I managed to make it a mostly good movie marathon with the hubby this past weekend when I perused my streaming watchlists for three creature features. Let’s find out where things went slightly wrong.
DARK NATURE (2022)
This is a slow burner, and I was concerned it was going to end up being one of those metaphorical monster movies, but the creature does prove to be real when it’s finally revealed.
After escaping an abusive relationship, a woman goes on a women’s therapy retreat in the wilderness. Oh yeah. This is one of those female empowerment films the woke haters would fume over for being “anti-male”.
Each woman in the group is suffering from past trauma, but there are only hints of what each one experienced in quick flashbacks.
Meanwhile, our main girl begins to have nightmares and visions and becomes convinced her ex has found her and is following them through the wilderness.
There are a few red herring to keep us wondering if there is really a monster, but then the group starts getting peeled away, and eventually, 59 minutes in, we see the creature, and it’s pretty damn gnarly. Is it just me, or does it look like it is female?
The final act delivers monster action and suspense, and there’s even a pretty unexpected twist in the plot that has me second guessing if this actually is a metaphorical monster.
MORTAL GAME (2024)
This one was the highlight of this triple feature for me. The premise is simple, so it goes right for the creature horror and rarely lets up.
A title card explains that there is an island of monsters where hunters go for sport…and never come back.
Next, we meet the latest group of hunters. Upon arriving on the island, they are immediately greeted by skeletons pinned to trees. We learn very little about each character as they set up shop in a house accessible to hunters. Why is this island so accommodating to hunters if it’s known that they never come back? Weird.
19 minutes in, there are flashes of blood and beast as the first hunter to go off on his own gets taken out. Soon after, there’s a wicked good fight with the creature right outside the cabin. The action doesn’t let up after that.
This is one intelligent and sadistic creature. It uses traps to capture victims. It uses a severed head to freak them out by putting it up against windows. It even seems to understand how walkie talkies work and uses them to hunt down victims.
The monster is awesome, there’s blood and nasty gore, there tension and suspense, the film is shot very dark even in daylight scenes to create atmosphere, and the final girl kicks ass.
SCREATURE OF THE LAGOON (2021)
70 minutes long with a title like this? Screature of the lagoon is my nickname whenever I have sex near a body of water, so I had high hopes for creature feature fun, but other than a cheesy good rubber mask and hands, this is an absolute mess and shot so dark you can barely see what’s going on (I brightened my screenshots so you can see what you don’t see when you watch the film).
This creature feature wants really hard to be moody and meaningful, but the plot is impossible to follow and loaded with holes. For instance, we are introduced to a sheriff calling a “tracker” to find a girl missing in the woods. Does he find her? No idea, because we immediately cut to the tracker in his house in a montage set tow mellow, twangy guitar music. He’s cute in a sort of Backstreet Boys way.
Next, the sheriff brings a military man to the home of this tracker to ask him to help them hunt down a creature that escaped a secret military lab after a failed experiment. What? We don’t even know if Roswell really happened and we’re supposed to believe the government would reveal this scandal to a redneck in rural America?
The tracker is teamed up with a handful of other nobodies who would never be told government secrets, and they are all sent to the wilderness location on a submarine. What? And why does everyone actually sound like they’re talking underwater while conversing on this submarine? I give this low budget film credit for attempting to pull off a submarine scene, though.
It’s all downhill from there. These dudes roam the woods, keep splitting up, seem to die at the hands of this creature and then suddenly reappear. At one point, “two months later” flashes across the screen—a time jump that offers no significance to the fact that this whole team is still just walking through the woods hunting this creature that I already thought killed all but the tracker.
Well, at least you get to watch them die all over again.
