Well, perhaps not completely different. It’s been a while since I’ve watched any 39¢ movies. To take full advantage of our Amazon Prime membership, we recently purchased a Roku player; about the same time, we added streaming service to our Netflix account. So far, I’ve been a bit disappointed to discover that these services seem to offer very little of the vintage, grade-z schlock cinema I usually write about. What they do have (in abundance) are contemporary, low-budget sci-fi and horror features that received limited (or no) exposure in theaters upon their release – what we used to call “straight-to-video” movies. In the past, I tended to think of that term as a synonym for “absolute garbage,” but like most aspects of media production, distribution, and consumption in the information age, things are changing. Some of these films are quite worthwhile, and I plan to look at some of the best (and perhaps some of the worst) in a new series of mini-reviews. First up for your consideration:
Harbinger Down (American, 2015)
Harbinger: one that presages or foreshadows what is to come.
-Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary
I was skeptical about this one from the beginning. Harbinger Down isn’t a very catchy title, and it seems to drop a major spoiler even before the opening credits are over. Still, the brief synopsis Netflix provides was compelling:
Thawed from ice after three decades, mutated creatures recovered from a piece of Soviet Space wreckage terrorize a group of graduate students on a fishing trawler…
Hmm. Isolated location? College kids? Soviet space wreckage? Mutated creatures? Sounds good to me – and Harbinger Down does have a suitably creepy, 1980’s style vibe reminiscent (and at times, fairly derivative) of classics like John Carpenter’s The Thing and Ridley Scott’s Alien. It also seems to borrow from the lesser-known (but quite worthwhile) 1989 film Leviathan. Riddled with plot inconsistences (why is a group of whale-watching grad students equipped with a tabletop “portable molecular analyzer,” and why doesn’t anyone think it would be best to keep human remains frozen until potential contamination risks can be assessed?) and well-worn B-cinema tropes (like tough-as-nails Russian crewmember “Svetlana,” played by Natasha “Nogoodnik” Fatale – err – Milla Bjorn), Harbinger Down is nevertheless a great deal of fun.
Hmm… seems legit to me…
Perhaps most interesting to me, Harbinger Down was funded primarily through a Kickstarter campaign, and made on a modest budget of approximately $400,000. The special effects are notable as well; the film relies almost exclusively on practical techniques (animatronics, make-up effects, stop-motion animation, and miniatures) in bringing an impressive array of disgusting alien monstrosities to life. Though Harbinger Down isn’t likely to merit repeat viewings, it’s well worth seeing once.
The 39¢ Movie Review 