Monsternado (2023)

Streaming Service: Amazon Prime Video
Movie Name/Year: Monsternado (2023)
Genre: Action, Horror, Sci-Fi
Length:  1h 21min
Rating: Unrated
Director: Tyler-James
Writer: Derek Miller
Actors: Derek Miller, Chloe Karr, Graham Miller, Jase Rivers, May Kelly, Lila Lasso, Michael S. Siegel, Danielle Scott, Nick Adamson, Hannah Pauley, Daniel Subin, Adam Rojko Vega,  Charlie Kemp

IMDb Blurb: A tornado, infested with prehistoric monsters, has formed in the Bermuda Triangle, and is making its way towards land. Now the city must fight to survive against these deadly creatures.

Selina’s Point of View:
It’s been a while since we’ve done a low-budget horror flick like this, but when Cat told me she came across a movie called Monsternado on Amazon Prime, you know I had to dust off my B-movie-loving heart and throw it on.

Anyone following the blog for a while knows that I very much enjoyed the Sharknado (2013-2017) films and the intertwined Lavalantula (2015-2016) tie-in flicks.  Clearly, Monsternado paid as much homage to those as it did with a few other movies, such as Robocop (1987), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and Anaconda (1997). I imagine there were more, but on a single watch-through that’s what I caught.

Movies like this need to be judged by a different standard. No one needs to compare Monsternado to classics like Bride of Frankenstein (1935) or more modern monster favorites such as A Quiet Place (2018). That’s like bringing a rubber chicken to a knife fight. Something like Monsternado needs to be judged against flicks like The VelociPastor (2018) and Zoombies (2015).

As far as that goes, Monsternado was fun. It had pop culture references that made me giggle, wacky acting that made me face-palm, and plenty of badly rendered monsters. All of which is exactly what I would expect from a movie like this.

The problem came when it took itself too seriously.

There was a trafficker storyline was way out of place, especially near the conclusion of it, and a few moments where the levity was replaced by an odd attempt at actual drama. When it was just a bunch of actors having fun, though, it was cute.

It’s not something I’d watch to take my mind of the day, but I would throw it on with a few drunk friends during Halloween. 

Cat’s Point of View:
When I was browsing through movies on Prime Video, I couldn’t help but notice the new offering of Monsternado. Of course, we’re huge fans of the Sharknado franchise. I was hoping that this new movie would follow suit and lean in so that it fell into the “so bad it’s good” if not at least decent category.

Unfortunately, much like a puzzle bought at a garage sale – the pieces here just didn’t fit together, and it seemed like there were extra bits just thrown in because they were roughly the same size.

There were several things that just yanked me right out of the vibe of Monsternado. The first was the distracting disconnect between the setting the production team was clearly going for with the story, and the obvious shooting location. I get it that shoestring budgets don’t allow for much in the way of effects or props, perhaps, to create the illusion of taking place somewhere other than where the filming is happening. There are ways around that, however. Different camera angles or even simply temporarily hanging a canvas your art department just whipped together could easily have masked the issues here.

Why am I irked? This felt lazy or haphazard. The film was clearly shot in London, but was pretending that it was in the United States somewhere. Major London, UK landmarks were plainly visible outside of office windows, they made no attempt to mask that the vehicles had steering on the opposite side of US cars, and there was even a sign inside a building that flat out said London. I might have been able to overlook the cars if the freaking Gherkin building (you know, the one shaped like a giant Fabergé egg) wasn’t visible from the window. They could have at least just put up some paper blinds.

Don’t even get me started on the actual “nado.” It looked like the effects were swiped from the Sharknado movies and then they just threw an octopus in the spinning mix just so they could say “no, no, this is different, see?!” I really found it hard to buy it. The waterspouts were clearly 99% sharks. I felt let down that the movie had promised ancient monsters and failed to deliver on any rudimentary level outside of the weird giant bugs and the flying dinosaurs. The poster lied. I wanted my T-Rex.

Further, I get that it’s plausible for weird things to get spawned from the Bermuda Triangle, but the technobabble that the scientist in this film was, indeed, babbling about just made no sense and was clearly something made up to sound smart.

Sharknado and its sequels that followed captured lightning in a bottle. They had several factors working together that, while absolutely ludicrous, still made the whole thing work as an entertaining experience. Sharknado never took itself too seriously. They seemed to anticipate what the silliest idea would be for the story and then went after making it happen. They also grabbed a few familiar faces to pad out the cast. The sequels were fun for the quirky cameos, but the first movie was able to stand alone with its cheesy plot and clever crafting.

Monsternado, which released a decade after the first shark-storm offering, clearly tried to make a grab for the creature feature niche that was carved out by its predecessor, but failed to take into consideration the elements that made the trailblazer successful.

The movie took itself too seriously and lacked the levity and enjoyability that its template had.
Unfortunately, rather than laughing I was groaning and regretting the loss of my time. But hey, we watched it so others don’t have to. 

Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score – None
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score –33%
Metascore – None
Metacritic User Score – None
IMDB Score – 2.6 /10

Trust the Dice: Selina’s Rating – 2.5/5
Trust the Dice: Cat’s Rating – 1.5/5

Trust the Dice: Parental Advisory Rating - R

Movie Trailer:

B-Movie - Revisiting Personal Cinematic Landscape

B-movies can be divisive. Due to how low their budgets are the graphics sometimes wind up questionable, less experienced actors are hired, and other cost-cutting measures are taken. They’re rarely shown in theaters, few people are putting money on them, but they can be a bit of a time-risk. No one wants to spend hours of their time watching something that isn’t all that great. They’d rather put their hard-won free time toward something better.
 
For movie fans that do enjoy B-movies, there’s almost a cult-like feel to their enthusiasm. I’m not gonna lie, I’m a part of that side of the argument. There are B-movies that I quote more than any other movie I’ve seen. In fact, as I mentioned in my original personal cinematic landscape article, my friends and I religiously quote The Gamers: Dorkness Rising (2008).
 
Why do movies like that stick with us?
 
It’s my belief that because the makers of B-movie don’t need to answer to multi-billion-dollar corporations, they don’t wind up having to speak for people who have nothing in common with their demographic. The geeks that created The Gamers: Dorkness Rising spoke directly to other geeks without having to sacrifice anything because some billionaires thought they needed to speak to a wider audience.
 
I was talking to a friend about horror movies last night. He’s not the biggest fan of newer polished, over-done, films. The old-school 80’s cult horror flicks speak to him more. The face peeling of Poltergeist (1982), the stop motion gore of The Evil Dead (1981), the high-pitched soundtrack of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). All those films can be found on the National Film Registry protected by the Library of Congress, but if they were made today, big-budget companies would strangle the charm out of them.
 
The charm in that low-budget creativity leads much easier to a cult following, which is why so many cult films are B-movies.
 
Hell, my favorite comedy flick, Clerks (1994) – which is on my list as part of the comedy genre – was funded completely by the director maxing out his credit cards. The constraint of less money leaves room for more creativity.  
 
The best example of a low-budget B-movie that got even more creative due to lack of funds is Deadstream (2022).
 

Deadstream is one of the newest movies going on my cinematic landscape. It came out just last year and I had no expectations for it. I’m not a huge fan of found footage. In fact, I dislike the sub-genre so much that I don’t even go over it as part of this article series at all. Falling in love with Deadstream was something no one could have expected of me.
 
The main character of the film is about as obnoxious as he can get. He’s a narcissistic streamer working to get past a bunch of scandals while trying to survive a night in a haunted house. As someone who loves to watch YouTubers/streamers it was easy to figure out where a lot of the inspiration for the character came from. They had plenty of material to draw on from bad apology videos and dumb mistakes others have made. A big production company might have forced them to tone that down.
 
It's a small thing, but something that added to the depth and reality of the character. People outside of online culture might watch and think it was a little far-fetched, but those of us who have followed ukelele apologies and seen people arrested for dumb pranks used for clout – we know better. It’s more realistic than we wish it was.
 
Aside from that, the entire movie took the found footage sub-genre and elevated it. The video is steadier because of the web-cam component, which allows people like my co-author, Cat, to watch it despite the vertigo she deals with. Going back and forth between the cameras allows for less graphic needs while the practical effects are much sleeker than anything CGI would have created at their budget.
 
Deadstream was a welcome change of pace by both critics and audiences, and I can only hope that other found footage creators learn from its successes. In 10 years, I hope I’ll be able to see it up for its own spot on the National Film Registry listing. I want it to alter the way others make movies the same way it’s altered the way I view them.
 
There’s another side to the B-movie genre: movies that aren’t made to be good. They’re made to mock the industry or just as a fun parody of movies in general. No big-budget company is going to pick up the kind of movies that aren’t made to speak to anyone, really. They’re just made for the fun of it. Not all of them turn into anything watchable, but when they do… they become so bad, they’re good.
 
The most recent flick I’ve added to that part of my landscape is the one that will probably become the first film I think of when anyone says “it’s so bad, it’s good.” That film is VelociPastor (2018).
 

When people think of B-movies, VelociPastor is what they’re thinking of. The costumes are ridiculously unreal, there’s not a single actor taking things seriously, and the graphics are… unbelievable at best. Yet, I cannot properly express how much fun I had watching it.
 
There were ninjas and dinosaurs, there was parody and humor. The creators of VelociPastor knew what they had. They leaned as far into the silliness as possible. One of the very first scenes exhibits a take on low-budget CGI that I’ve never seen utilized. It caught me so off guard that I had to pause the film until I was done laughing.
 
It doesn’t matter how bad a film is, if it makes you laugh so hard that you actively need to catch your breath, it’s good.
 
VelociPastor is never the type of film that I’d go around recommending to people looking for a real movie. That said, at a friend gathering with a bunch of people looking to laugh and drink while watching something to giggle at, it’d be the first thing I pull up.
 
I’ll always have a deep love for low-budget films. I grew up watching marathons of them on Halloween, and they are probably some of the first movies to ever affect the way I watched other films.