Razortooth (2007) -**
Oh no. Oh fuck. Oh Christ on the kazoo. I’m pretty sure Razortooth was made for the Sci-Fi Channel. At the very least, it’s the sort of thing that Sci-Fi/SyFy used to bankroll during the transitional phase between their golden age of shitty monster movies and the subsequent decadent period in which it was all about putting extra heads on sharks and combining toothy things with natural disasters. It also belongs to the proud old tradition whereby an invasive species is a jobbing screenwriter’s best friend, but instead of killer bees or northern snakeheads, Razortooth takes as its basis the introduction of the Asian swamp eel to the wetlands of Florida and Georgia. That was quite a challenge for writers Jack Monroe and Matt Holly, because the Asian swamp eel is an unimpressive creature resembling a foot of rubber hose with a quadriplegic frog for a head, and it poses a direct danger only to crayfish and aquatic insects. It drives native fish out of the ecosystems that it colonizes less by eating them than by out-breeding them in the absence of predators that think swamp eels taste good. That’s no fun, obviously, so Razortooth reimagines the eels as a sort of freshwater viperfish with the ability to breathe through its skin during excursions on land. And of course Monroe and Holly also found an excuse to make one of them big.
The insignia on the police cruisers that we’ll be seeing later on identify the setting as Dade County, Florida, but the actual terrain is an unpersuasive mix of shooting locations in Louisiana, Southern California, and Mexico. Two convicts named Sal (Joshua Rubin, from Witches Don’t Exist and The Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power) and Eddie (Max Rhyser, of E-Demon and Frankenstein vs. the Mummy, who was still calling himself Max Rishoj back then) have escaped from prison, and are making their way to the bayou shack owned by Sal’s brother, Lou (Ian Pliske). There’s an army of cops on their trail, but that’s okay, because the swamp which the fugitives are currently traversing is home to a land-slithering, tree-climbing, sprint-running viperfish roughly the size of a largish alligator, and it prefers the taste of policemen to that of felons. (I bet that’s because of all the toilet-hooch residue in Sal’s and Eddie’s systems from their time behind bars.) The two crooks never even see the thing that solves their pursuit problem for them.
The next morning, animal control officer Delmar Coates (Douglas Swander) gets dispatched to help a white-trash diva (Elsa Wolthausen) locate her missing Irish wolfhound— which, you must admit, is rather a lot of dog to have just up and vanish. Delmar’s interview with the dog’s owner coincidentally brings him into contact with his ex-wife, Ruth (Kathleen LaGue, from Sands of Oblivion and The Eye), who happens to be the sheriff in these parts. Theirs was evidently the kind of divorce that neither party really wants; frankly, it would have made much more sense to write the couple as merely separated, since the thrust of their character arcs is to get them back together in time for the closing credits. Anyway, Ruth and her deputy (co-writer Jack Monroe) were getting the word out about the escaped prisoners, but she drops that at the earliest opportunity to help Delmar look for the missing dog. They find it quickly enough, but the only reason they’re able to recognize the pile of bones and raw hamburger that confronts them at the edge of the swamp is that it’s just too big to be the remains of any other animal.
Meanwhile, Lott Dryer (Tim Colceri, of Evilution and Carnival of Love), the belligerent jerk who runs the local canoeing club for children, is sending a flotilla of paddling youngsters out into the marsh where both convicts and monster are on the prowl. It’s a strange little nodule of the Jaws template encysted into what is otherwise more of a Prophecy-style eco-horror flick— a cost-conscious and setting-appropriate nod to Amity Island’s Fourth of July festivities in a movie that otherwise owes very little to Spielberg’s example. And meanwhile once again, four students from what somehow seems to be a high school, a college, and a university graduate program all at the same time are trekking into the same swamp to pick up some between-semesters extra credit under the direction of Dr. Soren Abramson (Simon Page, from Midnight Temptations and Desires of Innocence). Abramson represents an outfit called the Environmental Task Force, which is searching for a solution to the Asian swamp eel problem. His big idea is to interfere with the eels’ breeding by introducing genetically sterilized females into the invasive population. It’s rather a big job for one man, though, which is why the professor is recruiting rejects from a 1980’s Crown International Pictures teen comedy to “help.” Of the four, Holly (Hysterical Psycho’s Kate Gersten) and Jay (Josh Gad, from Little Monsters and Artemis Fowl) might actually be halfway useful, even if it does look like Holly’s main objective is to have an affair with a respected scientist, while Jay’s is to hook up with Holly. Dean (Brandon Breault) and Mark (co-writer Matt Holly), though? I’d just about trust them to organize a game of beer pong— but only if somebody else were in charge of buying the Solo cups.
Naturally most of Razortooth will be devoted to people we barely know and don’t care about getting eaten by giant eels. Or a giant eel perhaps. Everything about the human response to the fishy crisis indicates that we’re supposed to assume there’s just one monster, but the timing and geography of the attacks makes no sense unless there are a bunch of the things fanning out all over town, and the final shot confirms that there are several of the killer eels living in the swamp. Regardless, Lott Dryer interprets all the abnormal deaths and disappearances as the work of Sal and Eddie, and tries to organize a vigilante posse against them before they can get to his canoeing kids. Delmar and Ruth increasingly recognize to the contrary that the situation falls more into his area of expertise than hers. Dr. Abramson’s students keep right on being dumb and horny, oblivious to the amphibious menace all around them. And the professor himself is ultimately forced to admit that the deadly new dimension to the eel problem is largely his fault, because the man-eating monster escaped from his own laboratory. His genetic tampering may or may not have sterilized the creature like it was supposed to, but it sure did super-size her! On the other hand, Abramson also endowed the runaway eel with a curious weakness. The local orange planters, for reasons best left unexamined, were afraid that the genetically modified eels would attack their crops after being released into the swamp, so Abramson tried to placate them by disabling the creatures’ ability to digest sugars. The rampaging beast, for all practical purposes, is diabetic, which opens up an easily exploited alternative in case Abramson’s efforts to poison her by conventional means don’t pan out. Or, you know, the eel could simply be shot, speared, chainsawed into pieces, or blown the fuck up, since it is, after all, only a fish.
It was the writers’ opinion, upon watching a handful of the Sci-Fi Channel’s previous monster movies as background research for Razortooth, that the biggest problem with the likes of Komodo and King Cobra was that they took themselves far too seriously in light of their inescapable cheesiness. It would be better, or so Monroe and Holly believed, to take a light touch with such material— maybe don’t go all the way to spoofing it, but at least keep a sense of humor about it. I suspect they had in mind something like Tremors, which I’m sure we can all agree is greatly preferable to, say, Silent Predators or Snakehead Terror. But if that’s the intended approach, then it’s absolutely essential that the jokes be funny. It’s absolutely essential that the characters be charming oddballs, rather than repellant goons. It’s absolutely essential that actors and director alike have strong comic timing. And none of that is true, on the whole, of Razortooth.
To be fair, there are some scattered glimmers of effective humor here. Douglas Swander can deliver a sight gag well enough, like when Delmar, in the course of his regular animal control duties, saunters through a crowded diner with a brace of successfully deployed rat traps slung over his shoulder. Josh Gad labors mightily to wring a stray laugh out of the witless and exhausted “horny teens” shtick, and is the only actor among the students to come anywhere near success even once. But mostly this is the kind of movie that treats a fat redneck getting eaten ass-first as he sits in his outhouse to be so intrinsically hilarious that no further effort is required to sell the scene. It’s the kind of movie that sets up a Meatballs-like conflict between the stridently macho Lott Dryer and the hapless adult dork chaperoning the kids in the canoes (Joseph Patrick Genier), but then never does anything with it. It’s the kind of movie in which a monster belches after swallowing the hand grenade that will soon blow it to kingdom come.
That said, I will give Razortooth credit for trying to be a real monster movie, rather than seeking cowardly shelter in pure camp. Although it’s bullshit to try passing a giant viperfish off as a giant Asian swamp eel, viperfish are some of the scariest-looking things in the deep sea, and a humongous version of one is fairly impressive, even when CGI-animated on a Sci-Fi Channel budget. The film makes clever albeit exaggerated use of the real swamp eel’s ability to operate on land for extended periods, adding an extra dimension to the problems typically faced by the protagonists of movies about killer fish. And I have to give props to any horror or monster flick that’s willing to slaughter this many children, whether or not it has the nerve to do it onscreen. (Razortooth mostly doesn’t.) I do wish, however, that director Patricia Harrington had settled on a single overarching tone for the carnage. Razortooth’s scenes of violence and bloodshed variously attempt everything from Peter Jackson splatstick to Tom Savini viciousness to Sam Raimi “laugh to keep from gagging” polyphony without ever actually hitting any of those targets, and in veering crazily from one mood to another and back again, Harrington mostly just confuses things needlessly.
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