TITLE & REVIEW
This is the Asylum's version, very liberally adapted from the nineteenth-century novel.
Marine Biologist Michelle Herman (
Renee O'Connor
) is conscripted by Captain Ahab (Barry Bostwick -
Rocky Horror Picture Show
) aboard the nuclear submarine USS Pequod.
They are hunting a super-whale named Moby Dick.
Is this more ridiculous than any of the other Asylum monster films,
or even than Melville's original book?
Bostwick attempts to chew the scenery, but he is basically far too nice for a role like Ahab. His dialogue is basically excerpts from the novel, which seems every bit as archaic as Shakespearean dialogue would be if used verbatim in a modern setting.
Cajuns have been dumping a bad batch of moonshine into the bayou.
It has a strange effect on the local wildlife.
The heroine is a Cajun girl who went to college and became a vegan.
The folk are attacked by creatures the black sheriff racistly refers to as redneck gators These are different from normal alligators, and not just because they are much larger in size. They also have porcupine-like quills that they can fire with great accuracy simply by flicking their tails. And strangest of all, any human who gets bitten (and lives) quickly transforms into a redneck gator himself!
Bill Johnson (Johnny Messner -
) and his sidekick Tran (Karl Yune -
) are hired to take some scientists up a river in Borneo.
The group's leader is Dr. Jack Byron (Matthew Marsden -
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen
), a polite Englishman who cares more about the mission than his people.
Gail Stern (
Salli Richardson-Whitfield
) is tough and smart, obviously set up to be the Final Girl.
In a bait-and-switch, the female protagonist ends up being Sam Rogers (
KaDee Strickland
) - who was set up to be Byron's blonde bimbo assistant.
There are also some men of colour along for the ride -
Gordon Mitchell (Morris Chestnut -
V (2009)
), Cole Burris (Eugene Byrd -
) and Dr. Ben Douglas (Nicholas Gonzalez -
). They provide decent comic relief.
The big surprise of the film is that the CGI snakes are actually much more convincing than in the original film.
Great White Hunter David Hasselhoff (
Star Crash
) captures some giant anaconda snakes.
A young female scientist (so beautiful she ought to be an actress!) doses them with the Blood Orchid serum - a nice reference to the second film. She works for billionaire John Rhys Davies ( Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lord of the Rings ) who wants to cure cancer.
Naturally, the enormous reptiles escape and start eating people. David Hasselhoff gets called in to sort things out. And while this is a predictable entry in an atrocious sub-genre, the presence of The Hoff himself makes it incredibly watchable.
A US Millionaire (John Rhys Davies -
Raiders Of The Lost Ark
) sends a team of gunmen to retrieve the serum.
There is a group of archaeologists wandering around the forest.
The serum allows a decapitated anaconda to grow a new head!
The anaconda is so fast that it can chase a jeep down a road at top speed!
Kayla Scoledario
goes to visit her father (Barry Pepper -
Battlefield Earth
). It is a matter of urgency - a massive hurricane is closing in on their home town, like in
Hurricane Heist
. Unfortunately, there is no sign of him.
She keeps looking, until she finds him ...
trapped in a basement with a massive alligator.
The problem is, she gets trapped there too ...
The fact is that this depiction of the feeding behaviour of alligators is about as realistic as that of shark behaviour in The Shallows .
MegaCorp head honcho
Joanna Pacula
has created a dinosaur-crocodile monster.
Naturally, it goes on a murderous rampage.
The Sheriff Charles Napier (
Silence of the Lambs
) and an Aussie croc-hunter Costas Mandylor (
Cosmic Sin
) have to hunt it down.
The good news is that there is an excellent decapitation scene. The old saying do not kill the kids or animals is turned on its head.
Millionaire David Carradine (
Autumn
) has a secret lab on a Hawaiian island,
where for some reason he illegally used growth hormones to turn deadly and uncontrollable predators into enormous CGI monsters.
Carradine sends in a team of gun-toting mercs, who are in no way prepared for what they're up against. He also hires world-class hunter The Cajun (who is not a French-speaking Louisiana native). Meanwhile, an undercover Federal Government agent teams up with a lady park ranger and her dad, the local sheriff.
The CGI monsters, meanwhile, spend their leisure time munching on a variety of blonde-haired big-breasted bikini-clad beauties. The heroes try to get the monsters to fight each other a bit at the end, but the title is a bit misleading.
A teenage boy lives with his parents on a remote island off the coast of America.
When his parents are eaten by Komodo dragons, the boy is left mute with fear ...
A psychiatrist ( Jill Hennessy ) takes the boy back to the scene of his parents deaths, in a startlingly naive attempt to cure him. Unfortunately the Komodos are hungrier than ever.
Luckily, a couple of hunters (including Billy Burke - Revolution ) are illegally slaughtering the deadly (but endangered) species. Can this motley band of idiots survive?
Well, at least the CGI Komodos look well-rendered. Especially since this film was made in 1999, in Australia!
The Asylum produces another typically low-budget effort.
Some hippies and a newscaster (
Michelle Borth
) hire a speedboat captain (Michael Pare -
Philadelphia Experiment (2012)
) to take them to a remote Pacific island.
The US Government has been experimenting with growth serum there,
producing super-size crops.
Unfortunately, the US military insisted that the serum be tested on a couple of venomous reptiles ...
The protagonists (and sundry extras) get chased and eaten by the monsters. Just like in Dinocroc vs Supergator . Seriously, except for the choice of monsters caricatured by the dodgy CGI SPFX it could be the same film.
The events of the previous film have faded into legend in less than a decade,
despite the massive crocodile's body being hauled across the State
on an open flatbed towed by an HGV.
The sheriff and his entire crew of croc-fighting veterans
have been replaced by John Schneider (
Smallville
) and a bunch of newbies.
The Sheriff's hot teenage daughter and her buddies get trapped in the monster's den.
The little old lady who lived on the lake has died.
Her last remaining relative, Colin Ferguson (
Eureka
), inherits the cabin, and brings his family to stay there.
The county also has a new hard-ass sheriff (Michael Ironside -
Total Recall
), elected to make sure nobody gets eaten by giant crocodiles.
Ferguson works as a wildlife ranger, investigating why the local elk are disappearing. He suspect that hard-ass poacher Reba ( Yancy Butler ) is shooting them. Instead she gives guided tours of the lake on her speedboat. The real culprits are some giant crocs that Ferguson's latchkey kid is feeding with shoplifted meat.
The kid's mother ( Kirsty Mitchell ) puts an end to his shoplifting, and the crocs get a hunger that no elk can satisfy. Luckily there are some tweenagers camping by the lake, and they include some bikini babes.
Despite the American setting and the Canadian lead actors, this was actually shot somewhere in Eastern Europe. Mitchell acquits herself well as a Yank, despite being Scottish.
The hard-ass poacher Reba (
Yancy Butler
) is now a Federal fish and game warden,
playing buddy cop with the new sheriff (
Elizabeth Rohm
). Well, this movie certainly passes the Bechdel test.
The good news is that the US Army Corps of Engineers has constructed an electrified fence around the entire lake. The bad news is that, with their food supply constricted, the crocs have turned to cannibalism and have now become much larger than average crocs. Almost as large as the crocs in the original movie, in fact. Naturally, the CGI ones look a lot more fake.
At night, Jimmy (Robert Englund - Nightmare on Elm Street ) leads a gang of poachers into the secured area. Yes, it all goes badly wrong for them. Worse, the gate gets left open.
The local High School graduating class take a bus trip so they can have a beach party for their senior Prom. Their driver spends more time looking at porn on his iphone than he does looking at the road, so something is bound to go wrong. Just to add some emotional motivation, the Sheriff's daughter is on the bus too. The school slut, Brittany ( Scarlett Byrne ), promises to make things interesting.
The hard-ass poacher Reba (
Yancy Butler
) is now the new Sheriff.
Her boss, the Mayor, is a scumbag who will sell her out
to look good because it is an election year.
Reba's replacement as Federal fish and game warden is Will Toll (Corin Nemec -
Stargate SG-1
).
Jimmy (Robert Englund - Nightmare on Elm Street ) survived the previous movie, at the cost of an arm and a leg - and an eyeball. He gets hired to act as guide for Stephen Billington ( Resident Evil (2002) ), who works for Wexel Pharmaceuticals. The new CEO, the daughter of the previous CEO, wants to continue her father's work with the Blood Orchid serum
With the security gates damaged, some of the crocs and snakes escape from Black Lake to the nearby Clear Lake. That is where Toll's tweenage daughter is pledging for her college sorority. Well, that is the storyline that has been used in three of the previous films, so that is obviously something the franchise feels comfortable falling back on.
A group of Urban Explorers, led by
Katherine Barrell
and her
Wynonna Earp
co-star Tim Rozon, infiltrate the HQ of Wenoco Corp.
Their mission is to draw attention to the Corporation's environmentally unfriendly policies.
Is this the rebranded version of Wexel Pharmaceuticals?
A rival explorer challenges the team to enter a mysterious zone that has been closed for twenty-five years due to a toxic spill. It has been hushed up, and removed from Google Earth. They accept the challenge, and discover an island with an abandoned facility.
This is a lot different from the previous entries in the series. To start with, they were shot in Eastern Europe while this is made with Canadian actors ... in South Africa! The previous movies were generally comedies, with unsympathetic characters getting eaten by unconvincing CGI monsters. This effort makes the characters more sympathetic, and the monster's appearences are kept minimal in order to create suspense.
The explorers get a bit of exposition from Henderson (Joe Pantoliano - The Matrix (1999) ), who used to work at the site. Apparently the man who used to run the place took his work home with him, to a place called Lake Placid ...
A couple of poachers go hunting on a tropical island.
They run into a massive snake, the largest ever seen.
Later, a professor (Eric Roberts - ) leads a team of students to explore the island. Although the professor is supposed to be an expert, he does not bother to shake his boots out before he puts them on. As a result he gets bitten by a venomous spider, and has to get hospital treatment in the next two days. The bad news is that when he radios the support staff on the mainland, they cannot send out a rescue chopper because of the weather. Yes, somehow the island must be in the eye of a massive tropical strom - because the weather on the island is perfectly sunny and fine.
The professor stays at the camp, immobilised by his injury, which is presumably so he is in the minimal number of scenes. Meanwhile, the Final Girl leads the others off into the jungle. The plan is for them to fetch help, but they get picked off one at a time by the giant snake.
In the age of the cheap mockbusters from The Asylum,
this was produced by good old-fashioned B-Movie producer
Fred Olen Ray
. That said, in line with modern tropes it does feature an enormous CGI snake.
Parker (Greg Evigan - Tek Wars ) is building a strip-mall on a greenfield site that should probably be a national park or something. However, his construction activity has awoken a sleeping monster.
Anacondas are constrictors, which squeeze their prey. This creature is a straight-up biter, which swallows its prey in one mouthful without either constriction or venom. Another unusual feature about it is the apparent fact that, like the Tyrannosaur Rex in Jurassic Park , its vision is based on movement so the best way to escape it is to stand perfectly still.
A bunch of humans get chased around by the monster snake. One is the classic 1980s scream queen Michelle Bauer .
The Asylum produces another typically low-budget effort.
The best scenes are the stock footage bits that establish the location at the start of every scene.
Rather than establish characters through dialoguie and story-telling,
the movie actually freeze-frames and puts a title-credit on the screen when everyone appears!
Some topless women (and a couple of VIPs) are eaten by mega-fish on the Orinoco river. The US Ambassador to a small South American country is one of the ones who got killed. The US Secretary of State sends his personal trouble-shooter, a beefy ex-SEAL, to investigate. Beef McHardcase, as we shall call the protagonist, does not speak Spanish! He has to out-manoeuvre the Third World army’s colonel who blames terrorists instead of wildlife. Luckily a lady scientist ( Tiffany ) has discovered the fish. They go up the river to see what is going on. The carnivorous fish are growing at an exponential rate, due to a botched genetics experiment. Why someone thought Piranha would be a good food source is not explained!
The badly-CGI’d monster piranhas swim downriver, towards the ocean - and eventually, Florida. Oh, and they can jump like flying-fish! Can a US Navy cruiser stop them? What about a nuclear submarine with nuclear-tipped torpedoes? How about Beef McHardcase and a dozen SEALs?
This is an Asylum effort, but it is not their worst. There is a cheap cheerfulness to this, if you do not take it too seriously. It practically MST3Ks itself!
Deep in the Florida everglades, scientist
Deborah Gibson
(yes, THE Debbie Gibson!)
clashes with Park Ranger
Tiffany
(yes, THE Tiffany!).
. Unfortunately the everglades are infested with super-snakes and super-alligators.
The climax is at a fundraising party with Guest of Honour Mickey Dolenz from The Monkees. Both monsters attack it at the same time - while Debbie Gibson and Tiffany have the ultimate cat-fight!
This is a made-for-TV remake of the
Joe Dante
original. The only update seems to be the casting -
for example, the Bounty Hunter is now a woman (
Alexandra Paul
). The SPFX consists mostly of stock footage edited out of the original movie,
almost twenty years out of date.
The Bounty Hunter and a local guide (William Katt - Greatest American Hero ) go looking for some missing teenagers. They accidentally release a swarm of killer piranhas into the river, and race the fish downstream before they can eat everyone at the summer camp. Worse, Katt's daughter ( Mila Kunis ) is at the summer camp ...
Lady Sheriff
Elizabeth Shue
fills the role played by
Kari Woo-Woo Wuhrer
in
Eight-Legged Freaks
. She and Deputy Ving Rhames (
Surrogates
) police the annual Spring Break festivities,
where thousands of College students get drunk and fool around on the lake.
Dina Meyer and her underwater explorers discover that prehistoric super-piranha have escaped from an cavern, and are now eating anything that moves.
Naturally, the Sheriff's teenage son goes AWOL to hang out with bikini babe Kelly Brook and sleazy Girls Gone Wild Director Jerry O'Connell ( Sliders ).
The climax involves a 1980s-style overblown gore-fest, where the makeup teams work overtime.
A year after the events of the previous film, Lake Victoria is a ghost town.
However, there is another lake nearby so people go there instead.
Redneck farmer Gary Busey (
) discovers that the piranhas have spread somehow.
The lake has its own water park, run by a sleazy promoter who replaces the trained lifeguards with big-breasterd strippers. His step-daughter Danielle Panabaker is the voice of sanity, because her breasts are much smaller and thus she is more professional than the strippers. She has two potential love interests - the local deputy and a goofy mascot guy from the water park. Together they must save the park from the impending disaster.
A couple of familiar faces are around to help. The mad scientist (Christopher Lloyd - Back To The Future ) provides exposition on the threat posed by the killer fish. Deputy Ving Rhames ( Surrogates ) is back too, with PTSD and a wheelchair.
This is best treated as a parody of monster movies. For example, David Hasselhoff appears as himself, guest of honour at the water park's opening ceremony. The Baywatch references are inevitable, but the Jaws parody is blatant comedy.
Yet more schlock horror, produced by
Roger Corman
and directed by
Jim Wynorski
. This is actually quite well-directed, compared to the similar effort
A.I. Assault
.
scientist Michael Madsen ( Species ) is hunting a Polynesian water-monster that only LOOKS like a cross between a piranha and an anaconda. A low-budget movie crew are filming on the same island.
A gang of Mexican banditos are hanging around in the jungle, kidnapping any Gringos they find there. Their leader's girlfriend is Rachel Hunter , who (despite the gun, cleavage and New Zealand accent) is almost unrecognisable as Stacy's mom!
Gustave the monster croc is eating people in Burundi, a war-torn country in central Africa.
TV Journalist Dominic Purcell (
Blade: Trinity
) and cameraman Orlando Jones (
Evolution, Time Machine
) are sent to help capture the croc.
They team up with local big-game hunter Jurgen Prochnow (
Wing Commander
).
The US Military-Industrial Complex uses nanites to turn a crocodile into a robot.
Unfortunately it goes amok in a zoo full of teenagers.
The usual crowd of jocks, nerds and bikini babes get chewed on.
Corin Nemec (
Stargate SG-1
) is a heroic zoo employee.
This was shot in South Africa.
It concerns a young woman and her boyfriend who go on a camping trip together.
They hike out into a remote area called Suicide Gorge.
At best we could expect some kind of 127 Hours situation.
A deadly venomous snake creeps into their tent at night. The couple must lie perfectly still in order to avoid getting bitten. There, in hushed tones, they discuss their relationship.
The symbolism of the serpent works on several levels. It can be taken as a reference to the garden of Eden, corrupted by the woman's infidelity. It can also refer to the man's predatory nature.
Dominic Purcell (
Blade: Trinity
) drives a truckload of poisonous snakes down a dark highway.
Nothing could go wrong ...
Two decades later, a greedy property developer uses dynamite to level the hills the snakes are nesting in. Can Fire Chief Harry Hamlin ( Clash of the Titans (1981) ) and the developer's assistant ( Shannon Sturges ) save the town?
As monster movies go, this is not too bad. The budget is low, true, but it was made in 1999 so there is no crappy CGI. The snakes are real, and the suspense is reasonably attempted.
Unlikely scientists Costas Mandylor and
Krista Allen
run a remote research station specializing in poisonous (giant CGI) snakes.
USN Admiral Tom Berenger (looking a thousand years old) sends disgraced officer Luke Perry ( Jeremiah ) to taxi a submarine across the South China Sea.
The result? Snakes on a sub!
Small-town sheriff discovers there's something in the water, killing swimmers and boaters.
He tries to warn people, but the mayor does not want to cause a scare.
Bruce Boxleitner ( Babylon 5 ) is the sheriff in this Jaws clone. The monsters are fish in a freshwater lake.
In Mexico, a young woman is cursed and starts turning into snakes.
Her boyfriend, a murderous medicine-man, tries to help her.
They stow away on a train headed to California.
Naturally the snakes start to kill the passengers. Everyone else on the train seems to have it coming to them. From the wannabe actresses who have become drug mules, to the sleazy cop who intercepts them ...
With every single character more or less unlikable, the audience have no reason to care if they are eaten.
Genetically engineered snakes get accidentally released on a small island off the coast of America.
The evil Billionaire responsible (Corbin Bernsen - LA Law) sends in a retrieval team.
The locals, including Don S Davis (
Stargate SG-1
) and
Tara Reid
, must battle to survive.
This is a predictable piece, with cliches and stock characters. However, it is reasonably well-made on a relatively limited budget. It is not BAD, as such, and may be considered watchable.
People are going missing in the Louisiana Bayous.
Rogue geneticist Mark Sheppard (
Supernatural
) has returned home.
Could this have anything to do with a giant crocodile?
Local sheriff Lochlyn Munro ( Jason vs Freddy ) tries to save the damsels in distress. Unfortunately, a couple of murderous rednecks are feeding people to the massive croc.
