Ever walk on hot coals through a mine field while someone follows close behind you scratching their fingernails on a chalk board while a strobe light attacks your frontal lobes? If you answered no then you probably never saw the movie “Cloverfield,” a film that managed to convey Hollywood’s brain damage as forensic evidence of the screenwriters strike. Movie critic Roger Ebert lopped off both his thumbs and with his bleeding nubs dug up the remains of Gene Siskel to make a higher sense of it.

Ok, granted when you go to the debut of a new movie you amble in with high expectations thanks to theatrical trailers that epitomize and promote the best aspects of the movie and even failing at times to include these action packed scenes in the actual movie. “Cloverfield” is the result of a bad lab experiment gone wrong when taking the Blair Witch sequel and mixing it with a vial of Beverly Hills 90210, Godzilla and a kiwi twist of unused comedy. It was reminiscent of “Alien VS Predator” where you are led to believe that at the end, the woman and sole survivor locks into an intimate embrace with the Predator and they begin to make out as the background fades into the credits. So after the smoke finally clears the surviving blear-witted orangutans grapple about the ruins for their crayons and begin jotting down their ideas and placing them in a tumbler, and whichever one they pull out first becomes the plot only this time falling short mere millimeters of the cuckoos nest.

The trailer for this film should start in that dramatically raspy tone: “In a world where movies have no plot except for the reserved slot at the cemetery next to “Gigli” and “Daredevil.”

Every movie has the potential to be a good one, so there is no excuse for using a metaphorical autopilot that abuses their budget and power to make a box office flop when the movie rakes in less than half of what was spent and predisposed to end up on DVD only a week after its debut. I believe in using all resources to survive, analogous to Eskimo’s that hunt whales for food utilizing their bones, organs etc. This film could have been truly awesome had they turned the table on their mistakes. The ultimate quandary is that they took the film seriously and placed it in the wrong genre, and had it been a comedy the dead horse could have been salvaged. Boring starts, equal liquid farts that sneak up on you as you lapse into a coma and wake up in a drenching pool of your own filth.

The monster in this movie materializes out of nowhere much like “Towelie,” the lab created-pot-smoking-beach towel character from Comedy Centrals “South Park.” There isn’t the slightest hint of the creatures origin as this horribly disfigured cliché terrorizes New York careening into buildings and knocking them down 911 style as our vis-à-vis homeland security nervously watches the first 45 minutes with ambivalence knowing that the screen writer for this film knows too much. Bush would then of coarse have a cameo appearance calling for the deployment of more US troops, as he shakes his tiny fists with the aimless intent of calling the alien perpetrator:

“A terrorist that needs to be captured and taken to Hurricane Harbor for some good old fashioned water boarding.”

But none of that ever happened. Instead, the indignant movie-goers were scratching their heads until they bled wondering how a lumbering dolt with a camcorder would have the journalistic audacity to keep filming through every catastrophic spectacle when the most fearless and dedicated journalist couldn’t? Pretty strong camera eh?..Impervious to molten debris, and sweet Jesus how about that battery? I think I can feel an energizer commercial montage coming on! The beast could have at least picked up the camera after killing the oaf that had been filming everything and then stalked the remaining survivors one by one and sent the video to the CNN prima donnas with the dire hopes of making a sequel with Soledad O’Brian who has been playing “The Joker” her entire life. You would think the films cast of writers and producers would take statistical consideration of the suicide rates that flare up with these films but then again, look at “Rambo IV.”