Monsters: Dark Continent (2015)

In all my years of watching movies, this is certainly the worst. It's like the writers just lost interest half way through it. 2 hours of my life I'll never get back!

Title. The movie doesn't make sense within it's own world that it created. I love mindfuck movies, horror movies, sci-fi, mysteries all of that good stuff and this movie was a poor excuse when it comes to any of those genres. TWO whole hours of my life wasted. Thank you Tom Green !One of a few movies where i'm agreeing with the ratings that imbd gave.

Another one of those movies shown as part of Film4's 'Creature Feature' that I would probably never have rented. Having missed the first 5 minutes though I will now definitely get this on Blu Ray, to own.One thing I've come to learn though is that the ratings on IMDb are now pretty useless as any sort of guide as to whether a movie is worth watching or not. 4.3? Seriously?? What a joke! I'm a huge fan of Starship Troopers but for me movies like Monsters: Dark Continent is what science fiction is really all about. No grandstanding, no witty quotable one-liners, no A-list actors, and no endless streams of explosions or action in a desperate attempt to keep the mass of ADD watchers from getting distracted.Most importantly it explores the human condition against a futuristic imaginary backdrop. I'd describe Monsters: Dark Continent as enjoyably hypnotic providing of course that you allow yourself to enjoy it.

This is an excellent movie. Beautifully shot, graded and cast. Well directed, well paced and with good, believable dialogue and characterizations. Horror movies in this genre are traditionally understood as externalizations of the current climate, and Monsters: Dark Continent elevates this tradition to new heights. The central message of the movie is that the Americans are chasing a nightmare/fantasy in Iraq and the middle east of their own making, and the more they kill, the worse things get. The reason I think, most people have canned this movie is because they prejudge it as racist (Dark Continent) or misguidedly expect it to be an entertainment movie. But this is presumably because those watching are not able to make the conceptual leap between watching a movie for entertainment purposes and creating a movie for the purposes of awakening mass consciousness towards a single, important issue: How the monsters spawn after they're killed is an allegorical play on how terrorism and extremism is seeded by American forces, through heavy-handed military intervention in domestic and local affairs in the middle east. Terrorism and the war in the middle east has been a pervasive theme throughout the first two decades of this millennium, and American audiences aren't comfortable with mixing reality and fantasy in a way which forces them to confront an uncomfortable truth. They want Entertainment or Documentary. Not allegory. This is a film with an extraordinarily simple message. Just like the first one, where the monsters represented middle America's fear of Mexico and South America generally, the monsters in the second film represent America's fear of Arabs and Islam. It's illustrative, but sadly was not well received, and so while it describes the Americans hysteria neatly, most, if not all of the reviews I've read of this film missed its central idea. A sad reflection of modern American critical culture!