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Reviews
Dark Queen (2004)
More proof that reality show contestants don't make for the best actors.
So what specific Mr. Hyde-like effects does drinking the psychic brain fluid from a mass murderer have on the bookish lady scientist, you ask? For starters, she magically develops dark blue eye shadow, red lipstick, rouge on her cheeks, and silver nail polish. It corrects her vision so that she no longer needs those bookish glasses. It inspires her to let her hair down and dress in a leather two-piece number so that she looks like someone at a Xena convention. She develops the ability to wield unspecified and unexplained blasts of light. Most importantly, she develops the personality of a megalomaniac sex kitten capable of controlling the minds of others and has a psychic link to the mass murderer, who actively encourages her new persona to aid him in his quest to destroy the very fabric of human civilization. That's some formula, huh?
Dark Queen is an astoundingly bad take on the traditional Jeckyll and Hyde theme that is practically boiling over with laughably bad acting and howlingly bad dialogue. If not for the occasional moments of stupefying badness, there would be absolutely nothing redeeming about the movie whatsoever. It's just dreadful on every level. The script is total gibberish, the directing is utterly lifeless, the acting is embarrassingly amateurish, and the quality of the production values often go back and forth between looking professional and looking like a public access television production. Even though Dark Queen was obviously meant to be campy that still doesn't change the fact that the only really amusing moments are so for unintentional reasons.
Okay, the movie does have one other thing going for it breasts. Then again, even though just about every major female character pops her top at least once there's still a shocking lack of sex in this movie, and that strikes me as being especially odd since the plot is seemingly tailor made for a film of the Cinemax After Dark variety. It just feels like it should constantly devolve into soft core sex scenes that go on for several minutes at a time. I wish it did, not just to see ample flesh bumping and grinding but also because it would have cut down on the seemingly endless amount of dull talky scenes and general lameness of the production. This is a movie with very little action going on and not just of the sexy variety.
Sasquatch Hunters (2005)
Quite possibly the most boring Bigfoot flick ever made.
There have been many movies featuring Bigfoot, the majority of which are not good but most at least have a goofy charm to them. Sasquatch Hunters doesn't even have that going for it. It's just a crashing bore.
Sasquatch Hunters is about a group of paleontologists, primatologists, and forest rangers that venture off into a remote part of a Pacific Northwest forest. Bones belonging to some sort of abnormally large primate have been discovered in this region and since apes aren't natural to North America to begin with this leads to a scientific expedition. Sure enough, they soon discover a whole burial ground full of the skeletal remains of these enormous ape-like creatures. I think we all know what happens to people that disturb ancient burial grounds in the movies.
The first half of the movie consists of uninteresting, interchangeable characters assembling their gear, hiking through the woods, stopping to rest, hiking through the woods some more, pausing long enough to investigate and discuss a few findings along the way, yet more hiking through the woods, looking for a group member that has vanished, even more hiking through the woods, digging through dirt, random theorizing, and gathering around a campfire to discuss what little they've done that day. When Sasquatch finally shows up it just turns into people stumbling around in the dark while being picked off one at a time (done in a blink and you missed it fashion and the actual killing occurs off-camera). All of this is excruciatingly boring.
The movie wants to be taken seriously and the director is clearly trying to build suspense but there is none to be found, thus we are left with dull, drawn out scenes of people wandering around the woods just to get somewhere and wander around the woods at night trying to act scared. I'd be lying if I said I didn't make liberal use of the fast forward button to speed these scenes up.
As for Sasquatch himself, much like every other character else in the movie, it doesn't have much to do and lacks a distinct personality. It looks like a shaggier version of King Kong, which isn't all that bad except in the scenes where they used CGI instead of a man in a Bigfoot costume, which is painfully obvious during the daylight monster scenes. A part of me can't help but feel that even using computer effects to bring Bigfoot to life is a tad sacrilegious. If there is any single movie monster that I believe should only be brought to life through situation, it's Bigfoot.
This is one of those movies that doesn't so much have a plot as it does a premise. That's all it really is, a premise, which the people involved stretched out to make a feature length motion picture without bothering to add all the ingredients to make a worthwhile movie.
The Snake King (2005)
Snake King - The New King of Awful Giant Snake Movies!
Someone at the Sci-Fi Channel must have thought making a movie about a giant, five-headed snake in the Amazon would make for a nifty monster movie. It probably could have if it hadn't been for the fact that the giant, five-headed snake is so huge that we generally only see one, two, or three heads on the screen at any given time. That is until the climax of the movie when all five are finally shown, albeit briefly, and even then you never really get a full body view of the creature to figure out how everything is interconnected. The movie establishes that the snake has a tail so they can't use the excuse of it having heads at both ends. I want to know where the hell the fourth and fifth heads disappeared to for the first three quarters of the movie. Were they on a smoke break? Were they given conscientious objector status for refusing to take part in the killing if innocent people? Were they off auditioning for a role in Python 3?
Oh, but wait, there are still more problems with the giant, five-headed snake. Despite the fact that it appears to be big enough to give Godzilla a heck of a fight, this colossal, multi-headed snake is still able to hide undetected in the jungle brush until it's too late. The noise it makes when slithering through the jungle is minimal and keep in mind we are talking about an enormous monster with five-heads, each at least the size of an automobile. If it wasn't constantly roaring (This snake doesn't hiss. It roars.), then it would barely generate any noise at all. People are constantly running away before coming to a stop and looking up just in time for one of the heads to lurch down and nab them. Despite being gigantic it still consistently managed to not only move around unseen, it actually sneaks up on people.
And if that wasn't enough, there are some serious continuity issues regarding the giant, five-headed snakes' size. It appears to suffer from Deep Star Six syndrome, and by that I mean its size changes depending on what is required of it in the scene. This is highlighted in the climax set inside its lair where it seems to shrink and enlarge at random. Each head is the size of an automobile and its cave entrance only appears big enough to fit one head and neck at a time so we don't even get an explanation as to how the thing even manages to get inside this cave chamber to begin with. Heck, at one point, this gargantuan serpent even manages to hide underwater in a small river just waiting to spring out and surprise someone. Good grief!
These are just the problems with the monster. And don't argue suspension of disbelief because there is a huge difference between suspension of disbelief and insulting one's intelligence. Worst of all, the CGI used to bring the giant, five-headed snake is some of the least convincing I've ever seen in a Sci-Fi Channel movie, and believe me, that is really saying something.
The fact that the monster turned out to be such a conceptual catastrophe is kind of a good thing because I'd hate to see a potentially cool movie monster wasted on a production as lame, formulaic, and downright dull as this stinker was. A complete waste of time and energy.