Creature del terrore

First, as mentioned above, there is no place close to this in Maryland. Let's pretend that there is. Now there are these VERY slow moving snakehead fish that have zero agility and are noisy as hell, and they manage not just to sneak up on people, but in packs of ten. Even when someone sees them coming from a distance, they repeat the steam roller chase from Austin Powers, yelling "NOOOOO!!!!" while the fish crawl towards them at about 2 miles per hour.

OK, suspend the location discrepancies, and assume that the non-existent town is full of very slow deaf people. Now you still have to deal with the drawn out suspense scenes where one person is in trouble and another person has to do something to save him. The saving person inevitably takes forever to do the simplest tasks, with no explanation. Person A is suffering and person B is just about to help. Then more suffering, then person B is no closer. Back and forth, back and forth until you start rooting for the fish.

Add huge discrepancies in reality to annoyingly poor writing/editing and you have Snakehead Terror. It was so bad, I had to log on just to write a review.

I watched Snakehead Terror mostly because I'm a big fan of Bruce Boxleitner.

Wow. Does he need money this badly? The premise wasn't bad. A small town's economy is ruined by nasty snakehead fish, their lake is poisoned to kill the nasty vermin, and the town is slow to recover. The film opens with a man and his dog finding a somewhat chewed up bear on the shores of the lake, the dog running into the lake to bark at snakehead fish and the guy going into the water to save his dog. Naturally both man and dog are eaten.

If I had found the dead bear, I would have run away.

Anyway, once you actually SEE the things and notice that the fish only crawl about 0.0005 miles per hour you wonder how come no one runs away, screaming into the night or even day? I mean I can understand the fish swimming quickly in the water, but on land? I could still outrun those things even if both my legs were missing and I had only the use of my left hand.

Bruce plays the sheriff of this under-economized town and his teenaged daughter's boyfriend is killed when he is eaten by the nasty fish and Bruce wants to immediately close the lake. Of course, no one listens and the lake remains open. Then he contacts the wildlife division and they send out Carol Alt who then determines the cause of the boy's death are snakeheads. Still, no one listens. Of course, what happens next is predictable, the news leaks out, and suddenly there are bounty hunters searching for the deadly snakeheads. And of course, teenagers who never listen, go on the lake seeking revenge for the death of their friend. Like a snakehead cares.

It turns out that the town's coroner has been giving his brother large quantities of growth hormone to help encourage the growth of the lake's natural fish but unfortunately all it did was make the snakeheads grow to enormous size and they HISS, SNARL, GROWL and I swear, they bark at you too.

These things are huge with appetites to match. The CGI was not very good but the gore was incredibly....well...gory. Bits and pieces of flesh flying about, blood spurting, limbs being ripped off, it was like watching me in the kitchen vainly trying to cut up a piece of meat for dinner.

Watching this movie made me decide on a couple of things (a) not to live on a lake (b) not to have teenagers, and (c) maybe give up sushi. It's an entertaining movie, better than most I've seen on the sci fi channel and believe it or not, more than 2 people actually survive. That was a relief. In a way.

This movie is a throwback film of the old science fiction / horror movies of the 1950's. The movie itself was decent, if you can suspend your disbelief that a pristine lake surrounded by snowcapped mountains in Canada is in the state of Maryland. The hero of this film is the sheriff played by Bruce Boxleitner of Babylon 5 fame who is battling a lake full of mutant asian humen eating snakehead fish during a fishing tournament (shades of Jaws here). He is helped by his daughter and her friends and a agent of the Fish and Wild Life Service. The film itself was well done for a low budget production make in Canada. A type of television movies thats good be watched and forgotten.

It's also called: Jaws Jaws 2 Jaws 3D Kingdom of the spiders Piranha Frogs Alligator Squirm Ants (AKA It happened at Lakewood Manor) Bug Prophecy Snowbeast The Swarm The Bees The Savage Bees Orca Grizzly Dogs

What happens is this. Man screws up the environment, and nature revolts by sending _______ to kick Man's ass. Man is having a big financial crisis, and _________ threatens it. Man summons Scientist to figure it all out. Scientist advises not to have the big _________ celebration. Government Man disagrees, because he's greedy and wants the money. Against Man's better judgment, Man lets the big ________ celebration take place. This causes mayhem and destruction. Man may or may not have romantic involvement with Scientist. Man's kid from previous marriage gets put in a vulnerable situation. Man and Scientist work together to save kid and town, and finally kills ___________. The end.

I was looking for something to watch last weekend, and this was aired on a Tv station. The movie is not something which will end up in any Cinema school class. In fact it is in the "so bad it's good" category, especially when the extremely cheesy fish stalk people on land. I don't know how much effort went in trying to make those fishes believable, but ... it did not work so well. It looks something out of a high school project.

Some of the actors are famous,evidently in a low spot in their careers. But the movie is not horribly acted. What is lacking is rather a coherent story which makes sense, substituted in this movie with an attempt to model the story on the "Jaws" line (hey, it worked for Jaws!). Also lacking is... mostly everything else. Except kills. Of course lots of people get killed. Most unbelievably.

In case anyone wonders, the movie is based on a real "scare" related to asian snakehead fish which were found to have become established in some areas of the Eastern US. The real fish do not eat people, but like any invasive species they damage ecosystems... alarmist news footage of this kind of (serious) problems easily get translated into movies like this about "killer" fish, wasps, bees, anything.

To sum it up: if you want to watch a teenage horror movie with friends and some beers. This is it.