Rather Be Draining The Lizard

One of the movies I watched a couple days ago- in a true fit of masochism- was a science fiction film entitled "Aberrations". The premise had real promise in it. A woman comes to some small snow-stricken town hiding out from the Russian mob, but finds herself under assault by a vicious strain of killer lizards. I put it on with hardly a thought. I find that thought slows things down too much. I just get the movie going- at which time I'm committed- and then there's the whole running time of the film to feel regret.

Make no mistake, I felt great regret over this film, which was truly terrible. Most of it was a brutal, painfully slow slog. The film's cast includes six names, one of which is a cat. The other five are used, shall we say, judiciously, which means that sub-professional grade actors are often counted on to carry scenes by themselves. It's like if the classic "Twilight Zone" episode employing a similar premise was executed with someone unfit to even speak the name of Agnes Moorehead.

Of course, I've loved many movies with equally atrocious acting before, but those movies often had things happening. This one opts to have nearly nothing happen for the first two acts. I kept moving the cursor over the timeline and seeing with palpable dismay that I was five minutes, ten minutes, 40 minutes into to a movie that felt like it had been going for days. With terrible acting and no kind of tension about something maybe happening, it was really hard.

The movie's climax finally began to move the needle. The two leads had the whole thing to themselves for the middle of the film (with three cast members who'd appeared in the beginning being absent), but the finale had one of them returning and the final unseen cast member appearing for the first time. This heartened me, but not nearly so much as the revelation that the film's budget could sustain explosions and fires, which the film has in spades.

The explosions and a fleeting glimpse of the female lead's unclothed form from behind represented the film's only exploitable assets. God knows the titular lizards were a disappointment. They are seldom seen and, really, very easily killed. That's a shame, because had they triumphed, we might have been spared the alleged repartee and sexual tension between our two leads. This is one film that I absolutely cannot recommend. Stay away.