My movie watch on 20 December 2023 was my long-owned but previously-unviewed Lionsgate Region 1 DVD of Razortooth, in order to find out at long last just how very far short this horror/monster movie would fall in comparison to what I'd always naturally assumed was the extreme visual hyperbole of its DVD's ultra-dramatic front cover illustration (shown above) – only to discover to my great surprise that, if anything, the actual movie was even more OTT than said illustration!!
Directed by Patricia Harrington, and released in 2007 by CAE/PUSH, Razortooth is on the surface just another of those numerous modern-day CGI-laden creature features in which a group of diverse people are brought together in a shared spine-chilling experience of a horrific monster on the rampage. The latter usually constitutes either a freakishly large or genetically-altered mutant individual of a known present-day species or some gargantuan prehistoric horror retrieved from the distant past either directly via time-travel or once again via genetic manipulation.
Said monster then systematically slaughters in a variety of different (but usually gory) manners virtually every human character in the movie, steadily devouring its way up the cast list from bit-part players to supporting characters and then, finally, confronting the leads in a grand do-or-die climactic battle before expiring with just enough screen time left for the surviving leads to exchange some light banter before the credits roll.
In Razortooth, the titular monster is a genetically-modified Asian swamp eel (much more about which later) of huge size and voracious appetite that has escaped into the Florida Everglades from the laboratory that engineered it, and now is diligently decimating everything and everyone that it encounters there – escaped convicts, Irish wolfhound, teenage canoeists, they all suffer the same gruesome fate, albeit executed in an array of imaginative splatter fests. Incidentally, I should warn you that this particular movie contains far more blood and gore than is usual for a low-budget modern-day creature feature of the ScyFy-similar genre, which is why it holds an R rating certificate in the States, so beware.
Normally at this point I'd present my own précis of the plot, but in this case the latter is so generic, and also because there is one particular aspect of the movie that I'd much prefer devoting the majority of this review to (especially as it does not appear to have been covered by anyone else whose reviews I've read), I've elected to save time and space by simply quoting instead a very succinct, accurate summary of it penned by Brazilian viewer Claudio Carvalho that I encountered on IMDb's Razortooth entry, so here it is:
Two prisoners escape through the swamp land in Everglades and the search party is attacked by a giant mutant eel and is considered missing. The Animal Control agent Delmar Coates is searching [for] a missing dog with his ex-wife Sheriff Ruth Gainey-Coates and he discovers the remains of the animal. Meanwhile members of a canoe club organize an expedition through the swamp. When Sheriff Ruth organizes a manhunt to capture the criminals, Delmar informs that his former friend, Dr. Soren Abramson, who is chasing the eel with a group of college students, is the [person] responsible for [this] mutant species [sic – specimen]. Sheriff Ruth organizes two teams to hunt the prisoners and the eel.
The two lead characters are Delmar Coates (played by Doug Swander) and Sheriff Ruth Gainey-Coates (Kathleen LaGue), so it will come as no surprise to learn that they are still standing, just about, by the time that we reach this movie's big, explosive finish – and I do mean big, and explosive!! What may come as a surprise is spotting a familiar face playing one of the lesser characters – yes indeed, Josh Gad (playing ill-fated Jay Wells), in one of his earliest big-screen roles before going on to the likes of Pixels with Adam Sandler, Disney's live-action Beauty and the Beast, and the voice of Olaf the snowman in Frozen, among many others.
But now, let's move on to what for me was the all-important feature of this monster movie – the specific zoological nature of the razortooth!! (Curiously, despite someone in the production company having specifically devised this memorable moniker for it, I don't actually recall it being employed anywhere within the film, other than as its title). As I mentioned earlier, this creature is supposed to be a genetically-modified, super-sized mutant specimen of a genuine species known zoologically as the Asian swamp eel Monopterus albus.
Native to shallow, muddy freshwater wetlands across eastern and southeastern Asia, this air-breathing eel-shaped species (but a synbranchid rather than a true eel), measuring only a very modest 3 ft or less, has indeed been introduced into the USA – beginning during the 1990s in Georgia, from where they themselves migrated into the Florida Everglades (their air-breathing ability enabling them to move overland in limited fashion if the land is water-saturated, but not if dry).
Due to the deleterious effect that its presence is having upon various native crayfish species, however, the Asian swamp eel is nowadays deemed an invasive species in these States, with attempts being made to control its burgeoning numbers and physically remove specimens where possible.
Needless to say, however it does not exist in any kind of mutant, extra-large version, and in any case this species confines itself to a diet of aquatic worms and insects, frogs, fishes, terrapin eggs, and crustaceans – as opposed to gorging itself upon humans and wolfhounds! But these are not the only major differences between the real Asian swamp eel and its monstrous movie counterpart.
Although much was made during the film of its disturbing true-life invasive presence in Florida's Everglades, in terms of its morphology the Asian swamp eel is nothing remotely frightening or dangerous, possessing only small, inconspicuous jaws and a totally smooth, featureless body. So how was this innocuous creature going to play the central role of a bloodthirsty terror? By not only greatly increasing its size but also appending to it some decidedly horrific characteristics purloined from various real but visually hideous piscean predators, that's how?
As a zoologist, moreover, I could readily recognize which predators had been utilized, and they were all from a specific taxonomic family of deepsea marine fishes – Stomiidae, the barbelled dragonfishes.
Totally unrelated to swamp eels, but once again only a few feet long at most (usually a lot less), these dragonfishes exist in several visibly different types, and it looks as if certain specific characteristics sampled from three of these types were deftly combined with the elongate body of the Asian swamp eel to yield the murderous razortooth of this movie, as I duly demonstrate below via the following series of comparative illustrations:
As can readily be seen from this comparison: if the viperfish's head and jaws brimming with javelinesque teeth, the black dragonfish's nearly membrane-less spiny dorsal fin (but extended along the eel's entire dorsal surface, not just the posterior half of it as in the dragonfish), and the boatfish's unusual arrowhead-like dorsal and ventral pre-terminal fins are added to the Asian swamp eel, the result is the razortooth. Apparently, Jeff Farley, the special effects expert who worked on Babylon 5, created the razortooth, so he had evidently conducted some sound ichthyological research during this process.
Moreover, there is no doubt that for much of the time, whether in the water or on land, or even when it slithers up into trees, the razortooth is impressive enough to keep the viewer's eyes glued to the screen, but most especially when it is very rapidly undulating horizontally in dramatic whiplash manner as it pursues its human prey on land, thus adopting the same mode of movement that snakes utilize.
The big problem comes from this monster's body size, which is anything but constant. One moment the razortooth is so huge that it rears vertically above the water like a latter-day plesiosaur from those now-dated prehistoric animal books from the 1960s and 70s that habitually portrayed these aquatic reptiles as swan-necked. The next moment it is small enough and narrow enough to swim up through the exit pipe of a toilet or shower unit in order to seize hold of the unsuspecting, hapless human utilizing said facility. Then suddenly it's big enough again to bite a man in half, or to be wrestled with by the redoubtable Delmar, and so on…
By way of mitigation for such morphological inconstancy, at one point scientist Dr Abramson (Simon Page) tells his students about how flexible the muscular bodies of eels are, enabling them to squeeze through holes and crevices ostensibly too small for this to be possible. That is true, but there are limits, even for a mutant eel ('mutant' being another oft-utilised get-out-of-jail card in monster movies for explaining seemingly impossible feats performed by the monster in question!).
Anyway, such quibbles aside, and if you're not hoping for any in-depth characterization of the mega-eel's numerous victims either, Razortooth is certainly an enjoyable creature feature (unless you're haemophobic!). And unlike many of its so-serious contemporaries in this genre, it even purposefully includes a blacker shade of black vein of tongue-in-cheek humour running through it, but without descending to spoof or parody levels. Monster movie purists may well hate this flick, of course, but at least its choice of animal antagonist makes an interesting, diverting change from the more usual giant inverts, prehistoric survivors, and belligerent ape-men that tend to dominate this cinematic category.
Razortooth is currently available to watch free of charge on YouTube, so if you'd like to do so, just click here. Or click here if you'd simply like to watch an official trailer for it.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
I instantly thought the exact same as you when I first saw the trailer for this film, that the Razortooth design looks MUCH more like a black dragonfish than ANY type of eel...
ReplyDeleteI'm an acquaintance of actress Kathleen LaGue, and only found out about her movie recently. She gave me the DVD to watch, which is always weird when you know the person in life, who's also up on the screen. She's charming, multi-talented, and has a good sense of humor since I started calling her Sheriff Ruth when I see her.
ReplyDeleteFrom the stills you've shown here, I think the other "missing" element in this composite monster might be the Potoo (Nyctibius sp)!
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