Tweet
Released by: Lionsgate
Released on: October 2nd, 2012
Directed by: Jorg Ihle
Cast: Jewel Staite, Marc Bacher, Justin Baldoni, and Nikki Griffin
Purchase From Amazon
The Movie:
A modern monster movie with practical effects and stunts? I was excited from the get-go. The plot synopsis on the back of the disc sounded damned entertaining, and I was honestly looking forward to this movie. After a monstrous prologue set in 1922, we move to today and meet a group of young people with money who embark on a yacht to meet up with some friends at a resort for a birthday party. En route, much to their dismay, their boat sinks and they end up stranded on an island… and soon realize they are being hunted by some very nasty creatures.
Now, I'm going to start off with some of the good aspects of this lil movie. First of all, obviously the premise is awesome. I'm glad to see an old school monster movie in an interesting location, in this case it was the jungles of Costa Rica. The settings in this movie are absolutely fantastic, and the jungle almost becomes a character in itself, in fact; it might be the best character, but more on why that's the case later. The monsters themselves also deserve some very due credit. The creature make-up is practical, no crap CG, and the stunt work is quite impressive. The beasts somewhat resemble a cross between Orcs from the Rings films and Bigfoot, which is honestly pretty cool. The threat they present is always palpable, and the stuntmen and actors in the suits pulled it off fantastically. In fact, pretty much all of the actors who play the main five characters are solid performers. They're not typical indie horror overactors, and they handle the action well. Then why are they so damn unlikable?
It is really quite a simple answer, and now I have to move onto the negative aspects of this film, of which there are quite a few and they all boil down to the screenplay. Every character in this film is flat-out unlikable, and there's no way around it. These are not unlikable or obnoxious characters in the typical dead-teens-in-the-woods horror film, as they're not just merely annoying. They're also not "bad" characters that we are supposed to hate, or maybe even love to hate. No, these are just poorly written characters who do and say things that just make the eyes of the audience start rolling, and not in the typical fun, "so bad it's good" way. When the characters are people you would never want to finish a conversation with, it is hard for the suspenseful horror element to work effectively, because in the case of this film it seemed like nature running it's due course that nerve-wracking horror film fun. One almost wished nature would take some of these characters out, if I'm being honest. On top of the bad characters, there's some weird plot inconsistencies, as well as some glaring plot holes. A lot of pretty major things seem to happen out of convenience and coincidence, with no thought really put into any foreshadowing, or setting stuff up for down the road.
Which is a damn shame, because a lot of the screenwriting when it comes to the creatures themselves, as well as some of the set pieces in the last half, show that this movie could have been a modern classic. All it would have taken was a good dialogue polish and a slight rewrite to a few scenes. Plus, when you have a location like that, you want the rest of the film to measure up and on a technical level they absolutely dol. It's shot well, lit well, action set-pieces seemed well planned and work efficiently, and as I mentioned earlier the actors and stunt performers did a great job…but with a plain bad script to hang it on it all just falls flat.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The movie was shot on HD and is presented in 16x9, and the movie looks good. Like I said earlier, they knew whet they were doing when it came to cinematography and it really shines through. The "look" of this movie is in no way a downside. The sound track is Dolby Digital 5.1, and sounds pretty good. Early on quite a few of the dialogue scenes were really quiet and I had to up the volume pretty high, which backfired when it very quickly got loud as all hell. That might be due more to my less-than-stellar sound system than anything else, but the difficulty hearing dialogue did seem isolated to early scenes. Extras wise we get a quick 10-minute Making-Of featurette that gives some small tidbits of information, and some cool footage of the stunt guys doing their thing, but little else other than quick snippets of interviews. Aside from featurette we get the original trailer, some other Lionsgate trailers, as well as a photo gallery. Personally, a commentary track could have been cool because I would have loved to hear more stories about shooting in Costa Rica, but alas it wasn't meant to be. As it stands now, the special features are not the selling point for this flick, but that is to be expected for a new indie horror flick.
The Verdict:
Honestly, I found myself flat out frustrated by this movie. The atrocious writing of the interplay of our main characters made it really hard to care about any of them, or really give a shit at all about what ended up happening to them. Honestly, if I wasn't reviewing the disc I don't know if I could have made it past the first section of the film where it is all spoiled twenty-something hijinks before the horrific elements arrive. The actors, the makeup effects crew, and the camera department did their jobs well, and the script should have, too. It was written by the director and the producer, and I have no doubt in my mind that they were far more worried about the horror aspects than the characterization of cannon fodder, and that is absolutely fine. That is to be expected, this isn't a teen comedy or a rite of passage drama…it's a monster movie, they should be far more worried about that than anything. However, it almost seems they didn't even TRY to make the characters likable or attempt to have it all to make sense. Honestly, when has a dude ever gotten his girlfriend to forgive him for cheating by proposing to her? Has that ever actually worked? Has it ever actually happened? I've never heard of it, but it definitely struck me as a weird writing choice in this flick. This is a good-looking movie, with some definite good things going for it, but I'm sad to say it's all sunk by the screenplay as badly as the boat is sunk in the film.
