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.

This movie is a throwback film of the old science fiction / horror movies of the 1950's. The movie itself was decent, if you can suspend your disbelief that a pristine lake surrounded by snowcapped mountains in Canada is in the state of Maryland. The hero of this film is the sheriff played by Bruce Boxleitner of Babylon 5 fame who is battling a lake full of mutant asian humen eating snakehead fish during a fishing tournament (shades of Jaws here). He is helped by his daughter and her friends and a agent of the Fish and Wild Life Service. The film itself was well done for a low budget production make in Canada. A type of television movies thats good be watched and forgotten.

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.

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.

A small Maryland town,desperate to recover from hard economic times,is under threat when voracious Snakehead fish mutate and survive previous lake chemical poisonings.Thriving on the hormones,the Snakehead fish grow to monstrous proportions,devouring everything within reach.Capable of moving and eating on land,they are forced to leave the now barren lake in a desperate search for food— animal,vegetable or human.Bruce Boxleitner(the town's Sheriff)and Carol Alt(the sexy scientist)team up to take on the snakeheads."Snakehead Terror" is mildly entertaining "Jaws" rip-off with snakehead fish instead of shark.The acting is suitably weak,but the gore effects are okay.The plot is totally clichéd and the computerized snakeheads look mediocre.Give it a look,if you need to see the perfect example of B-movie.