CURSE OF THE KOMODO (2004), KOMODO VS. COBRA (2005)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

I've seen lots of utterly forgettable "big-critter" films, but the two KOMODO films by Jim Wynorski are certainly contenders for the bottom of the barrel. It's of note that Wynorski, whose output in all genres is highly erratic, later assembled at least a tolerable big-critter film in 2010's DINOCROC VS. SUPERGATOR, even though he had helmed neither of the monsters' individual features.

CURSE is about as basic as a big-critter film gets. A military project sets a team of scientists to breed giant Komodo dragons on a remote island. Then the monsters break loose and kill a bunch of scientists and soldiers, though a few from both groups manage to hide from the dragons. Then a group of heist artists charter a helicopter to the island, planning to go to ground with their ill gotten gains. Instead, the crooks and their pilot (nominal hero Tim Abell) are forced to team up with the other survivors to escape the fierce predators, as well as to escape a military cover-up, a plot to bomb the island into nothingness. 

The only touch of originality-- and it might well have been borrowed from some other obscure film-- is that when the dragons' venom infects a human, the human goes Living Dead on his fellows. But the script does nothing interesting with this touch, and so all we have is a bunch of actors running around, a few of whom-- Abell, Gail Harris, George "Buck" Flower-- are familiar B-movie faces.

KOMODO VS. COBRA uses none of the characters from the first film, so presumably all the action takes place on a new island, where idiot scientists fed growth serum to both a Komodo dragon and an ordinary cobra, resulting in two big creatures (though some outsized leeches appear in one scene). 

This time the combination of actors running around consist of one surviving scientist and a team of environmentalists, seeking to learn the island's mysteries. (As in many of these films, sympathy for the environment doesn't earn the ecologically conscientious any points from predators.) Once again the military is responsible for both the experiments and the prospect of eradicating the evidence via carpet bombing. I don't believe any of the castaways succumb to a "living dead" syndrome, though in a coda one guy left on the island starts to mutate into a serpent-human.

The actors-- Michael Pare, Michelle Borth, Jay Richardson-- acquit themselves well with their nothing roles. But Wynorski blows the film's only real entertainment potential in that the implicitly promised monster-battle doesn't come until the film's last minutes, and is so quick and underwhelming that I can't even rate KOMODO VS. COBRA as a combative film.