There’s a lively indie horror scene coming from the UK, and it’s somewhat of an incestuous situation, with a circle of writers, directors, and actors working together regularly. For my latest triple feature, I checked out cheesy monster movies that all happen to feature indie horror vets Chrissie Wunna and Stephen Staley (whose hotness I recently covered in another post).
CROC! (2022)
It really bums me out that SyFy no longer snatches up all these hokey, low budget flicks featuring nature’s animals striking back. Croc! is a perfect selection for a SyFy Saturday marathon of CGI killer animal movies. Those were the days.
A shirtless mega hunk and his girl get eaten by the awesome, big-mouthed croc for starters, and then guests arrive at a mansion for a wedding.
Stephen plays a friend of the groom and Chrissie a friend of the bride.
In the best plot device ever, the groom needs to keep the eating of the first guest secret, which totally backfires when the croc shows up at the wedding to start chomping on people.
This is everything you want from a CGI croc movie. The croc’s mouth is mesmerizing, and its movements and attacks are laugh-out-loud funny.
And just as important, the characters make dumb and hilarious decisions left and right, like running around outside when there’s a perfectly good mansion to hide in.
That is until the croc gets inside. Oh, SyFy, you don’t know what you’re missing.
MONSTERS OF WAR (2022)
The director of Easter Bunny Massacre delivers a monster movie that isn’t even good enough for SyFy.
Chrissie plays a woman traveling on a country road with her two kids. They are terrorized by a weird creature, they meet two other guys, and they all run into a cave.
Within minutes, terrible CGI monsters, including 2 T-rexes, kill a couple of the people, and the rest end up at a church. Stephen is there, but he plays a fairly minor role in the film.
The movie gets weighed down by endless dialogue and character development we couldn’t care less about. We just want bad CGI monsters and laughable kill scenes. We get too few of them. The monsters aren’t even varied enough to entertain.
Worst of all, there isn’t a major battle with the monsters in the end. The survivors basically just hop in a car and escape.
DINOSAUR HOTEL (2021)
Dinosaur Hotel is about desperate contestants (all women) that participate in an underground game to win money. Little do they realize that the goal is to survive the night in a hotel filled with raptors, Pterodactyls, and a T-Rex.
Chrissie lands a spot in the game after a brief talk with Stephen, which is the last time we see him.
This is very much the same general plot structure as Monsters Of War. However, there are a lot more laughable kills, thankfully.
There’s also a silly floating eye host.
Once again, Chrissie has two kids with her, and they break off and sneak into a cave they find outside the hotel, so she has to go find them.
The best thing I can say about this one is that it’s more worthy of airing on SyFy than Monsters Of War. Now if this had been a film with a cast of all women in the 1980s, we would have gotten pillow fights, shower scenes, cat fights, and more. How far the monster movie genre has fallen…
