To start, one last FU to the Weinsteins for buying the rights to this movie and then waiting well over a year to release it, as they dicked around between announcements of “It’ll be a theatrical release—no, direct to video—no, theatrical—no, video—no, we’ll release it to a whole ten cites throughout then entire country for one week, THEN release it to video! Genius!” Remember, these are the guys who disastrously recut Shaolin Soccer (luckily the DVD carries the original as well as the mauled version), and altered the ending of The Descent.* Seriously, they should be outlawed from buying foreign genre films.
[*My mistake, that was Lions Gate that altered The Descent, not the Weinsteins/Miramax. Lots of doofi in the film business.]Anyhoo, saying that Rogue is the best killer croc/gator movie since Alligator (1980) is to damn Rogue with faint praise. Sadly, however, that’s not because Rogue is some mini-classic, which it isn’t, but rather because while there have been dozens of theatrical and DTV giant croc/gator movies over the years, the vast majority of them essentially suck.* Rogue doesn’t suck, not by a long shot. However, this was a film I was yearning to love, and, well, I didn’t. It’s a solid, well made horror film in a day where such things are pathetically rare. And, no doubt, its impact would have been far more pleasing had I experienced it in a theater rather than my living room. Still, we’re basically talking a three star movie here. It’s pretty good, not great.
[*On the other hand, I’ve been on a mini-roll lately with monster movies. 30 Days of Night was pretty decent, Rogue was quite good, The Ruins is efficient and fairly effective, and The Descent was actually something you might really remember down the line. On the other hand, both Rogue and The Ruins made significantly less at the worldwide theater than, say, the egregiously awful When a Stranger Calls remake, which also made nearly 20% more money at the box office than The Descent! Blech.]Since the movie *is* pretty good, I don’t want to spoil things for those who haven’t seen it. Suffice it to say that the first half hour features some extraordinarily beautiful travelogue footage of the Australian outback. A bunch of tourists are on a fairly low-rent river cruise, including a cranky American travel writer (Michael Vartan, the boyfriend spy on Alias). They travel down river farther than planned—the reason for this is fairly believable—and sure enough, are attacked by a truly massive—if yet just this side of credible—crocodile.
One thing I like about the latest round of the horror movies, at least the ones sited above, is that they are all basically survival stories, and emphasize that mistakes have outsized consequences in hazardous circumstances. One of the characters in The Descent panics momentarily and breaks her leg, and a situation that was pretty bad already becomes instantly ten times more dire.
Rogue follows through on that idea as well, most tellingly when their boat is attacked and begins to sink. The tour guide instinctively gun the engine for the nearest bit of land, and that largely tells the tale. Rather than going just a bit further and reaching the mainland, they head for an atoll that sadly proves to be a tidal island. Their bewilderment at realizing that they are stuck on an island that will functionally cease to exist by that evening and dump them into the water where the croc lurks is good stuff. Later fits of panic on two people’s part (which ironically manifest in diametrically different fashions) combine to ruin one avenue of escape. Both this and The Ruins pretty effectively play off the idea that many modern people are so unacquainted with disaster that they have no ability to deal with it.
Anyway, I won’t go into the final third of the movie, where they kind of change gears, but I will say I found that section less satisfying and more, well, movie-ish. It didn’t ruin the film by any means, but it did reduce my overall assessment of it. On the other hand, mileage varies and for many maybe that’s the best part of the picture. All I can tell you that was my take on it.
Frankly, I would have probably make the croc a bit smaller, but hey, it’s a monster movie. The film uses perhaps a bit too much CGI for my taste (there is some prospethic work, and we get entertaining looks at such on the myriad making-of extras the disc offers), but I will say that they actually studied real crocs, and that the CGI beastie here thankfully avoid the sort of ludicrous super-speed that added a complete sense of weightlessness/lack of mass to such other creature features as Anaconda and Deep Blue Sea.
Should anyone want it, Amazon’s price current price of $15 is a quite nice 40% off the $25 list.
