Gator” doesn’t come with any strings attached; there is no subtext, no character development, or convoluted storyline to really tickle and tease the brain in a sophistication of foreplay. What you get are dumb, unlikeable characters for a deathroll of laughs and gnarly kills. What you also get is a badly rendered giant floating alligator that on a one to ten on the badly rendered scale, this poor design is a four, resulting in a not too terribly layered and not the worst we’ve seen to date but obviously stands outs as a cut and pasted fake with animated movements. Also entailed, in complete Full Moon fashion, is the alligator’s transmogrified size and supplied new abilities that allows it to chomp heads clean off, savagely gnaw on half-naked beauties, and swallow hole it’s biggest, most arrogant opponent. What castrates the story is the limited locations with much of the cat and mouse play at the house and around the only vehicle for escape. The adjacent lake is virtually untapped for watery carnage, an area of helplessness for prey, aka people, to float in suspension while something more dangerous lurks below the surface or meets them at eye level. “Bad CGI Gator” is swampy camp at its best and, at the same time, at its worst but never pretends to be anything more.

Not only an ode to the monster movies of yore and a lampoon hit to the gross, schlocky creature features of more modern times, “Bad CGI Gator” emerges onto an AVC encoded, high-definition Blu-ray from Full Moon Features. The 1080p resolution on the single-layered BD25 of Full Moon’s feature number 395 has no digital discord regarding sharpness around the details. Gator POVs remark good pixel counts under and above water, delineating around the aquatic ecosystem including the plants and lake’s mucky floor. Night sequences bathed in a softer, illuminatingly spreading blue see equal amount of definition where the, what is considered to be, moon light hits and transition into the exterior cabin juxtapositions nicely with a warmer, shadowy outlined tone. The release’s audio mixes include a LPCM 5.1 surround sound and a LPCM Stereo 2.0. Early on, dialogue has a conical sound with reverberations that seemingly bounce back almost immediately. Though not totally free of audio fallibility, the dialogue does come across prominent and clean of distortion. Conical echoing dissipates later in the runtime and is replaced with the impenetrable sounds of a growling gator and its stomping around the cabin property that doesn’t seem to occupy the same space, much like the gator, ridiculing this particular creature feature sub-subgenre even more. English subtitles are optionally available. Special features include an audio commentary from director Danny Draven and screenwriter Zalman Band, a Screams from the Basement Podcast interview with the director, A second director interview on the Dead Talk Live Podcast, an isolated Jojo Draven musical score that sounds just as carnivalesque, humorous horror blend as Richard Band would compose, a blooper reel, a cast table read at the Full Moon mansion in Ohio, and the original trailer. The standard Blu-ray comes a fairly telling illustration of a savage-looking gator mouth agape just below a bitten-ripped Spring Break banner. There are no insert or other tangible bonus content alongside a humorously standing upright gator, slight smirking with the catalogue film number. “Bad CGI Gator” Blu-ray comes region free, has a runtime just under an hour at 58 minutes, and is not rated.

Last Rites: Full Moon’s satirical take on lousy alligator anarchy is spot on and though the cast of characters deserve every rendered tooth ripped into their flesh, the glossy gator pales in comparison to practical effects of its predecessors, and the story stinks as much as gator bait, “Bad CGI Gator” doesn’t false advertise this uncanny predator’s X-factors and that’s brownie points in my book.

“Bad CGI Gator” is an Amazon Choice item! Order it Here!

I Think We’re Going To Need Bigger EVIL! “Deep Blood” reviewed! (Severin / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on May 19, 2021

As kids, four boys were warned with an anecdotal tale of an ancient Native American spirit that took the shape of a killer shark malevolently stalking and killing the native villagers for their overfishing ways. Now adults, the four friends pursue very different lives as all four return home for the summer with interests in rebuilding family relations, girls, colleges, and avoiding the local punk, Jason, hellbent on making their lives miserable, but when a shark turns up and kills one of them during a solo dive, they recall the ancient tale and sound off to the authorities who take little heed to the incident. Their small beach community thinks they’ve killed the man-eating shark causing the ruckus, but when more chewed up bodies color the ocean red, the friends must take the task upon themselves to see the shark never devours anyone else again.

Italian shark-on-a-loose romper helmed by the legendary serial Italia horror and erotica trash filmmaker, Joe D’Amato (“Emanuelle in America,” “Anthropophagus: The Grim Reaper”), cashes in on the monster, man-eating shark celluloid frenzy with an uncredited directorial of the 1990 sharksploitation, “Deep Blood.” Originally to be Raffaele (Raf) Donato’s directorial debut, the George Nelson Ott script was salvaged by the then producer and cinematographer D’Amato after Donato’s change of heart and professions in the film industry. “Deep Blood,” that went under working titles “Wakan,” the designation for the Native American evil spirit, and just simply “Sharks,” was shot mostly with an English cast in the sunshine state of Florida with various underwater scenes filmed in Italy. D’Amato’s production company, Filmirage, supported the film in collaboration with Variety Film Production that has dipped it’s toes into another killer shark flick, Enzo G. Castellan’s “The Last Shark,” which some footage was utilized for D’Amato’s film nearly a decade later.

“Deep Blood” circles around the opening of four friends innocently having the time of their lives with a normal ocean side firepit, roasting wieners, being told horrifying campfire stories of the black finned Wakan by a mysterious Native American (Vans Jensens) who hands them a relic piece of oblong driftwood with noteworthy carvings about Wakan and slicing their wrists to make an impromptu blood pact to fight against Wakan whenever the time comes. You know, the usual stuff you do with your friends. As grown men, Miki (Frank Baroni), Allan (Cort McCown), Ben (Keith Kelsch), and John (John K. Brune) find themselves back home, reunited to only have their friendship ripped to shreds when John becomes Wakan’s tasty snack on a solo dive. Ott’s script really, really, and I mean really, tries to add depth to the characters, such as Allan’s spoon-feeding Mayor of a father handing out life advantages to his son every possible moment or with Ben who struggles between fulfilling his parents’ wishes of going to college or starting his professional golf career. There’s also some backstory about the death of Ben’s sibling at sea that has had some psychological torment on his father, Shelby (Charlie Brill, “Dead Men Don’t Die”). D’Amato crumples up character development like a piece of scrap paper and shoots a fade away jumper into the waste basket. My personal favorite in the shallow end moment is the local lout and head of a gang, Jason, who senselessly disparages the four friends, for whatever reason we don’t know, acutely 180’s from I’m-going-to-kill-you to becoming a good friend (out of respect?) and takes an active participation in hunting down the shark. All the relationship dynamics seem to just culminate right into the big, explosive deep-dive and pursuit for shark blood in the guys’ booty shorts and cut off sleeve shirts. Talking roles are aplenty but nothing worth the empathy or sympathetic emotional baggage surrounding the remaining cast of characters played by actors James Camp, Margareth Hanks, voice actress Mitzi McCall, and Tom Bernard as Sheriff Brody…I mean, Cody.

Only slightly echoing acts of Steven Spielberg’s flawless “Jaws,” “Deep Blood” also begs, borrows, and steals scenes to piecemeal together a semi-coherent story. In the wild Great White shark snippets from National Geographic video clips and shark scenes plucked and reused straight from another Italian schlocker, there lies a nonexistent sliver of thought in creating an original piece of footage that puts the resemblance of a monstrous shark and an actor in the same scene together with D’Amato relying burdensomely on editor Kathleen Stratton to handle the fragmentary bits of different look and feel shots and turn it into single profit linear narrative gold. But honestly, what do you expect? D’Amato was to be the director of photography but ended up in his lap directorial duties, taking on the extra work like any good producer. Many of the shark attack scenes are spliced together with the actors bobbing and turning up and down in the water with the iconic bubble and splash sequences that solidly create the allusion and the illusion of a frenzied blood bath, but some locations are blatantly amiss shots, especially those of the actors snorkeling and scuba diving inside an obvious aquarium vivarium in clearly an exterior beach scene, that are more of a blow toward our intelligence than anything else. When the movie magic shark finally does make an appearance, a rigid, clean cut, my 9-year-old nephew could draw better shark effects sells little amazement, wonder, or pelagic terror of the open water. “Deep Blood” is a see-it-to-believe sharksploitation disaster-piece with the Joe D’Amato Midas touch.

Luckily, seeing every story blighted nook and cranny and experiencing all the dysfunctionalities between characters have never looked better with Severin Films’ worldwide inaugural Blu-ray release of “Deep Blood.” Newly scanned in 2k from the original 35 mm negative and presented in a pillarbox 1.33:1 aspect ratio with a high definition 1080p transfer, the image clarity is about the only thing flawless in the film with natural looking color grading for a richer hue presentation. Aside from the wonkiness of equipment quality differences with Nat Geo’s stock footage, there wasn’t much in the way of image imperfections aside from faint speckle damage and a slight scratch briefly visible in one of the later scenes. Details are phenomenally crisp in the face, as you see every sagging wrinkle on Van Jensens’ mug, and even the slight white capping of the waves renders clearly across. The English language 2.0 mono track features a clean, discernable dialogue albeit some slight hissing. Carlo Maria Cordio’s synthesized score doesn’t invoke fear of the water, but does contribute to the Italiano-charm of D’Amato’s underwater thriller with a seducing melody of lo-fi chords to accompany the shark attack scenes. Optionally, a parallel Italian track provides a dub that isn’t typically as elegant in syncing with American actors. Special features for the 91 minute film include a trailer and a listed multi-region playback; however, I could get the disc to play on the region B setting. If you’re a shark film aficionado like myself, no matter how undeniable cheesy (and I’m looking at you “Bad CGI Sharks”), then “Deep Blood’ is an enjoyable serrated chomp into a chum soaked sandwich good to the last morsel.

https://youtu.be/g-pU8LOMf1k

Own Deep Blood on Blu-ray from Severin Films!

EVIL No Longer Swims Only in the Water! “Bad CGI Sharks” reviewed! (Sub Rosa Studios / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on February 4, 2020

Living hesitant, unconfidently, and unfulfilled in Hollywood, California, Matthew finds himself fired by his employer after experiencing a promotion interview from hell, but that’s not the worst of his problems. Earlier the same day, Matthew learns his estranged older brother, a free-spirited and enthusiastic Jason, has been kicked out of his parents’ home, provided a plane ticket, and sent to live with him possibly forever. The estranged brothers finally reunite after years apart and Jason infiltrates back into Matthew’s uptight life their childhood obsession with sharks to try and finish a rough, shark-thriller script from their past, entitled “Sharks Outta Water.” When a magical movie muse decides to grant them their boyhood cinematic aspiration, the sudden appearance of a poorly render man-eating shark floats about their neighborhood streets, hunting down the brothers during a night of computer imagery terror limned with shoddy shark frenzies.

Out in the surf of the internet, a list lurks just beneath the dark waters of the web. A list containing a flooded genre of some of the worst shark movies detrimental to mankind’s inherent fear of a primordial aquatic creature that was once known to be the ocean’s apex predator. To save us from the cold, bleak shark banality, “Bad CGI Sharks” absorbs all toxic mundane trash skimming the vast global networks and big picture boxes to recourse from the singular trained thought that sharks are much more than a punching bag of relapsed rendered dogfish with jaws. Written, produced, and directed by MaJaMa, an alias for Matthew Ellsworth (Ma), Jason Ellsworth (Ja), and Matteo Molinari (Ma), “Bad CGI Sharks” flaunts a straight-to-video, no-budget comedy-horror in the face of whoever is willing to once again put themselves in front of a speeding bad shark movie train; yet, the filmmaking trio embark on a creative, meta journey risky with little blood shed and a swarm of animated things that mark somewhat of a resemblance to sharks. What crests is insightful satirical wit over the ostentatious flare of gratuitous explosion, nudity, and monstrous sharks.

In keeping to the budget, MaJaMa already wear many hats behind the camera. To extend even further their invested working capital, the filmmakers also star in the lead roles, virtually as themselves, to surely hammer down a film entitled “Bad CGI Sharks” in their own brand of humor. We begin with Matteo Molinari, the Genova, Italy born actor who had a small role in 1994’s “Silence of the Hams,” a spoof starring Dom DeLuise and Billy Zane derived from the Jonathan Demme’s Hannibal Lector thriller, “Silence of the Lambs,” if the title itself wasn’t self-evident enough. Molinari is the only main lead not using his namesake and, instead, becomes the magical movie wizard Bernardo with his muse movie clapper. Bernardo was built for Molinari as the two are synonymous to each other’s manners, speech, and quirky simpatico charm, resulting in an innocent, mischievous movie imp to be the bridge connecting the gulf between Jason and Matthew’s polarizing characters. Jason’s a severe caricature of hyperactivity and of someone whose stuck in the past and while Jason Ellsworth has his moments, without his brother Matthew’s stern, grown-up, and spruced up onscreen self, the dynamic just wouldn’t be as potent as Matthew is essentially the activator spray to Jason’s gluey personality. The cast concludes with Jenn Liu (“Stranger in the House”), Josh Sterling, and Shaun Landry.

Tiptoeing around the fringes of being a stoner film, “Bad CGI Sharks” pushes a hyper-meta reframe of how shark movies, or perhaps the film descends deeper into the water molecule level of just the shark representation itself, should be brought back to the shores of reality from the watery depths of Davy Jones’ poorly rendered locker. Coinciding with crystallizing the shark-sploitation category is a more tender note of embrace with relatable themes of rediscovering brotherhood and mending broken bonds. Matthew’s parental manufactured disgust with his older, yet childlike, brother casts a large, dark cloud that seizes up any kind of affection and the floating shark, the symbolic dream of their childhood, tests their relationship, motivating the the character arches in the face of “Bad CGI Sharks.” Amongst the witty banter and flying carnivorous fish, “Bad CGI Sharks” shows innate signs of no-budget difficulty such as story pacing where the middle sags with Jason and Matthew running around Hollywood for awhile in a progression stagnation and there lies some early editing miscues with audio mixing and mic work. Like a shark, “Bad CGI Sharks” needs to keep swimming or else it’ll upend and die; luckily, MaJaMa saves the cinematic beast with the shark devours the internet and all bets are off!

If you like your sharks floating and roaring, then “Bad CGI Sharks” DVD home video is for you, sailor, courtesy of SRS Cinema and MVDVisual. The not rated, region free DVD is presented in a widescreen, 16:9 aspect ratio, with, an IMDB listed, Sony a75 II Mirrorless camera complete with a “vintage” lens. Most of the image transpires cleanly and sharp, even the inorganic, floating sharks look fair in their farce facade, and with the specialized lens seemingly cornered to just around the Bernardo’s outer shell host duties and intermission skit and also in the initial attack sequence in which is the only scene with any kind blood shed. The English language audio tracks include a 5.1 surround sound mix and a stereo mix. The audiophiles will find solace in knowing “Bad CGI Sharks” doesn’t mean bad audio tracks. Dialogue has clarity throughout, depth and range remains steady, and there’s negligible hum electric feedback. Bonus features include a commentary track with MaJaMa, a retrograde toy commercial for all the characters, the teaser trailer, trailer, and SRS promoted trailers. Though lacking bloody chum, “Bad CGI Sharks” has bite albeit with more comedy than creature feature horror, fleshing out real world problems with hilarity in a cheapjack rendition of a killer shark.