Plot:

Corpses are turning up around the Louisiana swamps. A corner and a biologist go out to the swamps to find out what’s behind the killings. The come across a group of residents who live in houseboats on the swamp. Pretty soon they are all fighting for their lives as a mutant Chinese Snakeheads attack the houseboats.

Here is another example of a direct to video movie in which I really wasn’t going to bother with. Let’s face it the title and the cover art make this look like another crappy mutant creature run amok movie. But once I read more then a few surprisingly positive reviews for the movie I decided to check it out and I'm very glad I did.

Frankenfish is a surprisingly entertaining movie that even manages to be much better then a lot of movies that have been released in cinemas recently (Anacondas! This means you). The movie itself come across as Jaws meets Tremors, with houseboats instead of a small town.

While Frankenfish isn’t as good as either movies that inspired it,  defiantly holds it’s own. The characters themselves are quite likable, I was rooting for them which helped the suspense better. Also I was happy to see a black lead acting normal for once, not spewing one liners every five seconds like most black people in movies these days. I thought I had it figured fifteen minutes in but I was wrong, it’s not to obvious who’s going to survive the movie.

The suspense works very well, I was into the movie for most of the running time. Director Mark Dippee (Spawn) does very well here. The fish itself looks quite decent, the makers hide it for the first half of the movie but when it shows up with a mixture of CGI and practical effects. I think it was handled well, the CGI shows up for jump frights or other parts were you don’t really see the fish long enough to see how fake it looks. The close up shots and other key moments the fish is practical and it looked good, the effects where a lot better then say Anacondas.

Lets get to the goodies! We get quite a few tit shots here and there. Then the gore, lets talk about how sweet the gore is. We get a cool decapitation, someone bitten in half, half a face blown off, some found mangled bodies and my favourite would be someone mangled onscreen! Nice! The gore effects are very good and right on the dot. More gore effects like this please.

On the downside the movie takes a bit of time to get going. We get two characters that I didn’t really like. A psychic woman, I always hate psychic women in horror movies, they never fail to annoying with going on and on about warning of doom etc. Then there was the comic relief guy who wasn’t as annoying as he could have been but his he still annoyed me during the flick.

The reason the creature is there is pretty lame, I didn’t really like it to much. It also introduces us to a group of hunters that show up and seem to make this just a tad bit to easy for our hero. I would of liked to see them try survive on their own. Towards the end we see a little more of the CGI creature which looked pretty fake and kind of downed the suspense a little bit. Some of the characters make some stupid moves, when the leads see someone killed by the fish, why on earth do they go back to the houseboats and have a dinner instead of alerting the proper authorities about what’s going on?

Over all Frankenfish is great fun, sure it has it’s flaws but I could easily let that go. If they could of maybe put more money into the budget and rewrote the script a few more times it could have been great. I hope we get a sequel to this movie, hell if we can get a Anacondas, Python 2, Boa 2 and eventually Python Vs Boa surely we could get a sequel to a decent movie like this one. Hell it’s better then most theatrical horror movies.

COVER REVIEW:

For such a good movie, the cover art is pretty bad. It reminds me of the Deep Blue Sea artwork. The tag live isn't overly original either, how many times have we heard that one? I'm giving it 2 stars because I'm in a good mood after watching such a good movie.