"Queen Crab" - More Joe Young than Kong, but Super Fun!

"Queen Crab" kept popping up in my suggested movie list on Amazon Prime.  So did a much older giant crab creature feature, "Claws".  I have seen most of "Claws" (keep falling asleep on it), and was confusing it with "Queen Crab" for a long time.  So, I skipped the newer film.  Finally, I saw the art for both on my T.V. screen at the same time.  This was my big clue that they were different movies.  Still, I had little interest in seeing a giant CG crab eat up a small town.  Finally, reading the IMDB page, I found out the F/X were done with stop motion.  I decided to give it a watch and I'm so glad I did.

Let me get this out of the way right here.  If you are looking for cutting edge special F/X, Oscar worthy performances or a deeply emotional and heart wrenching story, keep scrolling your movie list.  This is a creature feature throwback with all of the flaws and fun that entails.

"Queen Crab" is one of those movies with a very uneven tone.  It opens like a kids' movie.  The music, the cute little crab, the dancing child, but this is all set-up for what's to come later.  Make it through that first act, much like sitting through the bartering session at the beginning of "Mighty Joe Young", and you'll be rewarded with a monster movie for the rest of the film.

Once Melissa Webber (played as an adult by Michelle Simone Miller) becomes orphaned, the movie's tone becomes the one we expect.  Strange deaths, a mysterious young hermit of a girl, bumbling local police and some monster fodder characters who are just there to be torn to pieces.

Director, Brett Piper, actually does an excellent job of creating sympathy for our rampaging titular creature.  And she does rampage.  There is some nicely done gore for fans of that sort thing, a tank, fighter jets and farmers with shotguns and other assorted weapons.  In fact, the poster above is pretty accurate in portraying what happens on screen.  It may be a bit more spectacular on the poster, but it's far less exaggerated than some monster movie posters, such as the Poster for 1958's "The Blob" when it was released in France a couple of years later.

The F/X are an old movie fan's dream.  There are, of course, some digital moments that are easy to spot, like a hole in the side of a barn that clearly wasn't actually destroyed, but the stop motion is very high quality for a film of this nature.  If you like the monster work in "The Black Scorpion", you'll like this.

Stop motion is a painstaking process.  I only use a few moments in films like, "Lumber vs Jack" and "Jack vs Lanterns" , but even I know it can take hours to get a few seconds of decent looking animation onto the screen.  Season 2 of "The Simplest Things" only has a couple of dinosaurs and I had to loop some shots as a time saving device.  For that reason, a lot of independent movies avoid stop motion, or when they do use it,  you don't get to see a lot of the creature.  I never felt cheated out of monster time while watching "Queen Crab" and every time she made an appearance I would giggle with delight. (Seriously, Chaya, my dog, was looking at me like I was nuts.  She watches all of these movies with me.) It was magical.

I mentioned the acting earlier.  It's the typical B movie standard.  Performances range from, "Hey, Bob wanted to be in the movie so we gave him some lines" to professional grade performances.  One farmer can barely hold back a smile as he describes his cow being eaten.  Overall though, the best performances were by the leading characters and so the story holds together and moves along.  There are human interactions to develop characters and keep the pace moving, including a very awkward fight scene or two.  A hint to low budget filmmaker from one indie to another, keep a really junky car around so you can have it parking lot scenes when there's a fight.  Talent holding back so they don't scratch another actor's car is kind, but with GRIM, the Jeep from the "Jack" movies, I never have to worry about that.  I have covered that thing with slime, hit it with branches and driven it over a pile of crusher run.  It's mine and I keep around to do all of the thankless work my life requires.

The relationship between Melissa and Goliath (as the crab becomes known) is a sweet one.  It's the not the romance from "King Kong", but closely resembles the friendship from "Mighty Joe Young".  If you're a fan of monster movies with sympathetic, nearly heroic monsters, give this one a watch.

"Final Girl Vengeance" a.k.a. "Survival Knife"

I caught "Final Girl Vengeance" (previously titled "Survival Knife") on Amazon Prime.  And I'll be honest, the main reason this one was on my radar is because of actress Danielle Donahue. I had seen her in other films, such as "Jurassic Prey" and "Bigfoot vs Zombies", and while I enjoy the campy nuttiness of monster movies like that, I was curious about how she would do in a more serious role.  Something told me she could pull it off and I was happy to find out that I was correct in that assessment.

It was sort of like when I had the luck to work with Debbie Rochon on "The Lunar Pack", "Death Plots" and "All Wrapped Up".  She was spectacularly fun as the hostess Mistress Misty, but I knew I was wasting her true talent, so I wrote "Savaged", a movie that squarely put all of the emotion and tension on her capable shoulders.  Her co-star was my dog, Valkrie Liquori and they actually worked amazingly well together over a four day shoot.  (Yep, four days of principal photography for a feature film).

Cover Art with the original title, "Survival Knife"

One thing I think that may disappoint some viewers is that "Final Girl Vengeance" isn't a straight horror film.  It opens with a horror sequence, involves a serial killer called "The Survivalist" and has flash backs to some truly horrific situations, but the movie as a whole is a psychological thriller and character study.  Fortunately, the character we are focused on is Penny Warren, played by Donahue.  I say "fortunately", because out of the whole cast, Donahue is the only one who really shines.  The rest of the performances range from pretty good down to "in the wrong movie".  There are a few cast members who clearly didn't have the time or take the effort to prepare for their shoot days and it takes the viewer out of the moment.  While I usually forgive this in a campy creature feature, because I'm watching for the monster, in a character driven movie like this, it can really break the pace.

Try to press through those moments though.  Penny Warren has a lot of screen time to herself and a few scenes dealing with her own Lois Lane type reporter, who just won't let things go, played by Kaitlyn Shoeb.  These moments and an interaction with a police detective are when the best acting happens.  If you can concentrate on those you'll be able to appreciate the plot of the movie.

There are also those moments of horror I spoke of earlier.  They can be brutal at times.  The blood and gore is mostly average, but there is some  excellent make-up for Penny as she heals as well as a kill toward the final act of the film that is truly inspired.

The movie does suffer from the usual pitfalls of  low budget films.  The sound is uneven and at times just plain bad. Keep an eye out for a scene in a "gentleman's club" that is completely subtitled, but nobody actually seems to be speaking the lines you're reading.  It's an interesting way to handle not having control over the audio for the day.

The location work is amazing at times.  An "abandoned steel mill", the aforementioned club, the doctor's office, police station, and even characters' apartments are all on point.  The steel mill location is perfect for this type of movie.  Very "Robo Cop" meets "Nightmare on Elm Street".

In the end, enjoying "Final Girl Vengeance" comes down to accepting that it may not be the horror film  you expected, while still being horrific at times and getting past its obvious shortcomings in order to enjoy its strengths.

Oh, one of those shortcomings, for me, was the score.  It was super repetitive.  I know, for the director of "Shelter" to say that is pretty bold, but it got annoying right from the opening scene.  I had nearly forgotten how much it annoyed me it until I searched for the trailer.