My official Lionsgate Region 1 DVD of Razortooth (© Patricia Harrington/Gravedigger Films/Capital Art
Entertainment (CAE)/PUSH/Lionsgate – reproduced here on a strictly
non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
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.
Eyeballing the razortooth: not a sight that you'd ever want to see
up-close – or from any distance, for that matter! (© Patricia
Harrington/Gravedigger Films/Capital Art Entertainment (CAE)/PUSH/Lionsgate –
reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for
educational/review purposes only)
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:
From top to bottom: the Asian swamp eel Monopterus albus; the viperfish Chauliodus
sp.; the black dragonfish Idiacanthus
atlanticus; Alcock's boatfish Stomias
nebulosus; and the composite result, the razortooth (please click to enlarge for viewing purposes) (top four pix public
domain; razortooth composite pic © Dr Karl Shuker)
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.
No escape from the razortooth – whether in the water, out of the
water, on dry land, or even up a tree, it's gonna get ya! (© Patricia
Harrington/Gravedigger Films/Capital Art Entertainment (CAE)/PUSH/Lionsgate –
reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for
educational/review purposes only)
