Biohazard (1985)

 

A team of scientists are conducting experiments at a secret facility in the desert. The purpose of the experiments is to transfer matter from other dimensions. Why would they want to do this? For the military applications, presumably, since it is the military that is funding it.

Things go awry, however, when a container holding a creature from the other dimension gets opened. The creature promptly goes on a rampage, killing several people.

The army assigns Mitchell Carter to track down and deal with the monster, teaming him up with Lisa Martyn, a member of the research team. Lisa's also a psychic: it is her unusual ability to see things beyond her scope of normal vision that allows the scientists to transfer and reassemble matter from the other dimension.  

In a better film, Lisa's psychic abilities would have a significant role to play in the story.  But then, Biohazard sets the bar for being "a better film" very, very low indeed.

As you've probably already guessed, what we have here is basically Alien, but set on Earth (because that's cheaper to film) and terrible.  It comes to us courtesy of bottom of the barrel writer-director Fred Olen Ray, and was in fact only his fourth directorial credit.  He has over 160 today, but I doubt any of them are a significant improvement: I admire his tenacity, but I am yet to find a single film of his that's better than "pretty bad".

Biohazard's problems begin with its monster.  It is hysterically bad.

How bad?  This bad.

The creature is small - it was in fact played by Olen Ray's nine year old son  - and looks quite puny, especially as it has quite limited articulation. When it "attacks", it actually just kind of flails its arms at people while they scream.  It's not quite on a "that person is clearly throwing themselves into the monster's mouth" level of terrible that we get to see in The Creeping Terror, but it's really not far off.  And things aren't helped by the fact that in the monster's larval form, its growls are clearly just stock audio of a dog.

Don't worry though, Biohazard's flaws don't end with its antagonist.  It's got plenty of other issues to keep problem-spotters happy.  The film is technically deficient even at a basic level, for instance: the camera work is shaky, and not even in an intentional "shaky cam" kind of way, and the post-production audio is clumsy.  I should not be able to easily tell when your film has dubbed in audio, but it's frequently obvious here.

The script is also poor.  I have already alluded to the fact that there's little pay-off or consequence to Lisa's psychic powers, and that lack of follow-through is seen in other aspects of the story as well.  Most prominently, there's a sudden reveal near the end that is ... just there.  The point of a twist or reveal is to change the situation in some way.  This supposed revelation doesn't do that.  The movie would be pretty much the same without it.

There are also lots of other incidental writing issues along the way, such as the scenes involving what are apparently the world's worst paramedics, of the film's misguided attempts at humour.  Those are ... not good.  For example, the script's idea of a belly laugh is to have the monster tear down a poster for Spielberg's E.T., and stomp all over it.  Oh, such larks.

Honestly, the most entertaining part of the whole thing is the out-takes that play over the end credits.