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.

'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.

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")

One person commented Webs, raises the issue of, "If you could do it, should you?" And that might be just a little beyond its creator's true intentions but it does speak to a lot of the negative comments. Is Webs a bad movie? Is it low budget? Are the Actors second rate? You bet and I hope they never stop making movies like this.

Webs was made for TV, something important to keep in mind. I'd rather watch Webs over and over again than sit through any Sitcom crap, any unreal reality show or the next big Cop/Doctor/Lawyer Crapfest. Webs wasn't made to take your attention away from big blockbuster movies. Lets compare apples with apples.

Is Webs like Sliders? Well, yes in TV land, like Sliders, Webs is a sort of a Sci Fi film and it does involve dimensional travel but I'm smart enough to know I'm not watching a lost episode of sliders. I thought Webs dealt with the idea of despair and made the alternate Chicago seem like a place of lost hope. Sliders took us to some strange places but it always felt like we were just passing through waiting for the top of the hour to go some place else. In looking for faults, Webs has too many cookie cutter characters where you can remember their traits far easier than their names. There's the guy in peril controlled by greed and the doubting suspicious enforcer. There isn't much excuse for flat characters with fewer dimensions than the setting but, like the plot holes pointed out by others, it just comes down to bad writing. Just remember life is full of plot holes. My eight-year-old boy asks questions about our world that would take more time than you, me and Richard Grieco have left in our lives.

It all comes down to this. If DVD be damned and all we have is PVRs in our dimension, Webs would earn a spot on my hard drive right beside CSI: Baghdad. God help us.

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)