At lunch with some coworkers today, the inevitable topic of Palau came up. You see, we all work for a retail website and most of us live in Pennsylvania. Anyone in PA who has attempted to order online will no doubt recognize the pet peeve when filling out the Shipping Address: You enter your info, tab to the State field and press “p”, expecting to see Pennsylvania come up… but instead, we get Palau.
This brought to mind a video I recently saw on the interwebs. It’s from Jellyfish Lake in Palau. It’s a surreal video, and quite dissonant if you’re used to typical jellyfish, but these have apparently evolved differently: “Twelve thousand years ago these jellyfish became trapped in a natural basin on the island when the ocean receded. With no predators amongst them for thousands of years, they evolved into a new species that lost most of their stinging ability as they no longer had to protect themselves.”
So my first movie idea was a killer jellyfish movie, filmed at Jellyfish Lake in Palau. Andy why not, they’ve done it for every other type of creature, even seemingly ambivalent ones. The video linked above is almost scary all by itself. You just want to scream, Look out, Jellyfish! Oh God, they’ve surrounded you! Run! Go! Get to the choppah! All we’d really need is a decent physical actor/actress, a good makeup guy (for the gore), and a camera that can operate underwater. Just imagine all the cool shots that could be in this movie. Indeed, the typically boring horror movie POV shot could be quite effective here – jellyfish have an interesting, irregular pattern of movement, which could make for a really good stalking sequence. The great thing about this is that it would not involve any CGI – all practical effects, and in the case of the Jellyfish swarm, I apparently won’t even need to do anything special. This could be a great (bad) movie.
Of course, the topic then shifted into Sci-Fi (sorry, SyFy) original movies like Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus and Mega Python vs. Gatoroid. In speculating on the origins of Gatoroid, I stumbled upon my second movie idea. You see, I figure that our story starts with an alligator that has taken up residence in the sewer system beneath a popular gym. Like all gyms, there are lots of steroid abusing muscle-men in residence. But! One day, the police make a drug raid, and in order to avoid getting arrested, our juicing heroes flush all their illegal drugs down the drain… right to our hapless alligator, who unwittingly ingests said drug/sewage cocktail, thus ceasing to be an alligator and turning into Gatoroid!
Now, assuming that’s not how it actually happens in Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, I think we’re on to something here, but to avoid copyright woes, we may have to switch our monster from an Alligator to a Crocodile, thus making him Crocoroid.
Now all I need is a few million dollars.
Update: A coworker comments: “Why not make Crocoroid’s achilles’ heel be jellyfish? Then you only have to make one movie.” I’ve made him an executive producer.
I would like to invest in your film(s). Please send me the address of a PO box to which I can mail a crinkly envelope stuffed with cash.
In return for my investment, I would like an associate producer credit. I would also like to suggest the idea that the juicers’ steroid-fueled rage blinds them to pain, allowing for ridiculously bloody juicers/crocoid battles where the beast tears them limb from limb while they continue fighting as pieces are torn off, oblivious to discomfort and impending death. Audiences will find themselves unsure who to sympathize with, realising they’re forced to choose between siding with a gigantic crocodiloid or a group of modern-day berzerkers, blinded not only to pain but the world around them by their drug-induced rage and overpowering vanity.
I also suggest someone get eaten by the crocoid while distracted by a mobile phone that’s lost 4G signal in the sewer.
Uh, OK, well, that was me. Stupid OpenID.
You, sir, are a brilliant, brilliant man. The associate producer credit is all yours. You, uh, might also earn a “story by” credit (along with a couple other people) for that idea.
With respect to the 4G signal, I say we allow 4G signals to work flawlessly in the sewers. Everyone will expect it to fail, so why be so predictable. Now, maybe what we could do instead is have the juicers be so keyed up that they accidentally crush their phones… or perhaps they’re so jittery that they can’t actually operate the phone with their steroid-induced giganticism (i.e. their hands are bigger than usual human hands, so they can’t actually operate the phone). Or something.