Even bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon I could not cope with watching this. It's another "found footage" film, which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing - some of them can be good. This, however, was in my opinion unwatchable. A large amount of the run time had nothing discernible on screen thanks to the massive amount of camera-waggle and low light etc. I know some degree of this is part of the genre but in this it was far too much. Unless it was a dull (and often repetitive) piece to camera by one of the 2 main characters you could barely see anything and the waggling camera is enough to make you feel sick. This is one of those low budget films where almost nothing happens, when it does you don't see much (it's basically a monster movie with almost no monster at all) and it felt like a total waste of my time. I've thrown this away because I would feel guilty if someone else ended up paying any money for it and wasting 90 minutes of their life on it. It truly is awful.

I watched this because it was on Netflix and I was bored. The synopsis given by Netflix seemed decent, so I gave it a shot. The movie was just unwatchable. It was boring the entire way through and the acting is beyond terrible.It is seriously a movie about two women (in their late 20's?) who run around with the worlds worst camera. The movie uses the normal mockumentry features of the camera being shaky and some video being garbled...but this film overdoes it. The camera seems to go black, freeze footage, have pixilation, almost the entire way through. It is as though the filmmakers believed that video cameras in 2003 were not good for anything more than a paperweight.The film has numerous factual errors in it that could have been avoided with 5 seconds of research. My favorite is the characters referring to uploading the video to "Youtube" despite youtube not being founded when the movie was supposed to be taking place.The film starts bad, stays bad, and ends bad. There is nothing in it that gets "better" no matter how hopeful you try to be.

There are two big surprises that came at the end of this movie: 1) realizing that they managed to stretch it to almost 90min and 2) this thing had a half-million dollar budget?! Here's how Monster got made: 2 girls with no acting chops and rudimentary filmmaking skills saw Cloverfield and thought, 'Hey, we can do that!' At least they managed to swindle a trip to Japan out of whoever provided the funding for this thing, though you'd barely know it. Over half the outdoors, identifiable scenes were filmed in LA's Little Tokyo, complete with LA skyline in the background! Gawd. Add to this the gobbledy-guk the one girl tries to pass off as Japanese, the non-Japanese actors passed off as Japanese, generally awful acting and persistent 'film damage' issues and you're left with an unwatchable mess. The 'creature' is non-existent, the special effects are generally poor, and there's no drama of any kind.Nitpicky issues notwithstanding, the film could be good if it had had some decent acting, a single interesting character or any semblance of a plot. Instead, we're left with two plain-looking, flat-affect, uninteresting girls stumbling their way through ninety-minutes of dull meandering through poorly set up scenes. Please give me the last hour and a half of my life back.

Sisters Sarah and Erin hop the bigger pond, landing in Tokyo to film a documentary about global warming (though God knows why). In the midst of their interview with the Environmental Minister, havoc strikes. At first, it's assumed to be another earthquake. When military presence intensifies, terrorism is suspected. But all too soon, it's revealed to be...something else. Sounds a bit familiar, no? Just to get it out of the way, whether or not it's an unhappy accident of conflicting release dates, there's no getting around that this is "Cloverfield"-lite, with a few (very few) deviations. This is evident--from the distant explosion that marks the start of the action, to the overall concept, to splattering the camera with blood at least once. The monsters even roar as if they were separated at birth. To be fair, this film does have a few things on Cloverfield. The fish-out-of-water angle, namely placing the protagonists in an unfamiliar culture, was a great idea. It's difficult enough to survive disaster when most everyone speaks your language, but when they don't, the challenge is increased quite a bit. While the presentation of the global warming message is..."crunchy" at best, the not-so-subtle hint that global warming itself awakened the creature is another juicy notion. Honestly, there's no better place on earth to set your disaster than Tokyo, the world's capital of disasters! The biggest thing for me personally would have to be the logic of the beast itself. In this film, it seemed to cut its paths of destruction through heavily populated areas, as I believe an angry beast would, rather than conveniently following four scrawny twenty-somethings around, and even directly snacking on one of them, as New York's monster did.Now that that's out of the way, even if Cloverfield never existed, this would still be pretty poor. The creature, a giant squid presumably, isn't actually seen doing very much to constitute a threat. Perhaps it could have actually picked up someone or smashed something, but all we're treated to is many angles of large, waving tentacles. One thing it makes you appreciate is how difficult disaster is to write. It seems that it's very easy to get so wrapped up in the turmoil of your story that you forget how people actually talk, particularly in the midst of emergency. Sarah and Erin (their actual first names, by the way; a bright-and-shining sign of non-actors) appear to struggle on the initiative to keep many of David Michael Latt's throw-away lines out of the production, but enough of them sneak in to become distracting. "I feel like we were meant to be here...", "It's so important to document this..." Sure. I realize they would have to invent reasons for our heroines to lug around an industrial-grade camera, but there must have been another way. Call me shallow, but I believe I'd find it difficult to think of what progeny will see someday when flaming debris is exploding all around me, and the street is caving in underneath my feet.An additional note about the cast--in truth, considering the script, there's really no reason to have anyone American in it. The Japanese actors (and their characters) are FAR better than the American ones; particularly the high-schooler who lives with her half-crazed dad (and dad seems to know something of the angry creature) and the young doctor who just wants to get across town and make sure his son is okay. I wished the film were about THEM, or someone like them. Were I in Erik Estenberg and company's shoes, I'm sure I would have shot the entire thing with an entirely Japanese cast and subtitles. Couldn't the Japanese document their own disasters? They've had lots of practice.So, maybe it's not so much a ripoff as it is just not good. Of course, consider that trailer for another Asylum treat, "AVH". As in, "Alien Vs. Hunter". As in intergalactic hunters with advanced camouflage fighting slimy aliens with elongated heads and teeth. Can't wait for that one, can ya? What? You've seen it? Of course you have...