Blair Witch Meets Godzilla

Rating: 5/10 (26 October 2011)

Marketing played a large part in CLOVERFIELD's commercial success . It was very enigmatic and no shots of the monster appeared in the trailers and TV spots .In fact the marketing made more that it was produced by JJ Abrahams creator of ALIA and LOST than the plot itself . With hindsight this was very slick marketing as a tagline of " Blair Witch Meets Godzilla " would turn of a prospective cinema audience . I know it would in my case which is why I didn't bother about it until it appeared on TV
Make no mistake BLAIR WITCH meets GODZILLA is the perfect description of this movie though it also makes several other references in the horror sci-fi genre . Rats running around the New York subway is a nod to 28 DAYS LATER , along with its sequel etc . In fact watching this film would make a good drinking - you gulp down a shot of booze evreytime you're reminded of another movie but the downside of that is you'd be dead of alcohol poisoning tho thirds of the way through
This doesn't necessarily make CLOVERFIELD a bad film and it's not a bad film but is a very unoriginal one , a fact reflected in the marketing . It does suffer from being a " fly on the wall documentary " realist style movie though . For example almost the first third of the running time is taken up with character filming party . You can understand the director trying to make these characters empathetic to the audience but for the most part you don't really feel strongly about them one way or the other . The style also means the alien remains enigmatic and mostly unseen through out the film when I would have preferred to have seen scientists running around a lab feverishly trying to find a solution to the menace than having the characters running down yet another dark street