{"id":82775,"date":"2024-10-25T17:04:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-25T22:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/?p=82775"},"modified":"2024-10-25T14:18:15","modified_gmt":"2024-10-25T19:18:15","slug":"monster-movie-mayhem-aquarium-of-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/?p=82775","title":{"rendered":"Monster Movie Mayhem: Aquarium of the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By CONNOR KEATING<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tiger Media Network<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the final review for the 2024 October monster movie marathon, we have the scariest film of them all. A film from a company that makes any moviegoer shudder just by its name alone. \u201cThe Asylum\u201d presents \u201cAquarium of the Dead\u201d… also I\u2019m writing this in the middle of September because I refuse to watch this movie again, especially just a month later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAquarium of the Dead\u201d is the third film in the \u201cZoombies\u201d franchise. While I have not seen the other two films, I\u2019ve heard that the second is a prequel and this film takes place at the same time as the first one. I\u2019ve also heard they\u2019re very bad movies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film takes place at an aquarium where uh\u2026 Some sort of medical treatment item for the animals goes bad and after injecting it into an octopus, it begins spreading a virus around the aquarium. The virus turns all the animals undead so now they\u2019re all big and crazy and deadly. It\u2019s not well explained at all. Anyway, the main characters get locked inside the aquarium because one of the tanks broke and that apparently locks all the doors, so now they have to find a way out and try not to get eaten by the creatures of the undead aquarium!<\/p>\n\n\n

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Something has caused the dead dolphin to come back to life!
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Yeah, the plot sucks. Now I will give the film some credit, it gets straight into the action. The first thing we \u201csee\u201d is the octopus getting turned into a zombie\u2026 unfortunately, most of that is off camera\u2026 as in, it happens right outside of the frame. Now, despite the quick opening, a good chunk of the rest of the film is just people standing around in an aquarium and talking, with very little going on and nothing important to say.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film has three groups of characters. The first is the head of the aquarium, the aquarium vet, a politician that they\u2019re trying to get funding from, and his secretary. Then there\u2019s this aquarium employee guy and a random dude who I think is getting some kind of special tour of the place or something. And then, finally, there are these two\u2026 firefighters or paramedics or something guys who just wander around the building the entire time and add absolutely nothing to the film. I honestly think the movie wasn\u2019t long enough, so they added these two guys in just to make the movie like, ten minutes longer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s also this one lady who has been in some actual big films, most notably \u201cCool Cat Saves The Kids,\u201d but she spends most of the film in one room until the climax, where she shows up just to get eaten by the octopus. It\u2019s a pretty bland cast. The main four are extremely boring and the politician guy is, of course, very annoying. Now, the aquarium employee and the random guy do have some\u2026 not necessarily good, but fun back and forth. Better dialogue than anything else in the film, but they\u2019re still not very interesting. The film also can\u2019t decide which one is supposed to be the smart one and which one is the dumb one, so they go back and forth constantly. They\u2019re surprisingly the best part of the film, but still suck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way that the film is structured is also a total mess and the film is pretty poorly edited. The characters are constantly running through the same hallways and areas over and over again. At one point around the beginning of the film, the group of four gets trapped in some room, we cut to the dynamic duo while they fight crabs or something, and then when we get back to the others, they\u2019re suddenly out\u2026 and then a while later they get stuck in that same room again! It seriously feels like they took one sequence and split it in half and stuck each end of it at different ends of the movie. As stated earlier, while the film begins immediately, after that the film grinds to a screeching halt. It\u2019s a very slow movie where barely anything happens throughout, and when something does happen, half of the time, it\u2019s the same shot of this CGI crocodile doing the same walking animation over and over and over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dr. Karen James fails to sneak past the zombified mako sharks!
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Speaking of the animals, let’s talk about them. The fact that they\u2019re zombies has almost zero bearing on the plot. You might be wondering, \u201cDo the people turn into zombies?\u201d no! Of course not! That would require them to spend money on one of those zombie makeup kits you get from \u201cMichael\u2019s.\u201d Honestly, they could have just said the animals got some disease like rabies but for fish or that it\u2019s radiation, but no, they have to make a big deal about the animals being \u201cundead\u201d even though it means literally nothing. So what sort of animals do we get as zombies?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, the main beast is the octopus. He gets by far the most dynamic range of animation, but because of this, he spends most of the film growling at people from the air vents. Even when he does something, though, it\u2019s really not that interesting. The one time the paramedic guys interact with the actual plot is when one of them gets stuck in an elevator with the octopus, and the movie doesn\u2019t even have the guts to do anything with that. He just screams at the octopus for a bit, and then gets off on the next floor. Anyways, there\u2019s the crocodile, as mentioned before. He shows up a lot but does nothing, there\u2019s one scene of a dolphin that kills a guy in the medical area, it\u2019s actually a fun \u201cso bad it\u2019s good\u201d kind of scene, but then the dolphin never shows up again, there\u2019s also a blind zombie walrus who gets a single kill, there are some giant crabs, some vampire starfish, and we do get a scene where the characters have to walk past two beached sharks in the most anticlimactic scene ever that simply there to waste time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Honestly I would have liked to see more fish or something rather than the same crocodile constantly. They literally have one of the tanks break open and flood and room then do nothing with that. There are a lot of animals, but most of them are in very brief and mediocre scenes, and a good chunk of them have monster movies of their own. I wish there would have been more interesting animals attacking like the giant crabs and starfish. Those guys were interesting, octopus, sharks, and crocodiles all have their own movies, and seeing animals that would normally be harmless being bloodthirsty is kind of the draw for a film like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Daniel Hanley gets pinned down by a giant spider crab!<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like most films from \u201cThe Asylum,\u201d \u201cAquarium of the Dead\u201d sucks. It\u2019s a very nonsensical movie where not much ever happens, and when something does happen, it\u2019s so anticlimactic that it keeps the film from even reaching \u201cso bad it\u2019s good\u201d status. Boring characters that are either talking about nothing or running through the same corridors they ran through a minute ago, and a missed opportunity with its concept that gets wasted on the same killer animals we\u2019ve seen countless times helps to make this a *gasp* bad movie! I give this film two \u201cmarine animal stock footage clips\u201d out of ten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Connor Keating is a senior at Fort Hays State University, studying Natural Resources. Connor is an old-school movie fan, particularly Japanese monster movies, and is an avid DVD collector.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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