Spoilers, if you can actually spoil a Z-grade Sci-Fi Channel movie in some manner:
So I was watching Supergator, Saturday’s SciFi Channel movie, and it was great. The best part was that the monster appeared early in the movie and ate people regularly. A whole lot of people converged on the little idyllic waterfall in Hawaii where it lived and it managed to eat most of them. None of this “let’s save on CGI and stunts by having the monster unseen until the last 15 minutes” stuff, the dinner bill rang early for Supergator and it rang a lot thereafter.
But the real bit of genius for Supergator was that they had a Cassandra. Early on, two swimsuit models are posing for photos at the waterfall and when that happens you have to figure they’ll get et in short order, because that’s what always happens in SciFi Channel monster movies of this sort – early on a hottie appears and goes for a swim or wanders off in the woods to get eaten. I don’t know why that is, but thanks to Supergator, I know why it shouldn’t be.
Because one of the two hotties, the more bodacious of the two, dressed in nothing but a very skimpy thong bikini, does not get eaten. Instead, she sees her friend and the photographer guy get eaten, then she spends much of the first half of the movie running away from the Supergator which WANTS to eat her, trying to find someone to rescue her, but invariably just leading the Supergator to new people to eat. And the first people she meets don’t believe her. They think she’s high, or had a sunstroke, and so march blithely off to the falls, to be eaten scant seconds later.
She really added a lot to the movie. All that T and A action as she jiggle-runs thorugh the woods AND some good humor as people ignore her at their peril.
Now, immediately prior to Supergator on the SciFi Channel we had “King of the Lost World” which had a CGI King Kong that was the WORST CGI creature I’ve ever seen. He was blurry, and yet you could see scenery thorugh his body. He appeared to have been rendered on newsprint with charcoal sticks, in what artists call as “gesture drawing” which is a practice technique that rarely results in good drawings.
The CGI was so bad it immediately had me wondering what excuse they had used when the CGI studio presented it to the moviemakers. Probably something along the lines of, “Yeah, for the kind of money you’re offering, this is what you get. You want a real-looking monster, pay us more money than the kid who mows your lawn.”
During Supergator and King of the Lost World they had promos for next Saturday’s movie, “Atomic Twister.” Evil Captor Jr. took one look at the title and said, “Atomic Twister? It’s like they took two random scary words and jammed them together to come up with their monster.”
I allowed as how he had a point. Evil Captor’s nominee for SciFi Channel’s next monster movie: “Leach Shark Invasion.”
Sounds good to me.
