Oh. My. God. This is by far the worst movie I have ever seen. And I mean EVER. (For reference, I have seen: "In Memorium", whose writer and editing was so bad that the title itself is a massive typo; Lifetime Movie Network's "The Unquiet;" "Death of a Ghost Hunter," which I considered to be the worst movie in the universe before I witnessed THIS crime against film; "Hell's Highway", by which I mean Jeff Leroy's 2001 atrocity, not the 1932 classic with Richard Dix; "Psycho Ward," another misspelled disaster; and both "Tomie" and "Uzumaki," which were made all the more abysmal by the fact that their names and concepts were attached to works by Japanese horror maestro Junji Ito. I have also seen segments of "Hard Rock Zombies", the Sci Fi channel's "Piranha" entries, and I just finished "The House By the Cemetery" and "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave".) Like "Uzumaki" and "Tomie," a huge part of the reason this movie sucked so very badly was the massive letdown of the movie itself compared to the movie that was advertised. The synopsis on the jacket is promising. I wasn't expecting miracles, but I figured that the plot would make up for whatever failures of acting or direction might present themselves. Boy was I wrong.
The acting isn't just bad, it's atrocious. If you were to select a random group of 10-year-olds and give them the script, the performance you would get would be more energetic and believable than what this movie subjects its audience to. The costumes are all wrong--the corporate executive that is supposed to be pressuring the doctor to push on with his experiments regardless of the risks is wearing a polo shirt and khakis on the helicopter pad as he circles the doc, half-mumbling badly written bully lines. The performances of the female cast are only marginally better than the male, and unlike most bad horror where the women at least give the impression that on some level they are TRYING to be that god-awful, the performances here are so flat that it doesn't appear they are trying anything at all.
The worst part about the movie, however, is that it becomes apparent after the first fifteen minutes that the two main characters are supposed to be about twenty years younger than the actors portraying them. When they go home for a family dinner the "boys'" father looks about 3 years older than they are. One gets the impression that they are friends or relatives of the people on the production staff who never had a day of acting class in their lives but thought it would be cool to appear in a movie. Given that, I can't even complain about the flat climax and lame ending.
In short, even if bad is your thing, skip this one. My friend, who is a connoisseur of horrid horror, was begging me to turn it off after less than half an hour. It's just that awful.
The acting isn't just bad, it's atrocious. If you were to select a random group of 10-year-olds and give them the script, the performance you would get would be more energetic and believable than what this movie subjects its audience to. The costumes are all wrong--the corporate executive that is supposed to be pressuring the doctor to push on with his experiments regardless of the risks is wearing a polo shirt and khakis on the helicopter pad as he circles the doc, half-mumbling badly written bully lines. The performances of the female cast are only marginally better than the male, and unlike most bad horror where the women at least give the impression that on some level they are TRYING to be that god-awful, the performances here are so flat that it doesn't appear they are trying anything at all.
The worst part about the movie, however, is that it becomes apparent after the first fifteen minutes that the two main characters are supposed to be about twenty years younger than the actors portraying them. When they go home for a family dinner the "boys'" father looks about 3 years older than they are. One gets the impression that they are friends or relatives of the people on the production staff who never had a day of acting class in their lives but thought it would be cool to appear in a movie. Given that, I can't even complain about the flat climax and lame ending.
In short, even if bad is your thing, skip this one. My friend, who is a connoisseur of horrid horror, was begging me to turn it off after less than half an hour. It's just that awful.