Review: A Heartbeat Away

A Heartbeat Away
Dir. Gale Edwards
Year: 2011
Aus Rating: PG
Running Time: 91mins

I know it’s a bad sign when I am already looking around me within 30 seconds of a film beginning to gauge whether an audience is as taken aback as I. Such was the case during the opening credits of A Heartbeat Away, a film that takes mere minutes to stamp itself as Australia’s answer to The Room; an episode of SeaChange as directed by Tommy Wiseau. What begins as a potentially misguided, amateurish effort winds up a startling, discombobulating moviegoing experience that I shan’t too soon forget. A Heartbeat Away is an appalling effort from everyone involved that will have you questioning what everybody was thinking.

If you want plot, you get plot! And repeated over and over again, too! Set in Montague – because Shakespeare is exactly what this movie needed more of – A Heartbeat Away positions itself as a fantasy fable about a young rock musician who must take over his father’s ailing marching band after said father is nearly killed in a car accident. There’s enough quote unquote wackiness and quirkiness to fill the MCG, but nothing can quite prepare you for the amount of eye-popping awfulness that eventually presents itself for ridicule and mocking.


Much like The Room, it appears to have been directed by someone so hopelessly amateurish who knows not a thing about filmmaking, up to and including working with actors, dialogue, pacing, editing, cinematography, sets and plain old good taste. Gale Edwards is normally a stage director, apparently opera is her forte, and this makes so much sense in retrospect since she is probably used to dealing with overflowing stage presence in another language. Maybe Edwards has no idea how people actually talk in the real world? Maybe she’s never watched a movie since Star Wars in 1978 when swipe cuts were fancy and page roll edits were like something from the future.

Or, more likely, Edwards hasn’t seen a movie since 1983 when Flashdance was all the rage. How else to explain the inexplicable sequence where a young, attractive girl played by Isabel Lucas (as in played by an alien from Mars) dances to an awful pop tune surrounded by spotlights whilst wearing the costume wardrobe to Perfect.


I literally could not even begin to describe all the scenes from this movie that defy space, time, logic and reasoning. Like when Sebastian Gregory’s Kevin states that the marching band’s new routine must be top secret and yet they practice outdoors. Or how about the music store, in this town of surely no more than several thousand, that is somehow able to stock priceless guitars and somehow remains open for business despite there never even being a single customer? Or how about Colin Friels, who suddenly starts talking in a new accent as if he got bored on day and felt the need for a change? Or how about, strangest of all, the use of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to show off how young and hip the marching band really are. “Play something new and now! The Arctic Monkeys! Red Hot Chilli Peppers!” Kevin tells his ramshackle collection of old fogies. They probably were new and now when the dust was blown off of Julie Kincade’s dilapidated screenplay. To further show how hip this movie is to the young mindset of its lead character, there are musical sequences set to Amii Stewart’s “Knock on Wood” and Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park”.

There’s really no excuse for how this screenplay got so far. The press screening I was at featured howls of laughter, which says a lot from a group that is usually quite reserved. My personal favourite – it’s A Heartbeat Away’s own “I definitely have breast cancer” moment – was when Lucas’ artistic Mandy says she’s leaving town and “going to Sydney to study law”, as if she was just going to hop on a train, knock on the front door of a university and say “I’M HERE TO STUDY LAW! EDUCATE ME!” It’s truly some of the funniest stuff I’ve seen in a very long time, but it’s actually quite insulting that this gets made and somehow released through a major distributor when there are plenty of talented writers and filmmakers out there who can’t catch a break. Never mind, those involved – behind the camera, at least – will surely never set foot on a film set again and, for that, we can all be grateful. F

Review: Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus
Dir. Ace Hannah
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 85mins

To coin a phrase as sung by Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville (because, since we’re talking about a movie called Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, why not?); I don’t know much, but I know that if you want to see Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus then you should see it with a large crowd made up on cult movie boffins who delight in watching the weird and the appalling projected on big cinema screens surrounded by other bad movie fans. Much like The Room, a Melbourne cult cinema mainstay, this latest entry in Cinema Nova’s Cult Cravings is designed to be viewed with many people, all of whom are hootin’ and hollerin’ and having a good time.

There’s really not much to say on the film, to be perfectly honest. Everything you can possible hope to know about the movie is right there in the title. I could reel off a list of moments that had me in various stages of laught0er – from mild giggles to full on cackles – but to read about the hilarious extras, the dodgy CGI or the tacky scenes of “sexy science” just isn’t as fun as seeing it for yourself as you wave your “Team Shark!” or “Team Octopus!” flags (yes, actual flags) and cheer when your chosen defender gets the upper hand. Or, you can ditch either of them and go for “Team Seagull”, “Team Gun-Toting Security Guard”, “Team Pelican” or any other team you care to create out of the various throwaway establishment shots that director Ace Hannah includes.


Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus doesn’t have the fascinating back-story, instant rewatchability and all-round bizarre eye-popping badness of The Room, nor was it ever aiming for anything within proximity to quality, but what it has in its favour is a gleeful sensibility that is awakened by being watched with a large group of likeminded cinemagoers. I can’t attest to how it plays on DVD in your own home, but there’s something quite comical about settling down in a plush cinema seat after a few beers to watch a movie in which, very literally, a mega shark and a giant octopus battle it out mano-a-mano. To end this review, let’s take some wise words from Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus’ own leading lady, 1980s pop star Debbie Gibson, and note that the future only belongs to the future itself and the future is Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. Well, for 85 brief minutes it is, anyway. Z-

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus will screen as a part of Cinema Nova's Cult Craving sessions, here in Melbourne, from Boxing Day!

A Room With a View of Thunder

Last Saturday night I took some friends along to see Tommy Wiseau's "disasterpiece" The Room at Cinema Nova. It was the fourth time I had partaken in the greatest cinematic experience of my life, and it has lost none of its distinctive power. I was watching it with friends, some of whom had never seen it before and who, upon exiting, were just as baffled and amazed as one would expect after tasting the delectable treat that is Wiseau's magical fantasy land of manipulative women, drug peddling manchildren, games of football in tuxedos and cancer-stricken mothers. Oh how we laughed.

Anybody who follows me on Twitter will know that later in the evening I was taken to hospital and I think we can all agree that Lisa had something to do with this. Tommy Wiseau seems to think she's responsible for every misdeed known to mankind - and, as written, it's hard not to agree - so why not this, too?

I bring up The Room, however, because on Monday night I sat down to watch a particularly startling movie entitled A Sound of Thunder. Sometimes it's hard to gauge the hows and whys of particular cult movies, but it surprises me that Peter Hyam's sci-fi monstrosity adaptation of Ray Bradbury's famed short story hasn't developed some sort of underground following. In this day and age of bad movie worship, A Sound of Thunder is as good a candidate as I've come across in quite some time.

While Wiseau's Room cost $6 million dollars - including the funds it took to hire a billboard in downtown Los Angeles(!!!) - A Sound of Thunder cost $80 million and yet looks just as cheap as The Room. It was produced by Franchise Pictures, who went bankrupt during post production, and they should be familiar to all bad movie aficionados as the same company that produced Battlefield Earth, Ballistic: Ecks Vs Sever and the remake of Get Carter. Director Hyams has only made one film since despite some impressive (to some) films on his resume before this monumental debacle.


There are so many things wrong with this movie that it's surely impossible to list them all. How about those prehistoric sequences with embarrassing sets that remind me of a lame-brained CGI version of The Big Dollhouse and featuring dinosaurs that appear to have regressed so far beyond Jurassic Park that it borders on a non-existent Theodore Rex computer game for Commodore 64. Furthermore, the scenes set in this incredibly unflattering incarnation of 2055 feature the worst visual effects I have seen in a modern day film. Yes, they somehow best the abyssal work of Battlefield Earth. For whatever reason, the makers of this movie decided to film everybody against green screens that are subsequently filled with ridiculously flat images of skyscrapers, silly robotic toy cars and extras that look like they wondered in from the set of a cheap, direct-to-DVD remake of Double Indemnity. It looks like the CGI equivalent of rear projection; so completely and utterly fake and yet, unlike the days of rear projection, A Sound of Thunder was not made in the 1950s. Remember that scene in Flying High! where the chariot race appears behind the people in the car? It's like that but instead of a chariot race it's somebody's neighbourhood from The Sims.

It's all just so hilariously disposable and ridiculous. Of course, the worst effect of all is Ben Kingsley's hair. Ben Kingsley's hair and face, actually. Kingsley - who is clearly one of the un-pickiest actors in Hollywood; Daniel Day-Lewis he is not - gives one of those strangely cartoonish performances the he is wont to do, but this time with a fright wig that would give Leland Palmer a run for his money and a complexion that gives the illusion that he uses his salary from pictures such as this, Thunderbirds and The Love Guru (wherein he plays "Guru Tugginmypudha") to finance his holiday home on Mercury.

And what of Ed Burns? He would certainly make a suitably realistic zombie in Ted Mikel's next Astro-Zombies creation. No expensive make-up required there! The rest of the cast are all nameless, faceless nobodies so, at least in that regard, they have nothing on "Silk Shirt Guy" and "Cancer-Riddled Claudette" from The Room, but I haven't even gotten to the best part yet.

GORILLA DINOSAURS!!!!
Yup, apparently, when someone steps on a butterfly back in the cretaceous period, it causes a series of evolutionary "waves" (basically, really bad tsunamis of vegetation) and with it comes a species of dinosaurs that not only didn't become extinct, but somehow evolved into (or from, or maybe they mated? The so-called "science" is never explained in any great detail whatsoever) this sort of weird half breed dinosaurs with baboon faces that make chest-thumping noises like a mountain gorilla, but have the hunting pack mentality of those funny raptor dinosaurs from the canteen sequence of Jurassic Park.

And the weird bat monsters? I don't even know what they were meant to be.

I personally got a kick out of the bizarro science. This company that sends rich fuddy duddies back in time to hunt dinosaurs only goes back to a moment in time when the dinosaur they hunt (the same one each and every time) was going to die anyway (first in a swamp and then because of a volcano). Yet, somehow, somebody stepping off the path and killing a butterfly irrevocably changes history. Would that butterfly not have died in the volcano that sends ash right down towards the time portal, from which these futuristic travellers ventured, in only a few seconds. Could that butterfly flap its wings so fast that it avoided a catastrophic natural disaster before going on to lay eggs that allowed apes to become humans and for ferns to sprout flowers that would eventually allow us to live as we are to 2055 and onwards. And how come each group of backwards travellers do not bump into one another at the same dinosaur hunting ground? Or why these recurring time waves all but send people to the hospital they are so forceful and yet Ed Burns' character appears to sleep through the very first one. Oh, science! Who needs you?!


There really is no wonder why the film sat on the shelf for three years before getting released. It was able to coerce $1.9million from American audiences at the box office, which is a staggering amount really, although upon viewing the trailer there's not much in it that gives the waft of how bad A Sound of Thunder really is. I laughed during it. I laughed a lot. My eyes bugged out of their sockets and I screamed "Oh. My. God." at the television more than once. Watching A Sound of Thunder is akin to watching money get flushed down an ugly, clown toilet and Ben Kingsley is the grand ringmaster.

Play The Room

In a day and age where movies seem to made based purely on video games - characters conveniently go from one set and one mission to another almost as if they're in various levels of a computer game - it's funny to see a game come completely organically out of a moviegoing experience. Much like how there was a fan-made (or, "fan"-made) 8-Bit game based on Twilight released recently, so to has a similar style game been released based on Tommy Wiseau's immortal classic The Room.

This is hilarious. All your favourite moments are there like when Claudette reveals she has cancer and never mentions it again, when Denny (oh hai Denny) gets into a fight with his drug dealer, Johnny buying Lisa a sexy red dress and the flower shop attendant who doesn't recognise Johnny even though he is her favourite customer. It doesn't necessarily have a point, but it's a fine way to waste literally hours of your time.