Ocean City Monster Building

While I'm in support of amateur filmmakers doing everything they can to tell their stories and make their movies. This movie Ocean City completely fails to deliver a coherent and engaging film while making you suffer through it's utterly amateur filmmaking. The direction feels aimless and lacks any clear vision, resulting in a messy final product. The shaky handheld camera work is unremarkable and fails to capture any sense of atmosphere, leaving the viewer feeling disconnected from the story. The lighting is also poor and feels inconsistent throughout the film.

The main characters the detective and the girl are both underdeveloped and lacks any depth, making it difficult for anyone to care about their struggles. The acting is void of any meaningful emotions and hindered by the poorly constructed script which is so unnatural and robotic that I'm seriously wondering if ChatGPT wrote it. And the pacing of the film is all over the place, at times sluggish and slow, other times confusing and overwhelming, making it difficult to maintain attention. The lack of suspense throughout this mystery thriller is also disappointing, failing to deliver on any satisfying conclusion. I can't believe I paid $2.99 to watch this hot garbage.

Ocean City Monster Building is a low-budget sci-fi horror film that tells the story of a massive sea monster attacking an apartment building in the fictional coastal town of Ocean City, USA. We follow our protagonist one of the building's occupants and his struggle to survive the attack, rescue his estranged daughter and possibly find a way to defeat the monster before it destroys the entire city. Inspired by the classic Japanese Kaiju films of the 50s and 60s, Ocean City Monster Building rely on practical effects including special makeup, creature suits, animatronic puppets and miniature models instead of CGI creating a nostalgic yet engaging film.

Interesting low budget thriller-drama that takes place in a small town in Upstate NY. A mayor is found dead in a car with a 15 yrs old female. A detective from Albany leads the investigation and encounters the suspicious, sometimes racist, attitude of the local sheriff. She is originally migrated from Haiti and became a cop and she doesn't buy into the attitude of the local authorities that just want to close the case exonerating the mayor post-humanous. She forms a bond with the mayor adopted daughter from Vietnam, and they find common language because of their backgrounds. The plot thickens with several twists and turns and the case is being closed under pressure, without figuring out all the details. When they are revealed in the end, a sad truth of abuse and malignant intentions are exposed. The story takes place in 1984, before the Mondale-Reagan elections, and the filmmaker definitely wants to say something about the American dream in the eyes of immigrants, but it's not clear exactly. The film is very low budget, shot in monochromatic colors, better than black and white, but stands firm enough as a whole.

There is something that I really like about this. It doesn't 100% add up, and I'm not sure what the title has to do with it or at least the first half, but the story really gels as it goes along. Also, the lead performances by the daughter Sally and detective are really good especially when you piece it all together. I was thrown off initially by the hand held camera and the mellow color, but when I read that the Filmmaker was following the Dogme 95 style it kind of made more sense, and I had to give the filmmaker credit for attempting to follow this fairly consistently despite breaking a couple of the rules as many do.

Shakey camera work with weird angles and shots that really take you out of the movie. Horribly directed with terrible lighting/camera work. The camera shook constantly. Bad acting, story and script also felt bad, it has no focus and no balance, but it may have just been the cinematography/acting made the story impossible to be good. The dialogues are so unrealistic, it's laughable which contributed to the acting. The movie is meant to be a serious crime drama but it's bizarrely funny at times in ways the movie did not intent. I definitely feel like I'm laughing at the movie instead of with the movie. And it was set in like the 70s but didn't really look too much like it. I couldn't finish and skipped through the last third.

"Ocean City Monster Building" is what happens when a poorly made mumblecore movie took half a semester of philosophy 101 class at a third tier state college.

The plot of this supposed mystery film is oversimple, nothing important ever happens in the story, no real development, no reveal, no plot twist, not even a resolution. And yet somehow it is told in such a confusing way that I don't think anyone can walk out of this movie with a clear understanding of exactly what transpired. Which is the bare minimum for any detective drama in my book.

The character's actions does not seem to follow any reasonable logic, they just say or do whatever the writer happened to come up with in any given moment. And most of the time it's regurgitating some half-baked Nietzsche idea in the most convoluted and unsophisticated way possible.

Ineptly directed and badly shot. It looks like it was filmed on a iPhone3GS in front of a street lamp the whole time. I also strongly dislike the not so hidden partisan political message behind it. It's so on the nose just like the film itself.

Boring and pretentious. Watch it at your own risk.