In a humble Greek fishing village, we’re introduced to a misfit gang of townsfolk and visitors: a gay painter, his barbarian model, boho folk musicians, an American sailor, his landlady, and sundry others who, while stereotyped to an extent, are almost all engaging, warm, and funny characters. Most of them don’t yet know each other, but they’re soon to find themselves thrown together and fighting for their lives, as tends to happen when a town is besieged by tentacled monstrosities.
These cyclopean menaces, which wait until around the halfway mark of this unusually long – in fact, overlong – monster flick to show up, are portrayed mostly very satisfyingly with old-school practical effects, the CGI admirably restricted to those shots which would be more or less impossible to achieve on the kind of budget Minore is working with, which is probably high for a Greek horror/science-fiction flick but is, in the grand scheme of things, evidently pretty modest.
Once the hacking, slashing, and spraying of various liquids gets under way, Minore‘s mixture of horror, gross-out action scenes and gentle observational comedy proves to be a lot of fun. It isn’t often, however, that you wind up complaining that the characters in a film are too well-developed, but in the first half it’s easy – especially if you’re in my position, not having heard any pre-release hype and only having given the press release the briefest skim – to forget entirely that what you’re watching is billed as a monster movie and not a classy human drama. Of course, classy dramas are fine and all, but when you’re expecting monster action you can find yourself checking your watch, just waiting for the tentacles.
Mind you, that might just be a side effect of how absolutely the sense of trashy retro fun is embodied in Minore‘s poster, a shoo-in for The Coolest Poster of the Year.
