LD 50 Lethal Dose

This isn't Scary Spice's (Melanie Brown) first movie. That would be Spice World, not that I would ever admit seeing that. It is her first movie since then, and she was an interesting character that met an unusual end.

The Brits are famous for horror. Remember Hammer? Now, it seems they are famous for movies about radicals releasing animals. We do that here, but I don't know that we make movies about it. I don't think that many people really care over here, so we leave it to Peta.

The thing is that the group left one of their members behind on a raid and he got three years. He sends them an e-mail about a secret lab that they should check out. That is when the fun begins; as this lab is underground and some really strange stuff is going on there.

Now, I won't spoil it by saying what is going on, except to say that it was an interesting concept. The problem is that I really didn't care about the people in this film, and whether they lived or died. Maybe Katharine Towne (But I'm a Cheerleader), but even that is stretching it.

Don't just scare me, but make me care.

Synopsis : A group of animal rights activists have a rescue mission go wrong and one team member gets trapped at the location. A year later the team receives an encoded message from the friend and they join together to break him out of the facility he is trapped in. To their dismay, they locate an abandoned laboratory that seems to have a mind of its own, and the team starts disappearing one by one.



Plot : The story was a very interesting concept but I feel it lost something in the translation from paper to screen. The film had a decent budget but at times it didn't seem like the budget was used to it's full capacity. Definitely more of a science fiction feeling type of movie but it also had it's horror moments. It can be enjoyed by parties that enjoy either genre.



Cast/Characters : Not a Blockbuster line-up but some familiar faces on the screen with decent acting skills. Some of the scripting though made a few on the screen less talented than what they normally would be. All personality types were covered with the team, almost too formulaic.....nothing tossed in to liven up the story.



F/X : Nothing too cheesy, which is good. Just enough gore to keep ya going and no moments when you are sitting there saying "I see the guy behind the curtain". Of course, there could have been more gore to give it more of a horror feeling but working with what they gave me made it a-okay.



Pace : They spent a little too much time at the beginning of the movie setting up each character and creating a story that really had nothing to do with the result of the film. I feel they should have just skipped to the 2nd act and started the movie there, explained some things better that they skipped and it would have been perfect.



Jekyll's Final Thoughts : It was a good experience to see this film at the Nevermore Film Festival, especially with it being a British made film ; no usual dribble with American casting, etc. If you have the chance to see this movie, try and catch it. I give it a 3 star rating.

Lethal Dose is a tedious excuse for a horror film, with characters you won't care about and a script that will put you to sleep. It revolves around an animal rights group that tries to rescue one of their own a year after they abandoned him during a raid. What they find is a mix of bad dialogue and pseudoscience.

The film is nowhere near as gruesome as its subject matter would suggest. The opening credits show photos of animals being experimented on, leading one to expect a violent piece of gorn. Instead, we get a bunch of poorly thought out science fiction mumbo-jumbo as our protagonists confront the results of an experiment gone wrong.

This might have been a decent film anyway if we had had some characters we could care about, but these people are stupid even by horror movie standards. It's hard to see how these activists avoided getting caught on their first raid, as they wore only some camouflage make up on their faces even though they knew they were on camera. Furthermore, they decide it is a great idea to smoke pot when they are in the middle of a mission in a government installation. At least slasher movie victims have the excuse of only being at a summer camp when they act like idiots.

The premise of this movie is seemingly solid, and it begins like "28 Days Later" Animal Rights Activists break in to a lab and free the cute and fuzzy bunnies. One of them gets captured, and then it turns into some kind of "Altered States" heist movie.

Seems our Activists are now set on freeing their captured comrade from the lab where he has become the focus of a new experiment that is gradually stripping away his humanity in a "Lawnmower Man" kind of way.

Sounds cool, right? That's what I thought. The problem is that once the heist portion of the movie starts, it goes nowhere fast. There's a lot of pointless screaming as members of the crew start turning on each other. It's another entry into the current string of U.K. funded programming that features people turning on each other. For more of the same, watch "The Bunker". The Bad Guy doesn't make an appearance until the last ten minutes of the movie, and it's a pretty dull ride up to that point.

A group of animal rights activists' trespasses a lab to release animals, and a bear trap catches Gary (Ross McCall), one of the members. He is arrested but he does not denounce his friends. He goes to jail alone for a three years sentence and the team disassembles. One year later, they reunify and become aware that Gary was a volunteer of an experiment to reduce his period in prison. Later, they received an encoded message from Gary asking for help. The place where he is lodged is an abandoned laboratory and they decide to rescue him. Once in the location, weird events happen with each member of the group. This movie has a good premise, but something does not work well. For example, why the guys decide to smoke grass during their assignment? How and why exist live animals in a desert place? This forgettable film can be recommended for killing time only. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): `A Ameaça' (`The Menace')