Shocking Dark

I was baptized today.  Yeah, I'll start there.  I mean, why not?  I'm always looking for more ways to make this site random.  Of course, that's not the reason for my immersive lustration (or was it?), but it serves as square one.  The question is, how do I go from baptism to Bruno Mattei?  I could draw parallels from one rite of passage to another.  No horror fan starts with Italian ripoff cinema.  You dally with mainstream icons until you're seasoned enough to dig deeper into the b-movie mantle.  You dig and you dig until eventually, your trusty spade thumps a pine box with the words "Also Known As" chiseled into its lid.

You furrow your brow, but the ritual has just begun.  So what now?  Well, you watch genre films with four or five titles directed by people with four or five pseudonyms.  The eucharistic formality of it all can be disorienting.  And really, this process is most comparable to circumcision, but let's not mix up our rites of passage.  1989's Shocking Dark is also known (overseas anyway) as Terminator 2.  It was helmed by Mattei, credited here as Vincent Dawn.  Unfortunately, viewers are not given the option to spectate as someone else.  Wouldn't that be neat?  "Honey, I didn't rent porn last night; Alan Smithee did!"

Almost in defiance of its alternate title, Dark is a rattletrap photocopy of Aliens.  I mean, why not?  When it comes to xerox xenomorphs, I usually reach for Xtro 2: The Second Encounter, but I don't like to brag about my upper-crust lifestyle.  Hey, I'm common.  I'm street.  I don't mind slumming it with blue-collar muck and ingesting Eurotrash.  I'm being flippant, but actually, the first thirty minutes of this flick are supercharged.  For a little while, I thought I had landed the ultimate exhibition of unintentional humor.  This thing was tailor-made for MST3K (or Best of the Worst, or better yet, any nerd-centric parody series).

Energy is high, one-liners are copious, and we get a reasonable glimpse of the rad creature design.  But again, I'll caution you; these accolades only apply to the first act.  I wanted to spend more time with the outrageous characters.  How entertaining is the tandem of Koster and Caine?  I thought I recognized the former, a military grunt modeled after Jenette Goldstein in Aliens, so I looked it up to corroborate my suspicions.  And I was right!  That's Geretta Geretta (IMDb also lists her as Geretta Giancarlo Field), the mouthy prostitute in Demons.  Man, she rules.  You can see why I was disappointed when she kicked the bucket halfway through Dark.

The film itself seems to know that it lost its hero, as the pace backfires and curls into a fetal position.  You didn't know that a pace could do that, did you?  I knew.  Why, I knew from the second Koster became a cadaver that Shocking Dark was doomed to tail off.  Would I recommend it?  I mean, why not?  It doesn't live up to Severin's Blu-ray artwork, but I've seen worse.  Much, much worse.  Robert Z'Dar says, "Meh."