Attack of the Sabretooth (2005)
- Andrew Smith
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
"Extinct no more"
Plot
A rich tycoon has built a holiday park on a tropical island with one definitive hook - he has managed to create a pair of sabretooth tigers using DNA extracted from fossils. He invites an assortment of businessmen to the island in the hope that they will invest in his scheme and make him even richer. Also on the island are a group of wannabe frat students who are there on a scavenger hunt. It's unfortunate for everyone there that the students decide to crash the security systems in order to break into one of the off-limit areas. Without anything keeping them locked away, the sabretooths are loose and on the hunt for food.
Review
Jeez, where have you heard that little story before? I would say Sabretooth from 2002, as it even has the same writer Tom Woosley, but I am guessing that Michael Crichton is the more obvious answer. Hopefully his estate has taken these writers to court for the most blatant plagiarism of Jurassic Park that you're ever going to have the misfortune of watching - they even called their little resort in the film, Primal Park! Mirroring a beloved classic allows the filmmakers to bypass the need to explain their world though. They don't have time for exposition and just cut right to the chase. By communicating a highly specific, universally understood promise to the audience (i.e. you’ve already seen Jurassic Park so get the idea of genetically engineered prehistoric creatures returning to life), the filmmakers are managing expectations instantly - you're expecting people to run down brightly lit corridors while a computer-generated monster chases them and nothing more, nothing less. Although it shamelessly rips from the superior Spielberg classic, Attack of the Sabretooth isn't all that bad for this type of low budget nonsense. You could do a lot worse (and believe me, I have) in this 'monster on the loose' genre. The film just about delivers what you'd expect - a reasonably high body count, a surprising amount of gore and plenty of sabretooth action. It just seems to take ages to get going before you get to any of the good bits.
The story may be identical to Jurassic Park but at least that film had the sense to give the characters some ounce of intelligence. In this sort of straight-to-DVD flick, you expect some stupidity but here the characters take it to the extreme. To kick these films off, you must establish the threat of the monster which means some bum, janitor or various other throwaway characters are horribly killed and eaten before the titles hit. And I don't like doing this and describing the entirety of a scene, but the opening prologue needs explaining. If you want to avoid spoilers, then skip the next paragraph!
Attack of the Sabretooth starts off with some dumb security guard sits on the safe side of the security fence, reading a porn magazine. He tears a page out, presumably to get better acquainted with it. But it blows away in the wind and lands on the dangerous side of the fence in the sabretooth enclosure. Not content with the porn he still has left, the guard unlocks the security gate and strolls inside the enclosure to find the page, which conveniently keeps blowing deeper into the jungle. Believe me - that must have to be some kick ass porn for him to be risking his life for one sheet. He leaves the door open and is promptly devoured a few minutes later. Surprisingly the tigers don't escape at this point, but the open gate attracts the attention of another employee who strolls into the enclosure to find the remains of the previous idiot. Needless to say, he doesn't make it back to the door, which is still unlocked. Then not content with killing off two stupid characters, another guard sees the open gate, walks into the enclosure and begins shouting for his missing friend. The guy might as well have been ringing a dinner bell!
If your eyes roll any further from this opening sequence, then they’ll have dropped from your eye sockets. It’s a staggeringly incompetent and bizarre set of coincidences which really show just how poor the writing was for Attack of the Sabretooth. Contrast this with the movie it's ripping off. In a high budget film, the characters usually have an ounce of intelligence. The security systems fail because of complex cascading issues, like a massive tropical storm combined with corporate espionage and a structural flaw in the coding. It takes a perfect storm to break the system. But a perfect storm takes time to set up. It takes screen time, it takes dialogue, it takes narrative nuance. Straight-to-DVD films don’t have that luxury. Character logic is entirely sacrificed on the altar of pacing. The writer needs the tiger out of the box and they need three bodies to prove the sabretooth is dangerous. The fastest, cheapest row from point A to point B is just to have someone make a decision so foolish it practically breaks the laws of physics.
The addition of the students was a bit pointless to the overall plo but they simply add a teen factor to the film and more bodies when I'm sure the more important adult roles could have been given a bit of fleshing out. Characters are totally stock throughout - the rich tycoon who refuses to believe anything is wrong because it will ruin him, the gothic chick, the jock, the Asian computer nerd, the token blonde, the token Native Indian guards and a few other slime ball characters. Nicholas Bell is probably the pick of the cast, only because his British accent gives him a more sinister turn as the nasty boss. It's nothing to write home about and neither are any of the other performances. I guess when you choose to star in these films, you know you're second rate to the monster so there's no passion to perform (it's not like any of them did anything to convince me they can perform at the best of times).
It's about time we got to the sabretooths though because they are the only reason people like me still tune in. I've seen better but I've seen worse and it fluctuates wildly depending on the sequence. The CGI works best when it's against a lighter background like the jungle as opposed to the dark confines of the corridors, which most of the final half of Attack of the Sabretooth is set in. It comes down to the rendering of the fur and the lighting environment. Rendering hair or fur digitally is notoriously difficult, particularly for a small effects team as would have worked on this. If you have a brightly lit jungle, you can basically just blast the digital model with ambient light, and it blends okay. But in a dark resort corridor, you have directional lighting, you have deep shadows, flickering fluorescence. Trying to digitally map those complex lighting changes onto a furry computer-generated tiger on a straight-to-DVD budget is basically impossible. The monster just ends up looking like a flat sticker pasted over the film. But the film compensates for the spotty CGI with sheer, unadulterated volume.
Attack of the Sabretooth ruthlessly weaponises its pacing by allowing the monster to do the heavy lifting for the narrative. Every time the story drags, every time you start to question why the frat boys are hacking a door instead of calling for help, the sabretooths eat one of the losers and you instantly forget why you were bored in the first place. And the sabretooths get well fed, having a nasty habit of tearing their victims to shreds. The gore quota is very high here with decapitations, maulings and remnants of intestines and severed heads being left. I was impressed for a low budget film. The sabretooth tigers get a decent amount of screen time for the last half of the film as they stalk their remaining victims around the corridors of the resort. I was hoping for the party of investors to be gate-crashed by the sabretooth tigers as it was a perfect recipe for some cheesy moments but that didn't happen. But for anyone looking to get your teeth into some decent prehistoric carnage, these sabretooth tigers provide adequate bite.
Final Verdict
Attack of the Sabretooth isn't overly terrible given it was a Sci-Fi Channel production with a limited budget, limited scope and limited creativity. It doesn't offer a great script, it doesn't offer good acting and it doesn't offer logic. It just gives you the greasy, unapologetic spectacle of a computer-generated sabretooth tiger eating a guy in a hallway. It functions perfectly for its intended audience. I just hope someone remembered to pay royalties to Michael Crichton's estate.
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Attack of the Sabretooth Director(s): George Miller Writer(s): Tom Woosley, Phil Botana Actor(s): Robert Carradine, Nicholas Bell, Brian Wimmer, Stacy Haiduk, Rawiri Paratene, Susanne Sutchy, Cleopatra Coleman, Natalie Avital Duration: 90 mins |  |
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