Mandrake

Mandrake is one of those films that leaves you more confused than intrigued, trying to figure out if what you just watched was meant to be a horror film, a thriller, or some kind of misplaced woodland fantasy. The problem isn't just the story-it's that the film feels completely disoriented from beginning to end. There's no cohesion, no rhythm, and absolutely no sense of direction. It's as if the filmmakers threw together a collection of eerie visuals and half-written dialogue and hoped it would somehow come across as atmospheric. Instead, it's just frustratingly incoherent.

The screenplay, frankly, is where everything falls apart. A movie can survive weak effects, low budgets, even mediocre acting-but when the script is a mess, there's no saving it. Mandrake never establishes a clear sense of who the characters are, what they're doing, or why the audience should care. Every moment that should feel suspenseful ends up feeling random. It jumps between tones so wildly that you're not sure if you're supposed to be scared, intrigued, or just waiting for it to end.

It's hard not to compare it to Jaws-because Jaws knew exactly how to use atmosphere, tension, and pacing. Spielberg understood how to build suspense without showing everything, allowing the imagination to fill the gaps. Mandrake, on the other hand, throws everything at you but somehow still manages to say nothing. The directing feels unfocused, like the camera itself is wandering through the woods trying to find the story.

Character development? Practically nonexistent. You don't know who these people are, you don't care what happens to them, and the film doesn't give you any reason to invest in their journey. There are glimpses-tiny moments-where you can see what the movie wanted to be: a moody psychological folk horror that gets under your skin. But those moments vanish as quickly as they appear, replaced by confusion and a total lack of narrative payoff.

By the halfway mark, the film already feels like it's going nowhere fast, and by the end, you realize it never really started anywhere, either. It's disorganized, disjointed, and painfully slow for something that's supposed to keep you on edge.

To put it bluntly, Mandrake is a cinematic train wreck. It tries to be haunting but ends up being hollow. It tries to be mysterious but comes off as muddled. If you value your time-or your sanity-skip this one. There's no reward waiting at the end of this film, just confusion and regret.

This film opens with a woman running through woods (being chased by a mainly unseen being). This is never a good sign. If you've watched pretty much any handful of random horror films, you'll know that 'woman running through woods' is possibly the most overused cliché of the genre (with perhaps the teenagers having sex and dying being a close second).

That opening is a kind of warning of things to come. Some films thrive on having a low budget. The lack of money behind the picture forces the film-makers to use new and more subtle techniques to tell the story. Not here. This film has no budget and it shows in every scene.

It's about a team of archaeologists, sent somewhere in South America (like the location really matters!) to retrieve something for someone (again, such details are kind of pointless in the scheme of things). However, this 'South American' jungle looks suspiciously like some nice grassy fields in America. Plus the 'natives' also look a little Caucasian, considering they are supposed to have lived in the hot jungle all their lives.

The acting isn't all bad, but the dialogue is. Just because the film is set in a wood (sorry, jungle), the writers seem to want to make the characters talk like they're out of Predator. Yes, there's something hunting them, but whereas Predator used a monster that was actually there, the makers of Mandrake spent the entire $2.50 budget on some 'creepy' CGI tentacles. Woo.

If you like cheesy monster-munching movies, then you probably know plenty out there which will amuse and entertain (try things like Deep Rising, Tremors, or Grabbers to name but a few). Mandrake is not one of them.

The beginning of this made-for-Siffy movie starts out with a lot of promise, as far as Siffy Original movies go. The production values are high (comparatively speaking), the acting is good, the sound is synchronized with the video, there aren't any glaring, amateurish CGI effects, and the actors' names may tug at long-forgotten memories of low-budget movies you've seen in the past. Usually, in the first two minutes, I can tell if made-for-TV movies are worth watching or not, and, frankly, most of them aren't. The production values and special effects maintain their comparatively high standards (approaching the quality of a ST:TNG episode), but the acting, directing, and, especially, story end up dragging down the score substantially. I can't really blame the actors, because their characters were written to be really stereotypical, barely-developed fodder for CGI monsters. There isn't much you can do with that. I'm not sure how much of the blame lies on the director, either, because he, too, probably did the best he could with the material he was given. How do you make a movie about a CGI monster that hunts down a ruthless CEO and his nameless mercenaries, without it becoming one huge, boring cliché? I'm surprised the CEO didn't try to personally burn down the Amazon rain forest just for laughs, like a Captain Planet villain. Seriously, this movie is a live-action Captain Planet episode, with the same heavy-handed moralizing and 2D villains.

Oh well. With a better script, maybe this movie could have been good, but it's still watchable. Barely.

In a fictitious Latin American country, the soldier of fortune Sgt. McCall (Max Martini) leads the Vargas Expedition sponsored by the powerful Harry Vargas (Benito Martinez) and formed by the archaeologists Dr. Felicia (Betsy Russell) and Lin (Wayne Pere); the local Santiago Zavala (Nick Gomez) and a baggage carrier through the jungle. In the base, Carla Manning (Jon Mack) gives support to McCall's team and is the liaison with Harry, who is obsessed for a dagger.

When they reach a tomb facing south in a sacred ground, they open the tomb and finds a dagger with a ruby craved in a skeleton and Lin removes weapon from the grave, accomplishing the objective of their assignment. Dr. Felicia advises them that the tomb has a warning advising to not remove the dagger. Soon they discover that nature and the Yamballi tribe are chasing them; further, the previous expedition sent to the forest to retrieve the dagger has been slaughtered.

"Mandrake" is a TV movie released in Brazil on DVD. The story is absolutely predictable and the adventure of the expeditionary team is not scary. In the end, watching this film was a waste of time in a Saturday afternoon. Better off if I had taken a nap. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "A Raiz do Mal" ("The Root of the Evil")

As far as these syfy movies, which range from adequate to terrible, go this is better than most. It does have an intriguing premise, and starts off very well. And for a syfy movie it actually looks quite good, with the scenery quite nice, the photography not looking completely slip-shod and the monster creepy-looking and giving an adequate sense of menace. As for the attacks, two or three were nail-biting and quite gory, but some of them are quite tame.

Despite the cool premise and twenty-five minutes of genuine atmosphere, Mandrake quickly becomes repetitive and predictable. The dialogue is fairly unimpressive mostly, with a number of cheesy moments that never ring true, and the direction while better than you would expect is patchy particularly towards the end where the film unravels in credibility. The film's pace is uneven, the beginning is very well-paced, but some of the middle drag and the end feels rushed. I didn't find myself connecting to any of Mandrake's characters, and in all honesty I don't think the actors did either.

In conclusion, better than expected but that's not saying very much. 4/10 Bethany Cox