A pile of steaming horse manure

Rating: 2/10 (9 February 2008)

*MAJOR SPOILERS* I can't believe the high ratings that this film has received! The first thing that has to be mentioned is that the whole film is shot from a hand-held camera, which is buried under piles of rocks, involved in an helicopter crash and undergoes a chewing from the monster itself and yet miraculously manages to stay in complete working order. Unlikely, but OK I can go with that. The fact that the cameraman cannot hold it straight for one moment in the whole film and when he's running away he is constantly spinning around is just nauseating. And it is glued to his face? At some point all normal people would have dropped the camera because it would be hindering your speed and ability to run and dodge things, even when the guy was being eaten/chewed by the creature it still took him about 5 minutes to drop the sodding camera! And his friends basically went "Ahhh!! He's dead! Oh my god! Run! Oh, and remember the camera." Seriously.
The party at the beginning takes so long to get going that I was bored within about 5 minutes and it made me feel so ill that I spent most of the rest of the film with my eyes shut trying not to be sick. This probably induces the argument that I couldn't possibly comment on the film because I didn't actually see most of it. Well, I opened my eyes frequently during the film and knew what was going on from the numerous, and at most times hilarious, sounds. The noises the creature made in the tunnel were absolutely ridiculous! I honestly think that could have been a really good scene, I was getting quite enthusiastic when they put on the night-vision, but the sounds were so laughable that it just made it all a bit rubbish. And the whole thing with the rats- rats run away from bad stuff, if they're running then you'd better start running as well!
Then the girl who had been bitten- did she explode or did the army explode her or what? Seriously, what the hell was going on with her? And the army would never allow a civilian back onto the streets to find his (probably dead) friend who was trapped in a lopsided building.
We find the friend, who has been stabbed in the chest by a spike, they somehow manage to lift her off it with minimal screaming and blood, then tie a bit of cloth around the wound and make her run around, leaping across buildings and so forth. She had been lying with this spike in her for quite a while by the way and with the smallest chance that she wouldn't be dead, she certainly would have suffered enough blood-loss and trauma that she certainly wouldn't be able to run around and hug people.
We then encounter another mini-creature (is the mother-monster spawning these freaky mini-monsters?) which is subdued very easily and with minimal fuss.
Cue a lot of running around, a woman who has supposedly been stabbed through the chest being very agile and hugging her boyfriend VERY tightly and with very little blood. The creature getting bombed is quite impressive, but seeing as you know that they all die in the end it's not really that scary when the creature re-emerges.
We end with the last two survivors hiding under a bridge (yeh, the best place to hide when the army is bombing a massive creature which is smashing buildings up- under a pile of bricks and stones) and something very BlairWitch-like takes place, with lots of close mouth shots and snotty noses.
The monster had the potential to be excellent and failed quite spectacularly, the scene with the head of the Statue of Liberty is quite good and you don't really feel close to the characters and therefore don't really care when one dies. I think the guy behind me in the cinema actually cheered a bit when Hud was killed. Also, they milk the whole 'tell her you love her' bits. I mean, aren't there more pressing issues at hand here?
So all in all, I went with a group of six people, three of us felt ill, two of us had headaches and one was almost asleep. I want £3.50, two hours of my life and my settled stomach back please!