Wordiezett So much average

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Aiden Melton The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

fstammen This movie starts with the same scene as in Aliens when the Marines awake and dress themselves. The movie follows the same storyline as Aliens with some changes until half of the movie. We got copies of the evil company, Marines, Ripley and even the surviving girl is there. Only the andriod that in Aliens was friendly, is replaced by the version in Alien but he does the same stuff as the guy the company sends along who locks Ripley and the girl in a room with an alien. Ow, this also happens in this movie. Only it's not set out in space but in Venice where the water was so polluted it became toxic and people started to mutate.The monsters are really laughable, moving around like senior citizens yet being able to sneak up unto people. It's like they just walk up to the soldiers of the Megaforce and manage to kill them off.Then all of the sudden the andriod starts to act like the T-800 from Terminator 2 and the movie changes to Terminator 2 entirely and they finish the movie in an epicly bad way. That part I will not spoil so watch this turd in screen and be amazed!

Sam Panico Say what you will about Bruno Mattei, but the dude knows how to grab you from the first frame of travelogue footage!The film starts in a control room, where a bunch of dudes in grey and yellow futuristic jumpsuits watch a research base and most of Venice fall into chaos, as one guy keeps screaming that there are mutants everywhere. There are no survivors, just chunks of videotape that they watch.Basically, if this feels more like Aliens than the Terminator rip-off you were expecting, buckle up. While this movie was released as Terminator 2, Mattei and his cohorts Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi, who activated their Wonder Twin powers of insanity to create Troll 2, refuse to stop at covering one film. Oh no - this movie is too strange for that.They decide to assemble a team - the Mega Force! - to investigate and they bring Sara, a scientist, along to find the diary that has the answers to this breakout. Samuel Fuller from the Tubular Corporation asks to come along, just like Bishop. The fact that two of the members of the team are Geretta Geretta and Tony Lombardo from Rats: Nights of Terror are all the reason I needed to purchase this. The even more amazing fact that Geretta is playing a tribute version of Vasquez from Aliens is the icing on this slice of exploitation tiramisu.Geretta's first line is "Alright you bunch of pussies, I'm back and I'm kicking ass!" Then, we watch one of the kinda sorta Space Marines on Operation: Delta Venice practice his nunchakus with his back to the camera. Come on dude - work the hard cam. Also: the Mega Force's base looks like a high school locker room. Also also: they are not Megaforce.There's a member of the Mega Force that has long blonde hair and wears Oakley glasses and a red bandana. I love him already. Geretta's character, Koster, then starts to yell about Italians being allowed on the mission and gets into a racially motivated fight with another crew member. Mega Force! Get it together!If you haven't picked it up yet, I love this movie. This is why I watch Italian low budget genre films all wrapped up in one messy package. The acting is either way too intense or has stilted line readings, sometimes within the same sentence. The costumes are laughable. And the action is everything you wish there was more of in other films without pesky things like character development and a plot to get in the way.Every time I worry that I'll never find a film like 2019: After the Fall of New York or 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Italian filmmakers surprise me with something wonderful. All you need are some vests, bike helmets and soccer pads and a fancy synth score and you have a futuristic army ready to do battle with whatever the hell the bad guys in this movie are.The Mega Force finds a bunch of people inside the alien eggs, but those people beg to be killed before grabbing and choking Koster. Soon, the aliens or mutants or whatever they are decide to throw people around and kill everything in their path. If you love movies where people fall to their deaths, this should be in your collection.If you thought there wouldn't be a Newt character, you aren't watching much Italian cinema. Yep - in the midst of all this craziness, a small child has survived.The best scene in the film has the soldiers all trapped in a room and the scientist vainly trying to open the door by pushing the left button. Clearly, there is a button on the right, too. She ignores this and keeps jamming the left button like someone trying to make the elevator get there faster. Finally, after screaming, monsters blowing up and much death, someone finally tells this brilliant scientist to just push the button on the right. This movie is awesome.I have learned many things from this movie. No matter what language you speak, your scream sounds pretty much universal. You can fire a Franchi SPAS-12 one-handed and accurately hit a target. And while I previously was taught that seaweed is really algae and algae helps provide much of the Earth's oxygen, in the world of this film this is not true. Basically - screw science!I wonder - was Samuel Fuller named for the director? Why is Venice the center of the world? And why, when I knew this was also called Terminator 2, was I so surprised and elated that the Bishop character was also a Terminator?Finally, the ending - if you think that they're not gonna get time travel somewhere in this wedding soup...just wow.If you come to a party at my house in the next few months, chances are that you will be forced to watch this movie while I scream like a maniac and laugh my ass off. You have no choice but to comply.

Bezenby When modern directors 'pay homage' to something, they kind of put a respectful twist on an existing idea, but when Bruno Mattei (sadly no longer with us) 'pays homage' to something, it means he rips everything off wholesale and recreates it almost line for line, only with less money, bad acting, bad special effects etc etc. I've got to admit that he's a law unto himself and has balls so big I'm sure he had to carry them around with him in a wheelbarrow.Shocking Dark is total and utter plagiarism. Utterly, without a doubt. So much so that I'm not sure if there's some kind of post-modern ironic intent behind it. Was Bruno (and let's not forget Troll 2 director Claudio) taking the mickey? Or what? Who knows, but Shocking Dark is a scream. Sometimes a scream of sheer enjoyment, sometimes a scream of pain.For those that ain't read about it anywhere else, the initial film that this rips off is Aliens. A squad of marines and a chick adviser are sent into Venice to see what's happened to some scientists. They find cocooned people. They are attacked by monsters. They find an almost feral girl. They have tracking devices. One of them is a cyborg. The girl and the chick bond and get locked in a room with a monster. On and on and on it goes until your jaw just gives up and takes root on your chest.Scenes are created almost word for word ('Momma says monsters don't exist, but they do don't they?'), but the difference is that Bruno either doesn't have the money or has embezzled it and still has to deliver the film, so everything is filmed in a large factory or somewhere and the acting is so terrible that the 'newt' character had my ears bleeding with her screaming.Where's the enjoyment in this, you ask? Well, it's a Bruno Mattei film, so all those elements he's stolen are diluted and all the boring stuff in Aliens is thrown out of the window. The good stuff is still there, albeit in a weird, off-beat, loony Mattei way. The film isn't long and it seems even Bruno gets bored when he stops copying Aliens and starts doing a Terminator rip off instead.There are many layers to Bruno Mattei films but whether or not they are really there we'll never know. He did say that anyone who liked his films was an idiot, and I guess in the end he had the last laugh on just about everybody, outliving Fulci, Margherriti, D'Amato etc and still making films right up until he died.This is recommended only to those who know exactly what to expect - and thanks to the fella who sent me it.

Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) OK, so I'm not quite a full-time professional critic just yet, dabbled in a few tomes that I hope to peddle, worked as a Mac games journalist for a couple years & then did some freelance writing for a couple other computer geek oriented websites. You know, big deal. But I do pride myself at being able to maintain at least the appearance of having a professional demeanor when it comes to writing about movies or whatever, and one of the things I learned very quickly when reading other people's essays/comments was to avoid using expressions like THIS IS THE WORST MOVIE EVER MADE or EASILY THE WORST MOVIE EVER MADE. A good "THIS SUCKS" every once in a while is legit, since stuff either sucks or it rules.Then I saw SHOCKING DARK (or ALIENATORS, as the version I saw was titled) and my view upon such things is shaken. There is an amazingly annoying movie called THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT that is a fake documentary about a guy's search for Sasquatch that is actually a lot of idle nature photography edited together with vacation footage and then about ten minutes of staged Bigfoot related scenes, one or two of which actually show some schook dressed up like Bigfoot for about 8 seconds in total. At one point they use a rigid, posed, stuffed bear lying on it's side to simulate one of Bigfoot's victims. The most dramatic scene in the film is when a groundhog is hit by a car and it's frantic mate drags it into their hole before a hawk circling overhead can eat them.THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT is a better movie than SHOCKING DARK. JOHN Q. with Denzel Washington was a better movie than SHOCKING DARK. So was CROSSROADS with Britney Spears or even DOOM: THE MOVIE with The Rock, which bears a superficial resemblance to SHOCKING DARK. KID VENGEANCE is a better movie than SHOCKING DARK, and that is saying a lot. The science fiction films of Alfonso Brescia cannot even touch SHOCKING DARK's layers of utter awfulness. Larry Buchanan's ZONTAR - THING FROM VENUS is a cerebral masterpiece by comparison. MEGAFORCE is a better movie. GYMKATA is a better movie. They are silly, goofy, clumsy, cheesy, and hopelessly derivative, but they have the distinction of being watchable.I will let others describe the plot: SHOCKING DARK is in many ways like Mattei's far superior (and highly equally stupid) ROBOWAR: It is a collage, a pastiche of moments, lines, specific incidents, plot ideas, individual shots and even the same title as other movies. They are turned on their side, mixed up, jumbled, re-arranged, given slightly different names, and re-assembled into a narrative that serves no point, tells no story, and exists as a collection of 90 second interludes that all segue into each other and are edited together to take on the appearance of a movie. I will admit that the *LOOK* of the film is pretty polished: they found some sort of a huge power plant, hung up a bunch of neon lights, dressed a mob of clowns up like the Power Rangers, and have them scuttling about pretending to be various cast members of ALIENS, PREDATOR, FULL METAL JACKET, ROBOCOP, PLATOON and THE TERMINATOR. If you watch the movie with the sound off it is actually rather impressive looking at times. But if you listen to what the people are saying it is so close to so many other movies we have seen so many times -- but just awkwardly different enough to avoid a lawsuit -- that it is disorienting and annoying. You want to fix it, or straighten the mess out so that it retains the original form Mattei was basing his film on. Sadly, art doesn't work like that and the result is a colossal annoyance.The only analogy I can make is to sitting in the crowded waiting room of a doctor you don't particularly enjoy seeing, seated directly across from a really awful mail-order art print that has been framed, hung on the wall, and apparently brushed against by someone so that it's not hanging perfectly square. You sit in this chair and stare at this schwag art print and the only thing you can think of is how many other things you could be doing at that moment, and how pathetic that picture looks hanging there crooked. But since it isn't your picture in your office and there are other people present all you can do is sit there and suffer, waiting to be called for your turn. And then when you go back again the next month, the stupid picture is still hanging in the same crooked way, and it is time to sit and wait and stare at it all over again. The exasperation of futility.That is what watching SHOCKING DARK is like when viewed the same way one would watch any other movie. My advice is to not do so, listen to some tunes or something, and that's why this is such a great party movie. It's awful, but if you need random cool looking images with violence and explosions while some Ozzy blares, this should be your first pick. Anyone else will need blood pressure medication before the thing is even half over: THE MOST ANNOYING MOVIE EVER MADE. There, I said it. 3/10