Amphibious – Brian Yuzna

(the sporting guru takes time out to review a really bad horror movie as a favour for a friend. The Monkey would like to reassure his loyal fan base that this is a mere sideshow from his day job of reviewing Premier League football... but it is the close season... and he may toss out a review of Sharknado 2 as well)

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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