Amphibious 3D (2011) - 2/4

I've always been fascinated by Yuzna's work. He always teeters on the brink of hackwork, using story-ideas that are disarmingly insipid. Yet, when you watch the films, you see he always takes a different approach than any other filmmaker would, and there's always something, some wealth of subconscious, buried in the play of creative gore effects and strange appetites. With Rottweiler (2004), he pushed the killer-dog movie about as far as it could logically go until the killer dog became an archetypal fiend, a sort of symbol of fate, like Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven. Amphibious 3D, unfortunately, never does get pushed into the archetypal realms quite like Rottweiler does, but, as with any Yuzna film, it teases with more below the surface; and Amphibious is a good deal more subtle than most monsters-from-the-sea movies we've been seeing from SyFy, the Asylum, and several other b-movie filmmakers who hopped aboard that particular shark-filled train.

The plot, a fairly typical one, concerns a pretty female researcher interested in some scientific thing or other--it doesn't matter what--and chartering a boat from a charming local white guy. They uncover the prehistoric monster, which the researcher has no trouble identifying, and together slay the beast. In this case, the charming boat owner, fittingly named Jack Bowman, is Michael Pare and the researcher, with the pornstar name of Skylar Shane, is played by some TV actress from the Netherlands.

What makes Amphibious 3D stand out is not the 3D, but the remote Indonesian setting. Most of the action takes place on a fishing platform so far out to sea that you can't see the mainland. Here a part-time smuggler and full-time fishing-platform foreman manages his child slave labour. Some of the action does take place on an Indonesian island where a religious ritual, reminiscent of footage of voodoo rituals from Haiti, is taking place.

One of the children on the fishing platform is a dark, scrawny child sold by a witchdoctor. The other kids taunt him and call him something like 'voodoo boy.' The researcher, it turns out, lost a daughter on a scientific survey and now hallucinates her daughter in the island ritual, and finds a surrogate for her daughter in the weak boy on the fishing platform. It is in this material that the film's darker depths are to be found, with its play on maternity and on the mystique of a culture that threatens to devour the outsider.

Unfortunately, subconscious depths does not imply interesting action, in this case. Much of what happens on the fishing platform is boring, as we're just waiting for the monster action to begin. The character drama, the shallow interactions, is not good enough to sustain interest, even in these interesting locations.

Worthy of note, however, is the cool monster. I won't spoil what it is, but Yuzna uses real effects, as he always does, so that the monster is really, physically present with the actors. When someone sticks an axe in the creature's 'head', he really does that. Though little of the monster is seen until the end, the climax, for anyone who loves classic monster movies and creature effects, more than makes up for the scarcity until then.

Amphibious 3D is admittedly sub-par Yuzna. There are moments where it suggests the possibility of being a giant sea monster version of I Walked with a Zombie (1943), but it sadly never rises to being as clever and haunting as that film. It has a lot more going on in its depths, a perverse subconscious that bubbles up in the film's final, disturbing moment, than the likes of Two-Headed Shark (2012) or Mega-Python vs Gatoroid (2011), but it's never as much fun.