Snake Head Terror

The gang at MST3K would have had a field day with this movie. It has it all: bad plot, bad directing, bad effects, bad acting, and famous faces. With Bruce Boxleitner, William B. Davis and Carol Alt, the number of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, X-Files and supermodel jokes are endless (not to mention Babylon 5 and Tron). To be fair to Boxleitner, his acting was fine, but the number of long, drawn out scenes of him driving up and parking his car are worthy of ridicule, MST-style.

As has been noted, this movie rips off every other "animal attacks" movie ever made. Every cliché is here:

• Mutant "man made" monster: check

• Local sheriff: check

• Sheriff's child in peril: check

• Unconcerned politician: check

• New love interest partner: check

• Goofy teenagers: check

• Slow attacks that escalate without reason: check

• Illogical and downright stupid behavior of every human: check

• Dumb monsters that show intelligence for plot reasons: check

• Improbably, yet highly effective single solution: check

Actually there was one cliché that I either missed, or they just didn't do, but that's the "the end?" ending where something survived. Maybe I just stopped watching too soon.

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.

Nothing trumpets a movie's irrelevance louder than the inability to remember anything about it a mere few weeks after watching it. Seriously, when I started to review this I had to stop and recall whether or not I'd actually watched it yet. I thought I had, but I couldn't remember a thing about it. I finally found my notes and after reading through them all the craptitude came flooding back. I wish I had just kept those memories hidden in the recesses of my mind. Kind of like the "gym teacher incident" of '88.

This actually isn't as putrid as you might expect. But please don't take that statement as an endorsement of any kind. It's just one of those generic, low-budget movies that manages to avoid being horrible but is just too mediocre to be any fun.

There are a few moments of unintentional hilarity though. You gotta love when a teenager gets killed and his friends immediately vow revenge on the sea creature that introduced their buddy to his demise. Within a couple of minutes they're laughing and bumping fists as they set out to "even the score." Good job of completing bypassing the mourning period, guys! I'm sure y'all will have no problem defeating some creature (on his own territory, no less) that has the capability of killing humans.

Note to my friends: if you're ever killed by a shark or something then I hope you'll understand if I don't dive in the water and attempt to take the thing on by myself. I'll have to defer to the proper authorities in that case. Nothing personal.

I think my favorite part is when the teenagers are in a boat and one of the girls shoots at a snakehead fish but she shoots the engine of another boat instead, causing an explosion that kills one of her friends.

The remaining friends vowed revenge on her, laughed, and bumped fists. Or not.

Oh, and Carol Alt is another in a long line of hot biologists in bad monster movies. Gotta love the reliance on such clichés!

Welp, that's about it. The movie bored me, this review is boring me, and there's really not much else to say about it. Skip this one. I guarantee you that watching it will not add anything positive to your life. You won't be entertained, you won't walk away a better person, and you won't tell anybody, "You know, I'm really glad I watched Snakehead Terror." I simply cannot think of a single reason this might be worthy of 90 precious minutes.

THE GIST

If you happen to see this on TV one day then I highly recommend that you just keep on flippin'. I've seen worse, but this simply has nothing to offer. It's only for those of you who are really desperate for a bad movie.

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 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.