Rating: C+
Dir: Derek S. Campbell and David Rotan
Star: Raw Leiba, Roger Willie, R. Keith Harris, Bill Oberst Jr.
To be clear: this is, in many ways, utterly terrible. In particular, it has the worst puppet effects since The Giant Claw. The makers call it a “homage to the creature features of the 1980s.” While a laudable aim, I would be more inclined to accept this statement, if not for the copious volume of CGI, used for almost all the gore, muzzle flashes and bullet holes. This is not exactly a feature I associate with eighties monster movies. Admittedly, the puppet work might leave you with nostalgic yearnings. Albeit for computer graphics done in MS Paint.
To be fair, the makers do seem to be in on the joke. How else to explain the presence of a Predator-like mini-gun, in what is supposed to be 1830’s Appalachia? Consequently, does this self-awareness excuse the flaws? These are deep, philosophical questions which lie at the heart of film criticism. However, it is 10:15 pm on a Sunday night, and so I’m just going to slap a middle-of-the-road grade on this, and get on with it. Corporal Sam Tuttle (Harris) is escorting Indian prisoner Yonagadoga (Leiba) back to their fort, when the party is attacked by a giant flying hybrid of a bird, snake and deer. The survivors take refuge in a nearby trading post run by Sara, and are quickly joined by another fugitive from the creature, obnoxiously racist plantation owner Augustus, who is creepy in the way only Oberst can deliver.
Yonagadoga enlightens them that the monster is the Uktena, and a genuinely well-done animated sequence fills in the back story. Fortunately, Sara’s husband was a tinkerer with weapons. So the barn is filled with everything they might need – including that mini-gun – to take on the beast, and destroy the nest in which its eggs are waiting to hatch. [Sidenote: we completely guessed what that would mean for the epilogue, set in the present day. We did not guess the specifics, involving… Oh, see it for yourself] Though before that happens, there will be a lot of messy deaths, copious amounts of green-screen puppet rubbish, the least convincing pushing of a boulder in cinema history, and one of the worst performances by a child actor I’ve seen in some time. I will say, at seventy minutes including the credits, it’s never boring.
As we have noted before, cheap/bad practical effects have a charm to them which cheap/bad CGI can never hope to emulate. The problem here is the failure to commit fully to the concept, an approach giving us the worst of both physical and electronic worlds. You have an obvious model supposedly ripping someone’s head off, only for the resulting gore geyser to look like a port of Mortal Kombat for the ZX Spectrum. There is entertainment to be had here, and it is a remarkably even split, between laughing at the film, and with it. I’m not averse to future work from the makers. Just don’t half-arse it again.