Reviews

To begin with, this is not a slow-paced, boring movie, perhaps only to those with ADHD. The first half is great and it is understandable that the kid would be freaking out over killing a man, even though the man was trying to kill him. It's a shock to the system. The problems begin when the other men arrive looking for the dead man and his chest of gold. They start moving around the island in their boat while the keepers track them on land. Somehow, two of them manage to jump onto some rocks, scale nearly vertical rocky cliffs in short time and enter the lighthouse, all with the keepers failing to see this as they watched the boat?? It's so bad. Then, Butler's character runs after the third man with a hook in the darkness, hooks his neck, kills him, and then discovers it's a kid from home. It is such a painful plot contrivance that it ruins the film. After that, its downhill all the way.

Some sci-fi/horror movies are just dumb, while others, like Sea Fever, slowly creep up on you with their inanity. When the creature starts burrowing into the wood hull of the ship with it's "tentacles," we can see clearly that the green slime oozing through the wood is eating through it. But of course, the "scientist" just sticks her finger right in it. I was half expecting the dizzy moppet to taste it lol. And then, the captain sees the stuff eating through his boat and he has to swish his fingers in there just for the hell of it. Sometime later, the scientist laments that some or all of the people on the boat could be infected with the "parasites." Wow, really? Unless you want to feel sad and stupid for watching this dreadful heap of refuse, avoid this movie like the plague. Or a parasite.

These days of bone-headed big budget science fiction films are very concerning. The "Bird Box" effect seems to be spreading like some viral plague across the inflicted biosphere of genre filmmaking. You don't have to have a solid concept, just some gimmick and a whole bunch of moronic characters stumbling around for 100 minutes. Such is the case with Annihilation, a film so laden with pot holes it makes the streets of uptown New Orleans seem pristine by comparison. An object plummets from space and hits a lighthouse and immediately begins mutating everything in its path as it spreads across the countryside. "Scientists" and "doctors" set up a base to study the "Shimmer zone" and apparently keep sending idiots into the zone and of course, they never return. Except one guy who comes back, goes to his house, talks to his wife, and then starts spitting up blood and writhing in agony. Govt. spooks swoop in and take him and his wife to the base where it is determined that he's had massive organ failure and internal bleeding and she theorizes it could be a virus or radiation. So what does his doctor wife do? She goes on a mission with a few other women into the shimmer zone. No hazmat protection, nothing. Only rifles. There they encounter weird plants and animals which are being mutated by the force within the shimmer zone and they find a memory card with video showing some eel-like creature inside of one of the previous explorer's guts, to which one of the women shouts "It's a trick of the light! It's not real!" And she proceeds to be a complete idiot until her thankful death midway through this fiasco. I could go on, but I'm getting sick just thinking about this mess of a movie.