I don’t have any excuses for seeing this movie in theaters three months after its wide release. I was in a rut and a dry spell and knew that this might help jumpstart my heartbeat. The preshow served an assist by reminding me that there were many, many straight to video sequels of this super weird and much parodied monster movie from the mid nineties. The movie itself is sort of on the fence about its own relationship to the source material: at times loving satire in the vein of Blue Harvest and then at other times it seems like its just more broadly parodying schlocky action movies or the process of writing a movie at all? And then in other moments it feels like a generalized indictment of the current trend of mining IP for nostalgia and in the end killing the thing audiences loved in the first place.
If you are worried that this movie is trailer fatigue…! But also there are a fair bit of gags that come through the constant improvisation between the ensemble, including some found footage stuff that feels straight out of Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl. Some of the action sequences in retrospect feel a lot cooler as concepts than they look on screen: a fight on a set for a fight on a set for a… never mind. But there are some gags that are milked until they hurt, like the replacement for John Voight’s snake wrangler, who has his own crisis going on that doesn’t even get resolved until the end credits. Newton, Black, Rudd, and Zahn are wonderful together, though Jack Black never really feels like he’s acting anymore, so much as he’s trying to entertain people directly behind the cameras but maybe also like maybe he’s just standing in front of a green screen a lot and has no perspective on what the other actors look like and what the setting is, so maybe it’s sort of a protest?
I would honestly be super interested to know why it is that you’ve seen this movie past opening weekend if you are only seeing it now, so please message me when the exact circumstances that led you to stream this in full detail. It is the thing my brother used to call “a movie he’d see if he did all of the chores in his life forever” which quickly became long-hand for the next pandemic-induced shelter in place.
