With the whole world of art on the very brink of an Armageddon caused by the glorified plagiarism software that is A.I. I thought I’d lighten the mood a bit and write a review of a thirty-five year old Italian exploitation movie that didn’t need a complicated algorithm to plagiarize a James Cameron movie. It did it manually. Tubi calls it Shocking Dark, which is also the name of the film’s 2018 North American Blu-ray release, but its official and original title in Italy was Terminator II. It was called that because, in typical confusing Italian movie fashion, it was ripping off Aliens. I guess the producers were trying to pull the old switcheroo on us by pretending to have made a crappy pseudo-sequel to one James Cameron film so we wouldn’t notice that they were actually stealing from a completely different James Cameron film. Didn’t work. Anyway, let’s review this particularly nutty turd directed by the legendary Bruno Mattei.
If you’ve never heard of Bruno Mattei do yourselves a favour, log onto to Tubi, and just watch any of his many movies that are there. They are magnificently bonkers. Also, and I do mean this sincerely despite the fact that I’m busting his balls for being a thief, I think Mattei had talent. Yeah, he stole from everyone, but I’m not angry at him so much as I’m disappointed. He had a good eye for visuals and really knew how to shoot a movie that looked like it cost more than it did. Yet, at the same time, he didn’t seem to care two whits about what he made beyond whether or not people could be suckered into paying for it.
SYNOPSIS: Never has my job been easier. The whole movie can be summed up as “James Cameron’s Aliens, but…” James Cameron’s Aliens, but it takes place in the tunnels under Venice instead of on another planet. James Cameron’s Aliens, but with Mutants instead of Aliens. James Cameron’s Aliens, but with the characters of Burke and Ash merged together into the character of Fuller… You get the idea. It’s Aliens, but it’s different in really dumb and cheap ways.
TEN THOUGHTS I HAD WATCHING THE FILM:
#1 – When naming your evil corporation, perhaps it would be wise not call it The Tubular Corporation. It doesn’t sound very menacing. Was The Bodacious Corporation already taken?
#2 – If you’re just going to rip off the Newt character from Aliens anyway, perhaps hire a woman who’s younger than 30 to play her?
#3 – You would think that all the wide shouldered jackets displayed in the film were the costume department’s attempt to be futuristic, but actually that was just the real fashion of the time.
#4 – The Marines they send in the tunnels to investigate the weird happenings are called Mega Force. So now we’re stealing from Hal Needham too are we?
#5 – I understand that they’re trying to rip off Aliens by making everything a little bit more “extra” in their version, but did they really have to make Bill Paxton’s character into Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High? PUT ON A FUCKING SHIRT DUDE!
#6 – It may have done a bad job copying Aliens, but Shocking Dark is actually a pretty good Resident Evil movie.
#7 – The filmmakers tried to dumb down the explanation of why there are monsters under Venice so much that they actually made it hard to understand.
#8 – I love the fact that the “Ripley” and “Newt” characters are called Sara and Samantha. Nothing’s more fun than hearing similar sounding names being yelled back and forth during the climax.
#9 – The ending flirts with almost being clever. Instead of escaping a nuclear explosion with the drop ship and having to fight the Alien Queen on board the orbiting Sulaco, they escape via time machine and then have to fight the evil robot “Terminator” in present day Venice.
#10 – I would have died of laughter had Ripley/Sara said “Get away from her you BITCH!” to the evil guy Terminator. Alas, they didn’t because they weren’t that clever.
WAS IT REALLY A BAD MOVIE?
The thing that really hurts this film is how stupidly lazy it is. If they had just bothered to spend a couple of weeks working on a better and more original script this movie could have been it’s own thing, with only a passing resemblance to Aliens. In the same way that Leviathan or DeepStar Six were a lot like The Abyss without any of the three having too much in common beyond their underwater facility setting and the basic idea of finding something weird in the ocean. James Cameron ain’t exactly the most original filmmaker himself anyway. So no one would have raised much of an eyebrow if there had been minor similarities. Instead we get a bunch of copy/paste bullshit that only really comes alive when it fails at being a shallow imitation or when it takes weird creative little detours. It’s almost tragic. This could have been kind of awesome, or at least a load of fun, had they just respected themselves and the audience a little bit more.
SHOCKING DARK is a 1989 Italian Science-Fiction film starring Cristopher Ahrens as Samuel Fuller, Haven Tyler as Sara, Geretta Giancarlo Field as Koster, Fausto Lombardi as Lieutenant Franzini, Mark Steinborn as Commander Dalton Bond, and Dominica Coulson as Samantha. It was written by Claudio Fragasso and Directed by Bruno Mattei.
