Monday, March 1, 2010

GROWTH (a review)

Another horror movie. Yeah, I watch them in bunches. This one should could for a couple because it has just about everything in it -- kids going to a remote house, a creepy shariff, weird parasitic slug creatures, mad scientists, some take-over-people Invasion of the Body Snatchers stuff, and, uh, other stuff. I don't know, it just seemed like it was a different movie every twenty minutes.

The story, basically, is that these kids go to this remote island to sell their father's house. There's the girl, a guy who is dying, and some other kids. I'm not even sure how many there were anymore. The island is the site of a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong. Something about using parasites to improve people? Instead we get mutant slugs. It's kind of like a cross between the curing cancer of I AM LEGEND and the mutant slugs of SLITHER. Now the kids are on this island and are in danger of getting mutant-slug-take-overed and have to try to escape, except the sharrif and others on the isalnd don't want them to escape for some reason. In addition they have the sick kid taken over and he becomes strong ala THE FLY. They even have him go to a local bar (on the island?) and pick up a girl so he can get into a fight with his super strength. And the rest is mutant slug/avoid the sharrif stuff. Blah blah blah. The end.

Now I'm not against movie that change or have a whole lot going on in them. A lot of this slug/body snatchers stuff has been done a lot, so why not have fun and mix it up and combine them all. SLITHER is a horror/comedy that did it pretty well. GROWTH did not. The problem isn't that it has a lot of stuff it's that none of it makes sense. This is an island with a mutant slug invasion and yet there are plenty of people on it who don't seem infected, and even weirder they seem to be siding with the slugs? I don't know. The mad scientific outbreak was supposed to have occured 20 years ago, so is this place overrun or not? And why are the people still there if they aren't slugified? They show us this newsreel footage in the beginning and tell us like 3/4 of the people died so they must have known something was going on.

I don't know. It just didn't hold my attention. There was some fun moments and all, but it just seemed like a jumbled mess and there wasn't anything new in it. If you've seen THE FLY, THE RUINS, and SLITHER you've seen this movie and you've seen it done better. If you haven't sene those movies...well, I'd recommend you see them instead, but this might work for stupid/fun/horror night. Might.

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