Project Viper (2002)

Jim Wynorski is back! This time with a TV-movie from 2002, Project Viper, starring once hot up-and-coming Patrick Muldoon and veteran Tim Thomerson. It's out on a nice swedish dvd, but is that treatment worth watching the movie? So I found the dvd in my giantic collection and gave it a spin! Some astronauts are going to Mars, but they have hardly left the earth when something goes terrible wrong. The secret NASA-experiment, Viper, get's from it's containment and kills everybody and makes the ship crash. It's a liquid lifeform that can go everywhere and both take the shape of soft objects and hard ones... and it grows even more by eating humans!!! Muahahah. Or something.

Though it's quite low on action, it's a slick and often well made movie. The effects are okey, and there are some nice liquid-monster mayhem and at least one good killing. But most of that happens in the last twenty minutes. Most of the time is spent looking for the creature, having hip conversations and dealing with some thiefs that has stolen a sample of Viper from a lab. Patrick Muldoon goes on routin, but Tim Thomerson is the best - and sports! a huge moustache to. It's also fun to see a movie where it shows that Wynorski can direct. I knew that of course, but often he has to little budget to do something really good.

This is also one of those movies that has stockfootage in it to make the story and action look bigger. It's not much here actually, just a car chase from Species and some airplane-footage from Air American (which also stars Tim Thomerson by the way) and it's nicely integrated into the rest of the story. If I didn't know I would have been fooled. 

Not a bad little timewaster, but of course far away from being a masterpiece of any kind. But I liked it, if that means something.