LD 50 Lethal Dose

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.

This movie wasn't horrible, but it was not very good either. I got about what I expected when I rented it... a low budget sci-fi/horror movie that was at least somewhat entertaining.

Plot: C+, It starts out with a pretty generic, boring plot, but it grows into something more intriguing. I think the way they suddenly just dump the concept on you detracts from its greatness though.

Acting: C-, Acting was sufficient, but not great. They are about par with what you'd expect in a mediocre horror film. No one of the actors really stood out amongst the others as being exceptionally good, but one or two stood out as being exceptionally crappy.

Special Effects: C, Not that great, but again, it was sufficient.

Character development: D+, you don't really get attached to these characters. Part of it may have been the mediocre acting. The characters that stand out the most are the ones that follow the usual cliché character types. You have the tough guy, the smart computer nerd, the annoying goof-off joker, and more. The characters that didn't follow one of these cliché types really just blend into the background.

Best aspect of the movie: The actual concept they present to you later in the movie (I won't reveal) is interesting.

Worst aspect of the movie: Lack of character attachment. It's no secret people die in this movie, and when they do you'll find yourself not caring that much in most cases.

In short: lame first 30 minutes, super duper middle 30 minutes, super duper lame final 30 minutes. That's it, in a nutshell.

Mel b can't act, and so can't the female lead. The male lead was Shinzon in Star Trek Nemesis, incidentally. He looks weird here, probably because the film had zero character development. And the girl using yoga to beat the bad guy at the end was funny. Funny in a "ha ha, that blows" sort of way, mind you.

The film currently has a 7-something rating. This is due to a low voting count. When more people see the flick, I suspect the rating will go down. Around 5-point would be my guess. Myself, I am giving it 6/10, just for the spooky middle. The rest isn't worth spit.

My grade 6/10, just cause I dig horror flicks, even if they're mostly lame.

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')

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.