Review: DEMEKING (2009)

My eleven-year-old son and I are still watching movies from THIS LIST.  Several dozen down; only a few to go.

Today's is Demeking (aka [inexplicably] Demeking the Sea Monster; 2009).


I'll go first:

Well ... huh. 

This isn't so much a monster movie as it is a movie about kids' difficulty in dealing with getting older. 

There's the twenty-ish Hachiya.  He's insular and doesn't really socialize.  He works at a theme park and later moves to Tokyo.  The whole time, his father is fed up with his dawdling and wants to know why he doesn't have any direction. 

Then there's the teen, Kame.  He doesn't socialize with kids his own age and prefers the company of three younger kids in an "Exploration Group" he started.   

To say the first hour of the film is slow would be an understatement.  The narrative picks up a bit, though, once Hachiya sets Kame and the kids on a scavenger hunt of sorts to learn about Demeking, the monster Hachiya aims to fight. 

After the kids find the final piece of Hachiya's "prophecy," stating that Demeking the SPACE monster will attack in 2019 (the film is set in 1970), Kame goes home and has a dream about Demeking's attack. 

The three-minute sequence is well done.  Primarily CGI, the invader resembles a large, fire-breathing snail.  The action is too brief to make up for the rest of the film's lugubrious pace.
Kame decides to write a book about Demeking and to base his lead character on Hachiya.  We get the impression later that he has abandoned this idea.  Meanwhile, Hachiya lives a shiftless existence in Tokyo. 

Despite the made-up nature of the monster in the film, the movie is bookended with shots of an asteroid in deep space hurtling toward ... somewhere. 

Demeking ... as a monster film, it's lousy.  As a coming-of-age drama, it's better.  2.75 out of five atomic breath blasts.

My son, James, is next:

Well, this one is horrible. The reason it's horrible is because there wasn't any monster (The dream in the movie doesn't count) 

So, rating wise, i'll say 0.7 out of five Atomic Ughhhs of Boringness!!

Here's the trailer:



The next movie?  Trollhunter.