La mutazione

I watched this movie a while back and when it came to an end I was puzzled. Usually, I have a pretty strong reaction to a movie: I know if I've liked it or not, or if I've been bored with it, or if I've been bothered by it. I know something about my reaction to it. When I watched this a while back, I had - honestly - no reaction. I didn't know if I had liked it or not. So it faded into the distant past and I moved on, until the opportunity came up to watch it again. I decided to watch it again. Sometimes a movie that doesn't really strike a chord with you will do so on a second viewing. So I watched it again. And I have exactly the same reaction - I'm not really sure if I liked it or not.

It's a schlocky monster story, where a scientist invents some sort of cure for a disease that a multi-millionaire wants, but he forces the scientist to try it out first - with really bad results. The mutated scientist then encounters a maintenance crew in underground tunnels where he was forced to try the cure, there's a lot of blood and gore and death. What else is there? Really - not much.

It wasn't horrible. I'll say that. It's a basic, run of the mill monster story - and those can be OK as time wasters. Aside from Tom Sizemore, who played the head of the maintenance crew, the cast was pretty anonymous. And, as far as Vince (played by Sizemore) was concerned - how in the world could he have been a POW in Vietnam? Sizemore is nowhere near old enough to play a guy who would have been a POW in Vietnam. That grated on me a bit, even though it's a throwaway part of the story.

I guess I'll give it a 5. Right in the middle. Because I honestly don't know if I liked it or not.

It's amazing to me that Tom Sizemore has been in two of the best movies in recent history and then ends up being in crap like this. (Heat, Saving Private Ryan)

But this movie, is not very good at all. Reminds me of Mimic , underground tunnel thing going on, but no where near as good. 3/10

A maintenance crew headed by Tom Sizemore goes into an abandoned hospital to look for old equipment to sell to collectors. But a multi-millionaire has a scientist in the catacombs under the hospital, who has developed a serum to cause rapid regeneration and cellular growth. The scientist, who has taken the serum, is finding the results to be a bit more extreme than expected.

For my beef with 235 films (who produced this), see my review for "The Mad". This film's selling point was easy to identify as soon as I picked it up: it has Tom Sizemore in it. And, hey, I like Tom Sizemore (rent "Lock Up" with Sylvester Stallone) so this seems like something worth checking out.

That selling point is about as far as you can get with this one. You have a very one-dimensional millionaire who survives a fire. A creature in a tunnel who becomes part rat and part dog. A bum who is apparently a Rastafarian. These things mix well, surprisingly, but only in the most absurd sense of the word "well". It's just a lot of strange things going on.

The crew's background is in makeup, and it shows. There is a scene where they chop off a guy's fingers that was alright, and the creature is especially slimy. But the creature is just poorly conceived: in horror, there needs to be a balance of how much you do and do not show a monster. Here, they couldn't decide to show him too little (much of the film is almost pitch black) or too much (making him seem somewhat dumb).

I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy this film. I did. But the actors were nothing special, I didn't care about the characters, and Sizemore is either doped up or washed up in this film. Maybe he's not doped up. But whatever the case, he just looked old and tired. I can't have my hero looking like he wants to drink a six-pack of Coors Original (the Banquet Beer), smear Dorito orangeness on his chest and pass out watching NASCAR. This Sizemore didn't even have enough energy in him to pass gas.

I guess this isn't really telling you what you need to know, but there's really nothing to know: bad hero, weak monster, fake secondary characters. Unless your goal is to just get drunk or high and need something on the screen to move every so often, this isn't going to thrill you. If you want a good underground monster, rent "Tremors" or "CHUD".

Tom Sizemore lends his name to a schlocky, midnight-monster movie that is exactly as good as it looks and sounds. Not to say it is necessarily a GOOD movie, far from it, but take it for what its worth and you will enjoy it.

A group of utility workers are trapped in a series of tunnels which, unfortunately, contain a scientist mutated by his own creation. The creature feeds instantly on a rat, becoming what it has eaten.

The effects leave something to be desired, although it IS refreshing to see them returning to the monster in the suit instead of leaning on shoddy CGI. The entire film has a cheesy, low-budget horror/sci-fi feel to it. So if you're a fan of monster movies, you could do worse. See it for free but I would hesitate to recommend spending cash on it.

Working on a clean-up crew, several workers are assigned to a new job at an abandoned medical testing lab and after going through the facility are ambushed by a large creature living in the tunnels from a chemical drug that turned it huge and feral and set out to get away from the creature.

There was some good stuff to this one when it got around to it. One of the better aspects is the film's incredibly creepy location, as the fact that they're in a sewer-system is a big plus. The building they use to access them is already quite creepy, but it looks really great here due to this one effectively looking like an abandoned building should've been, with the appropriate amount of decay present with the other little things that would be found in a sewer to begin with but simply rotted away due to time, which is a very nice touch. That it's also dark most of the time seems to work well for this one, meaning that it's just an incredibly suspenseful location and mixed with the corridor of tunnels down there and the overall look to it, this one comes out rather nicely. There's also a nice bonus here in that, although it deals with a giant rat, it's not created in the traditional sense and instead is brought about through the chemical tests turning the individual into a monstrous creature and is much better than having a gigantic swarm of rats doing the killing. The confrontations with it are even better, as the encounters down in the creepy sewers provide a lot of fun times and generally seem highly enjoyable. The car-park one is one of the best ones, and the shootouts in the corridors work amazingly well at getting a lot of good action into this one. Even the surprise jumps from the creature attacking out of the shadows generate some fun, and the conclusion scores rather nicely before veering off. The last plus here is the film's incredibly high gore content, which gets bloody when it wants to. These here the film's good points. There were a couple of problems with this one. One of the biggest ones is that the film doesn't have a whole lot going for it during the beginning part. It's just far too long and not all that entirely interesting when it presents its opening, going from the run-down with the chemical to the meeting between the two parties and the aftermath of that to getting into talking about the mission from the crew, it takes about thirty minutes before even going down into the sewers. Since the rat isn't the first thing done down there either, there's not a whole lot of interesting things going on through these parts of the film, and it just makes these parts of the film drag on for some time before it gets really good. Another problem is that there's not a whole lot of clarity when it comes to dealing with the creature's attacks. Most of them are either over so quick it's hard to tell what happened until the aftermath, too dark to render anything visible, edited so haphazardly it's impossible to see anything or a combination of them, and a few suffer from all those factors which are unfortunate as they were set-up to be among the better scenes until the flaws kicked in. The last flaw here is the film's incredibly stupid ending, which has almost nothing right going for it and is just all-around bad, no matter how it's looked at. These here are the film's bad points.

Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.