Rating: D
Dir: Miao Jin-Guang, Miao Jin-Cang
Star: Ray Cao Lei, Wei Xiao-Dong, Yin Yi-Jia, Yang Xiao-Mi
I am a simple man. I see a movie with a title like Monster Attack 2, I watch it, despite not having seen the original Monster Attack. I will be happy, providing the film a) contains monsters, and b) they spend the movie attacking. I will not be happy, if I end up watching three or four people drive around a desert for more than half the movie, and then get only the most token of token animal attacks. The grade above should clue you in to the direction in which this goes. It’s a feeble effort, which lasts a mercifully brief sixty-five minutes, yet still manages to outlast its welcome, by a good fifty.
The first five minutes are okay, mostly because they are the first five minutes, and a token amount of scene-setting is acceptable. The location in which this is shot, is admittedly spectacular in the scenery department: wilderness to the max. We meet our characters: Da Chang (Lei), a freelance videographer, who has been commissioned to take footage of the wildlife, along with assistant Yuan Ming (Wei). Also there for the ride, literally, is Da’s girlfriend… or fiancée… or wife, it’s unclear, Xia Zhen (Yin). They pick up Yue Lin (Yang), a researcher whose car broke down. Finally, operating in the area are a group of poachers, although they serve no real purpose and you might as well ignore them entirely.
The issue with the first five minutes is, it then becomes ten. And fifteen. And twenty, all without anything more than random shots of a giant scorpion scuttling across canyon walls (top). Yuan gets the hots for Yue. The poachers park up in a ghost town and wait for their contact. Our quartet show up there too, looking for fuel supplies. We’re now past the half-way point, without a single one of the exciting events promised by the title. Eventually, it’s a giant snake which shows up – the scorpion must have been on its lunch break. It nibbles lackadaisically on a couple of the poachers, then vanishes from the movie, never to be seen again, its shift apparently over. However, it did apparently do enough to earn pride of place on the movie poster.
The scorpion then arrives, finishes off the bad guys, and… Well, not much more. It chases the quartet about for a bit, demonstrating a sad lack of competence at basic scorpion skills, such as hunting prey. It then chases them up an escarpment and falls off. That’s apparently the film’s climax. We likely spent more time being lectured on Yue’s mission. It involves research into prehistoric Chinese inhabitants, and she gets very excited when Yuan finds a rock. I should have seen this dismal excuse coming from almost the beginning, when a scavenging bear demonstrates conclusively it is smarter than any of the initial trio. If you watch this, it’s smarter than you as well.
This review is part of our feature, When Chinese Animals Attack.