Hyams' horror a relic of past productions
THE RELIC Starring Penelope Ann Miller, Tom Sizemore. Directed by Peter Hyams. Category 2B. Now showing at UA (Queensway, Times Square, Sha Tin, Whampoa, Bonds, Kowloon City, Aberdeen), Pearl, Ocean, New York, Golden Gateway, Astor, Ma On Shan, Park, Broadway (Kornhill, Tsuen Wan, Kwai Fong, Kowloon Bay, Yuen Long), Chinachem, Paris-London-New York.
Hot on the heels of the wobbly-brained monsters of Mars Attacks! comes an altogether more unsavoury creature in this gory science-fiction thriller. A reptilian monster, a DNA mutation caused by a strange plant from the Brazilian rainforest, gets its kicks from decapitating its victims and sucking out the thalamus and pituitary gland.
Director Peter Hyams piles on the gore as a tough-talking police detective, Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta (played by Tom Sizemore), who trails this feasting grim reaper through the labyrinthine vaults of a Chicago museum, aided by evolutionary biologist Ann Cuthbert (Penelope Ann Miller).
Some gloomy subterranean lighting sees Hyams mixing the grungy atmosphere of Seven with the urban high-jinks of An American Werewolf In London, and throwing in a huge dollop of Jurassic Park for good measure. The result is a fair reworking of the Evil Dead blueprint: nasty creature picks off trapped victims one by one and splatters the walls with blood.
The thrills are a little slow, and rarely have one teetering on the edge of the seat, but an above par script (for a horror) and some good cinematography allow the film to rise above the B-movie morass. As does the slithery, pincer-faced creature, courtesy of Jurassic Park 's Stan Winston, when it finally appears.
The action is set in a museum, and has a spooky feeling akin to being trapped alone all night in the British Museum's Mummy Room. The story, based on a novel, is standard pulp adventure. After a shipload of decapitated beings is discovered in the Chicago docks, a crate arrives at a museum containing some leaves with a strange fungus on them - and the sender, a researcher in the Amazon, cannot be contacted.
As people begin to end up as messes on the museum walls, D'Agosta tries to track the culprit down, while Cuthbert races to figure out if the murders are connected to the leaves.