 |
||||
|
Altered Species [2001] 'Oh my God, Chelsea, run!' The most notable feature of this terror-by-rat cheapie is that it has gone by two of the worst titles in history: Altered Species comes from that one-from-column-A- one-from-column-B method whereby the titles of two minor hits, totally unrelated to each other and this, are spliced together in the hope that bleary late-night TV viewers will make a mistake and tune in; and Rodentz is a holdover from that mercifully brief trend for graffiti-style misspellings in titles perpetrated by Spike Lee, which would be marginally more acceptable if the film had any African-American characters [it doesn't]. In the off-campus laboratory they've been relegated to after a loss of funding, Professor Irwin [Guy Vieg] and lone stalwart assistant Walter [Allen Lee Haff] inject rats with glowing green goop in the hope of finding a cancer cure. Not only has the sidekick lost a batch of to-be-destroyed rodents in the cellar but the latest strain of goop is responsible for enlarging and enraging chief rat 'Brenda'. The rats, who are as annoyed by pager and mobile phone beeps as anyone else, chew their way through Spunk the Laboratory Cat, the standard tippling caretaker [Robert Broughton] and the prof before five of Walter's classmates show up in a van to have a post-finals party and wind up being pursued by Brenda and her brethren. The bare-midriff, sluttier girl who gets her face chewed off after providing brief nudity is Alexandra Townsend, while Walter's more sensitive, miniskirt-and-black-stockings love interest is Leah Rowan, and the rest of the guys [David Bradley, Richard Peterson, Derek Hofman] are three varieties of jock asshole, who panic and do the wrong things to keep the group in danger. Brenda is a large puppet rarely seen in shot with any humans, as director
Miles Feldman resorts to those huge chewing twitching close-ups, while
the rest of the rat pack are busy trained Willard types who swarm over
pipes and walls and occasionally chew cadaver models. Though a 2001
film, it feels a lot older - with frat twat characters and lo-tech monster
and gore effects [in one scene, an eyeball is discovered stuck to a
spade]. The climax is busy, with a lot of overdone music to match the
panic, the redundant dialogue ['what do they know, they're just rats!'],
some editing tricks [Rowan has a flashback montage reprising how she
got into this mess], an old-fashioned get-out clause [noting that rats
don't like beeping things, Walter triggers an alarm that makes their
little brains graphically explode and then rigs up a portable noise-maker
to see off the rest of the horde], a silly giant rat suit [and a lot
of those red-tinted monster POV shots], the dismembering of the most
cowardly asshole among the kids, a giant-rat-on-top-of-the-van careen-crash-explosion
gambit and one of the sillier variations on the it's-starting-all-over
punchline [a spider licks some leftover growth-goo]. Garbage, but hard
not to like on some level. First published in this form here. Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
|
||||