Meg 2: The Trench (2023)
“See ya later chum!”
“Load up on the salted popcorn as this is the most fun you’re legally allowed to have with your clothes on in the cinema”
Stephen Blackford
You think they’ll put this on the movie posters?
Yes you now have three Jurassic age monsters roaming a modern day seashore scooping up pleasure seekers as chum as they go and yes, Jason Statham defeats them, one by one, with a harpoon whilst riding a jet ski.
Bring me some more salted popcorn!
But Ben Wheatley is the director? Why did I not know this before entering the cinema last weekend with my popcorn loving son? This is an outrage!
Why was I not informed?
Ben Wheatley?
As a cursory glance at the opus blog articles linked immediately at the end of this particular paragraph will demonstrate, I’m obsessed with the first six films from the Essex born filmmaker. Down Terrace is a horror with a last 15 minutes that’ll leave your jaw on the floor. Kill List has an even better and more harrowing last 15 minutes in an astonishing film for the ages and Sightseers has yet another ending you’ll never see coming but yet you’ll be cheering on the psychopathic protagonists as they look directly at the camera with a sly smile, accompanied of course by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and “The Power of Love”.
As a hat-trick of first films go, this is an otherworldly cinematic accomplishment.
A Field in England is an acquired taste that if you can relax into the trippy, hallucinogenic feel you may love as much as I do, before Ben adapted the “difficult book” of High-Rise brilliantly (but you might not like the world it depicts and a dystopian world ever closer to our own doorsteps) and then treated his fans and the cinema public alike with Free Fire, a 90 minute romp amid the madness and mayhem of a shoot-out that veers from the sublime to the utterly ridiculous.
As a half a dozen of first films go, well, it’s rather stellar indeed and as the lengthy articles above demonstrates, I was smitten and obsessed by the films of Ben Wheatley.
Then I watched Meg 2: The Trench and was incredulous to see “Directed by Ben Wheatley” commence the closing credits. What? Why didn’t I know this beforehand?
What has become of me?
In my defence I’ll point to re-watching Sightseers as recently as last week and what a twisted, tainted love of a psychological horror that continues to be! But I have nothing more, other than bemusement that between Free Fire in 2016 and now Meg 2: The Trench, Ben also helmed Happy New Year, Colin Burstead in 2018, Rebecca in 2020 and In The Earth a year later.
What has become of me?
Oh well.
At least I have three brand new Ben Wheatley films to catch up on.
“Meg 2: The Trench” can also be found within my 7 volumes of “Essential Film Reviews Collection” on Amazon with each and every volume free to read should you have a Kindle “Unlimited” package. All 9 of my self-published books can also be read for free on Kindle (but go on, treat yourself to a paperback or hardback version!) and should you watch my short Youtube video linked in the middle of this article you’ll also find links to my Patreon and Buy Me A Coffee and other ways of supporting my work as an independent writer.
"The Essential Film Reviews Collection VOL.1" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.