Créature de l'apocalypse

I'm not sure exactly where that phrase comes from, but when I saw it attached to the YouTube video description it made me laugh so much I just had to watch the movie. Turns out to be a watchable farce with some fun aspects and a few genuinely good moments.

There is a lot of cliché here, but from the opening moments it's clear that the movie was meant to be very much tongue-in-cheek while simultaneously preserving some degree of "serious" horror environment, and it works pretty well at that level.

The creature effects are solid enough to sustain a fair amount of screen time. Most of the shots don't linger very long, which is probably for the best; some of the scenes with the soldier/creature strapped to the table suffer from showing us the obvious makeup/prosthetics for too long. However, the action shots tend to be more fleeting and the creature looks pretty good in those.

The women look pretty good too. :-) Kim and Musetta are visually similar enough that I wondered why they didn't cast one of the two roles differently, but they're both beautiful so that's forgivable. They can act, too, so that helps. :-D

I liked the setting in the facility pretty well; there are enough different locations that the visuals don't get too stagnant, while still having some feeling of cohesion. When we go from room to hallway to room to wherever, it seems plausible that this all could be one large facility. The few exterior shots are good, although it seems odd (at least, to me) that there's a swimming pool right outside a military research facility. Oh well.

The pacing and editing were good. The directing was fine. The acting was good enough from the leads, although the continual varying of Musetta's accent was distracting. Thankfully, the lousy Mexican accent guy departs quickly (as noted by an earlier reviewer).

I was hoping for a bit more exploration of the whole "metal werewolf warrior" notion; mostly this is a fairly standard "experiment gone wrong, trapped in installation with monster" story, and the unique(?) angle is only partially explored. However, for a B-movie, it's entertaining enough. They probably would have needed a bigger budget to do more, like turn the guy loose on some test mission somewhere, or something.

Check this one out if you like the genre and are up for some fairly well-done silliness. If not, skip it.

I saw "Project: Metalbeast" last time when I was a kid. After that, I completely forgot about it. Recently I watch it again, and have to say, it's wasn't that bad.

Story starts with two soldiers coming to Hungary who kill a werewolf. They take his blood for the purposes of military experiment (this never gets old) to create a super-soldier. Of course, things turn rotten, and project is shut down. Flash forward ten years after those events, research continues, but naturally, everything goes wrong.

Shot on low budget, Metalbeast surprised me. It looked lot better then most of the direct-to-video(TV) movies of it's era. FX are also very descent with nice amount of gore. Script is also lot better then it appears to be, with some interesting moments thrown here and there. Of course, movies doesn't go too far from it's genre, leaving most of the clichés intact, but surprisingly, they kinda work in this movie. While true acting talents are pretty limited, Barry Bostwick and Kim Delaney (who would latter star in NYPD Blue) save most of the picture.

Negative side: Movie suffers from pace. It tends to slow down from time to time, has relatively slow start, but luckily becomes bit faster as the movie progress. Some dialogs are corny, but that's not a big problem. You are watching a movie about genetically enchanted werewolf with "indestructible" skin after all. I start laughing just when I say that.

Overall, "Project: Metalbeast" definitively is not a masterpiece, but it's a descent and unusual take on werewolf genre. If you are fan of werewolf movies, you might like this. You might like this if you don't have high standards for horror movies, but if you are looking for Hitchockian movie, you should avoid it.

There's no such thing as an idea for a horror film that's too ridiculous to work, but I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that the more complicated the concept - the more ideas that are layered on top of one another - the harder the road to success. Take 'Project: Metalbeast,' for example. Filmmaker Alessandro De Gaetano and co-writers Timothy E. Sabo and Roger Steinmann tossed together werewolves, military experiments with werewolves, corrupt government programs and officials, and not least, synthetic metal skin. Oh my. None of this means that success was impossible, but it does mean that one has to stretch the limits of their imagination and suspension of disbelief to accept what the movie is putting down. When one further considers how lax this tends to be in its tone and pacing, leading to a paucity of major goings-on, well, one's attention begins to wander.

It's not like this is abjectly awful. Everyone put in an earnest effort, and between the cast and the crew everyone made fair contributions. The acting is fine, the sets are fine, and the costume design, hair, and makeup are fine, if a little too overt. The stunts and effects are fine. I'm more concerned about the unconvincing dialogue, the halfhearted characters, and the lethargic scene writing. The plot doesn't go very far at all for the preponderance of the first hour, and all that's left for the last third is for the carnage to ensue (less than you'd think, honestly) and for the threads to be wrapped up in the manner in which we know they will be. The direction feels less than fully engaged, and for as relatively little action as there is in ninety minutes, the result feels like a bit of a slog. No, 'Project: Metalbeast' isn't fully bad, but there's just so little here to keep us invested that the picture falls quite flat.

Yawn. There are some recognizable names and faces involved here. The last act is fine. The climax is fine. Would that there were more substance to this of any sort, or that the feature did anything to make a lasting impression. As it is the viewing experience is just rather bland and dull, even in the moments of the most violence or would-be disturbing imagery, and it stops only a little bit shy of being sleep-inducing. Sure, there are worst things one could find themselves checking out, but the simple truth of the matter is that there's just no real reason to watch this flick. I suppose if one is extremely curious or bored, and open to all the wide possibilities of cinema, then one could claim sufficient impetus to press "play," but otherwise one's time is surely better spent elsewhere. 'Project: Metalbeast' was just kind of dead on arrival.

At the U.S. Secret Operations Center a small group of doctors led by Kim Delaney are experimenting with a metallic skin on a frozen cadaver. This particular body is that of a secret agent that succumbed twenty years earlier to self injection of a blood sample from a...werewolf. Barry Bostwick plays the evil Colonel harboring the blueprints for this gruesome experiment. Thus the Government has given life to a wolf-like creature with metal skin. The only reason I watched this is Kim Delaney. I'd watch her do a puppet show! Also in the cast are: Brian Brophy, Carole Davis, Tim Duquette and Kane Hodder as the MetalBeast. Pretty bad movie except for the last twenty minutes or so.

After finding, killing and extracting a blood sample from a werewolf in Europe, a soldier injects himself with it's DNA, turning himself into a werewolf in an American military base, where he's captured and cryogenically frozen. Flash foreword 10 years, where scientists are given the man's body for an experiment involving a metal-based, organic, self-restoring skin. Upon giving the soldier the skin graph, he awakens and turns into a werewolf, but this time faster, meaner, shinier and bullet proof. I picked this movie up the other day from my local video store for $2, as they are going out of business and need to sell all their videos. I grabbed as many as I could carry home, "Project: Metalbeast" being one of them. Despite the terrible title and having heard nothing of it before, "Metalbeast" turned out to be an okay way to kill 90 minutes in my book. It's got a script that's more intelligent than your usual straight-to-video horror flick, a decent score, some likable characters, a couple of gory bits (the highlight being the death of the creature at the end), and even John Carl Buechler's creature effects weren't bad, though the Metalbeast itself looks more like a Hedgehog on crack than a werewolf. Granted, the film never steps very far out of genre territory, and the portrayal of both the scientists and the military are as clichéd as can be but in the end, "Project: Metalbeast" offered a fine dose of gore, monster action, and a interesting concept that puts a nice spin on the werewolf myth.

$2 well spent, I say.

6/10.