Of course they rarely ever wound up being as disturbing or gory as I feared. I swear to this day I still get myself absurdly worked up over movies that are supposed to be gory, and I almost always wind up saying to myself "That wasn't that bad." I still have yet to watch the "Hostel" series or any of the "Saw" sequels because of the violence (not that I want to anyway, because they don't interest me in the least), but I'm guessing if I saw them I'd probably be irritated that the gore was so much less than I anticipated.
The point I'm coming around to is that I remember that back when "The Relic" came out, it was toted as being pretty intensely violent and hardcore. I vaguely remembered a scene where a guy is dangling from a rope and gets bitten in half by the monster, and the guys hauling him up only bring up his torso. As a kid, that sounded frakking intense, man. I guarantee you I was watching that with my knees in front of my face, covering up the majority of the screen.
Naturally when I watch it now as an adult, "The Relic" is laughably tame and dumb. I can't believe I used to be scared of this crap. I guess that's part of the magic of being a child, am I right?
The story is honestly what you would expect to get from a random monster-of-the-week episode of "The X-Files," only stretched out to two hours and starring a bunch of people not nearly as talented as Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny. The idea is that a shipment from the Amazon jungle goes to the Natural History Museum in Chicago, and inside is some stuff that causes massive mutations and creates a monster which runs loose in the museum and there's a big, important event going on that the mayor and everyone else is going to be at so there's no way they can close the museum even though people are getting brutally murdered and there's one cop who knows better but nobody listens to him and a whole lot of rich people get killed when the monster tears through them because they were stupid and didn't listen to the scientists who suspected something weird going on and stop me if you've heard this before.
He died in a bizarre gardening accident. Authorities said best to leave that one...unsolved...
That's it. That's the movie. It's a creature feature. Fine, there's nothing wrong with that. But there's four distinct things that make it not work.
First is the cast. Tom Sizemore as the one smart cop is basically sleepwalking through this movie, although I don't know if that's just Tom Sizemore being himself since he's kind of a crap actor to begin with. Penelope Ann Miller as a useless scientist who I think is supposed to be our Strong Female Lead™, and is a laughably boring character and sells both confidence and fear with equally tepid emotions. The movie actually kind of forgets about her for most of the third act when she gets locked in a basement. Oddly enough there wasn't too much that seemed missing during that sequence. Imagine that. Everyone else is equally as bland or forgettable.
Second, the CGI monster is really, really bad. It's that special kind of "bad 90's CGI" where it's clear that at the time they were actually really proud of what they had managed to achieve with their magical computer-machines, and liked to show off how realistically they can render things like fire. So naturally they'll have an entire scene displaying the creature on fire, which may have looked impressive in theaters (unlikely), but probably looked like old reruns of "Reboot" by the time it hit VHS.
Quire exciting, this computer magic.
Third, the "hardcore violence" is actually pretty tame, although severe violence does, in fact, happen. The issue lays with the fact that it's the same bit of violence throughout the entire damn film. The reason for that is because the monster does ONE THING: it beheads people. Oh man, if you think beheadings are scary, this will be the scary thing you've ever seen. But as for me, yes it's true that the first time we see a victim with their obviously fake head ripped off and laying next to their body, it's a natural reaction to say "Oh damn! He got jacked up, son." But after the fifteenth guy gets grabbed up into the creature's jaws, the fact that their head is 100% certain to come off their shoulders starts to make it a rather dull affair because it's like we're watching the same death scene on repeat for the last forty minutes of "The Relic."
And lastly, I don't know what in the world director Peter Hyams was thinking when he made this film, but this is by far and away the worst lit, darkest, murky film I've ever seen. This movie is so poorly lit, usually using only flashlights to light entire sets, that I rarely had the faintest notion what I was looking at or what was happening. I'm not exaggerating when I say I've seen a film lit entirely by a single candle which was easier to comprehend than "The Relic" was. The film's annoying habit of back-lighting people in already dark environments ALL THE TIME also makes it so that for most of the film, you're looking at silhouettes instead of faces, and you need to guess who's talking by their voice. It's insane, and I don't understand the purpose behind it besides trying to figure out how much more black could a movie get. Because I'll tell you: The answer is "none." None more black.
You can see yourself in...BOTH sides...
I guess on the plus side, I'd rather watch "The Relic" before I watched an episode of "Fringe." At least in "The Relic" the annoying characters get decapitated. That, I have to admit, is a point in it's favor, because I would pay hardcore money to see Joshua Jackson get ripped to shreds.
THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Relic" is a product of that wave of late-90's horror films that had just figured out that computers can do funky stuff for cheaper than doing it practically, at the expense of looking completely terrible within a year of its release. And like the vast majority of those films, this one sucks pretty bad. Pop in a random episode of "The X-Files" and you'll have a much better time.
(Why do I have the sudden urge to watch "This Is Spinal Tap?")
No comments:
Post a Comment