Monday, December 7, 2009

Unhuman (2004)

Just when I thought I've seen it all, Unhuman arrives at my doorstep and changes everything. Okey, that was TOO dramatic. But what starts like a normal teenagers-discovers-meteor-with-alien-inside soon turns really wild. First of all, I start with the really bad thing about this movie: the editing. I'm not sure if the director had a visual idea with the movie, but I guess ultra-fast editing, speeding up everything that might had been boring and doing weird video effects just is to hide that he didn't have any idea what he was doing. But after a while I got used to it and could concentrate on the "story":

Five teenagers (or at least around twenties) comes to a temple to... hang out, or something. One night there's a lot of stars falling and they see something, a meteor they suspect, crash in the jungle! The same night a couple of people get crazy, and some other unhappy souls die in terrible ways. We find out that there's a lab in the same area, researching body-transplants, and it seems a smaller army of very silly monsters originated from this lab and not the meteor... or? Because there's a couple of very alien-style people walking around to, looking friendly. Did I mention the evil cambodian witch that takes control over the monsters? Well, that's one unexpected ingredience in this confusing movie!

The story jumps around from storyline to storyline, sometimes just leaving characters and we never see them again. We have the teenagers, we have the scientists in the lab, the military, the witch, some locals, the monsters, the aliens, a fucking gorilla - all mixed together in a way that makes it impossible to understand what's going on. On the other side, it's actually very entertaining after you get used to the silly editing! From the beginning there's not much gore, some bloody body-rippings off screen and a lot of blood everywhere, but then there's a great ambush where the monsters (among them one of the worst gorilla suits I've ever seen!) attacks a country house and ripping everybody apart with some nice gore and blood - and it dosen't end there!

Another surprising turn is when the movie transforms itself to a jungle-action movie comple with exploding huts and watchtowers, machine guns and tons of people getting killed. And I have no idea why that scene happens. The budget was probably low, but not that low because we see a lot of extras, military vehicles, helicopters, a big temple (which also collapses) and an armada of cheap monster suits!

The movie picks up after around half the playing time and gives us plenty of monsters, blood, black magic, action and the mandatory lame thai pop song over the end credits. Recommended.

2 comments:

Paul Cooke aka Buckaroobanzai said...

I'm Sold, Thanks Fred. Order placed :) . Paul

Ninja Dixon said...

My pleasure, Paul! I hope you like it now :)