(1979) **
This is not the Christopher Walken movie you're thinking of. When this came out, a kid up the street whose cousin saw it told me about how cool it was. Turns out he was exaggerating, which I realized the moment I saw "rated PG."
Robert Foxworth, who is sort of like a blonde, bearded Mike Brady, plays an angry young public health official who is asked to investigate possible environmental damage in a Maine forest. He brings along his wife Talia Shire so she can trip on roots and slip in the mud and stuff. Eventually there's some mutated bears that try to kill everybody.
This could have been a fun one, if they didn't slam you over the head with The Message every single freaking second. Foxworth's character is puffed up as this Strident Idealist, The One Man Who Cares, etc., but you just want to punch him. When he finds out it's mercury poisoning, he informs Talia not by reading to her from the book he just read out loud, but by playing the tape of him reading it so he can also yell comments at the general direction of The Man. What a dick. If he's so smart, how come the first thing he did upon arriving in this possibly damaged environment was catch and eat a fish? D'oh!
After the opening, it's a whole hour before the next monster attack. I spent a lot of that hour groaning, especially during all the aerial footage of the forest, replete with inexplicable bombastic orchestra music. I found myself yelling "get attacked by a bear already!" You do get to see good guy Armand Assante (playing an American Indian) in an axe vs. chainsaw fight, but somehow, this time, it didn't say "horror movie." I will admit that the stuff after the monster's reappearance was kind of fun. Kind of. The victims display an amusing amount of bad ideas in action, like trying to escape by hopping away in a zipped-up sleeping bag. The attack scene that gets the main action rolling is such a miasma of bad editing, you'll say "who's that guy on fire?" or "Wait a second, where are they right now?" or "Why did the jeep explode?" This would be a decent goof flick to watch if you had some project to do at the same time, so you could look up during the animal attacks and maybe get a few laughs. That's about it.
And where are all these mutant babies the 70's promised us?
2 comments:
It's funny how there were so many movies about mutated beasts in the 70s. It really must reflect the times. I've still never seen Orca, has anyone?
Not me! But I remember It's Alive with its monster baby spawned from general modern toxicity. That's a 70's movie.
Man, it's such a 70's movie, too! It was shot in such hard-core 70's Uglyvision it's like a spike between the eyes.
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