"What would you do to resolve your midlife crisis?" asks the movie, and well... I probably wouldn't create a lizard human fucking hybrid child and unleash it on my friends and work colleagues... I'd probably y'know, buy a sports car or a really expensive Italian leather jacket... Lizard Boy, a 2011 movie from *checks notes* Picture Stable LLC is this weeks FTW Week movie choice, and I always enjoy FTW week because these movies are usually quite short, and really easy to watch, which is probably for the best as I had my 2nd COVID vaccine yesterday and I was awake at 5.15am this morning drinking paracetamol and trying to keep both sides of my brain held together... so my attention span is close to zero today.
Genetic Scientist, Gino (Pete Punito) just gets done being interviewed on the news about his spider silk producing goat, and settles down to watch some of the fakest MMA I think I've ever seen when... WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?! When... some kind of weird lizard thing in a sweatshirt starts attacking and eating his pals... Gino proceeds to explain, in monologue format, that the weird thing that looks a bit like a pre-pubescent predator is in fact his son, and we proceed to get an origin story; Gino, after promising his fiancee a sperm donation over the phone... ok... then proceeds to rock up at work and enlists his fiancee Rachel (Miranda Allgood) in err... helping with the donation... before he has to dash off. After bringing in Lucy: a part Komodo Dragon, part Snake, part Iguana hybrid and watching as it nearly tears somebody's leg off, Gino learns from the sperm bank that he's firing blanks. Meanwhile back in present day, Lizard Boy escapes from Gino's trailer and proceeds to rip apart a poor old couple resulting in Sheriff Johnson (Bruce Brown) and his Deputy paying him a visit, but that's enough of that, back to 3 years ago; and after getting dumped by Rachel, Gino fuses his own genome with one of Lucy's eggs and calls the resulting offspring; Carlo. Carlo (Steven Zeigler) grows quickly, and within a few years is already a teenager, but when Frankie (Mark Strano), Gino's work colleague and housemate accidentally cuts himself in the kitchen it sets off Carlo's instincts and Frankie has to fend him off by... getting him stoned with a bong... what am I watching?... So Gino takes him, Frankie and Carlo to his Aunt Rosie's, she's blind so she's not startled by Carlo's appearance, then they take Carlo to a party in fancy dress and Rachel just so happens to be there with her new fiancée, but in an hilarious* mix-up Rachel and Carlo end up having a quickie when Rachel mistakes Carlo for Gino... anyway we are now all caught up and back in present day and all the talk of a lizard man killing people catches the attention of Agent Hoffmeyer (Damon Gregory) and Agent Jenkins (Ryan Gray), the same Agents overseeing the Lucy program, and they pay Gino and Frankie a visit threatening to make them disappear if they don't turn over any info they might have, taking over the entire lab and team, and locking it down. But that doesn't last long because Carlo breaks in, slaughters one guard and unleashes Lucy on the other. After the incident at the lab, Julie (Rachel Riley, no not that Rachel Riley) goes to pay Gino a visit but comes face to face with Carlo instead, who looks like he is about to kill her but instead spares her and runs off. Gino finds her in the trailer and together the pair plan to catch Carlo alive but not before Hoffmeyer and Jenkins interrupt them and interrogate Gino. Carlo returns, killing the Agents guard and lures the agents into the nearby woods, meanwhile Gino, Frankie and Julie also set off into the woods and something sparks the interest of Sheriff Johnson and his Deputy who return to Gino's trailer and also set off into the woods! What are the chances! Then we have a big schmoz in the woods; Sheriff and his Deputy end up falling down a hole, Gino gets bitten when; confronting Carlo he tries to talk him round but Carlo has none of it, calling himself an abomination. Carlo kills Jenkins and Hoffmeyer fairly handily but then returning to discover Gino is dead, Carlo is grief stricken and shoots himself in the head. In the closing scene we see Rachel is... pregnant...!!
*not really
Wow this was bloody terrible! But I'd be lying if I said there wasn't bits that were genuinely quite good! For a start, Carlo's makeup, or at least the head part genuinely looked pretty good. I'm not sure if it was really lizard based, more weird Star Trek alien but it looked good none the less. And the films plot, whilst slow and lumbering at the beginning at least builds to a decent and... dare I say exciting? conclusion... but it was so plagued with everything else being so bad that it almost doesn't matter.
Let's start with the cinematography. It seems like half this movie was shot under exposed. There are so many scenes so many scenes shot where there is darkness enveloping the scene, or obfuscating part of the shot; peoples faces, or just whole people in general. It was a really odd approach to take and it didn't really accomplish... well anything. It's not like it built shadow or mystique it just felt to me like they didn't, or couldn't, really compensate for the lighting so they just shot it anyway? And the filming in general was just so off; really weird camera angles at like 20 degree or 40 degree angles and shots framed with the bottom of peoples faces cut off, or the top of their heads, really amateur framing. I've seen this before in other low budget movies and I don't know how it's a thing?! Unless the whole movie is filmed with one single diameter prime lens and it's a case of; frame it as best you can? I don't know? But it was just amateur and made the film look really poorly produced.
Secondly, the strange inconsistent audio levels in the dialogue. I get the feeling half the scenes were two or three different sections of filming spliced together to make a narrative, because you could audibly hear the different ambient noise levels. I don't just mean like telephone conversations or whatever, I mean like actual dialogue between two characters supposedly in the same room. Again so amateur and a dead giveaway of cheap, rushed production on a budget.
And the acting, for the most part was pretty green, pretty wooden. I wasn't convinced by Gino as the lead and he very much came across as somebody just going through the motions, and he really struggled to show any depth of complexity to the character. Everybody else was so vanilla it's not even worth mentioning except for Rachel Riley who was decent as Julie and Mark Strano as Frankie who was easily the standout actor is this movie and far too good to be doing low budget b-movies.
But I've said before that I'll never rag on a movie if they try and I feel like Lizard Boy was at least a try-er. Calling it a 'horror' movie is a real stretch as because of the low budget production values I never felt genuinely scared by Carlo but I feel like they at least put some effort in to tell a story and have a constructive narrative. Even the flashback parts were tied in quite nice with the main narrative and it's clear they at least put some effort into Carlo's appearance, even if they gave up after the head and the tail and just had him wear sweatpants and a jumper for the rest of the film like a backstage Star Trek villian who just got done in make up and hasn't put his costume on yet...
This had low budget smeared all over it like a bus station toilet seat, and there was more than one occasion where I asked myself what the fuck I was watching. When they got Carlo stoned, when Carlo banged Rachel, when Julie and Gino had an almost semi-romantic moment... it was so horrendously produced it was like watching a college art project... that failed... but I at least felt there was effort, there was an idea, and dare I say... there was almost a dream buried somewhere inside the dodgy movie. And if, like me, you thrive on watching these really weird, really fucked up movies just out of morbid curiosity more than anything then maybe give this a watch and maybe you'll appreciate it a little bit? 1 out of 5.
