Man-Thing (2005)

The Age of Commercialism

Simply Perfect

Excellent, a Must See

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Agents of an oil tycoon vanish while exploring a swamp marked for drilling. The local sheriff investigates and faces a Seminole legend come to life: Man-Thing, a shambling swamp-monster whose touch burns those who feel fear. The only way that someone could actually see this film it's because of that freaking Marvel Logo that is strapped right and front on the dvd cover of the film. First of all it literally starts like every basic horror film with a young couple trying to have sex and either one of them starts getting killed, then bodies start to appear in bad shape and last but not least the monster gets revealed in crappy cgi form and dies in some stupid way. The End... (0/10)

Calling a movie just awful might seem uninspiring and unoriginal, but "Man-Thing" hardly deserves any originality from its reviews. The movie is, just awful, period. No horror or even jump scares are to be found in this atrociously banal comic book adaption about a vengeful swamp monster who kills people and stuff.Although the plot is really not the point in this film (though I sincerely doubt the film has a point at all in any department), a new sheriff (Le Nevez, who makes Hayden Christensen look like a character actor) arrives to a small Lousiana town to replace the missing sheriff, amidst an influx of missing persons cases. Peculiarly, they have all gone missing in the swamp, where an oil company has just recently started drilling oil on sacred Indian land. The rest of this predictable and dull plot consists of an odd assortment of people running aimlessly around the swamp getting themselves impaled by the Man-Thing that looks strangely a lot like big tree, only less terrifying and a lot clumsier (how you can move less gracefully than a non-moving object is itself an achievement). Why anyone would be terrified of this thing is perhaps the biggest - and only - mystery the story has to offer.While this unfunny, non-scary bore-fest may not be nothing more than a waste of your precious moments on Earth, the film did propel Alex O'Loughlin and Rachael Taylor, both Australians (where the movie was filmed) into acting careers in Hollywood, with O'Loughlin starring on CBS's "Moonlight" and "Hawaii 5-0" and Taylor landing roles on ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" and "Charlie's Angels". Call it a silver lining if you wish.

A new horror about a lake monster, done with no less than a monster movie-making ! The lead, (Matthew Le Nevez), is bad. "Acting" is something he has never heard of. "Character" is something the scriptwriter has never heard of either ! You'll never know : was the lead having problems? Was he smart? Was he angry? What I know now for sure is that the scriptwriter has problems, one of them is that he's stupid, and that made me angry !The girl ? Grrrrrr ! I bet they wanted to insert any girl anyway into the movie's events, while forgetting giving her a character too. Her being here is absurd comedy. She falls in love with the lead, kissing him now and then, then and now, for no obvious reason but providing the movie with kissing. She's with him at the last scene, so the poster may have her with him…wet !The rest of the movie is at rest as creative or even workable. In the start there is a scene that copies the first scene of (Jaws). After that there is a "monster in the lake", how many movies had that before? Then, a slasher movie where everybody is killed, misshapen and torn apart, a man who wanted to have the land for himself, a Red Indian voodoo, and snore, snore, snorrrrr.. sorry, that was me in front of this ! In brief : What's new ? And in terms of making that old movie, or movies, what's not bad?The editing is primarily good, trying to make a surprising dark character for the movie, however loses every power it has during the lost and incredibly boring second act, in which nothing happens but some guys go into the lake, talk to each others, then get murdered brutally (At one moment I hoped that the creature may eat the lead, that should have made me happy, and changed the mood a bit !). The cinematography doesn't get out a chronic case of green for the lake scenes and yellow for the rest, so with the movie's unoriginality and emptiness I felt discontent; maybe that's a point for the sake of the movie's atmosphere ! And the direction has its moments, but what a scary vacuum it plays in for all the time, and it's shameful enough working with a script like that ! It pulls off one matter though, which is hiding the creature's features for almost all the time. It's a smart trick yes, based on the good horror works to inflame the expectation and generate some fear, but the thing is when we got to see it at the end, it looked so primitive and poor to feel frustration and regret. Here's a movie that doesn't want to complete anything good at all !"Let him dig, dig, and dig.. his grave" is a line I liked. Though, between you and me, was anything in this movie better than it ? Well, this movie digs its grave by its own hands ! (Man Thing) is a movie thing. It's supposed to be a B pastime product, however ended up as the movie shown on video in (The Ring); just series of hardly related dark images that do nothing but curse you. Heck, I should have been warned when the movie's title, at the movie's start, looked like a green vomit !P.S : How come that (Stan Lee)'s name is on this ? The man is a master of beautiful crap. Why he went on to produce pure crap this round ?!

I was not expecting a good movie, especially since I have an in general dislike of the movies airing on the SyFy movies, save a few exceptions. Man Thing has a lot of problems, but it is a decent movie compared to a vast majority of SyFy resume. For one thing, the film does look great with great effects, photography, lighting and scenery, and the monster actually looks it had taken effort and time to construct. The music is good and has a fair amount of atmosphere to it. The pacing was better than I expected, the middle may drag in spots but I have seen duller SyFy features and also ones that feel more rushed. The deaths are suitably gory and I admire it for attempting to stick to its original origins. Against all that, the story is very predictable with any scenes that attempt to be suspenseful falling flat and the script on the most part is derivative and clichéd. Likewise with the characters that also have no life to them. The acting is terrible, not only do the actors play their roles badly looking very uncomfortable but they don't connect to them. In conclusion, decent even with the many problems it has. 6/10 Bethany Cox