Creature Features: The Strangeness

We'd had this movie on our "to watch" short list for a while before we finally got around to watching it last month. It was full of surprises to say the least!

The plot unfolds something like this: A mining company has decided to gather a rag-tag team of non-miners to blast a caved-in mine to determine if it's worth sending an actual team of miners to mine whatever's in said mine. Together this ragtag team will descend into a mine, and INSTANTLY get lost. (Would you expect anything less of a team of nine random people?) While trying to navigate their way back to the surface, they discover the blasting has angered an ancient monster living in the mine. With supplies dwindling, and chaos growing, they descend further into the mine hoping to out run the monster. But by going deeper under ground... how will they ever find their way out? [Spoiler: as a total shock to us, someone actually does get out, and it's completely asinine.]

Sounds kind of familiar: If this sort of sounds like the mining version of the Decent, and it sort of is. Though compared to Strangeness, the Decent is an action packed thrill-ride.

Slow is an understatement: There are some key scenes that make this film worth watching (if you're into cheesy monster flicks), but everything between is brutally slow. This movie that falls into the "watch it with a loud group" category, otherwise it might be kind of unbearable.


DIY in the best-worst ways: This film feels like it was made by a bunch of friends on a lark (especially in the acting department), but there are some production elements that don't add up. For instance the mine looks like it was built on a sound stage, but there's no way this production had a sound stage in the budget. So, when we noticed our Blu-ray had an interview with the director, we had to watch. To our amazement this was indeed a bunch of recent film school grads shooting a film in someone's back yard with very little independent financing. It's sort of mind blowing that they pulled off the production value they did but, it seems like they were so excited to make a movie on their own terms, they just did it. (Not surprisingly, the two people who went on to have some modest success in film making after working on this flick were the guys responsible for the effects and title treatment.)

The blessing of IMDB: We were about 10 mins into watching this gem when Tim looked it up on IMDB. He quickly noticed the director was listed as a woman named Melanie Anne Phillips, though the title credits had listed the director as "David Michael Hillman". After the movie, when we watched the interview with the director, Melanie was the person being interviewed but the name difference never came up. So I dug a bit deeper in to Melanie and discovered that a few years after directing this movie as David, she began hormone therapy to transition to Melanie. At the start of that journey, she decided to chronicle her transition and eventually published it as the first online transition diary. Around the same time she also started one of the first online transgender support websites, and co-developed a very popular story structure computer program. (That program is still popular enough today that when I googled "story development software" it came up second in the search results, and sixth when I dropped "software" from the search.) It's not often we come across movies from these eras that are directed/written/produced/etc by anyone but white cis men, but the more of them we watch, the more we run into the welcome exceptions to the rules. (Melanie's site is still active, and you can read her transition diary here.)