Shocking Dark (1989)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

You won't be disappointed!

the audience applauded

Absolutely Brilliant!

In the grim near future Venice, Italy has been reduced to a toxic polluted wasteland. After a team of researchers in Venice die under mysterious circumstances, a team of rough'n'tumble soldiers along with two civilians are sent in to investigate only to run afoul of deadly mutant monsters. Boy, does this deliciously dreadful doozy cover all the essential Grade Z low-rent schlock cinema bases with positively jaw-dropping ineptitude: We've got clunky (mis)direction by the notorious Bruno Mattei, tin-eared profane dialogue, obnoxious macho meathead characters, clumsily staged action sequences, a meandering story which unfolds at a plodding pace, cheap sets (the main underground lab location looks like an old, leaky, rundown factory -- and probably was exactly that!), hokey monsters, laughably lousy dubbing, a ridiculous surprise ending that comes totally out of left field, and, best of all, a shamelessly derivative script that steals wholesale from "Aliens" with a dash of "The Terminator" tossed in for extra tacky measure. The hilariously horrendous hammy overacting further provides a wealth of unintentional guffaws, with Geretta Gerretta as strutting abrasive mama Koster, Dominica Coulson as scared little girl Samantha, and Clive Riche as the unhinged Drake standing out as the all-time worst offenders. A complete cruddy hoot and a half.

Say what you will about Bruno Mattei, but the dude knows how to grab you from the first frame of travelogue footage!The film starts in a control room, where a bunch of dudes in grey and yellow futuristic jumpsuits watch a research base and most of Venice fall into chaos, as one guy keeps screaming that there are mutants everywhere. There are no survivors, just chunks of videotape that they watch.Basically, if this feels more like Aliens than the Terminator rip-off you were expecting, buckle up. While this movie was released as Terminator 2, Mattei and his cohorts Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi, who activated their Wonder Twin powers of insanity to create Troll 2, refuse to stop at covering one film. Oh no - this movie is too strange for that.They decide to assemble a team - the Mega Force! - to investigate and they bring Sara, a scientist, along to find the diary that has the answers to this breakout. Samuel Fuller from the Tubular Corporation asks to come along, just like Bishop. The fact that two of the members of the team are Geretta Geretta and Tony Lombardo from Rats: Nights of Terror are all the reason I needed to purchase this. The even more amazing fact that Geretta is playing a tribute version of Vasquez from Aliens is the icing on this slice of exploitation tiramisu.Geretta's first line is "Alright you bunch of pussies, I'm back and I'm kicking ass!" Then, we watch one of the kinda sorta Space Marines on Operation: Delta Venice practice his nunchakus with his back to the camera. Come on dude - work the hard cam. Also: the Mega Force's base looks like a high school locker room. Also also: they are not Megaforce.There's a member of the Mega Force that has long blonde hair and wears Oakley glasses and a red bandana. I love him already. Geretta's character, Koster, then starts to yell about Italians being allowed on the mission and gets into a racially motivated fight with another crew member. Mega Force! Get it together!If you haven't picked it up yet, I love this movie. This is why I watch Italian low budget genre films all wrapped up in one messy package. The acting is either way too intense or has stilted line readings, sometimes within the same sentence. The costumes are laughable. And the action is everything you wish there was more of in other films without pesky things like character development and a plot to get in the way.Every time I worry that I'll never find a film like 2019: After the Fall of New York or 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Italian filmmakers surprise me with something wonderful. All you need are some vests, bike helmets and soccer pads and a fancy synth score and you have a futuristic army ready to do battle with whatever the hell the bad guys in this movie are.The Mega Force finds a bunch of people inside the alien eggs, but those people beg to be killed before grabbing and choking Koster. Soon, the aliens or mutants or whatever they are decide to throw people around and kill everything in their path. If you love movies where people fall to their deaths, this should be in your collection.If you thought there wouldn't be a Newt character, you aren't watching much Italian cinema. Yep - in the midst of all this craziness, a small child has survived.The best scene in the film has the soldiers all trapped in a room and the scientist vainly trying to open the door by pushing the left button. Clearly, there is a button on the right, too. She ignores this and keeps jamming the left button like someone trying to make the elevator get there faster. Finally, after screaming, monsters blowing up and much death, someone finally tells this brilliant scientist to just push the button on the right. This movie is awesome.I have learned many things from this movie. No matter what language you speak, your scream sounds pretty much universal. You can fire a Franchi SPAS-12 one-handed and accurately hit a target. And while I previously was taught that seaweed is really algae and algae helps provide much of the Earth's oxygen, in the world of this film this is not true. Basically - screw science!I wonder - was Samuel Fuller named for the director? Why is Venice the center of the world? And why, when I knew this was also called Terminator 2, was I so surprised and elated that the Bishop character was also a Terminator?Finally, the ending - if you think that they're not gonna get time travel somewhere in this wedding soup...just wow.If you come to a party at my house in the next few months, chances are that you will be forced to watch this movie while I scream like a maniac and laugh my ass off. You have no choice but to comply.

I think it's hilarious that this movie is actually called "Terminator II"! This just shows how unscrupulous and shameless Italian exploitation directors were during the late 80's when unleashing their films upon unsuspecting cinema lovers! The real "Terminator II", with Arnie Schwarzenegger, was probably already in a much advanced stage of production around the time of this movie's release, but these guys didn't care and went ahead naming it "Terminator II" all around the world, except in the USA. I think it's even more hilarious that this "Terminator II" is basically more of blatant imitation of "Aliens", with just a bit of "Terminator" thrown in near the finale. The cast and crew probably thought something like: "Hey, if we're going to upset James Cameron, we better do it right and imitate two of his films at once". Maybe it's just my twisted mind, but all this epitomizes the methods of the Italian exploitation cinema during the late 80's. They went extremely far in ripping off Hollywood box office hits only just to drain the formula entirely and make the maximum of easy money out it. I love it. To the avid fans of this kind of trash cinema, it really shouldn't come as much of a surprise that "Terminator II" was directed by Bruno Mattei; here under his favorite pseudonym Vincent Dawn. Mattei's life mission was to rip-off as much successful SF-horror classics as humanly possible and he literally continued to do so until his death a couple of years ago. Mattei often imitated one and the same movie several times, like John McTiernan's "Predator". Although I sadly haven't seen Mattei's entire repertoire just yet, I think it's safe to say that "Terminator II" ranks amongst his utmost bonkers achievements. The plot is a hodgepodge of borrowed ideas including slimy mutant monsters, corrupt global corporations, cyborgs, toxic cities, time-traveling and secret experiments. By the year 2000, the once beautiful city of Venice has become an uninhabitable wasteland. The water is heavily polluted and the entire city is covered by a thick toxic cloud. For some reason that must have escaped my attention, a specially trained troop of solider and scientists go back in assignment for the dubious Tubular Corporation. Samuel Fuller, representing the corporation, is clearly up to no good and one of the female scientists recovers an orphaned girl in an abandoned lab, exactly like Ellen Ripley found Newt in "Aliens", although unfortunately this girl isn't a mute. There's not the slightest bit of coherence or logic in the screenplay, but that doesn't matter too much, as clearly Bruno Mattei's sole intention was to copy the successful James Cameron flicks as much as possible. The stereotypical rough and tough soldiers are like exact clones of the characters in "Aliens" (like the loud-mouthed Bill Paxton, butch lady Jenette Goldstein and good Samaritan solider Michael Biehn) and multiple situations are even identical copies to the ones in "Aliens", like when the women are trapped in a sound proof laboratory with a monster and the villainous Fuller discretely turns off the safety cameras or when the remaining soldiers are counting down on their radar how fast the monsters are approaching. "Termintor II" is great trashy and cheesy fun and comes warmly recommend, but of course only if you have a high tolerance for gratuitous Italian exploitation rubbish. And if you can find it, too, as the film is really quite obscure.

This film has nothing to do with the 1991 sequel to the 1984 film "The Terminator." In fact, this is a low-budget film about a motely group of half-man, half-machine creatures stalking and battling each other in a post-apocalyptic future. It rips off (poorly) from just about every significant sci-fi film ever made (including BUT NOT LIMITED TO Star Trek, Aliens, Predator, Highlander, Mad Max, Terminator, etc). It was simply named "Terminator II" because of some similar plot ideas to the Schwartzenegger movie, and probably to cash in on the success of the original film.As an unofficial sequel, it doesn't hold a candle to the official one made in 1991, a classic in it's own right. And as a film, it's even worse. Summing it up, it's simply not a good movie. Poor effects, poor acting, and lousy storyline. Skip it and go with the REAL, James Cameron sequel.*1/2 out of ****