MOVIES: BEHOLD CREECH, THE LOVABLE “MONSTER” INSIDE THE “TRUCK”

Paramount Pictures' new family adventure Monster Trucks centers on young, smalltown hero, Tripp (Lucas Till) and a strange, `monster' appropriately named Creech, one of an undiscovered species of oil-consuming underground sea creatures.

The film presented several challenges in bringing Creech to life, with the use of computer-generated imagery.

Director Chris Wedge shares, “The concept of our movie, in case it hasn’t occurred to you, is really silly. It’s just big and fun, and I wanted to make the contrast between reality and our monster as crisp as I could. I wanted to ground the live-action, I wanted to ground the movie. So I set it in this North Dakota boom town, and I put a kid that was down on his luck in a gritty junkyard, and I wanted the creature to seem as real as I could, but as impossible as I could. So we used reference from everything—from an octopus to a walrus to a seal and a beluga whale.

“And I wanted it to emote like an animal, not like a character,” continues the director. “It has the range of expression that maybe your dog does. I knew it was all going to be in the eyes. I wanted the limbs to all feel heavy and labored under gravity in the world, so everything that he did when he was out of the water was difficult and I wanted to convey that. You got most of it from his attitude, from his head poses, and the expression you get from his eyes.

On top of that, a lot of emotion comes from the truck itself, which Creech has took possession of.

MOVIES: “MONSTER TRUCKS” DIRECTOR TALKS ABOUT THE FUN, FAMILY ADVENTURE

From the director of Ice Age, Chris Wedge, comes Paramount Pictures' new family adventure Monster Trucks starring Lucas Till (X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Apocalypse) and Jane Levy (Don't Breathe).

Looking for any way to get away from the life and town he was born into, Tripp (Till), a high school senior, builds a Monster Truck from bits and pieces of scrapped cars. After an accident at a nearby oil-drilling site displaces a strange and subterranean creature with a taste and a talent for speed, Tripp may have just found the key to getting out of town and a most unlikely friend.

Melding cutting edge visual effects and state-of-the-art CGI, Monster Trucks is an action filled adventure for the whole family that will keep you on the edge of your seat and ultimately touch your heart.

Chris Wedge opens up what drew him to Monster Trucks. “What appealed to me about it was that it was just nothing but fun, big, gigantic, silly fun. The intention of the movie was always to make something gigantic and weird and fun. And it was never supposed to be anything but. Well, what the film does, I believe, is for kids just to see something fun, and for adults to remind us of the movies that we liked when we were kids.

Comparisons to iconic family films like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and the live-action Disney films of the ’60s and the ’70s, weren't lost of the director. “Yeah, I get it. I grew up watching Herbie, the Love Bug and E.T. hit me at a formative time. And all of those Amblin movies, like Gremlins. They’re all movies where there are kids at the middle that happen to know more than the adults do, and they’re doing the right thing and the adults are trying to stop them. That’s basically where the fun of this comes. And then, there’s some completely unexpected relationship between a weird creature and a truck, and the kid that wants to help it. What I kept thinking it was, as we were making it, was E.T. meets Fast and Furious with trucks.

In addition to the high fun quotient, Monster Trucks boasts of an environmental subtext that doesn’t feel like heavy-handed. “I wanted just enough to get in the dramatic tension in the story, but not to make it a gigantic message film,” explains Wedge. “I just wanted to setup enough to make the story entertaining, and I happen to think that the guys that frack are the bad guys, and that the people that are trying to stop it are the good guys. And putting a little civilization of creatures under there that we hadn’t discovered, and so, we dug that deep down into shale rock. It seems like an appropriate way to bring some attention to it.”

Opening across the Philippines on February 1, Monster Trucks is distributed in the Philippines by United International Pictures through Columbia Pictures.

MOVIES: START YOUR ENGINES FOR THE NEW “MONSTER TRUCKS” TRAILER

This February, take a ride with a real monster as Paramount Pictures has just unleashed the new trailer for its new comedy adventure Monster Trucks.

Check out the trailer at http://youtu.be/8wNQUDjwrcU and watch Monster Trucks in Philippine cinemas starting February 1st, 2017.

Directed by Ice Age’s Chris Wedge, Monster Trucks stars Lucas Till (X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Apocalypse), and Jane Levy (Don't Breathe).

Looking for any way to get away from the life and town he was born into, Tripp (Lucas Till), a high school senior, builds a Monster Truck from bits and pieces of scrapped cars. After an accident at a nearby oil-drilling site displaces a strange and subterranean creature with a taste and a talent for speed, Tripp may have just found the key to getting out of town and a most unlikely friend.

Melding cutting edge visual effects and state-of-the-art CGI, Monster Trucks is an action filled adventure for the whole family that will keep you on the edge of your seat and ultimately touch your heart.

Monster Trucks is distributed in the Philippines by United International Pictures through Columbia Pictures.

MOVIES: GEAR UP FOR THE TEASER POSTER OF “MONSTER TRUCKS”

Paramount Pictures has revealed the teaser poster for its new comedy adventure Monster Trucks from Ice Age director Chris Wedge and starring Lucas Till (X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Apocalypse), and Jane Levy (Don't Breathe).

Take a look at the teaser one-sheet below and watch the film when it opens in Philippine cinemas on February 01, 2017.

Looking for any way to get away from the life and town he was born into, Tripp (Till), a high school senior, builds a Monster Truck from bits and pieces of scrapped cars. After an accident at a nearby oil-drilling site displaces a strange and subterranean creature with a taste and a talent for speed, Tripp may have just found the key to getting out of town and a most unlikely friend.

Melding cutting edge visual effects and state-of-the-art CGI, Monster Trucks is an action filled adventure for the whole family that will keep you on the edge of your seat and ultimately touch your heart.

The film also stars Barry Pepper, Amy Ryan, Rob Lowe, Danny Glover, Thomas Lennon and Holt McCallany. Written by Matthew Robinson and Glenn Berger & Jonathan Aibel and Derek Connolly
Monster Trucks is distributed by United International Pictures through Columbia Pictures.