Surviving Evil

Once again, various characters face a mystery the audience is already fully aware of the resolution of, prompting another movie that delivers little suspense or mystery.

The monsters are shapeshifters, capable of transforming into any creature, which in a jungle setting like this would provide excellent paranoia fuel. This gets wasted entirely, however, as animals barely appear on screen with the characters. Incidentally, the monsters rarely use these abilities in attacking their victims anyways.

Obviously it takes more than one actor to contribute anything worthwhile, and Billy Zane can only contribute slightly to a film with nothing else going for it. Even worse the monsters have almost no presence and aside from the times characters find evidence of their existence, it's as if nothing is happening.

I'm with you on your review. I didn't understand the ending, it was vague. Did you?

I'm a fan of Billy Zane, in fact I'd go as far as to say I'm a big fan of his so it always pains me to see him in movies like this. The man has the acting chops and natural comedic timing so should be gracing our screens in high budget efforts not things like this.

Telling the story of a famous television survivalist and his film crew visiting a Phillipino island full of nasty creatures that funnily enough ruin their shoot.

The movie has little in the way of originality but does certainly have its moments. It's weakness besides the fact we've seen it all before is a dreadful ending which damages the entire film. Not sure if they did that ending because they expected to make a sequel, but that was very naive if the case.

Surviving Evil is a watchable piece with a decent enough cast and surprisingly decent sfx considering its budget but just pretend the film ends five minutes before the end.

The Good:

Billy Zane

Looks the part

The Bad:

Beyond dumb ending

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

The creators had no clue of the weight of gold

The sanscript name for Jungle is Jungala

Set on the remote Mayaman Island in the Philippines, comes the story of six documentary filmmakers, who plan to spend six days shooting a survival special until they find out the island they perceived as uninhabited, reveals to have a Philippine folklore creature, the Aswang, lusting for their blood. The plot itself is intriguing. 6 people, a deserted island, and a mythical legend about a superior creature that looms over them. You can't go wrong with that, but somehow "Surviving Evil" didn't fully pull out all the stops when they had the chance.

I thought the cast was finely assembled. The performances of the actors were, for the most part, solid. Besides the atmosphere which was well established and the aerial shots of the island being beautiful, the acting came in as an added bonus. The characters all had their own conflicts affecting their lives, but the film makes a mistake spending over 40 minutes to flesh out these characters in their setting, leaving the creature to roar in hunger in the background. It just took way too long for the suspense to build up and nearing the end of the film, it felt like it was rushed to squeeze in a few things. And don't even get me started on that "to be continued" TV show episode ending. I surely hope they intend to make a sequel, because the ending is lousy.

All in all, "Surviving Evil" is decent horror worth a watch. You'll probably be exhausted with it for at least 30-40 minutes due to the lengthy character build-up taking away too much from the action to even begin, but when they deliver the last 90 minutes, it's pretty action packed. The directing and script may not be perfect; however, it's more than tolerable. Give the movie a shot. Sit back, relax and enjoy it.

I grew up with the stories of the "Aswang", which is a mythical creature in Philippine folklore. (The Aswang is an inherently evil vampire-like creature and is the subject of a wide variety of myths and stories, the details of which vary greatly.) Knowing this, I was expecting a great deal from the movie.

The opening scene was fairly decent and stoked me up for what should be coming next. Unfortunately, I was sadly disappointed with too much unnecessary dialogue that made the movie a bit of a drag to watch after the first part.

To make a brief enumeration, the story had a lot of potential. I believe they could have made this into a really good horror movie since the concept of the folklore has its own charm.

All the actors had to be given credit for doing a superb job on such an obviously meager script. If they did one thing right, it's picking out the cast in this film.

Now, the background music/sound effects reminded me of Vincent Price for some reason. Which I found a bit funny since the cinematography is like watching something from the 70's. I'm thinking, it's either something deliberate for effect or just a result of having a low budget.

Things pick up, though, near the end. Unfortunately, even then, there wasn't much focus on the Aswangs and their shape-shifting prowess. This could have been precious fodder for making a great horror story and messing with viewer's minds.

Overall, it's not THAT bad, but it's not something I would watch again.