The Rig

During a tropical storm, an assortment of badly written crew characters must deal with the rough weather as well as a mysterious creature who finds itself aboard the rig. Whenever 4 or more writers work on the same movie script, it's usually not a great sign (if said film is an anthology that rule doesn't apply, but this is not the case here) The plot is trite, the characters somehow cliché and bland at the same time, and the film as a whole is not nearly entertaining enough to make the huge detriments ignorable. An extremely dreary mess, avoid it.

My Grade: D-

Eye Candy: Carman Perez gets topless

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.

THE RIG is another nondescript monster-on-the-loose story, made foul by an almost non-existent budget and a distinct lack of imagination. Indeed, the paucity of creative energy is evident in this film's paint-by-numbers script, which tells exactly the same kind of story as has already been done dozens of times before by better directors with bigger budgets.

In this one, the crew of an oil rig find themselves menaced by a monster from the ocean floor, although there aren't many explanations on offer. It all boils down to a man in a rubber suit – or what looks like a child in this case – running around and killing overacting cast members in slapdash ways. Attempts at poverty-row gore effects are pitiful and the acting from the no name cast is even worse, not that it mattered when the characters are so clichéd to begin with. The only actors I recognised were THE BRING remake's Art LaFleur and OUT FOR JUSTICE's William Forsythe, neither or whom can readily be described as stars.

In the end, the things that really bring THE RIG down are the lack of money and the lack of experience on the part of the director. It just looks cheap and cheesy throughout, and not in a good way. There are no surprises, no well-directed scenes of suspense or action, just a mindless mess of watered-down and hackneyed scenarios done before and better.

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.