Harefooted Halloween: The Relic

What I Liked: The story is mostly no bullshit.  There’s a creature on the loose and it’s eating a specific part of people’s brains, that’s pretty much it.

It’s interesting to have the finale be the entire second half of the movie.  It goes from police investigation to holy shit we’re trapped inside the museum with this thing and it’s killing everyone in sight.  The flow is different than most and I liked that.

No forced romance between Tom Sizemore (Blue Steel, Passenger 57) and Penelope Ann Miller (The Shadow, Carlito’s Way).  Sizemore even says at one point “I’m not here to ask you out”.

The creature is gnarly looking.  It’s a combination of lizard, lion, beetle and who knows what the fuck else.  When they used a real puppet or animatronic it looked badass.  Maybe a bit bulky but definitely menacing.

What I Didn’t Like: When a character mentions something earlier in the film it’s a little too obvious that it’ll come into play later.  Like the storage room filled to the brim with flammable chemicals or the gala event that needs to go off without a hitch so the museum’s programs can stay funded.

The dialogue and acting are both kinda wooden.  It sounds awkward when folks talk about science-y stuff and shit gets too jokey at times with the police investigation side.

Unfortunately they went with a fair amount of mid-90’s CGI for the action creature shots.  Maybe two or three shots actually look good but most of them don’t come off so great.

The picture is a little too lopsided.  The first half doesn’t have quite enough going on and the second half has a lot happening.  They could’ve evened things out more and still had a somewhat unique structure.

Overall Impressions: This is kind of a fun movie from my man Peter Hyams (Sudden Death, The Musketeer).  He went for something darker than he normally does and it works well enough for what it’s supposed to be: a creature horror film.

And when I say he went dark I mean that literally.  This is one dimly lit movie.  It’s hard to make shit out sometimes but at the same time I never felt like I didn’t know what was happening.  Maybe Hyams used shadowy lighting to convey atmosphere or maybe he did it to hide the CGI monster.  I’ll let you be the judge.

Anyway if you’re into these creature type horror films this isn’t a bad one to check out.  They deliver on the thing cutting people’s heads off ‘n’ shit.  The body count is actually really high.  It just takes a little while to get going.