Excellent adaptation.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

This very low-budget rip off of Cloverfield is surprisingly well done, yet it is ultimately undone by a near total lack of plot and a complete absence of an ending. It's actually a lot smarter than the many other rip off films like this which litter video store shelves and frequently show up on the Sy Fy channel but while the effort may be admirable, the result is not that entertaining.Erin and Sarah (Erin Evans and Sarah Lynch) are a couple of American sisters who go to Tokyo to shoot their own documentary on global warming with a single video camera and some girlish gumption. While they're there, the city starts to shake. It's not an earthquake, though. What's shaking things up is a giant tentacled beast that rampages through Tokyo. Filming all the way, Erin and Sarah try to stay alive and, with the help of some Japanese folks, make it to the U.S. embassy.I wouldn't recommend this movie for too many people because it gets fairly dull after a while. I would encourage all other low-budget filmmakers to give Monster a look. That's because this film is very effectively styled. It's a much more realistic and, in some way, more imaginative take on the concept than the big budget flick it's shamelessly imitating. The quality of the video breaks up and freezes at times; the whole idea that they're going to keep filming everything is a much more contentious issue between the sisters; adding the language barrier nicely (and cheaply) complicates their situation; there's a pretty clever intimation that this isn't the only giant monster attack Tokyo has had to deal with; and there's a neat and perhaps unintentional subtext through the story about how the person in front of the camera is more freaked out while the person behind the camera is more in control, as though looking at the crisis through the lens provides a certain intellectual and emotional distance.Sadly, all of that gets crushed into a fine powder by the weight of the really sucky special effects and the fact that Erin and Sarah never manage to do or say anything at all interesting. The CGI in Monster is quite fake looking and overused. I lost count of the number of CGI aircraft seen soaring overhead, the damage to the city is represented by superimposing smoke onto unharmed buildings and the creature itself is nothing more 3 or 4 undulating tentacles that could be trying to destroy a city or simply trying to hail a monster-sized taxi. And after the initial discoveries about what's going on, the sisters might just as well be self-directed Segways that wheel from one bizarrely empty spot to another in the supposedly besieged metropolis.The end result of Monster is below average, but I give these filmmakers some credit for attempting to make something that's more than just another low-budget rip off. Writer David Michael Latt and director Erik Esterberg tried to make a legitimate movie. They failed..but at least they tried, which is more than you can say for most of the people involved in these sorts of ersatz productions.

This movie is Bad. I mean really Bad, as much as I hate movies like Meet the Spartans and the Hurt Locker, I at least know that the people making those films are trying to make something good. This is a shameless rip-off, that they made, solely to make money after the success of Cloverfield.The plot is very similar to Cloverfield. Except instead of 6 teenagers in New York, we have 2 American sister reporters in Tokyo. They are interviewing a Japenese man when a horrible CGI tenticle comes up and begins destroying the city. So we follow the two through their adventures while trying to survive. I'm going to be honest, I haven't watched the ending yet, so I don't know what the monster looks like, but believe me, I don't care.And if you thought the camera in the Hurt Locker was bad, this movie is literally 45% static. Most of the movie I can't see anything, just a cheap way to get out of showing special effects.So is there anything I liked? Well, the two main actresses were actually pretty good. Not outstanding, but I do hope they have promising careers ahead of them.

I don't know if this piece of drek was entirely coincidental to "Cloverfield" or not, but it doesn't feel that way. I understand when disaster happens, video equipment will get damaged and there needs to be some realism. But at least in "Cloverfield" you could follow the story. The camera malfunctions came so often that it was like watching a badly put together nickelodeon. The malfunctions themselves seemed to be unrealistic at times. I will admit the brief shots of the tentacled monster were not bad, but if it's impossible to follow the story, then nothing else matters. Oh, one more thing. On a movie this bad, I really don't want to see a behind the scenes documentary. That's like pouring acid on a wound.

Okay maybe this is not a rip-off of Cloverfield, and maybe I should not have watched it a few days after said movie. But still, Monster is almost exactly the same with chicks (you could sell anything with chicks, right?), without a decent plot, acting, and sadly, without a monster.We get two girls who are in Japan to make a documentary, when Tokyo is hit by an earthquake. And this is when the movie starts to get irreversibly bad and annoying. Because the two girls, however cute they may be, just cannot seem to use the camera. In the middle of a monster attack, *everything* is filmed, except for what is actually happening. When our heroines are staring with their jaws dropped at something supposedly terrible, the camera is well... showing them, their jaws dropped, staring. Then cut, or artifacts on the film (at every 5 seconds, or when something interesting is about to happen), and we go to the next scene. Rinse and repeat. In the end, we are given 90 minutes of artifacts, girls being scared and talking nonsense, running somewhere (filming each other's legs in the process), and just hanging out in Tokyo, obviously afraid of some tentacle monster that they always fail to capture with the camera.Besides of not being able to make a point (it is hard when you point the camera at your sister instead of at whatever is happening around you), the movie fails to convey a sense of plot. We know where the girls are trying to go, but we just do not care if they ever get there, or what happens if they do. There is simply no drama, no excitement, mostly due to the bad use of camera, and the long talky scenes, and short scary ones (usually cut by artifacts, or simply, darkness).I can't help but to compare this movie to Cloverfield, where you got a monster, and after some time, you actually got interested in where the group is going, and in the end, you cared. Monster could have been a great movie, even without showing the monster, if it manages to make you feel for the girls, but it sadly fails. It is not simply bad, but also an uninteresting movie.