Everyone loves good scare. The entertainment industry, grasping at anything that may signal "the big payoff," feeds movie-goers' desires by churning out hundreds of thrillers every year. Aside from the big-budget Hollywood horror movies, "B" movie and direct-to-video, film companies devote large portions of their libraries to exploit people's hunger for terror.
Horror movie writers' efforts in the past have certainly paid off. "Jaws" and "Jurassic Park" are two of the largest grossing movies of all time. Most recently, "The Relic," which opened a week ago, was the top grossing movie in America.
However, the movie does not deserve to sit on throne of movie glorydom. "The Relic" is inane, disappointingly unoriginal and, worst of all, completely unfrightening.
The film opens with an unnamed tribe performing an unexplained ritual. An anthropologist from the Chicago Natural History Museum is there, observing, when he makes a big mistake. He drinks a potion and then begins to scream. Soon, he is aboard a ship, desperately trying to find a mysterious shipment he has sent back to the museum.
Although everyone on board the ship is dead, the shipment somehow arrives at the museum. After a typical introduction of the main characters, a museum guard is found brutally decapitated.
When a poor vagrant is shot to death in the basement of the museum, the characters think the killing is over. But a superstitious cop (Tom Sizemore) claims that "this just doesn't feel right." The museum is hosting a large gala the next night and a museum official (Linda Hunt) railroads the cop into allowing the gala to go on as planned. This is another big mistake.
The murderer turns out to be some sort of lizard/beetle/human thing that feeds on a bizarre plant virus that mimics the output of the human hypothalamus. Unfortunately, the creature can not find enough of the virus, so he just rips the heads off of people and eats their brains instead.
Steven Spielberg's films are so terrifying because he leaves much of the horror off camera. When the movie goer hears about the mangled body of a man inside a shark's belly in "Jaws," Richard Dreyfuss' face is all the audience is allowed to see. Spielberg leaves the rest up to the viewer's imagination, which is almost invariably more terrifying than actually seeing something on screen.
But the director, Peter Hyams, does not seem to understand this. The audience in "The Relic" is acter at all. All the audience knows is that he is superstitious and that people mispronounce his name. Miller is so poor at delivering lines with scientific jargon that one can not help but notice that the jargon itself is completely ridiculous.
The special effects are the only things that keep the movie from being a complete catastrophe. Unfortunately, most of the effects are wasted on extraneous gore.
Special effects, though, are only part of the picture. Good acting, a good script, and good directing are what make a good movie. Perhaps if "The Relic" had focused more attention on even one of these elements, the film might have left viewers more satisfyingly scared.
