"They Will Eat Your Face Off!" promises the tagline, but faces go sadly uneaten in this rather tepid comedy-monster flick.
US Park Ranger Cal has grown rather disaffected with his job. He slacks off as much as he can, dodging whatever responsibilities his boss tries to send his way. When he's paired up with trainee Ranger Hobart 'Hobey' Moss, he sees it as an opportunity to push all of his work onto the eager youngster.
Unfortunately for Cal; and for that matter for any living human being in the area; his park sits over caverns filled with bloodthirsty orcs. Trapped for hundreds of years by a cave-in, the creatures are about to burst free and go on a murderous rampage. They're pretty good at killing folks, but sadly this mainly tends to happen off screen, or be relatively tame in execution, no doubt due to the limited budget.
Also probably a factor of the budget is the relatively small groups of orcs we see on screen; never more than five or six. We see larger groups at range where details are less discernible, but not up close.
Anyway, the orcs go on a rampage, and slovenly, lazy Cal finds himself on the front lines of the struggle to stay alive. Will he rise to the challenge and prove himself to the woman he once disappointed? It's a movie, so you can probably guess the answer.
This is a reasonably fun little outing with a couple of moments of obvious parody of The Lord of the Rings, but it suffers from a sense of never really getting into top gear. The climactic struggle against the Orcs doesn't exactly live up to the tension and action of a film like Zulu, you know?
A harmless enough diversion, but it fails to hit the schlocky excesses necessary to really shine. For that, check out something like Piranha, instead.
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