The Rig

I'm usually a huge fan of cheap low budget movies. And just as a previous reviewer said, I also thought the monster was a gigantic sea creature... but it turned out to be some tiny monster that looked not much larger than a little kid.

You can almost always tell the cheaper-made movies apart from how they show the monster. It's always... show an arm here... a leg there... a scene with some teeth and claws, etc. However, what makes this movie stand apart from all of that is this... You NEVER actually really clearly the monster(s) at all. I figured that maybe at the end you will be able to clearly see it... but no... it was inside a dark tunnel so you can't even really see it clearly.. unless of course you pause the movie... then you can sort of see it... kind of... hahahah Aside from being kind of predictable and the characters doing illogical things... it wasn't all that bad, I guess. I did manage to watch all of it.

This horror film is set aboard an actual oil rig--one that was the first of its type and is a museum today. A cute twist is having one of the characters actually wearing a t-shirt for the museum in one scene! On the rig, some underwater beast is disturbed and comes aboard to pick off the crew one by one.

"The Rig" is a low budget horror film with very modest production values in most ways. However, in two ways the film was quite outstanding--the blood and gore was a lot more realistic and profuse than you might expect and the musical score was great and really added to the tension. Otherwise, the film is clearly inspired by films such as "Alien", "Predator" and "The Thing". The idea of an alien slowly picking off members of a group certainly is NOT original and the writing could have been a lot better (the characters sometimes seem like caricatures and the ending is weak). It also suffers some from a few stupid clichés (such as adding nudity where it is pretty inappropriate) and seems a bit formulaic. Overall, the way I see it, if you like gore and low-budget monster films, you'll probably enjoy the film. If not, you'll probably wonder why you've wasted nearly and hour and a half of your life.

You know the boring parts of a porn that you just fast forward through until the "actors" are done talking? Well that is this entire movie! I'm talking about bad lighting, awful dialog, terrible editing (scenes are drawn out way too long, with awkward moments of nothing going on), and unforgivable monster attacks that show too little of a monster that looks like it was made in a middle school art class. I can't believe the cast and crew were even able to see this thing through to completion. The only reason I gave it 3 stars instead of 1 is for the brave men and women who selfishly destroyed their reputations for the sake of not giving up on something you started. One star movies are filmed with a cell phone in a junk yard, at least they got someone to rent them an oil rig.

This movie makes absolutely no sense and was written by people who have absolutely no idea of work safety regulations... people die all the time on that drilling platform and the staff acts like if they simply deserted - there is no emotion, no stress, no documenting what happened, just sex scenes and stupid dialogue.

I understand they had no budget, but that no excuse for lazy writing and pathetic acting. Roger Corman made movies on shoestring budgets but never sank that low.

I'm surprised the director ever found another job.

If you're wondering why, with a summary like that, I can only give it 1 out of 10, let me explain.

If someone can take a script this bad and a cast so poor and still persuade people to hand their money over to it, then, if you're an aspiring movie maker, you should be ecstatic.

It has absolutely everything bad you can think of in a movie: Horrendously poor editing; a completely pointless flashback to a few minutes earlier, in black and white to remind you (if you're a complete idiot) what just happened; dreadful, tinny low budget music to match the low budget set; and a man in a plastic monkey suit grabbing people in a quick blur of camera motion while someone throws fake blood around.

And dialogue that's so poor that if they had managed to hire a cast of decent actors they would have ended up shaking their heads at the inanity of it all.

There are some tits in it. That ought to double the viewing audience.

Give this one a wide berth unless you have the choice of watching this or sticking map pins into your eyeballs.