SHOCKING DARK (1989) *

At a time when ripping off James Cameron’s The Abyss was all the rage, Italian schlock director Bruno (Night of the Zombies) Mattei took it upon himself to rip-off not one, but TWO of Cameron’s other movies.  You might not believe it, but Shocking Dark is Mattei’s blatant low budget rip-off of Aliens and The Terminator.  If only Mattei tossed in some flying piranha as a tribute to Cameron’s Piranha 2, he could’ve made it a hat trick. 

Instead of going to a distant planet to fight monsters, like in Aliens, a group of soldiers go into the caverns of Venice on a rescue mission.  The only survivor is a little girl (Dominica Coulson) who latches onto the head researcher Sara (Haven Tyler) in a way very reminiscent of Newt and Ripley in Aliens.  It doesn’t take long for the creatures to start picking off the soldiers, but Sara soon finds herself with another problem to contend with:  A murderous android who has infiltrated their group.

There are many moments here that egregiously copy from Aliens.  We have a scene where the soldiers find humans cocooned into the wall (it looks like dime store Halloween cobweb decorations), a part where the Ripley and Newt copycats are stuck inside a locked room with a murderous alien, and a sequence where the troops use a tracking device (it looks like a pocket calculator) to find the monsters.  A lot of these bits are ripped off beat by beat from Aliens.  The big difference here is that it sucks big time.

While the bad movie lover in me loved seeing Cameron’s work so mercilessly aped, the fact of the matter is most of this is just too boring to work as an effective rip-off.  Haven Tyler is no Sigourney Weaver either.  Heck, her character is often frightened and needs the men in the group to constantly save her.  The rest of the acting is awful, and the hyperventilating histrionics and terrible dialogue aren’t even loopy enough to muster any so-bad-it’s-good laughs.  The production design is crummy too as most of the movie takes place in a series of boiler rooms and basements, and the monsters are inconsistent, non-threatening, and thoroughly stupid looking.  (They all look like props left over from other movies that have been hastily repurposed.)

That’s not even bringing up the Terminator rip-off aspects, which are half-assed at best and are relegated to the last twenty minutes or so of the movie.  Plus, you also have to deal with the annoying kid who screams, “Sara!” every forty-five seconds or so.  Speaking of annoying, there’s also a constant beeping sound effect that plays throughout the film that sounds like a dump truck backing up.  

In short, Shocking Dark deserves to be nuked from orbit.  It’s the only way to be sure.

AKA:  Terminator 2.  AKA:  Alienators.  AKA:  Aliens 2.