Of Monsters and Monkeys

Everyone's talking about Cloverfield, which I suppose is the blockbuster movie event of January, that month when all the good monster movies come out. I, on the other hand, have zero desire to see the film, not least because I find cryptic, viral marketing not only ineffective, but annoying.

For the past couple of months, I'd walk off the 6 train coming home from work and come face to face with a giant poster depicting lower Manhattan, a dessimated Statue of Liberty and a URL: http://www.cloverfieldmovie.com.

"Oh, monster movie, huh?"

Unfortunately, since "Cloverfield" is such a shit name, by the time I would walk 5 blocks to my apartment, I'd forget it. The conclusions I had to draw were:

• This movie thinks that broken Statue of Liberty imagery is somehow still original.
• New York turns green when threatened
• They REALLY want me to care what this is about, and I don't.

Then I found out it was all filmed on a handheld camera, which is pretty stupid, plot-wise. If you're my friend and we're running from a giant monster, you try and film the event and I'm gonna throw you in the monster's path. There's a time and a place for your stupid hipster artistic bullshit. Armaggedon is not that time. So basically, Blair Monster Project is not high on my list of must-sees.

Alarmingly, this movie is doing well. I don't mean to say that it shouldn't, as I'm sure it's entertaining if you're into that kind of thing. What's scary is that after Blair Witch, this is the second hand-held camera movie that's doing well in the box office, and we all know Hollywood's track history. In the words of Breathless Mahoney from my favorite movie of all time:

One is fun, why not two?
And if you like two, you might as well have four,
And if you like four, why not a few, why not a slew more?!

So get ready to barf into your $7 popcorn buckets because I bet we're gonna have a whole load of these things coming our way.

I, for one, will be staying at home watching things like Gorillas in the Mist, which is about as monster movie as I like to get. I watched it last night. Rampaging gorillas are funny, but I was grossed out by how attached Sigourney Weaver got to the monkeys:

Like this, only lesbian

Basically, any sort of movie with animatronic apes in it is fine by me. Animatronic apes working a handheld camera trying to document some horrible disaster, though, I dunno. Moving up and down at a steady pace from one perspective for an hour and a half doesn't scream epic to me.