Frankenfish (2004) Review

CLAYTON'S CREEPY CINEMA!

WEEK 4: CREATIVE KILLERS

Frankenfish (2004)

Frankenfish is a made-for-TV feature that, upon first hearing the title, sounds like a hopeless, no-budget endeavor that aims to suck in fans of the "animals amok" sub-genre by offering DVD cover art that looks promising but really features horrendous acting, cgi created by someone in their basement on an outdated computer, and a story that sounds like it was thrown together by an intern at The Asylum (for those of you who don’t know, The Asylum has produced some of the worst home video features ever to exist). But believe it or not, Frankenfish is actually entertaining and has an inventive concept.

A medical examiner and biologist journey up the Louisiana Bayou after a fisherman is mysteriously killed. They arrive at a remote fishing community, where all the houses are on stilts in the water. They check out a boat that washed up a few months ago, and according to the locals, it was shortly after that strange things started happening in the Bayou. They find the remains of the crew still on the shipwrecked vessel, and soon the lurking horror reveals itself. The creatures prowling the waters are genetically engineered snakehead fish—referred to as frankenfish—that are air-breathing, enormous, and hungry. A homing signal gets activated on the ship, drawing in the deceased crew’s employer: a bounty hunter. The bounty hunter and his crew show up after the frankenfish have already assaulted everyone on the stilt houses, and they join the smorgasbord. The survivors must work together to try and escape the Bayou and kill the frankenfish, which is easier said than done.

Frankenfish is a surprising killer creature flick. The characters are nothing special, nor are they very engaging, but the plot actually attempts something original and succeeds. The concept is inspired by a true incident involving invading snakeheads—a real species of fish that actually are vicious and can breathe air, but are nowhere near as big, strong, or intelligent as the frankenfish. The visual effects are quite good, with the frankenfish being mostly cgi, but it actually doesn’t look bad, especially considering it was made for TV. What I really enjoyed were the unexpected twists and turns the film took. Characters you didn’t think would bite the dust do, and they are killed in ways you might not anticipate. My favourite moment is when a guy kills one of the frankenfish, but you get a sense that it isn’t really dead. The guy tears out the fish’s heart and puts it on a barbeque in a demented act of vengeance. You keep expecting him to die, and the suspense is sustained for a surprisingly long time. Finally, he goes to take a bite out of the cooked heart, and then gets attacked and killed by a second frankenfish. It’s genuinely surprising and pretty horrific. Even though it rose above my initial expectations, I still wouldn’t call this a truly great horror film. The human characters still feel cut from the same low-budget cloth as many other SyFy channel features, and the explanation for why the frankenfish are there is predictably lame.

Frankenfish is reminiscent of other attacking animal flicks like Anaconda and Lake Placid, and it manages to entertain despite some cheesiness and campiness, which is to be expected. It has cool creatures, is solid throughout, and the ending has a fun, twisty cliff hanger.