Movies like Shakma are a dime a dozen. Cheap, throwaway horror flicks featuring vapid characters played by talent barely holding on to their careers in Hollywood, and maybe an aging star or two. The screenplay looks as if it was less than twenty pages long, sets are plain and repetitive, and what little gore there is must have been a strain on the miniscule budget. Everything about this movie screams cheapness and lack of effort. Everything, that is, except for one of the wildest creatures ever to appear in a horror flick.
In Shakma, from directors Hugh Parks and Tom Logan, filming a screenplay from Roger Engle, Typhoon the baboon plays the title character, a research monkey at some medical school, somewhere. Shakma has been injected with a serum that has turned him into a crazed killing machine, and that’s bad for a small group of med students and their professor, who have chosen that evening to lock up the medical school for a fun night of LARPing. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Shakma”
Teleportation is a fascinating subject. Most sci-fi fans have watched the transporters in Star Trek or elsewhere and thought how cool it would be to travel instantly from one place to another. But then science rears its ugly head. Sure, it’s a novel idea, and would change the way we live in ways that are hard to comprehend. For instance, if distance becomes meaningless, so does security and privacy. There’s no point in having locked doors if anyone at anytime can just teleport into your apartment and steal your stuff. There’s no point in living in cities if you can have cheap housing in the boonies and just teleport into midtown for work. Hungry for some Italian food? Forget the quaint little place that just opened in the old downtown, in the spot the shoe store used to be. Go to fucking Italy! Teleportation would be such a revolution in the way we think about distance that it would remake society in ways we can scarcely imagine. But there’s a dark side.