You are what it eats
As a general rule, there are three types of creature feature
film. The good. The bad. And the so bad they’re good. Amphibious, the latest
offering from Brian Yuzna, is not good. It’s not even bad. Infact, it’s so far
past bad that it goes all the way around so bad it’s good and back again.
That’s right. Amphibious is so bad it’s bad. A new level of
feature film ineptitude.
The problems with the film are vast. That the cast can’t act
is taken as a given for a low budget creature feature. But they don’t ever
appear to be trying here. It’s like they know they’ll never make it past the
straight to DVD section of their careers and have resigned themselves to this
fate long ago. The lead actress is passable, despite an accent that wanders
more often than the errant camerawork. The villains however, are caricatures of
caricatures. And the romantic lead is about as romantic as the giant scorpion
he is eventually killed by.
It’s hard to summarise a plot that makes no sense. There is
a giant sea scorpion which has apparently been created by a mixture of the
Tsunami and unexplained witchcraft. For no reason I could fathom, it attacks a
group of smugglers and child labourers who seem to live on a large floating
raft. Early on the second in command is killed and it takes a full 24 hours for
anyone to notice. Despite them all living on a large… floating… raft. Elsewhere
a child is killed by a blow to the head, yet wakes up several hours later to
deliver some final, meaningless words. Blood still fresh and flowing on his
wound. He then dies in 2 seconds flat. There is also something going on about a
lost daughter, and a character who is fat and clumsy and spectacularly unfunny.
Oh and around 20% of the entire movie is just an ominous shot of the same patch
of water not moving. I’ll be honest, within twenty minutes I was rooting for
the Scorpion.
But you don’t watch a film called Amphibious for the plot,
you watch it for the gore (plentiful, mostly absurd), nudity (almost nil, one pair
of clearly cgi boobs mid-impalement) and sense of humour (completely absent).
And, of course, for the monster. Amphibious doesn’t have the worst monster
you’ve ever seen (step forward Son of Godzilla), but it’s far from the best.
The CGI is competent but the genetic make-up of the monster make little sense,
given it moves like a Scorpion on land but appears to then morph into a squid
in the water. There is also far too much stinger impalement and too little
savage claw dismemberment for my liking.
The main problem with the film, other than the obvious fact
that it’s complete and utter shit, is that Amphibious is not interesting enough
to sustain its initial premise. It is devoid of humour and appears to be taking
it’s over complicated, overly stupid plot seriously. That it’s racists, sexist
and homophobic is almost an afterword by comparison. If you’ve been
unlucky/stupid enough to endure the entire film, you’ll be further treated to
an end that only makes things ever more confusing than before.
It’s been a long time since Re-Animator, and Brian Yuzna
doesn’t look he’s going to strike gold again anytime soon. Amphibious is
boring, senseless, witless and terrible in almost every conceivable way. Hell,
at one point I even found myself wishing Tara Reid was in it just so I could
laugh.
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