Snakehead Terror

The gang at MST3K would have had a field day with this movie. It has it all: bad plot, bad directing, bad effects, bad acting, and famous faces. With Bruce Boxleitner, William B. Davis and Carol Alt, the number of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, X-Files and supermodel jokes are endless (not to mention Babylon 5 and Tron). To be fair to Boxleitner, his acting was fine, but the number of long, drawn out scenes of him driving up and parking his car are worthy of ridicule, MST-style.

As has been noted, this movie rips off every other "animal attacks" movie ever made. Every cliché is here:

• Mutant "man made" monster: check

• Local sheriff: check

• Sheriff's child in peril: check

• Unconcerned politician: check

• New love interest partner: check

• Goofy teenagers: check

• Slow attacks that escalate without reason: check

• Illogical and downright stupid behavior of every human: check

• Dumb monsters that show intelligence for plot reasons: check

• Improbably, yet highly effective single solution: check

Actually there was one cliché that I either missed, or they just didn't do, but that's the "the end?" ending where something survived. Maybe I just stopped watching too soon.

Nothing trumpets a movie's irrelevance louder than the inability to remember anything about it a mere few weeks after watching it. Seriously, when I started to review this I had to stop and recall whether or not I'd actually watched it yet. I thought I had, but I couldn't remember a thing about it. I finally found my notes and after reading through them all the craptitude came flooding back. I wish I had just kept those memories hidden in the recesses of my mind. Kind of like the "gym teacher incident" of '88.

This actually isn't as putrid as you might expect. But please don't take that statement as an endorsement of any kind. It's just one of those generic, low-budget movies that manages to avoid being horrible but is just too mediocre to be any fun.

There are a few moments of unintentional hilarity though. You gotta love when a teenager gets killed and his friends immediately vow revenge on the sea creature that introduced their buddy to his demise. Within a couple of minutes they're laughing and bumping fists as they set out to "even the score." Good job of completing bypassing the mourning period, guys! I'm sure y'all will have no problem defeating some creature (on his own territory, no less) that has the capability of killing humans.

Note to my friends: if you're ever killed by a shark or something then I hope you'll understand if I don't dive in the water and attempt to take the thing on by myself. I'll have to defer to the proper authorities in that case. Nothing personal.

I think my favorite part is when the teenagers are in a boat and one of the girls shoots at a snakehead fish but she shoots the engine of another boat instead, causing an explosion that kills one of her friends.

The remaining friends vowed revenge on her, laughed, and bumped fists. Or not.

Oh, and Carol Alt is another in a long line of hot biologists in bad monster movies. Gotta love the reliance on such clichés!

Welp, that's about it. The movie bored me, this review is boring me, and there's really not much else to say about it. Skip this one. I guarantee you that watching it will not add anything positive to your life. You won't be entertained, you won't walk away a better person, and you won't tell anybody, "You know, I'm really glad I watched Snakehead Terror." I simply cannot think of a single reason this might be worthy of 90 precious minutes.

THE GIST

If you happen to see this on TV one day then I highly recommend that you just keep on flippin'. I've seen worse, but this simply has nothing to offer. It's only for those of you who are really desperate for a bad movie.

I watched Snakehead Terror mostly because I'm a big fan of Bruce Boxleitner.

Wow. Does he need money this badly? The premise wasn't bad. A small town's economy is ruined by nasty snakehead fish, their lake is poisoned to kill the nasty vermin, and the town is slow to recover. The film opens with a man and his dog finding a somewhat chewed up bear on the shores of the lake, the dog running into the lake to bark at snakehead fish and the guy going into the water to save his dog. Naturally both man and dog are eaten.

If I had found the dead bear, I would have run away.

Anyway, once you actually SEE the things and notice that the fish only crawl about 0.0005 miles per hour you wonder how come no one runs away, screaming into the night or even day? I mean I can understand the fish swimming quickly in the water, but on land? I could still outrun those things even if both my legs were missing and I had only the use of my left hand.

Bruce plays the sheriff of this under-economized town and his teenaged daughter's boyfriend is killed when he is eaten by the nasty fish and Bruce wants to immediately close the lake. Of course, no one listens and the lake remains open. Then he contacts the wildlife division and they send out Carol Alt who then determines the cause of the boy's death are snakeheads. Still, no one listens. Of course, what happens next is predictable, the news leaks out, and suddenly there are bounty hunters searching for the deadly snakeheads. And of course, teenagers who never listen, go on the lake seeking revenge for the death of their friend. Like a snakehead cares.

It turns out that the town's coroner has been giving his brother large quantities of growth hormone to help encourage the growth of the lake's natural fish but unfortunately all it did was make the snakeheads grow to enormous size and they HISS, SNARL, GROWL and I swear, they bark at you too.

These things are huge with appetites to match. The CGI was not very good but the gore was incredibly....well...gory. Bits and pieces of flesh flying about, blood spurting, limbs being ripped off, it was like watching me in the kitchen vainly trying to cut up a piece of meat for dinner.

Watching this movie made me decide on a couple of things (a) not to live on a lake (b) not to have teenagers, and (c) maybe give up sushi. It's an entertaining movie, better than most I've seen on the sci fi channel and believe it or not, more than 2 people actually survive. That was a relief. In a way.

mostly pedestrian directing, acting and production, but not bad for a sci-fi channel Saturday night flick.

a small fishing town is overrun with huge, crawling. killer snakeheads (how do they continue to come up with the killer animal of the week??) and it's up to the sheriff and an aging fashion model with some type of wildlife credentials to save the day. a side plot follows the sheriff's daughter and her friends fighting to keep one step ahead of the crawling monsters.

the acting talent of bruce boxleitner as the sheriff, some surprisingly good CGI killer fish and a bit more gore than is normally shown make this movie very watchable. just don't expect too much.

I was looking for something to watch last weekend, and this was aired on a Tv station. The movie is not something which will end up in any Cinema school class. In fact it is in the "so bad it's good" category, especially when the extremely cheesy fish stalk people on land. I don't know how much effort went in trying to make those fishes believable, but ... it did not work so well. It looks something out of a high school project.

Some of the actors are famous,evidently in a low spot in their careers. But the movie is not horribly acted. What is lacking is rather a coherent story which makes sense, substituted in this movie with an attempt to model the story on the "Jaws" line (hey, it worked for Jaws!). Also lacking is... mostly everything else. Except kills. Of course lots of people get killed. Most unbelievably.

In case anyone wonders, the movie is based on a real "scare" related to asian snakehead fish which were found to have become established in some areas of the Eastern US. The real fish do not eat people, but like any invasive species they damage ecosystems... alarmist news footage of this kind of (serious) problems easily get translated into movies like this about "killer" fish, wasps, bees, anything.

To sum it up: if you want to watch a teenage horror movie with friends and some beers. This is it.