Komodo (1999) Review

Komodo (1999) Review

 

The Komodo dragon is the largest predatory land reptile in the world, making it the perfect candidate for a killer animal film. Trap some people on an island with a few of them, and there’s your premise. The DVD cover of Komodo boasts that it’s from the writer of Anaconda and the special effects creator of Jurassic Park. While these two credits are certainly intriguing, is it enough to make this otherwise generic-sounding killer animal flick rise above average? In some ways, it’s a resounding yes, but not in all ways.

A young boy, Patrick, goes with his parents to their summer home on a secluded island, where a clutch of Komodo dragon eggs was unwittingly left nineteen summers earlier. He becomes severely traumatized after the hungry lizards kill his family—one of them even eats his dog, smashing through the dog door and snatching it, in a fun jump scare moment—so a psychologist, Victoria, takes him back to the island to help him get over his trauma. The first half hour is pretty slow aside from Patrick’s initial encounter, but at the half hour mark, the raging reptiles attack in full force. Victoria and Patrick encounter two mercenaries hired by the oil company that took over the island to kill the dragons, and they team up in an attempt to escape with their lives.

Komodo suffers the most from having uninteresting characters. The only actor of note for me is Billy Burke (Bella’s dad in Twilight and Miles in the TV show Revolution) who plays one of the guys hunting the dragons. Jill Hennessy who plays Victoria has a dumb, wide-eyed expression in every scene and gives a totally unbelievable performance. The kid who plays Patrick looks like a stunt double for Zac Efron, and he, too, gives a bad performance. He also disappears for a while in the middle of the movie after cutting the heart out of a dead dragon, then he shows up later and saves Victoria by impaling one of the lizards with spears. It’s odd and a little ridiculous, but makes for an exciting sequence.

I don’t think I can fully blame the actors for their bad performances, though, because the dialogue isn’t great and the script is by-the-numbers, but they were also under the direction of Michael Lantieri, who, as stated earlier, did the special effects for Jurassic Park. He’s an effects guy, therefore probably not the best at directing actors, and Komodo remains his only directorial effort. The effects, though, are the big highlight of the film.

Animatronic Komodo dragons were used whenever cgi wasn’t absolutely necessary, and without exaggeration, they are some of the best animatronic effects for a reptile in any movie I’ve ever seen. The heads look exactly like the real thing, and there are even full body shots that look totally convincing. The cgi is very good, nearly on-par with Jurassic Park, the animation is smooth, and the detail is excellent. There’s a shot of a dragon in the rain and you can actually see the water drops beading off its scaly skin.

The director said he wanted to make a B-movie with A-movie effects, and he pretty much accomplished that. It’s a somewhat below-average creature feature with above-average visual effects, and that’s the big take away from Komodo: great effects and creature scenes, but otherwise, not really anything special. This was not the last time a horror movie was to feature killer Komodo dragons, so while I’m on the subject, I might as well cover the entire unofficial Komodo trilogy, just for the hell of it.

The Curse of the Komodo upgrades from the PG-13 rating of the first movie to an R rating, so this time there are boobs and more F-bombs, but everything else gets downgraded. The cast of characters is annoying, the acting is atrocious, there are no practical effects to speak of, only poor quality cgi, and nothing original happens, the people just run from the monsters and shoot at them. This time the dragons are giant, I guess to make them scarier? There’s really not much more to say.

Komodo vs. Cobra cashes in on the “versus” craze of the early 2000’s, thanks to films like Alien vs. Predator, Freddy vs. Jason, and Boa vs. Python. It recycles some of the same actors from Curse of the Komodo, which is a little confusing because the characters are new but it still seems to be a sequel, retaining the same setting and secret government project from before. This time there’s a giant Komodo dragon and a giant cobra, and they both make appearances before the opening credits. In fact, the opening scene really sets the tone for what's to come. Three people run from the Komodo dragon, which looks even faker than before and only makes the same roaring sound as the T-rex’s in the Land Before Time movies. One person gets eaten, the other two swim away, then the cobra eats another person. The effects went from bad to worse, and so did the cinematography. It's mostly all bloodless deaths (back to PG-13), shooting guns with infinite ammo, repetitive music queues, and boring dialogue scenes. The creatures barely interact until the final minutes of the movie, and it doesn’t exactly feel like a reward for sitting through all 90 minutes. The cliff hanger ending is pretty funny, though.

Komodo vs. Cobra is faster paced and has more so-bad-it's-good moments to laugh at compared to its predecessor, so I'd give it a soft recommendation on those grounds, but Curse of the Komodo isn’t even worth watching, it just sucks. If you have any interest in seeing a killer Komodo dragon movie you really only need to go with the original.

One last thing to note is the creative team behind the original
Komodo had nothing to do with these other two Komodo flicks. Both of them were directed by Jim Wynorski (credited as Jay Andrews), who has been making B-movie schlock since the 80’s, and has some unbelievable credits on IMDB (some of my favourite titles: The Bare Wench Project, Cleavage Field, and The Breastford Wives). He actually has made some entertaining cult classics, such as Chopping Mall and Dinosaur Island, the latter of which is referenced in Curse of the Komodo (he references many of his own films in other films he makes).

It seems Mr. Wynorski just completely lost his schlock touch going into the 21^st century, and you can actually see the degradation in his Komodo films. Curse of the Komodo, while awful, was at least shot on film, and though the cgi was poor, it wasn’t painful to look at. Komodo vs. Cobra was shot on digital and the colours are awful, everything looks artificial, and the cgi is god-awful. I was considering reviewing another one of his films for this month, Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre, but it was so bad there wasn’t anything I could say about it. Apparently he made Curse of the Komodo just so he could hang out in Hawaii for a while. Good for him for combining business and pleasure, even if it resulted in audiences wasting 90 minutes of their lives.