On 4 November 2021, my evening's DVD movie watch was the post-apocalyptic monster movie Love and Monsters, which I purchased in American Region 1 DVD format as there doesn't appear to be a UK Region 2 DVD release for it as yet (happily my DVD player can play all regions).
Directed by Michael Matthews, and released by Paramount Pictures and Netflix in 2020, Love and Monsters opens with the imminent threat of an asteroid smashing into good old Planet Earth. Consequently, scientists send forth rockets to divert it from its path of destruction, which they do. However, the resulting chemical fall-out mutates cold-blooded creatures into enormous monsters that destroy most of humanity, with the few survivors forced to live in underground colonies in order to survive.
Following that bleak introduction, the movie traces the bold bid by teenager Joel (played by Dylan O'Brien) to trek 85 miles across the planet's surface to reach the colony housing his pre-apocalypse girlfriend Aimee (Jessica Henwick). En route, he battles all manner of monstrous mega-beasts, encounters a smattering of fellow human survivors, and is faithfully (even doggedly?) accompanied by an abandoned dog named Boy (played by two different Australian kelpies, Dodge and Hero). The verbal interactions between Joel and Boy (okay, mostly from Joel, less from Dog) are priceless, lots of the dry one-liners that I love, with O'Brien putting in an entertaining performance throughout.
No A-listers from the acting world appear in Love and Monsters (though I did spot Bruce Spence, who played Blondie the Aussie surfer in Oz: A Rock 'N' Roll Road Movie, 1976), but inevitably it's the monsters that take centre-stage anyway. They include an immense vicious centipede (is there any other kind?), a lengthy-tongued toad of titanic proportions, colossal snails, venomous hallucination-engendering water leeches, vermiform horrors known as sand gobblers, and a gargantuan crab that unexpectedly proves to be Joel and Aimee's salvation.
These multifarious mutated monsters of the CGI variety are wonderfully imagined and created, albeit equipped with rather more tentacles than is visually appealing. My personal favourite is the salmon-pink giga-gastropod, a kind of super snail and slug combined, replete with horns and tubercles, that seems rather more pacific than its unequivocally carnivorous congeners. Nevertheless, Joel wisely chooses not to put its perceived passivity to the test, electing instead to remain safely out of reach and overtly non-confrontational until this mighty mollusc has slithered on by.
There is also a touching scene in which Joel encounters a forgotten, long-obsolete female android, called a MAV1S Robot, whose batteries are almost discharged. With no means of recharging her, they spend her final functional moments looking up together at a host of shimmering multicoloured sky medusae suspended like living Chinese lanterns in the evening sky overhead.
The climax of Love and Monsters contains two major twists, neither of which (at least to me) was foreshadowed in any way, and which I'll leave for those who have not watched it yet to discover for themselves. Let's just say that menacing monsters notwithstanding, this is not just a monster movie, not simply a road movie, not merely an action movie – it is also very much a coming of age movie, in which Joel definitely does come of age during his many trials and tribulations confronted along the way. Through the course of his arduous, life-threatening quest to find Aimee, Joel journeys far more than the 85 miles that he treks in physical distance, because he gradually transforms from the lovestruck, clumsy, teenager living only in the moment that we see him as at the movie's beginning into the experienced, courageous, forward-thinking man that we see him as by its ending.
It was a great shame that due to the covid lockdowns, Love and Monsters received a limited cinema release, because it is exactly the kind of film that deserves - indeed, requires - spectacular big-screen viewing to do it full justice. Nevertheless, it makes thoroughly enjoyable, captivating viewing on any size of screen.
So be sure to check out a trailer for this excellent movie here on YouTube, and encounter from the safety of your armchair the giant creepy-crawlies only too ready to greet – and eat – the likes of Joel and Dog. And be grateful that the horrors lurking in your herbaceous border are of far less sizeable stature!
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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