Heebie Jeebies

I used to love lightweight horror comedies like "Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein." Those movies while funny, had just enough dread to scare me as a kid. Some SyFy movies appeal to me in the same way, only the acting and effects often suck, to a certain extent.

How does one rate these types of movies fairly? None are masterpieces, but some, like Heebie Jeebies, can keep you watching to the end.

This is one of those movies. The characters meet satisfying ends and several are actually likeable. If it wasn't so dang gory, it might even be fin to watch with your 9 or 10 year old, and seeing how they react to that horrible, but original monster. So I gave it a 6, because the ending satisfied me very much, and I left feeling a certain way. A "6" is about as high as I can go with SyFy movies.

Was this a SyFy Original? The production info doesn't mention, but this has Syfy written all over it: terrible acting, hilariously bad dialogue, weak plot, poorly developed characters and a godawful CGI monster. In truth, the monster is one of the messiest creatures I've ever seem. The design is already bad enough, but the awful CGI and the clumsy way it moves on-screen made me laugh way too much. It is a refreshment to see something besides the usual giant animal/hybrids, but c'mon!

As often with SyFy pictures, this falls in the 'so bad it's funny' kind of film. The combination of SyFy's usual terrible dialogue/acting makes most of the scenes funny enough to be watchable, especially with the likable Robert Belushi and the delightful Cathy Shim. However, it's Michael Badalucco that steals the show with his over-the-top acting and cheesy one-liners.

This little Z-movie (it still has a long way to go to become even a B one) is just your usual SyFy film: ambitious, somewhat likable in its badness, but overall you can easily find something better.

Could be the worst movie monster ever. And some of the worst acting ever. But the cheesiness of it made me stick around until the end.

When you think of SyFy, you think terrible acting and writing, amateurish-looking special effects, bad visuals and stories that don't grab you. Heebie Jeebies does have most of those things, but for SyFy it is a long way from being bottom-of-the-barrel. The acting is much better than anticipated, Robert Belushi is a good lead and Cathy Shim is astonishingly beautiful which does hold your attention(most of the ladies fare the same). The scenery and most of the photography is pretty and atmospheric, the gore is pretty good and the music is a rise above the often generic and sluggish-sounding music SyFy is prone to, not great but okay. However, some of the editing is to fast-moving and choppy, not all the time but in too many places. The monster is also the primary reason why Heebie Jeebies is as weird as it is, the design is unique but also very bizarre and somewhat amateurish too. The monster itself is uninteresting with little menace or personality. The dialogue is not that much different from most SyFy movies, the snappy parts come off as forced and cheesy and the more dramatic ones falling into hammy melodrama quality. It does also do a poor job developing the characters with none of them coming off as interesting. The story can get on the silly side- which is often too ridiculous and weird to be properly fun- but there is not much that is really exciting, fun or suspenseful about it(even for a movie that is clearly not meant to be taken seriously). The sense of terror is absent as are the thrills, the horror elements are rather schlocky as well, and the second half takes far too much time on the less important characters, none of them attention-grabbing and some even pointless. The death/attack scenes are handled in a very by-the-numbers way and are somewhat repetitive, the variation in how the monster kills ranges from very little to none. Overall, weird and not particularly good but there has been much worse from SyFy. Worth a look for curiosity and novelty value but not much beyond that, hardly a must watch or must rent. 3/10 Bethany Cox

Surprisingly enough, then "Heebie Jeebies" actually turned out to be rather entertaining - campy and cheesy, yes, but entertaining still.

The story is about some kind of mutated creature fused of several dead gold miners that becomes freed from its entrapment in the mine by accident when someone mine through a wall to it. The creature sets out to kill people in search for gold, and the town of Golderton is in dire peril. It is up to the local police to put an end to the monstrosity.

Sure, this was textbook material, but it was fun to watch and enjoyable. The storyline was predictable, as it usually is with these type of monster movies.

Aside from being poorly animated and comprised of questionable CGI, then the creature was nice in concept and interesting enough to look at on the screen. Although one does wonder if two strikes with a mining pick axe could free it from behind the wall, why didn't the creature just slam down the wall itself to begin with?

And if you are purchasing gold, why would you set up store at an old, abandoned mine outside of town? That just didn't make any sense for Billy Butler (played by Michael Badalucco) to have his business out there.

For an officer of the law, then sheriff Tatum (played by Carl Savering) wasn't particularly bright. I mean, when they picked up the video camera from the carnage scene at the gold mine (tinkering with a crime scene here in the worst way possible) and they looked through the footage, even though the image was blurred, you could still see a man-like creature with multiple heads. Then just how in the name of all that is unholy, could the sheriff say to the hunters that it was either a bear or massive feral boar? That was just the most stupid comment in the entire movie.

I will say that the creature design was really one of the most interesting and promising aspects of the movie. And I thoroughly enjoyed this particular monster on the screen. Great design and appearance, just a shame that the CGI effects were a bit shoddy at times. With a bigger CGI budget, then "Heebie Jeebies" could really have excelled and been that much more interesting.

The people on the cast list were doing good jobs with their given roles and characters, and it seemed that people had fun making this movie. And this level of acting really helped the movie along quite nicely.

Despite its predictability, questionable CGI and obvious plot and story holes, then "Heebie Jeebies" is actually worth sitting down to watch, especially if you enjoy low budget monster movies.