Well, it's a new experience to watch a movie for the first time and be able to recite the dialogue before the actors say their lines. This movie shares the exact same plot, and about 10 pages of the script, with the movie Curse of the Komodo. The trouble is, Curse is one of the better B-movies I've seen, with excellent characters, a fun story, nice locations, and big breasted babes galore. This movie may or may not be good on its own, I don't know; I spent the whole time noticing how unfavorably it compared to it's predecessor. It didn't help that one of the leads in Curse had a small part in this movie, and he served as a constant reminder of how much personality those characters had, and how little everyone has in this film. It really kept me from enjoying this film.
The story is fairly interesting overall. A group of H.G. Wells type tripods (or quadrupods in this case) are stomping around on an island, terrorizing the survivors of a plane crash and the military guys sent in to rescue them. The A.I. critters are done fairly well considering they're obvious CGI. I thought they added a nice '50 charm to the movie. Same with the cheesy '80s theme music, it reminded me a bit of Chopping Mall. Wynorski is a master of getting the most out of what he's got, and his cutting back and forth to the military commanders in Pearl Harbor keeps things moving every time the action starts to get a bit slow. The movie is chock full of the usual B-movie silliness - people firing 150 shots from a pistol without reloading, military guys standing right in front of the killer A.I. critters and firing another 150 shots without reloading, while the A.I. things can't seem to hit them with its lasers, but it can hit somebody else 100 yards away. Or the A.I. robot chasing a pickup, getting to within about 20 feet of it, but then the pickup pulls over to let the passengers off and the A.I. is nowhere to be seen. That stuff doesn't bother me, it's all B-movie goodness. I was just impressed to see that the F-16's DIDN'T change into F-14's in every other shot like they did in Curse of the Komodo. The main problem for me was the characters - they're just not very interesting. None of them distinguish themselves as anything more than the standard clichés. Maybe that was just because I was making the inevitable comparison to the really excellent characters in the previous movie; I don't know. The big climax at the end at least had a bit of originality to it, it wasn't just the usual large explosion that every Sci-Fi Channel original movie ends with.
Overall, for a Sci-Fi Channel original, it wasn't too bad. I'd say it rates in the top 20 or 30 percent of their output. It needed more boobs though.
The story is fairly interesting overall. A group of H.G. Wells type tripods (or quadrupods in this case) are stomping around on an island, terrorizing the survivors of a plane crash and the military guys sent in to rescue them. The A.I. critters are done fairly well considering they're obvious CGI. I thought they added a nice '50 charm to the movie. Same with the cheesy '80s theme music, it reminded me a bit of Chopping Mall. Wynorski is a master of getting the most out of what he's got, and his cutting back and forth to the military commanders in Pearl Harbor keeps things moving every time the action starts to get a bit slow. The movie is chock full of the usual B-movie silliness - people firing 150 shots from a pistol without reloading, military guys standing right in front of the killer A.I. critters and firing another 150 shots without reloading, while the A.I. things can't seem to hit them with its lasers, but it can hit somebody else 100 yards away. Or the A.I. robot chasing a pickup, getting to within about 20 feet of it, but then the pickup pulls over to let the passengers off and the A.I. is nowhere to be seen. That stuff doesn't bother me, it's all B-movie goodness. I was just impressed to see that the F-16's DIDN'T change into F-14's in every other shot like they did in Curse of the Komodo. The main problem for me was the characters - they're just not very interesting. None of them distinguish themselves as anything more than the standard clichés. Maybe that was just because I was making the inevitable comparison to the really excellent characters in the previous movie; I don't know. The big climax at the end at least had a bit of originality to it, it wasn't just the usual large explosion that every Sci-Fi Channel original movie ends with.
Overall, for a Sci-Fi Channel original, it wasn't too bad. I'd say it rates in the top 20 or 30 percent of their output. It needed more boobs though.