Oh my dear God…here we go again, with another direct-to-video schlockfest courtesy of those money-hungry psychos at Dej Entertainment.
And this time, Dej has prepared a truly, truly awful thing for its audiences. Suspend your disbelief? Oh, nay, Gentle Reader…you’re going to have to EXPEL it. You’re going to have to send it to prison and lock it away for all eternity to wrap your head around this.
A twenty foot tall, genetically engineered komodo dragon is on the loose, for some reason, and it doesn’t like humanity.
Why? WHY? Why are we still being subjected to garbage like this? It’s utter CRAP! This is a Z-grade Jurassic Park ripoff on a budget that consisted of whatever the producer found in the couch that day!
The plot isn’t much better. Of course, we start out with our giant komodo dragon having a brief con-fab with an electric fence, followed with a naval inquiry on board a battleship, and then segue into a casino robbery on what is only POSSIBLY the same island. Man, what movie did I rent? One second, it’s Jurassic Park, then it’s A Few Good Men–The Naval Years, and now it’s Reindeer Games for the next few minutes! Aaaugh!
And then, bizarrely, it actually starts to jell together into a semi-lucid plot. The casino thieves lose control of their helicopter, and land on Big Komodo Island. The folks currently dealing with the komodo and the casino thieves band together to take on the giant nasty beastie, with predictable results.
Curse of the Komodo attempts to distract the reader from the sludgy plot with the addition of Glori-Anne Gilbert’s character, Rebecca. Blessed with ample assets, and not in the acting column, Becky’s sure to distract somebody for a little while.
But this distraction is brief, and soon, we’re right back to the giant, apparently toxic, komodo dragon eating and attempting to eat people. Becky once again attempts to distract the viewership from the sadly ineffective komodo special effect, reacting to its entrance with a mild “aaa.”
The Jurassic Park ripoffs continue as a Jeep speeds down a tree-lined road, with the komodo special effect in pursuit, and the Robocop Syndrome active on every gun in the Jeep.
Robocop Syndrome, by the way, is the generic term I invented following Robocop 2. It refers to the horror / action / science fiction practice of no one ever needing to be shown reloading any weapon, no matter how many rounds are fired from that weapon. If you ever see a bottomless magazine, think of Robocop 2.
But anyway, our party of casino thieves and apparently government scientists are about to make a stand until a rescue party can show up at sunrise the next day. The party kills time with introspective discussion and character development for characters that will either be dead or unheard of for us within the next hour. Talk about unnecessary….
A truly fun moment comes when a couple scientists are at a computer station. One of them ejects a floppy disk and says, “There you go. All available data on the project.” On a 1.44 meg floppy disk.
Either they’ve got truly killer compression utilities or this isn’t much of a project.
This movie would be a lot better if so much of it weren’t spent in the exact same sequence. Let’s face it–an inordinately large amount of time is spent shooting ineffectually at the komodo special effect.
And my oh my…the ending is positively anticlimactic. You’re going to be positively AMAZED by this ending should you decide to see it.
The extra features are abysmal. Curse of the Komodo offers you a trailer for Curse of the Komodo and your choice of English or Spanish dialogue. Not a subtitle or deleted scene anywhere on the disk. Shameful.
So, all in all, Curse of the Komodo lives up to its name, as the only curse involved in it happens to be placed directly on the audience who sat through this waste of plastic and three dollars.
