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Credits

With: Penelope Ann Miller and Tom Sizemore
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By Ty Burr
Ty Burr
Ty Burr
Ty Burr is a writer at large for EW and is no relation to Raymond or Aaron

Engagingly absurd creature-feature hokum. There's such a debt to the giant-whatsit-trashes-downtown genre of the '50s, in fact, that sweet old James Whitmore, who early in his career faced monster ants in 1954's Them!, now comes full circle to deal with a similarly pincered South American deity rampaging through the Chicago Museum of Natural History. The nominal stars are Penelope Ann Miller (The Shadow) as the Spunky Evolutionary Biologist and Tom Sizemore (Devil in a Blue Dress) as the Superstitious Cop; the true star is the monster itself: a computer-generated beastie that suggests a rhino with bad teeth crossed with a really big velociraptor. If you can stagger around the plot holes (how'd a Brazilian cargo ship with a dead crew get to Lake Michigan?), the last 30 minutes are pure, dumb monster-movie fun. Normally, it'd be a film to savor at 2 a.m. on pay cable -- except there you'd miss the sound of a theater packed with happy campers in full hoot.


Posted Jan 24, 1997
 

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