Dragonwasps

Initially you already know what this movie will be like before you watch it, as it has low-budget monster movie written all over it. And on that aspect "Dragon Wasps" truly delivers. On all other aspects, not so much.

The story in "Dragon Wasps" is fairly generic and straight forward for a movie of this caliber. A mysterious genetic research company has been experimenting with mutations and of course something has gone horribly wrong. A scientist has gone missing in the jungle, and his daughter and her best friend venture there to find him. They encounter some American soldiers who drop all they are doing to help the two civilians go looking for a single man in the vast jungle. Cannibal locals and giant, mutated wasps all prove to be in the way for their search and rescue mission.

The effects in the movie were, well, laughable. Badly animated CGI wasps that looked anything but real. And to make matters even more 'interesting' then these wasps were able to breathe fire. Yeah, breathe fire, why not? But of course, the creature effects, as you might have guessed, is almost bound by law to be bad in these kind of movies. But moving on, there was a gun fight between the soldiers and the cannibals, where the American soldiers were pinned down at their truck. A lot of shots were fired and hit the truck, resulting in CGI animated sparks here and there, but get this, there were no bullet holes. I wonder what kind of dissolving bullets they were using.

Let's move on to the acting. Most of the acting was half-hearted or even uninspiring, as if some of the people in the movie were just there because there was nothing else available. Much can be said for Corin Nemec, who both starred and co-produced this movie, but he actually did a fairly good acting job in this movie compared to some of the countless other movies he had been in.

There isn't much to keep this movie afloat, and as such it becomes a rather boring and dull movie experience. There was a single moment where the movie shined, where one of the soldiers was making fun at Corin Nemec by mentioning some of the questionable movies he has been in. That was actually a great and funny moment. Always good with some self-irony!

That is not to say at all that Dragon Wasps is a good movie, it is a long way from that. But SyFy have done much worse than this. I cannot accuse Dragon Wasps of being dull, because the pacing was actually quite snappy. I also loved the self-ironic moment where Corin Nemec and his movies are poked fun at, while Nemec is quite good as the lead, obviously enjoying himself, while Benjamin Esterday is also appealing. On the negative side, the rest of acting is rather uninspired, the women are pretty but wooden and David Stasko grates the teeth in how bad he is. Apart from that one self-ironic moment the witty and thoughtful quality of the film's dialogue is next to nothing, and while the film has a formula it does it in a rather generic and annoyingly ridiculous way and is so clichéd that you can't help thinking that you've seen it before. The characters are not annoying as such but are not developed enough to make them relateable to the audience. The shootouts suffer from choppy editing and clumsy action. Dragon Wasps is poorly shot and edited, everything just seems so unfocused and amateurish, but the worst asset about Dragon Wasps are by far the special effects. Some of the deaths are gory, but overall the quality of the CGI is blurry and in a way unfinished-looking. The wasps especially suffer from this, and sadly they have no presence whatsoever, it gets increasingly difficult to care for the dire situations the characters go through when the threat is so weakly rendered in both look and characterisation. Overall, could've been much worse but has too many flaws to make it a good movie let alone a great one. 4/10 Bethany Cox

After learning of her father's disappearance in the Amazon jungle while working on secret research projects, a woman and her friend enlist a group of soldiers to help them only to find their work on mutated wasps has produced fire-breathing creatures infesting the area.

This was pretty much another typical Sci-Fi Channel creature feature, so this one's pretty obvious about itself quite early and often. With the creatures' appearing to be the same bland and totally fake CGI that at least has the decency to give them a bright color design to somewhat hide the fakery, yet whenever there's a close-up of them it diminishes almost immediately. There's also the simplistic plot done hundreds of times over without variation or the rather mundane pace that deals with outside areas other than the bugs to take up the majority of the running time, thereby reducing the confrontations and interactions with the creatures and reducing the gore quotient considerably. That said, the few action scenes present are a lot of fun, generate some pretty interesting scenes within and are full of pretty wild scenarios. Of course, the finale is a bit of fun, full of explosions, gunfire-riddled shootouts and the application of one of the movie's best qualities as it uses a rather novel idea against the creatures, generating a bit of smarts in an otherwise mundane effort. All in all, it's about the same as would be expected in such an effort.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Language.

Knee, Atkins, and Jordan do nothing more than earn their Hitler worship merit badge with the same old "kill all brunettes and make men depressed" theme that these movies always give us.

It's supposed to be about giant wasps, but it's hard to even go there, because of the neo Nazi preaching the director and writer team give us.

Just no fun in this, no strategy, no inspiration, except for Nazis, and those vindictive sorts who can't stand the jilting from brunettes they get all their lives.

The entomologist Gina Humphries (Dominika Juillet) travels to Central America with her best friend and also entomologist Rhonda Guiterrez (Nikolette Noel) with a hidden agenda: she expects to find her father, the scientist Dr. Humphries (David Stasko) that vanished in the jungle. When an acquaintance finds his backpack with a footage inside, Gina discloses her intention to Rhonda and they travel to search for her father.

They drive a Jeep and Gina convinces the military John Hammond (Corin Nemec) to help them in their search with his team. Along their journey, they fight against the drug dealer and voodoo sorcerer Jaguar (Gildon Roland). But soon they discover that in the spot there are huge mutant dragon wasps that spit fire but Gina expects to find her father alive.

The lame and corny "Dragon Wasps" is among the worst movies I have seen. The moronic storyline is awful; the acting and dialogs do not exist; and the CGI is ridiculous. It is laughable to see the two wooden scientists wearing shorts in a tropical jungle (and they are not hot). The lines and the attitude of Corin Nemec are idiotic. Hammond seeks out the drug dealer that he and his team have battled a couple of hours ago to ask him to help his pal. He drinks the spirits with drugs offered by his enemy. He lets the soldier shoot the drug dealers with his men tied to a wall to be fusilladed by the criminals. He sacrifices his life to try to save one man that might be dead in the hive. There are so many stupidities in this movie that I would spend too much time and space to list all of them. My vote is one (awful).

Title (Brazil): "Terror Tropical" ("Tropical Terror")