I started watching horror movies at a very young age. Perhaps a young enough age to cause people to question my parent's tactics for raising a child. Regardless, my dad and I would watch Tales from the Crypt on the regular and we bonded quite closely as a result. It was our thing. Some people build model airplanes with their dads, others harbor resentment over a missed dance recital, but I built my father-daughter memories on a foundation of severed heads and disemboweled corpses. Our affinity for horror meant that early in my adolescence I had already seen most of the classics (Freddy, Jason, Michael) so I had to tap in to some "creative" subgenres to quench my blood lust. This meant that the Sy-Fy channel and I became well acquainted.
At first my tolerance for these god-awful movies was the same as anyone else: I seriously questioned how the funding for these movies was generated and exactly how many drugs each actor/director/writer/producer was on during its inception. The more I watched and the lower my standards became, the more interested I was in the next anthropomorphic-animal-hybrid creature feature. My tastes became weirder and weirder and it wasn't long before I understood the socialist underpinnings in movies like Dead Snow 1 and 2, or the global warming skepticism in Mega Shark Vs. Mechashark. Now, in the present day, my Netflix queue is filled with one-star rated films and their C-list celebrity actors.
One of the first movies that fit in to this category and I loved unironically was Deep Blue Sea. It is still one of my favorites. The movie takes place on a marine research rig in the middle of the ocean. The scientists on board are studying mako sharks and their aggressive nature. A severe storm and failed rescue attempt (because of course), along with a breached rig, leaves the crew trying to escape against uber-intelligent sharks with a penchant for mindless slaughter. This movie even features Samuel L. Jackson and Ice Cube. Another one of the "classics" is Anaconda featuring Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Ice Cube (he knows how to pick 'em) and Jon Voight. Lopez and Wilson, among others, are floating down the Amazon River to shoot a tribal documentary. They encounter Voight who manipulates them in to taking a specific route that will allow him to track a massive, record-breaking, person-eating, anaconda. Then there is Dead Snow which chronicles the escape and defeat from Nazi zombies protecting their treasures in Norway.
Aside from my history with these movies, I am not sure what continues to draw me to them. It isn't because I enjoying telling people that I spent my weekend alone in my apartment, without pants on, watching Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (seriously, why don't I have a boyfriend?). The CGI is just as bad as the acting and the plots are always remarkably shallow. I would like to think that I derive so much enjoyment out of these movies because it gives me a chance to let go of any semblance of critical thinking. For an hour and a half all I have to worry about it how Brooke Hogan is going to escape a sinking island and outsmart a shark with two heads at the same time.
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