As Good As It Gets

An Exercise In Nonsense

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Harbinger Down: 1982, a Soviet re-entry capsule is spiraling out of control, the cosmonaut is doomed but there is some strange oozing material on a surface. The present, a professor & two grad students hire a crabbing trawler (although it seems to catch lobsters) in Alaska to research Global Warming and follow a pod of whales in the Bering Sea. They find part of the Soviet capsule with the cosmonauts remains inside.One of the students discovers that the cosmonaut didn't die due to re-entry burns. Also that a biological experiment was on board involving tardigrades (water bears). The body disappears. The professor acts strangely, he seems to be burning up, then he starts growing tubules (The Thingesque)! Some stock character: the grizzled sea captain: "anyone pulls a knife on my boat, I'll gut them", "we have seawater in our veins", (to his granddaughter); the intuitive Inuit: "Some things were meant to remain frozen".Fair SF/Horror which owes a debt to The Thing. 5.5/10

Greetings from Lithuania."Harbinger Down" (2015) is pretty much a much weaker rip-off / clone of "The Thing". Considering its small budget, i kinda enjoyed this flick for what it is. The creature itself was very "Thing-ish" - pretty creepy staff. Sure some of the characters kills off were way to chezee, but not also not that bad. The main reason i watched this flick were that i wanted to see some low-key horror flick and especially something with Lance Henriksen - i really like this actor, so basically i got what i asked for it - a low-key horror flick with Lance Henriksen - and it was pretty OK one.Overall, if you skip "Harbinger Down" you won't lose anything, as you have seen this movie many times if you like the genre and in much better form. Nevertheless i kinda enjoyed this movie, for what it is - it gave me what i expected and nothing more. Enjoyable, low- key genre flick, definitely not as bad as its rating says.

In one sense, this is a special case. In another, it deserves the same critical treatment as everything else. Low-budget, independently- produced movies need to compete on the same playing field as the big stuff. We don't want Kickstarter funding to become an excuse. On the other hand, some of the crueler reviews have, I think, a rather rose- tinted view of what 80s creature features were really like. They weren't all Aliens. That's magic in a bottle, and it isn't available to order for any amount of money - or Hollywood would be able to buy it, which it's becoming increasingly clear they can't.So, with these mixed views in mind, I rather liked Harbinger Down. If it sets out to avoid becoming saturated in embarrassing CGI, it succeeds, but naturally more is required than that. The performances are fine, given the painfully thin script - people knocking the actors need to consider the writing they've been given. The script is perhaps most kindly described as functional, and barely so. Henriksen is, of course, a massively experienced guy, and always a pleasure. The cinematography is absolutely rock-solid and a great advertisement for both Benjamin L. Brown and the staggeringly low-cost camera it was shot on. Both the pictures and Christopher Drake's score, and of course the creature effects, elevate the film way, way above the depths to which many low- budget sci-fi movies fall.So let's not be too harsh on Harbinger Down. Behind-the-scenes shots suggest that the creature effects could have been made more of on screen, a fair criticism that's been raised before, and the script is a letdown. But again, it's a genre creature feature. For a bit more creature and a bit more story and characterization it could have been better, but on the off-chance that some sort of renaissance of the golden age of sci-fi and fantasy filmmaking can be launched from this movie, or movies like it, I'm enthusiastic. If Blomkamp does get to do Alien 5, he'd be an idiot not to involve Woodruff and Gillis.

I understand what the director was trying to accomplish but this movie just did not come together - there was no sum of its parts.The movie premises was good if not a little similar to The Thing. However the acting was terrible......the actors filled one dimensional boxes of characters they portrayed and I found that the lead actress was this stone faced block. Others looked like they were being told what to do behind the camera. It just did not seem natural.The monster...........instead of being aggressive and sneaky it just likes to hide in dark spaces and that's what it does for the most part of the film - the design of he monster was well did not really make sense. Part human, part fish part plant....it was like some bad 80's B movie.Lastly this movie has no suspense - the main ingredient needed for good horror movies. Its obvious what the monster is, where the monster is. Ultimately at the end I really felt I had watched a bad 80's horror B movie.