Take the monsters out of the plot and you might have had a good adventure story, the sort of things we used to see on Saturday afternoons. Oh well, the monsters were a good addition to the plot anyway. Wait . . . did I just say "plot"? I did, didn't I? Oops, my mistake. This was yet another fill-in-the-blank story that managed to offer a few surprises but not many.
Our hero is taken hostage by some French terrorists (insert joke here) who hold his wife and children captive while he is forced to lead a group of them through an abandoned mine in search of a fortune in emeralds allegedly buried there. Now right away you know there are going to be problems and the problem in this movie is:
A. Personality clashes
B. Cave-ins
C. Giant prehistoric Rhinoceros Beetles
D. Bad special effects
E. Bad acting
Did you say "all of the above"? Good! You obviously know what to expect from movies like this. The leader of the terrorists is such an unlikable crumb you just know something really awful is going to happen to him and sure enough, it does! The gun toting psychopath named Marcel who is holding the hero's wife and daughter hostage is just as bad and meets an equally awful fate after he has been in the picture long enough for the audience to really get to hate him.
The giant beetles, and there are loads of them, are fairly well rendered but when they attack you get the feeling you are not watching a movie but a video game. Several of the monsters have a tendency to explode when hit by high velocity bullets and you could almost see a score getting progressively higher in the upper right hand corner of the screen if you use your imagination. CGI effects like these will never replace stop motion animation; at least not in my opinion.
So is this movie good? I've seen better, LOTS better!
