Intuition is the basis of everything but it is the cheek that frames everything. We are at the end of the eighties and Bruno Mattei describes Venice as a city with so polluted waters to be considered dead. Then there is Terminator that has been a great success and has just released the sequel. Moreover, how to forget Alien? A great classic. Finally, there are companies speculating on people's health. Things that if you tell today, without saying that it is a movie, some take you seriously believing it is a Monsanto’s plot. Well, maybe they do not believe you if you say, it is just a movie. Yet it is all true, we are in the world of Bruno Mattei and this is "Terminator 2" or if you prefer "Shocking Dark".
That funny person of Bruno Mattei, who signs Vincent Dawn, "explains" how to join three very different things like Venice, Terminator and Alien (above all). He guess well the problem of pollution but especially catches without thinking much, situations and ideas from the two films.
He puts everything together with his usual way and with two things, he creates a movie lost between the post-nuke and the horror. He turns it into a basement of some factory, saving heavily the lights and using shots close as possible embellishing everything with action movie expressions, with rude jokes, some with racist sense and names good for the American heroes such as the immortal Kowalski, to underline that here nobody is joking.
"Terminator 2" is rather boring and it is useless to say that there is nothing credible from the script, passing for the direction and acting and closing with the sound commentary. Somehow, it carries the usual charm "so bad it's so good" thanks to plagiarism without restraint.
As we have said, Venice is now destroyed because of pollution and the few survivors must carry their journey/mission to salvation, without forgetting the last resources and the last remaining living beings. This pool made up of crazy members of Megaforce and a person from Tubolar, the company that was to save Venice, begins to be decimated by mutant monsters.
The heroine like Sigourney Weaver is not lacking and she carries a little girl too, giving us a "fantastic" melodrama. Actually, Tubolar has deliberately destroyed Venice and a member of the mission is actually a traitor robot. Ending like "Terminator" with the protagonist who returns in the past to destroy the threat.
Written by Claudio Fragasso "Terminator 2" has a cast of actors quite anonymous if we exclude Geretta Geretta and Fausto Lombardi.
To look for a positive side, it can be said that probably Mattei wanted to do an environmental morale that is still hidden by the amount of trash stuff that he has put in.