Fire Wasps - L'ultime fléau

The entomologist Gina Humphries (Dominika Juillet) travels to Central America with her best friend and also entomologist Rhonda Guiterrez (Nikolette Noel) with a hidden agenda: she expects to find her father, the scientist Dr. Humphries (David Stasko) that vanished in the jungle. When an acquaintance finds his backpack with a footage inside, Gina discloses her intention to Rhonda and they travel to search for her father.

They drive a Jeep and Gina convinces the military John Hammond (Corin Nemec) to help them in their search with his team. Along their journey, they fight against the drug dealer and voodoo sorcerer Jaguar (Gildon Roland). But soon they discover that in the spot there are huge mutant dragon wasps that spit fire but Gina expects to find her father alive.

The lame and corny "Dragon Wasps" is among the worst movies I have seen. The moronic storyline is awful; the acting and dialogs do not exist; and the CGI is ridiculous. It is laughable to see the two wooden scientists wearing shorts in a tropical jungle (and they are not hot). The lines and the attitude of Corin Nemec are idiotic. Hammond seeks out the drug dealer that he and his team have battled a couple of hours ago to ask him to help his pal. He drinks the spirits with drugs offered by his enemy. He lets the soldier shoot the drug dealers with his men tied to a wall to be fusilladed by the criminals. He sacrifices his life to try to save one man that might be dead in the hive. There are so many stupidities in this movie that I would spend too much time and space to list all of them. My vote is one (awful).

Title (Brazil): "Terror Tropical" ("Tropical Terror")

This is a b-movie. Everything about it screams b-movie, from the title over the cast to the fact that it's a movie about giant wasps that breathe fire! You should obviously not expect this to be a polished high-budget Hollywood blockbuster. Anyone with such expectations will be sorely disappointed, and perhaps even angry. Nope, this is a b-movie, and its qualities lie in its absurdity, flaws, and general charm. That's just the way it is with b-movies - that's what we watch them for.

The set-up is quite simple and straightforward. A mysterious research organization called Transgen Tech have been conducting genetic experiments in the jungles of Belize, which have now gone wrong and resulted in the rise of a mutant breed of giant wasps. When one of the scientists goes missing, his daughter, the archaeologist Gina (Dominika Juillet), and her friend Rhonda (Nikolette Noel) set out to find him. They team up with a group of American soldiers under the command of John Hammond (Corin Nemec) and Willy Meyers (Benjamin Easterday). The group must not only face the giant wasps, but also fight off the voodoo-practicing drug-runner Jaguar (Gildon Roland) and his gang of cannibalistic guerrillas.

With a set-up like this, the scene is set of a cliché-filled action film falling under the rubric of tropical horror. Featuring bizarre rituals, implausible science, explosions, shoot-outs, exploding heads, and wasps emerging through cavities of the human face, there is actually plenty of entertainment in this movie, which in part also owes to its fairly consistent and appealing pacing. Things never slow down too much, although there are quieter moments. Obviously, the action sequences are not all equally convincing, and the film arguably features one of the worst ever rescue missions ever in film history. The CGI-effects are, as you might expect, not very good. The depiction of wasps in flight is particularly bad, and the best CGI-rendering of a wasp is, ironically enough, encountered during the final credits.

The acting is one-dimensional across the board, but nothing else should be expected from this type of movie. Corin Nemec does a pretty good job as the film's grizzled male lead, while Benjamin Easterday successfully manages to portray the character he plays as a sympathetic and loyal person. Gildon Roland's extremely one-dimensional yet very intense portrayal of Jaguar, the main antagonist, evokes a creepiness which is just perfect for the character. Dominika Juillet and Nikolette Noel, in contrast, deliver wooden and unconvincing acting, which at times is near-robotic and at times just awkward. Of course, it doesn't help that their characters are supposed to be archaeologists when they actually look like participants in a third rate reality TV show. The dialog is, of course, completely cheesy, and, not surprisingly, not all actors are equally successful at working with such silly dialog.

At the end of the day, "Dragon Wasps" is flawed in several ways, and you should not expect a realistic film in any way. It is silly, cheesy, and charming. It has everything a b-movie should have, and fans of such movies are bound to have a fun time. I mean, it's fire-breathing wasps after all!

Knee, Atkins, and Jordan do nothing more than earn their Hitler worship merit badge with the same old "kill all brunettes and make men depressed" theme that these movies always give us.

It's supposed to be about giant wasps, but it's hard to even go there, because of the neo Nazi preaching the director and writer team give us.

Just no fun in this, no strategy, no inspiration, except for Nazis, and those vindictive sorts who can't stand the jilting from brunettes they get all their lives.

After learning of her father's disappearance in the Amazon jungle while working on secret research projects, a woman and her friend enlist a group of soldiers to help them only to find their work on mutated wasps has produced fire-breathing creatures infesting the area.

This was pretty much another typical Sci-Fi Channel creature feature, so this one's pretty obvious about itself quite early and often. With the creatures' appearing to be the same bland and totally fake CGI that at least has the decency to give them a bright color design to somewhat hide the fakery, yet whenever there's a close-up of them it diminishes almost immediately. There's also the simplistic plot done hundreds of times over without variation or the rather mundane pace that deals with outside areas other than the bugs to take up the majority of the running time, thereby reducing the confrontations and interactions with the creatures and reducing the gore quotient considerably. That said, the few action scenes present are a lot of fun, generate some pretty interesting scenes within and are full of pretty wild scenarios. Of course, the finale is a bit of fun, full of explosions, gunfire-riddled shootouts and the application of one of the movie's best qualities as it uses a rather novel idea against the creatures, generating a bit of smarts in an otherwise mundane effort. All in all, it's about the same as would be expected in such an effort.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Language.

Initially you already know what this movie will be like before you watch it, as it has low-budget monster movie written all over it. And on that aspect "Dragon Wasps" truly delivers. On all other aspects, not so much.

The story in "Dragon Wasps" is fairly generic and straight forward for a movie of this caliber. A mysterious genetic research company has been experimenting with mutations and of course something has gone horribly wrong. A scientist has gone missing in the jungle, and his daughter and her best friend venture there to find him. They encounter some American soldiers who drop all they are doing to help the two civilians go looking for a single man in the vast jungle. Cannibal locals and giant, mutated wasps all prove to be in the way for their search and rescue mission.

The effects in the movie were, well, laughable. Badly animated CGI wasps that looked anything but real. And to make matters even more 'interesting' then these wasps were able to breathe fire. Yeah, breathe fire, why not? But of course, the creature effects, as you might have guessed, is almost bound by law to be bad in these kind of movies. But moving on, there was a gun fight between the soldiers and the cannibals, where the American soldiers were pinned down at their truck. A lot of shots were fired and hit the truck, resulting in CGI animated sparks here and there, but get this, there were no bullet holes. I wonder what kind of dissolving bullets they were using.

Let's move on to the acting. Most of the acting was half-hearted or even uninspiring, as if some of the people in the movie were just there because there was nothing else available. Much can be said for Corin Nemec, who both starred and co-produced this movie, but he actually did a fairly good acting job in this movie compared to some of the countless other movies he had been in.

There isn't much to keep this movie afloat, and as such it becomes a rather boring and dull movie experience. There was a single moment where the movie shined, where one of the soldiers was making fun at Corin Nemec by mentioning some of the questionable movies he has been in. That was actually a great and funny moment. Always good with some self-irony!