Tag Mythical Monsters

Carnivorous (2007)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Fantasy Movie Reviews, Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , May 14th, 2013 @ 11:50 pm
  • AKA: Hell's Labyrinth

  • Director: Drew Maxwell

  • Writer: Drew Maxwell

  • Starring: Leah Rose, Ryan Schaufler, Tom Lodewyck, Matt Ukena

  • Run Time: 89 mins

Carnivorous (2007)

In this underworld, humans are the prey

Kate Walker is driving along in the woods when she gets a flat tyre and a passer-by stops to help her. But he knocks her out with a shovel and abducts her. When she awakes, she finds herself trapped in a strange labyrinth with a handful of other abductees. Trying to make sense of the situation, they try to find  way out but soon find themselves being hunted down by strange demon-like creatures amidst the booby-trapped maze.

 

‘Cube with monsters’ springs to mind when  I look back on Carnivorous (not to be confused with the DMX killer snake feature which goes under the same name). It is a dismal creature feature which throws together a host of strangers in a labyrinth and unleashes a slew of CGI monsters upon them. And then repeats the same formula for the duration of its running time. Repetitive and monotonous in equal measure, it’s a wonder that this hasn’t become so form of prescription medicine for insomnia. I’m sure Carnivorous has good intentions and the plot is an intriguing twist on the usual ‘strangers-in-a-room’ story but the execution is woeful.

The alternative title, Hell’s Labyrinth, certainly means more than Carnivorous does. After all, the characters are trapped in a dingy labyrinth. Though where this dungeon is and just how the owner can get away with having a massive underground facility without anyone batting an eye lid remains to be seen (sarcasm aside, the labyrinth is revealed to be some sort of extra-dimensional sacrificial chamber – or at least I think…..yeah I didn’t really pay enough attention!). For some bizarre reason, the film opens with a scene inside the labyrinth featuring some other unlucky victims and proceeds to show off all of the goods straight away – the CGI monsters, the gore and the setting itself. Talk about giving the game away within the first few minutes – now there are no surprises left for the audience.

Shot almost entirely against green screens, I may have been a little more tolerant on this as a whole if they hadn’t decided to colour all of the CGI backgrounds with greys and browns, leading to the film looking really dark and dismal. Seriously, this is one of the most frustrating films to sit down and look at for ninety-minutes – there’s no life in the picture whatsoever and the background seems to go on forever in monotonous fashion. The cinematographer gets a lot wrong, failing to light the shots enough and lending the proceedings a constantly dim glow. It’s clearly attempting to be atmospheric but comes off as frustrating.

Whilst some of the Gothic architectural design to the labyrinth is amazing, you never once get the feeling that the characters are actually anywhere but inside a studio. Things aren’t helped by the positions they take in relation to their surroundings and each other, almost always standing side-by-side and giving no indication of depth to the sets. Anyone in the UK was ever seen or heard of the 80s TV show Knightmare will get the general idea of how this looks (I must stress that Knightmare looked fantastic for its day – but this isn’t 1987 and effects have gone backwards by the looks of it here) and at times it appears that they’re stuck inside a video game, rather than a labyrinth.

The creatures they encounter in the labyrinth are also CGI and whilst you’re never going to buy them as ‘being real’ at all, they at least show up regularly and do a bit of gory damage when they appear. It’s a pity that they look like rejected sprites from a 90s PC video game rather than anything modern. Matters aren’t helped by the cast who seem to be getting little direction as to where the post-production effects will be taking place in regards to their positions on the screen. They can’t act either, which is a big requirement of being an actor.

 

If you have a burning desire to see a bunch of one-note characters walk around in front of a green screen for eighty minutes, then be my guest and watch Carnivorous. George Lucas would be proud! It cost him $115m to do the same thing with Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.

 

 ★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Chupacabra: Dark Seas (2005)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , September 27th, 2012 @ 11:35 pm
  • AKA: Chupacabra Terror

  • Director: John Shepphird

  • Writer: Steve Jankowski, John Shepphird

  • Starring: John Rhys-Davies, Dylan Neal, Chelan Simmons, Giancarlo Giancarlo Esposito

  • Run Time: 88 mins

Chupacabra: Dark Seas (2005)

This legend is real.

Cryptozoologist Dr Peña has been hunting the legendary Chupacabra for years. So when he finally traps one on a remote Caribbean island, his name in the scientific community will be assured for decades to come. He smuggles the creature aboard a cruise ship but when some nosey workmen open the crate inside the cargo hold, the Chupacabra breaks loose and begins to kill the crew and passengers.

 

The Sci-Fi Channel pillages another monster to add to their never-ending collection of creature feature films, this time bringing to life the legend of the Chupacabra in a throwaway flick which ranks up there with their usual output. So for those not familiar with the Sci-Fi Channel’s endless supply of low budget creature feature films, they’ve brought to life all manner of CGI terrors including giant squids, snakehead fish, the Loch Ness Monster, dragons and the usual suspects of sharks, spiders and snakes. Given life in insipid, soul-destroying fashion, the bulk of these films contain one or two ‘named’ actors from bigger and better films, scripts which all play out the same way, terrible special effects and are about as exciting as a blank piece of paper. No surprise to find out that Chupacabra: Dark Seas is another one in the time-honoured tradition, equally as inept as the previous one and no doubt just as mind-numbingly predictable as the next twenty or so.

Think of something like Deep Rising without the humour and you’ll be getting close to Chupacabra: Dark Seas. The ‘plot’ is paper thin and basically consists of the creature being released onto the ship as soon as is humanly possible so that it can then munch it’s way across the crew and passengers. And that’s it in a nutshell. There are some vaguely sketched sub-plots involving a thief on the ship and the even more vague attempts to create some sort of romantic interest between the captain’s daughter and an undercover agent aboard. Not least the necessity for the film to contain some form of human villain (as if a ravenous Chupacabra wasn’t enough) as Dr Pena walks straight into cliché mode by attempting to capture the creature alive instead of killing it. If you can’t guess what happens to him, then you really have no business watching horror films!

Being original isn’t high on this film’s priorities as it churns out cliché after cliché with reckless abandon. There’s no comedy involved and you get the feeling that things may have been a little more bearable had someone decided to throw in some proper jokes or some light-hearted winking to the audience. Everyone plays it straight and then struggles to get into the one-dimensional roles they’ve been given. John Rhys-Davies is shoe-horned into a pointless role as the captain and, despite adding a touch of class to proceedings, he hardly gets anything meaningful to do except bark out orders to other people. Dylan Neal is the hero of the piece and Chelan Simmons plays the role of the captain’s daughter. There are a couple of very half-assed attempts to spark some sort of chemistry between them but there’s nothing coming of it. Giancarlo Esposito struggles with about five different accents trying to bring to life the character of Dr Pena and fails on every level.

Chupacabra: Dark Seas has production values which are shoddy and very low budget, perhaps some of the worst I’ve seen from Sci-Fi. The cruise ship seems to consist of the same room and corridor, all shot from different angles to give the impression that you’re looking at something new. You never really get the sense that these characters are actually on board a cruise ship and the terribly-rendered CGI shots of the ship will not do much to change your mind on that point. Thankfully, and in what seems like a first for the Sci-Fi Channel, some money seems to have spent on a realistic monster. The Chupacabra is a guy in a suit for the most, save for some dodgy CGI when it decides to scurry across the ceiling. But there’s a nice physical menace to the monster which is sorely lacking in other Sci-Fi creature features and the suit looks decent, with a suitably scary face. It does get plenty of screen time and it doesn’t disappoint in that sense. When it attacks, it attacks with brutality and the kills are gory and regular enough to keep things ticking over nicely.

Unfortunately after laying waste to most of the crew and some passengers during the opening half, the captain decides to evacuate the ship and the list of potential victims is dramatically cut short leaving the film struggling to keep any sort of momentum during the second half. It’s just the same routine of the remaining characters slowly plodding around the ship looking for the creature, stumble upon it which leads to the loss of one of the characters and then the survivors must go off and find it again.

 

Chupacabra: Dark Seas contains some alright moments but it’s not nearly enough to have to sit through yet another bargain basement creature feature from the Sci-Fi Channel. With an appalling script which goes through the motions from the opening scene right up until the end credits, even the decent make-up effects can’t save this mess.

 

 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Minotaur (2006)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , August 16th, 2012 @ 9:03 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Jonathan English

  • Writer: Nick Green, Stephen McDool

  • Starring: Tom Hardy, Michelle Van Der Wate, Tony Todd, Lex Shrapnel

  • Run Time: 93 mins

Minotaur (2006)

Curse the god. Slay the beast.

In the ancient land of Minos, a small village of shepherds and farmers live under the cruel reign of Deucalion, a tyrannical ruler who, every five years, sends his soldiers into the village to take eight teenagers and throws them into the Labyrinth to be sacrificed to his god, the Minotaur. Under an agreement between Deucalion and Cyrnan, the village leader, his son, Theo, would not be taken captive for he would be the one to lead the village in the future. However when Theo finds out that his love, taken years earlier, is still alive, he swaps places with one of the captives. Thrown into the Labyrinth with the others, Theo must find a way to escape before the Minotaur kills them.

 

Ancient Greek mythology is superb: stories of mortal men going up against insurmountable odds in the form of mythical monsters and gods. You’ve also got betrayal, rivalry, jealousy, romance, violence and tragedy. You name it, somewhere in the Greek mythology it will spring up. It’s a gold mine of entertainment waiting to happen. And given the wealth of mythical monsters that have come down throughout the ages thanks to the Greeks, I’m quite surprised that relatively few horror films have gone down this route. Hammer tried it with The Gorgon but there has been little attempt to base horror films around these monsters. So it makes a welcome change to see a horror film which doesn’t just have a guy in a mask, genetically altered animals or aliens killing people. Granted it’s loosely based on the myth but Minotaur has the balls to not only include the Minotaur as its monster, it also sets the film back in the ancient times to give it a unique period setting. It gets top marks for this in my eyes but is the film any good?

Well yes and no. I got the constant feeling throughout the film that I wanted to like it more than I actually did. There are loads of kick ass moments but then on the flip side there are plenty of scenes which drag. Given its setting and style, you think you’re in for something more substantial but at the end of the day, it is just another ‘monster-on-the-loose’ flick. As much as it piles on the fancy sets, costumes and dialogue, you still feel like you’ve seen it before. You still know which characters are going to live and die. You know that certain characters will get their comeuppance. Hell, you can pretty much tell how they’re going to kill the Minotaur midway through the film with constant close-ups of the gas holes which release a narcotic gas into the labyrinth.

The Minotaur itself looks maniacal. It’s no longer half-man/half-bull, it’s 100% animal and it’s CGI for the most, save a few close-ups. The animators have given it some sort of skeleton/zombie look which really makes it look like it came straight out of Hell. It’s big and constantly ticked off. Although it has lost its human elements and has been turned into a generic movie monster, it still kick ass. There are one or two moments in which the CGI looks ropey but for the most, it’s pretty flawless considering it was straight-to-DVD. It also does a lot of goring. The film is pretty bloody although the body count isn’t too high. I was a bit disappointed in its lair though – the fabled labyrinth. It’s more like a system of caves than a never-ending maze of passages. I always felt like the exit was just around the characters for the character – but you still wouldn’t want to get stuck down there.

The cast has plenty of names in it. Tom Hardy (of Star Trek: Nemesis, Layer Cake and most recently as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises) makes for a pretty bland hero. Theo isn’t exactly the most dashing, courageous man that you’d have expected him to be and looks like he belongs in Lord of the Rings. He doesn’t give a toss about anyone else in the labyrinth – he just went in there to try and find his love. If I had a long lost love and would have to go into the labyrinth with a big monster like the Minotaur to kill first, I’d send her a message saying it was time to move on.

More effective in his role is Tony Todd. I’m a big fan of this guy’s work. He’s got such an imposing, unmistakable voice and the man can come off as such a menace in any role of the villain roles he plays. He’s perfect as the gas-snorting, incest-obsessed ruler Deucalion. Certainly one of the more lavish roles he’ll get to play. You’ve also got Hammer legend Ingrid Pitt in a cameo and Rutger Hauer also pops up early on to cash a pay cheque. Don’t even bother with the other people thrown into the labyrinth. As usual you’ll only find out one character trait before they’re bull food. The mute girl is pretty hot though.

 

Minotaur is an underwhelming experience. It’s totally formulaic but somehow different. You’ll feel like you’ve just watched something like The Relic again but then the whole mythological spin immediately throws that out of your mind. The jury is still out.

 

 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Ogre (2008)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , August 16th, 2012 @ 8:56 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Steven R. Monroe

  • Writer: Chuck Reeves

  • Starring: John Schneider, Ryan Kennedy, Katherine Isabelle, Brendan Fletcher

  • Run Time: 90 mins

Ogre (2008)

No Donkey. No Fairy Tale. Just TERROR.

In 1859, the town of Ellensford was ravaged by a horrific disease. A mage offers to help the townspeople in return for becoming the magistrate. He manages to rid the town of disease but unknown to the rest of the village, this manifests itself in the form of a hungry ogre. A curse is put upon the town where every year they must sacrifice one of their villagers to the ogre. In the present day, four teenagers on a hiking expedition stumble upon Ellensford, which is now stuck in time. Seeing the new arrivals as a solution to the next four years of sacrifices, the townspeople capture the teenagers. But a few rebellious youths in the village are sick of the curse and want to end it. So they end up releasing the teenagers and without a sacrifice, the ogre is ready to go on a killing spree.

 

Sci-Fi Channel original. Three words to send a heart-stopping pulse of terror into my body. But like drugs to an addict, I’m hooked on them. Maybe it’s because they’re easy targets for my rants. After all, I can usually copy and paste my reviews for them, such is their similarity and usual levels of direness. Or maybe it’s because I keep watching them in the hope that one day, just one day, one of them will turn out to be pretty good. To be fair, there’s been a few that weren’t bad so I’m being overly harsh. But it’s one in a million. Ogre is the next victim to step up and be counted. It’s got a slightly different story to the usual monster-on-the-loose film so I hoped that it would at least provide some fresh material. How wrong I was!

Ogre basically runs like The Village with an ogre running around. There’s the village that is trapped in time and set in their peculiar ways. Dialogue is spoken and clearly meant to sound ‘old’ from some bygone era. The clothes are old fashioned and the village itself has no phones, no electricity and they still live in cold, wooden houses. This is the basis of Ogre‘s problem: it spends way too much time with the villagers, none of whom you will give a rat’s ass about. We don’t care when they’re constantly bickering and moaning at each other. They’ve had a long time to sit around in each other’s company so they’re bound to be a bit tetchy. The funny thing is that it’s not a comedy and not meant to be light-hearted but because everyone is taking it all so seriously, it ends up being a riot. Watch how this person reacts. Or that person overacts. The conviction in their voices and the stiffness of their deliveries would have you believe that this is their last feature film and they’re going out with a bang.

John Schneider is the worst culprit, barking out commands to the villagers as the sinister mage. Chelan Simmons at least provides some emotional support as one of the rebellious youths in the village but for an actress who has shed her clothes quite a lot, it’s sad to see that she’s the one who dresses up in the old fashioned head-to-toe get-up. Get used to seeing these people as the bulk of the film is based around them. I’ll at least give the film a bit of credit for trying to come up with a reasonable back story to the ogre but it’s a pity that the whole curse and magic element is overplayed and becomes confusing too quickly. This is a town of a thousand curses and none of them are pretty.

The ogre looks diabolical in all of his CGI glory. I’ve not seen worse special effects for a long time and when you’ve seen as many Sci-Fi originals as I have, that’s a mighty high bar to jump over. It’s simply terrible. I’m not joking. Even if the rest of the film had been absolutely awesome, it would have been completely ruined as soon as this loin cloth wearing blob of grey with the biggest man boobs in the world lurched out of its hole. He appears way too early and ruins any sort of credibility that the film may have had. The ‘money shot’ of his first appearance is wasted too early and there’s nothing left for you to look towards. Old school creature features kept the monsters hidden until later in the film to at least keep the audience waiting with anticipation. Now the monsters are shown in the first reel so you might as well switch off if it looks rubbish. Not only that but it’s a stealth ogre and, despite the loud rumbling it makes when it walks, manages to sneak up on many of the cast as if it had just appeared out of thin air.

Thankfully the ogre is not around for a lot of the film. He seems like an afterthought and is slapped in for a generic attack scene every once in a while to remind you what you’re watching. The attacks are lame, once again assisted by very low grade computer graphic gore. A guy in a suit would have been far more convincing. Heck, even a hand puppet…..anything barring the CGI abomination we have here. Even Shrek – I mean give him a darker shade of green, sharper teeth and you’ve got an instantly scarier ogre than this! The cast also have an uncanny habit of running away from him but then stopping and freezing to allow him to catch them up and clobber them. Keep running you fools!

 

I should really start a separate rating scale for these Sci-Fi Channel originals as what may rank as a 1 star film from another studio may class as a 5 star review from the Sci-Fi Channel. Ogre tries to be a bit different from the rest with a variation on the typical creature feature tale but ends up with exactly the same problems as the rest. Go and watch Shrek again!

 

 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep (2006)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , August 16th, 2012 @ 8:47 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Tibor Takács

  • Writer: Tim Cox (screenplay), Sean Keller (screenplay), Nicholas Garland (screenplay), Brian D. Young (screenplay)

  • Starring: Charlie O'Connell, Victoria Pratt, Kristi Angus, Cory Monteith

  • Run Time: 87 mins

Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep (2006)

…

Thirty years ago, Ray witnessed the death of his parents at the hands of a giant squid. Now determined to get revenge for his loss, he joins up with Nicole, an archaeologist who is searching for a fabled Greek opal and whose location is guarded by the squid itself. But a ruthless crime lord is also on the trail of the opal and will do anything to get it.

 

The good old Sci-Fi Channel has once again outdone itself in mediocrity. Not content with churning out such genre tripe as Attack of the Sabretooth, Hammerhead and Pterodactyl, it has decided to go back into the water for another aquatic-bound feature. This time sharks and mutated fish are not the source, it’s the giant squid. I’ve always been keen to see a decent giant squid flick since I saw 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in which Kirk Douglas and co. battle a rubber squid. I’m going to have to keep on waiting because this mess of a film isn’t going to convince anyone that there’s a giant squid involved, let alone anything resembling a decent plot.

Once again don’t sit down to watch a film with this level of budget and expect to see the squid tearing people apart every moment of screen time. You know what to expect before you do watch it, unfortunately you don’t know how badly your meagre expectations are going to be let down. For a film about a giant squid, you’d think the beast has joined the witness protection program. Apart from a few early moments and then the inevitable showdown at the end, the squid is hardly anywhere to be seen. In fact it’s not only hidden from view, it seems that no one really cares less about it as most of the conversations are directed towards obtaining the opal (or with characters trying to make out with each other).

With this being the Sci-Fi Channel, it can’t just be content with having a group of people all on the same side fighting off the said monster of the film. No, they’ve got to throw in all manner of crime lords, mad scientists, psychotic soldiers, terrorists and general nefarious bad guys to conflict with our heroes. In reality all it does is provide these films with human villains so that they don’t have to show the monsters as much. And it also gives us a few more unnecessary bad guys to feed to our monster. After all, we can’t have any of the good main characters being offered up as monster fodder, can we? Jeez I remember the days when no one was sacred in a horror flick (Spielberg feeding that Kitner boy to the shark in Jaws springs to mind)

The CGI squid rears it’s ugly head on few occasions and looks terrible when it does. The actors have no ability to interact with it whatsoever. I guess it’s hard trying to act as if an imaginary squid is trying to kill you without seeing anything there and waiting for the CGI to be superimposed at a later date. But at least the actors here could try. There’s a major problem with how the squid is portrayed too. In some scenes, the squid is clever enough to slice open scuba divers’ air hoses and in other scenes it drags its intended prey under the water, only to release them a few moments later for no apparent reason. Of course we know that any good characters attacked by the squid will be ok and any of the villains who are munched will not be so lucky. Also thrown in is a random boat of teenagers – their scene providing absolutely nothing to the film apart from three more bodies and the chance to attach Christa Campbell’s name to the production. An easy pay cheque for her it may be but I would have refused to pay the others in the cast.

Charlie O’Connell looks like a total meat axe and comes off sounding just as thick and wooden. Victoria Pratt does little else but hog the screen in a bikini. Why are all of these scientists smoking hot blondes? I need to get a new job! Also appearing is Jack Scalia as the crime boss. Quite what his organisation does is really of no interest to me and it’s a good job because you’re not going to get much more than “I’m a bad guy, boo me” plot development for him.

 

Throughout this film I was constantly reminded of the far superior mini-series The Beast, based on the novel by Peter Benchley. Although the effects looked just about as ropey at times, the emphasis was still on the squid. Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep seems to be a piss poor thriller about an ancient Greek opal with a bit of squid thrown in for good measure. It’s like renaming Raiders of the Lost Ark something like Snake Attack! for the brief moments that the snakes harass Indy. Definitely one to feed to the fishes.

 

 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Hydra (2009)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , August 16th, 2012 @ 8:43 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Andrew Prendergast

  • Writer: Peter Sullivan

  • Starring: Dwayne Adway, Frank Alvarez, Texas Battle, Ed Blinn

  • Run Time: 90 mins

Hydra (2009)

Prepare to be consumed.

Four millionaires pay a shady businessman to arrange them the ultimate hunt – live human prey. So four criminals are kidnapped, shipped out to a remote tropical island and given a 24-hour head start before the hunters set off in pursuit. What none of them reckon with is the multi-headed mythical monster, the Hydra, which lives on the island.

 

Jeez, that plot seems to be stretching it just a bit. It sounded believable enough until the completely random inclusion of the Hydra on the island. I mean come on Sci-Fi Channel, could you not just have had some giant lizard or dinosaur living there instead of a mythical monster? Or if you’re going to use something as mythical as the Hydra, then surely you can come up with something a little more relevant for it to be featured in. Anyhow, with this being the Sci-Fi Channel and this being one of it’s ‘creature features’ that it has been spewing out rapidly over the last few years, the Hydra is going to be as important as a pair of snow shoes in the Sahara desert by the time the credits roll.

As with the majority of the Sci-Fi Channel’s output, Hydra is mostly throwaway junk. The story is just awful as I’ve already commented on. It’s had potential on paper with the ‘hunting humans as prey’ story but absolutely nothing is made of it once it has been introduced. The actual hunt wasn’t even worth starting as the characters run around for a bit before the Hydra finishes everyone off pretty quickly. The characters are all terrible. The group of ‘convicts’ look like they have come straight out of college and it will need all of your imagination to buy them as cons. It would have been easier to have them as kidnapped freshmen instead of apparent cons. At least it would explain the goofy black guy and the unnecessary romance between the single male and the single female characters.

The hunters fare no better as each has a few lines of dialogue before they head off to the island. Just to distinguish them all, they dress in different ‘stereotypical hunter attire’ meaning one guy wears an English-style tweed jacket and flat cap, another wears camouflage, the redneck wears the cowboy hat and I can’t remember what the other guy was wearing but it was ‘hunter-esque.’ Even the characters on the ship are all one-dimensional goofs. The captain just chomps cigars all of the time but at least looks like he’s having fun with his role. His crew are all just random muscle men who are simply sent to the island to provide more fodder for the Hydra. At least Jana Williams provides some much needed glamour and sex appeal as the businessman’s wife. But alas this is Sci-Fi Channel material so the closest she gets to being naked is a quick bikini shot.

Let’s get to the actual Hydra shall we? Terrible is all that I can really say. CGI effects just don’t cut it when they are this shoddy. The monster grows two heads when it loses one but this only happens when people actually fight back. Most of the time, its victims just fall over unconvincingly and let it eat them. It gets very well fed during the film but that’s about all you see of it. It has the ability to sneak up on people almost without a sound too and doesn’t leave any tracks on the sand when it slithers across to devour a couple of boneheads shooting pistols at it. If you see a giant monster which clearly wants to eat you and you are armed with a small pistol, what would you do? Run away as fast as you can and use the pistol as a last resort or just stand there and fire aimlessly in the hope that your small bullet will hit a vital organ? I’m not a fast person but I’d be out there like a flash!

The monster just rips CGI people apart and there’s plenty of CGI gore but it all amounts to very little as it happens so often. I want to see slow deaths – getting eaten alive in these films is an instant death in most cases and the monsters chew people up too easily for my liking. On the positive side, this is one of the few Sci-Fi Channel films that I’ve seen that doesn’t fill up the cast with Eastern European hacks. Everyone speaks English perfectly which is a nice change!

 

Hydra actually had potential in my opinion but that was all frittered away within the opening few minutes! The mythological monster is one of the best out there and when treat right (see Jason and the Argonauts), it can actually look awesome. But the Hydra totally deserves better than this drivel. Slightly better than your usual Sci-Fi Channel guff but that’s not exactly a badge of honour.

 

 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Cerberus (2005)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , August 16th, 2012 @ 8:39 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: John Terlesky

  • Writer: Raul Inglis, John Terlesky

  • Starring: Emmanuelle Vaugier, Greg Evigan, Garrett Sato, Bogdan Uritescu

  • Run Time: 92 mins

Cerberus (2005)

Three Times the Terror

The priceless breastplate of Attila the Hun is stolen by a criminal gang in a raid on a museum in Bucharest and the curator is killed. According to legend, the breastplate reveals the location of the Sword of Mars which made Attila invincible and would do the same to any such man who would wield it. Unfortunately for them, the gang needed the curator to decipher the breastplate. So they head to New York to go to their next best solution – his former assistant, Dr Samantha Gaines. Her partner is kidnapped by the gang and she is forced to travel to Romania to help the gang. Little do they all realise that guarding the Sword of Mars is Cerberus, a monstrous three-headed dog!

 

Another monster flick from the Sci-Fi Channel and another complete waste of time, effort and a decent mythical beast in Cerberus. Just like their other cookie-cutter genre efforts, you can plan out exactly where this is heading from the get go. Let’s check off the list: Mainly Eastern European cast because the film was shot somewhere in Eastern Europe on the cheap – check. One or two recognisable American actors (here it is the lovely Emmanuelle Vaugier) – check. Silly and unnecessary human villains (because a monster isn’t enough to keep interest in the Sci-Fi Channel’s monster movies anymore it seems) – check. Plenty of human fodder from both the good guys and the bad guys (mainly bad guys though) – check. CGI monster that only appears a few times – check. Extremely misleading plot synopsis and DVD cover – CHECK! Yawn.

As with all of these dreary Sci-Fi Channel films, the monster becomes second nature for some unknown reason. Surely if you’re marketing something then you have to deliver? Can’t we start taking studios to court if they fail to deliver what they promise? False advertising? The film sidelines us with a really weak plot about some North Korean criminal gang wanting the sword so that they can launch nuclear missiles against the US. Plenty of tough-looking guys walk around in suits and shades brandishing firearms. Enough of the Reservoir Dogs posing, can we get the damned dog killing people? Is it too much to ask?

These plots are just shallow ploys to do anything in the film other than show us the monster which obviously costs money to appear, hence the cameo role. It is clearly in the contracts of the Sci-Fi Channel writers that they must include human villains in these films. So roll out the clichés: mad scientists, mercenaries, bent cops, greedy entrepreneurs and so on. It’s the turn of the mercenary here. Plenty of double-crossing with bad guys screwing over bad guys, bad guys screwing over good guys and local villagers getting screwed by everyone when a massive dog follows the good and bad guys into the village!

I hate dogs in real life. In fact I’m not really an animal person period. But there’s something about dogs I’ve never liked. However this overgrown puppy with three heads isn’t going to give me nightmares anytime soon. It looks terrible so there’s no wonder it was kept off screen as long as it was. But it’s not only the CGI that is terrible, it’s the interactions of the human cast. Usually there’s a reasonable degree of interaction with the cast and the actors usually do a decent, if not perfect, job of making you think there’s something there on screen even though you know there isn’t. However the actors in this film don’t even make the effort to do that. Given that the dog isn’t on screen a lot, you would have thought they’d at least try to go all out for its brief moment of glory. Hell, the mercenary kills more people than the dog in this film. So don’t expect loads of gory moments of people getting torn apart by three frenzied dog heads!

 

I keep watching these Sci-Fi Channel films in the hope that one of them will break the mould and actually deliver the goods instead of the same old retread. Cerberus blows big time and that’s all I’ve got to say on it. On the plus side it seems they’re running out of monsters to use. I’ve lost track of the amount of killer snake, killer shark, killer crocodile and killer bat films that have been made recently. What’s on the list next? Killer dodos? Killer hamsters? Now that would be an idea – just as long as there are no mad scientists hogging the limelight!

 

 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Wyvern (2009)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , August 16th, 2012 @ 7:01 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Steven R. Monroe

  • Writer: Jason Bourque

  • Starring: Nick Chinlund, Erin Karpluk, Barry Corbin, Elaine Miles

  • Run Time: 88 mins

Wyvern (2009)

Ancient evil has come to feed.

The residents of a small Alaskan town find themselves besieged by a wyvern, a medieval flying dragon that has thawed from its ancient ice tomb thanks to global warming and has taken up residence in their local woods.

 

The Sci-Fi Channel continues to raid mythology in a desperate bid to keep new monsters coming out of the woodwork with Wyvern, another by-the-numbers creature feature which runs like clockwork. I don’t even get why they need to keep using mythological monsters for as all of these films are exactly the same, save for a different ‘origin of the beast’ speech made by one of the characters. I guess it adds an extra couple of minutes to this film when the origins of the wyvern from Nordic mythology are explained to the other characters – who really cares though? It’s big, it’s bad, it’s hungry and the only thing the characters really need to know is how to kill it.

Anyway enough with the mini-rant, Wyvern isn’t actually that bad and coming from the Sci-Fi Channel, that’s saying something. I guess it was the different monster that spiced things up a bit because the rest of the film is just one terrible cliché after another.

What clichés does Wyvern roll out you may ask? Well there’s the token single male hero character that has some history and is looking to put that behind him. So no doubt by the end of the film he’ll be given an opportunity to redeem himself and get rid of the guilt he’s carrying. There’s the token single female character that is the only attractive woman in the town, is still single and has the attention of two guys fighting for her affection. So no doubt she’ll end up with whoever doesn’t get eaten by the end. There’s your crazy old guy who ‘shoot things and drinks a lot of beer’ so it’s obvious that he’ll be the first to see the wyvern and no one will believe him. This is a town where there is a festival coming up which, according to one character ‘is the only thing this town has got to look forward to’ – so clearly the authority figure in charge isn’t going to close this down (Jaws, you have a lot to answer for at times).

The cast is what you’d expect from such a Sci-Fi Channel flick – you’ve got some lesser known actors taking up the main roles with an odd recognisable face thrown in for good measure. Here the faces are Barry Corbin (no stranger to the genre with appearances in Dead & Buried and Critters 2: The Main Course) and Don S. Davis (who appeared in around 160 episodes of Stargate SG-1). The cast is dependable enough, with no one really standing out from the pack but no one making a total fool of themselves either.

The main star is the monster itself. The CGI wyvern looks pretty slick when it’s flying around in the air but as soon as it’s got landscapes or buildings back dropped behind it, the effects look decidedly less so. One of the problems of this new era of creature features is that they show the monster too early so there’s little excitement to be had waiting for a big reveal later in the film. In fact the wyvern here is shown in the first scene so you know exactly what the characters are up against. Part of the fun of the old school monster flicks was that you only got glimpses or the monsters until midway through the films when they’d be revealed in all of their glory. At least the wyvern gets well fed and although there aren’t too many gory moments of the creature eating people, there are plenty of leftovers on the floor including severed limbs and heads. And in a morbid touch, although you don’t actually see much in the way of eating, you can hear the noises of crunching bone as the wyvern flies off with its victims.

 

Wyvern is the best of the Sci-Fi Channel’s recent efforts and whilst that’s not saying a lot, it’s enough in this day-and-age of dreadful straight-to-DVD monster flicks. I just dread to think of how many more monsters will be dragged up from the depths of mythology to keep these creature feature films rolling.

 

 ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Carny (2009)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , August 16th, 2012 @ 6:55 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Sheldon Wilson

  • Writer: Douglas G. Davis

  • Starring: Lou Diamond Phillips, Alan C. Peterson, Vlasta Vrana, Dominic Cuzzocrea

  • Run Time: 88 mins

Carny (2009)

The carnival is anything but fun.

A carnival operator buys a real live Jersey Devil and labels it as his newest and proudest attraction. However on opening night, the monster escapes from its cage and flees into the woods where it develops a taste for human flesh. The local sheriff and the carnival’s psychic attempt to track down the monster before it kills again and before the angry townspeople and pastor burn down the carnival for bringing the Devil into their midst.

 

Another feeble creature feature flick from the Sci-Fi Channel and their endless bible of monsters to pillage, this time it’s the Jersey Devil that gets the cheap jack CGI treatment. So predictable, so tiresome and so devoid of ideas, Carny is hard to review in all honesty. There’s a small audience who watch these films regardless of their quality (*cough* me) in the feeble hope that they will improve over time and that there may actually be a decent one. Blood Monkey, Shark Swarm, Grizzly Rage, Maneater, Bats: Human Harvest, Sand Serpents, Eye of the Beast, Croc, Yeti, Swamp Devil….the list is nearly endless. There must just be one script floating around and the writers simply change the monster, the setting and a few character names and bang out another film. Every once in a while, a half-decent gem will be unearthed. But is it only half-decent because the rest of them suck so badly? Unfortunately, Carny is not that gem. Never in a million years will it be that gem.

Everything about Carny is just so pedestrian and predictable. There’s nothing new here. There’s nothing creative. It’s just the same old, same old from the Sci-Fi Channel. Monster is on loose in small town. There’s an enforcement figure in the lead role (police, wardens, etc.). There’s his/her token love interest who is usually either a scientist or local resident. There’s a human villain who wants the monster alive for personal/business/religious reasons. There’s a bunch of dim-witted locals (rednecks, hunters, fishermen, etc) who try and kill the monster down unsuccessfully. Don’t forget some obligatory teenagers to throw a spanner in the works and need rescuing. Of course, most of the film is spent in the woods looking for the monster with various characters going off on their own and doing silly things. I never get why people only go out in small groups to hunt monsters, given that they’ve already killed a few people and proven how deadly they are. Safety in numbers, not pairs should be the name of the game.

Hunting monsters in the woods is so dull too especially when pretty much every land-based creature feature flick does it now. Most of the kills are predictable enough and you can see the set-up a mile away. You hardly see the Jersey Devil which is probably a good thing as it looks poorly rendered in the few ‘action’ scenes it has to carry off. The CGI is lousy and the creature looks like it’s got a funny pig-like nose. There is a small latex model used for close-ups when it attacks and this looks infinitely better than its rubbery CGI brother.

Arguably the scariest part of the film is when Phillips takes a tour of the carnival and meets some of the freaks. Even then the film shows little creativity and it’s got to be the most pathetic looking carnival ever! No wonder everyone looks so depressed with their lives if they’re touring the country with that. Not content with just having the Jersey Devil as the monster, the film also falls into the same trap as so many recent creature features in having to have a human villain throw a spanner in the works of the hero, this time the sinister carnival manager who wants to protect his asset. He’s more terrifying than the beast itself but the role is too cartoony to turn him into a big threat. He even has a right-hand man who wears an eye-patch. Not quite a Bond villain but it was good for a chuckle.

Lou Diamond Phillips is the token named actor on board for this one and plays a sheriff role similar to the one he had in Bats. He sleeps his way through his, presumably well aware that he’s getting paid at the end regardless of how he performs. To be fair, he’s reliable and a steady hand but the role could have been given to anyone – he’s here solely to put his name on the front cover.

 

Carny would have made a decent The X-Files episode (in fact the Jersey Devil was featured in one episode if my memory serves me correct) but as a feature film, it’s just awful. The only reason it gets any marks is because of the ending which really goes against the genre norm. I won’t spoil it but Carny isn’t worth sitting through to find out either!

 

 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Evil Beneath Loch Ness, The (2002)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , August 13th, 2012 @ 10:45 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Chuck Comisky

  • Writer: Shane Bitterling (screenplay & story), Justin Stanley (screenplay & story), Chuck Comisky (screenplay)

  • Starring: Patrick Bergin, Lysette Anthony, Brian Wimmer, Lysa Apostle

  • Run Time: 85 mins

The Evil Beneath Loch Ness (2002)

Sixty Feet of Prehistoric Terror

Researchers on Loch Ness think that they have finally found the fabled Loch Ness Monster. However, when people start to die mysteriously around the Loch, they come to realise that Nessie is the least of their problems.

 

To say that it’s one of the world’s most widely-recognised mysteries of the world, the Loch Ness Monster has been given a relatively wide berth by the horror genre. You’d think that the idea of an aquatic dinosaur living in a lake in the middle of Scotland would be the ideal material for a decent creature feature flick but cinematic depictions of Nessie had been few and few between. In fact I can only think of two genre pieces (the recent Sci-Fi flick Loch Ness Terror and an earlier one called The Loch Ness Horror) – not counting Ted Danson’s gushy family film, Loch Ness. With Nessie films being in short supply, one would at least hope that the few films about it are actually decent. Despite a cast of familiar faces, The Evil Beneath Loch Ness will do nothing to change that under-representation and if they all turned out to be this bad, then it’s one mystery that is best left unexplained.

You can’t really have a proper film about Loch Ness when the film isn’t shot there! The Evil Beneath Loch Ness was filmed at a lake in California, poorly doubling for the Scottish Highlands. As local landmarks such as Urquahart Castle are part of the legend of Nessie, then surely some effort could have been made to incorporate them into the film. A second unit seems to have taken some token shots of a Scottish loch to scatter around the film but this isn’t the real deal. The problem that the Californian location is vastly different to that of Scotland is emphasised with the different vegetation on show and the fact that it’s just way brighter and sunnier than Scotland. Where are the murky, grey skies? Where’s the fog? I know that Scotland isn’t like that all year around but it’s the sort of images we conjure up in our heads when we think of the Highlands.

Not only does the film skimp on the ‘Loch Ness’ part of the title, it also skimps on the ‘beneath’ part of the title as it doesn’t look like any of it was filmed underwater. The scenes we get from beneath the surface look like they were filmed on a soundstage with the actors moving in slow motion. Slow seems to be a recurring theme though as the film is deathly sluggish and there’s a lot of exposition and unnecessary sub-plots bubbling over. It takes way too long for the monster to get down to business and even then, the kills are few and far between. In fact the monster is hardly seen, despite the blatantly obvious twist mid-way through the film which reveals that there isn’t just the one underwater menace. The same CGI shot of the monster is re-used over and over again but from different directions to give you the illusion that what you’re seeing is new footage. It’s about all you’ll see of the monster as it’s not on screen for long, which is probably for the best as it looks ropey when you do see any of it. When it does attack people, the scenes are shot so frantically that its hard to see what is going on…..not that you’ll really care.

Patrick Bergin gets top billing but doesn’t show up until half-way through and even then he just does a feeble imitation of Quint from Jaws. He gives some half-assed back story about how the monster killed his son and then for the final hunt, he dresses up in blue war paint and a kilt like Mel Gibson did in Braveheart. But the daft thing is that he’s only going underwater in a wet suit so all of the ridiculous get-up is quickly covered over! Vernon Wells, the campy bad guy from Commando, pops up as the local Scottish constable despite the fact that he has an Australian accent. With the lack of a town mayor or any form of civic governance, Wells’ fulfils the necessary role of being the one who wants to keep the lake open to tourists to save the local economy. I was wondering where they were going to cram that old chestnut into proceedings!

Brian Wummer makes for a damp squib of a male lead and Lysette Anthony co-stars as his ex-wife/TV producer boss. Their bickering is just one of many of the unnecessary sub-plots that I mentioned earlier on. Coupled with another side story about some people trying to create a hoax monster and it’s clear that the script is full of these human plots which are designed to pad out the time and avoid anything remotely expensive….or exciting.

 

The Evil Beneath Loch Ness does the legendary monster a great disservice. Featuring weak special effects, being overly talky and with a chronic lack of action and excitement, its probably a good thing that this thing wasn’t filmed on location as everyone associated with Loch Ness can forget about this blemish and pretend it never happened.

 

 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

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