La Reine des prédateurs

I know I gave Point Doom a bad rating.I really liked this flick.I liked it so much I recorded it.I knew Richard was a decent actor.To me he in this movie did an excellant job.The cast was good even the guy from the Fast and the Furious.I give Richard props for this.The effects were good for a low budget movie.

In Chicago, four electricians leaded by Dean (Richard Grieco) come to an old building to disconnect power. They accidentally activate a portal and arrive in another dimension, where Chicago was destroyed by a Spider Queen and inhabited by mutants. The group meets survivors leaded by Crane (David Nerman) and Elena (Kate Greenhouse), and finds the inventor of the portal, Dr. Richard Morelli (Colin Fox), who has been living in this dimension for thirty years. They join forces, trying to rebuilt a portal to bring them back home. "Webs" is a watchable plagiarizing of "Sliders", only worse. Most of the dialogs seem to be written by a person who has not concluded the elementary school, so imbecile they are. Further, the story is illogical, and seems that Chicago is the only city in the world. The scientist trying to start his sophisticated machine with broken wires as if he were stealing a car is very funny. The face of Richard Grieco looks like a white version of Michael Jackson and is horrible. If the viewer shuts-down his or her brain, he or she may like this forgettable TV movie. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Na Teia do Terror" ("In the Web of Horror")

'Webs' was another TV movie in a string of them made by the Sci-Fi network. It stars the hunky Richard Grieco as Dean, one of a quartet of Chicago electricians who were sent to an abandoned building to check out an unusual power source. What they find is a portal to another dimension. And in this dimension, the Earth of the future is decrepit and over run by the spider-people minions of a queen spider working towards total dominance.

This one is routine and uninspired, with unremarkable characters for the most part. They're not really fleshed out to where people can actually care about them, but editor / director David Wu keeps the pedal to the metal, delivering passable action at a consistent pace. This is also taken more seriously than a lot of cheese epics of this kind; there are not as many utterly laughable elements. The special effects aren't great but they're not all that terrible, either. It's still better CGI than this viewer has seen in other things.

The performances are very straight faced from all concerned. Grieco is decent enough and he even gets to shed a single tear in remembrance of his comrades. Kate Greenhouse is okay as a tough survivor of this other Earth. Canadian character actor Colin Fox is able to bring some gravitas to his role, and to the proceedings. The rest of the cast is nondescript, but not incompetent. David Nerman, as Crane, has an actual character arc where he comes off as argumentative and suspicious of Grieco for a while, but turns into a hero of sorts.

'Webs' is not great storytelling or TV movie making, but it's certainly not trying to be. Movies like them do have their place in the great scheme of things, and this viewer, for one, would sometimes rather watch junk like this than overproduced Hollywood feature film product.

Five out of 10.

WEBS is a pretty odd movie, albeit slightly watchable. Richard Grieco plays an electrician who gets suck into a parallel Earth overrun by mutant spiders, or something like that. The film itself was made with a modest budget, which explains the limited locales, and the somewhat tedious screenplay that manages to do very little with quite an interesting premise. Basically a 90 minute episode of the TV show "Sliders", and nothing more.

4 out of 10

(go to www.nixflix.com for a more detailed review and reviews of other films in the genre)

For a movie titled "Webs", I had initially expected more spiders and much more webbing, so imagine my surprise when there was surprisingly little on both accounts. Apparently Chicago in an alternate dimension is overrun by strange mutated humans that have been exposed to spider venom; a venom that turns people into spider-soldiers. And more impressively is that this venom causes the people's hands to turn into claws and their teeth to become crooked, protruding and just ridiculous to look at.

"Webs" is a low budget movie, yes, but there is something mildly entertaining about the setting of the movie, despite the lack of spiders and a proper horror element. There was a single spider in the movie, the queen, which was actually nicely enough made, although not with the best of CGI effects. But still, it worked out well enough.

However, the movie is weighed down by a rather unemotional and unenthusiastic actor with a bad talent and even worse hair. Why they opted to cast Richard Grieco for the lead role in this movie is definitely beyond my comprehension. However, I strongly believe that the movie would have been much, much better with someone else in the role; someone who at least had enthusiasm for the job and role he is hired to portray.

Aside from Richard Grieco, then people in the movie generally did good enough jobs with their given roles, despite their characters being very one-dimensional and not really having proper characteristics and personalities as to the extend where we as the audience actually get into the movie and form some sort of bond or attachment to certain characters. All throughout "Webs", you never really got to know any of the characters on any profound level, which made the movie have a very superficial feel to it.

For a horror movie, then "Webs" was rather devoid of scares and a general horror movie. It had a decent enough story, but it just failed to deliver in the horror genre. And as for low budget movies go, then there are far better choices out there to pick amongst for an evening of movie watching.

The movie was predictable to the core, as most of the movies in this particular genre is. But the movie was fast paced and had some moments here and there. But in overall, then "Webs" is rather below average for a horror movie of this particular type.