SKULLBRIDGE: Insane iceworld epic of dinosaurs vs. pirates.

It’s a cold, brutal steampunk world of ice and snow in SKULLBRIDGE. Snowy cities huddle on rocky islands and the shipping that keeps everyone alive comes from the few fertile islands far away across the flickering sheet of ice that makes up this imaginative place.

Clipper ships glide on massive sledges across the flat ice at high speeds—but any disruption of the cargo trade means islands full of angry, starving-to-death people. So when rumors spread of a massive sea creature ripping through the icy ocean and destroying incoming shipping, the authorities don’t waste time on investigations.

They hire a ragtag crew of ex-pirates and ex-slaves who have to go kill the beast or die trying.

They are led by a brilliant gunmaker whose weapons are what passes for high tech in this grim, Victorian-like realm.

And even he doesn’t have a prayer.

Based on the young adult novel, “Skullbridge: The Pirate’s Apprentice,” this dizzyingly exotic movie has everything you could want from a blockbuster. For starters, the main character Brennon Cory is a likeable young man who will simply never give up, and his partner, the genius roughneck rogue Randon Ridley is unforgettable: an Indiana Jones-Thomas Edison character in a world Tolkien himself would have found fascinating.

Here, the snow glows. It picks up on your emotions, and flares red around you if you’re mad, blue if moody, and amber if in love. The water glows, too; the sea is luminous, but frozen over for all eternity. As for those who ride the seas…

Ridley is no ordinary pirate. His specialty is stopping slave ships, freeing the human cargo, and taking the valuables for his own to fund further ventures. His own ship is a rocketclipper with massive engines at the stern that blast his pirate vessel over the ice fields at astounding speeds.

Ridley and Brennon have to take on this mission or the authorities will kill them. They’ve been captured for piracy, and nothing is so despised in this world as that. Destroy the icy animal out on the distant ocean, and they’ll win pardons for their freedom. Fail and they’ll be killed.

The funny part is, Ridley does not for a minute believe in the creature. It seems that in this world the giant murderous sea creature is a bit of a religious legend. Crazy people in the snowy Victorian streets say this thing harbingers the end of the world. Captain Ridley thinks this is nothing short of hilarious, but Brenn is not so sure.

Ridley’s plan is to take the money for the mission, go off for a few weeks with some rum and some girls, and come back with some whalebones to fake the killing of the rumored creature.

Problem number one: the creature actually exists.

Problem number two: it is nearly the size of a city.

Ridley and his crew use huge electrified spearguns and harpoon cannons. It seems really impressive, until you see the size of this monster. It splinters the ice into a cosmos of shattered particles, and eats the ship in about eight seconds.

Ridley is quickly left with no way to kill it.

Stranded on the frozen sea, in ever-smaller white islands, he salvages what he can from the debris of his ship, and as the situation becomes more and more and more desperate, and more people we’re counting on to save us keep dying, Ridley and Brennon finally figure out a way to use munitions to blow up the creature—after and if it swallows them.

It’s a great plan.

It even seems to work.  Until we find out that all of the legends are true.

And the legends say, if you kill the great sea titan, you bring about the end of the world.

Which seems to be happening…

Floods of dead fish come roiling up from the bottom of the frigid sea, laid waste by a toxin spreading from the dead body of the titan.

The toxin is released from microbes that spread in the sea like wildfire in a forest. And the microbe had survived for eons on the skin of this giant sea creature species. Ridley killed the sea creature. So now everything in this realm is dying.

Ridley’s crack team of support inventors figure this out back home—and they’ve begun a furious rush across the ocean on a souped-up jetboat to stop him from his original mission.

And they get to him in time for a rescue.

Now, depending on how you look at, there’s good news and bad news.

            Because the giant thing has brothers.

Lost on the ice sea, Ridley has to figure out a way to survive with a very tricky situation: he cannot kill the beasts. How do you defend yourself when you can’t kill your enemy?

The startling answer is, you don’t. So by the end of the story, Brennon and Ridley have killed the creatures in an us versus them pure survival battle.

And it’s all very heroic, except that as the curtain closes, Ridley finds himself back on the run like in his pirate days, as he’s relentlessly hunted by a populace that believes he has caused the downturn in fishing and very possibly, the end of the world…

What really vaults the story into the domain of the highly unusual, however, is the final moments. Out of nowhere, we are tossed into a series of scenes set in our, modern-day Earth world. These scenes just burst into our path with no warning.

Suddenly, we are with a young man who’s been brutally taken hostage in Somalia by real-world pirates. It’s absolutely jolting. He is stuck in the leaking, stained and sordid cargo hold of the Somali ship.

Left for days, he discovers an old paperback floating in the hold, and what should it be but a fantastical book called The Pirate’s Apprentice—detailing everything we have just seen.

It’s the story of a strange icy world and a pirate guy named Ridley who has invented a host of weapons and who’s sent out to kill a sea titan or else die trying… and so on, and so on…

Weird, right?

While he is trapped in these dark circumstances, the book sort of keeps this kid alive, and gives him something to keep his mind off the Somali killers who periodically beat him up or serve him a slosh no one could imagine eating.

This entire section lasts only about 8 minutes, but it sets up a dark and claustrophobic tone all its own.

Finally, the captured young man breaks away from his captors.

He ends up swimming for safety—and in the process, loses his beloved Pirate’s Apprentice book.

He returns to America with missionaries.

He settles into a normal American life, far from the gruesome realities of Africa.

But he is haunted forever by that book, which helped him through the darkest days of his life… a book that no one on Earth will admit exists, and which he can never find again, not for any price…

As he begins to suspect that the book floated up out of the other world—an icy landscape that is absolutely real, and for which there must be some way, some how, to find a doorway that would allow him to cross over into it…

It’s an amazing open ending that raises a million tantalizing questions, in an epic adventure that deserves a wider audience… In this crazy, darkness-filled world, sailors board their ships by crossing a bridge studded with skulls (thus the title), and say goodbye to the world they know. Movie viewers will be happy to do the same.

_____

ANCHOR.

            JAWS meets BLACKHAWK DOWN in a pulse-pounder and low-budget wonder.

Remember that movie a few years ago where they used real Navy SEALs in some kind of ‘80s-ish action thriller deal? This is like the supergood version of that kind of thing, with an amazing supernatural angle worked in.

Marines stranded in lifeboats after a botched assault operation wind up under attack by some unknown thing in the water that’s taking them down one by one and turning them against each other…

It’s an incredibly basic, visceral situation. Like JAWS, or THE THING, ALIENS, or THE GREY, or any of those in the genre, you watch as the group gets winnowed down and breaks under the pressure of trying to make it out alive. The difference is, there is no hero. They’re all heroes. We really like this group. We’ve gotten to know them for the first half-hour back before they’re deployed and they are really a decent group of Joes.

And Janes. Two female Marines who are experimentally put into this frontline combat situation are particularly interesting to watch because they never give in to the obvious temptation to attack each other. While everyone else is at each other’s throats, these two never do. It’s intriguing to figure out why.

The other aspect of it is the subtle supernaturalism.

“The thing that gets you is, was there ever really anything but fear pulling them apart?”

We never know whether the black alligatorlike thing with weird trailing tentacles which slips briefly into view beneath the lifeboats is somehow able to manipulate them into a state of paranoia or rather if starvation, the elements, and pressure just take their toll.

This is a tour de force of acting, and a film in which the flashbacks really do deepen our understanding of the people rather than slow the pace down unnecessarily. These are secrets very much worth discovering to an audience. The soldiers’ previous military experiences are nightmarishly real, and vivid self-contained vignettes about the hardships of war.

In the best way, the whole thing becomes like a bad dream of war itself, surreal and feverish.

When the main character, Lodge, scrambles up onto the drifting hulk of a dead ship to escape his own crew, you pretty much know he’s screwed, and just prepare for this sweet-hearted guy to get blown away. This is, after all, the kid we saw barely making it through training, who bucked the odds then. But twice? It seems impossible. How he gets out of this mess is a stunning reversal. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, indeed. The size of the fight in this dog is amazing.

Sometimes in military action stories like DOG SOLDIERS or BELOW, you may not like the characters because they seem too similar to each other, or too dedicated to the mission to allow for us to see their human sides. In ANCHOR, the actors really bring to life the title’s metaphoric power: these people are both the reliable and stable part of each other’s lives, and the thing that could weight them down and bury them in the sea.

_____

1815

            “Of all revenge tales, this might be the most beautiful…”

            With Leo DiCaprio’s REVENANT still haunting our minds after a recent screening, we thought this might be a great time to rediscover the similar but sea-monster-rich epic, 1815.

A lost Ridley Scott classic, 1815 presents us with a cold and beautiful universe, wonderfully evoked with naturalistic sounds and almost no dialogue at all.

If PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN was the ultimate pirate fantasy, 1815 is a tough, pared-down and ultra-realistic piracy tale, its crude and credible counterpart.

It just happens to have a goddamn ocean of sharks in it.

Yes—granted these are not sea monsters in the usual sense, but they play the same part in this scenario despite the fact they are real-world creatures.

No one is saying that the amount of sharks in this movie is believable, but tell me you don’t find it believable when you’re watching it. The mesmerizing mood of the film is such that you don’t punch the logic button while it’s unspooling. You just don’t.

Instead, you watch as Oscar Isaac gets marooned on a barren, vicious-looking island with the captured women who have apparently stirred up a significant amount of trouble with the privateers Isaac has long ago found himself with. (What exactly transpired aboard that ship is left to the imagination since we start with Isaac and the women attacked onboard, but it sure seems like whatever happened prior to the credits could be a movie in itself.)

It’s long after the heyday of piracy.  It’s a bleak life.  You get the feeling our crazed-looking captain might’ve taken these women off some 19^th century pimp and then refused to share them with his crew. There might have been rivalries and unfair punishments and savagery of various kinds. In any case, the Captain (who we know mysteriously only as The Reaper) is left on this long, ugly spit of a desert island with two women who look just as mentally unstable as he is.

The women are not friends. While hiding their mutual dislike from Reaper, they frequently involve themselves in fierce backstabbing the second he marches off into the distance for some alone time. Food is scarce. The island is surreally surrounded by a shark swarm drawn by schools of eerie red fish, and Reaper’s luck at fishing leaves something to be desired.

Almost instantly after his being deserted, Reaper begins building a ship from nothing to exact revenge upon his faithless former crew.

We know he is after revenge by his face. His face tells us just about everything in this film, since pretty much no one ever talks.

His hatred is so great that when—after God knows how long—a passing ship is spotted in a storm, Reaper is positively delighted when it wrecks against the rocky shore, and he kills the few survivors that aren’t murdered by sharks just so he can commandeer it.

He repairs the ship and heads to sea, hellbent on getting tasty revenge.

His women are with him, in one of the weirdest and most fascinatingly under-explained relationships of all filmdom, and they assist him with a nasty bit of subterfuge when they discover small-pox ridden blankets in the cargo hold. Later they will wrap the enemy crewmen in these blankets as if bestowing a gift. We will never know why exactly they support Captain Reaper so very much—but we don’t need to know to enjoy this vengeance show.

Reaper kills his way through a ship full of men to get to the leader of the mutiny, a crazily-tattooed-head-to-toe Brad Pitt, whose fascinating character demands more screentime and tantalizingly isn’t given it…

The whole film builds to this one intensely long sequence, Reaper closing in on his enemy ship, boarding it, crossing past all the defenders, and eventually, driving his quarry away in fear—up the mast of the ship where the final battle occurs…

Just as all the sharks we knew from the island begin swarming around the ship.

It ends with Reaper victoriously tied to the mast on a drifting, chaotic ship of all-against-all, the women wrapping the men in small-pox-ridden blankets, the vessel partly burning and surrounded by a billion sharks, by which time we are fairly certain…

…This has to be hell.

_____

 

Text copyright 2015 by James Holt.  All rights to photos and media retained by their proper owners, and no rights are asserted to the media here except under fair use standards.