Posted by Boo
This weekend the hubby and I decided to give the movie Vicious a try. I found the flick at a
local used record/DVD shop here in Minnesota called Discland. I wasn’t
expecting much from Vicious, but it had
both Tom Savini and Bill Mosely on the ticket, so really, how bad could it be?
Answer: Don’t ask.
Tom Savini plays some kind of mysterious government agent –
or maybe ex-government agent, I’m not sure – that uses a group of campers as
bait for his vicious beast that is a failed government experiment.
It’s an ambitiously bad movie, with the only real redeeming
quality being Tom Savini. If the
director, Matt Green (also a good friend of Savini’s), had been smart he would
have recognized Savini’s entertainment value and stuffed the movie full of
Savini in his Rambo-type ass kicking character. Instead, he opted to assault us
with a barrage of benign office scenes with many people talking, yet not really
saying much of anything.
We have Matt Green and Martin L. Kelley to thank for this
movie’s ineffective dialogue. Dialogue which, frankly, makes George Lucas look
like a dialogue master. I almost found myself yearning for those awkward
conversational moments between Anakin and Padme while watching Vicious…
No, I’m sorry. That’s going too far.
But the dialogue really was not good here. And an
unfortunate victim of this dialogue disaster is Bill Mosely. Mosely plays the
cliché, high ranking government official that bullies his subordinates and
makes the self-serving decisions that leads to the monster-riddled disaster in
the movie. Mosely looks the part,
with those unnerving, predatory eyes of his, but as soon as he starts speaking,
desperately trying to give the empty dialogue some kind of substantiality, the
magic is lost.
Movie, you know you’re bad when even Bill Mosely can’t save
you.
We’re halfway through the film at this point, and I’m
getting some serious douche chills watching the great Mosely struggle with his
dialogue. I really just wanted a vicious beast to start killing people, because
after all, that’s what the movie is promising! To my delight, people start
dying, some blood starts flying, and my movie spirits are lifted…
And then we see our “vicious” monster.
Folks, I’ve see some bad digital monsters in my day, but
none worse than our old pal Vicious. It literally looked like a digital draft
of the monster, crude and unpolished, as though they were in the middle of the production
and ran out of money. This, I learned from IMDB, was exactly what happened.
They apparently had an animatronic monster that was only half finished, and had
to resort to a hastily compiled digital monster to get the movie finished.
I’m sure in hindsight this crew realizes they should have
subscribed to the less-is-more theory regarding movie monsters, just stuck with
the animatronic head that they did manage to build, and abandon the “full
frontal” views, so to speak. The up-close shots that utilize the animatronic
head aren’t so bad. They do work, and Green should have focused more on creative
ways to use that head, rather than crow-barring those digital full body shots
into the film.
The last fifteen minutes of the film, though, we finally get
some substantial Savini. Yay! Savini’s character worked, because there wasn’t
much dialogue for the character. Green was letting Savini use actions, not
words, to be smarmy and kick some vicious monster ass. And it was exactly what
this movie needed.
I have many criticisms of this movie, but none as important as this: not enough Savini. But really, couldn’t this be said of any Savini movie? After
all, there is never such a thing as too
much Savini…
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