Frankenfish (2004) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Quick quiz. Very quick. Only one question.

Frankenfish is:

(a.) A really liberal underwater talk show host.

(b.) A fish stitched together from parts of other fish.

(c.) A member of Country Joe's band.

(d.) None of the above.

The answer is (d) none of the above. Although this movie features giant creatures, and those creatures are fish, they are not stitched together from other fish to animate or re-animate a new species.

Instead, these fish conform to the general principles of giant movie creatures, which are:

Method 1. If the writer is a liberal, the giant creatures are formed when irresponsible Republican politicians dump unlimited quantities of poisonous substances into the air and water, thus altering the ecosystem and precipitating the development of a giant new species which can survive under extreme conditions and therefore presents a threat to man. The changes in the species do not take place over millions of years, like normal evolutionary processes, but happen overnight.

Method 2. If the writer is a conservative, the giant creatures are formed when godless scientists place their curiosity above mankind's accepted moral principles. The scientists choose to ignore the rules of nature, play God, and create a new and unnatural species to study. Being evil atheists, they never stop to think that if God had wanted the world to be filled with 80 foot gerbils, He, in His infinite wisdom, would have told Noah to build a larger ark. More important, we know that the Good Lord does not want gerbils to be 80 feet tall, because if He did, He would have made Richard Gere much larger.

Method 2a. If the writer hates liberals and conservatives equally, he puts a twist in Method 2. The godless, atheist scientists create a giant creature, but only because they were paid vast sums to do so by a filthy rich Republican businessman whose hobby is big game hunting. The rich hunter has already killed every species on the planet, even the most dangerous ones, so he needs the godless scientists to violate the rules of nature and make a new species which is more dangerous than any on earth, thus allowing him to reinvigorate his adrenalin flow.

This particular giant creature film follows Method 2a.

All giant creature films should follow certain other conventions as well:

1. There should be an old gypsy woman, or cajun witch, or voodoo priestess, or the equivalent. This old woman believes that the creature is not simply a mutation which can be explained by science (well, to be more specific, by movie science), but is rather an evil spirit, possibly even the Lord of Darkness himself, and has been sent by God to punish her for something she did with another woman and some KY jelly and some "Japanese octopus porn" and some common table salt. She knows God cannot forgive her even though she was only 16 at the time, and it was only one time, and she was just experimenting with sexuality in ways familiar to so many of us, especially those of us who live near the Japanese seacoast. Alas, her soul is lost to The Dark One, who has now come to attack her in the form of the 80-foot gerbil.

Inevitably, she has an exotic anti-gerbil talisman which can protect her against the Evil Spirit. Just as inevitably, it gets destroyed just when it might actually serve some purpose.

2. The destruction of the giant creature should actually occur about halfway through the film, after a prolonged battle which costs many human lives. Then, just when everyone is relaxing, an even larger creature should appear from nowhere, kill an additional human, and disappear quickly, so that the stunned survivors are in shock, and are terrified because they now realize that the one they defeated may have been just one of many, and may even have been a baby. By killing it, they may have forced a confrontation with an angry mother gerbil.

3. There should be a stuck-up guy who refuses to co-operate with the plans of the other people fighting the giant creature. There is no good reason for this. It is just required by genre convention. Sometimes the stuck-up guy is allowed to redeem himself by dying in a self-sacrificing way, but this is not essential. Sometimes his death just provides darkly comic relief.

And there you have the plot of Frankenfish, except that the creature is not a gerbil but, as you might expect from the title, a giant fish. Frankenfish has rudimentary lungs and can breathe out of the water, so a human can not easily escape it.

I'm almost ashamed to admit that I thought a totally predictable film named Frankenfish was actually pretty good. Of course, giant creature films are inherently delimited in quality, and their quality ceiling is quite low. Can you name one that is really any good, except for Jaws? If you were strapped to a polygraph, you'd have to admit that even the legendary giant creature films like King Kong and Godzilla are pretty damned awful. King Kong, of course, reached out to mainstream audiences with a lot of heart. Frankenfish isn't that type of film. It is a pure genre film which doesn't care about mainstream audiences. It's filled with extreme gore, gratuitous nudity from unnecessary characters, and macabre humor. It also has some genuine tension and some pretty good scares.

It kinda got my heart pumpin'.  It's far from a masterpiece, and it has some unnecessary plot detours, but it is ten times better than you'd expect from a film named Frankenfish.