It’s a good thing TM

You know what people, there are just too many films coming out on a weekly basis and remarkably too many that I have watched recently. Perhaps it’s thanks to the countless freebies we get via ShowFilmFirst but in essence, there have been far more films to talk about then you could shake your moneymaker too. There are also a good many that are worth a mention for one reason or another and therefore perhaps it’s unfair that they don’t get that much attention.

Well fear not the two readers who do actually look at content on here! In what will be a new option for the film reviews on Ooh Sometimes, just when there isn’t enough time to go into ridiculous amounts of detail or perhaps when not a lot needs to be said, we will present it as a “Mini Meh”.

Genius no?

So the first victim for the new test format?

10 Cloverfield Lane, a sort of sequel-ish to the original shaky-cam personal story released back in 2008 that happened to feature something which may be for confused for Godzilla, Cloverfield. It’s actually hard to know if this took place at the same time or was later, it’s never actually made clear.

This time instead of keeping up with a few close buddies as they record their adventure on a camcorder wandering through New York as the ‘Godzilla’ type thing attacks, we focus on three people surviving something bad happening in an underground bunker. A bunker which just happened to be built by a very unstable John Goodman, and sets up permanent tension throughout. Mary Elizabeth Winstead (mmm, nice.) basically ends up trapped in the shelter after being run off the road and the other dude played by John Gallagher Jr. just happened to have helped John Goodman build it and then get in before things went bad on the surface. So the premise of the film is set.

Was that another chemical attack? Nope, John Goodman just farted.

Various things happen which test everyone, the tension never leaves despite them all being safe as you could be during an attack and in the end, it all goes to hell. While I can see the appeal of such a film like this (Cloverfield itself was a surprisingly compelling experience as it caught us by surprise), this time around it just seemed to be just crazy and permanently uncomfortable until the very end.

This is pretty much a survival-thriller-scare-a-thon where you wonder who will make it to the end, mainly as a result of John Goodman being just bat-shit crazy, let alone the evidence presented above when a dying woman is banging on a door, begging to be let in, only to go crazy herself. Mind you, even Mary Elizabeth Winstead tries to off John Goodman a few times to escape, so not actually sure who is the more psychotic.

There are plenty of things which happen, which doesn’t make any real sense, other than to set up more plot or ways things can go bad. For example, take John Goodman, playing the prepared experienced Navy Officer who built the shelter. This man happens to have a vat of acid for dissolving things in. Why?

F**k knows, but it’s there and it does feature during two really key scenes just as a way to present scenes which are to shock you. The film really was just a series of jumpscares with some occasional relief, and it just relied on ramping up the music louder and louder to shake you up, and then only half the time something bad would happen. It was annoying to say the least. There were moments where it was actually scary, then just ridiculous and the yo-yo of emotions left me just drained at the end.

I have to also wonder if the budget for this dictated whether or not it would just stay underground most of the time as you really don’t see that many people during the entire time. Seems maybe they didn’t have much faith in spending much on this, even if the original did actually make a profit.

In the end, I did feel relieved that it was over and sadly I have to say that it would be a film I wouldn’t want to revisit. That honour would go to the original Cloverfield which is also shorter. You might have hated all the young hip and happening characters who thought it important to carry a camcorder everywhere with them while New York went to sh*t, and believe me they were pretty stupid at times too. But in this stupid writer’s opinion, it’s the better film.