Abominable Advent Calendar Day 22: Shocking Dark (1989)
Crapsterpiece Category: Cash Grab, AnythingSploitation
Heads up: nearly every scene in this film is ripped off from a better film
What happens when Italian exploitation director Bruno Mattei—known as a “copycat director”—gets together with the screenwriters who would go on to create of one of the “greatest” schlock movies of all time—Troll 2—and they decide that since nobody has made a sequel to Terminator yet, they might as well do it, but it will “borrow” a lot from Aliens, and be set in Venice and done on a shoestring budget, because why not? You get Shocking Dark. And if you don’t know that that is, it’s okay, because the title doesn’t really have anything to do with the movie anyway.
The movie opens footage of a riot at a research base in Venice and people yelling that the place is overrun with “mutants.” A “megaforce” is assembled to go in and find out what happened. Among the team members is Christopher Ahrens as Not Bishop-Burke and ’80s exploitation star Geretta Geretta as Not Vasquez. There’s also a Newt character who you will want to die a slow, painful death by fire within two minutes of her being onscreen. Truly one of the most annoying human beings ever captured on film. This team is supposed to be tough, but with the exception of Geretta, they mostly look like disaffected gym rats or Big Brother contestants.
Much of the film looks like it was shot in the locker room of a municipal swimming pool. There are humans trapped in mutant eggs, and lots of wandering down hallways and falling over railings. There’s a hilarious scene where the team desperately needs an elevator to work and keeps pounding the button on one side of the doors while half of them die, when all they had to do is pound the button on the other side. There’s hilariously bad dialogue. There’s gore galore and rubber monsters. Oh, and time travel. And that’s just for starters. It’s audacious in its awfulness, bold in its badness. And it’s laugh-out-loud fun.
The film wasn’t released in the US until 2018 because of copyright violations, but it was fairly well-known outside the US as a b-movie. You can find it here now thanks to Severin Films.
Geretta Geretta also did this promo for Severin. It’s awesome.
