Bottom Of The Barrel

The Cloverfield Experience

To build buzz for this year's first highly anticipated releases, the team behind Cloverfield created a cryptic trailer was placed in front of last summer's blockbuster Transformers film and launched a 6 month long viral marketing effort. Their efforts paid off, to the tune of $46 million dollars last weekend and the highest ever January opening.

The film uses the Blair Witch story telling methodology of the "found" homemade movie tape just being played back to deliver the story. The director also used a clever tape or existing recording to reveal additional back story which would have been awkward to add to the Going Away Party and forward story told on the film. I was pleasantly surprised that the "monster" was shown in several scenes and their use of "parasites" added some good interaction between the people and the thing destroying New York City.

As with many Sci-Fi movies several elements must be ignored in order to make the movie work like staying in the city during the attack, the fact that most people would ditch the camera as soon as the shit started to hit the fan, and if I took a piece of steel rod to the chest I wouldn't be able to walk down 50+ flights of stairs and then begin to run allow over the city - but I digress.

On the plus side, the scene on the Brooklyn Bridge was great [and was by far the shakiest part of the film] and unexpected, Marlena being bitten and then later, umm, exploding I think, was excellent, and helicopter view gave us show idea of the size of this thing everyone is running from. I would recommend taking the movie in at the theater to get the full effect of the hand held camera work and full effect of the monster looking down on you.

Although the movie contains no score or music, which accompany most movies these days, the guys over at Hypeful have put together Rob's Party Mix from Cloverfield. The great thing about the list of songs is a link to an mp3 of each track so you can put together your very own cd for your next party featuring gaggles of ridiculously good-looking hipsters.

So that's it right? Well, there seems to be plenty more going on with regards to the film. The site 1-18-08 has posted new photo's that may show aftermath of the attack. Their has been some speculation that perhaps others may have filmed the attack and their are other vantage points for a sequel. The last scene showed something dropping into the ocean before the attack and and what about the strange transmission at the end of the credits? I'm not sure what all that means but it at least [for now] creates some additional buzz for us bloggers to banter about while we wait for our Cloverfield Monster Movie Toy, due in September.

posted by TheWino @ 9:07 AM