By Geno McGahee
The glory days of stop-motion animation is something that is missed. With CGI as the go-to for most special effects in film, stop-motion has proven too much of a headache and not as user friendly for filmmakers, but every so often, we get a return. In QUEEN CRAB, produced by Brett Piper and Mark Palonia, we have a monster crab causing damage to a small town. Piper may be best known for the wretched SCREAMING DEAD (2003) and Mark Palonia of the Palonia brothers is known for making hundreds of films and none of them good. In his defense, I have only seen 50 percent, so apply that percentage accordingly.
Needless to say, after seeing the players behind this film, I was not too optimistic and the film lived right down to expectations. Melissa (Michelle Simone Miller) has a small property and basically lives away from most of the community. She guards her land with a gun and won’t even allow the sheriff onto her property. When a barn is destroyed and tracks lead back to her home, she still refuses.
Jennifer Kane (Kathryn Metz) returns to town a star and reunites with high school friend, Melissa, and tries to convince her to become an actress. A lot of the dialogue is meaningless in this film and doesn’t go anywhere, but what was I expecting? The two team up with a scientist and discover that a huge crab is in town and is tearing it up. They must team up to stop it. This is sort of like LAKE PLACID but not good.
The stop-motion animation is nice to see again, but it’s not very good. Much of the effects in this film are rather poor and it reportedly had a budget of 75,000 to make this. Not that it’s a great deal of money, but this wasn’t a movie that dictated a large budget. I would have expected more, but perhaps the stop-motion animation was costly.
QUEEN CRAB is supposed to be a B film, but it is missing the one element that made those films so special. The fun factor does not exist. With a giant killer crab, you are supposed to have fun with the absurdity, but it’s a slow-moving mess. Even when the crab is on the screen, the animation is so bad, it’s difficult to connect it to the real actors. I’m not a big fan of CGI, but it was probably a better bet in this one.
I was pretty disappointed in QUEEN CRAB. It started out with a little promise, playing up the fact that it was not taking itself too seriously but then drudged along. The character development was non-existent and much of the situations and conversations in this film were mere filler. The film had all the potential in the world, a good idea, but poor structure and execution and that’s too bad because they had a rather capable cast that could have pulled it off with a better script…outside of those at the bar. Those “actors” were terrible.
I can’t recommend QUEEN CRAB. I know this isn’t a Palonia-written film, but it follows the Palonia formula. Have a monster and that’s all…keep your fingers crossed that the viewer look beyond the bad writing and just focus on how much they like the creature.
Rating: 2.5/10
